After nearly 5 years of development (including 2 years of beta testing), I’m pleased to announce that Synaesthesia 1.0 is now available to buy.

It’s been a long time coming, and it still amazes me that there’s not anything else on the market quite like it. With productions increasingly moving towards digital acquisition (and with companies becoming focussed more on environmental impact), it seems that the time is right to end the use of paper-based annotation and logging. Synaesthesia helps you to do that, and more besides.

Starting out as a way for me to work a bit more efficiently on complex productions such as Earth, it soon became apparent that the same tools would be just as useful on a low-budget, independent production, so we gave it a test-drive on an in-house project.

Three years ago we decided the time was right to make it available to others, so work began on adapting the system to make it user-friendly. Then 2 years ago to the day, we announced the availability of the software as part of a beta programme. Initially we thought it was reasonably close to what the final product would be like, but then 2 years went by.

In that time, we’ve listened to feedback, and implemented a bunch of new stuff. We added integration with third-party products like Final Cut Pro (7), Shotgun, Assimilate Scratch, and Final Draft. We added the ability to export everything to CSV files, and created a format that can be used to share data between Synaesthesia systems. We added other features like file checksumming and automatic updates based on feedback, and improved the performance and usability as we went along.

All this, and it still runs on PowerPC macs (running OS 10.5). I wonder how many other applications released this year will be able to make that claim.

If you haven’t yet had a look at Synaesthesia, now is the time to do so. There is a free 30-day trial available on the product website, and you can check out our overview video below.

Synaesthesia demonstration from Surreal Road on Vimeo.

Do you have a story about how you’ve been using Synaesthesia? Send an email to stories@surrealroad.com before January 1st 2012. We’ve got 3 Synaesthesia 1.0 licenses and a $50 Amazon voucher to the most inspiring story!

(We’ll decide the winners in January 2012 and notify them by email. By emailing us, you grant us the right to use publish your story, so please don’t break any NDAs!)

*(16/1/12 in the UK)

Automatic Duck, who make plugins for interchanging data between different platforms, such as Avid and Final Cut Pro, last month announced a new partnership with Adobe.

Today they’ve announced they will be unable to support their current range of products, and as such, they are giving them all away for free.

Wow.

You can download the plugins from their website.

Lots of fixes and tweaks in this version. I’ll let the release notes speak for themselves on the majority of fixes and additions, but I want to focus on one little button:

You’ll now see this button in the Reel Breakdown and throughout the Asset Manager. The purpose of this button is one of the reasons I created Synaesthesia in the first place, and it’s a considerable milestone for it to be included.

Here’s the scenario: during the lifetime of a production, reels (and other assets) that are created will be sent out to post facilities, loaned out to people, and so on. How do you keep track of all of this? Until now, you could do this by simply changing the reel’s (or asset’s) location. The problem is, that doesn’t tell you where the item belongs.

With the check-out system, you still have the original location stored, but there’s a record of who it was checked out to, and when. Nothing earth-shattering, but useful when you later try to track down that reel that’s gone missing. And it’s as easy as going to the reel breakdown and clicking a button (or via the Asset Manager).

Also, Apple today released Final Cut Pro 10.0.1 which has a brand-new XML format. So expect support for that in the next version of Synaesthesia (maybe…).

Current Synaesthesia users will be notified of the new version when running the application during the next few days, otherwise it can be downloaded as usual.

Synaesthesia has been in beta now for almost 2 years, and I believe, is almost production-ready.