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.

Introducing FCS Maintenance Pack

I'd like to introduce our newest product, FCS Maintenance Pack.

FCS Maintenance Pack is a group of utilities designed to help maintain your Final Cut Studio system. The tools fall into two categories - those that help keep things ticking along and those that help to fix problems when they arise.

FCS Maintenance Pack can clean up your autosaves, locate corrupt clips within a Final Cut Pro sequence, analyze crash logs, periodically trash caches, salvage data from damaged files, manage plugins, repair projects that refuse to launch, remove bloat from applications, and much much more.

FCS Maintenance Pack includes:

Autosave Cleaner	Expanding on the basic autosave management in Final Cut Pro, Autosave Cleaner offers more flexibility and can remove autosaves based on additional criteria including age and file size. It can also be set to automatically remove autosaves from the Trash so that you don't have to keep emptying it when working on a long project.
Content Manager	A tool to manage the content that ships with Final Cut Studio. You can repair broken content links and remove or move content quickly and easily.
Corrupt Clip Finder	When you have corrupt media on your timeline, Final Cut Pro will simply crash and you will not have any idea which clip is causing the issue. You face the long and arduous process of reconnecting each clip one-by-one in order to find the problematic one. Corrupt Clip Finder finds the corrupt clip for you in seconds.
Crash Analyzer	All of us have at some point received cryptic or confusing error messages and crash logs. Crash Analyzer analyzes your Final Cut Pro logs, attempts to diagnose the cause of the crash and suggests ways to solve the problem.
FCS Housekeeper	Trashes various caches and temporary files to keep Final Cut Studio in peak operating condition. FCS Housekeeper is even more useful when used in conjunction with Task Scheduler to run these tasks automatically.
File Salvage	Salvages video frames from corrupt movie clips. Currently compatible with DV, DVCPRO50 and Motion JPEG media. The input file need not even be a QuickTime container - it can extract data from any type of file, even if it is not a movie clip.
Plugin Manager	Plugin Manager allows you to quickly and easily organize your Final Cut Pro plugins. You can group them together, install new plugins and selectively enable and disable them - all without having to worry about where the plugins are physically located on disk. Also includes a crash tester for discovering which plugins are causing Final Cut Pro to crash upon startup.
Project Repair	Attempts to repair non-launching projects so that they are recognized by Final Cut Pro again.
System Toolkit	A wealth of options to tweak and tune up your system, including: Extra launch and display options for Final Cut Studio applications Manage Final Cut Studio registration Scan, repair, refresh files and remove temp files from disks Adjust system and per-application scaling Streamline your applications by removing unused languages and architectures Access many options hidden in OS X

Also includes:

FCS Remover	Removes Final Cut Studio, Express and Server. Can remove the entire suite or individual applications.
Preference ManagerManages Final Cut Studio preference files. Allows you to trash, backup, lock and restore preferences. Can also be configured to restore a particular set of preferences before a certain project is launched for per-project preferences.
Compressor Repair	Repairs the fragile links between Compressor and Qmaster.

The version we're releasing today is version 1.1 - some of you may know that the pack had a limited release just over a week ago in order to gather feedback from the community, and version 1.1 is the result of the great feedback we received.

The pack is $99 but a 15-day fully functional trial is available to test things out. FCS Maintenance Pack greatly simplifies the life of a Final Cut Pro user and should be an essential part of any editor's toolkit.

Why don't my old Preference Manager backups work on FCP 7?

One question we've been seeing a lot lately is from people who are wondering why the Preference Manager backups they previously created under Final Cut Pro 6 no longer work on Final Cut Pro 7.

There is a very simple reason for this - Final Cut Pro's main preference file is called Final Cut Pro x.0 Prefs.fcset, where x is the major version of the software. So when you updated to version 7, it created a new file called Final Cut Pro 7.0 Prefs.fcset and ignored all previous files.

So when you try to restore a backup created under Final Cut Pro 6, it will transfer the Final Cut Pro 6.0 Prefs.fcset file which will be ignored by the newer version, thereby having no apparent effect. You could just rename the file but there may well be side-effects to doing this. The solution, therefore, is to recreate your Preference Manager backups under Final Cut Pro 7.

(Incidentally, I've heard a lot of people complain about scratch disk locations resetting and favorites being lost upon upgrading. FCP 7 does not read the old preferences when creating the new file so your preferences are completely reset.)

How to run Final Cut Studio 3 on a MacBook

I've been meaning to post this for a while but haven't had the chance until now. I had to be an early adopter of Final Cut Studio 3 because I develop software that interfaces with it, but I had no desire to edit on a x.0 release so I decided to install it on my MacBook solely for testing.

The only problem is that, unlike FCS 2, the FCS 3 installer refuses to continue because it requires a 128 MB graphics card. Only Motion and Color are heavy on the graphics card, so the other applications in the suite will work just fine on a lesser machine. Luckily the block is easy to work around.

Here's how I got it working on my MacBook:

1. You will need to change one of the files on the DVD. As you cannot write directly to the DVD itself, you will need to create a writable copy of the disc. Put in the Final Cut Studio DVD and open up Disk Utility (located in /Applications/Utilities).

2. Select the disc in the left-hand pane and click New Image in the toolbar.



3. Set Image Format to Read/write and Encryption to None.



4. Type a relevant filename and click Save. It will take several minutes to process.

5. Open up the disk image and ctrl-click on Install Final Cut Studio. Select Show Original.



6. A new window will appear with the FinalCutStudio.mpkg file selected. Ctrl-click on this file and select Show Package Contents.



7. Navigate to Contents/Resources and ctrl-click on the Requirements Checker bundle. Select Show Package Contents.



8. Navigate to Contents/Resources and open up minsys.plist in Property List Editor (if you have the Apple developer tools installed) or TextEdit.



9. Under the heading AELMinimumVRAM change the number from 128 to a number lower than or equal to your current video memory. I changed mine to 32. Alternatively you could change block to warn and the installer will warn you but let you continue installation.



10. Save the file, close all the folders that appeared and double-click Install Final Cut Studio on the disk image. You should now be able to install Final Cut Studio without problems.

Some of the applications in the studio also contain a minsys.plist file that will need to be modified. These applications are Final Cut Pro, Motion, Color, Soundtrack Pro and DVD Studio Pro (even though the latter apparently has no changes from FCS 2).

If you have FCS Maintenance Pack installed, you can do this quickly and easily by checking the Low Minimum Requirements option in System Toolkit. Otherwise follow the steps below.

11. Ctrl-click on the application in question and select Show Package Contents.



12. Navigate to Contents/Resources and open minsys.plist in either Property List Editor (if you have the developer tools installed) or TextEdit.



13. Under the heading AELMinimumVRAM change the number from 128 to a number lower than or equal to your current video memory. I changed mine to 32. Alternatively you could change block to warn.



14. Color will still warn you about your screen resolution - however you can just select Never show again and continue.



That's it! You will need to repeat steps 11-14 whenever you update Final Cut Studio.

Note: Some people have suggested simply removing the Requirements Checker application but I do not advocate deleting files.

Final Cut Studio 3 compatibility with Digital Rebellion products

I've already posted this on Twitter several days ago but here it is again to clarify our products' compatibility with Final Cut Studio 3 (2009).

FCS Remover

Versions 2.5.0 and above are compatible with Final Cut Studio 3.

Download FCS Remover

Preference Manager

Version 2.0.3 is compatible with Final Cut Studio 3.

Important Note: Final Cut Pro stores preferences for each major version separately, consequently version 6 preferences will not be recognized by version 7. You will therefore need to overwrite your old preference backups with new ones. This doesn't affect other applications in the Studio - just Final Cut Pro.

Download Preference Manager

Compressor Repair

Not fully compatible with Final Cut Studio 3.

Some features will work but many will not. Expect an update in the next few weeks.

Download Compressor Repair

FCS Remover 2.5.2 released

We've just released FCS Remover 2.5.2. This is a general maintenance release that fixes several issues, most notably the crash that a small number of users were experiencing. The software has additionally been given several performance boosts.

FCS Remover is a tool to completely remove Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Express and Final Cut Server. This can be useful in many instances such as upgrading to a newer version, removing content or unused applications to save disk space, or general troubleshooting. FCS Remover gives you a great deal of flexibility by allowing you to specify exactly which components you wish to remove.



FCS Remover is completely free and is available here. It is fully compatible with Final Cut Studio versions 1, 2 and 3 (2009) and works on OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard.

FCS Remover 2.5 released

We've just released FCS Remover 2.5.

This version adds support for last week's Final Cut Studio (2009) release, as well as improving the overall speed and responsiveness of the application.

One minor tweak worth noting - if you want to reinstall Final Cut Studio but don't want the bother of entering your serial number and license information all over again, go to the Shared Files heading, then deselect Registration. This is a new option in this version, as requested by several people.

FCS Remover is a tool to completely remove Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Express and Final Cut Server. This can be useful in many instances such as upgrading to a newer version, removing content or unused applications to save disk space, or general troubleshooting. FCS Remover gives you a great deal of flexibility by allowing you to specify exactly which components you wish to remove.

FCS Remover is completely free and is available here. It is compatible with OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard (PPC and Intel) and Final Cut Studio 1.0 and above.

Check out the Resources section of the site for more tools.

My thoughts on the new Final Cut Studio

Wow, I go away for a couple of days and Apple has a brand new version of FCS waiting for me when I get back (although I do think the fact that it is simply called Final Cut Studio and not Final Cut Studio 3 will cause confusion).

Here are my first impressions:

Architecture

This is Leopard and Intel-only, which is a little surprising because there's only a couple of months until Snow Leopard comes out, and I think many of us thought a Snow Leopard-only release in September was likely. There is no word on whether or not it takes advantage of the new features of Snow Leopard such as Grand Central Dispatch or OpenCL, nor any indication that Final Cut Pro has been rewritten in Cocoa as has been so often speculated. I noticed a lot of the screenshots in Apple's examples were taken in Tiger, suggesting that perhaps the feature list was set long before Snow Leopard was announced.

Apple claims that Final Cut Studio will not work on a device with integrated graphics - such as a MacBook or Mac Mini. However, they also say that ProRes 422 Proxy is designed for editing on a MacBook or MacBook Pro, so it would appear that Final Cut Pro can at least be used on a machine with integrated graphics, if not some of the other apps in the suite.

It's also worth noting that the minor applications in the suite only received minor updates, as indicated by their version numbers. So it is likely that the problems with Compressor have not gone away.

Blu-ray

Blu-ray burning directly in Compressor - I certainly didn't expect this. And integrating it into Compressor is significant too. Although I never really thought about it before, the majority of the DVDs I make in DVDSP are rough cuts for client approval that don't need a fancy custom menu and I never make use of any of the advanced features like scripting. I would imagine many people are in the same boat and therefore burning a basic disc in Compressor is a much faster and more efficient way to work.

It is telling though, that DVD Studio Pro did not receive a significant update for the second time running. We have been using essentially the same version for the past three years (an eternity in the technology world), and it suggests that Apple may perhaps discontinue this product in the future.

More ProRes options

Don't underestimate the importance of this. ProRes 4444 (the extra 4 refers to the alpha channel) allows you to convert footage shot with a high-end 4:4:4 camera to ProRes without sacrificing color information. With previous versions of Final Cut Studio, you would have had to leave it uncompressed (using up significantly more disk space and bandwidth), use Animation (slow) or explore a third-party codec.

The mastering possibilities are interesting too. HDCAM SR has long been the industry choice for HD mastering but it is expensive. Using ProRes 4444, you could create an HD master of equivalent quality to HDCAM SR but on a significantly cheaper LTO tape (LTO drives cost less than 1/10th of the cost of an HDCAM SR deck). LTO is the standard for data backup / archiving in the IT world and offers a number of other benefits such as potentially faster-than-realtime writing and also being format, frame size and frame rate agnostic. Of course, the receiver would have to have an LTO deck and necessary equipment.

LiveType discontinued

LiveType has long been superseded by Motion so it was only a matter of time before it was canned. In Motion 4 you can now adjust individual letters in a text object, meaning the one advantage LiveType had over Motion has now disappeared and consequently, LiveType has been discontinued. It was inevitable really.

Avid-like features

There are some nice new features to emulate Avid functionality, such as the new floating timecode display, global transitions and the ability to automatically import clips just by plugging in a drive. This is the benefit of competition.

Faster, better quality

I am a big fan of anything that makes things faster and/or improves video or audio quality. Background rendering and exporting is a huge feature and arguably should have been in Final Cut Pro 6 because they'd already laid the foundations with background SmoothCam processing.

Soundtrack Pro has a significantly redesigned architecture which improves performance and will hopefully address some of the issues I have experienced, such as working for a while on a project and then suddenly not being able to save it. It also features improved audio cleanup tools.

Faster frame control processing in Compressor gets my vote too.

RED support

The RED post workflow has always had issues and Apple has clearly developed the new Color and Cinema Tools with RED in mind. The main stumbling block in the RED workflow seems to be conforming the R3Ds once the offline edit is complete, and some third-party solutions have been created in an attempt to address this.

Now you can maintain the relationship between your original RED camera footage and your editing proxies inside a Cinema Tools database (hopefully CT creates and links the proxies automatically). You edit the proxies, export to Color and grade the original R3Ds using the data from the database to conform. This greatly simplifies things, although some would argue that native REDCODE support in the FCP timeline would be even better - perhaps when RED Rocket comes out?

Color also now supports 4K - although Apple will still be behind if the 6K Scarlet comes out this year as predicted.

Media Management

One thing people haven't commented much on is the improved media management, which has been the bane of every Final Cut Pro user at one point or another. Spotlight in Mac OS X indexes the files on your hard disk in a database and Final Cut Pro 7 uses that data to quickly reconnect the files, as opposed to querying them directly.

What this means is that FCP can reconnect files faster (so projects will presumably load a lot quicker) and hopefully be more intelligent when a file changes.

Missed opportunities

• No ScriptSync (Avid) / Speech-to-Text (Premiere) - There is no way of syncing dialogue up to a script or automatically converting it to text. This means that, unless you have an assistant to transcribe it for you, you have to search through a load of footage in order to find the line of dialogue or the soundbite you are looking for.


• No XML project files - Please Apple, this would make it far, far easier to seamlessly integrate Final Cut Pro with other applications.


• No word on Phenomenon - Contrary to speculation, the Shake replacement codenamed Phenomenon was not included in Final Cut Studio or bundled into Motion, which begs the question of whether it will ever arrive.

Final Thoughts

There's some good stuff here - Apple has (eventually) listened to a lot of our complaints about media management, exports typing up the application, etc. But how well these work in reality will remain to be seen. I won't get my copy until next week.

But maybe it's not called Final Cut Studio 3 because there's not really anything there to justify calling it that. Although Final Cut Studio 2 also had few major features, it did at least come with a brand new application that used to cost $20k (Color). I think the new price cut reflects Apple's recognition that selling the upgrade at $499 would perhaps not be value for money, meaning future updates may not necessarily be as cheap.

Interesting Links

Official Final Cut Studio page
Fully-indexed online Final Cut Pro manual
Final Cut Studio in Depth - 66 page document from Apple detailing all the changes
Apple ProRes white paper
Apple KB: Installing content when upgrading
MacWorld review by Mike Curtis
How to Install Final Cut Studio 3
Norman Hollyn's take
In-depth review by Jan Ozer
Mike Jones compares Final Cut Pro 7 to his wishlist
Installing Final Cut Pro 6 and 7 side-by-side
Changes in FCP 7.0 XML - for developers
Studio Daily summary
More links from xlr8yourmac.com

Compressor Repair 1.1.4 released

Yesterday we released Compressor Repair 1.1.4. This is a maintenance release that fixes a single bug that resulted in qmasterd not relaunching in certain situations.

Compressor Repair is a utility designed to diagnose and repair issues with Apple Compressor and Qmaster. Compressor relies heavily on Qmaster in order to operate properly, and the link between the two is very fragile. Compressor Repair tries to resolve launch and batch submission issues, particularly the dreaded "Unable to connect to background process" error.

Compressor Repair is completely free and is available here. It works best with Compressor 3.x on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger or 10.5 Leopard.

We have many other tools available which can be found in the Resources section of the site.

Final Cut Pro 6.0.6 released

Apple today released Final Cut Pro 6.0.6.

The release notes name only one fix:

Improved Real-Time Playback on Certain Mac Pro and Xserve Models
Final Cut Pro 6.0.6 improves real-time playback capabilities with Mac Pro (Early 2009) models and Xserve (Early 2009) models when working with complex sequences or high-bandwidth media formats.

There are no new features, but I wasn't actually expecting any - in fact, I wasn't expecting an FCP 6.0.6 update at all. I guess this was an urgent fix.

Of course, this new update will raise questions about Final Cut Studio 3 but I am confident that it is in development. Apple's ProApp developers on the pro-apps-dev mailing list are very much alive and well, and frequently ask third-party developers what features they would like to see in future versions. Some kind of official acknowledgment and a tentative release schedule from Apple would be nice though.

The usual guidelines apply - don't update in the middle of a project, don't update for several weeks so that potential bugs and issues have a chance to show themselves, don't update if you don't need the features in this patch (it only applies to 2009 models), and make sure to clone your drive before you update.