FCS Remover 2.0.6 released

Yesterday we released FCS Remover 2.0.5. This is a minor update to our Final Cut Studio uninstaller.

Changes:

• Feature: Remembers last window positions.


• Feature: Remembers last selected options.


• Feature: Preferences dialog.


• Feature: Trash Preferences option.


• Improvement: Improved Qmaster exit method.


• Feature: Command-line arguments (see user manual).


• Feature: Keyboard shortcuts - Space to select items, Cmd+A to Select All, Cmd+Shift+A to Select None.

FCS Remover is completely free and is available here. Check out our other software here.

Update 1/14/09: 2.0.5 was re-released as 2.0.6 to fix some bugs.

Macworld 2009 Keynote

I've been busy today so apologies for the lateness of this post. I almost entitled it "Macworld 2009" before adding "Keynote" when I remembered that there is more to Macworld than just the keynote. And, of course, that's something IDG will be banking on next year when Apple will sadly be absent.

Phil spent a lot of time on iLife and iWork. I won't say much about them except that the Keynote Remote is an awesome idea.

Onto the 17" MacBook Pro. There's been a lot of disappointment with Apple's recent pro notebook releases, and Apple has luckily made some excellent decisions with this new one. It's glossy but you can thankfully change it for a matte screen for $50. It's considerably faster than the 15" one (up to 2.93 GHz, 6 MB cache, up to 8 GB RAM). It comes with a 320 GB 5,400 RPM hard disk that can be upgraded to either a 7,200 RPM disk or a 128 or 256 GB solid-state drive (I didn't realize they made SSDs so big nowadays - they're really advancing within the market). Like the 15", it comes with two Nvidia graphics chips and a large glass trackpad.

Like the 15", it's also Firewire 800-only. Luckily FW800 is backwards-compatible with FW400 so it's just a case of using an adapter, but that's one more thing to carry around with you. Not really a deal-breaker though.

There is some controversy over the battery. You see, it's fixed. I see that as a good thing for some and a deal-breaker for others. It will give you up to 8 hours of "wireless productivity" which is 3 hours more than the 15". It will also take much longer to deteriorate. For me, as someone who doesn't own spare batteries, I see that as a very useful thing.

However, if you regularly use your machine outdoors for more than 8 hours at a time, or are planning a trip to the Amazonian rainforest where it might be days before you see a power outlet, that could be a problem. So it's neither great nor terrible - it all depends on your needs. I can see third-party manufacturers filling this gap in the market though, much like the iPod "battery packs" that you can strap on.

The base model is still the same price - $2700. The 128 GB SSD adds $500 to the price and the 256 GB SSD adds $900. SSDs have now reached the point where their storage space is comparable with that of a regular laptop hard disk. Hopefully SSD manufacturers will now focus on lowering the price because they are still far too expensive.

It's going to be 3-4 weeks before they ship but Apple is accepting pre-orders today. If you select the matte screen it changes to 4-6 weeks.

The other announcements can be summed up quite quickly - fixed-price iTunes tracks are a thing of the past and Apple will now adopt price tiers of $0.69, $0.99 and $1.29. 8 million songs DRM-free today, the entire catalog DRM-free by the end of Q1. You can now purchase songs from the iPhone itself.

I was hoping Apple would go out with more of a bang considering it's their last Macworld but I guess their whole point was that they didn't need to save their big announcements for Macworld any more, as people would listen wherever and whenever it was. I wasn't expecting much to interest me as it's mainly geared towards their consumer line, but I was disappointed to see nothing of Snow Leopard.

Update: You can now view the keynote video online.

Getting to know the Terminal Part 1: Basic File Operations

The Terminal is an application that drives fear into the heart of a lot of Mac users - an application they only dream of using in their worst possible nightmares.

It's really not that scary - in fact, it can actually be a very useful timesaving device. You can perform operations on a large number of files at once in a fraction of a second, saving a lot of time.

Although the GUI is prettier and more intuitive, constantly moving, clicking and dragging the mouse around the screen wastes time - not to mention that rendering the GUI takes away precious processing cycles from the operation you are trying to perform. And you don't even need to constantly type things either - you can write a shell script to perform a task and set it to run automatically.

If you are thinking of entering the visual effects industry, most employers will expect basic command-line knowledge and shell scripting abilities. While most VFX houses use some form of Linux, Mac OS X's Terminal is almost identical with the exception of a small number of proprietary commands.

So let's get started.

Setting up

First of all, open up the Terminal by navigating to /Applications/Utilities and double-clicking the Terminal application. I find it useful to ctrl-click the dock icon and select Keep in Dock so it is always there for convenience, but this is up to you.

A window like this will appear:

The title bar of my window says "Terminal - bash - 80x24".

bash refers to the shell I am using. There are various different shells available, each with minor differences. We will just concentrate on bash. Incidentally, if your title bar doesn't say "bash", type bash and press enter.

80x24 refers to the number of characters that can be displayed on screen at once - 80 horizontally and 24 vertically. If you resize the window these numbers will change. It doesn't matter if yours has a different value to mine.

Directory navigation

You will see something like this on screen:
Last login: Mon Jan 5 15:27:17 on ttys000
MacBook:~ Jon$

MacBook is the name of my machine, Jon is my username. The ~ indicates that the current directory is my user directory. To view the full path of the current directory, type:

pwd

This stands for Print Working Directory and on my machine outputs the path /Users/Jon. The working directory is the directory the shell will perform all commands in unless specifically told otherwise.

To change to a different working directory use the cd command like so:
cd Documents

The prompt changes to MacBook:Documents Jon$.

It's worth noting at this point that all commands are case-sensitive, so cd Documents is not the same as cd documents, and cd is not the same as CD.

There are some specific shortcuts you can use with the cd command that are summarized below.



It's worth mentioning here that shell commands are easily confused by spaces in a file path. If you must type a path with spaces, you must either:

a) Surround it in quotes
cd "~/Desktop/My Spaced Filename.doc"

or b) Use escape characters
Escape characters are characters placed before a potentially conflicting character (a space in this case) so that the shell knows to treat it as text and not as a command. The escape character for the Unix shell is \ (backslash).

cd ~/Desktop/My\ Spaced\ Filename.doc

Viewing directory contents

If you want to view the contents of a directory inside the Terminal window, use the ls command. ls is short for "list" (you'll notice that shell commands are generally quite short as they need to be typed often).

cd /
ls

Returns:


Notice that ls returns system files and folders that would normally be hidden by OS X, except for files and folders that have a dot at the front of their name such as .DS_Store. You can show these by typing ls -a (short for "all").

You can also specify a directory as a parameter such as ls /usr/bin and it will list the contents of this directory instead of the current one.

You can set several options when you call ls such as:



You can combine as many of these parameters as you like such as:
ls -l -R

Or more simply:
ls -lR

(note: some parameters automatically override others)

These are just a few parameters of many. For exhaustive details of the parameters available, type:

man ls

This is an important Unix concept that also translates to OS X. Man (manual) pages are documentation files easily accessible from the shell using the man command. They will tell you everything you could possibly want to know about the command such as its syntax, parameters, compatibility and return values (more on that in the upcoming scripting tutorial).

You can use man with any command such as man cd, man ls, man echo. With the man page open, press Space to go to the next page and press q to quit and return to the shell.

This gives you documentation instantly at your fingertips, even if the machine you are using doesn't have an internet connection.

Basic File Operations

Use the cp command to copy files like so:

cp [source file] [destination path]

Here's an example on my system:
cd ~/Desktop
cp UntitledDoc.txt ../Documents

This will set the working directory to my desktop. It will then copy UntitledDoc.txt to my Documents folder (remember that .. refers to the parent directory).

You can also create a duplicate of a file within a directory by changing the destination filename:
cp UntitledDoc.txt UntitledDocDupe.bak

To copy a folder and all its subfiles and subfolders, use cp -R. Type man cp to learn about the other parameters.

To move a file, use the mv command with the exact same syntax as the cp command.

To rename a file, you can either use the rename command (same basic syntax as cp) or use mv like so:
mv myfile.txt mynewfile.txt

To delete a file, use rm:
cd ~/Desktop
rm myfile.txt

Some useful rm parameters are listed below:



That's it for the first tutorial. In Part 2 I will be covering more file operations, working with directories, wildcards and permissions.

Macworld SF 2009 rumor roundup

As you are probably all aware of, tomorrow is the date of the Macworld San Francisco 2009 keynote by Phil Schiller instead of Steve Jobs.

MacRumors has done a great job of rounding up the rumors pertaining to this event. It's definitely worth checking out - even if a lot of them seem to be from the same source.

It's also important to remember that Macworld SF is a consumer-oriented show so if don't expect too much in the way of professional products and equipment.

(As a side note: I would always advise buying the later speed-bumped version of a product, not the original. If Apple does release a fixed-battery MacBook Pro, there's lots of potential for problems and issues with the first-generation.)

Why does my DVD audio level differ from the level in FCP?

Have you noticed a discrepancy between the audio in your Final Cut Pro timeline and the audio of the finished DVD when using Compressor's DVD presets?

That's because the Dolby Digital 2.0 audio preset in Compressor has several functions to improve unsuitable audio, but if you have already mixed your audio they might do more harm than good in some cases. Rather than just telling you which settings to use, I'm first going to explain what these functions are designed to do because there are a lot of misconceptions about them.

Compression alters your dynamic range (the difference between the loudest and quietest sounds in a soundtrack) by compressing the level of sounds to fit within a certain range. The loudest sound in a Dolby soundtrack can be 105dB. Considering the fact that prolonged exposure to 90 dB audio can result in hearing loss, most people do not play their audio at 105dB. When you set up a Dolby decoder with a reference tone, you are telling it the volume level it should play 105dB audio at. So if this is lower than 105dB (which is likely), you will lose some of the very quiet sounds on the soundtrack. The compression presets allow you to regain these sounds by sacrificing some dynamic range in the process.



It is set to Film Standard by default but if you have already performed a mix with a moderate dynamic range, further compression is not likely to be necessary and so it is worthwhile to switch this to None.



Dialog normalization is a feature on several Dolby decoders that ensures all content plays back at the same level. The listener sets their preferred playback level and the dialogue in every DVD and TV show plays back at the same level, meaning you don't need to keep reaching for the remote in order to adjust the volume. Contrary to popular belief, it only adjusts the overall volume level when the source changes (i.e. when you begin playing the DVD or when a new TV program begins) so dynamic range is preserved throughout the movie. It does not dynamically adjust the volume as the movie is playing.



The normalization value indicates the difference between the overall level of dialog and the maximum audio peak of 0 dBFS. The default is set to -27 dBFS, which is the established level for film soundtracks. It is also the level most decoders are set to by default. If you have your decoder set to -27 dBFS and then, for example, try to play a -25 dBFS movie, the decoder will lower the overall volume by 2 dBFS so that the general dialogue level remains the same. If you do want to switch it off when compressing your audio files (if you've already leveled your sound mix for example), set it to -31 dbFS.

So if you would like your audio to be exactly how it was in Final Cut Pro, set Dialog Normalization to -31 dBFS and set Compression in the Pre-Processing tab to None. However, these functions do serve useful purposes for the end user and it is worthwhile to bear their needs in mind.

What does 2009 hold for Final Cut Studio?

Now, 2008 has been a year of frustration for us editors. We've seen few Final Cut Studio updates (and some of those have broken more things than they fixed), we've seen matte displays replaced with glossy ones, we've seen no Apple at NAB 2008 and we've seen very little in the way of Mac Pro updates.

Has Apple abandoned pro users? Are they more interested in making iPods? Yes and no. Yes, of course, they will want to put a lot of resources into something that contributes strongly to their bottom line. However, I don't believe they have abandoned pro users at all.

Everything changes with Snow Leopard. Snow Leopard is Apple's way of telling us it still cares. Look at the feature list - Grand Central, OpenCL, QuickTime X, even the 2.2 gamma change - is there anything there that will benefit the average Joe Bloggs user when he's checking his email? No, this is a lean operating system designed for performance. And it's also designed to sell Mac Pros of course, and make the 8-core Mac Pro you bought a year ago worthwhile. This is an operating system designed to put the Mac back on top of the list of pro must-haves. Apple has a massive head-start on Microsoft here.

And what better way to promote Snow Leopard and the Mac than with a highly-optimized version of its flagship pro suite, Final Cut Studio.

I don't think Apple is abandoning us at all. I think they are just diverting their pro app resources into something much better. Think how the number of patches and the number of fixes has dwindled lately. Updates are rare and they only fix major issues. It makes sense that Apple would only put resources into fixing major bugs if Final Cut Studio 2 was at the end of its life.

Another thing I find interesting is that Apple is putting Shake updates in Pro Applications Updates but it is not putting Logic or Aperture updates in there. This would suggest that there may have been a merging of the Shake and Final Cut Studio teams.

And let's look back at the original launch of Final Cut Studio 2. If you remove Color from the equation, there's really not much there. Worth upgrading, sure, but no big architectural changes like FCP 4.0 to 4.5 or 4.5 to 5.0. Could it have been a version designed to tide us over until the big changes came along? Only Apple knows the answer to that question.

So here are my predictions:

1. Final Cut Studio 3 launches in 2009 to coincide with the release of Snow Leopard. I don't know how backwards-compatible it will be, it could well be Snow Leopard-only (which also means Intel-only). It will be largely rewritten to take advantage of new Snow Leopard features and hardware acceleration.

2. LiveType will be killed off and its features will merge into Motion. Motion will inherit some of the features of Shake. This will better position it to compete with After Effects. It remains to be seen whether Apple will keep the node-based interface from Shake or spin it off as a separate application. I don't think Apple will completely merge the two together as they have different target markets and different complexity levels.

3. There will be greater interoperability between Final Cut Studio applications. Color will be redesigned to better fit into the studio. Interfaces will be improved so that there is greater coherence between applications.

4. Media management will be redesigned and there will be tighter integration with Final Cut Server.

5. The current NLE fashion is to have an automatic transcription tool. I would imagine Apple would implement this too, as it has great potential, even with the inevitable inaccuracies. Imagine this with Final Cut Server - you could easily search for that elusive line of dialogue within hundreds or even thousands of media files.

Ok, some of these are predictions, some of these are wishful thinking. But I believe Apple will at least optimize FCS3 for Snow Leopard technologies, because Snow Leopard is pointless if software isn't written to support it. At the end of the day, performance is what matters most.

Other features that may not come but I'd like to see anyway:

1. Why do we have to keep exporting to XML? Why not just make the FCP project file XML?

2. Add scripting abilities to the applications in the Studio and improve their expandability. Apple can't possibly think of everything - let third party developers fill in the gaps. It might also win over some larger companies who will be able to integrate it with their other applications and databases.

3. Blu-ray - Who even knows? It might interfere with Apple's iTunes business model but either way, BD support in Adobe Encore is proving that there is a demand for it and it is possible to provide it in an authoring application despite the draconian licensing issues.

Roll on 2009!

Compressor Repair 1.1.0 released

We've just released Compressor Repair 1.1.0 with the following changes:

• Enhancement: Improved Qmaster relaunch process


• Enhancement: Improved feedback when errors have been discovered


• Feature: Command-line functionality (see user manual)


• Feature: Now refreshes Qmaster icon in menu bar


• Bug fix: Fixed "file exists" error when trashing qmaster spool

Compressor Repair is completely free and is available here.

Pro Applications Update 2008-05 is out

Apple just released Pro Applications Update 2008-05. This is identical to Pro Applications Update 2008-04 except it now comes with Color 1.0.4.

The news is still hot off the press so Apple haven't gotten around to updating their release notes at this point in time, however, given the timing and the fact that only one application was modified, it is safe to say that this patch was released solely to fix the dreaded XDCAM bugs in Color 1.0.3.

If you are currently running 1.0.3 and suffering from the XDCAM bug I would advise updating to this version. If not, the Golden Rules (TM) apply as usual:
* Never update in the middle of a project.
* Don't update if you don't actually need any of the features included in the update.
* Always clone or backup your system beforehand.
* Wait for at least a week to see if there are any reported problems with the patch.
* Wait even longer if you're using third party hardware or plugins e.g. the AJA Kona card or FXFactory plugins.

Update: Changelog is now up:

XDCAM Clip Relinking Is Fixed
XDCAM EX, HD, and 422 clips now relink properly.

ISO Changes in the RED Tab Appear Correctly
Instances where the Color UI did not accurately reflect changes made to the ISO parameter in the RED tab of the Primary In room have been fixed.

Improvements to the Blur Node in the Color FX Room
Adjusting the spread parameter of the Blur node no longer causes the clip to scale up.

Macworld 2009 to be the last for Apple

Apple just released a press release stating their intention to abandon all Macworld trade shows after January 2009. This is big news because Macworld is the most important trade show in Apple's calendar, and was the one they chose to use for announcing the iPhone.

Apple states that it has less need for trade shows due to the greater media presence it experiences nowadays, and I would say this is probably true. It's the reason they pulled out of NAB 2008 and it's the reason you shouldn't expect them at NAB 2009.

However, the more pressing question is this: why is Phil Schiller delivering the last keynote and not Steve Jobs? Surely Jobs should be present for the last one? Apple offers no explanation but this is likely to fuel further speculation about the CEO's health.

All I know is this - there are unlikely to be any huge announcements at the event, and it will become much harder to predict the best time to buy a computer now that Apple could spring new models upon us at any moment. But the computer industry is constantly changing and if you keep waiting for the next big thing, you'll be waiting forever. The best thing to do is buy what you need when you need it. Without the benefit of foresight, that's all you can do.

FCS Remover 2.0.4 released

We've just released FCS Remover 2.0.4. It's a maintenance release so there aren't any new features. This improves the window resizing code (thanks Andy) and now reports the application version when submitting an error. This is in response to several people reporting errors from earlier versions that had already been fixed in later ones. The bug reporter now prompts you to update older versions of FCS Remover before submitting a bug report in case the bug has been fixed in a later version, although you still have the option to submit the report regardless.



FCS Remover is a tool for removing Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Express and Final Cut Server. This is recommended practice when upgrading Final Cut Studio or for general troubleshooting. You can specify which elements to remove, and there are even built-in presets for common tasks. It works with Final Cut Studio 1 and 2, and Final Cut Studio 4 and above, and is compatible with Leopard and Tiger operating systems.

FCS Remover is completely free and is available here. We also have many other useful tools available here.