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SPOTLIGHT - Onyx for OS X

I teach advanced Final Cut Studio at the Toronto Film College, and I have students that pass through my classes, and are excited about purchasing their first Mac, and I always get asked “Do I need to know anything before I get it?”, and I always respond with two answers.  First, make sure you get Apple Care, and second, make sure you download Onyx.  Normally when I tell people the latter, they have a confused look on their faces, but I cannot tell you how many times Onyx has gotten me out of an editorial jam.

INSTALLATION

Let me start out by saying that Onyx is absolutely, 100% free, and is available for the Mac OS all the way back to Jaguar (remember that OS???), and it can be downloaded at the included link.  There are also other applications that are free that you can download from the same site like Maintenance, which is a system maintenance and cleaning utility , and Deeper, a personalization utility letting you get in and enable/disable the hidden functions of the Finder, Dock, Dashboard, etc.  Now, one thing that I do need to point out is that Onyx warns you to back up your system before you start any processes, so if you feel you need to, by all means do it.  I have been using Onyx for five years now, and have not had a problem with it erasing and/or destroying my hard drive, so take that for what it’s worth.

HOW IT WORKS AND HOW IT WILL SAVE YOU

As I said earlier, Onyx has gotten me out of editorial jams, and here is a perfect example of a jam it got me out of just today.  I have been having issues installing Adobe’s CS5, After Effects specifically, and it got to the point today where the application wouldn’t even launch.  I would click on the icon in the dock, and nothing.  It “bounced” like the icons do when you click on them, and nothing.  Well, needless to say, most people would at this point would start scouring the internet to find a possible solution.  Me?  I just headed over to my friend Onyx, and I ran all the maintenance scripts, and guess what?  After Effects CS5 goodness!  Onyx has bailed me out of similar situations with Final Cut Pro (6&7) as well.  Here’s how simple it is to use.

PROS

- Fixes problems that “regular” maintenance doesn’t

- It’s free

- Available all for Mac OS all the way back to Jaguar

- It’s free

CONS

- You didn’t know about this awesome application earlier.

- It doesn’t make you coffee

What else can I say.  Onyx is awesome, it’s free and it does the job you need it to do, when you most need it.  It’s almost like a fix to Murphy’s Law, and we all know how badly we need something like that in post production.  As always, you can send me an .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or follow me on Twitter @ http://www.twitter.com/kpmcauliffe .

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Just be aware that its also possible to hose your system with this powerful free tool ...  you’d have to be pretty darned unlucky I think (as I was) in fact I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone who has suffered any catastrophic failure as a result of using this tool (other than myself) but nonetheless it can and did happen to me. Luckily I had a recent clone to recover from.

Posted by Andy  on  04/22  at  03:22 AM

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