The Palette Gear Controller

I can’t believe I never heard of the Palette when it was in it’s Kickstarter campaign, but this is a fully customizable controller with analogue controls. It has 4 levels of kit from $199-$899mfor a wooden controller,mand you can also get additional buttons, controllers and sliders which are all controllee by the core untit, amd they have programable lcd lights, so you can remember which button is set for what.

This sounds very cool, and I would love to try one out, though the lack of SpeedGrade control makes it certainly not as impressive, though it does work with basically the rest of the suite.

Jonny Elwyn has an awesome review, which goes heavily into the details.

Adobe has licensed Apple ProRES playback for Wndows

Adobe today announced that they have licensed playback of Apple’s ProRES, so it will be natively supported within Adobe Creative Cloud, without having to use Apple’s Quicktime to do so (since it has been killed for Windows). Now it won’t be able to write out to ProRES (so Window users will need another format), but it will be able to be read, and should be out soon.

They are also adding export support of mov wrapped DNxHD and DNxHR as well as playback of AAC audio and PNG compressed frames, and the native reading and writing of the legacy Animation format.

At least this gives ProRES a lifeline, though it is really too bad that it won’t be able to write it as well, as ProRES is a great format, that looks to be in decline from now on.

I love that Adobe is doing this, but I still can’t wrap my head around Apple’s thoughts on this. Sure it saves them money in development, and in licensing fees, but to have a really pro format it needs to be cross platform!

Honestly with Apple’s history with Pro Products (constantly making them great then killing them), and with the MacPro not being customize-able or upgrade-able at all (and not having been upgraded since it release in 2013), it looks to me like Apple is moving completely out of the high end pro market, and I worry that any of their high end software may not survive either!

Yet again it looks like no SpeedGrade Upgrade in the next version of Creative Cloud

RedShark has a post on the Roadmap for the next version of Creative Cloud for Video to be shown at NAB this year. And the rumors look like once again, no more upgrades for SpeedGrade.

At a press briefing a few weeks ago where we first learned of these upgrades, but of course were not allowed to speak until the official announcement, a journalist questioned Adobe about Speedgrade future development and received a response to the effect of “we’re concentrating on Premiere Pro in this iteration.”

Actually what Adobe is doing with SpeedGrade seems to mirror what Apple did with Shake. Buy it, make it cheaper without changing it much, and integrate some part of it’s tech into it’s other apps, then stop updating it, until they just eventually kill it.

And the unfortunate thing is that SpeedGrade is a really great program, and the fact that a full grade comes back into Premiere Pro as a plug in is so much greater than having to render out each shot in DaVinci. And really the only thing it needs to get better is to let you move windows to a seperate monitor so you can have scopes be as big as you want.

And while it is great to have more SpeedGrade tech in Premiere (and even better to have it carry into After Effects), the simplified Lumetri color panel is so much less powetful than a full grade from SpeedGrade that it is almost useless. And really should have a more advanced version that allows for more powerful grades instead of lightroom like simplified controlls!

Major problems with El Capitan

http://www.apple.com/osx/

Well Apple recently released it’s next OS X upgrade, OS X El Capitan, and for me at least it has nothing but trouble.

I run a MacPro 4,1, which is rapidly again, but still works well for video work (especially with an NVIDIA GTX 670 with 4GB of RAM of it), and so far my upgrade to OS X El Capitan has been a nightmare.

First off Messages no longer works for me. I cannot log into Messages with my Apple account, it says that I can’t activate my account. I have been trying solutions since it came out, including deleting preferences, resetting my keychain, setting up a new account (and it still wouldn’t work there), and re-installing El Capitan, but still it does not activate. So Messages is just completely broken for me. And I am not running a Hackintosh, nor have I changed mortherboards and lost my serial number (it still shows up in about this Mac).

And then there are the problems with Mail. While my accounts have come over, it seems it has removed the passwords from the outgoing mail servers, and since they are so badly hidden within Apple Mail (in advanced and you have to select custom in a drop down menu to get to them), it is a super pain to go in and re-enter all of my passwords so that I can actually send mail! And this seems to have happened with my mom’s computer as well, and I can’t easily fix it, since I can’t log into Messages to do video chat and take over her computer! ANNOYING!

And while the startup seems quicker now, my finder is very slow and so is iTunes! And my first step on any repair has always been to repair permissions, but you with Disk Utility at least, you can’t do that anymore. That feature has been removed as the system is supposed to do that itself when you install a new program, but I would like to be able to do that myself. Now Titanium software’s Onyx still says it does that, I am not sure you should anymore, though I am going to try it.

Now Alsfot’s Diskwarrior works on El Capitan, but it’s repairs have not helped my system at all. And TechTool Pro needs to be updated to work so I can’t try that.

And another annoyance is that iTeleport Connect, which I use to VNC into my computer from my iPad needs you to enter your admin password every time it starts in El Capitan, so if the machine restarts I can no longer VNC into my computer without first being there to enter the password! I am sure this is a security feature, but I have saved my Machine using iTeleport when some driver screwed up and I was still able to VNC in, but with it not able to log in on it’s own I can’t do that anymore! FRUSTRATING!!!

And that is to say nothing of pretty much the whole Adobe Video suite not working at all in El Capitan! And there is no word from Adobe of an update (other than some word that their previous demo of After Effects running on Metal [of of the new big features of El Capitan] and running 8 x faster will likely not be coming to consumers) that will fix this. Hopefully they are working with Apple and an update is coming, but so far there is no word.

So far El Capitan is a huge bust for me, and I wish I hadn’t upgraded at all. Apple should not have released this until the bugs were worked out, and important software like Adobe’s Creative Cloud actually worked!

Problems Batch Relinking MXF files in After Effects that were sent from Premiere Pro using Adobe Dynamic Link

So I am working multiple projects right now, primarily on a single machine, but had to render out some 30 minute very complicated projects in Adobe Media Encorder, and I have found it is very unstable with the long complicated projects, so we copied the media to an alternate drive and I moved to another machine. Premiere Pro easily relinked my whole project in a few seconds, but with after effects it was not so easy.

I had quite a few After Effects compositions that I had sent from Premiere Pro, and the problem arose from the fact that the media are MXF files from a P2 card. Normally in after effects if you replace a single file with it’s original file, it looks and relinks all the files it can in that same structure, but this does not work with MXF files.

MXF files that were imported using Adobe Dynamic Link from Premiere pro show up without their extension in After Effects, while the actual files have the .mxf extension. If you import the same files normally in After Effects they show up fine with extension, so this is a Dynamic Link issue. And the problem is that when you replace a file with it’s correct original, it does not see the other files as the correct file because they don’t have the correct extension in After Effects.

These are the MXF files after relinking.

This means that you have to manually relink the files in After Effects one at a time, which is a major time waster. I am pretty sure that this is an Adobe Dynamic Link issue, so I have reported this to adobe and hope that someday they fix this bug (you can report bugs and features requests to Adobe here).

Of course this wasn’t my only issue, as when I brought the project back to the original system after using File Synchronization to bring the projects back to the original issue, the Premiere Pro project got messed up. The timeline is completely screwed up and doesn’t show correctly.

Here is the messed up version, and zooming, scrolling or anything doesn’t help.
Here is what the sequence should look like.

Now I was able to work around this, by opening the earlier project in Premiere and using the Media Browser to import the new sequence into Premiere Pro. The cool part is that it also imported all the new files that I had imported into the proper places within the project. They were offline, but it was easy enough to relink the files. Still not sure what happened here, but it is furstrating!