Insuring Your Home Studio

I don't know if it's an attempt to be more responsible or an expression of my growing paranoia but I finally got renters insurance. I bought a macbook pro back in September with hopes of taking it on a long overseas trip. That was the impetus to get renters insurance to cover my laptop in case it was stolen or irreparably damaged. This of course also covers my home studio all for the price of $23 a month. What a...um...steal. What I was not looking forward to however was the tedious process of cataloging all of my possessions including my long list of miscellaneous software. That's when I was pleasantly surprised to find that Allstate had a desktop app called Home Inventory that does exactly what it implies.


Besides including your serial number you can also attach pictures of your possessions and pictures of the receipts. The app was made by an interactive design studio on Wall Street (of all places) called M-One Studio. The cross-platform app is very intuitive and being a version 3 release it feels very stable. Hopefully there will be a web version of this app soon so that if anything ever happens to the my computer that's running this app all of my data will be safe. So my work-around has been to email myself copies of my newly updated Home Inventory files.

This brings me to Allstate's iPhone app Digital Locker. It has the same features and functionality as the Home Inventory desktop app. But by using a mobile app to catologue inventory data my information is not tied to the very hardware that can be stolen or destroyed (and ironically the iPhone itself is not covered). This of course means that the I need to make sure I always have the iPhone passcode feature enabled. My only beef is that I wish there was a way to sync the data from the desktop app with the iPhone app. It's gonna be a pain to have to manually re-enter all of my inventory data that's in Home Inventory into Digital Locker. I sent a message to Allstate asking if this workflow is possible (maybe I just missed it). Hopefully, I will hear from them soon.













Meanwhile, I'm moving on to the last phase of being 100% covered in case of disaster: incremental cloud-based media archiving. I'm currently in the process of establishing regularly recurring back-ups of Super Duper volumes on Dropbox. If this sounds like gibberish check back in a few weeks when (if I'm successful) I will explain my archiving modus operandi. In the meantime, let me know if you're using renters or home owners insurance to protect your studio. Also let me know if other insurance companies are using apps to make the process easier. I know Farmers Insurance has their iClaim iPhone app which lets the user do inventory but are there others? Let me know. Until then stay creative, vigilant and safe this holiday season.

December Links

My New Year's resolution is going to be to post more. I don't want this blog to turn into a link farm. My excuse is that I've been extremely busy working on a lot of interesting projects the last couple of months. I'll post links to those videos in a week or so. Until then, here are the December links:

- Like so many others out there, I've been extremely excited about Smoke on OS X. It finally puts top tier editorial within closer reach of mere mortals. The blog (aptly named) Smoke on OS X is a repository of information on the topic.

- The post-production crowd-sourcing trend continues with the virtual animation studio Mass Animation. Imagine what we'll be able to do once the bandwidth limitations start to fall away.

- You knew it was coming pt. 2 - Hand Held Hollywood - Where iPhone Obsessions meet Hollywood Professions.

- Post Haste (freeware) looks like a great app for organizing folders for all of the apps you use in post.

- Adobe launches free PhotoShop iPhone app. Another similar app that I covered months ago is Mill Color by the world famous VFX house The Mill.

- Speaking of VFX, the web app tracksperanto promises to convert trackers between VFX apps.

- And yet another great free web app, Baseline, will show you a visual image of the amount of space on your drive and what apps are using it.

- I wish my new MacBook Pro had the upcoming optical port Light Peak that may start shipping on new Macs next year.

- The next version of iDVD is rumored to support the creation of iTunes LP Apple's new album format. And this week on MacBreak Weekly Alex Lindsay brought up a provocative idea (about 54:20 in) that on the next big update of DVD Studio Pro Apple should make it so that you can build interactive QuickTime movies. I'd take it a step further and say that a lot of content creators would love to create Rich Internet Apps apps but are intimidated by all the scripting. Air and Silverlight apps are everywhere but they're are still part of the domain of web dev types. As the content / mobile / web convergence increases I think we will hopefully start to see more
video editor oriented web app tools appear.