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.

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.

This new release of Synaesthesia removes EDL and Final Cut Pro XML support, and adds “Publish to Facebook” functions…

…Um no. I was thinking of something else there.

This is just a very minor update to fix some bugs and tidy up some loose ends. It also extends the trial period through the end of September.

Read about the changes here.

Download the new version.

Speaking of everyone’s favourite editing system, Apple have officially announced that there will be APIs made available soon. Hopefully this will allow a future version of Synaesthesia tie directly in to Final Cut Pro, and thus restore some of the missing functionality.

Beta 10 of Synaesthesia has been released.

As usual, there’s a bunch of stuff added and fixed. This release focuses particularly on making editing a little bit easier, with some “real-world” tools added.

What do I mean by “real-world”? Well, they were put in specifically to address a problem during some post-production I was involved with. A problem I’ve had to deal with many times in fact, and that I’ve never been able to address with any software at all.

The problem is this: let’s say you have an EDL from somewhere. For whatever reason, you need to swap the source and record timecodes (or copy one to the other). How can you do it? The low-tech solution (editing the EDL with Notepad) works, but due to the way EDLs are formatted, you have to edit them line by line. Yes, it works, but it is painful. I defy anyone to look at an EDL with more than 100 events and not wince at the prospect.

Enter Synaesthesia. Or more specifically, enter the new Transpose Time feature. Choose Modify > Transpose Time… from the Sequence Breakdown, and you’ll get this shiny new dialog:

Transpose Time Dialog

This dialog allows you to set any timecode of an event to any other timecode. You can swap timecodes, set them all to be the same, set them to zero, and so on. You can choose whether to affect the entire sequence, or just selected events. Import an EDL, transpose it, and then export it. Very handy (and fast). And while we’re at it, you can now also add handles to sequences from within Synaesthesia.

As if that wasn’t enough, there are also a couple of other new features and some more bugs fixed. See the release notes for more information.

Download Synaesthesia Beta 10

Just a minor update this time, Beta 9 improves performance and reliability of Google Maps integration.

View the release notes

Download