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Pro Maintenance Tools
Pro Media Tools
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Preference Manager
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Maintain, optimize and troubleshoot your NLE
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Professional cloud workflow platform
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Simplified media management
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We're proud to introduce our newest product, Pro Media Tools. Pro Media Tools is a suite of ten workflow utilities focused on processing and managing media, with functions including detecting gamma shifts, editing QuickTime movie metadata, batch renaming files and more.
There are many features that have been in demand for a long time, including notifying when a render is complete, editing markers and adding timecode tracks and reel names to QuickTime movies.
Pro Media Tools also marks our first foray into supporting multiple NLEs. Version 1.0 supports Final Cut Studio 2 and higher and Avid Media Composer 5.0 and higher for Mac*. The Avid support is primarily aimed at people using AMA workflows. Adobe Premiere Pro support will be coming shortly.
The full list of tools is as follows:
Various actions can be performed after the transfer has taken place, including showing the copied files in the Finder, opening up the clips in QuickTime Player or, if the clips are in a compatible format, importing them directly into a Final Cut Pro project.
Results can be exported in a variety of formats including Final Cut Pro marker lists, Avid locator files and EDLs.
Just navigate to the same frame in both clips and click the Detect Gamma button. It will compare them and give you a percentage difference between the two. You can then use this percentage to go back to the app and compensate for the shift.
In some cases, the pixels will be identical but the gamma shift will be occurring due to a mismatch in metadata. In these cases, Gamma Shift Detector allows you to sync the metadata of the two clips with one button press.
It also offers comprehensive marker editing capabilities including offsetting, custom printable data fields, label presets (to label all green markers as "Needs VFX" for instance) and the ability to import Final Cut Pro marker lists and Avid locator lists into an FCP project. It's a great companion to Cut Notes, our note-taking iPad app.
There are several types of quick bins available. A Bin Range generates a group of numbered bins, allowing you to quickly create empty bins for scenes 1-100 in your movie for instance.
A Smart Bin automatically sorts media into the bin if it matches the criteria you have chosen (e.g. "scene greater than 11" or "filename contains MVI_"). A Smart Bin Range takes this concept one step further, where you choose the criteria first and then Quick Bins automatically creates Smart Bins for each variation of the criteria.
As an example, in the screenshot below I selected "File Extension" as the criteria for the Smart Bin Range. Quick Bins went through all of the media files in the project and discovered files ending in .mov, .aiff and .tif, so it created new bins for each of these types and automatically sorted matching clips inside them.
The suite is available for an introductory price of $99 and there is a 15-day trial available here. It will run on Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6 on both Intel and PowerPC computers.
If you want to find out more about Pro Media Tools, check out screenshots and the user manual.
We're always keen to hear feedback, so contact us to let us know what you think and how well the suite fits in with your workflow. We have many more post production tools available here.
Update: Just a quick note for FCS Maintenance Pack users - when you install Pro Media Tools the FCS Maintenance Pack launcher will be removed and replaced with "Digital Rebellion App Launcher", so you will need to update any shortcuts or Dock aliases.
* Note: due to technical limitations, a few features of the suite are unavailable for Avid users.
Late last week we released Aspect Ratio Calc onto the iTunes App Store. It allows you to calculate aspect ratios and pixel dimensions for video. There are many preset aspect ratios for different formats to choose from and you can also specify a custom one.
Results can be copied to the clipboard or emailed.
The app will work on iOS devices running iOS 3.1.3 or higher, making it compatible with every iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad model. You can download the app here.
As always, we appreciate your feedback and will use it to improve our tools. Just use the feedback link within the app to tell us what you think.
NVIDIA is reporting that Mac OS X 10.6.7, released a few days ago, removes drivers for high-end NVIDIA Quadro 4000 cards, so machines with these cards will refuse to boot up after installing OS X 10.6.7.
There is an updated driver for OS X 10.6.7 here. The support post is a little vague and doesn't state if the new driver can be installed before updating to 10.6.7 to prevent the issue from occurring, or if it must be installed afterward. If the latter, the article states that you should install a different graphics card in order to boot up to install the new driver, but I'd only advise that if Safe Mode and Target Disk Mode fail.
Update: TUAW is reporting that the NVIDIA support article is inaccurate and that Quadro 4000 machines will boot up just fine but without 3D acceleration and other features. Just install the new driver and these features will be restored.
Today we released FCS Maintenance Pack 1.3.3, a bugfix release for our suite of tools for maintaining, optimizing and troubleshooting Final Cut Studio.
Version 1.3.2 had a lot of under-the-hood changes which introduced a bug into Corrupt Clip Finder that caused it to randomly flag up non-corrupt files. This has now been fixed. We also changed the way Corrupt Clip Finder displays scanning progress to bring it back to 1.3.1 functionality, based on user feedback.
We also took the time to update Crash Analyzer definitions and fix some other minor issues including Plugin Manager's Crash Tester not working correctly with plugins that need an admin password in order to be disabled.
Please note that when upgrading from version 1.3.1 or earlier, registered users will need to re-enter their registration information. We apologize for the inconvenience and you will only need to do this once.
Since we didn't post a blog entry for version 1.3.2, here are the notable changes since version 1.3.1:
We've now made sure that files in the trash are no longer marked as being in use and they can now be trashed without any error messages or additional steps.
Last week we released Cut Notes 1.0.2, a maintenance update for our iPad note-taking app.
This version fixes a crash some users had been getting when pressing buttons, as well as fixing an issue with misinterpretation of shorthand timecode.
We've been listening to your feedback and version 1.0.2 adds the ability to edit notes. Just switch to portrait mode and press the Edit button at the top. Click Done when you've finished.
Another nice tweak in this version is that when you double-tap a button to expand upon a note, after you press Enter, Cut Notes will scroll back to whichever button page you were originally on.
Finally, please note that we have changed the way Final Cut Pro marker lists are generated. The note text is now added to the marker name instead of the comment, meaning that you can ctrl-click on the timeline header and see all of the markers listed by name.
Cut Notes 1.0.2 is free for existing users or $7.99 for new users.
Last week we released Film Rate Calc 1.0.1, which adds iPad support and backwards-compatibility for iOS 3.1.3 devices, as well as fixing a few bugs.
Film Rate Calc enables you to calculate the amount of film required to shoot for a certain amount of time, and vice versa. This is really useful in planning the most efficient use of your film and should be in any script supervisor's toolkit.
Film Rate Calc is available on the App Store for $1.99.
Today Apple released brand-new MacBook Pros with Intel's LightPeak technology, now called Thunderbolt.
Thunderbolt is a 10 Gbps port that can daisy-chain up to six devices including a display. To give you an idea of how fast it is, USB 3.0 is 5 Gbps, Firewire 3200 is 3 Gbps, eSATA is 2.4 Gbps and Fibre Channel can be up to 4 Gbps.
To me, this is a game-changer because these ports can become any type of port as long as you have an adapter, so Apple essentially added support for USB 3.0, eSATA and anything else you like in one go. Thunderbolt is a huge leap forward for professional users. Its power is in its versatility.
It also means that laptops can finally rival desktops in I/O performance. As an example of the amount of throughput you'll be able to get on a laptop, Apple showed a demo of Final Cut Pro running four streams of uncompressed HD on the 15" MacBook Pro, peaking at 600MB/s.
And if you're in a shared environment you'll be able to easily add laptops, or indeed any type of Mac, to an Xsan network for fast access to shared storage, which is something that was difficult to do before.
Finally, Apple posted some new details about Mac OS X 10.7 Lion today and revealed that the desktop and server versions of the operating system will be merged together, meaning that every Mac is now a server out of the box. Couple that with Thunderbolt and the Mac Mini suddenly looks reasonable as an Xsan metadata controller (and indeed for many other server tasks) now that the Xserve has been discontinued.
Earlier this week we released FCP Versioner 1.2.8, a minor update to our tool for backing up Final Cut Pro projects and generating changelogs.
We've noticed that most people are backing up the entire project which can take a while if the project is large. This is not always necessary and for larger projects we recommend only backing up the sequence you are currently working on. You will notice a significant speed improvement if you do this.
Version 1.2.8 will now prompt you to backup a specific sequence when you import a large project, but for existing projects you can simply go to the Projects tab, click the Backup dropdown and select Choose sequence.
As well as the usual bug fixes, performance improvements and memory optimizations, we've also overhauled printing to provide more reliable results.
The full list of changes is below:
FCP Versioner is available for $59 and a free 15-day trial is available here. This update is free for registered users.
Does your Compressor settings window have missing items or is completely blank? Here's how to restore the default Apple-supplied settings.
1. Close Compressor if it is open.
2. Navigate to your Applications folder.
3. Ctrl-click on the Compressor application and select Show Package Contents.
4. Navigate to Contents/Resources/English.lproj (or whatever your language is).
5. Cmd-click the following folders to select them: Apple Devices, DVD, Formats, Other Workflows.
6. With all of them selected, ctrl-click on one of them and select Make Alias. Four aliases will be created with filenames like "Apple Devices alias" and "DVD alias".
7. Move the four aliases to ~/Library/Application Support/Compressor.
8. Launch Compressor.
You can add one more item to the ever-expanding list of things that break Final Cut Studio: Bootcamp. Yes, if you have a Bootcamp partition, Final Cut Pro can in some instances hang at startup and refuse to launch.
Luckily the fix is very simple. It seems to be caused by Spotlight indexing and users have confirmed that adding their Bootcamp volume to Spotlight's Privacy list in System Preferences solves the issue for them. Apparently you need several restarts to get the setting to stick but once it does, Final Cut Pro should be able to launch again.
If you did experience this issue, please let Apple know.
Cut Notes
CinePlay
Aspect Ratio Matte Generator
Video Space Calculator