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.

Adobe After Effects is improving it’s 3D experience!

Coming Soon to After Effects Beta – New ways to work with 3D

Discover these new 3D tools to help you navigate in 3D space better and faster, including improved camera features and 3D Transform Gizmos. pic.twitter.com/CXpef2DNo7

— Adobe Video & Motion (@AdobeVideo) September 15, 2020

Awesome After Effects is updating it’s 3D tools, and looks like it is a borrowing from C4D which can only be good. The 3D tools have always been way too basic, and this could be a huge improvement.

Adobe updates Premiere Pro to 14.4 (September 2020 release)

 


Adobe has updated Premiere Pro to version 14.4, the September 2020 release. 

The new features are:

  • Scene Edit Detection using Adobe Sensei AI
  • HDR Rec.2100 Clor space for broadcasters, with Apple ProRes and Sony XAVC-I formats fully color managed and GPU accelerated
  • Export with Proxies for a quick export that doesn’t require full resolution
  • Scans Audio plugins multiple times faster.
  • Export AAF with Breakout to Mono p[r audio channelization.

Red Giant has updated to Universe to 3.3 with 2 new tools 4 updates

 

Red Giant has updated it’s Universe Plugs ins to version 3.3 with 2 new tools and 4 updates plugs ins.

The new Tools are:


  • Quantum: a tool that creates the illusion of an animated light trail in front of or behind a layer. Great for text and motion graphics
  • Modes: a tool that makes it easy to combine layers in entirely new ways using powerful features that go beyond the native blend modes found on your editing timeline.

 And the Updates are:

  • Glow: Now offers Inverse-square glow falloff, multi-pass chromatic aberration and the ability to glow a single color channel.
  • Glimmer: This update gives you 6 mono or bi-directional glow streaks with variable intensity and color mapping, an animatable shimmer, variable rotation control, and Color maps aligned with Trapcode’s Starglow.
  • Chromatic Aberration: This tool now includes control over the focus area, the ability to split the aberration into multiple passes, and chromatic rotation.
  • Hacker Text: The addition of customizable random characters and the ability to auto-animate the encryption and decryption.

 

 Always excited for new Universe tools as I have a lifetime on them, and they are always very fast with GPU support.

Have to play with Modes, though Modes themselves exist in Premiere, so it will be much more amazing in AVID which doesn’t have layer modes for compositing.

Does anyone else lament the loss of Red Giant’s Keying suite from the VFX suite?

 

Now it isn’t like I don’t love the Red Giant VFX suite, but I have been a Red Giant user for many years, and I miss all the tools of the Keying Suite. 
Now I am not complaining about Primatte Keyer 6 which is included in the Red Giant VFX Suite. It is very powerful and easy to use, though since Primatte 5 doesn’t really seem to work with 2020 or Beta it had better be good, but I do miss all off the ancillary plugs ins of the Keying suite, and I do know that many of the effects have been incorporated in SUPERCOMP, but I want all the controls of the individual plug-ins again.
I will admit that I am using keyers in a different method than most, as Primatte works great for a standard green screen (which I am using as well), and I find it vastly superior to the build in Keylight. The thing is I am doing puppeteering and using a green glove to puppet a teddy bear, so instead of just the green, I want to expand the green beyond the glove, instead of objects inside the green screen. And yes I can do that with rotoscoping, but that kind of negates using a green glove as I have to animate every frame.
And I have to admit I had an easier job doing that when I had the tools all in separate plug ins. I miss the key correct plugs in. I miss seperate versions of Alpha Cleaner, Light Wrap (which I know is in SUPERCOMP), Matte Feather, Smooth Screen, Spill Killer (I know this is in Primmate 6) and Wire/Rig Remover, which is more what I am trying to do. And yes I still have the old plugins, but they really don’t work in After Effects 2020.
Now I know I am using the plug ins out of their comfort zone, but using the separate plug ins I was much better able to do what I wanted to, and with Primatte 6 only having some of the plug ins integrated I am not as happy with what I can do.
And that is beyond the whole SUPERCOMP not working with Motion Blur thing which really needs to be fixed.

Roto Brush 2 in the After Effects Beta is a vast improvement

So I have been using Roto Brush for years in After Effects. It was a tool that worked with a lot of user input, but it was so incredibly slow. And honestly with footage getting larger I think it had actually gotten slower, but Adobe has finally been working on an upgrade that is available in the current Beta.

Roto Brush 2 stills needs user input and it doesn’t do well with a lot of motion blur, but it is so much faster! It used to take sometimes minutes to calculate a single frame, and now in minutes it can calculate a whole clip.

I am not sure how much better of a roto that it does than the old version, but the speed in which it works means you can make changes and even work frame by frame, and work quickly enough to do a basic roto very quickly.

I am so glad for the public betas and them letting us use unreleased features.

Now I know why Adobe denied my request for years on apps, they have made all apps in the same category the same color, so they are harder to tell apart!

So I opened Adobe’s updates today and low and behold, they have updated a great swatch of apps, but even worse they have updated the icons so that applications in the same category are the same color. Sure it means you can tell this years apps from earlier versions, but now it is easier to confuse different apps for each other as all the video apps are now the same damn color, WTF! And this will get even worse when they release next years versions with the same damn app icon (why can’t they put some versioning in the icon?).

These are the swath of Adobe Apps I keep in my Dock, and without dragging over them with a cursor it is a pain in the ass to tell them apart (and yes I need the different versions as some companies I work with run older versions because of stability issues).

Hell even the beta icons are changing already, though at least they will let me keep breaking up the apps

I guess at least this year for individual apps it will be easier, but what about when the previous 2 versions have the same damn icon, and they are all the same color?

For a company that makes applications for designers they sure have a shitty sense of design!

Adobe denied my feature request to put the year on the application icons without allowing anyone to vote on it

So adobe very quickly denied my feature request to add the year to the product icon, saying since they have removed the year form the product name. Though they have not. They removed the CC for Creative Cloud for the name.

And as they have always done the updates for the year stay at 2020, until the next version will be 2021.

And they should have differentiated icons, WTF!