In an effort to give you a better idea of how I spend my time working for JS0 I think I’ll start passing on various little nuggets about our editing workflow.  In this edition I’ll cover some of the joys of Apple software design.

We (I) at the JS0 Production Office use Final Cut Pro to edit our show, and to help me (the sole editor) get some sleep during the week we have Bryan and Kevin diligently log all the footage they record in the field and then email me the log files.  When a batch of tapes arrives I just import those log files to Final Cut Pro, toss a tape into our capture deck and hit “Go!”  FCP reads all the times/lengths of shots from the plain .txt log file and attaches those attributes to clips coming in off the camera for a nice, tidy package that I can work with.  It’s a pretty slick-and-smooth workflow.

Usually.

Fuck you, Steve Jobs.

Windows plain .txt files use a kind of line ending character called a CRLF, or “Carriage Return Line Feed,” which includes more data than the simple LF or “Line Feed” character that Macs use by default when encoding plain text.  The two are incompatible for a number of reasons, and if you’ve ever tried to open a .txt file created in TextEdit on a Mac in NotePad on Windows, you’ll probably have noticed that all the lines are mashed together into one big jumble.

Usually Bryan & Kevin are doing their footage logging on a Windows machine, scribbling down frame numbers and typing them into a pre-formatted text file for me, which saves all the line endings as CRLFs.  But once in a while they happen to do the note taking on a Mac, which saves the batch files with my new enemy in this world, the LF character.

In Apple’s infinite wisdom they have decided that Final Cut Pro (which is available exclusively on the Macintosh) should only recognize CRLFs, and will completely ignore LFs, thus rendering an otherwise identical batch file unreadable.  Naturally this is completely undocumented and cannot even be found in a Google search or forum troll.  I should know: I just spent the last two hours screaming at my laptop and staring at tab characters and word spellings looking for a difference between two text files that, as far as TextEdit is concerned, simply doesn’t exist.

So, in conclusion, to get my Mac only editing software to recognize a .txt file created on a Mac I must convert it to a Windows only text format.

Thanks, Steve Jobs.  Now make me a cheaper iPhone.  And a sandwich.  Dick.