FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2 Beta 2 released

We've just released FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2 Beta 2. This is a performance and stability update for users of Beta 1.

FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2 is a significant update to FCS Maintenance Pack so we're releasing it as a public beta to gather feedback and locate bugs.

Please use the Report Bug or Suggest Feature links in the Help menu of each application to let us know of any issues, however severe or trivial, and help us discover the features our users want.

Although Beta 2 is pretty stable our official line is that it is not recommended for use in a production environment.

You can download the beta here:
FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2 Beta 2 (DMG)
FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2 Beta 2 (ZIP)

Also note that FCS Maintenance Pack is currently on special offer - if you buy before Dec 25th you will receive 15% off the retail price.

Changes in FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2 Beta 2:

• Corrupt Clip Finder - Improved progress display
• Corrupt Clip Finder - Stability improvements
• Corrupt Clip Finder - Corrupt files are now displayed in the list as they occur
• Corrupt Clip Finder now searches directories recursively
• File Salvage - Fixed an inaccuracy when processing DV NTSC footage
• File Salvage - Added support for NTSC and PAL ProRes files
• File Salvage - Drag and drop support added
• Project Repair - Stability improvements
• System Toolkit - Checks apps are closed before streamlining
• Crash Analyzer - Updated definitions
• Path Manager - Updates parent directory when an individual item is edited
• Plugin Manager - Lots of bug fixes and performance boosts
• Plugin Manager - Audio Unit Validation UI improvements
• Plugin Manager: Added the ability to drag plugin folders into the window
• QT Repair - Stability and memory usage improvements
• QT Repair - Added support for removing edits from QuickTime files
• QT Repair - Now supports files larger than 4 GB
• General bug fixes and performance improvements

Changes in FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2 Beta 1:

• New application - XML Repair. Fixes illegal characters, malformed XML, missing tags and elements not supported by the current XMEML version.
• New application - QT Repair. Repairs various structural problems with damaged QuickTime movie files to allow them to be opened by QuickTime again.
• New application - Path Manager (replaces Content Manager). Allows you to manage your user and content paths from a central location.
• Autosave Cleaner now supports Motion.
• Plugin Manager now allows you to change whether or not a plugin is available to the current user or all users.
• Plugin Manager - added a new tool to validate Audio Units
• Corrupt Clip Finder - now works on movie files without a .mov extension
• Corrupt Clip Finder - improved the accuracy of corrupt clip detection
• Redesigned FCS Housekeeper UI
• FCS Housekeeper now works even if Spotlight is disabled on the scratch drive
• Crash Analyzer now supports all applications in Final Cut Studio
• Crash Analyzer - dramatic improvement in loading speed
• System Toolkit can now restore streamline backups
• File Salvage now supports Apple Intermediate Codec, ProRes and DVCPROHD
• Redesigned File Salvage interface with a focus on batch processing

Introducing FCP Versioner

We've just released a brand new application called FCP Versioner, which 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.



And even if you never use the versioning capabilities, it is still very valuable to have XML copies of your project files because XML files are plain text and therefore it is virtually impossible for them to become corrupt beyond use. We've all had the situation where our FCP project got corrupted and it corrupted half of the autosaves as well.

In addition, it offers a wealth of options for managing your backups to ensure they don't eat up 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).

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 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.

Combining odd and even frames in Shake

I've just finished helping a guy with a Shake issue via email and I think the solution would be useful to others. He had a situation where he had one movie clip with all the odd frames from a sequence and another clip with all the even frames, and he wanted to combine them into a single file.

At first glance, it would appear to be as simple as using the Select node to switch between them, however you would miss out half of the frames by doing this. Here's the solution that worked for him:

1. Import the two files into Shake via the FileIn node.

2. Add a TimeX node to the first clip and set it to 0.5*time (this doubles every frame) and do the same for the second clip.

3. Add a Select node and plug the output of the two TimeX nodes into it. So that it's not confusing later on, make sure the output of clip 1 goes to the first input and clip 2 goes to the second.

4. In the Branch parameter of the Select node, set a keyframe at frame 1 with a value of 1 (i.e. the first input), then step to frame 2 and keyframe the value to 2 (the second input).

5. Load the parameter into the Curve Editor by clicking the clock icon next to the Branch field so that a tick icon appears, and then click the Curve Editor tab.

6. In the Curve Editor, change the Cycle parameter to MirrorValue.

7. When you render the FileOut, make sure to double the frame range as the sequence is now twice as long.

FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2 Beta 1 released

FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2 is a significant update to FCS Maintenance Pack so we're releasing it as a public beta to gather feedback on some of the changes.

Please use the Report Bug or Suggest Feature links in the Help menu of each application to let us know of any issues (however trivial they might be) and help us discover the features our users want.

This is a beta so it is not recommended for use in a production environment. If you want the latest stable version choose version 1.1.6 instead.

Changes in FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2 Beta 1:
* New application - XML Repair. Fixes illegal characters, malformed XML, missing tags and elements not supported by the current XMEML version.
* New application - QT Repair. Repairs various structural problems with damaged QuickTime movie files to allow them to be opened by QuickTime again.
* New application - Path Manager (replaces Content Manager). Allows you to manage your user and content paths from a central location.
* Autosave Cleaner now supports Motion.
* Plugin Manager now allows you to change whether or not a plugin is available to the current user or all users.
* Plugin Manager - added a new tool to validate Audio Units
* Corrupt Clip Finder - now works on movie files without a .mov extension
* Corrupt Clip Finder - improved the accuracy of corrupt clip detection
* Redesigned FCS Housekeeper UI
* FCS Housekeeper now works even if Spotlight is disabled on the scratch drive
* Crash Analyzer now supports all applications in Final Cut Studio
* Crash Analyzer - dramatic improvement in loading speed
* System Toolkit can now restore streamline backups
* File Salvage now supports Apple Intermediate Codec, ProRes and DVCPROHD
* Redesigned File Salvage interface with a focus on batch processing

Download FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2 Beta 1 (DMG)
Download FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2 Beta 1 (ZIP)

Speeding up Compressor

Is Compressor taking too long to encode? Here are some tips to speed it up.

Don't export directly to Compressor from Final Cut Pro

Although sending your timeline directly to Compressor may seem faster because it cuts out the step of exporting as a QuickTime movie, it is much slower overall because Compressor needs to request each frame one-by-one from Final Cut Pro instead of just reading the data out of the movie clip. It gets even slower if you're using Frame Controls or doing multi-pass encoding.

Just go to File > Export > QuickTime Movie (not QuickTime Conversion) and make sure Setting is set to Current Settings and Recompress All Frames is switched off. This ensures that the movie will not be recompressed unnecessarily.


Here's a tip - if most of your timeline is already rendered, deselect Make Movie Self-Contained. This creates a small reference movie that links to the render files on disk instead of writing the data into the file. This will be much quicker to export. If your timeline is not rendered, however, this setting is unlikely to offer any speed advantages over a self-contained movie.

Once the file is exported, drag it into Compressor and set up your batch as normal.

Only use Frame Controls where necessary

Frame Controls allow you to improve the quality of resizing, retiming and deinterlacing operations, however they should only be switched on when you are actually performing one of these operations.


In addition, you should use Better quality instead of Best, as Best is usually reserved for extreme circumstances and in most situations gives you a massive performance hit with no benefit.

Perform heaving-lifting in a separate pass to the encoding

Using Frame Controls with a multi-pass or long-GOP encoder can really slow things down because the Frame Controls processing will need to be reapplied to every frame each time it is read. Even if you're not using Frame Controls, compressing from a processor-intensive codec such as HDV or H.264 can seriously slow things down.

It makes sense, therefore, to perform all these processor-intensive operations on an intermediate movie clip (ProRes would be a suitable codec for this) and then drag in the intermediate clip and encode it to the desired format.

But there is an easier way. Job chaining is a little-used yet very powerful feature of Compressor that allows you to plug the output of one job into the input of another for additional processing.

Here's how to do it:
1. Drag your movie clip into Compressor.
2. Drag either the ProRes 422 for Interlaced Material or ProRes 422 for Progressive Material (depending on your source media) setting onto the job in the batch window.
3. Go to Job > New Job with Target Output. This will add a new job to the batch with a chain symbol to show it is linked to the job above it.
4. Drag your desired output setting onto the chained job and set up the destination as normal.
5. Submit the batch

Use a cluster

A cluster is a group of computers where each machine processes a portion of the movie simultaneously, potentially providing a massive speed boost. This service is provided by Qmaster and can be set up in the Qmaster section of System Preferences or the Apple Qadministrator utility.

You will need Qmaster set up on each computer in the cluster, and all computers should have the required codecs installed and have full access to the source media and cluster storage area.

If you have a multi-core computer, Qmaster can emulate the effects of a cluster by launching multiple copies of Compressor side-by-side to process the movie in a "virtual cluster". This can make a dramatic difference to encoding times. I wrote a tutorial on this a while back.

Conclusion

Compressor is not the fastest encoder in the world but with these tricks you can make it a lot more bearable. One important trend to note is that the simplest method isn't always the fastest - with a little extra setup beforehand you can save a significant amount of time overall.

FCS Maintenance Pack 1.1.4 released

We've just released a maintenance update to FCS Maintenance Pack, bringing it up to 1.1.4.

Change list:

• Improvements to trial validation
• Updated Crash Analyzer definitions
• System Toolkit now shows per-file progress when refreshing large files
• General bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

FCS Maintenance Pack is a utility pack designed to keep your Final Cut Studio machine running at optimal performance and help resolve problems when they arise.

Major problems always seem to occur right on a deadline - FCS Maintenance Pack is designed to quickly diagnose and fix common issues, ensuring you meet your deadline. With the Task Scheduler utility, you can even schedule maintenance tasks in the background and not have to worry about them.

FCS Maintenance Pack costs $99 but a 15-day unrestricted trial is available here. See the Resources section of the site for more useful tools.

FCS Maintenance Pack 1.1.2 released

We've just released FCS Maintenance Pack 1.1.2 with the following features and changes:

* Snow Leopard compatibility
* Improved Crash Analyzer UI
* Added a crash reporter to all applications
* Plugin Manager window now refreshes automatically
* Autosave Cleaner now updates automatically
* Updated Crash Analyzer definitions
* Significant improvement in Task Scheduler launch speed
* Added registration option to launcher
* General bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

This means that all of our products are now Snow Leopard compatible.

FCS Maintenance Pack is $99 and a fully-functional 15-day trial is available here.

FCS Remover 2.5.3 and Compressor Repair 1.2 released

We've just released FCS Remover 2.5.3 and Compressor Repair 1.2.

FCS Remover is now compatible with OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and FCS Maintenance Pack. It's had a couple of cosmetic improvements too.

Compressor Repair is now compatible with OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, FCS Maintenance Pack and Final Cut Studio 3. It officially supports Compressor 3.5.x (Final Cut Studio 3) and 3.0.x (Final Cut Studio 2) but runs in a reduced mode for lower versions.

Both utilities are completely free and available from the Resources section of the site.

FCS Maintenance Pack 1.1.1 released

We've just released FCS Maintenance Pack v1.1.1.

FCS Maintenance Pack is a utility pack designed to keep your Final Cut Studio machine running at optimal performance and help resolve problems when they arise.

Major problems always seem to occur right on a deadline - FCS Maintenance Pack is designed to quickly diagnose and fix common issues, ensuring you meet your deadline. With the Task Scheduler utility, you can even schedule maintenance tasks in the background and not have to worry about them.

As well as general bug fixes and overall polish, it has a couple of new features. There's a new QuickTime pane in System Toolkit that allows you to manage QuickTime components and unlock hidden QuickTime X settings.

There's also the option within System Toolkit to preserve more than one language when streamlining an application (you can find this setting in the Preferences window). This is useful if you have other people using the same computer who are fluent in a different language - just select which languages to keep and System Toolkit will preserve those when it streamlines the application.

FCS Maintenance Pack costs $99 but a 15-day unrestricted trial is available here. See the Resources section of the site for more useful tools.

Preference Manager 2.0.4 released

We've just released Preference Manager 2.0.4.

Version 2.0.4 is now fully Snow Leopard compatible, and we will be working to verify Snow Leopard compatibility on our other software over the coming days.

This release also adds support for Final Cut Express and offers improved compatibility with FCS Maintenance Pack - you can now schedule Preference Manager tasks within Task Scheduler.

Preference Manager allows you to manage preference files for Final Cut Studio and Final Cut Express. Preference files store information about user preferences, window and toolbar placements, launch settings, etc. Sometimes these can become corrupted, causing problems. Preference Manager allows you to trash corrupted preferences and keep backups of working preference files in order to quickly restore your settings.

Preference Manager 2.0.4 remains completely free and is available here.