SWEET! For those that know me, I am very keen on organization. For those that don’t know me…hey, I’m very keen on organization. I have a tutorial DVD all about file organization (look at the right side of this blog). Well, with this new tool I am about to mention, about half of the organization I talk about in that DVD will be made moot. This tool is VERY cool.

It’s called LOADER and it is made by the geniuses at Digital Heaven. To quote the site (which you will no doubt click on and read AGAIN):

“Simply drag items from iTunes or the Finder over the Loader tab and it slides out to reveal a list of currently open Final Cut Pro projects. Drop the items onto the desired project and Loader handles the rest.”

On my last job…on a shared network with four editors…we had issues of editors importing pictures and audio into their projects, but NOT moving those pictures to the server to the appropriate folders we designated. So when I opened up the project that another editor started, I’d have all this media offline, because all the pictures were on the other guy’s desktop.

Or what if you are working on a project on local drives, and need to copy all the media used in the project onto another drive to hand off to another editor, or to give to the producer. But oops, you forgot the folder of music you had on your desktop or Music folder. How do you ensure that the other person is getting all the media you are using? Well, if you use LOADER from the start, it will make sure that all the media is copied to a folder inside your CAPTURE SCRATCH folder for that project:

“Loader automatically sorts copied media into subfolders inside the destination folder for each project. For example, .aif, .aiff, .bwf and .wav files will be copied into a folder named DestinationFolder/Audio. Loader comes with default settings for Audio, Graphics and Movies subfolders and you can edit the settings to suit your particular needs.”

Sick of converting your MP3s to AIFF in iTunes, then dragging them to a folder on the external drive, then importing into FCP? I know I am…even though I mention this on my DVD. I like organizing myself with iTunes, but converting can be a pain. because now I have TWO copies of that song in iTunes, one AIFF and the other MP3. Figuring out which to delete can be tricky. After being on an Avid for a couple weeks, I like how it converted the audio for me, and put it where it needed to go. Now, so does LOADER:

“Some types of audio formats don’t play very well with Final Cut Pro so if you drop an mp3, AAC or Core Audio Format (.caf) file onto Loader then it will automatically convert it to a 16 bit 48kHz AIF. Say goodbye to the beep-beep-beeps from the days of unrendered audio.”

OK…enough gushing. I am just giddy about this application.