Final Cut Express / Pro - Hidden Menu - Easter Egg.

This is an Oldie but goodie, I was thinking of kicking this blog off with a mission statement or something more juicy, however this post fits the bill.

Apple's developers wired in a hidden "Internal Tools" menu into both Fincal Cut Pro and Final Cut Express products. This feature is confirmed to work as of version 6.0.6 of Final Cut Pro and version 4.01 of Final Cut Express.

To get access to the hidden menu inside of FCP/FCP hold down the Apple + Alt + Shift otherwise known Command + Option + Shift and then click the "Tools" menu in either program. The easter-egg "Internal Tools" menu will reveal itself. You have to this three key salute each time for the menu to show up.

Here it is in Final Cut Pro:

Here it is in FInal Cut Express:

Once you create a window from this menu, it is persistent and requires no special option keys.

Rather than jumping into deep details about each feature of this super not-so-secret menu, I'll leave the reader to discover what each function does and lightly glaze over some. Some of the options create windows, some enable extra logging to syslog/console facilities from the application, the two most handy ones without a sequence open are:

* App/Pef Dump which is handy in figuring out what features were reported to Final Cut by the Operating System.

Here is a snippet from my test system:

# Final Cut Pro Perf Dump (Final Cut Pro 6.0.6)

Elapsed Time since launch: 30.212664 (0 hr, 0 min, 30 sec)

GENERAL SYSTEM INFORMATION:
---------------------------

MacOS version: 10.5.8
QuickTime version: 7.6.6
Processor information:
 CPU Speed: 3000 (CLS 64)
 MP library says 2 processors installed.
 FCP using 2 CPU's
 CPU Bus Speed: 1332
 sysctl hw.ncpu: 2 **
 sysctl hw.activecpu: 2
 sysctl hw.physicalcpu: 2 **
 sysctl hw.logicalcpu: 2
 L1 cache size: 32K
 L2 cache size: 4096K
 PPC features (per Gestalt) are 0x00000000 = 
 FCP NOT USING altivec.
 FCP NOT USING dcba
 FCP dst assumption: 0

 PPC features (per sysctlbyname) are:
  Altivec: not present
  64-bit (G5) instructions: not present
  DataStreams (dst): not present
  DCBA: not present

                  VM: on
Ges Phys Memory Size: 2047.999999 MB (note: 32-bit limit!)
 Ges Log Memory Size: 2047.996094 MB (note: 32-bit limit!)

Process information:
  Processes:
    loginwindow                     wngl bgOnly
    AirPort Base Station Agent      ADPA bgOnly
    Spotlight                       tops bgOnly
    Dock                            kcod bgOnly
    SystemUIServer                  iuys bgOnly
    Finder                          SCAM       
    Safari                          irfs       
    mdworker                        ???? bgOnly
    Preview                         wvrp       
    DashboardClient                 ???? bgOnly
    Final Cut Pro                   GyeK *fore*

Mounted Volumes:
  "Macintosh HD", 325999 files in 77306 directories, attr: 0x00004060+0x10ac243e
  (HasBTree, HasFileIDs, 2TB, LongNames, )
  (Device id: disk0s2)

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* Playback Meter Which will give you a nice read-out of the I/O you're doing while scrubbing in the Viewer or Canvas etc.. I'll leave you with that and enjoy.

We'll be exploring more of Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express hacks.