Quicksilver Tip: Fix a Slow Quicksilver

Over the last week or so, my much beloved Quicksilver has gotten very, very slow and sluggish. I'd hit the hot key (option-space in my case) and start typing. And then I'd wait. After a few seconds, the command would register and the action would take place.

After snooping around for what the problem is, I found a few web pages that suggested reducing the catalog size. Yes, I did have a large number of items in my catalogue. Therefore, I promptly unchecked many of the items in my catalogue and issued a rescan command. However, contrary to my expectations, this had no noticeable effect.

Apparently deselecting items does not actually remove them. The whole lot is still sitting in memory. They are only cleared out after Quicksilver is shut down and restarted. Ugh. That's the way I had to fix things on my old operating system.

Gripe aside, here's the lesson. To really fix a dawdling Quicksilver, pare down your catalogue and restart the application.

Movie Tip: Rotate Movies With BitPlayer

I've run into a rather simple problem. When taking short movies with a digital camera, it is sometimes nice to film in a portrait orientation. However, digital cameras always assume movies are in a landscape orientation.

It turns out that there are a number of available tools to rotate movies. I'm sure that most top-end movie editors can do this, but iMovie doesn't. QuickTime Pro can, but I don't want to shell out for the pro tools just for a simple edit.

The solution I found is to use BitPlayer, a simple video player with the abilities to apply some transformations and re-encodings. All we have to do is rotate the video in the playback display and export it with the current settings applied. All very simple!