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!

Adobe Media Encoder won’t put chapter markers in H264 Video

So this is something that has annoyed me for some time, and has really been annoying me of late, so I have been trying workaround.

So basically the issue is that you can create Chapter Markers in Adobe Premiere Pro in your sequence, which are ostensibly for use in Adobe Encore, but that program stopped with CS6, and after my last hard drive bailed after the El Capitan Update I don’t even have it installed on my current hard drive.

Anyway, back in the day with Final Cut Pro 7 I could export a video with chapter markers and compress an H264 video with chapter markers using compressor. It would make Apple Compatible m4v files instead of a normal mp4 files, but chapter markers would work in most programs and show up on the web in most cases.

Unfortunately Adobe Media Encorder won’t do this, as it only makes straight mp4 files, and since Encore is a dead program, the Chapter Markers in Premiere Pro are pretty much useless.

After much searching, and seeing all the ways people were making chapter markers (most of which are really a pain the ass, and don’t use standard formatting for either the text file, or the timcode), I went back to basically my old way of doing this.

This is to export my video as a ProRES video which includes chapter markers, and then use HandBrake to encode it with Chapter Markers. Now not only this take longer, but also take up more hard drive space, but at least the chapter markers work!

And while m4v is a subset of mp4, it does play in most players including directly in Firefox, though doesn’t show the chapters markers, but at least it plays fine. And I am OK with my chapters only working on Macs, because at least they will show for most people looking at my reel.

Why are there not Ergonomic Editors keyboards?

So I have been an editor for a long time now, and I spend so much time on a computer that at times I get massive Carpal Tunnel attacks. I have figured out solutions, and my main one is to use an ergonomic keyboard. I currently use a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000.

In fact I own 2. And I carry one to work with me ,as well as Kensington Expert Trackball as I never really got why you would need a wireless mouse or especially trackball.

 Of course at home I still use my last (my 3rd) Microsoft Trackball Explorer, which they stopped making years ago, and now sells for around $200 on ebay for a used one, and will never be replaced as the best Trackball ever made. No idea what I will do when my current one dies, but that is a bit off topic of this post.

So back on topic, I always use an ergo keyboard, and have an Aeron on home to help with my wrists (as well as some exercises with rubber bands I do when things get bad), but I would love to have an Editing keyboard. Yes I know most of the keyboard shortcuts I use on a regular basis, but there are still some in Premiere I don’t know or think about and would love an a Premiere Pro editing keyboard, but they tend to be the standard Apple keyboards, which are flat and have no key travel (I like my keys to click and loved the old apple clicky keyboard) and they hurt my wrists! WHY OH WHY HAS NO ONE MADE AN ERGONOMIC EDITORS KEYBOARD?

I mean most editors spend way too much time on a computer, so you would think someone would do this! So if anyone is listening an Ergonomic Editors keyboard would be AMAZING! AS would someone copying the Microsoft Trackball Explorer, though unless I someday become a billionaire I doubt either will ever happen! Oh well.

Problems with MXF files that have been imported into Final Cut Pro X

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.

Major problems with El Capitan

http://www.apple.com/osx/

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!