Hi Folks,
This is a little complicated and involves OS X Server but I think its worth posting here. It is posted on the Server list as well.
One of my educational clients is using OS X Server 10.5 and 10.5 clients. The students accounts are External accounts. If you're not familiar: its a kind of mobile account and when a student logs in, the client machine asks where the home directory should be created. We're having the students keep their data on external drives since large video files are involved.
This works well except for one detail. In FinalCut, there is a Send To menu item that will allow the project to be sent directly to the Color application for color correction. We're having persistent problems with this feature but only with External accounts.
A local account, admin or standard, can send the FinalCut project to Color. Color launches and works as expected. Both Local and External accounts can send the project to Shake in the same menu with no trouble.
When an External account tries to roundtrip the project to Color, the application does not launch. There is no error logged. After a minute or two, the user's UserEventAgent process hangs. It respawns normally after a kill command.
Digging a little deeper: I took a snapshot of the files created during the send process with PackageMaker. The Local account that successfully sends the project to Color generates a .promptCache file and a Color Documents folder in the ~/Document folder. A file was also created inside /private/var/folders but I'm not sure if that is related. Some user preference files are touched as well. Notably a FinalCutPro.plist, com.apple.LaunchServices.plist and a Color folder or package containing a Preferences.prf file.
The External account does something different. Instead it creates a com.apple.LaunchServices-12313123.csstore file inside /Library/Caches. This is not seen in the Local account snapshot. These files accumulate with different numbers as the user tries the process again. The com.apple.FinalCutPro.plist is touched but none of the other files are created. My guess is that FinalCutPro is sending something that chokes Launch Services but i don't know why an external account would make things different.
As a workaround, the user can export XML from FinalCutPro and import into Color. That works fine but it would be nice if the students were able to send from the menu easily.
So this is probably just a program bug that we can't do anything about but maybe someone else has encountered it and found more information. Thanks!
Dean Ingram
ACTC, ACSA
Sirius Onsite Support
303-755-0800