Lacq’ing in Depth

It’s been a busy summer. I’ve been particularly occupied by a bug in the latest releases of Final Cut Pro (6.0.3 and 6.0.4) that causes FCP to ignore the Conduit plugin’s requests when the Canvas window needs to be updated. This makes it look like Conduit isn’t working, when in fact FCP is simply failing to correctly update its windows. (The same update operations do work when Conduit is running in Motion and previous FCP versions, so something has changed in these latest FCP updates.)

Unfortunately the fix for this seemingly simple bug has turned out elusive. A fix doesn’t seem to be forthcoming from Apple, so I’ve spent quite some time trying to come up with a workaround, but have been unable to find a solution that would work for all users. The only solution guaranteed to work was to basically circumvent FCP’s Canvas window entirely by providing a preview inside the Conduit plugin, so that’s what I ended up doing. That new feature will be shipping in the Conduit 1.6.2 update very soon. Hopefully it will provide a relief from FCP 6.0.4 woes to everyone – apologies to all those affected!

With the FCP fix and the 1.6.2 update wrapped up, I’ve finally had more time to work on the Conduit Live manual — here is the latest complete draft. As always, any feedback is most welcome!

In my previous post, I wrote: “The Conduit Suite gives you access to Conduit in 7 different applications: FCP, Motion, AE/Mac, PS/Mac, AE/Win, PS/Win, Conduit Live.”

Make that eight, as the Conduit plugin also works in Apple’s Final Cut Express 4. The latest version of this excellent mid-range ($199) video editing application added support for the FxPlug plugin standard, so Conduit now works just as it does in FCP and Motion.

There’s still a few days left of dvGarage’s $149 sale on the new Conduit Suite. If you can accept the limitation of only working with “prosumer” video formats, the combination of FCE+Conduit makes for a tremendous editing system: you get the fluid and familiar Final Cut interface, HDV and AVCHD support, FCE’s new open format timeline… And Conduit delivers advanced effects directly on the timeline – flexible keying, infinitely customizable color effects, custom transitions between clips, and guaranteed high-end color precision through pervasive HDR support.

Total cost: $348 – and you’re also getting Conduit Live and all the other Conduit plugins completely free.

Apple released Final Cut Pro 5.1.3 some few days ago. Unfortunately, this upgrade breaks many 3rd party plug-ins, including Conduit (but also Automatic Duck, Colorista…)

Any projects that use Conduit will continue to render as they should, but you’ll be unable to access the Conduit Editor because of what appears to be a bug in the FCP FxPlug GUI host.

Until the problem is resolved, please hold off on the 5.1.3 upgrade!