Is it just me or has Alexa become garbage?

For a while Alexa hasn’t worked as well for me as my wife, but lately things have gotten so much worse.

We have 4 Alexa devices in our house, and we use it mostly to play music, set alarms and cooking timers and activate devices with voice control. My wife also makes shopping lists, though they aren’t compatible with shopping list program I use so I don’t it for that.

My issue is how much Alexa actively ignores me, like when a reminder comes on and it just won’t stop (unless I mark it done on my phone).

And even with music attached to my Apple Music account it often can’t find songs, but lately it won’t play songs, or they take a while to start and then only play half way through and stop. This seems to happen about 60% of the time of late. Maybe it is the Apple Music thing, but I don’t pay for Amazon music above my Prime membership.

And Apple music doesn’t explain why I will be talking to one Alexa and ask it to play music and it will play music in another room about 25% of the time. And it isn’t like it can heard me from the other room. I can’t seem to get it to do this with commands myself and it just makes zero sense. Why would it play in another room and not the Alexa that is responding to me?

And I use it to control the light in the Baby’s and I would say that is about 33% successful. It works less than it doesn’t, and I am repeating myself. It is great when it works, but is super frustrating when carrying a screaming baby to get a diaper change.

And then there are the creepy ads that show up all over social media when my wife and I talk about things around Alexa. I fucking hate targeted advertising!

And now they are talking about making a paid tier of Alexa to make it better. Really? Fix what exists first!

Honestly if I could get a bunch of Apple HomePods for cheap enough I would love to replace our Alexa’s! At least Apple places some value on privacy, though I am sure there will have to be new models to deal with Apple Intelligence when that comes out and those will cost more!

Alexa has announced the ALEXA 35, their first new sensor in 12 years!

The Alexa 35 looks amazing and it looks like Alexa has done it again, though way out of my price range.

Here are some links and videos I checked out about it.

Potato Jet has a video Review.

Brian Hallett at ProVideoCoalition has a look at it.

As does Yaroslave Altunin at No film School.

I edit a lot of spots shot with Arri, so hopefully will run into some footage from one of these soon.

I just wish that Adobe would allow us to not have the damned AMIRA Lut automatically applied, especially since it doesn’t do this for other cameras. On a pro editing system I want to control it,

Did Adobe hide the Amira Lut instead of trying to fix it? NOPE THEY MOVED IT, but it still is automatically applied, and now takes more steps to de-activate it

OK AMIRA LUT CAN BE TURNED OFF, SEE BOTTOM OF POST ON HOW TO DO IT, I STILL WANT THE ABILITY TO NOT HAVE IT APPLIED THOUGH, WHY AM I FORCED TO HAVE THE DAMN AMIRA LUT APPLIED? AND WHY DOES IT TAKE MORE STEPS TO TURN IT OFF NOW THAN IT DID BEFORE? Yes Sorry I was yelling.

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Adobe released Premiere Pro 2022 this week, and I was playing with some Alexa footage, and looked at the source in the effects window and there is no AMIRA LUT anymore, but the LUT is still being applied. WHAT IS GOING ON?

Honestly I have been complaining about the damn AMIRA LUT for years, and I just wanted ADOBE to remove the fucking thing. I never want it automatically turned on, I want to work with the RAW footage and I can add an Adobe LUT if want it.

So in 2019 I have Alexa footage, that if I bring into the project it has the AMIRA Lut applied.

Alexa Footage with AMIRA LUT Automatically Applied
AMIRA LUT IN THE MASTER SETTINGS
The Alexa Footage with the AMIRA LUT Turned off

Now lets take a look in 2022, and it looks like in 2021 as well.

Alexa Footage in Premiere Pro 2022
This files Effects Panel with no Lumetri
The Source (renamed from Master) of the Alexa clip within 2022, no AMIRA LUT, but it is being Applied.

So it looks like Adobe saw that people were complaining about the AMIRA LUT being automatically added to footage and instead, of listening to us and just not adding it, they are now automatically adding it to any ALEXA footage you import into Premiere without the ability to remove it. WTF!!!!!

THIS IS NOT THE DAMN SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM ADOBE!!!!!

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OK HERE IS HOW TO TURN OFF THE AMIRA LUT, given by a very helpful Adobe Engineer in the Adobe Premiere Pro Editors facebook group, though my post was removed for being too emotional, so the solution is no longer available there.

So Right Click on a clip and go to Interpret Footage
The Modify Clip panel go to color Management, and you see embedded AMIRA LUT
In the drop down menu you can select none to remove the AMIRA LUT

OK so you can remove the AMIRA LUT, in a different way than you previously did, but why am I forced to have this LUT Applied. Adobe give me a way to not have the AMIRA LUT applied! And why does it actually take more steps to remove the “Embedded” LUT than it previously did?

Of course I was also told by an Adobe Engineer on UserVoice that the new top navigation bar is far better than the old one, even though it takes more clicks to switch between workspaces, but enough people complained, and now we at least get 3 that can be at the top, so I will continue to complain. And especially when things are made even less efficient!

In Premiere Pro 2019 you could select all the clips, and right click and hit disable Master Clips, and this turned the AMIRA LUT off.

Batch disabling the Masterclip effects in 2019

Now it is right click, sub menu, then another sub menu in another screen. And I have heard said now it is removed, but I am not so sure about that. If it was removed, the AMIRA LUT wouldn’t be re-selectable. The fact that it is called Embedded now I think means it is still there. I wonder if it is still causing project bloat as the AMIRA LUT had previously done?

All I want is for an option to not have AMIRA LUT added at all, if I want a Alexa Rec709 LUT I Can add it. Most other footage doesn’t force a LUT on it in Premiere, except maybe RAW.

I deleted my previous post on this, and posted an updated post at UserVoice.

Adobe After Effects (Beta) Version 17.1.0 (Build 55) once again works with Alexa Footage

So Adobe today released Beta’s of apps in the Creative Cloud app that anyone can download, and so I decided to test the Alexa test footage and my own footage, and all of it works fine. So this was certainly a bug and it is fixed in the Beta.

I would love to be able to check the release notes to see what they fixed, but I haven’t figured out if there are release notes for these public betas.

EDIT:

OK was still having some weirdness when I opened up a project that is working fine in 2020. I was still getting the weirdness when trying to play back the sequences, but if I reload the footage it then works fine, and this did not work in 2020. WTF!

Oh well it actually works now, so no complaints.

Adobe After Effects 2020 17.0.6 still does not work with ALEXA footage!

So Adobe released a new version of After Effects today 17.0.6 and I tested it again this shot from Alexa’s test footage page. Obviously it still does not work. Now it wasn’t listed as being fixed, but their is a lot of ALEXA footage out there, how can no one else have run into this issue? Come on Adobe get on the ball.

I have posted about it the adobe community forums, and in the bug report/feature request segment to little avail.

After Effects 2020 does not work with an ARRI footage that automatically adds the AMIRA lut in Premiere, THIS IS A HUGE BUG!

So when Adobe first released After Effects 2020, I tried opening a 2019 project that I have been working on and saw some scary results. None of the footage was working properly. This was January 5th, 2019.

I posted about it on the Adobe Forums, but the response from an Adobe employee was it is a bad graphics card or the footage is corrupted. The computer is new and the footage and project work perfectly in After Effects 2019, as well as Premiere 2019 and 2020, which made me doubt the response, as did it when someone else was having the issue.

I then recently went on a job, and all of their footage was shot on Alexa, and when I tried to move the footage to After Effects on Adobe Dynamic Link the footage had exactly the same response as as the footage on my home machine.

And it was all ALEXA footage that when imported into Premiere Pro automatically has the unremovable AMIRA LUT added to it.

So to prove that it was not in fact my footage, but in fact Alexa footage today I decided to to download some ALEXA footage from ARRI, and try that out.

Here is the Alexa LF ProRES footage download page, and I downloaded the first video. I took this ProRES clip and opened it in Premiere Pro 2020 and it imported and automatically added the AMIRA LUT just as I thought it would. I then imported that footage directly into After Effects 2020, and low and behold I am getting the exact same effect.

So this is most certainly a bug in After Effects 2020 to do with ARRI Alexa footage and probably something to do with why the damn AMIRA lut is automatically added in Premiere. Whatever metadata that makes the AMIRA LUT is what seems to be causing this. The footage works fine in every other Creative Cloud version.

THIS IS A HUGE BUG AND NEEDS TO BE FIXED!