Having a ton of issues installing Adobe Creative Cloud 2014 on my home computer, SugarSync again looks to be involved

Am having a ton of issues with installation of the latest and greatest update of Adobe Creative Cloud 2014 on my home computer. No problem at work. And I love how the new versions install as new Apps (though this of course creates plug in issues, and having to re-install plug ins to make them work), but it leaves the old version untouched, so you can keep working with old version on current projects.Well first off I am still having issues with CS6 updates. I have 8 CS6 updates that just will not install. They error out every time, and I have even tried downloading the individual installers and running them, but they just won't update, and I am not sure why.As for CC 2014, well first I have been getting a ShellExtLoader error message, and to quit the program to continue, but quitting the app using Activity Monitor kept the error coming. I think this is the fault of SugarSync, which I had forgotten to turn off. So after quitting SugarSync, I tried the installs again, but have kept getting failures on many apps, though not all of them. Really wish those two companies would get together and fix this issue, though I have been considering dropping SugarSync anyway, since it does not have the iOS interactivity of DropBox, and with iCloud looking to be improved with iOS8 and Yosemite, I might be able to replace a lot of it's functionality that way.My final solution has been to quit Creative Cloud, then use XtraFinder to launch it as Root, and run the installs. This has mostly worked (had to do it a few times to get the installs working) and I think I am all installed except for the aforementioned CS6 apps.And unfortunately Red Giant has not yet updated it's plugs ins for CC 2014 yet, so...

StudioDaily on Adobe Ink and Slide for iPad

StudioDaily has a great look at the now release $199 Ink and Slide by Adobe for iOS. The new Stylus's look very powerful, though a bit on the pricy side, and they work with new Adobe Apps, Adobe Sketch for sketching, Adobe Line for drafting and the new Photoshop Mix. And these apps are free so you can use them without Adobe's new physical tools.

StudioDaily has a first look at the new Adobe Creative Cloud Video Suite Features

StudioDaily has a great first look at the new features being released with the latest Creative Cloud release.Effects Masking and Tracking within Premiere Pro sounds like an awesome addition, as are Master Clip effects, which will make color correction a breeze.As for SpeedGrade the direct link to Premiere Pro feature where you actually open your timeline in SpeedGrade would seem to answer about half of my issues with SpeedGrade. Now they just need to get some curves going in there.The ability to apply filters per mask in a layer will greatly speed up effects, and simplify timelines. And the Live templates features is very very cool. Where you can set text lines in After Effects to be editable by an editor within Premiere to quickly make lower thirds and the like based on a graphical template.All in all it sounds great, and I hope the download is available soon!

After learning DaVinci Resolve, I decided to delve into Adobe SpeedGrade, so far I will be sticking with Resolve

After learning DaVinci Resolve, and being incredibly impressed with it, I decided to learn Adobe SpeedGrade for it's integration with Adobe Premiere Pro (my current choice of edit software), but so far I have been less than impressed.First off with Resolve and a good NVIDIA Cuda card, the program works great with BlackMagic or AJA video cards, is rocket fast and you get a recreation of the timeline from your edit program, and can remove shots as needed, or do basic editing. And you have such a great collection of edit controls and presets.With SpeedGrade you only get a single video track (or 3 if you have dissolves or transitions as it puts the a & B on different tracks and the transition in between). So you need to prep your sequence, and the send from Premiere is even weirder. Instead of using the original media files, it converts everything into uncompressed DPX image sequences, which will take up a huge amount of space (uncompressed files after all) and it bakes in any effects you applied into the clips. So it basically ignores the awesome Mercury playback Engine from premiere, and it's only real bonus is that your color correction returns to premiere as a filter applied to the clips.You can work with original premiere pro clips, but not with the send from premiere command, instead you need to export and EDL from Premiere and import the clips into SpeedGrade that way.And there there is the fact that it doesn't export video a monitor using Black Magic video cards, only AJA! This sucks. It should work with everything Premiere Pro does!And as for the color correction, the lack of curves is inexcusable! Curves are such a powerful color corrector and Adobe needs to fix this right away.I know Adobe purchased this program to compete with Apple Color (now defunct) and DaVinci Resolve and round out their suite, but I would rather see them base the whole program on the amazing Mercury Playback engine from Premiere Pro, instead of having this current attempt at integrating the two programs, which seems more like a cludge than reel integration. Yes, having the color correction return as plug in corrections is very very cool, but so far that is really the only thing cool i am seeing about SpeedGrade.I have not fully explored or gotten proficient with the program, and I will report back once I have, but so far my initial impressions don't make me consider moving away from Resolve for my color correction needs.

PVC on the recent Adobe Cloud Outage and my thoughts

Scott Simmons at the Pro Video Coalition has a good article on the recent day long outage of Adobe Creative Cloud.He does spend a little too much time on how many people he knows that weren't affected, because it is the people that were that are really important. And honestly Creative Cloud kicks me out of my login way too often for me to be comfortable, and in fact was even worse for a job I was on.I have been trying to get convince my boss that the Adobe Creative Cloud is the way to go for Direct Response commercials. Which are very graphics heavy and usually shot in multiple formats and even frame rates. Well we have been trying out creative cloud in it's 30 day trial, and if it worked were going to get a month to month account for it on our machines, but unfortunately even time you open one of the demo version you must OK that you are using a trial and that did not work during the outage. And we couldn't upgrade to full version to get that working either. Not a good selling point for creative cloud.My personal versions at home kept working as I was logged in and they continued working, but any down time because of Cloud computer can be catastrophic when media has been bought so an airdate is set.Adobe needs to make some sort of backup system that allows you to keep working for a day or two until Adobe can get their servers back together!This really isn't a good showing for subscription based software. Maybe there needs to be a way to keep it working for the whole period of the current subscription without checking in, and they need to keep Creative Cloud from accidentally logging your user out.

Oliver Peters at Digitalfilms has a great comparison of AVID Symphony, Adobe SpeedGrade, Davinci Resolve and Apple Color and my thoughts

Oliver Peters has posted an article with a great comparison of AVID Symphony, Adobe SpeedGrade, Davinci Resolve and Apple Color.Personally I have been spending a lot of time with Davinci Resolve of late. With a proper video card it is really an awesome program, and is certainly my current choice for color correction. It is fast and easy to use and does a very good job.The other interest is SpeedGrade which I am learning, mainly because of it's ability to roundtrip a grade to Premiere Pro and put it on clips as a single filter on each clip. A very cool feature, but the program needs some work before it can really compete with Resolve. First off it needs support for Black Magic cards instead of just AJA cards. If Premiere Pro can do it, Resolve needs to do it. And second it really does need curves. Curves are such a powerful color correction method that many have come to rely on, and not having them seems a huge failing. Other issues I have are it's abilities with multitrack video are limited, and I have just gotten so used to nodal vs layer based correcting, though that is certainly not going to change. SpeedGrade is powerful and does work well with Premiere, but needs to get some updates to be able to really rival Davinci even with it's ability export it's grades as color correction filters into Premiere.

RedGiant Universe is out of Beta

Red Giant has released version 1.0 of it's new GPU accelerated Universe Plug ins. These include 31 free GPU accelerated plugs ins and currently 19 Pro plug ins that can be had for $10 a month, $99 a year or $399 for a lifetime subscription. And they promise dozens of new tools in 2014 alone. Already these protools include a version of Knoll Light Factory, Toonit and Holomatrix.I love Red Giant's stuff, so this is a great thing. Not sure about all these subscriptions though. So far the small businesses I work with have been very averse to a monthly fee, but the free plug ins are great to have.

Cinemartin makes Premiere Pro Plug-ins for ProRES and H.265 HEVC for Windows

Studio Daily reported the news from NAB.A 30 Day Trial is available for download.They will have various versions:•ProRES 422 including LT and HQ in 1080p 30FPS for $68 with Single Core Encoding•ProRES 4444, UHD, 4K and H.265 (v2) at up to 60FPS for $137 with Dual Core Encoding•H.265 SQ and HQ and up to 6 Core Encoding for $551ProRES is so ubiquitous that this is great news.