Noise Industries has upgraded the FxFactory to 4.0 and added Premiere Pro CS 6 Support. I have a ton of their compatible and free plug ins, but don’t actually own this suite (always thought it was a tad expensive), but this gives me one more reason, as I have moved from any version of Final Cut and now prefer Premiere Pro (though I of course still have Media Composer which works with very few plug ins).
Apple has updated it’s iMac and it is thinner and more powerful, and now sans a CD rom drive.
Most impressive for editing are NVIDIA Mobile processors across the line, so they should all be great for CUDA in Premiere Pro. The low end has a GT 640M with 512MB of RAM, the second has a GT 650M with 512MB, the 3rd has a GTX 660m with 512MB and the high end has a GTX 675 with 1GB of RAM (best for editing right there). Even better the high end is configurable to a Geforce GTX 680MX with 2GB of RAM!
Too bad ll the stock models have i5 processors, but you can upgrade to an i7 that is 3.4Ghz. The high end also has user addable RAM, though the smaller model is soldered, but comes with 8GB to start.
Another exciting upgrade is the Fusion Drive you can get in BTO. It has 128GB of Flash Ram tied to 1 or 3 TB of regular hard drive, so your system can be on the fast Fusion, but you seamlessly get FLASH speeds for your system.
Starting at $1299-$1999 and available in November to December.
You have to configure it, but it really could be a great editing machine, especially with Thunderbolt, though I would prefer a non-mobile video card personally.
AEScripts has a new one, Layer Library which lets you create prestes of groups of layers and properties to be used between different projects in After Effects. It is listed at $29.99, but is name your own price.
Very cool, especially for those we often do repeated tasks between projects.
FCP.Co has an article on installing a PC GTX570 in a MacPro to get better OpenCL performance in FCP X, but it will also increase your CUDA power for Premiere Pro and After Effects CS6.
Still you can score over 1000 on Luxmark if you go for a GTX670 instead (which has a huge amount more of CUDA cores, and can still draw it’s power from the internal power supply instead of say a 680, which would require an external power source to run), but they are not as well supported on the Mac. Either way you will need to go to Netkas to get some instruction and some help (though some of the help can be rather surly, but it is worth it if can really beef up using your MacPro). Someone at Netkas has also figure out how to Firmware update recent MacPro’s to the latest firmware for the newest itineration, allowing beefier XEON’s into your old MacPro.
The instructions are pretty easy, but I have found that they don’t always work, so think about re-installing your NVIDIA drivers once you are done, as that did it for me.
You will also need to do some hacking to Premiere Pro and After Effects to get them working with the CUDA cores on a new video card.
VideoCopilot has announced a free Halloween Pack for Element 3D is coming soon. NICE! Free is always good.
I really do need to spend some time playing with Element 3D in the near future.
Todd Kopriva has the announcement at his blog. Looks like Ray Tracing fixes, and Kepler updates. Wonder if those would translate to a Mac with a Kepler card in it? Anything with CUDA updates is good in my opinion.
Actually reminds me that I need to replace my Quadro 4800 with my GeForce GTX 285, which the recent NVIDIA update should have helped with the crashing issue I was having.
StudioDaily has an awesome article on how they are using Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 on SNL. They were in Final Cut Pro and decided to move to Premiere Pro, especially because of the workflow with After Effects.
Still I am surprised it is all Mac, but they obviously had Macs for Final Cut. So far I am impressed with CS6, but there have been some stability issues for me, especially with CUDA, though hopefully that last NVIDIA update fixed that. I would think PC’s would be faster and more stable, though I do still love my Mac. They had just better make a really kick ass MacPro really damn soon!
CoreMelt has released the free ActiveText plug in for creating text with pre-animated templates, no keyframes.
I am not too much of a fan of templated effects, but you really can’t argue with free.
Pond 5 has released a new plug in to search for stock footage from within Premiere Pro. You can browse their library, and automatically import free watermarked clips into your project, and if you purchase the clips, you can automatically conform to replace the clips with full versions! A very cool idea!
Adobe has released a webinar on “Speedgrade for Aspiring Colorists.” It is done by editor and colorist Jeff August, and includes Lin Kayser the inventor of Speedgrade in the questions. They also have an earlier Webinar on using Speedgrade by Patrick Palmer.