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! 

Annoyance in Catalina save dialogue box

OK so I have found a new annoyance with Catalina and it is in the save dialogue box.

Often when I am rendering something in After Effects I overwrite an old render with a new one. But when I make the file, it adds a _1 to the filename, so I open the save dialogue and hit the right arrow to go the rightmost character and delete the two characters. Before Catalina that is how it worked, but now it goes to the end of the .mov so if you delete, you delete the .mov instead of the last 2 characters.

This is a new behavior, and completely changes how I have worked for years. It is a huge annoyance!

After Effects 2020 does not work with an ARRI footage that automatically adds the AMIRA lut in Premiere, THIS IS A HUGE BUG!

So when Adobe first released After Effects 2020, I tried opening a 2019 project that I have been working on and saw some scary results. None of the footage was working properly. This was January 5th, 2019.

I posted about it on the Adobe Forums, but the response from an Adobe employee was it is a bad graphics card or the footage is corrupted. The computer is new and the footage and project work perfectly in After Effects 2019, as well as Premiere 2019 and 2020, which made me doubt the response, as did it when someone else was having the issue.

I then recently went on a job, and all of their footage was shot on Alexa, and when I tried to move the footage to After Effects on Adobe Dynamic Link the footage had exactly the same response as as the footage on my home machine.

And it was all ALEXA footage that when imported into Premiere Pro automatically has the unremovable AMIRA LUT added to it.

So to prove that it was not in fact my footage, but in fact Alexa footage today I decided to to download some ALEXA footage from ARRI, and try that out.

Here is the Alexa LF ProRES footage download page, and I downloaded the first video. I took this ProRES clip and opened it in Premiere Pro 2020 and it imported and automatically added the AMIRA LUT just as I thought it would. I then imported that footage directly into After Effects 2020, and low and behold I am getting the exact same effect.

So this is most certainly a bug in After Effects 2020 to do with ARRI Alexa footage and probably something to do with why the damn AMIRA lut is automatically added in Premiere. Whatever metadata that makes the AMIRA LUT is what seems to be causing this. The footage works fine in every other Creative Cloud version.

THIS IS A HUGE BUG AND NEEDS TO BE FIXED!

More Problems with Apple Music on Catalina

I swear the problems with Apple Music, Apple’s iTunes replacement for Catalina never cease and they don’t get better.

I am stilling dealing with the items in folders showing up out of order in folder iOS sync, but here is another issue that is driving me nuts.

I know that basically they just want you to use Apple Music and not own your own music anymore, but I still own a lot of music, and when I create a new playlist in Music and drag the music I want in it to the playlist the tracks show up for a little while and then disappear. Now the music has been added to the library and I can go find it and then re-add it to the playlist, but why the hell if I add it to a playlist does it then leave the playlist. Honestly Apple What The FUCK!!!!

Apple needs to fix Catalina’s iOS Finder Sync

I was scared when I heard apple was breaking up iTunes and everything has been proved right. The sync is terrible.

To get any syncing working I have to let it sync once, and then click out of the iPhone in the finder make changes and sync if the sync button isn’t greyed out.

iTunes folders are showed in some completely random order in the finder.

In iTunes
In Catalina Finder Sync the same folder

What the hell is this? And the old iTunes applescripts to remove playlists from Folders no longer work.

And there seems to be no way to get custom Ringtones into your phone anymore, only payed ones. WTF!

And if you start a sync their is no way to stop it if say you need to restart your computer. In iTunes you could at least Force quit iTunes, but you can’t force quit iOS finder sync, even restarting the finder just keeps it going. I have turned off all automatic syncing and WIFI sync so that I don’t have to deal with this issue.

OMG iOS sync on Catalina is f***ing garbage!!!

OK so I been having problems with the iTunes replacement Music in Catalina since upgrading, but the worst part seems to be the finder iOS sync! Not only are anything in folders shown in the finder in completely random order, but the sync itself barely every works! if you select any music to sync the sync button gets grayed out! Sometimes if you let it do an initial full sync but make the changes in itunes after a sync you can hit the sync button and it will work, but it is far from assured that this will work.

It usually takes me multiple restarts, and connect and disconnects to get the damn sync to do anything, and I am running a fairly new iMac Pro! WTF!

Apple doesn’t give a shit about you syncing your own music anymore, they just want you to use their cloud music and Apple Music, so they have relegated syncing to the dumpster fire of Catalina Finder sync! WTF!

Adobe Updates Creative Cloud Video and Audio Apps

At Adobe Max Adobe updated it’s video and Audio Apps, as well as 2 new mobile apps (though Photoshop Camera is only in a beta).

Premiere Pro includes the sensei AI powered auto reframe feature. Improved Layers, Faster ProRes HDR, Time Remapping to 20,000%, Audio Gain to +15db, and HDR 10 metadata export controls.

After Effects is a core engine update (woohoo), with Real-time playback of cached previews, EXR productivity and performance, Faster Shape Layers, Enhanced Expressions including speed improvements, Faster Content-Aware Fill, better controls for Motion Graphics, and updated C4D Lite.

Audition has improved multichannel audio effects workflows.

Character Animator and Premiere Rush also have updates.

Adobe has released the app Aero for building AR without coding.

And they announced the AI powered app Photoshop Camera that is currently in beta.