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!
William Gallagher and Charles Martin have an interesting article on Apple and it’s changes to it’s video lineup. It goes into iMovie, Final Cut Pro and iDVD, and how Apple upgraded the first 2 with less features, but slowly made better versions.
My biggest complaint with the article would be on who they polled as they say that most of the people who were angry over Apple’s switch from Final Cut Pro 7 to Final Cut Pro X have moved back X (with a cursory mention of Premiere Pro as an alternative).
Personally being a professional editor, I did give the initial Final Cut Pro X a try, and hated it. And got a refund and have not gone back. There are some features that I do really like in X (especially it’s handling of Meta Data), but since I edit complicated graphics heavy shows, it is the timeline that is the deal breaker for me, and it is the fundamental feature of X, so no matter how many updates they do, the timeline is too unorganized and broken for it to make sense for a 15 track highly organized video project.
And of all the editors that I know, I have only heard of one that has gone back to X and really likes it now. And while features are starting to make their move to Premiere Pro, there have only been a few instances I have heard of big houses moving to X. Most of the big houses I know that were basically all Final Cut Pro have moved to AVID at the studios insistence (kick backs?!??!), while most commercial houses have moved to Premiere Pro for it’s fidelity with graphics.
I just don’t see Final Cut Pro X as a viable solution, and with Apple’s history of dropping software, I don’t trust Apple to keep it going anyway!
The telegraph is reporting that Adobe is considering buying The Foundry. It seems The Foundry’s private equity owners have put it up for sale, and Adobe might be interested.
Now this will likely scare some of the high end users of the Foundry‘s software, but seems like a perfect fit for Adobe who would like to get into the high end of film compositing. as well as 3D. And the foundry has the high end node based compositor Nuke, Modo for 3D sculpting, Mari for 3D painting as well as powerful Plug Ins including a 3D Camera Tracker, Keylight for Green Screen keying, Kronos for CUDA accelerated After Effects retiming and Motion blur and Furnace for 2D problem solving in Nuke. Of course they also have Ocula for 3D imagery in Nuke, and Katana for relighting shots, as well as Flix for Visual Story Development, and Colorway for Design colaboration and Heiro for shot management, conform and review, which would likely just be rolled into Adobe Dyanmic Link.
And it would be just awesome to have all or most of this rolled into your Creative Cloud subscription, and hopefully Adobe would keep developing all these applications and not just do Dynamic Link enhancements (which they seem to have done with SpeedGrade, worrying more about putting the tech into Premiere than enhancing the original app when it really needs some upgrades).
Of course Linux users will likely be worried, as most Nuke users run on Linux, and Adobe has only ever released one version of Photoshop for Linux, and then killed it.
Still I would be much happier with this, than say Apple’s purchase of Shake, which while it did drop the price, really just ended with them stealing some tech and killing the program.
And with Black Magic making Fusion so cheap or even free for most users, The Foundry really needs to compete with Nuke, so this would likely do it.
This looks like fun, though obviously a work in progress for animating Photoshop or Illustrator characters. Not sure how much use I will have for this, but will likely learn it anyway!