Friday, July 31, 2009

FCS Remover get an update

Just in time for FCS3's release FCS Remover from Digital Rebellion LLC gets an update to 2.5.1:

Adds support for last week's Final Cut Studio (2009) release, as well as improving the overall speed and responsiveness of the application. One minor tweak worth noting - if you want to reinstall Final Cut Studio but don't want the bother of entering your serial number and license information all over again, go to the Shared Files heading, then deselect Registration. This is a new option in this version, as requested by several people.

Thursday, July 30, 2009

Shake = The Dead


Looks like Apple may have EOL'd Shake according to some rumor sites.

Apple appears to have finally discontinued Shake, its long-standing high-end digital compositing and visual effects software package. While Shake's product pages remain available on Apple's site, it is no longer listed in the online Apple Store and MacRumors has received word that Apple sales representatives have been informed of the product's discontinuation.

The link to Shake redirects to Final Cut Studio as of this post. It'll be interesting to see if something replaces it or takes it's place (Motion?) or some of it's functionality is abandoned altogether.

Most people (who pirated it) used it for not much more than converting 29.97fps to 24fps anyway, maybe Apple realized this.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

When P2 Cards Die

If you've never seen a Panasonic P2 Card die…



There ya go.

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Arriraw Toolkit for FCS updated to 1.0.3

ArriRaw Toolkit allows Mac OS X and Applications to work with ARRIRAW “.ari” image sequences. With this Toolkit, Finder is fully aware of these files, including support for Spotlight, Previews, and basic QuickTime Playback. Other applications that are QuickTime aware, will also work with ARRIRAW file format.

It's only $799.00 (all three Glue Tools Toolkits bundled together are only $1599.00). This is helpful albeit I believe a wee bit overpriced since Final Cut Studio itself is only $999 for the full version. But it is cheaper than buying a ton of hardware to do the same thing.

Monday, July 27, 2009

Title Graphics: DVD vs Blu-Ray

Best Practices for creating title graphics for use in the DVD setting of the Share feature

DVDs and Blu-ray discs scale images the exact opposite from one another (yay) so here's some info from Apple on what to do.

Installing Final Cut Pro 7 on unqualified machines



I haven't (and cannot) test this so if you try this you try it at your own risk.

If you want to install Final Cut Studio 3 on a machine that doesn't meet the minimum requirements you can try this hack which involves navigating to:

Final Cut Studio Installer > FinalCutStudio.mpkg > Contents > Resources > Requirements Checker.app

and deleting "Requirements Checker.app".

Again, I have no idea if this works but it could be helpful.



You could probably also edit the minsys.plist file in there but I don't know what that would do. The important part of the file is probably this:

<key>AELMinimumVRAM</key>
<dict>
<key>block</key>
<string>128</string>
</dict>


(If you don't get the reference in the image then you're young.)

Fixing Corrupted Quicktime Files


Eventually everyone has a Quicktime file go bad that they REALLY need. Most of the time, the data is there, it's just improperly indexed or lacking an index. Here are some options:

01) Dumpster. It's an app that allows you to look at the file in a nice graphical (albeit old-school) way. With it you can view and edit .moov resources.

02) You can try this method using Java. Complex but has worked for some.

03) Atom Viewer. The old saying rings true here, if you don't know what an atom is in the sense of data/files, you probably won't gain anything from this. Plus, it's Windows only.

04) HexEdit. If you spend some time with this and know what you're doing this can save your caboose. (It's like ResEdit...sigh)

05) QT Repair Tool. Don't get your hopes up for this one. It essentially updates a file's clut to work with newer versions of QT.

06) A classic fix if you've lost a file, don't reboot, and look in /private/var/folders/ for a .mov

07) Treasured. They have an app that will analyze your file and if possible, repair it. If it can't it tries to let you know if it can repair it at which point you send it to them or a portion of it and they fix it or send you an app that will. You pay them for their service.