Introducing FCS Maintenance Pack

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

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

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

FCS Maintenance Pack includes:

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

Also includes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final Cut Studio 3 compatibility with Digital Rebellion products

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

FCS Remover

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

Download FCS Remover

Preference Manager

Version 2.0.3 is compatible with Final Cut Studio 3.

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

Download Preference Manager

Compressor Repair

Not fully compatible with Final Cut Studio 3.

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

Download Compressor Repair

FCS Remover 2.5.2 released

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

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



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

FCS Remover 2.5 released

We've just released FCS Remover 2.5.

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

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

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

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

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

Compressor Repair 1.1.4 released

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

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

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

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

Preference Manager 2.0.3 released

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

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.

Compressor Repair 1.1.3 released

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

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.