Dennis Sellers at OWC Rocket Yard has a post on how to paste non-formatted text on your mac, and I can’t believe that I never knew the keyboard shortcut Shift-Option-Command-V to paste without formatting.
I always used Textedit to past into and turn it non-formated.
This is huge, I always have issues with pasting formatted text, just as the article talks about.
When my MacPro 4,1 finally kicked the bucket I was devastated, especially since the new MacPro wasn’t out yet, and I needed a machine to edit on. The solution was the very powerful iMac Pro with the Radeon Pro Vega 64X 16GB. Now that blew my old video card out of the water, but video editing apps can use every bit of power you have and more, so you want to save as much video processing power as you can.
The problem is that the default settings or even scaled settings on an iMac Pro or even an iMac are made to make the screen look amazing, not save on video memory, and for a long time the OS X control panels have removed the important statistics on the display control panel.
Now if you hover over the choices it tells you what resolution it is like and that scaled resolutions might affect performance, but they don’t tell you what the default resolution is actually doing.
This is where the awesome SwitchResX comes in. The app is $16, or $250 for a site license. It takes a little playing to get it all set up nicely (especially turning off all the resolutions that you don’t want).
It runs in your menu bar, and you can customize to remove all the resolutions you don’t want, but when you go into the iMac Pro or iMac’s resolutions you see where I am going.
You can see I have chosen 2560×1440 which is the normal default resolution, but I have not chosen the HiDPI version. HiDPI is what Apple does to make the monitor look great, it takes your resolution and runs it twice to subsample and make it look better, but basically whatever video ram it is using for your primary display it is doubling it to make the display look nicer.
For a video editor this is a huge no no, don’t waste your video memory, it is precious! Make sure to set your display to a non HiDPI resolution so that you are not wasting your video memory!
Of course this isn’t all that SwitchResX can do, you can actually set different resolutions for different apps and have it change as you switch apps. Now I have tried that out and it worked very well, but I have realized I just like one resolution for my 2 monitors, and try and save as much video memory as I can, so that is why I use SwitchResX, and the less video memory you have the more important this is.
I am assuming this will be the same with M1 iMacs, but they don’t exist yet. If they stay like the current M1 macs and share memory with the mac, then it is even more important to use less memory for your display so that you can use more for editing!
Mac Performance Guide has as an article on how the upgrade to Big Sur has been nothing but negatives, except that you need to upgrade to it to get Thunderbolt Hub Support which was added in Big Sur.
I know this site is usually very negative on the coverage of Mac OS upgrades, but the upgrades do seem to add more problems than they add, and usually add hits to performance.
And I have personally held off on the upgrade to Big Sur, though I really do need the Thunderbolt hub support so I can have more drives connected than I currently do.
Of course I also can’t upgrade because where I am currently working refuses to upgrade past Adobe Creative Cloud 2019, and that version does not work on Big Sur, you need to run at least 2020 to run on Big Sur. Now when the built in Speech to Text comes out of Beta maybe I can upgrade, though I might as well hold off for now.
This awesome little plug in for Apple Mail, MailTrackerBlocker hosted at Github is a must install. If you don’t know, companies install something called a tracker pixel into the html of an e-mail they send you, and when it loads the image off their server they can track your location and often more information. These spy pixels should be illegal, but they aren’t so do what you can to stop them!
Honestly I would think Apple would do something about them, and especially on the iPhone and iPad. They are so into not letting companies track, then they should stop this insidious behavior. At least you can do something about it on the desktop.
It is scary how many e-mails have these built in trackers, which you can see once you install this app. Basically every e-mail with html formatting has one.
Now this has been one of the great things about Final Cut Pro X, if you bought it once you own it for good, and that is how DaVinci Resolve works, but Premiere Pro from Adobe is a subscription service.
The question does Apple just subsidize Final Cut Pro X with computer sales, or do they want it to make some money and make it subscription. I understand wanting it to pay for some of it’s development costs, but if they are going to do that I expect updates, and fixes.
Honestly I think a better idea is to have upgrade fees to new versions, not full price, but pay for the upgrade how things used to be. I can justify the subscription to Adobe as I make my living using it, as very few companies edit in Final Cut Pro X. I think they should update the App store to allow upgrades instead of just subscriptions, or full priced new versions.
And with a subscription Apple has better take a long hard look, and start looking into the many issues the program has as I have posted about before. If they go subscription I want them to seriously be developing, and it would be nice to have forums that the developers actually read and work on issues that professionals are having.
It is funny to see so much outrage, and how everyone will now move to DaVinci. Well as a professional, since both AVID and Premiere are subscription, I am totally used to it. I will get a month to month as needed and it won’t bother me, but I won’t keep the subscription around because I see it having too many problems that I just don’t think they will every fix or even care about. If I need it I would get it basically.
It is a good article, if a little too FCP X focused overall. I made my huge post on the problems that I have with extensive use of FCP X, and I wish Apple would deal with them before adding too much else, though collaborative editing might help with some of my complaints quite a bit, but there are still so many to go into.
I totally agree that Apple needs to knock it out of the park with a GPU, but not just for Cinema4D, but also for Premiere Pro (as well as DaVinci). And yea the CPU needs to really stomp ass with After Effects for sure.
An updated XDR display should happen quickly, and the new version should also be the basis for a new iMac Pro.
And yes the Afterburner card needs to be able to decode different codecs as well, not just ProRES, and that should also be either added to the iMac, or make a breakout box with BlackMagic and include the tech in that along with an HDMI out and in.
I really do wish I could afford a MacPro, though with the M1, it calls it into question. Be really weird if Apple ends up with the MacPro as the only Intel Mac, and a medium machine like the article calls for as M1.
In Apple Mail if I sort by Date, and Oldest Message On top, so newest messages are on the bottom (admittedly a habit I developed from years of using the mail program Eudora), when I open Mail the sorting should not scroll to the top, but the bottom.
I mean seriously Apple. I know you want me to have newest at the top, but if you are going to actively try to make me change why not just remove the ability to sort in a different order?
Woohooo! Softraid has publicly release it’s SoftRaid 6 beta with support for Big Sur and M1 Macs! This is huge news, as I can never move to an operating system until SoftRaid supports it, as I can’t work without my RAID.
And it already has the Final Release of the SoftRaid Version 6 Driver included, so a RAID should be fully supported.
SoftRaid is mandatory for a RAID on a mac, so I could not be more happy about this.
And they are working on M1 support, but it obviously couldn’t be out with development Macs as they didn’t include thunderbolt ports, so you couldn’t test thunderbolt connectivity, but are working on it now.
AppleInsider has an article on how the new M1 Macs in fact support USB 4, and not just Thunderbolt 3. I hadn’t realized this at all, but it makes sense as it is new open standard, but amazing that it is before Intel managed to release it. They do need to add more ports though, 2 ports on the laptops when it includes charging is nuts. I have problems with only 4 thunderbolt 3 ports on my imac pro as is.
A huge annoyance that I have run into in Catalina, is a major inconsistency of the Finder’s Save Dialogue box. In previous OS’s when I saved a file, the name of the file was always selected when the window popped up. This window shows what I mean.
I can’t understand why sometimes the text is selected and sometimes it isn’t. This seems totally random, and I can’t figure out why it happens.
I have posted about it at the Apple community forums, though I don’t expect to hear a response.