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Utilities

fcpxfree.com

There are a ton of great free plugins for effects, transitions, generators, titles, LUTs, you name it, someone’s probably made it. The best site to find this and much more is fcpxfree.com. Click here to go to it. The site is supported by Roger Bolton of CoreMelt, who makes great plugins like SliceX and TrackX and Lock&Load and more. You can see what CoreMelt is doing here.

Intelligent Assistance

If you are still a legacy FCP user, Intelligent Assistance has some useful tools for you, SendToX (formerly7toX) and its companion XtoCC (formerly Xto7). The latter will convert an XML for use in either Premiere Pro CC or into FCP7. These are great tools for every FCPX user who is migrating from legacy FCP.

Philip Hodgetts and Dr. Gregory Clarke also make some of the best tools for high end production work, all based on FCP’s XML. Sync-N-Link X is used for syncing double system audio and goes beyond FCP’s audio sync capabilities. This is a sync tool for those who use time coded, jam-synced devices, such as those used in feature films. Sync-N-Link X will process hundreds of video and audio files in seconds.

Change List X compares the XML files from two projects and notes the differences, producing a PDF or a tab-delineated report. It will also create pull lists and discard lists. This is an essential tool where your edit goes into picture lock and then is subsequently changed after it’s gone to audio post.

Broadcasters require detailed reports of footage used in production, music usage, titles, transitions, stock footage. Producer’s Best Friend generates these reports for clips, markers, keywords, transitions, audio and video effects. It produces a comprehensive report that is in spreadsheet format for Excel or Numbers.

Lumberjack is Intelligent Assistance’s logging and organizational tool that starts in the field, on location, getting your production on track and ready for post. It starts with mobile devices, iPhones and iPads, to do real-time logging and information gathering, and moves on to two desktop applications, one to merge XMLs from FCP with logs from the field, and a web application to sync all the data, create Events for FCP, and manage your Lumberjack account. For every kind of production company working with non-scripted material, it’s an essential tool.

Marquis Broadcast

Marquis Broadcast makes media handling utilities for a number of editing applications including FCP. For those who need to export to Avid Pro Tools for audio sweetening, there is X2Pro, which converts FCP XML to AAF for easy integration. It’s a great utility. If you need a media manager to trim your media for sharing or archiving, they also produce Worx4 X, which really everyone should have. It’s an essential utility. Read about it here in Articles. It’s available through the Mac App Store.

Arctic Whiteness

If you’re working on more than a single production with one library, you have to get Final Cut Library Manager from Arctic Whiteness. FCLM organizes all your libraries, events, and projects, together with cache files and media files, both external and managed media. It also lets you create templates for your libraries, which many production companies are finding very useful. For productions that have repetitive formats, templates helps to make organizing your media plug and play. In addition FCLM is a great tool for seeing where your media is building up and clearing out those giant, unneeded render, cache, and proxy files.

CommandPost

CommandPost is Chris Hocking's toolkit for Final Cut Pro editors. It has something for everybody. It lets you do a great many little things that improve the applkication. It sits in the Finder menu bar and does a ton of things: timecode overlays in the Viewer; batch exporting; scrolling timeline; watch folders; customizable Touch Bar buttons; clipboard history; timeline zooming with the mouse; Color Board controls on the Touch Bar or Duet; Color Board shortcuts with control surfaces; moveable markers; mobile notifications; toggle rendering; change the backup interval; ignore camera cards, and more.

spherico.com

Another utility that creates an archived vault is X-Files Pro from Andreas Kiel. X-Files Pro is a more comprehensive package of utilities including mounting and unmounting disks, managing sparse bundles, event and project tracking, database management and repair. X-Files Pro allows you to see what media is in what project and what event. It’s a very powerful utility.

Another really excellent shareware tool is X-Library Check. This will check FCP libraries in the Finder to see if they have missing effects or fonts, and gives out a report of exactly what’s missing. 

Though you can selectively import segments of clip from a camera card or archive, you can’t import segments of a media file from a hard drive. This useful function is made possible with a small utility from Andreas Kiel called VirtualCamCard, which you can download from his website. This lets you make the media you want to import into a sparse bundle so it acts as a camera card. Andreas is a world expert on subtitling and XML, and he has a number of great tools on his site.

Please contribute if you find this tools useful.

Versioning

FCP's built-in backup function can be a bit erratic at times. There is an application to help with this, Backups for Final Cut Pro, available in the App Store.

Preference Manager

Another useful utility to have is Preference Manager, for trashing, backing up, and restoring your preference files. It’s free from Digital Rebellion. While you can reset your preferences by holding 

Option-Command while launching the application, this does not allow you to back up and restore preferences, which Preference Manager does. In addition, Preference Manager works with many other applications, Compressor, Motion, Adobe Creative Cloud, Avid editing applications, legacy Final Cut Studio, Lightworks, Logic, and Pro Tools. You can get it here. Digital Rebellion also makes the Pro Maintenance Tools, which, if you’re in trouble, is a very valuable resource. Pro Maintenance Tools include Plugin Manager that lets you check for plugins that might crash your application at startup. Again, this works with a variety of applications including FCPX. In addition Digital Rebellion makes the Pro Media Tools. This is an excellent collection of useful utilities for pro editors, including QT Edit, which allows you to incorporate chapter markers in your QuickTime files.

Other Professional Tools

A great tool developed for the movieFocus is Shot Notes X, which lets you take CVS files used for production notes on set and convert them to XML for FCP to bring metadata from the field into editorial. 

Also from XMiL is Marker, which shows you lists of where all your media actually in on your hard drives, in which folders, highlights them, and lets you tag them. It opens all the folders that hold your media.