Backing Up The Good
If your are as unlucky as I am and have had FCP Studio crash and burn towards the end of a deadline, you know how nerve racking that can be. When FCP Studio goes belly up, it’s very difficult to troubleshoot from within the belly of that beast, as there are so many connections to other programs: Compressor, Color, Livetype, and all the rest.
Fortunately, some smart folks at Digital Rebellion have sorted all this out and given us some FREE tools to work with when FCP is not working. Preference Manager (PF) will back up all of your FCP settings by User or Project, so you don’t ever have to worry about loosing all your settings again, as in the case of a complete reinstall or move to another machine. PF is great for troubleshooting, as you can just delete your preferences to try and fix any problem that comes up, and if you find out that it was not your preferences that were hosed, you can easily restore them from backup. For darker problems, in a few clicks you can even completely remove FCP Studio using the Remover tool provided on the Digital Rebellion website, then restore your prefs from backup.
Even if FCP never crashes on you, PM is useful two other ways: you can 1) save preferences across the board for all studio apps by user, and 2) even by individual project. And did I mention that this is all free?
In addition to PF, there is Compressor Repair, which will make things right if Compressor or Qmaster ever starts acting up. From experience, I can tell you that is a real nightmare when those two misbehave. I was down for 2 weeks once trying to sort Compressor out back when V6 of FCP came online. But if it ever happens again, I am hoping that Compressor Repair will make it a one-click fix.
Many thanks to Digital Rebellion for providing such nice tools, and doing that for free!
[See
http://www.digitalrebellion.com/resources.htm for downloads.]
