We've just released a major new version of Pro Media Tools, our suite of media management tools for video professionals.

The focus of this release was Auto Transfer, our tool for offloading and verifying data from camera memory cards. We've given it a complete overhaul which now allows it to copy and verify in a single step, resulting in significantly faster processing speeds.

Embeddable Metadata

Auto Transfer has had the ability to add metadata before transferring for a while, but until now this was used only for naming directory structures or embedding in a spreadsheet. You can now link a metadata field to a corresponding QuickTime metadata key which will be embedded in any QuickTime movies on the transferred volume. We offer a variety of presets for different NLEs and cameras so you can pick the best options for your workflow.

Determine if a volume has already been copied

Auto Transfer can now determine if a drive has already been transferred and such drives will appear as "Finished" upon mounting. If you want to transfer it again anyway, just select it and click Transfer. 

It works by placing a small invisible file on the volume and is smart enough to know if the drive has been updated even if it wasn't fully reformatted. It requires drives to be writeable and can be disabled from Preferences if preferred.

Other changes

• Auto Transfer - Copy progress is now shown in the window title and icon
• Auto Transfer - Notification Center alerts are now shown on failure
• Auto Transfer - Volumes chosen as destinations no longer appear as transfer sources
• Auto Transfer - The Day field intelligently auto-increments
• Auto Transfer - Select multiple volumes at once and batch eject or transfer
• Auto Transfer - The number of copy failures is now linked to the drive serial number rather than volume name
• Auto Transfer - The drive's UUID is now logged in the spreadsheet

You can read the full list of changes here.

Pro Media Tools is an essential toolkit for media professionals. To find out more, view the feature list, read the user manual, watch the overview video or download the free 15-day trial.

 

Last week we released Pro Maintenance Tools 2.1.4, a minor update to our suite of maintenance and repair tools for video professionals.

In this update we've improved compatibility with Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro X, including a fix for an issue where FCPX preferences may not be correctly restored from a backup in certain situations.

Other improvements include support for trashing FCPX font caches and Avid Application Manager unfinished downloads, in addition to providing the ability to force Spotlight indexing of network volumes in System Toolkit.

You can view the full list of changes here.

Pro Maintenance Tools is an invaluable toolset to help working video professionals get up and running again quickly in the event of a problem. To find out more, see the feature overview, read the user manual, watch the overview video or download the free 15-day trial.

Our professional media player CinePlay for Mac has a new update with some useful new features and lots of bug fixes.

Import markers

By popular demand, we've added the ability to import markers from FCP 7 and Avid marker lists directly into CinePlay. This makes it easy to transfer your markers to other computers running CinePlay and provides compatibility with other tools like Cut Notes.

Markers import at the same timecode positions and with the same assigned colors.

Other changes

• Added a keyboard shortcut to copy the current timecode position to the clipboard
• Timecode display settings are now respected in the timecode hover and Info window
• Fixed an issue that could cause the user interface to not appear when moving the mouse in full screen
• Fixed an issue where the timecode overlay could appear off-screen when choosing the View > Half Size option
• Fixed an issue where playback would start at the beginning if it reached the end and the user seeked somewhere else and started playing
• Fixed a hang that could occur when closing a movie
• CinePlay no longer asks to convert movies that are corrupt
• Numerous UI tweaks
• Various other bug fixes and improvements

CinePlay is a powerful playback and note-taking tool for video professionals. To find out more, see the feature list, read the user manual, watch the overview video or download the free 15-day trial. Kollaborate customers get cloud functionality in CinePlay free of charge.

We've just released a new beta of Kollaborate Folder Watcher, which is a free tool for automatically uploading files to Kollaborate when they're added to a watch folder on your hard drive.

This version has a Finder Sync extension which allows you to see the status of files in your watch folder when you browse to it in Finder. It will show an orange icon if the file is currently processing and a green icon if it has been successfully uploaded to the cloud (note that these icons will only appear for files added to the folder from now on). You can also right-click files and either reupload them or cancel an existing upload.

Kollaborate Folder Watcher will work on OS X 10.6 and up but the Finder integration requires OS X 10.10. After installing, the extension may not automatically be enabled so please go to Extensions in System Preferences and tick the box marked "Finder" under the "KollabWatcher" heading (you may need to restart your computer for this to appear).

Please be aware that this version is beta quality, which means that it may have bugs and other limitations that could cause problems in a production environment. If you find any issues or have any feedback about integrating the tool into your workflow, please file a bug report on our support site.

Earlier this week we released Pro Versioner 2.1 which provides many tweaks and improvements to our project backup tool for creative professionals.

64-bit only

Due to several under-the-hood changes we are no longer providing a 32-bit version of Pro Versioner and all updates will be 64-bit only from now on.

Improved FCPX compatibility

We've improved compatibility with Final Cut Pro X, which boosts performance and cuts down on erroneous backup notifications.

Other changes

•  Improved app responsiveness when deleting large numbers of projects
• Support for full-screen mode on recent OS X versions
• Various UI tweaks
• General bug fixes and improvements

Pro Versioner is a comprehensive backup tool to keep your project safe, complete with screenshots, annotations and cloud sync. To find out more, check out the feature list, read the user manual, watch the overview video or download the free 15-day trial.

We've given our higher-end Kollaborate subscription packages a massive storage space boost completely free of charge. Subscribers now get the following:

The full list of packages and prices can be viewed here.

Kollaborate is a cloud workflow platform for video professionals, centered around Digital Rebellion's post production apps. To find out more, visit the Kollaborate site, view the feature list, watch the overview video or sign up for the free 15-day trial (no credit card needed).

Today marks the launch of a brand new website design for Digital Rebellion. This isn't just a new skin though - it's a massive rewrite from top to bottom that adds a host of useful features for our customers.

The first thing you'll notice is that it's much cleaner, organizes information more clearly and displays well on mobile devices. It's designed to get you the information you need as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Instead of being a separate section on the site, user accounts are now front and center and underpin many of the site's features. Being logged into the site saves time by auto-filling certain information and some functions such as blog comments now require an account.

We've also revamped our support section and reorganized it to make it much easier to find the information you need. Bug reports and feature requests are now handled through support tickets instead of email. This makes it easier to keep track of the current status of your support ticket.

Not only does the new site offer useful features to our customers, it's also much better for us too. Our backend was 8 years old and extremely clunky. The new dynamic site allows us to more easily update things and even automate many of the tasks we currently do manually.

This is just the first phase of the site redesign. The ultimate goal is to create a powerful foundation for delivering new features and cloud services through our apps. We will be launching additional features later in the year so stay tuned.

Last week we released Pro Media Tools 1.3.8, a minor update to our professional toolkit for managing media.

Adobe CC 2015 support

Pro Media Tools is now fully compatible with the Adobe Creative Cloud 2015 update.

QT Edit playback improvements

QT Edit has had numerous improvements to playback functionality including a full screen mode and JKL shortcut key support.

Other changes

• QT Edit now identifies caption tracks correctly
• QT Edit - Improved compatibility with FCPX XML
• Video Check stability improvements
General bug fixes, tweaks and improvements

Pro Media Tools is an essential toolkit for media professionals. To find out more, view the feature list, read the user manual, watch the overview video or download the free 15-day trial.

Earlier this week we released Pro Maintenance Tools 2.1.3, a minor update to our suite of maintenance, repair and troubleshooting tools for video professionals.

Adobe Creative Cloud 2015 support

Pro Maintenance Tools is now fully compatible with Adobe Creative Cloud 2015 and we have made Preference Manager more intelligent at detecting future versions of CC.

Clear After Effects disk cache

Have you noticed that you suddenly have very little free disk space available? The culprit is probably After Effects' disk cache, which is set by default to consume up to 10% of your drive space. While that might not sound like much, 10% of a 1 TB drive is 100 GB, which is a lot of space for a temporary file cache that is only useful while AE is open.

Now you can easily clear out this cache with Housekeeper, or even schedule a basic housekeeping clean periodically.

 

Trash Audition plugin cache

Housekeeper can also trash Adobe Audition plugin caches, which can help to solve launching issues.

Pro Maintenance Tools is an invaluable toolset to help working video professionals get up and running again quickly in the event of a problem. To find out more, see the feature list, read the user manual, watch the overview video or download the free 15-day trial.

Kollaborate Server 1.3.2 was released late last week, offering some great new additions to our in-house cloud workflow platform for video professionals.

Save playback position

Kollaborate Server will automatically play back files where you left off, making it seamless to switch between home and office or desktop and mobile. This is also supported by the latest versions of CinePlay for Mac and CinePlay for iOS.

This setting can be disabled in Actions > Playback Settings in the player.

Simplified sharing

It's now easier than ever to share files with clients outside your project. We've reduced the number of clicks required to share a file and made it much easier to track links across the entire project.

Plus you can get additional statistics including when a recipient last viewed the link and the timecode position at which they stopped viewing.

You can also relink to a different file so that you can silently fix problems without needing to send the person another link.

Python scripting (beta)

The Python scripting beta has been incorporated into Kollaborate Server 1.3.2. It is considered beta so we welcome all feedback. You can find more about how to script Kollaborate Server in the Scripting Guide.

Other changes

• Project alerts - Easily see the most recent changes to a project with the project alert dropdown at the top right of the screen
• The Users section of the player now shows the last time a user viewed a file
• Import markers via FCPX XML
• Marker colors are now respected when importing from FCP 7 XML
• Right-click the Files page to add a new folder or comment stream
• You can now add up to 25 linked accounts to your subscription
• Various UI improvements

Kollaborate Encoder 1.0.1

We've also released Kollaborate Encoder 1.0.1 which adds support for higher-resolution encoding (you need to activate this from Kollaborate Server itself by visiting yoursite.com/beta) and offers several encoding optimizations.

Kollaborate is a cloud workflow platform designed to help you work better with colleagues and clients. Upload files to the cloud, have them reviewed by others and then export their notes back to your editing application.

Kollaborate Server gives you all of those features in-house on your own servers and storage. To find out more, view the feature list or sign up for the free no-obligation 15-day cloud trial (no credit card needed). Trials of Kollaborate Server are available on request.