Kollaborate
Pro Maintenance Tools
Pro Media Tools
CinePlay
Post Haste
Preference Manager
FCS Remover|
Maintain, optimize and troubleshoot your NLE
|
Professional cloud workflow platform
|
Simplified media management
|
I have heard several people on Twitter say that they are thinking of switching to Adobe Premiere or Avid Media Composer after the release of Final Cut Pro X.
As we announced earlier this year, we will be releasing a new version of FCS Maintenance Pack soon called Pro Maintenance Tools. This will support Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro for Mac, so whatever decision you make we've got you covered.
And if you're an existing FCS Maintenance Pack customer who purchased the software on or after 1st February 2011, you will be eligible for a free upgrade to Pro Maintenance Tools upon release.
Are there features you like in Final Cut Pro X but wish they were in Final Cut Pro 7 or Adobe Premiere Pro? We've got you covered there too with Pro Media Tools.
Pro Media Tools adds support for Quick Bins (Apple calls these Clip Collections in FCPX) and you can see a complete overview of the media, effects and markers in Project Overview (Timeline Index in FCPX). Project Overview is more advanced than FCPX's Timeline Index because it allows batch modification of the data, printing, import and export to marker and Avid locator lists and more. A 15-day trial is available here.
We're interested to hear from anyone with requests for other Final Cut Pro X features they'd like to see ported to earlier versions or other NLEs.
Last week we released Pro Media Tools 1.0.2, a significant update to our suite of tools for processing and managing media in Final Cut Studio, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro.
The focus of this version was Auto Transfer and lots of new features have been added.
Auto Transfer now checks the file sizes before running the full verification check, allowing it to spot errors very quickly without needing to run a time-consuming verification.
To add timecode from a THM file, go to the Quick Tasks pane and select Create Timecode Track from THM file. Click Perform Task and navigate to the location of the THM file on your memory card. A new timecode track will be added with the information from the THM file.
This is a small overview of the changes in Pro Media Tools 1.0.2. The full changelog is available here. A 15-day trial of Pro Media Tools is available here.
Last week we released FCS Maintenance Pack Network Admin 1.0.8, a maintenance update for our tool to remotely troubleshoot Final Cut Studio over a network.
The biggest change in this version is support for entering a manual IP address and port. This is essential for negotiating some corporate networks.
Just follow these steps to set it up:
1. Open up the FCS Maintenance Pack Network Client preference pane.
2. Select a specific network interface to listen on and tick the option to specify a custom port and to disable Bonjour broadcasts.
3. Once the client restarts, the current IP and port will be listed on the left-hand side.
4. Launch Network Admin, click the + button in the bottom left and select Add Manual IP.
5. Enter the IP address, port and a descriptive name and click Connect.
6. The service will appear in the left-hand Services pane.
Unlike Bonjour services, manual ones will always appear in the list even if the destination computer is offline.
A 15-day trial of Network Admin is available here.
We're pleased to announce our newest product - Editmote, an iPhone and iPod Touch remote control for Final Cut Pro, Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere Pro and QuickTime Player.
The app is available on the iOS App Store and requires the Editmote Preference Pane to be installed on your Mac.
After installing the preference pane, simply flick the switch to the On position to make the computer name appear in the Editmote services list. You need to be connected via wi-fi on your iPhone and be on the same network as your editing machine for this to work correctly.
Once you are connected, launch a supported application and you'll be able to control the playhead, add markers, set in and out points and adjust the volume remotely. A full list of buttons is available in the user manual.
We've also prepared an introductory video to help you get everything set up.
Editmote is an essential tool for editors and producers during a screening. To discover more about Editmote, follow our Twitter and Facebook pages. For more post production tools for Mac and iOS devices, see our products page.
Update: Want a free copy of Editmote? We've teamed up with FCP.co to give away copies to two lucky winners. More details here.
With Final Cut Pro X on the horizon, it seems like a good time to talk about the future of FCS Maintenance Pack.
FCS Maintenance Pack has solved countless Final Cut Studio problems and is used around the world by freelancers, production companies, post houses, broadcasters and studios. It is in use at most of the major broadcasters in the USA.
We're now going one step further by announcing Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro support and renaming the suite to Pro Maintenance Tools. We also intend to support Final Cut Pro X.
As well as support for new NLEs, Pro Maintenance Tools will be 64-bit and compatible with Lion. A full list of features will be provided upon release.
We're planning to release it approximately two weeks after the release of Final Cut Pro X. It's difficult to be more precise due to the lack of a firm release date for FCPX from Apple.
This will be a paid upgrade for existing users, although people who purchased the software from February 1st 2011 onwards will be eligible for a free upgrade. Upgrade pricing will be announced closer to the release.
We will be entering beta for Pro Maintenance Tools in just over a week and are looking for testers who can submit crash and error logs to help us build up our Crash Analyzer database for these new applications.
We're looking for people who use the Mac versions of Avid Media Composer or Adobe Premiere Pro on a daily basis and are prepared to give detailed feedback. Testers will receive a free copy of the suite when it is released. (Due to non-participation problems in the past, we only give out free copies to people who actually send us bug reports and feedback.)
If you meet the requirements and would like to participate in the beta, please contact us to request addition, including a little bit about yourself, your system and your workflow. Please note that places are extremely limited so try to apply as soon as possible.
Yesterday we released Cut Notes 1.0.3 which incorporates many of the feature requests and suggestions we have received from users. Cut Notes is an iPad app for quickly taking timecode notes during a screening.
We noticed that we had been receiving requests for features that were already in the app, so there is now a Quick Start tutorial when you first launch it to highlight the major features. There is also a link to the user manual in the Actions menu.
We've also made it much easier to change the timecode settings. Just click the little "i" button next to the timecode display and you can quickly modify the frame rate, starting timecode and various other settings. These can also be modified in the Projects menu as in previous versions of the app.
The biggest new feature is support for feet and frames instead of timecode, making Cut Notes much more useful in feature film environments.
Just press the "i" button, switch Feet + Frames to On and select your film type. Note that choosing this will limit your output options to formats that are capable of supporting feet + frames. You will not be able to export FCP markers or Avid locators from feet + frames projects.
There is also a new output option: Edimarker lists allow you to import notes into Pro Tools via the third-party application Edimarker.
Cut Notes for iPad is available for $7.99 on the iOS App Store. We recommend Project Overview in the Pro Media Tools bundle for managing markers exported from the app and bringing them into Final Cut Studio and Adobe Premiere Pro.
Earlier this week we released Pro Media Tools 1.0.1, which offers new features and bug fixes for our suite of utilities to process and manage media in Final Cut Studio and Avid Media Composer.
The biggest new feature is support for Adobe Premiere CS5 for Mac. Premiere users have feature parity with Final Cut Studio users and can use the tools in the suite by exporting their projects to Final Cut Pro XML.
We've also improved the email settings dialog in Render Watcher to help those who had difficulty setting it up in version 1.0. There are now presets for common email providers, you can specify custom ports and there is now a button to check the settings by sending yourself a test email.
Edit Detector had several changes too. The sensitivity slider now behaves more predictably (this fixes an issue where it would not detect changes for movies with subtle edits, regardless of how high you raised it), thumbnails can now be switched off for improved performance when detecting changes, and edit points can now be added manually by pressing the N key.
We've also created a video overview of the tools in the suite:
The full list of changes is here:
Pro Media Tools is available for an introductory price of $99 and there is a 15-day trial available here. It will run on Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6 on both Intel and PowerPC computers.
If you want to find out more about Pro Media Tools, check out screenshots and the user manual.
We've just released episode 2 of the Digital Rebellion Podcast that gives a brief overview and demonstration of all of the utilities in our newest suite, Pro Media Tools.
You can subscribe in iTunes or via the direct feed. The Episode 2 video is available for direct download here. The podcast is free and is optimized for iPhone 4 and iPad.
We're open to requests for future tutorials so please let us know if there is something you'd specifically like to see.
We've just created a video podcast to show how to get the most out of Digital Rebellion products. We plan to show tutorials and demonstrations for common workflows and focus on tips and tricks that people don't know about. The first episode is the Cut Notes overview video from earlier this year and more episodes will be coming shortly.
You can subscribe in iTunes or via the direct feed. The Episode 1 video is available for direct download here. The podcast is free and is optimized for iPhone 4 and iPad.
We're open to requests for future tutorials so please let us know if there is something you'd specifically like to see.
We're proud to introduce our newest product, Pro Media Tools. Pro Media Tools is a suite of ten workflow utilities focused on processing and managing media, with functions including detecting gamma shifts, editing QuickTime movie metadata, batch renaming files and more.
There are many features that have been in demand for a long time, including notifying when a render is complete, editing markers and adding timecode tracks and reel names to QuickTime movies.
Pro Media Tools also marks our first foray into supporting multiple NLEs. Version 1.0 supports Final Cut Studio 2 and higher and Avid Media Composer 5.0 and higher for Mac*. The Avid support is primarily aimed at people using AMA workflows. Adobe Premiere Pro support will be coming shortly.
The full list of tools is as follows:
Various actions can be performed after the transfer has taken place, including showing the copied files in the Finder, opening up the clips in QuickTime Player or, if the clips are in a compatible format, importing them directly into a Final Cut Pro project.
Results can be exported in a variety of formats including Final Cut Pro marker lists, Avid locator files and EDLs.
Just navigate to the same frame in both clips and click the Detect Gamma button. It will compare them and give you a percentage difference between the two. You can then use this percentage to go back to the app and compensate for the shift.
In some cases, the pixels will be identical but the gamma shift will be occurring due to a mismatch in metadata. In these cases, Gamma Shift Detector allows you to sync the metadata of the two clips with one button press.
It also offers comprehensive marker editing capabilities including offsetting, custom printable data fields, label presets (to label all green markers as "Needs VFX" for instance) and the ability to import Final Cut Pro marker lists and Avid locator lists into an FCP project. It's a great companion to Cut Notes, our note-taking iPad app.
There are several types of quick bins available. A Bin Range generates a group of numbered bins, allowing you to quickly create empty bins for scenes 1-100 in your movie for instance.
A Smart Bin automatically sorts media into the bin if it matches the criteria you have chosen (e.g. "scene greater than 11" or "filename contains MVI_"). A Smart Bin Range takes this concept one step further, where you choose the criteria first and then Quick Bins automatically creates Smart Bins for each variation of the criteria.
As an example, in the screenshot below I selected "File Extension" as the criteria for the Smart Bin Range. Quick Bins went through all of the media files in the project and discovered files ending in .mov, .aiff and .tif, so it created new bins for each of these types and automatically sorted matching clips inside them.
The suite is available for an introductory price of $99 and there is a 15-day trial available here. It will run on Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6 on both Intel and PowerPC computers.
If you want to find out more about Pro Media Tools, check out screenshots and the user manual.
We're always keen to hear feedback, so contact us to let us know what you think and how well the suite fits in with your workflow. We have many more post production tools available here.
Update: Just a quick note for FCS Maintenance Pack users - when you install Pro Media Tools the FCS Maintenance Pack launcher will be removed and replaced with "Digital Rebellion App Launcher", so you will need to update any shortcuts or Dock aliases.
* Note: due to technical limitations, a few features of the suite are unavailable for Avid users.
Cut Notes
CinePlay
Aspect Ratio Matte Generator
Video Space Calculator