Why do Adobe Application Icons not include the year of the application so they are easier to tell apart at a glance?

 

So these are the application icons for Premiere Pro and After Effects 2019 and 2020 in my dock. Why do they have the exact same icon? Yes if I hover my cursor over each one it will tell me the whole application name, but why don’t you just put the version number in the icon?

And yes I need to have both versions. I am a professional commercial video editor, and very often I have to match a companies version so that the project files will open in the version that they are using. And then there was the whole Arri files not working in 2020 After Effects, but that is another story.

Now I used to customize the icons on my own, but that is a pain in the ass, and they get replaced every update, so if I am paying over $600 a year for a subscription to Creative Cloud can’t they update the icons for each yearly version? And I don’t mean just change the Icon, like they did for Photoshop with 2020.

That is 2019 on the left and 2020 on the right. And sure it helps, but I still have to think, oh yea the rounded icon is the new one.

So I made a couple of examples of what I used to do and what they could do. Here is a Premiere pro with the 2020 included.

Now this totally works for me, but I have fairly large monitors set a 2560 by 1440, so the 2020 so can get small on small monitors, so how about just the last 2 numbers?

This is easier to read on any screen. I used the same PR that came from the original icon and just added a large 20, not it is Arial black and not whatever font Adobe is using, but at least it quickly tells you the version!

And yes I have posted this at Adobe User Voice, and I didn’t see any other posts about it, so if you care about this like I do, please vote.

Will Adobe add X-Rite ColorChecker support into Premiere Pro CC?

So for years DaVinci Resolve has had support for X-Rite’s ColorChecker products. These are color cards that you can use to shoot video (they also have Photo versions) and you can use them to balance different cameras to the same color correction. I personally use a ColorChecker Passport Video. Sure I have had some difficulty on shoots where the script supervisor did not give me enough notes on shot Color Temp, but this is still usable.

For years I have hoped Adobe would implement this in Lumetri in Premiere, as it would be quick and fast for certain projects that don’t need the full color correction of DaVinci. And it seems they are listening as they have commented on User Voice.

Of course they do comment that it won’t happen as soon as they are working on stability and performance, though that never seems the case with Premiere. The whole Adobe suite gets more and more unstable and gets features that aren’t needed, when features many professionals could use right now are bypassed.

More ways that Apple Music is messed up for those who moved from iTunes and some ways to fix things with some work

I have been chronicling all the problems I have had since moving my iMac Pro to Catalina with Music, formerly iTunes. Since Apple broke iTunes into multiple apps I have had nothing but problems with the app.

One of the big ones for me is that in the move to Music, Apple decided to ignore all the years of column organization you did with your playlists. They defaulted every playlist to the Playlist view, which only shows your album artwork, song titles, album title and time of the track.

There is a much superior Songs view, but even it starts with only limited columns, but as with iTunes if you customized the main songs list to have the columns and widths that you want, then they would propagate to all new playlists you create. Now the problem arrises, because all your playlists from iTunes were reset to the default Songs layout, so you either need to change each and every playlist (over 3100 for me) or it is time for a trip to Doug’s Scripts.

Doug’s Scripts has been around for a while now previously having the best applescripts for iTunes, and now slowly updating scripts to work with Music if they work. My only complaint with the site is that you should be able to search for scripts that just work with Music, and maybe it could use a voting system to vote on old scripts and see if they can be made to work on Music, as their are few that I really miss. Still it is just an awesome site.

And Doug has updated an old script to fix this very problem, Assimilate View Options V 5.1. This script brings up a window with all of your playlists and you can select them and hit process and it will go through and duplicate the playlist and add all the tracks in the same order with the current View Options baked in. It’s only issue, is that pesky view being automatically set to the Playlist view instead of the Songs view you want. So you will still need to switch every playlist to Songs, view, but Doug has a tip to set a keyboard shortcut to the Songs view so you can at least speed up the process.

I still can’t fathom why apple doesn’t let you specify a default view in Music. And it is worse that Apple chose to ignore your organization from iTunes when importing into Music, but I am assuming that was easier for them, but hell if they would have just let you update the view options first so that all the playlists imported with your default would have been amazing. That is assuming Apple still cares about people using local music libraries and I am pretty sure they don’t. So for now this is at least a solution.

Why is there no Motion Blur for moving objects in Adobe Premiere Pro?

This is an oldy but a huge annoyance for me. Why is there way to activate Motion Blur on moving objects in Premiere Pro? This was a feature in Apple Final Cut Pro 7, sure it had a slow render, but the machines are faster now. And so many places I work at just do their graphics within Premiere Pro because it is faster and easier (and so many people can’t or won’t use After Effects) and when moving graphics it just looks awful without Motion Blur.
Don’t premiere and After Effects share at least some of the engine? Premiere Pro needs damn Motion Blur and has for a long time!

Red Giant Updates VFX Suite to 1.5 a paid upgrade

Red Giant has released a paid upgrade to it’s VFX Suite to version 1.5. It is a $199 upgrade unless you are subscriber to Red Giant Complete (feels like a 1.5 should have been a free upgrade).
It includes a new Lens Distortion tool to easily figure out lens distortion to help composite and even track.
And they have updated Supercomp with an automatic color matching, color space options, optical glow and layer glow tools, though I am mostly pissed that they have not figured out how to include motion blur which has been my main objection to supercomp.
Optical Glow has been updated with the ability to control radiate which gives directionality, control per channel size and size xy. This certainly makes for an impressive update over the built in glow.
And Shadow and Reflection has added the ability to show shadows only as well as distort based on the image.
I am glad for the update, though as I said I would like them to put motion blur into supercomp to really make it usefull.

Adobe introduced Creative Cloud Public Beta

So Adobe is releasing Public Beta from within creative cloud.

If you look in your creative cloud application you will see the Beta Apps on the left, which I have highlighted with red. Currently it is for the Video Suite, though they will add all apps eventually. The apps use the same plug ins as the current version.

And when you open the app you get 2 new buttons.

The will be blue every time their are new features and you can read about them.

And the second lets you report bugs and go the forum for the beta.

Already there have been almost daily updates.

And they fixed the issue I was having with After Effects 2020 and Alexa footage, though I wish you could remove the damn forced AMIRA LUT entirely from the workflow.

Adobe After Effects (Beta) Version 17.1.0 (Build 55) once again works with Alexa Footage

So Adobe today released Beta’s of apps in the Creative Cloud app that anyone can download, and so I decided to test the Alexa test footage and my own footage, and all of it works fine. So this was certainly a bug and it is fixed in the Beta.

I would love to be able to check the release notes to see what they fixed, but I haven’t figured out if there are release notes for these public betas.

EDIT:

OK was still having some weirdness when I opened up a project that is working fine in 2020. I was still getting the weirdness when trying to play back the sequences, but if I reload the footage it then works fine, and this did not work in 2020. WTF!

Oh well it actually works now, so no complaints.

Adobe After Effects 2020 17.0.6 still does not work with ALEXA footage!

So Adobe released a new version of After Effects today 17.0.6 and I tested it again this shot from Alexa’s test footage page. Obviously it still does not work. Now it wasn’t listed as being fixed, but their is a lot of ALEXA footage out there, how can no one else have run into this issue? Come on Adobe get on the ball.

I have posted about it the adobe community forums, and in the bug report/feature request segment to little avail.

Adobe needs to stop with new features in their video suite and speed up what already exists. Things like Roto-Brush is way too slow!

I have been an editor for almost 20 years now, and though it has it’s issues I do still love the Adobe suite, but it has so many issues, and Adobe needs to stop updating with new features and work on their old features, making them faster and streamlining, and work on stability.

I have already recently the fact that After Effects 2020 does not work with Footage that has the damn AMIRA Lut attached to it. Adobe needs to fix this shit right now, and they need to remove the automatic AMIRA lut. You shouldn’t be forced to have it clogging up your project. Adding any lut should be voluntary and should be able to be removed! WTF!

The thing is this is not the only problem with adobe today. Stability is a huge issue that many people have.  Of course their are ways to make the program more stable. Personally I ignore the fact that Adobe can basically play back any footage and treat it like AVID, compressing everything to a finishing format. Being on a Mac I use ProRES. And I don’t import any footage that isn’t some flavor of ProRES, even temp stock footage I recompress. Also don’t let any JPEG images into the project, converting everything to at least a PNG. And that does help with stability.

Then there are things that are just plain slow. I have a 3Gz 10-Core iMac Pro with a Radeon Pro Vega 64x and 64GB of RAM, so it is a fairly fast machine. I have a short for a short that needs to be slowed down, but the normal tools look bad, and even twixtor is having issues because of all the motion blur. So to let Twixtor work better I need to pull the subject out of the background and decided to try out the Roto-Brush tool to pull the subject out of the background, but it is interminably slow. I am having to go frame by frame and fix the roto, each brush stroke, if it even works can take 5-15 minutes to get results. And this is with 3.5 K ProRES HQ footage. And a good portion of the time, the stroke stops working a beachball appears and the stroke ends up randomly going across half the image, and it can take a good 10-20 minutes to get to where I can undo it and go back to the previous undo state! I know this is a complicated tool, but if anything it feels slower than when it was released!

Here is a screenshot, the little green at the top was what I was trying to make, but then the beachball started and everntually the line appears, and a good 10 minutes later I can under this reandom line that it has added to what I drew. And this happens more than 1 in 10 strokes!