1. Open the FCSvr Admin panel and create a new device, on which we will copy the exported XML files (click to enlarge):
2. Create a “Write XML” Response which uses the asset title as the filename for our XML file. If you use subfolders in your media library, it’s possible that you have duplicate file names. In this case, please get in touch with me to discuss your options. The response looks like this:
3. Now create a “Search Expired” response, which finds all assets managed by FCSvr. Please note, that the resulting list gets stored in the Event Type variable “Custom 1″:
4. Set up a subscription, which gets triggered as soon as the Event Type variable “Custom 1″ gets fed by our Search Expired response. This subscription invokes the XML export:
5. Now tell FCSvr to invoke the “Search Expired” response: Enter any time which seems appropriate for you.

Now wait until your new workflow gets triggered.

If all works well, you should find a list of XML files in your XML folder:

Open a file to see a valid FCSvr XML structure:

If you want to import these data into another DAM, please get in touch with me to discuss how to transform these XMLs into valid import data.

Despite its shortcomings like missing rough cut editor, no native tape support for archives, lack of decent UTF-8 level 3 support when importing and exporting XML files, even today, almost two years after its last update and more than six months after Apple has dropped it, Final Cut Server seems to be the best asset management and workflow automation system for FCP7 clients.

Yet, though Apple still sells Final Cut Studio (FCS), sooner or later it won’t run on the latest Apple hardware anymore, so we need to consider switching over to FCPX, Adobe Premiere, or probably Avid Media Composer as soon as Apple drops FCS support with their latest hardware.

Final Cut Server doesn’t support project files of these editors (apart from Premiere using FCP7 XML structures), so a big part of its functionality can’t be used with the latest editors. In addition, Apple won’t fix any FCSvr bugs anymore, so you can’t really add functionality to your FCSvr based workflows.

Long story short, you might want to consider replacing FCSvr with a modern Asset Management and Workflow Automation solution sooner or later.

There are a couple of tools you might wanna look at, e.g. Cantemo Portal DAM, CatDV, ConSol* FocalPoint, Flavoursys Strawberry.

Strawberry and FocalPoint focus on sharing project files, both FCP7 and Media Composer, but –at the time of this writing– don’t allow to preview individual media files. Both tools are absolutely great in what they do, especially because they are so easy to learn and to use.

CatDV and Cantemo try to cover more functionality, and in addition to sharing project files you can share and preview individual media files.

There are other MAMs as well, which might fit your needs, and it’s up to you to choose the best fit as successor of your existing FCSvr environment.
(Or ask me to help you finding the right MAM).

In most environments, you might want to migrate your existing FCSvr installation to your new system.
This might include at least these things:

• Link new MAM to your media files
• Copy metadata of all your media files into the new MAM

Optionally you might want to preserve information which assets belong to which FCP projects and FCSvr productions as well as reuse existing proxy files.

Squarebox provides a migration tool, which helps you migrate all these data from Final Cut Server to CatDV.

Most other vendors don’t provide a migration tool, so you need to extract data from FCSvr on your own and prepare them for an import to your new solution.

If for instance you’d like to migrate from FCSvr to Cantemo Portal DAM, one way to do this looks like this:

1. Extract data from FCSvr. I use a script I wrote, which relies on fcsvr_client and exports an individual XML file per Asset. This XML file includes any metadata related to an asset. As an alternative you could set up an automation within FCSvr. (E.g. using “schedule”, which triggers a “Search Expired” response to find all assets and then triggers a “Write XML” response for each asset. This would give you the same result without using external scripts. See http://www.andre-aulich.de/en/perm/export-asset-metadata-from-final-cut-server-using-builtin-tools-only for more details.)
2. -optional- If you need information which asset belongs to which FCP project and FCSvr production, I use a second script which gets this information from FCSvr, too.
3. I use another script which transforms the FCSvr generated XML files into XML files Cantemo Portal DAM understands. (Or to be correct: Portal DAM relies on Vidispine as its backend, and the XML files will be interpreted by Vidispine).
4. I rename each XML file (automated, of course), to match the name of the related media file, and place it in the same folder like the original media. This means that a file called mediafile1.mov will have an accompanying XML file called mediafile1.xml in the same folder.
5. Now I point Portal DAM to the FCSvr media storage and tell it to automatically add all files found on that storage to its database. PortalDAM will automatically detect media related xml files and add the contained metadata to the assets.

Please note, that I don’t mention migrating existing proxy files, here. This is because Portal DAM works with an HTML5 interface, so we need our proxies to be in another format than on Final Cut Server (only if you need a preview, of course, but hey, that’s what proxy files are for).

If you need information where your proxy files reside, please get in touch with me, and I can calculate the paths to your proxy files for you, so that these proxies can either be linked to your new MAM or automatically moved to a place better suited for your new MAM.

While vi, emacs and nano are nice tools and are available on most Mac and UNIX/Linux machines, using them remotely means that all your personal editor settings might not be available on the remote machine, and if you share a common admin account to connect to the remote machine, you might not be allowed to copy your personal setting files over to the remote machine.

If you prefer your personal editing environment, you either need an editor application which supports opening an ssh connection to the target machine and then opening the file with the local editor settings (like BBEdit), or you need to mount the remote ssh system as a local filesystem and then use any local text editor you prefer (like vi, emacs, TextMate, etc.). The latter can be done using Fuse4X and sshfs. There are plenty of tutorials on the net how to set up Fuse4X and sshfs.

In BBEdit instead, just choose File -> Open from FTP/SFTP Server, then enter your ssh connection details:

Make sure you activate “SFTP”, as this tells BBEdit to use ssh instead of ftp.
Now you can browse the remote file system the same way you could using an ssh connection in Terminal:

Just browse to the file you are looking for and edit it the same way as it was a local file.

The tool is called WingFS and can be found on the brand new Archiware Technical Blog.

The tool is available for Mac OS X and is going to be released for Windows and Linux in Q1/2012, too.

While WingFS is cool as it is, I wonder if this is Archiware’s first step towards cloud integration of their commercial tools, too.

Whatever new asset management system you are going to use, you surely want to migrate your existing data and metadata from FCSvr to the new system.

If you need help extracting these data from Final Cut Server, please feel free to get in touch with me. I can help generating XML import files for your new DAM as well as reusing existing proxy files.

If this sounds interesting to you, please use my contact form to discuss your options.

I agree with these companies that it can be very efficient to extend an existing infrastructure for Mac client management, as this allows you to use your support teams for this new task without big changes in organization, operation and infrastructure.

Using free Open Source tools allows Windows and Linux administrators to manage Macs in a similar way like with Apple servers or commercial third party solutions. (You can read more about it in my upcoming O’Reilly book, which I wrote with my co-author Harald Monihart – Harald works for Axel Springer, where he’s part of the team which integrates 12,000 Macs into a Windows environment)

The standard solution I use at most of my customers includes a little Python program and requires Web services as well as an SMB or AFP share and an Active Directory with an extended schema. Aside from these server-side services, the whole management process happens on an admin Mac client, so that your Windows team takes care for the availability of your Windows servers, while your Mac team takes care for the actual Mac client management – this way you maximize the usage of your admins’ specific know-how.

These are the main advantages of the solution I work with:

• It doesn’t matter if you use Windows, Mac or Linux servers – the Mac client management services run on all of them.
• There’s no licensing costs apart from Mac OS X Server or Windows Server costs.
• Your users can install software delivered by you without administrative permissions, so that they don’t need to be admin users – this increases the security level of your Mac environment.
• The GUI for your users is so easy to understand, that users either don’t need any training, or it doesn’t take longer than five minutes.
• This solution can be operated by separated Windows, Linux and Mac teams. It doesn’t matter if individuals understand both Windows and Mac OS X or if Mac and Windows know-how is spread across multiple people.
• Choose yourself how much internal and external resources you use – I provide consulting services to choose the best solution for your environment, help you build this solution, and train your admin team. My team and I also offer monitoring and operating of your Mac client management environment, so there’s a full choice of services from consulting to full-service operating available.
  Please get in touch to discuss your options.

The tools I use help you with the following tasks:

• Installation and upgrading of operating system and applications (mass deployment)
• Asset management
• Preferences management on user, group, computer, and computer list level
• Remote support of your users

If you need help managing Mac clients using Mac, Linux or Windows servers, I’d be happy to help.

For many companies it is important that their laptop users can access external networks for email and Internet access (e.g. at home, in the hotel or at a customer’s site) or because they need to access your customer’s server while they are on-site.

This means that most likely you let your users add network settings on their own.

Yet, in many companies you find both public Wi-Fi networks with internet access but limited access to a company’s internal network and an ethernet network with full access to the internal network but limited access to the outside world.

Due to security restrictions in these environments it is not allowed to build a bridge between the public Wi-Fi and the internal ethernet network.
But if you let your users change network settings on their own, how do you make sure, that they don’t build that bridge, either on purpose or by accident?

One way to do this is to use a free tool like crankd, which allows you to monitor your network devices and to trigger scripts whenever something changes. crankd has become part of the PyMacAdmin tools, so don’t get confused by the name PyMacAdmin.

In this little tutorial, we use crankd to monitor the ethernet and the Wi-Fi device in a MacBook Pro running Mac OS X 10.6.x. As soon as we get a working Wi-Fi connection, we deactivate our ethernet connection.

First, download and extract crankd.
Cd into the extracted folder and invoke
sudo ./install-crankd.sh
to install crankd on you machine.

Now, create the folder /usr/local/bin:
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/bin

Create the file /usr/local/bin/toggleEthernet.sh:
sudo nano /usr/local/bin/toggleEthernet.sh

and copy the following code into it:

#!/bin/bash
AirPortStatus="$(/usr/sbin/networksetup -getairportnetwork en1)"
# echo "${AirPortStatus}"
if [[ "${AirPortStatus}" =~ "AirPort power is currently off." ]]; then
echo "AirPort not running. Activating Ethernet interface."
/usr/sbin/networksetup -setnetworkserviceenabled Ethernet on
elif [[ "${AirPortStatus}" =~ "Current AirPort Network:" ]] || [[ "${AirPortStatus}" =~ "You are not associated with an AirPort network." ]]; then
echo "AirPort is running. Deactivating Ethernet interface."
/usr/sbin/networksetup -setnetworkserviceenabled Ethernet off
fi
echo "========================="
(You can instead load the file from here.)

Save this script by typing Control-W, and close nano by typing Control-X.
Connect your test machine to working ethernet and Wi-Fi networks and run the script to see if it works.

If it works as expected, copy this file (after unzipping it, of course) into /Library/Preferences/.

The interesting part in this crankd preference file is:

SystemConfiguration
State:/Network/Interface/en1/AirPort
command: /usr/local/bin/toggleEthernet.sh

which means, that crankd listens to our AirPort interface and runs the script /usr/local/bin/toggleEthernet.sh whenever something changes.

To start the crankd daemon during system startup, please download this file, unzip it and copy it into /Library/LaunchDaemons.

Set the correct permissions:
sudo chmod 644 /Library/LaunchDaemons/de.andre-aulich.runcrankd.plist
sudo chown root:wheel de.andre-aulich.runcrankd.plist

and load the job:

sudo launchctl load -w de.andre-aulich.runcrankd.plist

Now AirPort should be turned off automatically as soon as you activate your ethernet connection.

Note: if someone connects a USB ethernet interface to your laptop, this will not be watched by our example crankd configuration. If you need to monitor multiple ethernet interfaces, you need to customize the configuration files described here.

Using the tools mentioned here, you can allow your laptop users to manage their network settings on their own without building a bridge between internal ethernet network and public Wi-Fi connection.

In short, I would say, that

• Apple opens up its pro software like FCP X and Mac OS X Server to the consumer, by making it easier to learn than ever before. A great strategy to sell more boxes and devices, which surely leads to greater turnover, and probably to more profit, too, as consumers buy easy tools and need support on a very low level only (if at all), which Apple can provide for cheap.
• Apple dumps all network products, which’s sole purpose was to help sell more client boxes to professionals in the enterprise or workgroup, like Xserves, Xserve RAIDS, Final Cut Server, and probably -on the long run- other products like Xsan metadata controllers and Mac OS X Server. In fact, I don’t think there is a big need for any of these products anymore, since Apple clients integrate just fine with Active Directory environments, most file servers, and many storage devices.
• I don’t think that this necessarily means Apple doesn’t care for the pros anymore. I think that FCP X is already quite powerful, and multicam support, FCP X APIs/XML interfaces, SDI connectivity and the like are going to be added to FCP sooner or later. Yet, I think Apple’s main market for FCP X is the single user or small workgroup. If you look at FCP X’s media import options, you’ll see the option “Create proxy media”: If you also look at the Sharing options: you’ll see that FCP X includes an option to export files and probably metadata to CNN iReport. I bet that FCP X’s powerful metadata management capabilities and the option to generate proxies during media import, are a very good basis to add iCloud support to FCP X. I guess that for many very small workgroups it would be great to simply send a proxy version of a project to the iCloud, so that another team member can edit a sequence and send it back to the original FCP X machine which has access to hires files to render the final output. This might be a very good Final Cut Server replacement for very small teams.

Making tools like FCP simpler than before doesn’t necessarily mean, that it’s not suited for pros anymore. Okay, right now it is not, but I am sure, it will soon be.

Yes, Apple has dumped Final Cut Server, which is the base for many postpro environments, now. But FCSvr meant to most of its customers, that you needed Xsan in place (most resellers and consultants were simply not able to design these systems right), that Open or Active Directory needed to work fine and that your Mac and Windows clients needed to be integrated into this directory infrastructure (and again, most service providers could not do these things properly).

This means it was very difficult to get a Final Cut Server infrastructure working, especially as so few people know how to make storage, asset management, Open or Active Directory, filesystem permissions, portable home directories and video editing clients work together smoothly.

In my opinion for many small shops it would be a great step to cut out all this overhead and move FCSvr into the cloud by adding an option to FCP X.

On the other hand, FCSvr leaves a big gap in the market, which tools like CatDV might fill: many shops do not want to publish their data into the cloud.
Especially in Europe people don’t like to store their business data on servers hosted either in the US or anywhere else by a US company, which might sooner or later grant access to these data to any kind of secret service.
This leaves a need for a local DAM in enterprise environments.

Personally, I would like to have a much easier DAM tool than anything on the market, something that can be set up without needing a consultant, at least for small environments. For bigger environments, I would say that if you work with FCSvr, you will be able to keep your current infrastructure and just replace either the FCSvr server software or probably the whole FCSvr machine to get something else up and running.

As FCSvr is so open, it is totally easy to export media and metadata to any other system.

I had a look at the new FCP X project files and the way FCP X stores files on a central storage. Even without the Apple API I think that there is a way to extract data easily and build them into your own asset management.

Being a consultant, my approach to Apple’s latest announcements is this:

• I recommend people to use Windows servers for directory management.
• Don’t know if Xsan will really be free in Lion. Still Xsan is a great tool, but I might recommend people to use StorNext metadata controllers at least if people need rack-mountable hardware.
• Apple builds wonderful standalone machines, which can be integrated into enterprise environments. In fact, now that Apple focuses on its core business – building great machines which are easy to use – and doesn’t care much about the enterprise network stuff around it, there’s more money in the game for third party developers who build DAM systems. I bet we’ll see great third party solutions soon and overall Apple kit will better fit into enterprise environments than today.

I feel that Apple’s approach on the pro market might leave us all with better tools in the end.
Let’s see.

Maybe you already know fiprecon, my little middleware between Final Cut Server and Archiware PresSTORE, which allows Final Cut Server to archive media on tape.
In this article I’ll explain how to install an extended version of fiprecon, which adds the following features to the basic version:

• recursive archiving and restoring of productions and FCP projects
• stores id, label and barcode of the tape on which an asset has been archived in the asset’s FCSvr metadata
• sends a mail to an administrator, if a tape needed for a restore process is not available. Includes a list of missing tapes, supports authorized mail sending

Please make sure you try this in your lab first, to make sure everything works as expected.

Please download this zip file, copy it to your computer and extract it.

Login to the Terminal using the same user credentials you used to install Final Cut Server.
Now create /usr/local/fiprecon:
mkdir -p /usr/local/fiprecon
Copy the contents of the fiprecon folder into it.

Install the launchd plist files into /Library/LaunchDaemons and set the permissions to
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 429 May 4 2010 de.andre-aulich.aw2fcsvr.plist
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 429 May 4 2010 de.andre-aulich.fcsvr2aw.plist
Launch them:
sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/de.andre-aulich.*
Now run the config tool:
sudo /usr/local/fiprecon/bin/config.command

Add this line to your /etc/sudoers file:
ALL ALL = NOPASSWD: /Library/Application\ Support/Final\ Cut\ Server/Final\ Cut\ Server.bundle/Contents/MacOS/fcsvr_client

Add this line to your /etc/newsyslog.conf file:
/usr/local/fiprecon/logs/activity.log 777 10 100000 * J

Now open your FCSvr admin panel and create these items:
Metadata fields:
Unicode Strings:

Boolean:

Category is always “None”.

Metadata groups:





Please add the fields “Send FCP Project To Archive” and “Restore FCP project from Archive” to the Asset Filter MD group:

Please add the fields “Send Production To Archive” and “Restore Production from Archive” to the Production Filter MD group:

Responses:

Command path is /usr/local/fiprecon/bin/archivefcpproject.command
Command Parameter is [Asset ID]

Command path is /usr/local/fiprecon/bin/archiveproduction.command
Command Parameter is [Production ID]

Command path is /usr/local/fiprecon/bin/restorefcpproject.command
Command Parameter is [Asset ID]

Command path is /usr/local/fiprecon/bin/restoreproduction.command
Command Parameter is [Production ID]

Subscriptions:





Devices:
Add /usr/local/fiprecon/bin/postarchive.command as a post-archive command to your archive device.
Add /usr/local/fiprecon/bin/prerestore.command as pre-restore command.

Now fiprecon should work like this:
1. You can still select one or more assets in the FCSvr client interface and send them to the archive.
2. Instead, you can also select an FCP project asset and archive/restore entire FCP projects:

3. The same works with productions:

4. After PresSTORE wrote a file to tape, fiprecon will write the tape id back to the item’s FCSvr metadata:

If you archive and restore the same asset multiple times, fiprecon pro will only store the tape ID of the latest archive process, as a normal restore process will always access the latest version only.
I added some functionality to send authenticated emails if tapes needed for a restore process are missing. You will get the idea when you run the config tool.

Enjoy!