Ron Diamond wrote me about a new Final Cut Pro Preference Manager that he’s developed that I wanted to bring to your attention.

Ron writes:

Take control of your Final Cut Pro preferences at last!

EditGroove’s UserMatic(TM) solves FCP Preferences hassles once and for all, encouraging and facilitating experimentation in the thousands of ways Final Cut Pro can be customized. It leverages the editor’s time and creativity — by enabling multiple versioning, rollback points, easier troubleshooting, multiple users, and even accessing the same preferences across multiple edit bays.

Download and more info available at http://www.EditGroove.com

This looks like a very cool application. I’ve been playing with it for a day or two and it has a nice look and feel. I especially like the fact it allows me to have multiple preference configurations, then easily switch between them.

Important note: Be sure to quit out of Final Cut BEFORE switching preferences!

If you are interested in learning more, visit here.

Also, Ron tells me you can save 15% off the purchase price of $34.95 by adding the code DPBUZZ08.

IBC (the International Broadcasting Convention) in Amsterdam has been the source of a variety of exciting announcements that I want to bring to your attention. (Thanks to Ben King for doing the legwork and filing this report.)

First, Adobe continued it’s careful rollout of CS4 news by showcasing a speech to text conversion facility inside Soundbooth that literally transcribes the footage. Adobe’s rollout of the entire CS4 line next Tuesday looks increasingly exciting. (By the way, there are rumors going around the web that the CS4 announcements are pretty tame. I think, from a video point of view, that will not be the case. We shall see.)

Second, Apple announced native support for RED files in an upcoming version of Final Cut Pro. (Currently, RED files are transcoded into ProRes for editing.)  The report we have from IBC was that Apple said this update would be out in “the next couple of months.”

Third, JVC and Sony are partnering to jointly support XDCAM EX and SxS.  This is the first time someone other than Sony supported these formats. Could this be the beginning of both a video recording and storage format that producers could count on working the same between different camera vendors?  We’ve taken this for granted for years in standard-definition, only to discover that almost no HD formats – especially HDV – play nicely together.

Fourth, Ikonoscop launches the smallest HD camera which records in RAW images at full HD resolution.

Fifth, Digital Heaven announces Loader, a new application to make loading elements into Final Cut Pro easier.

Matrox is now, finally, shipping the MXO2 – an all-in-one, PCIe-connected box for capturing, monitoring, and outputting SD and HD signals.

CalDigit is shipping a new, high-performance RAID.

And a French company, called “Soft Lights,” is demoing studio lights that can be controlled from your computer. No more climbing ladders.

We’ll have a complete report from Ben King, Michael Horton, and Dan Berube in this week’s Digital Production BuZZ, and I’ll have an audio file of it posted to my website later in the week.  

Lots of fascinating things to come – life continues to be exciting!

Today, SmartSound released Sonicfire Pro 5 – a free upgrade to their already extremely useful music software.

I’ve been using SmartSound products since about 1997 and have always enjoyed the flexibility they gave me in creating interesting and compelling music of any arbitrary length.

However, I fell off the wagon a while back with the release of version 4, with its weirdly named “mood-mapping” feature.  I didn’t understand it and didn’t see a reason to upgrade.

A few months ago, Brian Dickman, SmartSound’s VP of Sales and Marketing, met with me to discuss ways we could work together and I shared with him some of my reservations about the software. (SmartSound’s royalty-free music library has always been excellent, with a wide variety of tunes spanning almost 200 albums – and growing by 3-4 CDs a month.)

Over the months our conversations continued until, about three weeks ago, Brian asked me to record new on-line tutorials for the up-coming release of version 5 of their software. This gave me a great opportunity to play with the software and discover some of its subtler features. Over the last two weeks, I’ve recorded ten different tutorials on the software, which runs the same on both Mac and Windows systems.

My goodness!  If you haven’t looked at SmartSound recently, you need to check out Sonicfire Pro 5. It does some amazing things with music amazingly well. Just as Apple’s Soundtrack Pro broke new ground in allowing us to change the tempo of a loop without changing its pitch, and vice-versa, SmartSound has taken music modification to entirely new heights.

They simplified the initial interface to allow you to create music quickly and easily, without resorting to a timeline. You can create exciting music – with a beginning, middle and an end – at any arbitrary length. You can set keyframes and change instrumentation in the middle of a song. You can have the software automatically determine the best tempo to match your video. And, in a feature that left my jaw on the floor, you can grab a timing keyframe and change the entire structure of the music to match your video by simply dragging a keyframe.

With hundreds of music titles to choose from, software that allows you to modify music in an unlimited number of variations, and an ease of use that makes working with music fun, the latest version of SmartSound Sonicfire Pro 5 is stunning. Best of all, the upgrade is free.

Apple today released QuickTime 7.5.5.

In typical Apple fashion, all they said about this release was: “QuickTime 7.5.5 includes changes that increase reliability, improve application compatibility and enhance security.

“This release is recommended for all QuickTime 7 users.”

My recommendation is to hold off updating to this version of QuickTime until we see if it causes any problems with Final Cut Studio.

You can learn more about this update here:  http://www.apple.com/quicktime/