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2024
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November
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12th November 2024
Metaburner v1.1.0 is out now on FxFactory!
For those that have been following along, Metaburner has proven to be one of the most challenging and complicated things I've ever built.
The idea is simple - we just want to be able to "burn in" metadata from a Final Cut Pro project, simple, right?
Whilst it didn't take me very long to throw together a proof-of-concept, getting it to work well proved to be incredibly complicated.
Metaburner v1.0.0 (Build 1) hit Apple's TestFlight on 16th December 2023.
Thanks to the feedback and support of some of the best minds in the Final Cut Pro community, we iterated fast and pushed out quite a few updates improving things.
By 8th January 2024, Metaburner v1.0.0 (25) hit FxFactory, our first product to be sold outside the Mac App Store.
All our initial paid apps, such as BRAW Toolbox, Gyroflow Toolbox, Marker Toolbox, Recall Toolbox and Fast Collections were all released on the Apple Mac Store.
So, why FxFactory? FxFactory has a number of benefits for us:
- FxFactory is a highly curated store focussed on editing professionals with a huge catalog of amazing products
- FxFactory offers free trials and watermarked versions
- FxFactory doesn't require Apps to be sandboxed
- FxFactory offers developers advice and code-level technical support/guidance
- FxFactory helps with user technical support
- FxFactory helps with marketing and promotion
- FxFactory has a number of technologies built into their software platform to make sure Motion Templates are updated correctly
- The FxFactory team are super smart and super lovely - you have direct contact with their developers/engineers
On 24th January 2024 we released Metaburner v1.0.7 (35) on FxFactory - but then there was radio silence... except if you're in the Final Cut Pro Discord group.
After pushing out v1.0.7 we decided to go back to the drawing board on a lot of things.
Whilst Metaburner was working fine in a lot of cases - for example, if you just have standard clips on a timeline - it wasn't working in more complex cases, such as re-timed Multicam Clips containing Sync Clips.
I enlisted the help of my long-time friend and collaborator David Peterson to do some paid full-time work on FCPXMLKit - our own Swift-based FCPXML engine that's doing a lot of the magic behind-the-scenes.
David also wrote Capacitor (which allows you to easily convert between FCPXML versions) as a test case for FCPXMLKit.
Things that we thought would be simple, turned out to be days and weeks of work.
I knew that Metaburner was never going to make any money, and investing so much time and money into the project was kinda insane - but I also knew that this kind of tool was so important to editors working in long-form - it's just something that NEEDED to exist.
FCPXML is insanely complex - and even though I work with it all the time, even I have trouble explaining it in some cases.
After months of work, lots of maths (I'm terrible at maths), lots of experimentation, we FINALLY got FCPXMLKit to a point where it was working great in most cases.
But we also hit some performance issues - Metaburner was working, but it was slow.
Again, after months or work, emailing every Swift/FCPXML genius I know, and lots of swearing... EVENTUALLY I was able to get performance to a good state too.
It's not the most zippy of applications - but at the same time, it actually performs pretty fast compared to Final Cut Pro's own exporting of FCPXML on large libraries!
So whilst things have been fairly quiet publicly, we did 14 private beta builds of Metaburner v1.1.0 - and there was a lot of Discord discussion happening!
I'm am HUGELY thankful to everyone who's been testing and putting Metaburner through it's paces.
HUGE THANK YOU to Matthieu Laclau, Sam Pluemacher, Knut Hake, Robin Moran, Florian Duffe, Tyler Nelson, Marcos Castiel, Geoffrey Orthwein, Josh Beal, Alex '4D' Gollner and Vigneswaran Rajkumar!
Also, an absolutely MASSIVE THANK YOU to the incredible Steffan Andrews - who is probably on-par with Intelligent Assistance's Dr Gregory Clarke, as the worlds best FCPXML expert.
We've using Steffan's TimecodeKit under the hood, and have also had some fantastic video calls with him regarding his DAWFileKit, which is absolutely amazing if you're a Swift Developer working with FCPXML.
So whilst I originally hoped to have Metaburner done and dusted by January 2024, it's taken until November to finally get it to a point where I'm mostly happy.
Sadly, I'll never make back the money I invested in Metaburner and FCPXMLKit - however hopefully this tool will make it heaps easier for editors to cut long-form projects in Final Cut Pro.
I learnt a HUGE amount for taking on this insane project, and we'll also be able to use FCPXMLKit for lots of other things in the future.
You can download a free trial of Metaburner on FxFactory.
Jumper v2024.11.12 is out now!
It includes the following improvements:
🆕 Important Changes:
- We've removed silence checks from the speech processing pipeline (for now, since it causes issues in some cases).
- If you have very long silent audio/video files, simply don't check the speech processing in the Media panel for these clips.
🐞 Bug Fixes:
- Fixed issues with
.mxffiles having malformed timecode values. - Error-safe parsing of
.cafaudio file metadata. - We no longer ignore an audio file if there is some issue parsing the audio channel count.
You can download and learn more here.
evrExpanse v5.1.0 is out now!
It has the following improvements:
- Significant performance boost when exporting metadata, up to 4x faster on Apple Silicon and 8x faster on Intel Macs, plus optimized Finder Tags extraction.
- Improved precision in extracting gamma curve metadata from Sony Alpha cameras.
- Fix Gamma Notes and Color Space metadata acquisition when Sony Alpha cameras get GPS coordinates from mobile device.
You can learn more here.