If you’ve been using Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Studio for any length of time then you’re probably aware of FCS Maintenance Pack. It’s an incredibly useful set of tools from Digital Rebellion that aims to help diagnose, troubleshoot and fix problems with Final Cut Studio and its related applications. I liked this little set of tools so much I did a Q&A with the creator a while back. Now they are looking to move the tools to Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro for the Macintosh and they’re looking for beta testers.
If you are a Mac user of Media Composer or Premiere Pro and might be interested in beta testing a new product that will be called Pro Maintenance Tools then get in contact with the programming wizards of Digital Rebellion and get on their beta team. You could score a free copy of the software once it is released. A tool like this has to take quite a lot of resources to develop and even more energy to shake out the bugs and it’s not something a single developer can do. The wide variety of workflows possible today make it impossible for a developer to put out a bug free tool so that’s why they rely on beta testers. It has to be an even more tedious task when a tool like Pro Maintenance Tools is planned to support multiple applications.
There’s a page over on the Digital Rebellion site called Announcing the Future of FCS Maintenance Pack that outlines just that … the future of the tool including discussion of where it might go once Final Cut Pro X is released. Click over and give it a read and if you still want to participate in the beta check the contact link at the bottom of that article.
As for the beta testers they are looking for:
We will be entering beta for Pro Maintenance Tools in just over a week and are looking for testers who can submit crash and error logs to help us build up our Crash Analyzer database for these new applications.
We’re looking for people who use the Mac versions of Avid Media Composer or Adobe Premiere Pro on a daily basis and are prepared to give detailed feedback. Testers will receive a free copy of the suite when it is released. (Due to non-participation problems in the past, we only give out free copies to people who actually send us bug reports and feedback.)