Archive for February, 2012

XfcpX2 released – and why it doesn’t matter ;-)

So, I finally got around to do a version 2.0 of the XfcpX utility.

It has proven more popular than I expected – which is great; but also pretty bad as this should never have been nessecary.

The new version is rewritten from scratch and solves some of the major issues with the old utility. All of this does not matter though, as Canon FINALLY release a plugin. Yes, you heard me right – it’s out there, and while I have not tested it myself yet, it is apparently doing it’s job. While I would like to say “Kudos to Canon for making this” however, I will settle with saying “That’s about d*** time”. I love Canon. I am a photographer who’s whole gear base is Canon and as such, I was expecting the same top notch Customer Service moving my Video to the XF platform. This is simply not good enough.

Anyways – I made the utility, and while it is basically rendered useless, I am putting it outthere anyways. Who knows, someone might find use for it – if anything, as a backup in case there are glaring bugs in Canon’s plugin (let’s hope not!). I also think Canon’s utility is MacOS 10.7 (Lion) only…. this is NOT confirmed, so please correct me if I am wrong. However, if that IS the case, you can use XfcpX2 until you get your system upgraded – it has been tested on Leopard as well.

You can find Canon’s XF plugin for FCPX here: Canon Plugin for FCPX (Make sure you select Mac OS 10.7 from the dropdown list.)

Without further ado, here it is – XfcpX 2.0:

XfcpX2 Release notes:

Due to popular demand, and a few rather handsome donations (Thank you!) I have reworked the XfcpX code.

Version 2 of XfcpX indicates a big change.

There are 3 major things to notice with this release.

– The program has been rewritten from scratch, and is now a Cocoa application written specifically for mac instead of Java. This has no real big impact other than the fact that I had to learn a new programming language ;-) What I do hope, though, is that it solves a few issues of mine (and some of yours). First off, Java is not really well supported on the Mac platform. As a result, some people have simply been unable to use the program as it would not start on their system, and I had no chance to find the cause. Being a native program, it is my hope this will be more smooth now. It also opens up for a few more tricks in the UI part of the program – and it will be the foundation for the XfcpX utility from now on.

– The workflow model has changed – or rather, has disappeared. My way of doing this should not be imposed on everyone else; and for some users it was a bit hard to understand the whole workflow idea. Instead, XfcpX just takes any folder as a master folder, with no requirements to the folder structure. You simply browse to your master folder (Or drag it to the green drop area in the application) and XfcpX will scan that folder and all subfolders for the video files. This has some added benefits:
– You are not forced to use the canon supplied XFUtility program (But, you certainly can and I still recommend it)
– You can simply backup your cards, by copying the contents folder from camera to your harddrive and read that folder (as the majority are doing it seems)
– If you have no need to retain the original files, you can now read directly from the camera by dragging the cards (labelled “Canon XF”) from finder directly into the green drop area in XfcpX (Or browsing to them using the “locate” button)

– Finally, and the big one for many, XfcpX will now combine your big (2GB+) files into one clip.

You can download the new package here: http://pika.dk/XfcpX/XfcpX2Installer.mpkg.zip