Preference Manager best practices

Preference Manager is a useful tool for trashing preferences for a range of video editing applications including Avid, Premiere and all versions of Final Cut Pro. This wipes the user settings for your editing application and can fix a wide range of problems.

However, having to set everything up again can be a chore. With a little bit of preparation in advance, you can ensure you never have to trash them again.

1. Start with a stable foundation. We recommend trashing preferences in Preference Manager and then setting them up again from scratch in your NLE, but you can skip this step if you are confident that your settings are stable.

2. Backup the settings. You can choose to backup additional items such as keyboard layouts if you desire.

3. Optionally, lock your preference files to prevent them from becoming corrupt. Some apps don't work correctly with locked preference files, so for these apps the lock option will be greyed out.

4. When a problem occurs, instead of trashing preferences, restore the backup. This will restore the settings you backed up previously to enable you to get back to work quickly.

Additional tips:

• You can right-click on a backup in the Restore pane and set it as the default backup. This means that it will be automatically restored when running a Quick Fix and you can set it up to fix problems simply by pressing a button on your keyboard.
• If you make changes to your editing software preferences later on, right-click on the backup in the Restore pane and select Update All Files to replace the preferences in the backup with the current versions on disk.
• By default Preference Manager will autosave your preferences every 7 days. This allows you to go back to previously working settings if you did not make a backup beforehand

Preference Manager is a free and useful tool for editors and post production professionals. See the user manual for more workflow tips.