Mac Performance Guide is quite negative on Mac performance, and it is the only place I have seen to show negative performance of Mac Studios, and he is certainly right on the Core Rote in Apple Systems. And this article on Spotlight Indexing is very interesting as I hate when does things that you have no control over. Spotlight is one of those things, especially when it indexes and you have no control over it. A simple pause indexing would be an amazing thing.
Personally I hate Spotlight as it doesn’t find everything for me, I use Find Any File for any major searches.
And for core rot I have to bring up my issue with Apple Music and moving iPhone sync to the finder. Also the fact that the damn sync has to sync twice to sync any files to my phone. Why? WTF!
So I am in the middle of making 2 short films shot on my BlackMagicDesign 6k Pro, and I am shooting in 6k 23.976 Blackmagic Raw Constant 8:1, and both have serious visual effects. And I have been having issues with running out of memory in After Effects.
Now my machine is getting old, it is a an iMac Pro with the upgraded Radeon Pro Vega 64X with 16 GB of RAM, but I only have 64 GB of DDR4 RAM, which I am thinking is the main issue. And I am running of a RAID 5 with 36 GB of mechanical drive space, which has at least half empty. And I have even moved the After Effects Disk Cache to a fast external SSD with a 250 GB cache.
For BRAW support I am using the amazing BRAW Studio from Autokroma. This plug in really is great in Premiere Pro because it allows selection of multiple BRAW clips to allow editing if they are all shot the same, and also to save out a sidecar file easily so any program can see what you have done. It works in Premiere Pro and After Effects and replaces Blackmagic’s BRAW plugin which has more limited functionality.
Still using this I do seem to be having RAM issues with RAM previews where my RAM is running out very quickly and won’t render out a whole shot. I find myself having to restart after effects to get a longer RAM preview, and many times even a computer restart.
Now I am also doing a lot of green screen and using Maxon formerly Red Giant’s Primatte Keyer 6 to key, so that might be also a RAM hog here. I have never had an issue with 4k Alexa ProRES footage in green screen though.
I tend to think it might be the BRAW , as on some shots I used BRAW Studio to do the initial grade and save out a sidecar, and then render them in Media Composer in ProRES HQ. With this footage I get much longer renders. Now I know it is less compressed, as the files are larger, and with the LUT added, there is less to decode, but this is very drive intensive.
And sure the 6K is bigger than 4K, and eating more RAM.
And the new M1 chips with ProRES processor wouldn’t help here, because it is BRAW, and 128 GB of shared memory and video memory doesn’t seem like a whole bunch more.
I am hoping the whole lesson isn’t that BRAW 6K is just too processor intensive.
I have been having an issue with Mail on my iPad Pro of late. For some reason the mail app was having issues loading. I would open it and it would be empty and blank, and take up to a minute to load if it loaded without crashing. This also meant I was unable to send e-mail from other apps unless, I first got Mail itself to load. And this only started recently.
I had tried turning off all my mail except my Apple mail account, and even tried resetting network settings, but mail was not working correctly for the last couple of weeks, and it was driving me nuts. I was about to backup and wipe the ipad, but was waiting for the update to see if it fixed it.
Yesterday apple released iPad OS 15.6 and after updating the Mail issue has been solved, if only that was the only issue that recently cropped up on my iPad.
At the same time as the mail issue, Safari has started losing logins for web sites. Sites that for years have stayed logged in, must be logged in every time that I got to the site. So every time I use bing or google I need to log in again. Super frustrating, and unfortunately not fixed by 15.6.
Customization is really the best thing about Premiere Pro.
Of course AVID was the start of this because every editor doesn’t want to work the same way or have the same setup to work on, so being able to have your own setup is so important and AVID premiered this feature in the editing space.
The original Apple Final Cut Pro also had this feature.
The new Final Cut Pro, previously Final Cut Pro X, did away with this and wants you to edit their way. You don’t have as many ways to do things and you really can’t do a lot of customization in the workspace.
DaVinci Resolve has added editing to it’s color correction program and it is great, but it also does not let you customize, it is once again how they want you to edit. Yes you can use one or two monitors, but the windows are all very fixed where they are.
Premiere though is like AVID in customization, but adds to it, especially with so many available 3rd party extensions, like from AESCRIPTS, and it’s extensive keyboard shortcut options.
Scott Simmons is so right that Premiere’s customization abilities are it’s absolute best feature and it is a shame that DaVinci Resolve doesn’t allow the same customization.
If only it didn’t look like the next MacPro is probably a year away, meaning that Apple won’t be making it’s pledge to move everything to Apple Silicon in the next year.
