Digital Rebellion Blog

FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2.2 out now - redesigned Corrupt Clip Finder and more

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 16:57:46 MST

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.

FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2.1 released

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 12:04:15 MST

We've just released FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2.1, a small maintenance update to our popular Final Cut Studio troubleshooting software.

As well as the usual bug fixes and performance improvements, this update also offers a couple of new features. File Salvage now supports Big Endian audio formats and also offers audio support for DV QuickTime movies; Corrupt Clip Finder can now locate corrupt audio files in addition to corrupt movie clips; and Preference Manager can now automatically launch the Final Cut Pro System Settings dialog when you open a new project to encourage users to double-check their scratch disk settings.

Here's the full changelog:

Improved Task Scheduler memory usage
Fixed an Autosave Cleaner crash
Improved compatibility with PowerPC processors
File Salvage now supports Big Endian audio formats
File Salvage now supports audio for DV QuickTime movies
Path Manager automatically creates a subfolder for safety if you set a path to an important directory such as your user library or system root
Corrupt Clip Finder can now locate corrupt audio files
Preference Manager can now automatically launch the Final Cut Pro System Settings dialog when a new project is opened
Updated Crash Analyzer definitions
General bug fixes, tweaks and performance improvements

FCS Maintenance Pack is $129 with a free 15-day trial available here. Check out the Resources section of the site for more useful tools.

FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2 released

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:08:12 MST

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.

FCP Versioner 1.1 released

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 11:26:48 MST

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.

FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2 Beta 2 released

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 17:14:51 MST

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

Christmas promotion - 15% off everything

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 11:00:33 MST

Christmas is a time for giving, so in the final week before Christmas we're offering a 15% reduction on all of our products until Christmas Day.

You can get FCS Maintenance Pack for as little as $84 and FCP Versioner for just $49.

You don't need to do anything special - just visit the product page, click the Buy Now button and the lower cost will be reflected automatically.

This is an excellent time to buy if you're on the fence, as introductory pricing on FCS Maintenance Pack will be ending in January (the price of FCP Versioner will stay the same). This is your last chance to get it for a rock-bottom price.

Merry Christmas!

Introducing FCP Versioner

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 20:29:38 MST

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

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 06:27:57 MST

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

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:25:40 MST

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

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 03:47:26 MDT

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

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:31:41 MDT

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

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:35:51 MDT

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

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:54:13 MDT

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

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:37:37 MDT

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

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:37:35 MDT

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

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 17:02:27 MDT

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.

FCPUG Amsterdam Supermeet 9-13-2009

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 01:32:29 MDT

If you're in Europe (or willing to travel), there is an FCPUG Supermeet in Amsterdam on Sunday 13th September.

As always, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on including:

Final Cut Pro co-creator Michael Wohl shows off FCP 7

Simon Walker shows how to do a Color grade in 10 mins

Jason Levine from Adobe shows how to integrate FCP and Adobe CS4 workflows

26 vendors will be showcasing their wares

The World Famous Raffle with over 43,000 Euros worth of prizes

Tickets are a steal at 15 Euros (around $20) or 10.50 Euros for students with valid ID. Doors open at 17:00 with the FCP Showcase, where attendees can meet third-party vendors and developers, and the main Supermeet lasts from 19:00-23:30.

It's being held at The Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky in Dam Square in the Netherlands. This
event is expected to be the largest gathering of Final Cut Studio users, Gurus and Digital Filmmakers in Europe during the annual IBC trade show. These shows are always well worth attending.

More details are here.

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

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:40:42 MDT

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

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:30:30 MDT

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).

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

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 12:12:11 MDT

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

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 12:13:05 MDT

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

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:21:00 MDT

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

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 09:54:23 MDT

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

Could SD cards replace DVDs?

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 07:36:33 MDT

ComputerWorld has an interesting opinion piece entitled Is Apple trading SD cards for DVDs in MacBooks?. The author, Seth Weintraub, speculates that the inclusion of SD card slots in Apple's latest notebook line signifies a gradual shift away from optical media to solid state, similar to the way Apple killed off the floppy disk.

Whether true or not, it would make a lot of sense. Steve Jobs has made it clear that he is not a fan of the licensing system for Blu-ray discs, and switching to SD or SSD distribution would not only remove the need to use a proprietary, licensed format but also provide the opportunity for more powerful hardware DRM / encryption to protect content, such as that used by the military. Although DRM is unpopular with consumers, it is a necessary evil in order to get content providers to embrace a new format.

SD cards / SSD drives also have the benefit of being reusable (although distributors could choose to prevent writes at the file system or controller level) and being considerably smaller than optical discs, which is both convenient and good for the environment. As well as being smaller, they would be much faster at reading and writing than conventional discs.

The content creation process would be much simpler too. Burned DVDs are inferior to replicated DVDs, and so any mass distribution requires you to send your master off to a replication facility, which is an expensive process that can be very inflexible when it comes to quantities. SD cards / SSDs, on the other hand, can easily be cloned in-house for no cost and there would be no physical quality issues in doing so.

Computer manufacturers could use the space taken up by large DVD drives to increase the battery size of laptops, add more components (such as ExpressCard slots and eSATA ports, Apple), increase performance, reduce heat, or reduce the physical size of the computer. Television manufacturers could simply include an SD slot in the TV itself, removing the need for a separate player, saving both space and cost.

As to the format on such a disk, it would be silly to use H.264 as it requires royalty and licensing fees, and one of the positive reasons for switching to SD / SSD is to get rid of such licensing fees. As you may be aware, a battle for web video formats is currently ongoing and Ogg Theora, while weaker in a technical sense, could be a great open format for SD/ SSD-based distribution as bandwidth and storage space would be much less of an issue than on the internet.

SD distribution would also provide a means of increasing compatibility, as it would be possible to include NTSC, PAL, 16:9, 4:3 and HD versions on the same disk, which could be automatically selected based on the type of television being used (or the resolution of the computer display). If video formats should change in the future, it would be dead easy to include both the new and old formats on the same card to maintain full compatibility between old and new. Companies could even put 4K video on the card in anticipation of future technologies.

It would have the potential to really level the playing field for independent filmmakers. Right now the safest option for indies is digital distribution because it doesn't cost any money to put your film online. It just sits there, for free, until it is sold - in stark contrast to the DVD approach, where you pay a lot of money up front and hope and pray that you make it back. Most indies will not be able to get their discs into physical stores like Wal-mart, which makes getting through inventory much harder. The downside to a download-only approach is that by not going the DVD or Blu-ray route, you cut out a significant portion of the audience who have no desire for digital downloads.

It's very difficult for an independent filmmaker to create a Hollywood-quality DVD, as Hollywood has access to high quality hardware encoders and professional compressionists that are experts in squeezing out the maximum quality in the limited bandwidth available. With SD cards, bandwidth would be considerably higher and so it would take much less effort to produce a high quality image suitable for distribution. And if the video formats were open formats like Ogg Theora, there would be no license fees to pay for mass distribution.

Will this ever happen? Well, there are currently two barriers. The first is that the cost per GB of solid state media is very high. This is something that will decrease with time though.

The second, more pertinent, issue is the fact that many companies are heavily invested in DVD and Blu-ray technology including studios, post houses, distributors, replication houses, disc manufacturers, drive / player manufacturers, software developers, and let's not forget the consortium of companies that receive patent royalties. None of these will want to see their investments or, for some companies, their entire business model go out of the window.

Of course, this is all pure speculation. When the cost and size of SD cards becomes viable, there could be a brand new technology which renders this solution unnecessary. We'll just have to wait and see what happens, what Apple chooses to do, and if they have the ability to make an impact on this issue.

Compressor Repair 1.1.4 released

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 03:39:25 MDT

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

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:10:33 MDT

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.

WWDC 2009 Summary

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:37:37 MDT

The WWDC Philnote ended a few minutes ago. If I were to sum it up in one sentence, it would be "one step forward, two steps back".

15" MacBook Pro

Apple announced a new 15" MacBook Pro with a built-in battery like its 17" sibling. This results in dramatically improved battery life, performance and reliability at the expense of a battery you cannot replace. To me this is not a problem at all but to some it will be a dealbreaker.

It also has an improved display with a 60% greater color gamut, allowing it to display a much greater range of colors. It's much faster, with up to a 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo CPU and up to 8GB of RAM, with a 500 GB hard disk or 256 GB SSD. It's also cheaper, starting at $1699 for the base model.

However, much like its previous notebook offerings, Apple gives with one hand and takes with the other. In a move that makes me question how in touch Apple is with its pro users, they have replaced the ExpressCard slot with an SD card slot. So that means no more native SxS support - you'll need to fork out for a USB adapter. And expect a drop in transfer speed over USB too.

Removing the ExpressCard slot drastically reduces the flexibility of the laptop. They've replaced a versatile port with one that has few uses (at least for video professionals). It also means we will not be able to connect eSATA devices or monitoring / conversion devices such as the Matrox MXO2 to MacBook Pros, drastically reducing their usefulness. This is a ridiculous decision for Apple to make on a device with "Pro" in the title.

Sure, you can get around this issue by buying a 17" MacBook Pro but I feel an ExpressCard slot should come as standard and not require you to buy a bigger, heavier and more expensive machine just for that feature.

Another aspect that is sure to irk ProApp users is the base model. Although it is good that Apple has reduced its price, it only features onboard graphics, unlike all the others which feature onboard and discrete graphics. This makes it unsuitable for applications like Motion and makes me question how future-proof this machine will be when Snow Leopard with OpenCL comes out. I think a machine with "Pro" in the title should be appropriately-specced to run Apple's professional applications.

13" MacBook Pro

Speaking of which, Apple rebranded the aluminum unibody MacBooks as the 13" MacBook Pro. Although the specifications are similar to the base 15" model and will therefore also result in limited ProApp usage and questionable OpenCL performance in Snow Leopard, I don't have a problem with that because this is something that was never there in the first place - this is not something Apple has taken away from us.

There's also some good news - Apple seems to have paid attention to the protests over the lack of FireWire ports in the previous generation and has now restored a single FireWire 800 port. The models are available up to 2.53 GHz with up to 8 GB RAM, an SD slot and a GeForce 9400M. The high-end 13" model is identical to the base 15" model in specification, which reiterates my opinion that the base 15" model is underpowered.

MacBook Air

Like the others, the MacBook Air has received a speed bump. It's also had a huge price cut and there is now only a few hundred dollars difference between the regular hard disk and SSD versions.

Snow Leopard

Apple demoed a few features but as the main changes were under the hood, these will probably be explored in more detail during the rest of the week.

Worthy of note:

Snow Leopard takes up around 6 GB less space than Leopard
"Fewer wait cursors"
Exposé is built into the dock - click and hold on a Dock icon and the app's windows will zoom out
Browser plugins are put in a separate process so that they do not crash the browser when they fail (it's unclear whether browsers other than Safari will be able to take advantage of this)
QuickTime X has been rebuilt from scratch, is hardware accelerated, has built-in ColorSync support and can stream data from any HTTP server (unfortunately more detailed information was not given)
QuickTime X has a minimal UI - it's very similar to QuickLook. Simple editing and uploading to popular video sharing sites built-in (essentially QuickTime Pro for free).
All system apps run in 64-bit
Grand Central allows developers to manage threads to make multi-threading more efficient

The biggest Snow Leopard announcement is that Snow Leopard will cost $129 retail like all the rest but only $29 if you are upgrading from Leopard. Yes, you read that correctly. It comes out in September, a month before Windows 7.

Safari 4

Safari 4 is out today and is available for download for Mac OS X 10.5.7. and Windows. This was one of my favorite announcements of the day - why? Because it makes Safari 4 the first shipping browser to pass Acid3 and support many new HTML5 web features.

One notable feature is video and audio tags. These allow you to play supported video and audio content directly in the browser without the need for Flash, Silverlight or other technologies. Plugins are always slower and more resource-hungry than native support for a particular feature, and open standards are always preferable. See this page for an HTML5 video that plays directly in your browser without Flash.

These changes have also made it across to MobileSafari, and it means Flash on the iPhone is even less likely than before (not a bad thing).

iPhone 3GS

It is a new iPhone but the name is very similar to the previous iPhone 3G, probably because no external differences were made to the phone or perhaps because it is still on the 3G network. It is considerably faster, features a 3MP digital camera, can record video, has a magnetometer (compass), 7.2Mbps HSDPA (faster 3G connection), voice operation, available in 16 and 32 GB on June 19th. The iPhone 3G has been reduced today to $99 and will continue to be sold once the new phone is out.

Tethering is not supported by AT&T and MMS will only work on the AT&T network at the end of summer (other networks do not have this handicap). Even Apple seemed fed up with AT&T's general incompetence, making frequent jokes at AT&T's expense.

One other notable feature is called Find My iPhone. Mobile Me users can log in and locate their lost iPhone on a map, send messages to it or make it emit a sound so that it can be located (even if it is on silent). If the phone has been stolen, you can remotely wipe your personal data from it. This is a pretty nice feature.

Final Cut Studio 3

This was missing in action, leading us to wonder when it will be released. Will it be released in conjunction with Snow Leopard - who knows? All I know is that Avid and Adobe CS4 have edged ahead and are looking mighty tempting, and Nuke is looking like a great replacement for Shake. When it comes to making your living, you can't wait around forever for software that you don't know anything about in terms of new features and may not even end up being released. You have to buy what you need when you need it - Apple needs to realize this.

So in conclusion, there's some great stuff there for consumers but professional users appear to have been sidelined once again.

Sign the DVD Studio Pro Blu-ray petition

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 02:24:37 MDT

AppleInsider recently had an article listing the version numbers of the applications in Final Cut Studio 3.

Although it's just a series of numbers, it is a useful indicator of just how much the applications have been updated. The most notable numbers are Color 1.5, Compressor 3.5 - indicating relatively minor changes - and DVD Studio Pro 4.2.2 - indicating virtually no changes at all.

So for those of you hoping for a major DVD Studio Pro update that supports Blu-ray burning, it looks like you're going to be disappointed once again.

There is now a petition circulating that asks Apple to reconsider its policy.

"We, the undersigned, will not buy a new version of Final Cut Studio if it is still lacking Blu-ray support."

Be sure to add your signature if you agree.

Preference Manager 2.0.3 released

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:52:40 MDT

Preference Manager 2.0.3 was released earlier today with some minor new features.

Preference Manager is an application for managing the preference files of Final Cut Studio. Preference files store user preferences and other settings, and can cause strange behavior if they become corrupt. Preference Manager allows you to trash, backup, restore and lock these files for maximum flexibility.

Here are the changes in the latest version:

Backup editing
Backup settings can now be edited.
Import Backup function
The Import Backup menu item adds a backup to the library without automatically restoring it, unlike Open Backup.
Project filenames are now listed below the backup name for convenience
You can now see at a glance which project is associated with a particular backup.
Support for Boris text plugin preferences
Preference Manager is now capable of backing up preferences from the Boris text tools included with Final Cut Pro (Text Scrambler, Title 3D, Title Crawl and Vector Shape).

Preference Manager is completely free and is available for download here. View the user manual for a walk-through of some of the new features.

Preference Manager 2.0.2 released

Sun, 17 May 2009 10:59:00 MDT

We've just released Preference Manager 2.0.2, which is primarily a maintenance release but has a couple of small features too.

Preference Manager is an application for managing the preference files of Final Cut Studio. Preference files store user preferences and other settings, and can cause strange behavior if they become corrupt. Preference Manager allows you to trash, backup, restore and lock these files for maximum flexibility.

The main changes are:

Better support for prior versions of FCP
Preference Manager now supports all versions from Final Cut Pro 3 onwards.
New icons to differentiate project-linked backups
When you link a project to a backup, a linked chain symbol will now appear. Hovering over the icon will reveal the name of the project it is linked to. If the project does not exist, a red broken chain icon will appear.
Selections in the Advanced dialog are now remembered when the application is closed
A lot of people asked for this, so here it is. Also, when you launch Preference Manager for the first time, only preferences are selected in the Advanced dialog. Some people inadvertently deleted their button bars and window layouts because they didn't realize they were selected by default.
Support for custom Compressor settings and destinations
Preference Manager is now capable of backing up custom Compressor settings and destinations.

Preference Manager is completely free and is available here.

Mac OS X 10.5.7 released

Tue, 12 May 2009 16:26:04 MDT

Apple has finally released the much-delayed 10.5.7 update to Leopard. There was much speculation that it was delayed to coincide with the full release of Safari 4 which is currently in beta, however this is clearly not the case as Apple has just released Safari 3.2.3 and an updated beta of Safari 4 (you won't see this in Software Update until you update to 10.5.7 though).

The release notes are quite brief, however it is possible to get a much better overview by looking at World of Apple's seed notes for the 10.5.7 beta. This is not a comprehensive list but gives a good indication of the final changes.

There's some good stuff in there - lots of networking fixes and several changes aimed at improving sleep/wake reliability (I've actually stopped putting my MacBook to sleep because it either wakes up constantly every 10 mins or never wakes up at all). It also contains updated graphics drivers. There's really nothing serious in there so you can update at your leisure. It's very much a polish update.

If you are thinking of updating though, remember the Golden Rules:
1. Never update in the middle of a project
2. Wait a week or two for problems to surface
3. Perform a clone of your system before installing
4. You will experience greater reliability from the larger combo updater

10.5.7 Delta Update (10.5.6 -> 10.5.7)
10.5.7 Combo Update (10.5.x -> 10.5.7)
10.5.7 Server Delta Update (10.5.6 -> 10.5.7)
10.5.7 Server Combo Update (10.5.x -> 10.5.7)

The bundled security update is also available separately for Tiger users as Security Update 2009-02.

Update: Mac Mini users are reporting problems already. It seems like certain DVI displays are not being recognized correctly on Mac Minis.

Compressor error - "You must enter a name for this batch submission"

Sun, 03 May 2009 02:31:35 MDT

Sometimes when you submit a batch, you may get the error:
"You must enter a name for this batch submission. This is the name that identifies this submission in the Batch Monitor and History window."

This error pops up when you drag items into the batch window in the wrong order. You must drag the clip in first and then drag in the settings and destinations.

There really shouldn't be a specific order for doing this but unfortunately Compressor can be very illogical at times.

Hacking Firefox extensions to work on beta versions

Sat, 02 May 2009 12:20:14 MDT

This is a little off-topic but some people might find it useful. For the past three months or so, I have been using the Firefox 3.5 betas as my main browser. Why? Well, it is considerably faster than the previous version, renders pages more accurately (much less difference between Firefox and Safari now) and has some features I now cannot live without, such as the ability to restore closed windows as well as tabs.

But the trouble with using a bleeding-edge browser is that third-party developers take time to update their extensions to make them compatible. This can be frustrating, as often no code changes are necessary and all that needs to be done is a simple modification of the maximum version string.

There are two things you can do here - switch off compatibility checking or modify the maximum version of the extension.

Switch off compatibility checking

1. In Firefox, type about:config into the address bar.

2. Select "I'll be careful, I promise" if a warning appears.

3. Ctrl-click anywhere and select New > Boolean.

4. Enter extensions.checkCompatibility (note the capital C) as the name.

5. Select false as the value.

I have heard people report problems with this so if you want to specify exactly which extensions you want to make compatible, read on.

If the extension is already installed

1. Make sure Firefox is closed.

2. Navigate to ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles.

3. You should see a folder with a gobbledegook name ending in ".default". Open this folder.

4. Delete or rename the file extensions.cache.

5. Open the extensions folder.

6. You will see more gobbledegook folder names. The only way to tell which one is the extension you are looking for is to open each folder one at a time and look at the contents of the folder's install.rdf file in TextEdit. The file's contents include the name of the extension, a description and compatibility information.

7. In the install.rdf file, look for the tag <em:maxVersion> and change the tag value to your current version (at the time of writing this is 3.5b4).

8. Save the file (you may need to change permissions on the file so you can write to it).

9. Launch Firefox and go to Tools > Add-Ons to verify that the extensions are now recognized by Firefox.

If the extension is not already installed

1. The Mozilla add-ons site won't let you download the extension if you have an incompatible version of Firefox. The easiest way to get around this is to fire up Safari, navigate to the add-ons page for the extension in question and download it manually (this works in Safari 4 - I don't have version 3 to test with).

2. Change the file extension of the .xpi file that is downloaded to .zip and unzip it. This will create a new folder on disk with the contents of the archive inside it.

3. Open install.rdf inside the folder and follow steps 7-8 above.

4. Select all files inside the folder, ctrl-click and click Compress X Items. You must compress the files inside the folder - do not compress the folder itself.

5. Rename the Archive.zip file to have an xpi extension.

6. Drag the XPI file into Firefox or go to File > Open File and navigate to it.

7. Firefox will now install it as if it was compatible.

Note - the extensions I modified were compatible with 3.1b3 (the previous version) so it was not much of a jump and I didn't experience any issues. I would not advise major version jumps (e.g. 2.x to 3.x) as this is likely to cause problems.

Compressor Repair 1.1.3 released

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 16:34:36 MDT

We've just released a quick maintenance update to Compressor Repair, bringing it up to version 1.1.3. This one improves Tiger compatibility and compatibility with foreign language versions of OS X.

Apple's Compressor relies heavily on the Qmaster service in order to work. Qmaster allows you to split rendering tasks across multiple machines in a render farm but it is still required even if you are only rendering on a single computer.

The link between the two is so important that if the Qmaster service fails to launch, Compressor will be unable to submit batches. Should this occur, Compressor Repair checks for problems that could be preventing Qmaster from operating correctly. It checks for missing files, incorrect permissions, an invalid hostname, and attempts to manually start the qmasterd process.

Compressor Repair remains completely free and is available here.

Preference Manager 2.0.1 released

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 12:14:24 MDT

We've just released Preference Manager 2.0.1 (if you're wondering what happened to 2.0.0, that was exclusive for FCP SuperMeet visitors).

Preference Manager is a utility that allows you to trash, lock, backup and restore your Final Cut Studio user preferences. Unlike other apps, it supports all applications in the Final Cut Studio suite, not just FCP. It is useful as a troubleshooting tool and as a simple means of transferring your preferences to another computer.

Version 2.0.x is a complete rewrite with a redesigned and improved interface. It was designed to be easier for casual users while still being useful for power users. So if you click Backup or Quick Trash in the Basic tab, this will just trash or backup all of your preferences, which is fine for most users.

People who want a bit more control can click on the Advanced tab, where they will have more precise control over what is trashed or backed up, and also have the option to lock files to prevent modification.

You can also assign categories to better distinguish backups. There are three categories - User, Project and Workflow. These categories are just different ways of representing the backups and have no bearing on the content stored in the file or the operation of Preference Manager - they're purely for organization (incidentally, I am open to suggestions for additional categories).

However, it is possible to optionally link a project to a Project-categorized backup. This doesn't just apply to FCP projects either - you can add Motion projects, Color projects, Compressor jobs, etc. Whenever you launch the project, the backup will automatically be restored before the application launches. This enables you to easily set scratch disks and other settings on a per-project basis (you must open the project file in the Finder - you can't click File > Open).

As these are major changes to the application, I would fully appreciate feedback on what works for you and what doesn't. Everyone uses the app in a slightly different way, so it'd be interesting to hear what would improve your particular workflow. Just reply to this post, use the feedback form at the bottom of the Preference Manager page, send us an email or contact us on Twitter.

Preference Manager remains completely free and can be downloaded here. If you are running version 1.0.7, you will need to download and install the update manually due to a bug with the updater in that particular version.

RED Rocket announced

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 01:54:42 MDT

Many within the RED community have been clamoring for an official conform tool to simplify online/offline RED workflows. Well, RED's gone one better with RED Rocket.

Rocket is a hardware R3D decoder and debayer capable of realtime output of up to 30 fps @ 4K or 24 fps @ 5K. This completely removes the need for an offline (at least with the RED One - Epic will still need it at high resolutions), allowing you to work with 4K directly in FCP, Premiere, After Effects, RED Alert!, REDCINE, REDrushes or any application using the REDCODE SDK.

It is PCI-Express (laptop users are out of luck here), is compatible with Windows, OS X and Linux, and features Quad-DVI and Quad-HD-SDI.

This is bad news for DVS which just introduced Clipster at NAB, however there could be a place in the market if they can undercut Rocket's $5k pricetag and beat it to market. There is currently no ETA on RED Rocket.

Update: Jim says two months but RED's release dates have been pushed back on many occasions.

NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 for Mac Pro

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 07:31:57 MDT

The 2009 Mac Pros don't have a great range of graphics cards to choose from. You can go for the cut-down GeForce GT 120 or the more advanced Radeon 4870, and that's it unless you plump for an older card (not to mention of course the fact that you must buy one card for every Mini DisplayPort monitor you own, which screws up FCP).

There's now another one to choose from - the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800. It's incredibly powerful with 1.5 GB of memory, 192 CUDA parallel processing cores (!) and 76.8 GB/sec memory bandwidth. But its price tag matches its capabilities - $1799.

I would not actually recommend this for ProApp use, as the Quadros have not traditionally been optimized for Core Image operations (not to mention the small number of ProApps that utilize the GPU significantly) so a lot of that power goes to waste in Final Cut Studio. However, this card is often used for 3D modeling and visualization tasks.

Why was this not released with the 2009 Mac Pros? One explanation could be the fact it requires OS X 10.5.7 which has not been released yet. The card is scheduled to be released in May, which suggests 10.5.7 would also be released around that time too.

It is compatible with the 2008 and 2009 Mac Pros. Apple have not announced anything on their site so it remains to be seen if there will be a BTO option. Interestingly, NVIDIA's site only mentions Dual-Link DVI as a display option and does not mention Mini DisplayPort at all.

NAB 09 Day 1

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 05:17:32 MDT

Yesterday was the first day of NAB. I'm not going to list every single announcement (for that you can go here), but I'm going to focus on what I feel were the biggest or most interesting announcements.

Avid completely redesigned their logo - I can see what they were trying to do but I'm not a big fan of it. Luckily they had some bombshell announcements to go with it. In a surprising move, Avid qualified Final Cut Pro to run on its Unity MediaNetwork and ISIS storage. This makes it considerably easier to use both FCP and Avid systems on the same project.

Avid also redesigned its support offerings and showcased RED support and stereoscopic 3D integration. Avid has always had the edge on FCP when it comes to media management but the recently-introduced AMA architecture takes that one step further. There is no need to Log and Transfer - just link to the P2 or XDCAM volume and all of the clips just pop up in the bin, complete with metadata. This is clearly a lot better than FCP's clunky implementation (hopefully something Apple will address in FCP 7) and Avid were keen to show it off.

Adobe announced it has partnered with several manufacturers to create TVs with Flash support. So you could theoretically watch a documentary on a subject and then view interactive content related to that subject.

But far more interesting was Adobe's post announcements. Adobe Story is a collaborative screenwriting application that is integrated with Adobe Premiere. There are very few details but it seems likely that it will build on Premiere's transcription function to introduce an Avid-like Script Sync feature.

This continues the recent trend of linking pre-production processes directly to post production software - something we will no doubt see more of in the future. Right now Apple appears to be considering storyboard integration.

Blackmagic Design announces UltraScope - 3Gb/s SDI and optical fibre scopes for $695. This is huge. Hardware scopes cost more than some cars, so a scope for $695 is a real game-changer. Lets hope it's good - Blackmagic's products normally are.

It is a PCI Express card that plugs into a Windows computer with a 24-inch monitor (alas no Mac support as yet) to display output on the screen. As one PVC commenter notes - the lack of Mac support is not necessarily a bad thing as you would probably not use the machine for any other purpose, thus a cheaper PC would be a better option.

This is a clever solution to an age-old problem and I wish I was at NAB to see it in action.

Blackmagic's HDLink looks to be a worthy opponent to the original Matrox MXO. This gives you HD monitoring via DVI or HDMI for only $495. Monitor 4:4:4 SDI video on a regular computer monitor.

In addition, Blackmagic have lowered the prices of several of their existing products.

Matrox CompressHD is a PCI Express hardware H.264 encoder. This allows you to encode H.264 faster than realtime using Matrox's MAX technology. Also announced is the MXO 2 Mini, which is a cut-down, smaller, cross platform version of the MXO 2. It lacks XLR and SDI ports, unlike its larger and more expensive brother but it works on PC, Mac, and all QuickTime-compatible editing applications. It costs $449 or $849 with the H.264-accelerating MAX option.

AJA has a very nice new website and have introduced the KI Pro. It connects to a camera and records to ProRes422 in the field, without the aid of a laptop. It is the only device to do this because AJA have an exclusive contract with Apple for ProRes support.

This means you can import footage into Final Cut Pro instantly without the need for transcoding. It also means that the post production team is dealing with the same video format each time, no matter what type of camera was used on set.

It can accept SD/HD SDI, HDMI and component inputs and can connect to your computer via FireWire 800 or Ethernet. It can also convert from one video standard to another in realtime. You can record to removable ExpressCards or an external hard disk. It can be remotely controlled through Wifi via a laptop or iPhone (nice!).

AJA also announced the Io Express which looks to be similar to the Matrox MXO 2. I haven't had time to do a feature-by-feature comparison yet though.

Finally, Panasonic is developing a 3D camera and JVC is developing a very pricey $200,000 4K camera.

That's what interested me... did I miss anything?

Look for the FCPUG SuperMeet on Day 2 (today) where a brand-new exclusive version of our very own Preference Manager will be given out on the SuperDVD.

Also, a lot of people think that Apple will release new details of Final Cut Studio 3 today. I don't think this will be the case - we'll have to wait and see I guess.

Incoming network connection dialogs keep appearing

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 07:25:23 MDT

Amazingly for an OS that markets itself as secure, the firewall in OS X is not switched on by default. So if you switch it to the recommended mode, "Set access for specific services and applications", OS X will prompt you to allow or deny incoming connections.

But sometimes that dialog will not go away! Certain applications such as QmasterStatusMenu.app and Batch Monitor.app cause the dialog to pop up every 5 seconds (or every 20 seconds if you ignore it) which gets annoying very quickly.

The reason for this is that applications like QmasterStatusMenu.app and Batch Monitor.app don't communicate on the same port each time. It is constantly changing, as this log excerpt shows:

This really confuses the very basic OS X firewall.

Some people have recommended switching the firewall off but I wouldn't recommend this. There's always a trade-off between security and convenience, but this trade-off is far too big. Instead, it is much better to just obtain a more advanced firewall.

I would recommend Little Snitch for this job. It gives you infinitely more options than the default firewall, lets you see where apps are sending data, doesn't bug you too often, and most importantly, it copes with applications that constantly change ports so those annoying 5-second popups go away.

The demo gives you full functionality for 3 hours, after which you just restart the firewall again. That's a lot better than popups every 5 seconds, but if 3 hours is too often, you can buy a single license for $29.99.

Just install Little Snitch, restart the computer and switch the default OS X firewall to "Allow all incoming connections". Little Snitch then takes over - you can now use Qmaster and be safe at the same time.

If you're going to NAB 09...

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 16:01:24 MDT

I'm sure everyone's probably noticed that this blog's been pretty quiet of late. That's partly because I haven't had much time lately and partly because I generally don't like to pre-announce things before they are due.

However, there is one thing I would like to announce right now. If you're going to NAB this year, be sure to check out the FCPUG SuperMeet on Thursday 21st April, 5:00 PM-11:00 PM at the Rio Hotel Amazon Ballroom. This is a great place to meet up with fellow Final Cut Pro users, learn new things and win great prizes in the raffle ($70,000-worth of prizes in the bag and counting). Entry is $15.00 ($20 at the door) which includes two raffle tickets.

The doors open at 4:30 PM, so be sure to get in there quick because the first 1000 people in the door get the SuperMeet DVD. This is a disc containing gigabytes of software, tutorials and discount codes. And the lucky recipients of this DVD will also exclusively receive the brand new, completely redesigned version of Preference Manager.

This version has taken into account much of the feedback from the original version, and version 2.0.0 aims to simplify the most commonly-used tasks while still providing customization for those that need it.

Brand new features include the ability to categorize backups, and the ability to link backups to specific projects so that settings are automatically applied when the project is launched. This is in addition to its prior functions of trashing, backing up, restoring and locking preference files. Preference Manager 2.0.0 is Leopard-only.

Preference Manager remains completely free but this version will be exclusive to those with the SuperMeet DVD. If you're not going to NAB or you miss out on the DVD, don't fret. You'll get version 2.0.1 a few days later which has some very minor features (like Tiger support and an improved application icon) that didn't make the deadline.

Also on the disc is the current version of FCS Remover and a minor new release of Compressor Repair that now displays a warning stating that it is designed for Compressor 3.0.x. This is to clear up confusion over some of the warnings 2.x and 1.x users were getting about missing Compressor files.

As this is a completely rewritten version of Preference Manager, we'd really appreciate feedback. We think this is a major improvement over the previous version but we'd love to hear what doesn't work for your needs and workflow (and of course, it's always good to know what does work too). You can use the bug report / feature request links within the application itself or contact us on Twitter.

If you're waiting for the 2.0.1 release, you can subscribe to this blog, our appcast, or follow our Twitter feed to hear when the new version has been released.

Wish I could be there, hope everyone has a great time.

3-31-09 New AppleCare articles

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:51:16 MDT

Here is my roundup of recent useful AppleCare docs.

Best and worst of iPhone 3.0

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 04:34:53 MDT

Apple released details of iPhone OS 3.0 yesterday. It's got all kinds of great features - turn-by-turn GPS, copy and paste, MMS, tethering, to name a few. Here's my take on the best and worst features.

The Best

Stu Maschwitz from ProLost was particularly impressed with the new accessory APIs, which is probably the biggest new feature that no-one is talking about. Do not underestimate the importance of this - it is HUGE. This bridges the gap between software and hardware and takes the phone from a simple smartphone to a full-scale development platform.

No other phone developer is offering this. A lot of them are jumping on the app store bandwagon now but Apple just increased the gap even further. Apple is once again taking advantage of their control over hardware and software - I believe Apple's toughest rival is Google but it would be difficult for Google to replicate this with Android as they do not control the hardware.

Of course, hardware development is more complicated from a business perspective as you'd need to manufacture it, handle billing, arrange shipping and keep inventory (which is always a little risky, particularly in a recession). So this is purely aimed at companies and not bedroom developers. I don't know if Stu will get his wish for an iPhone scope (I hope so) but it will be very interesting to see what developers come up with. There are loads of on-set applications here ranging from remote operation/focus pulling to synchronized iPhone timecode slates to an app for editing camera/lens metadata. I could totally see the RED guys embracing this technology.

The Worst

The most worrying aspect is the new in-app payment system. I can picture only a few scenarios where this would be genuinely useful (such as an e-book reader or GPS app with its own maps) and I can see a lot of developers abusing this. It really will bring out the worst in developers.

The problem with the iPhone development platform is that it's far too easy for developers to charge money. If they were selling software on their own sites they would need to pay for marketing and sort out a system for billing. It's a lot more complicated and there are more up-front costs so they'd need to ensure they were selling something of value.

With the iPhone it is very easy for someone to create a poor application in five minutes and charge for it, and if some poor sucker buys it that's a win for the developer. If no-one buys it, then the developer hasn't lost anything either. It's win-win for them.

There are lots of applications on the app store for $0.99 that are completely valueless (for example the multitude of "flashlight" apps that display a white square on your screen). The devs are charging $0.99 because they can. It's too easy. And Apple's just made it even easier. I see this as a bad thing for the consumer.

Although I am certain this will be abused, I think the benefits of the accessory APIs will far outweight abuse of this feature. If developers need to keep inventory, they will have to ensure they have something worth selling. Sure, not every developer will choose to use in-app purchasing, and I'm sure many will offer excellent value for money. But when the new apps are accepted into the store, it will be important to read the small-print and be aware of exactly what you are getting for your money.

Having said that, I can't wait to see what developers come up with.

Guide to Final Cut Pro Internal Tools

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:48:09 MDT

Did you know Final Cut Pro has a hidden menu? Just hold down Cmd + Option + Shift and click the Tools menu. You should now see a new menu item called Internal Tools.

This is a debug menu used by the developers of FCP, but it actually has some uses for us mere mortals as well. It's especially useful for plugin developers and system troubleshooters, but some features benefit all users. Here is a rundown of what's in the menu.

Adjust Windows

When you open the Audio Mixer, Frame Viewer and several other tools in the Tools menu, they open in a tabbed window called the Toolbench. This normally appears on top of the Viewer and is hidden behind it when you select the Viewer again.

The Adjust Windows menu item adjusts the window layout so the Toolbench can fit in without being obscured by other windows. If you don't have the Toolbench open when you click this item, it will leave a gap in your window layout.

Before

After

To restore the default window configuration again, press Ctrl+U.

App / Perf Info

This generates a text file containing just about everything you could ever wish to know about your FCP configuration.

Probably the most useful part is the Project / Sequence Information section. This gives various statistics about your project including the total number of clips placed in your timeline and the proportion of those clips that were unique. It will even tell you how many edits you performed per minute (don't let your boss see this!).

Log OpenGL Profile Costs

This function displays timing information about OpenGL Profiling in the Console. It will do nothing until you start profiling (see the Statistics section below), at which point it tells you how long (in ms) it took your machine to process the given frame sizes and codecs.

One thing I noticed about this is that it takes a fair while for the data to be posted to the Console - around 1-2 minutes.

Log VM Footprint

This outputs the current memory usage to the Console.

Resident refers to data in physical memory, Virtual refers to data on the disk ready to be copied into main memory as required. Note that the system often assigns more virtual memory space than it needs, so not all of that space will actually be used. So if you see a ridiculous number like 4 GB, it is not necessarily a cause for alarm.

Movie Dumpster

This one crashes Final Cut Pro for me, so I wasn't able to ascertain exactly what it does. However, Apple offers a tool called Dumpster on their developer site which gives you a large amount of technical information about a specific movie clip. I would imagine this would be similar if it worked.

Playback Meter

This will show you how your media drives are performing, and is probably the most useful tool in the menu.

If you are not using a RAID, only the audio bars will work. Everything is fine while the bar is green, but if it turns yellow or red, this is an indication that your computer cannot keep up.

Screen Size Override

This allows you to fool Final Cut Pro into thinking that you have a different-sized monitor.

Just select the desired resolution from the pull down menus and press Ctrl + U to automatically resize the windows to the new dimensions.

If you mess things up, just restart Final Cut Pro and press Ctrl + U to restore the windows to the correct position for your screen resolution.

Statistics

This displays a lot of technical information about what's going on under the hood of FCP.

For instance, select the Render check box, drag the playhead across the timeline and then click the Average button. This will average the times taken to perform the various function calls required to render the image to the screen. If your system is getting sluggish, you may find it useful to use the Averages function to see which areas are taking a long time to process.

Most of the checkboxes are self-explanatory so I won't elaborate on them here. However, I would advise selecting them one at a time otherwise you'll end up with an overflow of information.

If you want to clear the text box, click Reset. Copy copies the entire data to the clipboard and Copy Avg copies only the averages. Unset All deselects all of the checkboxes.

Both Auto Profile and RT Verify go through each item in the Browser (video clips, sequences, images, etc), playing each one four times and averaging the data. Sequences take longer because the profiler initially tests with only the V1 track enabled, and then gradually enables V2 and V3 to perform compositing tests (if such tracks exist of course).

It's worth mentioning that since it goes through everything four times, it will take a while to finish processing, depending on the size of the project. You cannot switch to another application either or the profiling will fail. I would advise creating a brand new project with short media clips and sequences. If you truly have serious bottlenecking, this will still be apparent in the shorter sequence.

All the timing information is stored inside the Profile.csv log. Although you can view this in TextEdit, it will be difficult to read because it will not be formatted correctly. A spreadsheet application, such as MS Excel or the free NeoOffice or OpenOffice packages, is recommended.

If you are experiencing poor performance, look at the timings in this file to see where the major bottlenecks are. For instance, a slow FXScript filter could be indicative of a CPU bottleneck or an inefficient script. A slow Flop operation could be indicative of a GPU bottleneck.

Auto Profile and RT Verify appear, on the surface, to perform exactly the same task. However, it is likely that Auto Profiling actually updates your RT information whereas RT Verify merely performs the test without changing anything. This is difficult to verify without official documentation though.

Most of the functions in the Internal Tools menu will be too technical for a lot of users, and so the menu will likely remain something of a novelty. But if you are troubleshooting performance issues or developing applications and plugins for FCP, it is an invaluable source of information on the inner workings of Final Cut Pro.

The only downside is that the menu must be reactivated every time you start Final Cut Pro. If anyone knows of a way to enable it permanently through a preference file, I'd love to hear about it.

New Mac Pros, iMacs and Minis

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 08:25:17 MST

Apple has hit us with three hardware refreshes in the same day.

Mac Mini

2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo	2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
1GB memory	2GB memory
120GB hard drive	320GB hard drive
8x double-layer SuperDrive	8x double-layer SuperDrive
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics	NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics
$599, shipping within 24 hours	$799, shipping within 24 hours

I'm really glad this little guy is still going strong. There were fears it would be discontinued but thankfully this has not proven to be the case.

Not the greatest specs in the world, but the GeForce 9400M is a welcome addition that should provide a decent performance boost to graphical apps.

Apple is claiming that it now uses 45% less power, making it even more viable for server-related tasks (my personal favorite use for Minis). It's worth noting that the case has not been redesigned to match the iMac, as was rumored.

iMac

20" display	24" display	24" display	24" display
2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo	2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo	2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Duo	3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2GB memory	4GB memory	4GB memory	4GB memory
320GB hard drive	640GB hard drive	640GB hard drive	1TB hard drive
8x double-layer SuperDrive	8x double-layer SuperDrive	8x double-layer SuperDrive	8x double-layer SuperDrive
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics	NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics	NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 with 256MB memory	NVIDIA GeForce GT 130 with 512MB memory
$1,199.00, shipping within 24 hours	$1,499.00, shipping within 24 hours	$1,799.00	$2,199.00

Not much to say here - just a speed bump and NVIDIA graphics across the whole line. The 24" now starts at a lower pricepoint.

Mac Pro

Quad-Core	8-Core
One 2.66GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processor	Two 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processors
3GB (three 1GB) memory	6GB (six 1GB) memory
640GB hard drive	640GB hard drive
18x double-layer SuperDrive	18x double-layer SuperDrive
NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 with 512MB	NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 with 512MB
$2,499.00, ships within 4 days	$3,299.00, ships within 4 days

And here's a custom configured Mac Pro with pretty much everything you'd ever need:

Two 2.93GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon

32GB memory (8x4GB)

Mac Pro RAID Card

4 x 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s

ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB graphics

Two 18x SuperDrives

2 x Apple Cinema HD Display (30" flat panel)

AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi Card with 802.11n

Quad-channel 4Gb Fibre Channel PCI Express card

Xsan 2

Mini DisplayPort to Dual-Link DVI Adapter (needed for 2x 30" displays

AppleCare protection plan for Mac Pro

$19,994.00, shipping in 6-8 weeks

Processor - You might think it's just a speed bump but the Nehalem series of CPUs has a completely redesigned architecture that removes a lot of traditional bottlenecks. This will significantly improve performance (particularly memory throughput) over previous Mac Pros.

The new architecture also allows two threads per core, meaning that 16 threads can be run simultaneously on the 8 core. I had wondered if Apple would market it as a 16 core machine but they chose not to, which is probably best as it could have been misleading.

Go for the 2.93 GHz processor if you can afford it.

Memory - Apple has been generous with the memory in the 8-core model. My usual advice would be to custom configure the machine with the minimum amount of memory possible and then buy it separately from cheaper sources. Note however that the custom configurator offers a minimum of 6 GB of memory, which will be enough for the majority of people.

Hard Drives - There are four bays, each offering a 640 GB or 1 TB SATA drive at 7200 RPM. I'd advise against ordering additional drives from Apple. Instead, shop around and you will get a much better deal. They are dead simple to install.

Apple has chosen not to offer solid-state disks as an option.

Graphics - Apple is offering two cards - the NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512MB and the ATI Radeon HD 4860 512MB. The GeForce card is available in multiples up to 4. I would not advise purchasing multiple graphics cards in anticipation of Snow Leopard, as you'd be forking out a lot of money for something that has an unknown performance benefit. You don't know that it would improve performance enough to warrant the extra cost, and you don't even know if Final Cut Studio 3 will be able to use the extra cards. You can always buy extra cards later.

The Radeon is advised for Pro App use, however, as it has much better Core Image performance and a much greater range of working color depths. It is much faster than the GeForce and no comparable NVIDIA cards are yet offered as a BTO option for the Mac Pro. Both cards come with dual-link DVI and Mini DisplayPort connectors.

Note the absence of the NVIDIA Quadro FX.

Optical Drives - Not much to say really, except no Blu-ray.

Displays - The new graphics cards have support for the DisplayPort standard so the new 24" LED Display can now be used by Mac Pros, in addition to the traditional 30" Cinema Display. It looks like the 20" will not be replaced.

Note: you must have two GeForce cards in order to connect a second 24" display, or a Mini DisplayPort to Dual-Link DVI adapter if you are connecting two 30" displays.

My advice would be to go for the 30" because it is not glossy (there unfortunately isn't a matte option for the 24") and if you want to connect more than one, your choice of graphics card is not restricted.

Other minor aspects - There is no FireWire 400 - it's FW 800 only, like the MacBook Pro. You can use FW 400 devices with a converter cable. Bluetooth is now built-in.

Conclusion

It's a product refresh - you can't expect a whole host of new features. I think the Mac Pro refresh was a decent one (and long overdue) although I would prefer more display options from Apple. The 24" should have a matte option for those that prefer it, but what I dislike the most is that you are tied to the much slower GeForce if you want to add two of these.

Additionally, no-one really knows the future of the 30". Is it wise to buy one now when there could be a possible refresh in the near future? Or is it actually better to buy one now in case Apple gives us an inferior refreshed product in the future (it has happened before)? Or should we just buy from an alternative manufacturer? That is the question.

I'm really glad they chose to release these machines while Leopard was still around. It means that when I come to buy one in the near future, I can downgrade to Leopard if problems occur with Snow Leopard. It's not best to be an early adopter of an OS if you use it for professional work, nor is it best to downgrade to an earlier OS that does not support your computer.

The price hike for the Mac Pros was less welcome but this is mainly due to the increased cost of the CPUs from Intel, so it was not unexpected. Whenever Apple gives us something, they take away something else - but I do think in this instance Apple has given more than they have taken.

Update: Apple also gave the 15" MacBook Pro a speed bump.

Blu-ray license simplification coming mid-2009

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 13:49:29 MST

ZDnet is reporting that many of the problems preventing Blu-ray from coming to the Mac should ease in mid-2009 when new licensing comes into place.

A new licence will be established by mid-2009 as a "one-stop shop" for device makers. The licence will include all necessary Blu-ray, DVD and CD patents for selling Blu-ray players. The licensing programme will be handled by a new licensing company to be led by Gerald Rosenthal, former head of intellectual property at IBM. It will be based in the US, but will have local branches in Asia, Europe and Latin America.

Instead of having to approach Blu-ray, DVD and CD holders individually and paying them separate royalties, the single licence should cut down the total cost of royalty payments by 40 percent, according to Sony.

The fees for the new licences will be $9.50 for a Blu-ray player and $14 for a Blu-ray recorder. Making Blu-ray Disc will cost 11 cents for read-only, 12 cents for recordable discs and 15 cents for rewritable discs.

Hopefully this new license coupled with new DisplayPort Mac Pros will encourage Apple to consider Blu-ray drives as an option for its high-end systems.

Compressor Repair 1.1.2 released

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 11:55:09 MST

We've just released a minor update to Compressor Repair, bringing it up to version 1.1.2.

This update checks for a missing local hostname or computer name. This is a common reason for Compressor failure and can be fixed by entering a new name into the text field at the top of the Sharing dialog in System Preferences. Compressor Repair won't actually change the name but it lets you know it is missing and tell you how to change it. Why these names disappear unfortunately remains a mystery.

As always, it is completely free and is available here.

We also have several other tools and utilities in the Resources section of the site.

20" Cinema Display discontinued

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 09:55:07 MST

MacRumors is reporting that Apple has now officially discontinued the 20" Cinema Display, not long after the 23" display was also discontinued.

Although Apple offers a newer 24" LED display, this is currently only compatible with Apple's laptop range using the new Mini-DisplayPort connectors. There is no adapter available to connect these up to a DVI-enabled machine. This means that the only current choice for Mac Pro buyers is a 30" display, which may not meet their budget or space requirements.

Never fear, the most probable reason for EOL-ing the display is to make way for new stock that will most likely ship when new Mac Pros with (Mini) DisplayPort connectors are released. That is the core market for these displays - I doubt many laptop owners have purchased one. Here's hoping they'll take a leaf out of the new 17" MBP's book and offer a matte option.

Note: Apple is no longer shipping these to resellers, but that's not to say these resellers haven't got a few 20" displays still in stock. If you call around, you might be lucky.

Why the RED delay is not a big deal

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 08:42:19 MST

Jim Jannard of RED announced today that the new Epic and Scarlet cameras will be delayed due to the current economic climate.

There has been a mixed Twitter reaction to this news. Here are five reasons why I don't think this is a big deal, and could even be considered a good thing:

1. Jim only expects a delay of "a month or two".

2. The RED One is beyond anything the competition currently has to offer. The RED One is not a bad camera, nor is it outdated (quite the opposite in fact). Does it need to be replaced quite so soon?

3. More RED Ones on the market mean lower rental prices and better availability (especially if demand is falling, as Jim says).

4. The RED One will be on the market for longer, meaning better NLE support and improved post workflows. Bigger production houses are looking for dependability with tried-and-tested workflows.

5. Components are constantly improving and prices are constantly falling (SSDs in particular). This delay may help RED deliver better and/or lower priced cameras.

Compressor error: "Unable to connect to background process"

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 12:03:41 MST

The "Unable to connect to background process" and "Unable to submit to queue" messages are common errors that unfortunately have many causes.

Before you do anything else, check that your version of Compressor is compatible with your operating system. Only the versions included with FCP 5.1.x and 6.0.x are compatible with OS X 10.5. If you have an incompatible earlier version, you will need to either upgrade Final Cut Studio or downgrade your operating system.

Try the following steps:

1. In Compressor, go to Compressor > Reset Background Processing.

2. Run Compressor Repair.

3. Trash Compressor preferences (can also be done in Compressor Repair).

4. Try these steps (use at your own risk).

Do the following if nothing else works:

5. Disable your internet / network connections.

6. Reinstall Compressor and Qmaster.

7. Perform a full erase and install of the operating system and reinstall from scratch.

Compressor Repair 1.1.1 released

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 11:41:10 MST

We've just released Compressor Repair 1.1.1. This is a minor release that automatically enables the Qmaster startup process if the user has disabled it.

I'd also like to make a point about compatibility. Compressor Repair is designed for Compressor 3. Not all features will work with versions below this - you will receive messages stating that certain files do not exist because they were not present in earlier versions.

However, many features do work on earlier versions so it is still recommended to try it before reinstalling.

Compressor Repair is completely free and is available here. For more of our applications, visit the Resources section of the site.

Backup Options for Filmmakers

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 15:56:51 MST

As filmmakers, we put a tremendous amount of trust in our equipment. With the rise in popularity of solid-state media, many of us are no longer shooting on tape or film. This offers many advantages but also several disadvantages. Unlike a film workflow in which many prints are made, or a tape workflow where the tapes are digitized to a hard drive and then stored safely away, filmmakers are often erasing their solid-state media and relying on a single hard drive copy to last them throughout the post production process and onto distribution/release.

Three things are guaranteed in life - death, taxes and hard drive failure. It is a fact that every hard drive will eventually fail. No-one can predict when it will happen and you may not have an opportunity to salvage the data before it does.

So it is wise to assume it will happen and have a good backup policy in case it does. Here are some of the options available for data backup.

Data Tape

While there used to be many consumer options available such as the Iomega Ditto, tape backup is now almost exclusively geared towards enterprise users. Higher-priced options have high capacities and autoload capabilities - i.e. where you insert multiple tapes at once and the system switches them automatically so you don't have to. Lower-priced options will generally require you to change the tape far more often - if you're fine with that, you can save a lot of money.

Most backup drive manufacturers are moving towards the LTO format. This is an open standard so you know that the data you backup now will work on a competitor's drive for the next 1-2 LTO generations.

One way to save money is to use an older, less advanced format. A lot of manufacturers still offer older proprietary systems for sale. These are not as advanced as the LTO options (nor as compatible with competing products) but they are much cheaper. As stated earlier, cheaper drives have lower storage capacities and are less likely to have autoloading functionality. They are also likely to have much lower data transfer rates, unlike LTO -3 and LTO-4 which can transfer data at higher speeds than a conventional hard drive.

When purchasing a drive, consider also the connector and the supplied software. Some drives use SCSI and will need a SCSI card installed inside your machine, but setup will be much easier if you opt for a Firewire version instead (not to mention allowing greater drive portability). Check if the supplied software is compatible with your operating system and if not, check if there is a compatibility update available.

Because these tapes are designed for enterprise use, they are very sturdy and have extremely low failure rates. They have normally been stress-tested by the manufacturer, and most manufacturers will offer you failure statistics on their site. You are, of course, paying for this privilege though.

Format types: LTO, VXA, SLR, DLT, DDS, AIT/SAIT, Travan, T10000
Drive manufacturers: Tandberg (formerly Exabyte), HP, Quantum, IBM, Sun StorageTek
Software: Retrospect, NetVault, CommVault, UltraBac, PresSTORE, ATempo

Pros:
* Low failure rate
* Tried and tested
* LTO-4 tapes can store terrabytes of data and access it faster than a regular hard disk

Cons:
* Expensive
* Can be complex to set up
* If you opt for a cheaper, small capacity, non-autoloading version, you will spend a lot of time changing tapes
* Overkill if you don't have much data to backup

Verdict:
Great if you're backing up a large amount of data and only plan to keep one copy.

Hard disk

The main advantage of hard disks is market penetration. You can go into almost any store and buy a disk at short notice. They are priced very low per GB, there are lots to choose from and (unless you have an old machine) you shouldn't need any new hardware or software in order to use it.

As this is primarily intended as a backup, go for an external drive. Speed is not an issue here so mounting the drive internally will offer no worthwhile performance benefit. Additionally, an external disk safely stored away will not be damaged if something happens to your machine.

It's worth mentioning that some manufacturers offer separate Mac and PC editions of their external disk drives. This is not a marketing gimmick - there is a difference! Some of the I/O controllers in certain drives (often cheaper ones) are not Mac-compatible and you will experience issues if you use one of these drives. Choose a drive enclosure with an Oxford controller where possible. Check online reviews if in doubt.

Finally, one aspect people often don't realize is that hard disks store data magnetically and must be "refreshed" every six months or so to prevent data loss, as Larry Jordan explains in this article. This must not be overlooked when considering hard disks as a backup medium.

Manufacturers: Lacie, G-Tech, Samsung, Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, Hitachi, Toshiba

Pros:
* Cheap
* Ubiquitous
* High capacity
* Fast transfer rate

Cons:
* Relatively high and unpredictable failure rate
* Physical bumps and bashes increase the chance of failure

Verdict:
Good for cost-effective backups but multiple backups are advised.

Solid-state flash drives

The main advantages of these drives are their small size, high potential read speed and high damage tolerance. It is likely that these will eventually replace conventional hard disks in the future and this will be a good thing, however current models have certain caveats.

The biggest of these is price. The cost per GB is considerably higher than any of the other formats on this page, and available capacities are much lower than those offered by conventional hard disks. In addition, although read speeds are fast, write speeds are considerably slower than those of conventional hard drives.

One of the most interesting aspects of flash SSDs is the way that they fail. Unlike rotating disk hard drives, SSDs do not suffer from mechanical failure but gradually wear out as you write to them. Although they have quite a high failure rate (each memory cell is limited to 100,000 writes), failure doesn't actually result in data loss. When a memory cell fails, you will be unable to write data to that cell - but you will have no problems at all reading data from it. This would be awful for a scratch disk that is written to many times but perfect for a backup in which reading is more important than writing.

However, controller chips inside the drives have been known to fail, meaning you will need to call a data recovery expert to recover the data from the disk. And there lies another problem - a lot of manufacturers uses proprietary chips that are constantly changing, making it difficult for a data recovery expert to keep up with developments. And in many drives data is difficult to recover by design, as these systems were originally developed for the military to carry sensitive information.

Efforts are being made to resolve some of these issues - such as putting two drives in a RAID 0 to improve write speeds, and balancing write operations across the entire drive to reduce the load on a single cell. Prices are going down and capacities are going up, but they will only become viable when the cost hits $1.50 per GB or less.

Manufacturers: Samsung, IBM, Intel, Corsair, SanDisk, Toshiba

Pros:
* Very fast read speeds
* Tolerant of physical abuse / damage
* More predictable failure rate than regular HDDs
* Data can still be read when drive fails

Cons:
* Very expensive per GB
* Slow write speeds
* Current drives have relatively low capacities
* Limited number of times the drive can be written to

Verdict:
One to look out for the future but limited to small backups right now.

Online Backup / Storage

There are several online backup services available. Some will give you a certain amount of space for free, requiring you to upgrade if you need more, while others offer a trial service. The advantage of one of these services is that the data is stored elsewhere and so will not be affected by theft, fire, water damage etc affecting your facility. Many of them offer software that runs on your machine and backs up your specified backup folders automatically, ensuring an up-to-date backup even if you forget.

When considering this option, you should consider security as a priority. You are handing over your files to someone else so you need an assurance that they will not end up in the wrong hands. I use Mozy to backup my laptop and all files are encrypted by default. The simplest option is to let Mozy create an encryption key for you but this is not as secure as specifying one yourself. If you do specify a custom one, beware that your data will be permanently inaccessible if you forget it.

The two biggest problems are storage space and transfer speeds. It is impractical to upload files greater than a few hundred megabytes, especially as the service takes quite a while to encrypt them before uploading. So backing up terrabytes of footage is not possible, but these services are very useful for backing up important project files. Many of them will store multiple versions of a file so you can restore to a version several days or weeks in the past. I wouldn't recommend this as your sole backup, but it would be useful as an extra cushion, especially as some companies give a small amount of space for free.

Services: Mozy, Carbonite, Dr. Backup, DropBox, iDrive

Pros:
* Simple and automatic
* Great for backing up small files

Cons:
* Not suitable for large files
* Subscription fees

Verdict:
Great as an additional backup but don't rely on this as your only option. Only suitable for small files.

Videotape

Videotape backups offer some distinct advantages over data tape backups. Firstly, unlike the LTO specification that has various revisions, video formats adhere to strict standards that rarely change. These standards tend to stick around for a long time. A brand-new DVCAM deck will play a DVCAM tape made a decade ago with no problems. LTO drives are only backwards-compatible with the last 1-2 generations which could cause problems with long-term backup.

Secondly, there is greater predictability. Tapes are rated at the hour or half-hour, making it much easier to calculate how many would be needed and how long it would take to record/play the footage, which is invaluable if you are planning to rent a deck. The downside of this, of course, is that transfer speeds are much lower than modern LTO drives.

However, when creating a videotape backup of your footage, it is important to choose the format carefully to avoid quality loss. If you shot on the Panasonic HVX-200, which shoots DVCPRO HD, it is recommended to output to DVCPRO HD tapes. If the codec you are using does not have a tape equivalent, output to a tape format that closely matches the frame size, frame rate, color sampling and approximate data rate of the original footage. Some formats like Redcode RAW 4K do not have tape equivalents and so a different backup method must be used unless you are willing to lose information.

Also make sure your tape timecode matches the timecode of the original footage, otherwise your NLE will not be able to accurately reconnect the footage to the clips on the timeline. You will spend a lot of time manually rearranging and synchronizing footage.

Formats include: MiniDV, HDV (varies per manufacturer), DVCAM, DVCPRO, DVCPRO HD, HDCAM, HDCAM SR, D1, D2, D3, D5, BetaCam, DigiBeta.
Manufacturers: Panasonic, Sony, JVC

Pros:
* Durable
* Established standards

Cons:
* Limited to real-time capture and playback
* No tape equivalent of certain formats
* Information must be captured rather than simply copied to a hard disk

Verdict:
Great for backing up established formats. Excellent for long-term backup / archival.

Blu-ray

Blu-ray discs can store around 50 GB and have a relatively low price per GB. They are compact and, if stored in a solid case, are relatively durable compared to regular hard disks. They are not as durable as tape-based alternatives, however.

Blu-ray hasn't caught on as well as everyone had hoped after the format war ended, and Apple has not yet implemented hardware or OS support for it yet. This has severely limited the availability of Blu-ray burners and software for the Mac, with the only option for data discs being Roxio Toast 10 plus the Blu-ray plugin. PC users have a lot more choice but even despite this, it has still not fully caught on in the PC market either.

Transfer rates are quite low and the format doesn't offer as much disc space as other formats. However, BD-R does have an advantage as a backup medium because it can only be written to once. Every other format can be written to or erased (some more easily than others) after a backup has occurred.

Drive Manufacturers: Sony, LaCie, LG, Pioneer
Software Manufacturers: Roxio, Sonic Solutions, Nero, Adobe Encore

Pros:
* Discs relatively cheap per GB
* Data cannot be overwritten

Cons:
* Not much support on the Mac
* Slow read/write speeds
* Low disc space compared to other offerings

Verdict:
Don't rely on it as a sole backup. Not suitable for large amounts of data.

A Game of Chance

None of the options listed above are infallible, however the point is to lower the chance of losing your data. If you have one backup, that lowers the chance of critical data loss to 0.5. Make another one and it goes down to 0.25. Backups are especially crucial if you're running a RAID because the chance of data loss increases with every drive you add (unless it is a RAID 1 of course).

So it doesn't really matter which option you choose, as any one of them will reduce that chance - some more than others of course. A mix of multiple types is the safest way to go. And when thousands or millions of dollars, plus the culmination of months or perhaps years of hard work are at stake, it helps to have a pro-active backup policy planned from the start. The fate of your movie might well depend on it.

The links to companies and products in this article are intended for guidance and not as an endorsement.

PowerBooks to become obsolete in March

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 13:58:34 MST

Just a heads-up: the following product lines will be obsolete on March 17th:

* PowerBook G4
* Power Mac G4 (Digital Audio)
* Power Mac G4 (Quicksilver)
* Macintosh Server G4 (Digital Audio)
* Macintosh Server G4 (Quicksilver)

The following lines will become "vintage" on March 17th (this means that replacement parts will only be available in California for a limited time):

* Xserve RAID
* Xserve (Slot Load)
* Xserve (Cluster Node)

If you own any of these items, it is worth stocking up on spares and getting any issues fixed before the March 17th deadline.

[via TUAW]

Speculation on Mac Pro refresh

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 08:21:39 MST

It's been more than a year since the current Mac Pros came out. Although the software to fully take advantage of them is still not here, a year is a long time and technology has moved on. As a 2009 refresh is very likely, here's some speculation on what the new machines are likely to be like.

First of all, a release to coincide with Snow Leopard is very likely, as the Mac Pros are the best-equipped machines in Apple's lineup to show off the new OS. Snow Leopard will be released (assuming no iPhone-related delays this time) in either Q1 or Q2 2009, discounting any hardware that is due to be released after this date.

CPU

I'm almost certain this will be a Xeon 5500 series "Gainestown". That will be Intel's most powerful CPU line until Beckton towards the end of the year.

Although the clock speeds are identical to the Harpertown range inside current machines, they offer significant performance boosts elsewhere. The biggest of these is an on-die memory controller (i.e. built into the CPU instead of on the motherboard). This reduces bottlenecking significantly and is something AMD's chips have had for several years. It will provide a major performance boost.

Another new technology is QuickPath Interconnect, which replaces the legacy Front-Side Bus (FSB). The FSB connects all system devices and memory to the CPU through a single interface. This is now split up, with the new memory controller handling memory and QuickPath Interconnect dealing with the other system components. You may have noticed that the caches on these CPUs are smaller than their predecessors - this is because the greater efficiency in the new architecture means data spends less time in cache memory.

There have been several optimizations to multithreading, including hyperthreading which allows two threads per core (great for Snow Leopard). Although Gainestown is limited to four cores per CPU (8 in total in a Mac Pro), Apple may market it as a 16-core machine because of the 8 extra logical cores. True 16-core machines will not be available until the end of the year when the Beckton series is released.

Memory

You're probably familiar with dual channel memory which doubles memory bandwidth. That's why you have to install Mac Pro memory modules in pairs.

The new architecture has triple channel memory! Mac Pro motherboards are expected to have three rows of four memory sockets, totaling a maximum of 96 GB (12 x 8 GB). You would be required to install chips in groups of three.

Hard Disk Options

2 TB internal hard disks are now available so it seems likely that Apple will offer these in their machines. This will allow up to 8 TB in total.

What about solid-state disks? I doubt they will be offered for the Mac Pro just yet. They're too small for media storage (unless you can afford to RAID them) and although they are a decent size for boot disks I don't think they are suitable for that purpose just yet.

I always put Western Digital Raptors (10,000 RPM) as boot disks inside my machines because they reduce boot times, load applications faster, and everything is generally more responsive as memory can be paged to and from disk a lot faster. So the fast read speeds of SSDs are welcome from me, but there are two problems. Writing is slow. The OS writes a lot of data to disk and you will notice a slowdown when multitasking or using a lot of memory at once.

The second problem is that each memory cell inside the drive has a lifetime of around 100,000 writes. You can easily exceed that in the lifetime of your computer, particularly if it is switched on constantly. Modern chips try to get around this by writing evenly to all areas of the disk in order to balance it out, but the usefulness of this will depend on the total size of the disk.

SSD technology looks very promising and these are problems that will be overcome as time goes on, but they are not ready for this kind of usage just yet in my opinion.

Graphics cards

I don't know what the stock graphics card will be but the following cards may be offered as options:

Radeon 4870 - This is a high-end card capable of accelerating H.264 and MPEG-2 encoding and decoding. ATI's drivers are traditionally much better optimized for Core Image than NVIDIA's so Final Cut Studio performance is likely to be good. Crossfire technology is available on the PC version of the card - it remains to be seen if this is something Apple will embrace. Another version, the 4870 X2 with dual GPUs, will not be available for the Mac.

It comes with DisplayPort and HDMI connectors. Apple may request a Mini DisplayPort connector instead (or in addition).

GeForce GTX 285 - This is a single-GPU card that is SLI-capable (NVIDIA's equivalent to Crossfire), should Apple choose to utilize that technology. This card does not offer DisplayPort by default so this is something likely to be requested by Apple for the Mac version.

Let's hope NVIDIA improve their Mac drivers to offer better Core Image performance.

Quadro FX 5800 - This card supports DisplayPort technologies as well as the brand-new OpenGL 3.0 specification (which the other cards do not). It's very fast but also very expensive. It is not necessarily guaranteed to make a significant difference to Pro App usage because, while it has a lot of raw power, it does not have some of the optimizations that the other cards have (e.g. H.264 hardware acceleration), and I don't know how well-optimized for Core Image they are. In addition, raw power is worthless if it is bottlenecked by other components in your system.

With the launch of Snow Leopard, Apple will be trying to sell us multiple graphics cards in our machines. I would personally wait until I have read reviews before deciding on purchasing multiple cards for Pro App usage. Also, I would have to wait until Final Cut Studio 3 came out anyway because multiple cards with FCS 2 cause problems.

Things you shouldn't hold your breath for

* eSATA - Apple has completely ignored this particular technology in the past - this time around will most likely be no different.
* FireWire S3200 / USB 3.0 - It's early days and I'm not aware of any devices currently supporting the new standards.

Conclusion

It's pure speculation but if my predictions come true, there will be a hell of a lot of new tech in the Mac Pros. Which is great because they'll be leaving a lot of legacy technologies behind - but on the other hand, new things carry a certain degree of risk.

The first-gen Mac Pros needed a couple of firmware updates to fix minor issues, and I have my own rule that says I refuse to use an operating system for professional work until at least 10.x.4. This rule will be particularly crucial for Snow Leopard which now has a 64-bit kernel, meaning every system component will need new drivers. This is fine for the hardware that ships with your machine but what about third-party capture cards, graphics tablets etc? I don't think it's going to be a huge problem but it's worth thinking about in advance.

Either way, 2009 looks pretty good for video professionals.

Twitter

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 04:23:26 MST

After years of wondering what the fuss was about, I have finally signed up to Twitter.

What's Twitter? It's basically a mini blog where you post very short messages up to 140 characters. It's great for letting people know what you are doing, asking questions and getting feedback. The beauty of it is the 140 character limit - this ensures posts are quick and to the point. Perfect for the modern age!

It'd be nice to have a little post production community where people can help each other out or just get to know each other. From a business perspective, it's also a great way of getting feedback on our products in order to improve them.

So if you want to follow me on Twitter, my Twitter URL is:
http://twitter.com/digitalreb

FCS Remover 2.0.7 released

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 13:09:54 MST

FCS Remover 2.0.7 has just been released. This is a minor release to fix a couple of bugs that still remained from the changes added in 2.0.5.

FCS Remover is completely free and is available here. See the Resources section of this site for more software.

QuickTime 7.6

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 05:37:24 MST

As I'm sure you are already aware, QuickTime 7.6 was released yesterday. Unlike a lot of recent releases that were provided solely for compatibility with new iTunes versions, this one has a lot of things that can benefit pro users.

First, let's look at the change list:

Video:

* Improves single-pass H.264 encoding quality
* Increases the playback reliability of Motion JPEG media

Audio:

* Improves AAC encoding fidelity
* Audio tracks from MPEG video files now export consistently

Almost all of the main features improve exporting, and so it only benefits Pro App users and people who purchased QuickTime Pro. Furthermore, they all improve quality and performance in one way or another.

But Apple never details every single change made in detail. Discrete Cosine discovered that QT 7.6 can now demux MPEG-1 audio, meaning you can convert an MPEG-1 file to another format and the resulting file will have both video and audio.

Meanwhile, on ProLost, Stu Maschwitz discovered that QT 7.6 fixes clipping issues on footage imported from the Canon 5D MK II. However, as he notes, this could drastically change the look of an existing project if you update in the middle of it.

So in all, this looks like a pretty good update for Pro App users. However, the update has only been out for a day which doesn't leave much scope for discovering potential problems. If you look at the ProLost link above, some commenters are already complaining about slow playback performance with some codecs.

The Golden Rules (TM) of Updating

As always, the Golden Rules (TM) apply:
1. Never update in the middle of a project.
2. Only update if this update fixes a problem you have been experiencing (i.e. don't install it if you don't use these codecs).
3. If you do decide to update, give it a couple of weeks for any significant issues to surface that would affect your workflow.
4. Make a clone or backup of your system drive before you install.

Here are the download links:
QuickTime 7.6 for Leopard
QuickTime 7.6 for Tiger

Important Update!
MacFixIt is reporting many problems with this update. It would seem Apple has made significant changes under the hood that are causing compatibility issues with everything from the Finder to third party codecs - even to video games. The MacFixIt page lists several workarounds.

My advice is to avoid this like the plague until Apple releases 7.6.1 or third party developers update their software to be compatible.

Getting to Know the Terminal Part 2: More File Operations

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 10:26:29 MST

In the previous article, I showed you how to launch the Terminal and perform basic tasks like navigating through folders and dealing with files. Today I will build on this with more advanced file operations, working with directories, and wildcards.

Working with Directories

To create a new directory, navigate to the relevant parent directory using the cd command and type the following:

mkdir MyNewFolder

Remember: as discussed last time, if you want a file name with spaces, you must do either of the following:

mkdir "My New Folder"

or:

mkdir My\ New\ Folder

What if you need to create several new directories? Simple:

mkdir Dir1 Dir2 Dir3

A little-known feature of the mkdir command is that you can create multiple directories with just one command. Just separate them with spaces.

If you want to create a long chain of directories (e.g. Renders/Video/TIFF) you can use the -p parameter like so:

mkdir -p Renders/Video/TIFF

Press Enter and it's all done, instantly. Imagine how long it would have taken to do that within the Finder GUI! This is why the command-line is still used in the 21st Century even though we have pretty GUIs to look at.

To remove a directory, use the rmdir command:

rmdir Renders/Video/TIFF

The above command assumes that all directories are empty. If they are not, an error will be returned. To remove a directory and all its subfiles and folders, use the following command:

rm -dR Renders

(the d parameter tells it to include directories, R tells it to be recursive)

Wildcards

Last time I mentioned file operations such as cp for copying and mv for moving files. But what if you need to perform an operation on a large number of files at once?

Wildcards can be used to substitute characters. So if you want to copy, say, 100 files that are named Image.001.jpg to Image.100.jpg, you would use wildcards to substitute for the numbers. This will allow you to copy all of the files with one command instead of a hundred like so:

cp Image.*.jpg Renders

Question mark (?) substitutes a single character. So for instance, if you had files called render_v1.iff, render_v2.iff and render_v10.iff and you typed ls render_v?.iff, it would return only renders 1 and 2 because they are a single digit whereas render 10 is two digits.

Asterisk (*) substitutes a potentially infinite length of characters (including no characters at all). Use this if you don't know the precise length of the substitution. In the example above, if you type ls render_v*.iff, it will return all three files because it matches both the 1- and 2-digit numbers. You can also type, for example, *. jpg to return all JPEG images or *.* to return all files in the directory.

So, going back to the 100-frame image sequence previously mentioned, you would type ls Image.*.jpg to return a list of all of the images. That's all well and good, but what if you don't want to return all of the images - what if you only want a specific range?

Braces ([ ]) can be used to be more specific. In the above example, type ls Image.[20-30].jpg to restrict the results to frames 20-30. You can also restrict characters in the same way, such as [b-f] (remember that everything is case-sensitive).

If your numbers or letters don't fall into a sequential range, you can pick a set of non-sequential numbers or letters such as [brz] or [179] to match any of these characters. You can also combine them with ranges like so: ls Image.[1-10,12,14,20-40].jpg. This will return frames 1-10, skip frame 11, return 12, skip 13, return 14 and display frames 20-40.

And if you don't want specific characters to be returned, use the following syntax: [^bgv].

Combining the examples above: if you want to match a file starting with the letters a-c or x-z, with three miscellaneous characters in the middle, ending with a three-digit number at the end, you would type ls [a-cx-z]???[0-9][0-9][0-9].*. As you can see, it gets complicated pretty quickly.

But imagine if you had to search through and move or copy those files manually. It would be time-consuming, tedious and prone to human error. The command line comes into its own when you want to perform operations on a large number of files at once.

Editors can get away with not knowing this (although it can be very useful for them to know) but it is required knowledge for anyone who wants to get into visual effects.

I had originally planned to cover permissions here but I'm going to move it to the next article because I went into a lot of detail and it's too large to add on the end of this one. I'd much rather delay it than miss out information.

So next time I will be covering file permissions, symbolic links and opening, viewing and saving text files.

FCS Remover 2.0.6 released

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 07:02:28 MST

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

Changes:

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

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 13:08:03 MST

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.

Digital Rebellion Blog

FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2.2 out now - redesigned Corrupt Clip Finder and more

Corrupt Clip Finder

FCS Housekeeper

FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2.1 released

FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2 released

Three new tools

Final Cut Express support

Redesigned File Salvage

Crash Analyzer now supports all Final Cut Studio apps

FCP Versioner 1.1 released

FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2 Beta 2 released

Changes in FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2 Beta 2:

Changes in FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2 Beta 1:

Christmas promotion - 15% off everything

Introducing FCP Versioner

Combining odd and even frames in Shake

FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2 Beta 1 released

Speeding up Compressor

Don't export directly to Compressor from Final Cut Pro

Only use Frame Controls where necessary

Perform heaving-lifting in a separate pass to the encoding

Use a cluster

Conclusion

FCS Maintenance Pack 1.1.4 released

FCS Maintenance Pack 1.1.2 released

FCS Remover 2.5.3 and Compressor Repair 1.2 released

FCS Maintenance Pack 1.1.1 released

Preference Manager 2.0.4 released

Introducing FCS Maintenance Pack

FCPUG Amsterdam Supermeet 9-13-2009

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

How to run Final Cut Studio 3 on a MacBook

Final Cut Studio 3 compatibility with Digital Rebellion products

FCS Remover

Preference Manager

Compressor Repair

FCS Remover 2.5.2 released

FCS Remover 2.5 released

My thoughts on the new Final Cut Studio

Architecture

Blu-ray

More ProRes options

LiveType discontinued

Avid-like features

Faster, better quality

RED support

Media Management

Missed opportunities

Final Thoughts

Interesting Links

Could SD cards replace DVDs?

Compressor Repair 1.1.4 released

Final Cut Pro 6.0.6 released

WWDC 2009 Summary

15" MacBook Pro

13" MacBook Pro

MacBook Air

Snow Leopard

Safari 4

iPhone 3GS

Final Cut Studio 3

Sign the DVD Studio Pro Blu-ray petition

Preference Manager 2.0.3 released

Preference Manager 2.0.2 released

Mac OS X 10.5.7 released

Compressor error - "You must enter a name for this batch submission"

Hacking Firefox extensions to work on beta versions

Switch off compatibility checking

If the extension is already installed

If the extension is not already installed

Recently updated AppleCare docs - 5/1/09

Hardware

Final Cut Pro / Express

Motion

Compressor

Logic

Xsan

Misc

Compressor Repair 1.1.3 released