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.

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.