FCS Maintenance Pack Network Admin 1.0.3 released

Last week we released FCS Maintenance Pack Network Admin 1.0.3, an important maintenance update.

FCS Maintenance Pack Network Admin extends FCS Maintenance Pack to allow tasks to be performed simultaneously over a network. The Network Admin interface gives system administrators all the tools they need to manage, maintain and troubleshoot Final Cut Studio systems on their network.

With just one button press, administrators can repair Compressor, clean Final Cut Studio caches, analyze crash logs, synchronize plugins, troubleshoot problems and much more - saving time and allowing them to get on with more important tasks.



Notable changes in this version:

Improvements to software update mechanism

Previous versions of Network Admin used Sparkle to manage admin updates, with client updates handled separately by the Software Updates dialog within Network Admin. In some cases this would complicate things because you would need to install the client update first before the admin update.

We have now replaced Sparkle with a proprietary system that allows us to deliver all updates directly to the Software Updates dialog, providing a seamless update experience. Client updates are always installed first and Network Admin then closes to update itself before relaunching. This greatly simplifies things and means that you no longer need to worry about accidentally installing things in the wrong order.

Client updates can now be set remotely

With version 1.0.3 you no longer need to change client settings on each client one-by-one - you can now do it remotely from the admin interface.

FCS Maintenance Pack is priced at $69 for a 5-user license and $129 for an unlimited user license. Each client requires a separate version of FCS Maintenance Pack, with bundle pricing available. There is a 15-day trial of Network Admin that works with the 15-day trial of FCS Maintenance Pack here.

We constantly strive to make things easier and if you have any suggestions for further improving Network Admin, we'd love to hear them.

FCP Versioner 1.2.5 released - significant speed and accuracy improvements

We've just released a new version of FCP Versioner, bringing it up to version 1.2.5.

FCP Versioner is a backup and versioning utility for Final Cut Pro. It automatically backs up Final Cut Pro projects in XML format and generates changelogs to show exactly what has changed between revisions.

This version is aimed at improving the speed and accuracy of changelog generation and simplifying the results to improve readability.

It features the following notable changes:

Significant improvements to changelog generation speed

While we cannot improve the time it takes to generate an XML file (only Apple can change that), we can improve the time it takes for Versioner to process changes from one revision to the next.

FCP Versioner 1.2.5 performs these tasks significantly faster than version 1.2. As an example, one of my test projects took 3 minutes to generate changelogs for all 20 revisions on version 1.2. This time was reduced to 4 seconds in version 1.2.5, a 45-fold increase. We're not promising a 45-fold increase for all projects, but you should definitely see significant improvements in this area compared with the previous version.

Improved readability

FCP Versioner 1.2.5 now removes extraneous information to simplify the results.

For instance, if you change the start point of a clip on the timeline, version 1.2 notifies you that the start point and the in point of the clip changed. While this is perfectly accurate, it is unnecessary information because changing the start point implies that the in point was changed. Version 1.2.5 now simply notifies you that the start point changed.

Another example occurs when you modify two stereo-paired tracks. Version 1.2 notifies you of the change twice (once for each track) while 1.2.5 only notifies you once, as you would expect.

These are just a few of the many tweaks and under-the-hood modifications in FCP Versioner 1.2.5. It is available for Final Cut Pro 6.0.2 and above (the optional autosave feature requires version 7) for $59 and a 15-day trial is available here.

FCS Maintenance Pack 1.3 Beta 1 released - new utilities and more

We've just released a beta of the next major version of FCS Maintenance Pack, version 1.3.

This version offers many exciting new features, some of which are summarized below.

New tool - QuickFix

Ever had a problem with Final Cut Pro but don't know (or care) what it's caused by? There are lots of tools in FCS Maintenance Pack but you need to have a general idea of what the problem is in order to know which tool can fix it.

QuickFix aims to solve this problem by becoming a one-stop solution whenever problems occur. When something goes wrong simply launch it, press the QuickFix button and it will perform a series of common tasks to resolve issues that would normally require launching several tools at once. You can then quickly get back to work without needing to worry about determining the cause of the issue.

Keyboard shortcuts

Now you can perform common maintenance tasks simply by pressing a keyboard shortcut. When used in conjunction with QuickFix, it makes it even more powerful by enabling you to easily fix common problems simply by pressing a button. It makes QuickFix even quicker.

Note: keyboard shortcuts are only supported for FCS Housekeeper and QuickFix in this beta. Support for the other apps in the suite will be added in future betas.

Crash Analyzer error message database

Crash Analyzer is invaluable when Final Cut Studio applications crash, but what if they just display an error message without crashing? That's why we've added a new tool to Crash Analyzer that allows you to search for common error messages and receive tips for overcoming them.

The database is very much a work in progress right now so not every error message is supported. If you receive a message that's not in the database we'd appreciate it if you could use the built-in error message submission system to send it to us so that we can support it in future versions.

File Salvage droplets

You can now create droplets (mini-applications that you can drag files onto) within File Salvage to make it easier to salvage multiple files of the same format at once. Just go to File > Create Droplet, select the relevant source and destination formats and then drag corrupt files onto the droplet.

Growl notification support

If you schedule a task or use a keyboard shortcut it can be difficult to tell when the task is running. If you have Growl installed, FCS Maintenance Pack can now notify you when these background tasks run.

Note: Growl is only supported for FCS Housekeeper and QuickFix in this beta. Support for the other apps in the suite will be added in future betas.



Please note that this is a beta release designed for evaluation purposes only. It is not intended for use in a production environment. If you require a stable version please use version 1.2.7 instead.

To download this update, either visit the FCS Maintenance Pack product page or, if you have an existing version of FCS Maintenance Pack installed, go into the Preferences menu of Software Update and select the option to check for beta updates, then go to File > Check for Updates.

It's also worth noting that in addition to our regular appcast, we now have a beta appcast to separate beta updates from stable versions.

Update: Just to clarify, this will be a free update when the final version is released, so if you buy version 1.2.7 today you will not be penalized for it.

FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2.7 and Network Admin 1.0.2 released

Last week we released FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2.7 and FCS Maintenance Pack Network Admin 1.0.2, providing lots of new changes.

FCS Maintenance Pack is a useful tool to optimize and maintain your Final Cut Studio system and Network Admin takes that one step further by providing significant time savings to businesses.

Here are the highlights:

Comments can now be submitted with Crash Analyzer logs

Crash Analyzer has long had the ability to upload Final Cut Studio crash logs to our servers in order to improve our crash diagnosis algorithm. We've now expanded on that by giving you the option to add additional useful information to help us further, such as error messages reported by Final Cut Pro, unusual software or hardware configurations and any other important symptoms.



As an added bonus, system administrators can now submit logs from within Network Admin.

Corrupt Clip Finder file skipping

Corrupt Clip Finder locates corrupt clips in your timeline by opening each one with QuickTime and seeing if it crashes. However, some files don't crash but instead pop up an error message, such as in the case of a reference movie where the media has since been deleted or moved.



In previous versions of the software you would be forced to wait for Corrupt Clip Finder to realize that the file was taking far too long to open before you could move onto the next file, but with version 1.2.7 you can just go to Edit > Skip Current File or press Cmd+K to instantly declare the file corrupt and move on.

Password-protecting FCS Maintenance Pack applications from the admin dialog

The ability to protect FCS Maintenance Pack applications with an administrator password to prevent user tampering has been around for a while now, but before now this would need to be enabled for each application individually. This would be particularly time-consuming if you needed to do this for many computers on your network.

Now you can easily perform this on multiple computers at once, just by ticking a box in the FCS Maintenance Pack pane of Network Admin.

Standalone applications can be updated from within Network Admin

Standalone applications not affiliated with FCS Maintenance Pack (such as FCP Versioner) can now be updated on every machine on the network at the same time via Network Admin's software update mechanism.



This is just a sample of the features, tweaks and fixes available in these new versions. Both products have been used on network television and film productions and have been proven to save time and reduce support costs. Each has a 15-day trial available so that you can test them out.

More information about FCS Maintenance Pack and FCS Maintenance Pack Network Admin is available on their respective product pages.

FCP Versioner 1.2 released - many more XML backup options

We released FCP Versioner 1.2 last week and I completely forgot to blog about it.

If you have a large FCP project, Final Cut Pro can sometimes take a while to export an XML copy when you save. Older versions of FCP Versioner had incorporated an all or nothing approach - either you waited for it to finish or else you were left without an XML copy of the backup, which meant that some of the functions of the software wouldn't work.

Version 1.2 changes this completely. You now have a slider to control how often you want to generate XML copies. At lower settings, the XML copy will only be generated for the second, third or fourth backup depending on how far you push the slider.


Versioner will then show the differences between versions that you have an XML copy for and if you want more detail, you can choose to generate the XML data on demand for backups without that information. But in most cases this will be unnecessary.

Alternatively, version 1.2 gives you the power to completely disable automatic XML generation and only generate XML copies when you actually need to use the functions of Versioner. This provides the best of both worlds for larger projects by giving you all the benefits of Versioner without interrupting your work.

FCP Versioner is a backup and versioning utility for Final Cut Pro. It automatically backs up Final Cut Pro projects in XML format and generates changelogs to show exactly what has changed between revisions.

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

FCP Versioner is available for $59 with a 15-day trial version available here.

Introducing FCS Maintenance Pack Network Admin

Yesterday we released a brand new product, FCS Maintenance Pack Network Admin.

FCS Maintenance Pack Network Admin is designed to compliment FCS Maintenance Pack by giving system administrators the ability to run tasks remotely across the entire network in unison.

It also allows you to sync preferences, plugins, user paths and scheduled tasks between computers, which is great for minimizing problems and makes it easier to move projects from one machine to another.



FCS Maintenance Pack Network Admin also offers many extra troubleshooting features in addition to those featured in FCS Maintenance Pack. The Difference Finder works out the differences between operating system, plugin, kernel extension and framework versions to tell you what is unique about a certain group of computers.

This is really useful if you have one or two computers on your network that are experiencing a problem and every other computer is fine. Just drag the computers that work properly to the Working category and the ones that aren't working to the Not Working category. Difference Finder will then tell you if the non-working group is missing any important files or using old versions compared to the working group. This is a huge timesaver.

You can also view Crash Analyzer statistics to discover how often the machines are crashing, which are the most and least stable, the most common cause of crashes, and much more. If users experience a problem, they can request help from their system and the administrator is immediately notified in Network Admin, allowing them to remotely troubleshoot the problem.

These are just some of the features of FCS Maintenance Pack Network Admin. To find out more, download the 15-day trial or check out the user manual. It also requires FCS Maintenance Pack but this can be installed remotely from within Network Admin (another great feature).

A common question we've been asked is if it is suitable for small businesses with only a few systems on the network. The answer is yes - FCS Maintenance Pack Network Admin provides lots of benefits that are useful no matter how many computers are being used. Many of our beta testers only had a few systems and experienced tangible benefits despite this.

As this is a version 1.0, we're looking for people to try it out and tell us how well it fits in with their workflow. We want to hear if we have missed out any features that would be useful for you, or if there is a common issue you run into that you wish it would fix automatically.

To contact us, use the Report Bug or Request Feature links inside the app itself, the contact form on our website or contact us on Twitter.

Update - If you are connecting though a corporate firewall, you will need to open ports 35011-30513. The user manual has a troubleshooting section at the back that lists other circumstances that may prevent clients from connecting.

FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2.5 released

We recently released an update to FCS Maintenance Pack, bringing it up to version 1.2.5. Here are some of the important changes:

Task Scheduler can now run tasks as root

Task Scheduler can now run certain tasks (such as Compressor Repair) as root, meaning that it will no longer pop up a password dialog when protected tasks run.

To take advantage of this you will need to remove and re-add your scheduled tasks. When you try to add a task that needs to run as root, you will be prompted for an admin password.

More options for Autosave Cleaner

We've added an action button to Autosave Cleaner that can be used to perform cleaning actions manually, such as removing all autosaves older than 7 days. This allows you to perform actions on a per-project basis rather, which is very useful if you finish a project and want to clean things up by removing all except the 5 most recent autosaves, for instance.

When running automatically, Autosave Cleaner can now archive (compress) autosaves that match the specified criteria instead of removing them.

QT Repair now repairs invalid ImageDescription extensions

There's a strange bug in Final Cut Pro where it will crash if an ImageDescription extension is incorrect while QuickTime quite happily ignores the issue and plays the file just fine.

QT Repair can now fix this issue.

Corrupt Clip Finder is faster and more accurate

Corrupt Clip Finder has been improved to be faster at scanning folders and more accurate when scanning Final Cut Pro project files.

Other changes

• Autosave Cleaner - Improved Final Cut Express support
• Compressor Repair - Fixed an issue where multiple clusters would sometimes appear after repairing
• Path Manager - Final Cut Express support
• Preference Manager - Fixed an incompatibility with the Open in Editor function of Final Cut Pro
• QT Repair - Added m4v support
• System Toolkit - Now lists system QuickTime components
• XML Repair - Interface improvements
• Updated Crash Analyzer definitions
• General bug fixes, tweaks and improvements

The full list of changes in version 1.2.5 is here. There are also many significant under-the-hood changes in this version that are not listed in the changelog.

FCS Maintenance Pack is an essential tool for any Final Cut Studio user. It is available for $129 and a free 15-day trial and user manual is available here.

FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2.4 released

Yesterday we released FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2.4, a bugfix and polish release. Notable changes include:

Logging

Most of the applications now generate detailed logs showing exactly what the application did while it was processing, and if it encountered any problems along the way. It will also create separate logs for tasks started by Task Scheduler, letting you know when the task last ran and the actions it performed.

These logs are available in the Help > Troubleshooting menu.

Support for future beta versions

We will be entering a public beta stage soon for the next major version of FCS Maintenance Pack. With this in mind, Software Update can now notify you of beta software updates. This makes it easier for us to distribute betas while at the same time separating them from regular stable releases.

Participation is optional so you will need to switch this on in Software Update preferences.

Other changes

• QT Repair - Fixed an issue where large files would not repair correctly
• System Toolkit - Speed increases when performing Refresh Files and Strip Temp Files scans
• System Toolkit now pays attention to language settings when showing eligible files for streamlining
• Corrupt Clip Finder no longer stops processing when it encounters a read-only hidden file
• FCS Housekeeper - Now closes running apps before cleaning and reopens them when it finishes
• Software updater can now check for beta updates (switch this on in preferences)
• Path Manager - Fixed a bug with the Qmaster cluster path not being recognized when using the Browse button
• Task Scheduler - Reduction in the CPU usage and disk I/O of scheduled tasks
• Task Scheduler - Fixed a bug that would sometimes cause tasks to repeat over and over
• Plugin Manager - Many UI improvements
• Updated Crash Analyzer definitions
• General bug fixes, tweaks and improvements

FCS Maintenance Pack is an essential tool for any Final Cut Studio user. It is available for $129 and a free 15-day trial is available here.

Advance notice - Tiger support to be phased out

We will shortly be phasing out OS X 10.4 Tiger support for FCS Remover, Preference Manager and Compressor Repair.

Phasing out Tiger support is necessary to improve the experience for users of more modern operating systems. This will lead to more frequent software updates, greater stability and additional features. We believe that now is a suitable time to do this because it has been a considerable amount of time since Apple has actively supported Final Cut Studio on Tiger systems.

We will be releasing special Tiger-only versions of these applications within the next few weeks, which will receive no further software updates except in the case of any major bugs. If you have any bug reports or feature requests to make for the Tiger versions of these applications, please submit them as soon as possible.

After the Tiger-only versions are released, future software updates will only support OS X 10.5 and 10.6. Note that PowerPC systems will continue to be supported.

FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2.3 released - improved File Salvage and QT Repair

We've just released FCS Maintenance Pack 1.2.3, a minor update to our suite of popular troubleshooting tools for Final Cut Studio.

This update mainly focuses on File Salvage and QT Repair but there are many other tweaks and improvements elsewhere in the suite. Here's the changelog:

• QT Repair - added options to ignore certain consistency checks when rebuilding - this can help to repair particularly problematic files
• QT Repair - added option to renumber track IDs to ensure they are unique
• QT Repair now caches file information to speed up rebuilds when rebuilding from the same working file
• File Salvage - Improvements to audio salvaging
• File Salvage - Fixed an issue with green frames appearing in the middle of DVCProHD movies
• File Salvage - Improved memory usage and responsiveness when scanning
• System Toolkit - Improved memory usage when scanning applications
• Launcher - Fixed an issue with a blank launcher window appearing on 10.6
• Crash Analyzer now shows an icon to indicate when a log has been submitted to Digital Rebellion for analysis
• Updated Crash Analyzer definitions
• General bug fixes, tweaks and improvements

FCS Maintenance Pack is an essential tool to keep Final Cut Studio in good working order. A free trial is available here.

For more information on FCS Maintenance Pack, check out the user manual or the recent Q&A we did with Pro Video Coalition.