Adobe Premiere Pro is adding an Adobe Sensei Speech to Text Auto Transcription feature, and I wish I was beta testing it right now

 

Javier Mercedes has this video on a new feature that Adobe is beta testing right now, automatic Speech to Text using Adobe Sensei.

Unfortunately it isn’t just in the Premiere Pro beta, you have to request access, because I could use it right now. 

This feature would be mind-blowingly amazing for cutting testimonials, which as a commercial/direct response editor I could use almost every day.

The video shows just how impressive this feature is.

It makes me wonder if they will expand on the feature to allow editing via text, or if the jumping to the place in the sequence via the text will be the extent of it.

I also would like to see the options for exporting the text, as I would love some way to automatically export these as documents that could be automatically uploading to producers.

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And here is the Adobe page for the new feature. You can also sign up for the feature there.

Excalibur from Knights of the Editing Table is an amazing keyboard shortcut plug-in for Premiere Pro, it significantly speeds up my editing, it us a must have!

 Knights of the Editing Table has made the amazing new plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro that adds quick smart keyboard short cuts for Premiere Pro. It reminds me of ObDev’s awesome keyboard launcher Launchbar, which I swear by and love, except thus us within Premiere Pro. You hit a quick keybiard shortcut, and the type what you want, say di for dissolve, then if you hit return it adds a transition or you can hit > and type how many frames you want it. 

Here is an overview.

At $75 it is a steal. I have written about it before, but after using it I have been very impressed, though even after the 1.0.1 update I have had some issues putting transitions on clips, but everything else has been incredibly fast, and Premiere really needs a paste on same track shortcut without turning off the track targeting.

Every editor should give this a try!

Apple app updates only compatible with Big Sur, but showing up in Catalina, and continuing to give notifications of updates is incredibly annoying

So I am running Catalina 10.15.7.

 

But Apple keeps sending me Updates Available, but the only available update is for Garage Band, which the update only works in Big Sur. I know they want me to move to Big Sur, but I literally can’t.

And the reasons I can’t just update to Big Sur are many. First off Catalina is running very well right now, but also I am on a job that uses Adobe Premiere Pro 2019 13.1.5, and I haven’t seen anything that shows that it runs in Big Sur. And while I would rather move to a newer version, that is what they are running at the company.

Excalibur for Premiere Pro adds quick keyboard shortcuts for Premiere Pro and is $25 off till the end of the year

 

Knights of the Editing Table has released a new extension plug in for Premiere Pro on Mac and Windows that adds quick keyboard shortcuts to Premiere Pro to speed up your editing workflow, it is called Excalibur. Check out the video above or their page on how this can speed up your workflow.

This looks very cool. I already use Launchbar from Obdev to do similar things for the Mac, and Andrew Kramer from Video Copilot has one for After Effects called FX Console.

I wouldn’t have known about this if it wasn’t for the article about it at ProVideo Coalition by Scott Simmons who beta tested it.

I purchased this and will be testing it out, as I love speeding up my workflow. My biggest frustration has been getting used to things like this and then having to go work in an office and not having it, but with the Covid Pandemic forcing my editing to be from home, I can safely use it for the time being.

Why do the font engine in After Effects no include the ability to underline text?

 

So this the font style selection box in After Effects, which lets you select faux bold, faux italix, Upercase, UpperLower Uppercase and subscript settings.

Premiere Pro is exactly the same as After Effects.

This is the Type Options in Photoshop, which includes Underline and Strikthrough, as well as more options.

Why is there no Underline option in After Effects and Premiere Pro? Sure you can add a line if you want to, but it won’t follow the text.

Really this is the dumbest thing. WHY WOULD YOU NOT IMPLEMENT AN UNDERLINE ADOBE?

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OK so the latest version of Premiere Pro’s Essential Graphics now includes the underline function, but not After Effects. This makes it even weirder and more glaring.

What is up with sort order in Adobe Premiere Pro? Can someone explain to me it’s behavior?

 

OK, this is an issue that has been bugging me for a while, and I would really love to hear an explanation for the behavior of Premiere Pro.

The graphic above shows the sort order of my bins, I am sorting by Media Start so I can merge my audio and video using the merge clips function.

This is an image of my bin with the 2 clips selected that I am going to merge in a bin sorted by Media Start.

This is the same bin, now showing the merged clip as soon as I have merged the clips. The bin is still sorted by Media Start, and the Media start of the new clip is 11:39:19:19, so why does it move to the top of the bin (well almost the top, under the folder in the bin) as soon as it is created. Why isn’t in the sort order? And if you close the bin and re-open it, or create a new file, that file then moves into the sort order of the bin, but when created it jumps to the top of the bin. WHAT IS GOING ON?

Here is another case.

Here I have the files sorted by Name, and I have a version B of a file that I want to update to be the version 12, so I change the name and date of the file to be after that of V11.

The file is renamed, and the folder is still sorted by name, but the file is not sorting by name. What the hell is going on?

When adding new music to Apple Music, formerly iTunes who wants it to autoplay? I sure as hell don’t!

 When using Apple’s Music, formerly iTunes to import music, why does it automatically play what you are importing? There used to be a choice in iTunes to keep it from doing this, but Apple purposely removed this feature. So now every time you import something it automatically plays that, even if you are already playing something else.

Now I don’t know about you, but importing and wanting to play are seperate things, and I would always rather chose to hit play than to have auto-play.

Why does this feature even exist? And it gets ridiculous when importing downloads of multi-disc albums, when it plays some random track off all 4 discs, starting one, then another, then another, then another.

I know apple doesn’t want me to own any of my own music anymore unless I buy it from them or stream it from them, but I don’t buy any music from them, and I wish they would have a more hands off approach.

Mac OS Catalina Finder Save Dialogue box selection inconsistencies

 A huge annoyance that I have run into in Catalina, is a major inconsistency of the Finder’s Save Dialogue box. In previous OS’s when I saved a file, the name of the file was always selected when the window popped up. This window shows what I mean.

The problem is that in Catalina the selection of the name seems to be random. Sometimes when I output a file I get it selected where I can use keyboard shortcuts to alter the name if necessary, as always used to happen previous to Catalina. The problem is that sometimes, and I can’t say why or when the selection dialogue shows up unselected, so I can’t use keyboard shortcuts to change the name, but have to use the mouse (or trackball as it is for me) to select the name and change it.

I can’t understand why sometimes the text is selected and sometimes it isn’t. This seems totally random, and I can’t figure out why it happens.

I have posted about it at the Apple community forums, though I don’t expect to hear a response.

OWC ThunderBay 4 Firmware update did not fix the issue of the drives ejecting

 

So after taking the time to do the upgrade on the firmware on my OWC Thunderbay as I saw in this post on their forums, and shutting down my computer over the night, I restarted and one of the drives disappeared.

Sure SoftRaid managed to fix it in under 10 minutes, but having this happen every restart or wake from sleep is not OK!
So I don’t want to have to do it, but I am going to try turning off Put Hard Drives to Sleep when Possible in my Energy saver to see if I can get around this issue (the post on OWC said that is the issue).

We shall see if that helps. And I have allot of spinning discs that I actually would like to have spin down when possible, but just not have my whole raid go down by dropping drives.
Super frustrating.

My OWC ThunderBay 4 Thunderbolt 3 has been having drive ejects, Firmware Update Available

 

So I want to preface this with the fact of just how much I love OWC. I have been buying their gear for many many years, and it has always been very reliable, and they have amazing customer service. I have had them replace ram, and quickly get back to me on issues for years and years.

Lately though I have been a few issues, and this post is about one of them.
So I have a fairly new Thunderbay 4 Thunderbolt 3 and am running a full version of OWC’s amazing Softraid to run it in RAID 5. It is way too small with 4 2TB drives, for a 6TB raid. I am on an iMac Pro running Catalina 10.15.6 and all the sudden have been getting drive drops often on waking up from sleep, or when restarting, forcing a quick rebuild or making me restart to get the drives back. And constantly having the drives be out of sync, though Softraid fixed this in a minute or two each time.
Now it hasn’t happen while I was working and I haven’t lost anything, but it has been annoying.
Now while looking at their forums for another issue I will post about in another post, I ran into this post about Disk Ejecting a firmware update. I quickly downloaded and went through the steps to install. It basically says it has to do with allowing drives to sleep in the energy saver control panel, but this firmware should permanently fix the issue.
As with most things of the sort it is made a bit of a longer process, because of having to disable SIP or System Integrity Protection, and is a multi-step process since you have to then install a kext file, restart and then eject your drives, and install the firmware update.
Now this is where I would add a note to the process, because while the instructions said it would take about 30 seconds, once I selected the firmware and hit the FWUpdate button. It did not take 30 seconds, in fact my computer sat beachballing for well over 30 minutes, before it successfully did the update. This is fine if it fixes the issue, but 30 SECONDS IT DID NOT TAKE!!!
The process then has you uninstall the KEXT, turn SIP back on restart and then turn back on all of your networking which you have turned off earlier.
When I restarted the final time Softraid again said the drives were out of sync, but lets hope that has fixed the issue.