FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2.4 released
Yesterday we released
FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2.4, a bugfix and polish release. Notable changes include:
Logging
Most of the applications now generate detailed logs showing exactly what the application did while it was processing, and if it encountered any problems along the way. It will also create separate logs for tasks started by Task Scheduler, letting you know when the task last ran and the actions it performed.
These logs are available in the
Help > Troubleshooting menu.
Support for future beta versions
We will be entering a public beta stage soon for the next major version of FCS Maintenance Pack. With this in mind, Software Update can now notify you of beta software updates. This makes it easier for us to distribute betas while at the same time separating them from regular stable releases.
Participation is optional so you will need to switch this on in Software Update preferences.
Other changes
- QT Repair - Fixed an issue where large files would not repair correctly
- System Toolkit - Speed increases when performing Refresh Files and Strip Temp Files scans
- System Toolkit now pays attention to language settings when showing eligible files for streamlining
- Corrupt Clip Finder no longer stops processing when it encounters a read-only hidden file
- FCS Housekeeper - Now closes running apps before cleaning and reopens them when it finishes
- Software updater can now check for beta updates (switch this on in preferences)
- Path Manager - Fixed a bug with the Qmaster cluster path not being recognized when using the Browse button
- Task Scheduler - Reduction in the CPU usage and disk I/O of scheduled tasks
- Task Scheduler - Fixed a bug that would sometimes cause tasks to repeat over and over
- Plugin Manager - Many UI improvements
- Updated Crash Analyzer definitions
- General bug fixes, tweaks and improvements
FCS Maintenance Pack is an essential tool for any Final Cut Studio user. It is available for $129 and a free 15-day trial is available
here.
Posted by Jon Chappell on Apr 14 2010 to
DR News,
Front Page News,
UtilitiesPermalinkPro Applications Update 2010-01
Apple released the second Pro Apps update for Final Cut Studio 3 yesterday. It includes Final Cut Pro 7.0.2, Motion 4.0.2, Color 1.5.2, Cinema Tools 4.5.1, Compressor 3.5.2 and Qmaster 3.5.2. There are a lot of fixes there, some for critical issues, and also some performance updates too.
Here's the complete list of changes:
Final Cut Pro 7.0.2* Drag and drop of files from iTunes works as expected with supported file types.
* Fixes the "Preview Unsupported For This Format" message that would occur occasionally with P2 media recorded to a Firestore FS100 recording device from Panasonic cameras.
* Fixes an issue ingesting from P2 cards with spanned clips which contain more than 80 individual elements.
* Fixes a performance issue with transcoding AVCHD to ProRes on Mac systems using the GeForce 9400M graphics card.
* Fixes an issue with some third-party filters that would cause Final Cut Pro to quit unexpectedly on Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard.
* Markers on multi-cam clips are now preserved when edited into a sequence.
* Log and Transfer function is no longer disabled while using the Share function to export media.
* Media Manager will now copy ProRes media created by AJA Ki Pro.
* Multiple fixes to Change Speed functionality including:
* The term "Duration" in the Change Speed interface is replaced with "Smoothness" which describes the function better.
* Speed keyframes no longer snap to other speed key frames. This improves ease of use when dragging to change speed in the timeline.
* Fixes an issue in which removing a reverse speed change with Ripple Sequence enabled would cause a clip to become half its length.
Motion 4.0.2 * Fixes rendering and performance issues that could occur when using Motion projects in a Final Cut Pro timeline.
* Motion is now more stable when operating in low system memory or low graphic card memory situations.
* The default project setting is now set to PAL or NTSC depending on the operating system localization.
* Addresses an issue that impacted the reliability of the Undo command.
* Corrects the rendering of the Checkerboard Generator to the proper orientation when rendering from a 3D camera.
* Fixes an image usability issue that could be encountered on complex projects when rendered in 32-bit float with Motion Blur turned on.
* Exclusively exporting the alpha channel of a Motion project using the Share feature now returns the proper alpha channel.
* An issue with importing files named with dual-byte characters has been addressed.
* An issue with the importing of Japanese language text has been fixed.
* Fixes aspect ratio issues encountered with imported shapes and circle masks.
* A correction to the selection tool now makes it easier to select text.
* Fixes an issue related to the the rendering of soft shadows.
* Addresses issues that could produce significant artifacts when objects would intersect in 3D space in certain ways.
* Addresses issues that could be encountered with images of large resolution.
* A performance related fix was applied to the caustics generator.
* Adjusting paint stroke control points in 3D space is now more responsive.
* Corrects the rendering of anamorphic projects to the digital cinema desktop output.
* Changes were made to certain filters to match the output they produced in Motion 3.
* To address a user interaction issue, the selected animation curve in the keyframe editor now displays on top of other curves.
* Fixes were made that benefit some filters applied to images that are cropped.
* A performance issue with text flattened to a single plane was addressed.
* Fixes an issue that could have affected some third-party FxPlug plug-ins that perform temporal manipulations like retiming.
* Addresses issues which could appear to soften images, or flattened groups of images, of odd-sized resolutions.
* Manipulation issues that could occur with multiple duplicated and cloned objects or groups within a project have been addressed.
Color 1.5.2 * 3D Color Space Scope now allows zooming.
* Resolves an issue in which media would sometimes become disconnected after a save and restart.
* Fixes an issue with CFX nodes not being imported when choosing File > Import > Color Corrections.
* Addresses several issues with the loading and processing of motion trackers.
* Fixes an issue with the green channel on video scopes displaying an incorrect value.
* RED 2K renders from 4K media are no longer softened.
Cinema Tools 4.5.1* Trying to save a Cinema Tools database to a read-only volume no longer closes the database.
Compressor 3.5.2 * Corrects disk size limitation messages when burning a project to an AVCHD dual-layer disc.
* Fixes issues with long chapter names not appearing correctly in disc templates.
* Fixes issues when inserting a DVD-R or BD-RE disc with data already present.
* Provides warnings before a DVD or Blu-ray Disc is burned when the source will not fit on the media.
* Provides an option to cancel a disc burn when quitting Compressor.
* Fixes issues with burning a DVD using DTS audio.
* Fixes an issue with automatic bit rate so that the appropriate bit rate for a single or dual layer DVD-R is applied.
* Corrects an issue with the encoding of HD video when burning a Blu-ray disc with surround sound.
* Addresses issues with saving and changing audio channels and video using surround sound.
* Corrects a problem that caused Share to not work when switching to another user on the same machine.
* Fixes a MobileMe sharing issue when entering a single character in the "Viewable by Name" field.
* Fixes MobileMe upload for file names that contain the "+", "?", or "%" characters.
* Corrects an issue with uploading an IFF image sequence with an uppercase extension.
* Corrects the default bit rate for the iPod encoding setting from the Share menu.
* Corrects color shift when transcoding image sequences.
* Correct timecode is now displayed in the Preview window when sending a Final Cut Pro sequence to Compressor and applying a timecode generator.
* Job Action "Open Application" now works with multiple targets.
* Fixes an issue with creating a new job with Target Output from an image sequence to a cluster.
* Fixes an issue with source field order for Compressor plugins.
* Fixes a pixel aspect ratio issue with transcoding a duplicated image sequence to a custom TIFF setting.
* Corrects an issue that stopped a WAV file being associated with with an image sequence for output.
* Compressor preferences are now honored when submitting jobs from Final Cut Server.
* Corrects a field order issue with certain sources.
* Fixes an issue with the audio tab becoming inactive when moving between the video and audio tab on MPEG-2 targets.
* Addresses an issue with upload to MobileMe with files containing reserved characters.
* Improves file size estimation for H264 files produced for Blu-ray.
* Corrects an issue when burning a Blu-ray or DVD disc from a Final Cut Pro sequence with 5.1 Surround Sound.
* Fixes an issue with display of password-protected MobileMe movies on iPhone.
* Addresses a pixel aspect ratio compatibility issue.
* Improves stability when processing large batches.
Qmaster 3.5.2 * Fixes a memory leak associated with transcoding to a YouTube destination.
* Fixes unexpected quitting when copying large numbers of image sequences to a destination.
* Corrects issues when copying AVI and reference movie media to a Wide Area Network cluster.
* Corrects an issue with Apple Qmaster command line preferences utility when a user is only logged in remotely.
Be aware, however, that people are already
reporting issues with the new update.
Apple also posted the following known issues:
*
Final Cut Studio (2009), Final Cut Pro 7.0.1, & 7.0.2 with Mac OS X v10.6: Final Cut may stop responding when capturing DVCPRO HD via FireWire*
Final Cut Studio (2009), Color 1.5: Upgrading a Color 1.0.x project to 1.5.x changes any existing Trackers*
Final Cut Studio (2009), Color 1.5.2: Video Output of REDCODE material clips at 97 IRE*
Final Cut Studio (2009), Color 1.5.2: Unrendered freeze frames in Color displays an unexpected framePosted by Jon Chappell on Mar 25 2010 to
Apple,
Final Cut Studio,
SoftwarePermalinkFCS Maintenance Pack Q&A on PVC
I recently did a Q&A with
Scott Simmons over at
Pro Video Coalition about our flagship product,
FCS Maintenance Pack. It gives a good insight into the reasons for creating the suite and answers many common questions.
If you haven’t been having any noticeable problems with Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Studio, do you need Maintenance Pack?
If you haven’t run into problems in the past, that’s no guarantee that you won’t run into problems in the future. And of course, those show-stopping problems always happen on a deadline.
FCS Maintenance Pack is not just limited to fixing problems though. It has been designed as a prevention, diagnosis and cure rolled into one. You can run common housekeeping tasks to keep Final Cut Studio performing well and minimize the chances of a problem developing, use Crash Analyzer to diagnose your crash logs if a problem does occur, and then use System Toolkit, Project Repair, QT Repair, or one of the many other tools to fix it.
Some of the applications, while being invaluable if a problem arises, are useful applications in their own right. Plugin Manager, for instance, allows you to organize your Final Cut Studio plugins into groups, selectively enable and disable them, toggle between making them available to all users or just the current user, and painlessly install new plugins - all without having to worry about which one of the many plugin folders the plugin resides in.
So FCS Maintenance Pack is still useful for users who might not currently have problems, and it will be invaluable once problems do crop up (and I can guarantee they will sooner or later).
You can read the full article
here, and feel free to leave a comment with additional questions.
Posted by Jon Chappell on Mar 13 2010 to
DR News,
Front Page News,
UtilitiesPermalinkFCS Maintenance Pack 1.2.2 out now - redesigned Corrupt Clip Finder and more
Yesterday we released
FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2.2. This update adds several new features, a few of which I will detail below.
Corrupt Clip Finder
Corrupt Clip Finder has a redesigned user interface and now offers more options for dealing with files once they have been found.
You can now assign a color label to corrupt files in the Finder so that they are easily recognizable, as well as quarantining them into a separate folder or moving them to the Trash. Corrupt Clip Finder now supports batch operations so these actions can be performed quickly to a large number of files.
In addition, Corrupt Clip Finder is now more tolerant of reference QuickTime movies, and will automatically close any QuickTime dialogs that pop up as a result of trying to process these files.
FCS Housekeeper
FCS Housekeeper has been greatly simplified to be more user-friendly. The new Preset drop-down at the top of the window gives you a choice of two presets.
Basic is for everyday housekeeping tasks where Final Cut Studio is not necessarily misbehaving and Comprehensive is specifically designed for troubleshooting. You can also select and deselect tasks individually.
These are just a couple of new fixes and tweaks. Here's the full changelog:
- Improved Corrupt Clip Finder clip detection
- Corrupt Clip Finder - Batch operations on corrupt clips are now supported
- Corrupt Clip Finder - Corrupt files can now be color coded in the Finder for easy identification
- Corrupt Clip Finder - UI improvements
- Corrupt Clip Finder - Added a timeout to prevent reference movies with missing data from tying up the application
- Path Manager - Support for Final Cut Pro user paths (read-only)
- Autosave Cleaner - Added the ability to specify autosave paths manually
- FCS Housekeeper - Simplified the application by adding presets for common tasks
- File Salvage - Improvements in responsiveness when creating a QuickTime movie
- QT Repair - UI improvements
- Updated Crash Analyzer definitions
- General bug fixes, tweaks and improvements
FCS Maintenance Pack is available for $129 and a 15-day trial is
available which will fix many problems for free.
We're always on the lookout for feature suggestions and the changes in this release are a direct result of user feedback. So if you have a request, however important or trivial, use the
Help > Suggest a Feature link in each application,
contact us or send us a message on
Twitter.
Posted by Jon Chappell on Mar 6 2010 to
DR News,
Front Page News,
UtilitiesPermalinkFCS Maintenance Pack 1.2 released
We've just released FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2, a significant update to
FCS Maintenance Pack.
There are far too many tweaks, bug fixes and optimizations to mention in detail but here's a summary of some of the biggest changes.
Three new tools
QT Repair repairs QuickTime movies and is intended as an alternative to the heavy-handed approach of using File Salvage to extract data to a new file. It can also repair invalid CLUT IDs that can corrupt movie clips created with older versions of QuickTime and optionally restore trimmed or edited media if you make an edit that you regret (providing the media is still within the file).
For more heavily damaged files, it can rebuild the clip by combining the movie data of the damaged file with the QuickTime structure of a working file.
Path Manager provides a central place to manage Final Cut Studio content and user paths. It replaces Content Manager and offers extra options such as mass path organization, path locking and syncing, and more.
XML Repair verifies and repairs Final Cut Pro XML files. Can also convert between Final Cut Pro XMEML versions for compatibility with older versions of Final Cut Pro.
Final Cut Express support
FCS Maintenance Pack now supports Final Cut Express 4.
Redesigned File Salvage
File Salvage has been redesigned with a focus on batch processing. Multiple files can now be salvaged sequentially - saving a lot of time if you have a large number of files to process.
It also supports significantly more formats than the previous version, including DVCPRO HD and all flavors of ProRes. Audio support has been added for several file formats and you can specify custom frame sizes and frame rates for formats where these parameters are variable.
One very useful new feature is the ability to read information from a working QuickTime file with the same encoding settings (captured with the same camera or exported with the same Compressor preset for instance) and apply these settings to the corrupt clips in the batch. This is very useful if you can't remember the exact codec or frame size, for example.
Crash Analyzer now supports all Final Cut Studio apps
Crash Analyzer is no longer limited to Final Cut Pro support but can now analyze crash logs from Final Cut Express and all applications in Final Cut Studio.
This is, of course, in addition to the usual updates to crash definitions. Crash Analyzer now supports over 60 different categories of crashes (yes, FCS really is that unstable).
Users of previous versions of FCS Maintenance Pack will have to install the update manually. This is to ensure that all users have the recent software updater components on their system which will allow future updates to progress smoothly.
FCS Maintenance Pack is available for $129 and a 15-day trial is available
here.
Many of the improvements in FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2 are a direct result of user feedback. We're always keen to hear from people and find out what works well and what doesn't. Just use the
Report Bug or
Suggest Feature links in the apps themselves,
contact us or message us on
Twitter.
Posted by Jon Chappell on Jan 21 2010 to
DR News,
Front Page News,
UtilitiesPermalinkFCP Versioner 1.1 released
We've just released
FCP Versioner 1.1 with the following changes:
- Added the ability to only backup a specific sequence, boosting performance
- Added the ability to initiate a manual backup snapshot
- Improved marker support
- Improved changelog generation performance
- Fixed extraneous "New filter added" notifications
- Improved memory usage when generating logs
- Frame values are now converted to timecode
- Markers can now be filtered
- Fixed an issue where it was not possible to remove the base copy of a project
FCP Versioner is a backup and versioning utility for Final Cut Pro. This is how it works - you add the FCP projects you wish to backup to the list of watched files. Then, every time you save, Versioner creates an XML copy of the project and compiles a list of changes so that you can see exactly what changed between revisions. If you need to restore a specific version of a project it is dead simple to find the one you are looking for by looking at the changelog. You can also set it to autosave your project file at specific intervals.
So it offers three main advantages over more general backup solutions:
1. You get a list of changes so you're not just looking at a filename or date
2. It saves the project as XML so you get a plain-text version for safety and compatibility
3. It offers flexible backup management options to ease disk usage
FCP Versioner costs $59 ($49 until Christmas) but a 15 day trial is available
here. It requires OS X 10.5+ and Final Cut Pro 6.0.2+ (autosave requires FCP 7.0).
As always, we appreciate any and all feedback - just use the
Report Bug or
Suggest Feature links within the application.
We have lots of other software for Final Cut Pro; see our
Resources page for more details.
Posted by Jon Chappell on Dec 23 2009 to
Front Page News,
DR News,
UtilitiesPermalink
Kollaborate
Pro Maintenance Tools
Pro Media Tools
CinePlay
Post Haste
Preference Manager
FCS Remover
QT Repair repairs QuickTime movies and is intended as an alternative to the heavy-handed approach of using File Salvage to extract data to a new file. It can also repair invalid CLUT IDs that can corrupt movie clips created with older versions of QuickTime and optionally restore trimmed or edited media if you make an edit that you regret (providing the media is still within the file).
Path Manager provides a central place to manage Final Cut Studio content and user paths. It replaces Content Manager and offers extra options such as mass path organization, path locking and syncing, and more.
XML Repair verifies and repairs Final Cut Pro XML files. Can also convert between Final Cut Pro XMEML versions for compatibility with older versions of Final Cut Pro.
FCS Maintenance Pack now supports Final Cut Express 4.
File Salvage has been redesigned with a focus on batch processing. Multiple files can now be salvaged sequentially - saving a lot of time if you have a large number of files to process.
Crash Analyzer is no longer limited to Final Cut Pro support but can now analyze crash logs from Final Cut Express and all applications in Final Cut Studio. 
Cut Notes
CinePlay
Aspect Ratio Matte Generator
Video Space Calculator