FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2.7 and Network Admin 1.0.2 released

Last week we released FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2.7 and FCS Maintenance Pack Network Admin 1.0.2, providing lots of new changes.

FCS Maintenance Pack is a useful tool to optimize and maintain your Final Cut Studio system and Network Admin takes that one step further by providing significant time savings to businesses.

Here are the highlights:

Comments can now be submitted with Crash Analyzer logs

Crash Analyzer has long had the ability to upload Final Cut Studio crash logs to our servers in order to improve our crash diagnosis algorithm. We've now expanded on that by giving you the option to add additional useful information to help us further, such as error messages reported by Final Cut Pro, unusual software or hardware configurations and any other important symptoms.



As an added bonus, system administrators can now submit logs from within Network Admin.

Corrupt Clip Finder file skipping

Corrupt Clip Finder locates corrupt clips in your timeline by opening each one with QuickTime and seeing if it crashes. However, some files don't crash but instead pop up an error message, such as in the case of a reference movie where the media has since been deleted or moved.



In previous versions of the software you would be forced to wait for Corrupt Clip Finder to realize that the file was taking far too long to open before you could move onto the next file, but with version 1.2.7 you can just go to Edit > Skip Current File or press Cmd+K to instantly declare the file corrupt and move on.

Password-protecting FCS Maintenance Pack applications from the admin dialog

The ability to protect FCS Maintenance Pack applications with an administrator password to prevent user tampering has been around for a while now, but before now this would need to be enabled for each application individually. This would be particularly time-consuming if you needed to do this for many computers on your network.

Now you can easily perform this on multiple computers at once, just by ticking a box in the FCS Maintenance Pack pane of Network Admin.

Standalone applications can be updated from within Network Admin

Standalone applications not affiliated with FCS Maintenance Pack (such as FCP Versioner) can now be updated on every machine on the network at the same time via Network Admin's software update mechanism.



This is just a sample of the features, tweaks and fixes available in these new versions. Both products have been used on network television and film productions and have been proven to save time and reduce support costs. Each has a 15-day trial available so that you can test them out.

More information about FCS Maintenance Pack and FCS Maintenance Pack Network Admin is available on their respective product pages.

FCP Versioner 1.2 released - many more XML backup options

We released FCP Versioner 1.2 last week and I completely forgot to blog about it.

If you have a large FCP project, Final Cut Pro can sometimes take a while to export an XML copy when you save. Older versions of FCP Versioner had incorporated an all or nothing approach - either you waited for it to finish or else you were left without an XML copy of the backup, which meant that some of the functions of the software wouldn't work.

Version 1.2 changes this completely. You now have a slider to control how often you want to generate XML copies. At lower settings, the XML copy will only be generated for the second, third or fourth backup depending on how far you push the slider.


Versioner will then show the differences between versions that you have an XML copy for and if you want more detail, you can choose to generate the XML data on demand for backups without that information. But in most cases this will be unnecessary.

Alternatively, version 1.2 gives you the power to completely disable automatic XML generation and only generate XML copies when you actually need to use the functions of Versioner. This provides the best of both worlds for larger projects by giving you all the benefits of Versioner without interrupting your work.

FCP Versioner is a backup and versioning utility for Final Cut Pro. It automatically backs up Final Cut Pro projects in XML format and generates changelogs to show exactly what has changed between revisions.

In addition, it offers a wealth of options for managing your backups to ensure they don't consume all your disk space. Rather than simply keeping a certain number of total backups, Versioner can choose to keep a certain number per day, week or month, allowing you to see much further back in time while minimizing disk usage (the current day's backups are always kept in their entirety unless you set a limit on them).

FCP Versioner is available for $59 with a 15-day trial version available here.

Introducing FCS Maintenance Pack Network Admin

Yesterday we released a brand new product, FCS Maintenance Pack Network Admin.

FCS Maintenance Pack Network Admin is designed to compliment FCS Maintenance Pack by giving system administrators the ability to run tasks remotely across the entire network in unison.

It also allows you to sync preferences, plugins, user paths and scheduled tasks between computers, which is great for minimizing problems and makes it easier to move projects from one machine to another.



FCS Maintenance Pack Network Admin also offers many extra troubleshooting features in addition to those featured in FCS Maintenance Pack. The Difference Finder works out the differences between operating system, plugin, kernel extension and framework versions to tell you what is unique about a certain group of computers.

This is really useful if you have one or two computers on your network that are experiencing a problem and every other computer is fine. Just drag the computers that work properly to the Working category and the ones that aren't working to the Not Working category. Difference Finder will then tell you if the non-working group is missing any important files or using old versions compared to the working group. This is a huge timesaver.

You can also view Crash Analyzer statistics to discover how often the machines are crashing, which are the most and least stable, the most common cause of crashes, and much more. If users experience a problem, they can request help from their system and the administrator is immediately notified in Network Admin, allowing them to remotely troubleshoot the problem.

These are just some of the features of FCS Maintenance Pack Network Admin. To find out more, download the 15-day trial or check out the user manual. It also requires FCS Maintenance Pack but this can be installed remotely from within Network Admin (another great feature).

A common question we've been asked is if it is suitable for small businesses with only a few systems on the network. The answer is yes - FCS Maintenance Pack Network Admin provides lots of benefits that are useful no matter how many computers are being used. Many of our beta testers only had a few systems and experienced tangible benefits despite this.

As this is a version 1.0, we're looking for people to try it out and tell us how well it fits in with their workflow. We want to hear if we have missed out any features that would be useful for you, or if there is a common issue you run into that you wish it would fix automatically.

To contact us, use the Report Bug or Request Feature links inside the app itself, the contact form on our website or contact us on Twitter.

Update - If you are connecting though a corporate firewall, you will need to open ports 35011-30513. The user manual has a troubleshooting section at the back that lists other circumstances that may prevent clients from connecting.

Compressor error: "Unable to submit to queue"

If you're getting this error message when trying to submit a batch to Compressor, follow the steps listed here:

Compressor error: "Unable to connect to background process"

FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2.5 released

We recently released an update to FCS Maintenance Pack, bringing it up to version 1.2.5. Here are some of the important changes:

Task Scheduler can now run tasks as root

Task Scheduler can now run certain tasks (such as Compressor Repair) as root, meaning that it will no longer pop up a password dialog when protected tasks run.

To take advantage of this you will need to remove and re-add your scheduled tasks. When you try to add a task that needs to run as root, you will be prompted for an admin password.

More options for Autosave Cleaner

We've added an action button to Autosave Cleaner that can be used to perform cleaning actions manually, such as removing all autosaves older than 7 days. This allows you to perform actions on a per-project basis rather, which is very useful if you finish a project and want to clean things up by removing all except the 5 most recent autosaves, for instance.

When running automatically, Autosave Cleaner can now archive (compress) autosaves that match the specified criteria instead of removing them.

QT Repair now repairs invalid ImageDescription extensions

There's a strange bug in Final Cut Pro where it will crash if an ImageDescription extension is incorrect while QuickTime quite happily ignores the issue and plays the file just fine.

QT Repair can now fix this issue.

Corrupt Clip Finder is faster and more accurate

Corrupt Clip Finder has been improved to be faster at scanning folders and more accurate when scanning Final Cut Pro project files.

Other changes

• Autosave Cleaner - Improved Final Cut Express support
• Compressor Repair - Fixed an issue where multiple clusters would sometimes appear after repairing
• Path Manager - Final Cut Express support
• Preference Manager - Fixed an incompatibility with the Open in Editor function of Final Cut Pro
• QT Repair - Added m4v support
• System Toolkit - Now lists system QuickTime components
• XML Repair - Interface improvements
• Updated Crash Analyzer definitions
• General bug fixes, tweaks and improvements

The full list of changes in version 1.2.5 is here. There are also many significant under-the-hood changes in this version that are not listed in the changelog.

FCS Maintenance Pack is an essential tool for any Final Cut Studio user. It is available for $129 and a free 15-day trial and user manual is available here.

Aperture changes in Compressor 3.5

Have you noticed that movies compressed with Compressor 3.5 have a slightly different frame size when viewed in QuickTime Player?

Compressor 3.5 gives all QuickTime movies a Clean aperture by default (previous versions of Compressor set the aperture to None). This means that, although the actual frame size of the movie hasn't changed, when playing back, QuickTime scales and crops the movie to account for the non-square pixel aspect ratio of various video formats such as DV.

This has confused a lot of people because videos encoded with Compressor 3.5 are displayed differently to those encoded with Compressor 3.0. Although it is easy enough to change this within QuickTime Player, it needs to be done on a per-movie basis.

Luckily, Apple included an option in Compressor 3.5.2 (in the Pro Applications 2010-01 update) to switch this off. Just upgrade to Compressor 3.5.2 and deselect Add clean aperture information in the Encoder tab.

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.

Advance notice - Tiger support to be phased out

We will shortly be phasing out OS X 10.4 Tiger support for FCS Remover, Preference Manager and Compressor Repair.

Phasing out Tiger support is necessary to improve the experience for users of more modern operating systems. This will lead to more frequent software updates, greater stability and additional features. We believe that now is a suitable time to do this because it has been a considerable amount of time since Apple has actively supported Final Cut Studio on Tiger systems.

We will be releasing special Tiger-only versions of these applications within the next few weeks, which will receive no further software updates except in the case of any major bugs. If you have any bug reports or feature requests to make for the Tiger versions of these applications, please submit them as soon as possible.

After the Tiger-only versions are released, future software updates will only support OS X 10.5 and 10.6. Note that PowerPC systems will continue to be supported.

FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2.3 released - improved File Salvage and QT Repair

We've just released FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2.3, a minor update to our suite of popular troubleshooting tools for Final Cut Studio.

This update mainly focuses on File Salvage and QT Repair but there are many other tweaks and improvements elsewhere in the suite. Here's the changelog:

• QT Repair - added options to ignore certain consistency checks when rebuilding - this can help to repair particularly problematic files
• QT Repair - added option to renumber track IDs to ensure they are unique
• QT Repair now caches file information to speed up rebuilds when rebuilding from the same working file
• File Salvage - Improvements to audio salvaging
• File Salvage - Fixed an issue with green frames appearing in the middle of DVCProHD movies
• File Salvage - Improved memory usage and responsiveness when scanning
• System Toolkit - Improved memory usage when scanning applications
• Launcher - Fixed an issue with a blank launcher window appearing on 10.6
• Crash Analyzer now shows an icon to indicate when a log has been submitted to Digital Rebellion for analysis
• Updated Crash Analyzer definitions
• General bug fixes, tweaks and improvements

FCS Maintenance Pack is an essential tool to keep Final Cut Studio in good working order. A free trial is available here.

For more information on FCS Maintenance Pack, check out the user manual or the recent Q&A we did with Pro Video Coalition.

Pro 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 frame