Adobe pulling an Apple with it’s awesome SpeedGrade and gutting it, and not updating it

As you can see from my last post, Adobe has just announced it's next set of features for the Video Tools in Creative Cloud at IBC 2016. Unfortunately once again one program has been left out, Adobe SpeedGrade. Yes they are adding more color correction tools from SpeedGrade into Premiere Pro, but it has now been many years since SpeedGrade has had an update.This is really a shame as it is a great color correction tool that needs some love, especially since it's ability to do a grade, and have it roundtrip back to Premiere Pro as a plug in, makes it so much more powerful for projects that have many versions than doing a grade in the more powerful DaVinci Resolve, in which you have to render out your grade. With Master Clips Grades in SpeedGrade those grade would be there for whole clips in future versions while you edit.I just think it is a shame that they seem to be gutting SpeedGrade and not giving it the love it deserves. It really needs multi-monitor support so you can pull your scopes to a different monitor, and it needs some updates, especially moving some of the tools they have created for Premiere and moving them back into SpeedGrade. The lack of updates make it looks like it will go the way of the dodo, much like Apple did with the amazing Shake and Color apps that they purchased and then killed.The death of SpeedGrade is a real shame!

Adobe Creative Cloud Video and Audio Tools New Feature Reveals at IBC 2016

I just wish they would fix some of the bugs of 2015.3 quickly, as I have heard nothing but issues from people.Check out an overview of the new features by Victoria Nece at the Adobe Creative Cloud Blog.As for new features, the big one is Team Projects. A hosted service allowing collaboration between Premiere Pro, After Effects and Prelude. This could be huge if it works well. I like how media mapping can be different for each user. Finally something to fight AVID in large multi-user environments!Premiere Pro and Media Encoder are next. Bronwyn Lewis has written about it at the Adobe Creative Cloud blog. In addition to team projects, it now has enhanced Captions and Subtitle support.Enhancements to the Lumetri Color Tool Sets, which rocks, though unfortunately likely also spells the death of the separate and more powerful Speed Grade Application which once again is not getting an update here.There is even more expanded VR support.And destination publishing (something I will likely not be using).And something I likely will be using enhanced Live Text Templates from After Effects! As well as visual Keyboard Shortcut mapping tool like AVID has always had.It also will work better with Apple Metal, and have faster Dynamic Linking, And Media Encoder will stitch together multiple clips to ease file management.After Effects has new features gone over by Victoria Nece at the Adobe Creative Cloud. It has the afore mentioned Team Projects, a new 3D rendering allowing bent planes and extruded 3D text and shapes within After Effects using Cinema 4D's standard renderer!It has faster performance with GPU's and more GPU accelerated effects. The aforementioned Improved Live Text Templates, with TypeKit Font Sync.And more Powerful Dynamic Linking.And when creating projects from Templates settings like color management and folder structure can be passed on!Dave Werner shares new features of Adobe Character Animator CC Beta.Durin Gleaves talks about Audition CC's new features. It has a cleaned User Interface, that more matches the rest of the creative suite and will work on high resolution monitors.

Moving from Rapidweaver to a PC Web Site Creation Tool, any help would be appreciated! MacPro 4,1 EOL, so time to move to PC.

So if you have been reading my posts you know that my MacPro is nearing the end of it's life. The next version of OS X, macOS Sierra, officially does not support my MacPro 4,1. Now it does support the MacPro 5,1, and I can do a firmware flash and make my Mac think it is a 5,1, since the only different was a firmware upgrade and newer processors. So I will be able to Install Sierra, but the writing is on the wall and Sierra will likely be the last OS to support a 5,1 MacPro.And it is not like I have a stock 4,1, it has an SSD, an NVIDIA GTX 670 with 4GB of RAM, and a ton of Hard drives, but the big issue is that Adobe Creative Cloud big updates tend to only work with the latest Mac Upgrade so my MacPro has maybe a year or at best 2 before it can no longer get OS upgrades, and will literally be a paperweight. Sure I can still run it for some things, but it won't be getting security upgrades, and software will stop working on it.Now for most software I can easily move it to a PC, or if not easily it can at least be done. I can resave all my Pages files to word docs, and things like that, but for Web Site Creation it is not so Easy.I run Rapidweaver 6 for web site creation. I used to make my own web sites in HTM, and have run many many programs from Net Objects Fusion when it was Mac, to Dreamweaver, but I don't want to code anymore, as basically when the web moved heavily to CSS I moved to WYSIWYG completely and gave up on coding for the most part.So now I run RapidWeaver 6 (I know 7 is out, but do I really want to upgrade, when in the next few years I will be likely be moving to windows? Not really!) and do my 2 web sites, as well as my mom's web site for her business.Of course RapidWeaver is unfortunately Mac only. So the question becomes what to rebuild my web sites in that would work on a PC. The obvious choices are not so obvious.I already run Adobe Creative Cloud, so Dreamweaver makes sense if I wanted to code HTML, but I don't.So I recently took a look at Adobe Muse, it's WYSIWYG web creation tool, that was created not by the Dreamweaver team, but by the Indesign team. And MUSE looks fantastic and powerful, except for one major thing, BLOGS!And it is blogs that hurt the whole equation! I have one local Wordpress Blog, my Movie review blog, and 4 google blogger blogs. Now I know that not having a blog local means that it won't show up in search for the site, though I get around this in RapidWeaver by user the Loghound SiteMap plug in, which scans all of your blog entries and…

The New NVIDIA TITAN X is the King of the Hill!

Yes there is a new king of the hill in the consumer video card arena, and that is the new NVIDIA TITAN X. I had expected this to take a while to come out after them releasing the new 10 series, 1080, 1070 and 1060, but it was quickly announced and is coming out August 2nd! Wow! And the specs are amazing!GPU Engine Specs                                               TITAN X                 GTX 1080NVIDIA CUDA® Cores                                          3584                         2560Base Clock (MHz)                                                   1417                         1607Boost Clock (MHz)                                                  1531                        1733Memory Specs:GbpsMemory Speed                                                10                              10GDDR5XStandard Memory Config                        12 GB                       8 GBMemory Interface Width                                         384-bit                      256 bitMemory Bandwidth (GB/sec)                                 480                           320Thermal and PowerMaximum GPU Temperature (in C)                       94                             94Graphics Card Power (W)                                       250 W                     180 WSupplementary Power Connectors                          8 pin and 6 pin       8 pinThat is an extra 1024 CUDA Cores for Adobe Creative Suite to play with, and an extra 4GB of faster RAM for not that much more power draw!If you have been reading my posts, I have come to the realization that my next computer won't be a Mac, and have been looking at custom build PC's like Origin PC or Puget Systems. For a bit I was thinking that maybe 2 SLI GTX 1080's would be the answer for my CUDA needs, but that would basically eat all of my PCI slots. And I likely need some sort of Black Magic Design card to kick out video at least to an HD Monitor for editing, if not an Intensity Pro 4k. And while I can get a USB 3,1 external Raid for hard drives (as I likely won't get a ThunderBolt 3 Motherboard, unless I decide to build for myself), so I could live without a raid controller I would like need a Firefire PCI board to deal with my all my old hard drives until I can afford new enclosures.So it looks like the new NVIDIA TITAN X would be my $1200 card of choice.

Trying to figure out what programs I will use if I move from Mac to PC

I have been talking about it for ages, and have used Apple Computers since I was 7 and got an Apple IIC. I love my Mac, but it getting old, and the next macOS Sierra has end of lifed my 4,1 MacPro. Luckily I can hack it to become a 5,1 with a simple firmware hack, so I can install Sierra, but it is likely the last Mac OS my computer will run. And big Adobe updates usually require the latest Mac OS. And the new "MacPro", the trashcan is a joke that has not been upgraded since it's release in 2013. It isn't upgradeable, nor can it have more than one harddrive internally, so it isn't pro. And it's use of a Xeon processor is not a boon. Xeon's are usually a few generations behind on technology, the big difference is that Xeon's don't have an integrated graphics processor (which doesn't affect you if you us a high end graphics card) and they 2 processors! But the trashcan can only use one! And yes it can have 12 cores (for an insane price), but i7's have now reached 8 or 10 cores and are newer tech, so why not use those if you are only using one processor. I really don't get it!And yes I could build a Hackintosh, but I have been using a Quo at work,mand while it is great, upgrades are never too fun, and you must disable security features to even install El Capitan.So it is looking like my next computer is a PC, cause I can put an NVIDIA Geforce 1080, but I need to figure out moving away from many of my current programs.I know I can move iTunes to PC, though I hear it doesn't work as well on the PC, but my library and ratings will make it over.I can export and move my mailboxes, browsers and the like pretty easily. There is nothing to easily move my Photos library to Windows, but I can import my Library into Adobe Lightroom and it will take my Keywords, then move to PC so it will work there. Pages and the whole iWorks suite is a pain as I need to open each file and save it out to word (hopefully I can automate it).Making my web sites is more of a pain. I have used many programs over time, starting with Net Objects Fusion before it went Windows only, and I have even used Dreamweaver, though my HTML skills have gone to hell, and I don't want to code anymore. So currently I use Rapidweaver, which makes it easy and I have 2 different web sites for me and my mom's web site, which can link to much web site content. Now I am starting to look at Adobe Muse as an alternative, but I am not sure it will easily plug into all the content I currently use, from YouTube, Vimeo, 500px, or Flickr, so sites you can easily upload things…

The Palette Gear Controller

I can't believe I never heard of the Palette when it was in it's Kickstarter campaign, but this is a fully customizable controller with analogue controls. It has 4 levels of kit from $199-$899mfor a wooden controller,mand you can also get additional buttons, controllers and sliders which are all controllee by the core untit, amd they have programable lcd lights, so you can remember which button is set for what.This sounds very cool, and I would love to try one out, though the lack of SpeedGrade control makes it certainly not as impressive, though it does work with basically the rest of the suite.Jonny Elwyn has an awesome review, which goes heavily into the details.

Adobe Creative Cloud blog on the Essential Sound Panel in Audition CC

Durin Gleaves at the Adobe Creative Cloud blog has an awesome article on the new Essential Sound Panel in Adobe Audition for mixing DIalogue, Music, Sound Effects, Ambient or Environmental Audio in easy, but powerful ways. It can even retime or recompose a music clip to match a certain time!Well worth a read, I am looking forward to trying this out, though wish it was integrated into Premiere so I don't have to do a separate mix, but could instead have it happen with the timeline (which I already put on different tracks for different mix types).

Adobe has licensed Apple ProRES playback for Wndows

Adobe today announced that they have licensed playback of Apple's ProRES, so it will be natively supported within Adobe Creative Cloud, without having to use Apple's Quicktime to do so (since it has been killed for Windows). Now it won't be able to write out to ProRES (so Window users will need another format), but it will be able to be read, and should be out soon.They are also adding export support of mov wrapped DNxHD and DNxHR as well as playback of AAC audio and PNG compressed frames, and the native reading and writing of the legacy Animation format.At least this gives ProRES a lifeline, though it is really too bad that it won't be able to write it as well, as ProRES is a great format, that looks to be in decline from now on.I love that Adobe is doing this, but I still can't wrap my head around Apple's thoughts on this. Sure it saves them money in development, and in licensing fees, but to have a really pro format it needs to be cross platform!Honestly with Apple's history with Pro Products (constantly making them great then killing them), and with the MacPro not being customize-able or upgrade-able at all (and not having been upgraded since it release in 2013), it looks to me like Apple is moving completely out of the high end pro market, and I worry that any of their high end software may not survive either!

Yet again it looks like no SpeedGrade Upgrade in the next version of Creative Cloud

RedShark has a post on the Roadmap for the next version of Creative Cloud for Video to be shown at NAB this year. And the rumors look like once again, no more upgrades for SpeedGrade.At a press briefing a few weeks ago where we first learned of these upgrades, but of course were not allowed to speak until the official announcement, a journalist questioned Adobe about Speedgrade future development and received a response to the effect of "we're concentrating on Premiere Pro in this iteration."Actually what Adobe is doing with SpeedGrade seems to mirror what Apple did with Shake. Buy it, make it cheaper without changing it much, and integrate some part of it's tech into it's other apps, then stop updating it, until they just eventually kill it.And the unfortunate thing is that SpeedGrade is a really great program, and the fact that a full grade comes back into Premiere Pro as a plug in is so much greater than having to render out each shot in DaVinci. And really the only thing it needs to get better is to let you move windows to a seperate monitor so you can have scopes be as big as you want.And while it is great to have more SpeedGrade tech in Premiere (and even better to have it carry into After Effects), the simplified Lumetri color panel is so much less powetful than a full grade from SpeedGrade that it is almost useless. And really should have a more advanced version that allows for more powerful grades instead of lightroom like simplified controlls!