Catalina Finder IOS Sync doesn’t tell you what stage of syncing

So I did make the move to Catalina after SoftRaid upgraded to 4.8 with Catalina support, and overall I am OK with the split Music, Podcasts and TV apps that replace iTunes. In fact the TV app is superior because it now will play back 4K movies on my iMac Pro.

My biggest complaint so far is with the Finder Sync for iOS. It seems mostly the same, save for a few things I don’t like. First off your apply and Sync Buttons are greyed out while the phone is syncing. So if I connect the iPhone or iPad it starts syncing, then I can make any changes I want, but can’t apply them until the current sync is finished. In iTunes I could apply as soon as I made the changes I want to.

And the problem with having to wait is not knowing when it will end. At least iTunes had text based feedback of what was going, and would tell me that it was in the backup portion which always took forever. Now all you get is a little spinning ball next to the device in the finder which gives no indication of how long the sync is going to take!

And then after that it does give a little indicator to give you some idea of how long it will take, but not text information of what is syncing at that point. You can see the white filling up means how much time it is going to take.

So what did the first spinning thing mean? I am going to have to assume that is the backup. If so it went much faster at least the first time.

And I always sync playlists, and every time you open the program it reverts to Albums. How hard would it be to remember where you were? Really?

64 Bit Mac OS Catalina will disable a lot of apps, the steps I am taking, but still can’t upgrade right now: UPDATE

Apple has released Mac Os 10.15 Catalina, and it is the first to make the jump completely to 64 bit, abandoning the ability to run any 32 bit code. It is always recommended to wait a while to upgrade you system, or even better wait for 10.15.1 to work out some of the bugs. I am very interested in it though as I want to try out SideCar with my iPad Pro and Pencil.

Since there is no more 32 bit code many programs will not run, and you can tell which ones that will be in Mojave. Just to to your apple menu and About This Mac.

Then Select System Report:

Then go to Applications:

Then check the column that reads 64 bit and the applications that say no will certainly not work.

I have a lot of applications that will not work, but most are from old versions of Adobe that I still have installed.

Now I am certain to need some 32 bit application at some point in the future, and if you make the move to Catalina before taking some steps to ensure you can still run the applications you will never be able to.

My first step was to make a clone of my hard drive at Mojave for that I head over to Bombich and get the latest paid version of Carbon Copy Cloner. This is an amazing program I have used for years that will clone a hard drive and make a bootable copy. Now I have an iMac pro, so there are additional steps to be able to boot from an external drive thanks to the T2 security chip (you need to restart while holding down command and r and then change the startup security utility to allow external boot with at least Medium security instead of Full Security).

And to keep running 32 bit apps, since I own Parallels to be able to run Windows Applications on my Mac. Tidbits actually has a great article on how to do this using your Mojave Recovery Partition to create a clean install. Sure you will have to re-install the 32 bit apps to get them to run, but a nice clean install won’t take up the space that a full backup of my system would.

And finally it turns out I can’t upgrade to Catalina right now, as I run an external RAID using Softraid for my OWC Thunderbay. Now it will mount in Catalina, but will run slower and have no ability to recover hard drive that die or basically do anything with it in version 5.7.5. Now Softraid and OWC are an amazing company so they are working on it, but since Catalina is much more restrictive on running system extensions this one is going to be hard. It will first be available in 5.8, then in the new version 6 they are developing. I do hope it comes out soon.

••••

UPDATE!

Wow, so I got an e-mail from SoftRaid and OWC and they said that they should be releasing 5.8 within 24 hours with Catalina support! AWESOME!!!

Supercomp in Red Giant VFX suite seems to not work with Motion Blur

So I was playing with Red Giant Supercomp, which is pretty powerful, but it seems to be missing the ability to deal with Motion Blur.

I was hoping to use supercomp for a comp I was doing, but the comp had motion blur in it. And the motion blur doesn’t show up in supercomp. It must interact with all the other comp features.

I was actually hoping to use the features to deliver in RAW, as the background plate was RAW and the item I was comping in was not, so I wanted to deliver it all in RAW without straight eyeballing it.

So just know that Motion Blur doesn’t currently work with Supercomp.

Red Giant releases new awesome VFX Suite, but in doing so have killed the Keying Suite and the Effects Suite

So Red Giant has released the new VFX Suite for Keying, Tracking, Cleanup and Visual Effects Compositing. They have a full blog post with many YouTube videos on features and how to use the new tools.

The only bummer is that they have killed their Keying and Effects suits to do so. I say bummer, not because the new tools don’t look awesome, but because you have to owned the previous to get a special offer upgrade (it isn’t just available on the site) and you get no discount for owning both previous suits.

Supercomp looks impressive though, basically it makes compositing much easier, and allows all layers to effect your comp, so you don’t have to do a bunch of pre-composing to make your comps looks the best they can, and it is all GPU accelerated.

And Primatte has reached version 6. Many people just go with Keylight, but I have always found that Primatte is faster and easier to reach a good key, so I am excited about this.

Key Pin tracker seems to supercharge corner pin tracking (though the demo does show some features they need to add, like copying the from and to points automatically by a single button).

Spot Clone Tracker looks super easy and powerful.

Optical Glow also looks amazing, and should negate the need to every use the built in After Effects glow which never was very good.

I already have some ideas for the new Chromatic Displacement plug in.

Will have to see how the new Knoll Light Factory 3.1 is. I used to use it all the time, but have completely given up on it, because of Video Copilot’s Optical Flares plug in, which I think surpassed it years ago.

And Shadow and Refection looks cool when needed.

Sidecard for MacOS Catalina has to have Wacom scared as all hell!

This has been rumored, but to see it in action, wow. So with Mac OS Catalina, you can use a feature called sidecar, and have your iPad extend your Mac Screen and use the Apple Pencil. Goodbye Wacom tablet, you can now use the Apple Pencil and iPad to draw right on images!

Wow, I really can’t wait for this! This is a game changer for Photoshop!

Adobe Creative Cloud Video Production Suite updates for NAB 2019

So Adobe has updated it’s video suite in time for NAB 2019 with some exciting new features, and hopefully some stability improvements.

Obviously the most exciting new features is the content-aware fill for video in After Effects.

I am pretty excited to try this one out, as the results from the demos look impressive, but I think it will work best with moving footage so the pixels exist somewhere.

And the new expression engine in After Effects looks amazing.

I can’t wait to try that out.

For Premiere we get the Freeform view as a kind of visual storyboard.

This is pretty neat, though not a mind blower for me.

And the new rules and guides will make placing things much easier.

Pretty neat. And Faster Mask tracking will always be helpful.

Overall some cool new features, though I am hoping for more stability overall.

Adobe has released Premiere Rush for the iPad

The formerly only available through an invited beta, Adobe Rush has been released for the iPad and iPhone. It is an online editing system that converts everything to H.264 and can do simple edits, and they can even be exported to Premiere Pro though he desktop version requires 10.13 on the mac.

It seems to be a simple and quick editing program to upload web videos, and has to be better than the previous adobe clip, which was pretty basic.

I have downloaded to my ipad, but have not played with it yet.

Adobe has release After Effects 16 also known as After Effects CC October 15th 2019

You can check out all the features at Adobe.

I am most excited about the new JavaScript Engine for expressions and especially the ability to save your favorite expressions in a library!

And I am excited that the new Mocha included is a plug in instead of a stand alone application. I have not upgraded to the latest Mocha as it is a bit expensive, so am glad that this has been updated.

I am just hoping that this fixes some of the problems I have been having lately with UHD projects and not being able to open without either trashing my prefs (which also trashed my Workspaces) or importing the project into a fresh project which works until I have to re-open it. This has been incredibly frustrating!