New tool: Preference Manager

We've just introduced a new tool - Preference Manager. This application allows you to trash, backup and restore your Final Cut Studio preference files.

Preference files store information about user preferences, window and toolbar placements, and launch settings. Sometimes these can become corrupted, causing problems. Preference Manager allows you to trash corrupted preferences and keep backups of working preference files in order to quickly restore your settings.

Now, I know there are a few other apps on the market that do this as well, so what makes Preference Manager unique? Well, for a start, it works for the entire Final Cut Studio suite, not just Final Cut Pro. In addition, it is completely free, you are not limited by the number of backups you can perform, you can assign names to your backups, and it is Leopard-compatible.

As always, we are trying to create a genuinely useful application, so your comments and suggestions are encouraged.

FCS Remover 1.0.6 released

We've just released a new version of FCS Remover, taking it up to 1.0.6. This update offers no new features but makes changes to some elements of the automatic updating facility. It is a recommended update because in the next few days we are going to make some changes that will cause problems with it.

FCS Remover is a program to automatic the uninstallation of Final Cut Studio and Final Cut Express. It has many uses such as wiping an old version before updating, downgrading to an older version or simply removing the entire suite from your machine.

FCS Remover 1.0.5 released

We've just released FCS Remover 1.0.5, based on much-appreciated user feedback. This new version offers Final Cut Express support (version 3.5 (HD) and 4, although earlier versions may work as well) plus a couple of bug fixes.

If you don't know, FCS Remover is a tool that allows you to completely remove Final Cut Studio (and now Express as well) and its associated components. Why would you want to do this? Well, maybe you are planning to upgrade to a later version and want to fully uninstall the previous one in order to improve the stability of your upgraded system and reduce issues. Or you might be one of the unfortunate few experiencing problems with a particular patch and wish to downgrade.

Alternatively, you may be swapping project files between your up-to-date machine and a machine running an earlier version, although an XML export is the recommended way of dealing with this problem.

Whatever the reason, we always appreciate your feedback, bug reports and feature requests.

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Apple announces iPhone SDK

Apple today gave details on its iPhone SDK (Software Development Kit). You can read more about it on AppleInsider. What I'm going to focus on is our iPhone apps and how this affects them.

Firstly, our offline apps will be replaced by SDK applications. They haven't been updated in a while and they are slow, so it makes sense to do this.

The standard (non-iPhone) web apps will stay. The iPhone web apps will probably stay too, as they don't need much extra work.

Applications will be delivered via iTunes, and will remain free.

None of this will happen until the iPhone 2.0 firmware is released in June. Note that Apple is limiting it to the US at first but will gradually roll it out to other countries.

FCS Remover 1.0.4 released

I just commissioned a quick patch for FCS Remover, bringing it up to 1.0.4. The removal of some extra frameworks was added in v1.0.3 but the corresponding package receipts were not removed, leading the FCS installer to mistakenly think that the frameworks were installed when they weren't. This caused some "missing framework" errors when starting FCP up after reinstalling.

This is now fixed in v1.0.4. Apologies for any inconvenience caused by this bug.

To be notified of new updates automatically, subscribe to our appcast feed.

NewsFire now completely free

I just heard that the developer of NewsFire is now offering the popular Mac feed reader for free. I recommended this even when it cost money (I am a paid user) so I recommend it even more now that it is free.

So what is it and why do you need it? Well, those little orange buttons you see on web pages are links to RSS feeds. An RSS feed is a tiny file containing textual information such as posts from a blog or software updates. If you have a favorite site or blog, you can be notified of updates without having to visit the site every day. Obviously this saves a lot of time and bandwidth.

I didn't think I needed one until I tried it, and the time I saved was tremendous. If you see a new site you like the look of, put it in your feed reader and forget about it until the next update. Visiting a site to check for updates that don't exist is very inefficient.

NewsFire is a great program because, as the developer himself says: "Unlike other readers, NewsFire is designed with a deliberately minimal interface. The news is what matters and it takes center stage." And now it's free, so try it out.

We have several feeds on this site, listed here. We also have an appcast feed that tells you when one of our applications is updated.

[via TUAW]

FCS Remover 1.0.3 released

We've just released version 1.0.3 of FCS Remover. This doesn't offer any new features - it's just a small release to chase up some Final Cut Studio files that were not deleted in previous versions.

For those that don't know, FCS Remover is a freeware utility to remove the entire Final Cut Studio. Why would you want to do this? Well, it's a good thing to do if you are upgrading from a previous version of Final Cut Studio or Final Cut Pro. Sometimes upgrade installations do not work very well so an installation from scratch is recommended. The best way of doing this is to completely wipe your hard disk, but we understand that not everyone wants to do this. FCS Remover fills the gap by removing Final Cut Studio and leaving the operating system and your other files intact, allowing you to install a new version.

Other people use it for reinstalling an unstable installation of FCS, while others use it to downgrade to a previous version in order to save Final Cut Pro projects to an earlier format for compatibility reasons.

FCS Remover can be downloaded here for free. Also keep an eye on our appcast or this blog for updates and new releases.

How to clone and restore your system

This is a quick guide to cloning and restoring your system. I'd advise that you print this out and keep it in a safe place by your machine so that you won't waste time looking for it when your machine goes down.

Cloning your machine will create an exact copy of every single file on your computer onto a second hard drive. This can be either an internal or external disk. I'd advise external over internal because if something damages your machine, the external disk won't get damaged as well. The best time to create a clone is right after you have done a fresh Erase and Install of your operating system, have installed all of your apps and are ready to go.

Cloning
1. Download and install Carbon Copy Cloner.

2. If you are cloning to an external drive, connect it now.

3. Fire up Carbon Copy Cloner from your Applications folder. In the dialog that appears, select your system drive as the source and set your backup drive as the target.



4. Under options, make sure "Copy everything from source to target" is selected. You must check "Erase target volume" too, so as not to cause conflicts with data already on the disk. If you do not check this, the drive may not be bootable and this whole process would be pointless.



5. Click Clone and wait for it to finish. Be aware that this could take several hours.

6. Unmount your external disk (if applicable) and keep it in a safe, dry place, not too hot and not too cold. If you're paranoid like me, I'd advise connecting it to your machine every so often and verifying the disk in Disk Utility to make sure that it everything is ok.

Restoring
So the worst has happened. Your system is completely hosed and you have a deadline in 12 hours. What do you do?

Temporary Solution
1. Mount your backup disk, go to System Preferences and click on Startup Disk. If it is an external disk, it must be connected via FireWire in order to be bootable.



2. Select the backup drive in the drives list and click Restart.



3. The system will now restart in the backed-up "fresh" operating system.

This is a temporary solution to help you get your project finished without wasting time. You are advised to follow the permanent solution below.

If you have an external disk, make sure that it doesn't get disconnected either deliberately or accidentally. That's a good way to cause a kernel panic, which is never good. Don't put the machine to sleep. Shut the machine down completely before unplugging the drive. I once forgot the machine was asleep and unplugged it and my system completely froze. Not good.

Permanent Solution
1. Backup any data that you do not want to lose.
2. Boot to the backup hard disk as detailed in the Temporary Solution above.
3. In Carbon Copy Cloner, clone the backup disk over the startup disk. Follow the steps for cloning above but select your backup drive as the source and your startup disk as the target.
4. You must select "Erase the target drive".
5. Click Clone and wait for it to finish. Again, this could take several hours.
6. Go back to System Preferences > Startup Disk and set your startup disk back to the old drive and click Restart.

FCS Remover 1.0.2 released

We've just released FCS Remover 1.0.2. FCS Remover is a free utility for uninstalling Apple's Final Cut Studio suite.

This update offers the following features and fixes:
* Compressor and Qmaster support
* Now removes Final Cut Studio codecs
* Now removes some extra files that were missed out in previous versions
* New automatic update facility

This is just a minor update to fix a couple of things. I've been receiving a lot of feedback and the next version will not only be faster, but it will allow you to select which Final Cut Studio products you wish to remove. I am planning to rewrite the application for the next release so please be patient. Your comments and suggestions have been noted though and the update facility will notify you when additional versions are available.

You can file bug reports and feature suggestions here:
Bug reporter
Feature request

As always, your feedback is highly appreciated.

I also wanted to let you know that we now have an appcast feed up and running. You can import this into an RSS reader such as NewsFire and be instantly notified of new application updates, complete with a link to install them immediately.

New tool: Pixel Aspect Ratio Calculator

We've just released a new online tool on our site. Pixel Aspect Ratio Calc will take two image resolutions and work out the pixel aspect ratio needed to convert from one to the other.

It can also work out the necessary square-pixel resolution of a still image that will fit perfectly into the non-square pixel video frame. If you have ever tried to resize still images to fit into an NTSC frame, you will understand how useful this tool is.

Pixel Aspect Ratio Calc is available in two versions:
Pixel Aspect Ratio Calc (standard)
Pixel Aspect Ratio Calc (iPhone edition)

See our Resources section for more tools.