Are we there yet?

The promised 'upgrade' for FCP X made a stealthy appearance, as promised for early 2012, in the App Store yesterday (UK).   There's also an upgrade for Motion - both are free,  (or rather, included in the price you've already paid for them) and both are hefty upgrades, weighing in at well over 1GB each.  So don't try this on a limited broadband tariff!
Promised features include FCP X 10.0.3 are multicam editing and, in beta form only, video output for monitoring - using one of several interface cards/boxes (AJA, Matrox).  The multicam looks promising - the FCP description page has links to a couple of videos, here.  If camera toys are your thing, then you'll enjoy the 'Multicam Demo Video' - I did.
I like the look of the multicam tool, especially the manual choice of sync mechanism (marker, timecode, audio etc).   Too early for me to have tried it, but it promises to be a distinct improvement over the previous method for syncing multiple tracks of audio.  (Which I found unintuitive and disappointing on a project this month).
Two caveats about the video monitoring output:  it'll only work when the manufacturer of the interface box has finalised their driver (currently no statement from Matrox for instance) and it'll be OS X Lion only.   This will delay my adoption for several weeks, while I finish off the current batches of work.  And do remember these are flagged as beta product.
Also in the mix is a rework of the XML that FCP X uses - we are promised a richer set of descriptions, which will make it possible to export a project to DaVinci Resolve for colour grading - and who knows, to Soundtrack Pro (or whatever next) for audio dubbing?   They haven't promised that, though.
This change to the XML means that existing FCP X projects (and I believe events) will have to be updated when opened in the new app - this will be a one-way trip of course.  Echoes of previous FCP version changes, of course.
And the upgraded XML means there's now a convertor app, 7toX, for importing FCP 7 projects (or at least their XML) into FCP X.   The app is available at the app store, it's from Philip Hodgett's company Intelligent Assistance and is a very reasonable £6.99 download.   It won't answer all your prayers, and may lead to a lot of time spent chasing and relinking media - but fills a vital need for just about everyone, I'd think.  Thanks to Nick btw, who was the first to spot the appearance of this app.
So the work continues to bring FCP X up to speed.   More chat and personal reviews no doubt at our next meet, Monday next (6th Feb) 13th Feb*, if you can make it through the streets of Bristol, currently twinned with Omsk, as far as the weather is concerned.

*We've had to postpone a week because of illness.

A last quack from the duck

Many of you will know of Automatic Duck, the first and best inventors of software (in the pre 'apps' days) to transfer edit information between FCP, Avid, and AE, as well as ProTools.  Not only did their software work, and work well, but they always struck me as nice guys to do business with.   Time after time I've come across posts from Wes Plate (founder of the company) explaining how to do stuff, or promising to make something happen.   For many a pressured editor, Automatic Duck came to the rescue like the seventh cavalry.  And let's face it, it's a great name for a company.

Alas, it looks like the Duck has become the first victim of the new order represented by FCP X - in what would appear to be a chilly climate for third-party suppliers, it's been announced that the company will no longer be updating their software or able to support customers in the manner accustomed.   Wes himself now works for Adobe systems.

But they're going out in style; they've made the current offers free to download, even including the recent FCP X to AAF/OMF export.   That's a generously good-spirited offer back to the community, and well deserving of a round of applause here at the wefcblog.

Read more of the background / link to the downloads here.  (It's a now rare dotted IP address in the link, btw, offered by the Duck because of the delays in DNS promulgations.)

Another year, not just another update

The first impressions I have of the 'App Store' - now available on an Intel Mac / Snow Leopard desktop near you - are favourable.   The installation comes part and parcel with the latest (and possibly the last, in its current form) update to the OS, namely 10.6.6  Accept and download the update, and one restart later, there's a new icon in the Dock - the 'Spend It' icon, leading to the App Store, which is essentially a version of the iPod apps store for grown-up computers.

We've come a long way from feeding DVD installation discs into a slot to install software.  Not that it's called 'software' any more - apps it now is.  Finding apps is as easy as finding music in the iTunes store - as is paying for it.   Your existing Apple ID will do just fine!

What I liked:

- the interface is attractive, easy to use

- finding, downloading and paying is equally easy to do.  (though the download speeds seem slower than the dedicated downloads from the apple site of old).  Maybe the easy payment isn't quite such a good point !

- apps are priced down from previous incarnations.   For instance, iPhoto is available (at £8.99) separately from its buddy apps in iLife (iMovie and Garageband) and even if you want all 3, it's cheaper than the previous boxed set price.

- updates are handled automatically (they promise) through the app store.

- purchased apps can be loaded on to any other mac you own.   (In effect, this is limited to Intel macs though).  This can be done by running the app store on another mac you own (with your apple ID), where you will find the app marked as 'purchased' and so available for download free of charge.   I believe it's also permissible to copy the app across and authorise through the app store.   Of course, both macs need to be running snow leopard for this to work, too.

There appear to be some issues with apps you already own:  the only path to upgrade seems to be to re-purchase.   Maybe this will be sorted.

One app which is a bargain (and which I was about to tip for 2011 anyway) is 'Pixelmator'.   It's a great image editor (ideal for designing caption cards for use in FCP) with a neat cutting-edge interface, at an unmissable price of £17.99  Highly recommended.   This app has been recently discounted widely on the web, and this even lower price apparently includes a free upgrade (via the app store) to (and I quote) their 'totally awesome Pixelmator 2.0 for free'.

You can also find Aperture, the iPhoto for grown-ups, on the app store, undercutting its previous disc-based price - and I'm already reading rumours that FCP would have to / could go a modular route for sale there.   Interesting year already.

 

What happened at the July07 wefcpug

A crowded house celebrated the finale of this year's wefcpug meets, and with a summer break in mind, what better way to ensure peace of mind for Autumn restarts than by looking at ways to keep a Mac happy?

Backups in a nutshell: (not literally recommended except for squirrels)

If you want a bootable clone of your system disk then head for Carbon Copy Clone
It's a very small app (as the developer writes, actually a collection of Applescripts) that can clone a disc onto an external firewire drive. For intel macs especially, making such a drive bootable involves more than the old OS9 technique of dragging a system folder across. Oh, for such simple days! Plenty of info about this on the developer's site. It's donation ware - PayPal drinks money accepted.
Note that, although Carbon copy can do scheduled sync'ing of files, this requires another (free) routine (psync) which may have to downloaded too. Also note that CCC doesn't work with network attached drives.

For this, I recommended Chronosync which is a $30 app. Chronosync does work with networked drives - in my case, a 500GB RAID array on a G4 attached via ethernet - and is configurable as you like to backup folders, files on a schedule. It will even wake up the source Mac, mount and unmount the remote drive. The first run is obviously the longest, when the whole material is copied over, subsequent sync's will only copy over changed files: you can decide whether to mirror deletions, archive previous versions of files, exclude certain folders. The best feature for me is that the backup copies are a straightforward copy with the same hierarchy of folders, no fancy 'restore' software required. Chronosync can of course be configured to go into reverse mode, to restore say a complete set of User folders, but it's also easy to find individual files on the target machine, using Searchlight.

From experience, I recommend backing up the entire User tree, including the Library folders (which contains preferences, metadata as well as cache files) - but restoring with care when it comes to prefs etc. I don't myself backup the Apps folders this way - CCC is the way to go for that. Note that Chronosync is NOT recommended for system restores (ie bootable drives).

Yet to come, with the Leopard release of OS X, is the Time Machine, which it seems will do much of the above with a great 'back in time' interface.

If you don't have a backup strategy yet, and don't want to install extra apps yet, do at the very least use the routines built in to several of the iApps for backup of data. For instance, iCal and Address Book have 'backup database' options under 'File', and iPhoto and iTunes both have options to export albums and data.

Maintenance
Richard Harrison spoke very highly of AppleJack for routine maintenance as well as for persuading a misbehaving Mac back to work. It's donation ware, and runs in Single User mode (Command S on startup) - which is especially good if your system is ill and not booting up to the full login window. The app runs a set of Unix cleanup routines (checking permissions, purging caches) which, if you don't fancy Single User mode, can also be invoked using Onyx
- if you decide to download Onyx, make sure you choose the correct version (there is a 'Panther only' previous version on the page too).

And Finally
Despite all the helpful suggestions from the audience, Richard worked his way through a live demo of sound cleanup using Soundtrack pro. Many more of these demos to come in the next season, when we'll all have had time to unwrap and play with FC Studio 2....see you in September.

Do keep checking here on the blog for updates, news, gossip, and unfounded rumours.