A weekly roundup of buzzworthy tips, tricks, and topics from the Final Cut Studio community:

A weekly roundup of buzzworthy tips, tricks, and topics from the Final Cut Studio community:

This post is written for Mac users who are running Mac OS X Tiger or Panther, although the principles apply for earlier (and later) versions. Windows users will not be served by this post except to say, backing up your stuff and reinstalling your OS is a good thing to do once in a while, particularly when things seem to be really having problems and your machine is slow, or apps are crashing, or...

Ok cheesy title, but if you're anything like me, or are a freelancer of any kind, there is no question that you have experienced the To-Do list looming on a Monday morning, and said "ugh" to yourself or out loud. In that moment, there's nothing better than the feeling of all of those items being done. Thus the "Ta-Da" exclamation. Unfortunately there's no magic wand in the world that can make them all be done, so they have to be dealt with head on. One by one.

Well my talk went great today @ PodcampNYC and I'd like to thank everyone who attended for their questions and comments. Hopefully they enjoyed it as much as I did. Since so many people were talking about the process of making a video podcast, I stuck solely to the topic of video compression for the podcaster - talking about the concepts of compression and offering some ideas for improving the quality.

Paravue just announced a new image masking tool called Turbo Mask, a plug in for Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Photoshop CS3 Extended that significantly streamlines the process of cutouts. Turbo Mask will be available in late May 2007 for $249 USD. The product will be available for Windows and Mac Universal.

Submitted by Todd Howard  April 4, 2007 - 6:08pm

It seems there is a preponderance of Apple TV hack ideas out there, and more coming every day. I read today on AutoBlog and TUAW that the Apple TV is by far the most hacked Apple device to date. And it only shipped a couple weeks ago.

Dennis Radeke at The Genesis Project blog has been putting together some excellent tutorials on After Effects basics. The blog is said to be "A blog for beginners in the creative space. Beginner to intermediate trips, tricks and tutorials on several Adobe products, especially After Effects, Premiere Pro and Photoshop.

Adobe is announcing the official release of their brand new Creative Suite 3 offerings this afternoon, and the announcement can be seen by anyone with an internet connection via the live webcast from New York City -- Today, Tuesday, March 27, 2007 at 3:30 PM eastern time -- just a reminder to tune in and see all the cool new features with live demos by Adobe gurus and all that good stuff.

Upon first digging into Adobe Photoshop CS3, a few features have really popped out at me as incredibly useful. I would like to offer a brief overview of some of these new ways of attacking your creative challenges using the latest version of Adobe's flagship app. PsCS3 will run you about $649 to buy it outright if you do not own any previous versions. If you own Photoshop 7, CS, or CS2, you are eligible for upgrade pricing - looks like $199 for the upgrade.