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!