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
|
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'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.
Late last week we released Aspect Ratio Calc onto the iTunes App Store. It allows you to calculate aspect ratios and pixel dimensions for video. There are many preset aspect ratios for different formats to choose from and you can also specify a custom one.
Results can be copied to the clipboard or emailed.
The app will work on iOS devices running iOS 3.1.3 or higher, making it compatible with every iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad model. You can download the app here.
As always, we appreciate your feedback and will use it to improve our tools. Just use the feedback link within the app to tell us what you think.
Today we released FCS Maintenance Pack 1.3.3, a bugfix release for our suite of tools for maintaining, optimizing and troubleshooting Final Cut Studio.
Version 1.3.2 had a lot of under-the-hood changes which introduced a bug into Corrupt Clip Finder that caused it to randomly flag up non-corrupt files. This has now been fixed. We also changed the way Corrupt Clip Finder displays scanning progress to bring it back to 1.3.1 functionality, based on user feedback.
We also took the time to update Crash Analyzer definitions and fix some other minor issues including Plugin Manager's Crash Tester not working correctly with plugins that need an admin password in order to be disabled.
Please note that when upgrading from version 1.3.1 or earlier, registered users will need to re-enter their registration information. We apologize for the inconvenience and you will only need to do this once.
Since we didn't post a blog entry for version 1.3.2, here are the notable changes since version 1.3.1:
We've now made sure that files in the trash are no longer marked as being in use and they can now be trashed without any error messages or additional steps.
Last week we released Cut Notes 1.0.2, a maintenance update for our iPad note-taking app.
This version fixes a crash some users had been getting when pressing buttons, as well as fixing an issue with misinterpretation of shorthand timecode.
We've been listening to your feedback and version 1.0.2 adds the ability to edit notes. Just switch to portrait mode and press the Edit button at the top. Click Done when you've finished.
Another nice tweak in this version is that when you double-tap a button to expand upon a note, after you press Enter, Cut Notes will scroll back to whichever button page you were originally on.
Finally, please note that we have changed the way Final Cut Pro marker lists are generated. The note text is now added to the marker name instead of the comment, meaning that you can ctrl-click on the timeline header and see all of the markers listed by name.
Cut Notes 1.0.2 is free for existing users or $7.99 for new users.
Last week we released Film Rate Calc 1.0.1, which adds iPad support and backwards-compatibility for iOS 3.1.3 devices, as well as fixing a few bugs.
Film Rate Calc enables you to calculate the amount of film required to shoot for a certain amount of time, and vice versa. This is really useful in planning the most efficient use of your film and should be in any script supervisor's toolkit.
Film Rate Calc is available on the App Store for $1.99.
Cut Notes
CinePlay
Aspect Ratio Matte Generator
Video Space Calculator