Check out Tim Kurkoski’s blog post on the new features, which mostly are Bug Fixes and CINEWARE 3.0 for Cinema 4D with most features for the latest version (not the Lite Version included with After Effects).
So I was given some footage with absolutely no knowledge of how it was shot, or what format it was, but was not worried as I have am running Adobe Premiere Pro CC. Unfortunately I was wrong.
They all appear to be quicktime movies, but will not open in anything, or if they do only audio appears. And when I opened them in VLC it says it is a missing XALG encoder.
The only thing I could find on this issue is this unanswered post at Adobe Forums, and it seems to be my exact problem.
It turns out these are MXF files shot from a Sony Camera, and they were brought in through Final Cut Pro X (which I do not have on this machine), and it wrapped it in an MOV with the XALG encoder. The strange part is I do have the latest version of Motion so that I can get the Apple Pro Codec Updates, so you would think it would have the codec to play the video, but even motion won’t open this quicktime movies.
Luckily I was able to get the person with the footage to send the original cards that the footage was shot on, and was able to copy them over and import the MXF files directly into Premiere Pro with no problem, but I can’t seem to get the MOV’s that Final Cut Pro X to open in anything. I figured Motion would do it, and was thinking maybe Compressor, but if Motion can’t do it I am not spending the $50 on compressor, and certainly not paying Apple for Final Cut Pro again because it made some video footage useless.
This is a huge issue. Final Cut Pro X should not do anything to the files it imports, it should just play them all natively. That it wraps them in another file that makes them unusable by other programs makes me dislike this program even more.
Jamie at Make a Web Site has posted an Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects Keyboard shortcut Cheat Sheets. Very cool. Check them out.
The Verge noticed a job listing for an editor at it’s Beats Music division, but it is asking for someone with experience with AVID MEDIA COMPOSER and ADOBE PREMIERE PRO! Ha! It seems even Apple does not use Final Cut Pro X.
Well Apple recently released it’s next OS X upgrade, OS X El Capitan, and for me at least it has nothing but trouble.
I run a MacPro 4,1, which is rapidly again, but still works well for video work (especially with an NVIDIA GTX 670 with 4GB of RAM of it), and so far my upgrade to OS X El Capitan has been a nightmare.
First off Messages no longer works for me. I cannot log into Messages with my Apple account, it says that I can’t activate my account. I have been trying solutions since it came out, including deleting preferences, resetting my keychain, setting up a new account (and it still wouldn’t work there), and re-installing El Capitan, but still it does not activate. So Messages is just completely broken for me. And I am not running a Hackintosh, nor have I changed mortherboards and lost my serial number (it still shows up in about this Mac).
And then there are the problems with Mail. While my accounts have come over, it seems it has removed the passwords from the outgoing mail servers, and since they are so badly hidden within Apple Mail (in advanced and you have to select custom in a drop down menu to get to them), it is a super pain to go in and re-enter all of my passwords so that I can actually send mail! And this seems to have happened with my mom’s computer as well, and I can’t easily fix it, since I can’t log into Messages to do video chat and take over her computer! ANNOYING!
And while the startup seems quicker now, my finder is very slow and so is iTunes! And my first step on any repair has always been to repair permissions, but you with Disk Utility at least, you can’t do that anymore. That feature has been removed as the system is supposed to do that itself when you install a new program, but I would like to be able to do that myself. Now Titanium software’s Onyx still says it does that, I am not sure you should anymore, though I am going to try it.
Now Alsfot’s Diskwarrior works on El Capitan, but it’s repairs have not helped my system at all. And TechTool Pro needs to be updated to work so I can’t try that.
And another annoyance is that iTeleport Connect, which I use to VNC into my computer from my iPad needs you to enter your admin password every time it starts in El Capitan, so if the machine restarts I can no longer VNC into my computer without first being there to enter the password! I am sure this is a security feature, but I have saved my Machine using iTeleport when some driver screwed up and I was still able to VNC in, but with it not able to log in on it’s own I can’t do that anymore! FRUSTRATING!!!
And that is to say nothing of pretty much the whole Adobe Video suite not working at all in El Capitan! And there is no word from Adobe of an update (other than some word that their previous demo of After Effects running on Metal [of of the new big features of El Capitan] and running 8 x faster will likely not be coming to consumers) that will fix this. Hopefully they are working with Apple and an update is coming, but so far there is no word.
So far El Capitan is a huge bust for me, and I wish I hadn’t upgraded at all. Apple should not have released this until the bugs were worked out, and important software like Adobe’s Creative Cloud actually worked!
Oliver Peters at digitalfilms has a nice look into Lumetri Color in Premiere Pro CC 2015.
It is worth checking out, and actually pointed out some things I didn’t realize.
I didn’t realize that the grade in Premiere Pro is separate from a SpeedGrade grade, and none of the grading passes over. This is really too bad. I really like SpeedGrade is an awesome Grading program, and it could be amazing with just a little work from Adobe, but instead they are porting some of it’s functionality into Premiere, but dumbing it down to a much more Lightroom like interface, instead of a Pro Grading Suite as SpeedGrade is.
I would be much happier if the grade was in fact the same and passed from one to other so you could use the high end grading controls if you want or the lightroom like controls in Premiere.
It actually kind of scares me that they might just dump speedgrade (no upgrades this time around), when really all it needs are a few little tweaks like multi monitor support to make it really powerful.
I don’t know if this was issue before 2015, but I really noticed it on an edit today.
When you are copying and pasting attributes of a file, it doesn’t paste size correctly if you have unselected uniform scale. I have clips that are a strange aspect ratio so I have to scale the height and width separately, and the only way to paste the attributes correctly is to first unselect uniform scale, and the paste works as you would think. this is frustrating with many clips, and uniform scale should be one of the attributes that Adobe copies when you copy and paste them, but it is not.
The latest and greatest Adobe Creative Cloud 2015 came out, and you should be warned of some issues.
First off the new version requires OS X Yosemite on a Mac, the latest OS Version. This means if you have a computer that is going to be slow on Yosemite or doesn’t have enough memory you are SOL even with a subscription to Creative Cloud. And this makes 2 other major problems.
The first is that when you install the new version the default setting is to remove 2014 from your system. You can get around this if you know by going to advanced settings and not allowing this, or by re-installing the old versions, but this is an annoyance that was never hear before. Normally it kept all your old versions.
And the second and worse part is that projects saved in Premiere Pro 2015 cannot be opened in 2014, and even worse there is not a way to save down a version like Premiere used to have. In fact you could save down a version in each version then open in that version and save down again. Now you can only save projects to 2015.
The only workaround is to export a Final Cut Pro XML and import that in 2015, but that can be messy. On my first attempt at that, the clip size got messed up (making ever clip 33% wider, which was fine for clips that had not been resized, but for resized clips make for a lot of work). And even worse for projects with lots of text created in Premiere Pro, it all gets wiped out, and leaves a clip with some of the text (but not all) as a marker. This is nuts!
Adobe needs to put back in the ability to save down a version, as not everyone upgrades right away or at all!
I have of course reported this as a bug to Adobe (you can see the form right here) and you should to, because if they get enough complaints they will have to put this feature back in!
Adobe has officially released the latest version of Creative Cloud!
Am installing it now. Looking forward to the new features, though still pissed that SpeedGrade didn’t at least get a dual monitor view where you can move windows (especially the scopes to another monitor).
So I am working multiple projects right now, primarily on a single machine, but had to render out some 30 minute very complicated projects in Adobe Media Encorder, and I have found it is very unstable with the long complicated projects, so we copied the media to an alternate drive and I moved to another machine. Premiere Pro easily relinked my whole project in a few seconds, but with after effects it was not so easy.
I had quite a few After Effects compositions that I had sent from Premiere Pro, and the problem arose from the fact that the media are MXF files from a P2 card. Normally in after effects if you replace a single file with it’s original file, it looks and relinks all the files it can in that same structure, but this does not work with MXF files.
MXF files that were imported using Adobe Dynamic Link from Premiere pro show up without their extension in After Effects, while the actual files have the .mxf extension. If you import the same files normally in After Effects they show up fine with extension, so this is a Dynamic Link issue. And the problem is that when you replace a file with it’s correct original, it does not see the other files as the correct file because they don’t have the correct extension in After Effects.
This means that you have to manually relink the files in After Effects one at a time, which is a major time waster. I am pretty sure that this is an Adobe Dynamic Link issue, so I have reported this to adobe and hope that someday they fix this bug (you can report bugs and features requests to Adobe here).
Of course this wasn’t my only issue, as when I brought the project back to the original system after using File Synchronization to bring the projects back to the original issue, the Premiere Pro project got messed up. The timeline is completely screwed up and doesn’t show correctly.
Now I was able to work around this, by opening the earlier project in Premiere and using the Media Browser to import the new sequence into Premiere Pro. The cool part is that it also imported all the new files that I had imported into the proper places within the project. They were offline, but it was easy enough to relink the files. Still not sure what happened here, but it is furstrating!