And it is true, you need to be backing up in every way possible and with local and cloud based copies, just in case something happens.
I use both Time Machine and Backblaze and even with that I can’t backup everything. I don’t have a drobo to be able to backup everything locally (my video is on a RAID 5, so if a drive fails I should be able to recover that, but even my Backblaze took the better part of a year to backup everything I had set to backup.
Losing a drive one or a whole computer will be the lesson to get you to start backing up, but you need to backup as much as you can and as often as you can, preferable constantly!
So I woke up way too early today because the air conditioner is not working too well, and I was too hot to keep sleeping and low and behold Adobe has updated Premiere Pro to Version 15.4!
This update brings the amazing Speech to Text out of Beta and into the normal version and out of the Beta program which I have been running for a bit. This quickly became my favorite feature when cutting testimonials, and I am so happy that i is available to all. It also includes new Transcript Editing Tools and the ability to Generate Captions Automatically.
Color improvements with Tetahedral LUT interpolation. And the beta now includes a colorized vectorscope for more detail in grading.
The Speed of Saving of Team Projects has improved thanks to a new file structure. And in the Public Beta is progressive project loading to work faster, and improved media relinking.
As an editor at some point you are going to fill your hard drives, and before they get too full you are going to want to clear up some space and to do that you need to see exactly what is filling them up. To do that I have 2 really good paid utilities that you can use to see exactly what is taking up so much space on your mac. These are WhatSize and DaisyDisk.
Now I have been using and continue to use WhatSize as my primary, mainly because I prefer it’s interface. It is more expensive at $14.99, but it has a 30 day trial and works on Big Sur just fine.
Why do iOS mobile sync’s take up so much damn space?
And it also includes a graph form interface if that is your thing, though I prefer the lists view which I find makes much more sense.
DaisyDisk on the other hand is all built along it’s graph view, which is very pretty, but I do find it much harder to use than the column view of WhatSize.
It is very pretty, but column view just makes more sense to my mind.
As an added bonus it also works on M1 Macs already.
Both programs take a bit of time to scan a disk and then give you the results. As I have said I prefer WhatSize, but that is entirely your decision and you can try them both out before you buy, so…
Either way being able to delve into your files and find out what is taking up so much space on your hard drives in a quick and easy way is tool every editor and graphics artist should have in their tool belt.
You learn something new every day, I didn’t actually realize that this was now built into the Mac OS, as I have always used A Better Finder Rename (and awesome app with more power than this, but it costs $22.95 unlike this tip but if you do check it out also check out A Better Finder Attribute it’s companion app).
And it is on by default, though you can return to the new method if you want to (but why would you). She is also reporting that the tab bar will make a return on iPad OS 15 in a future beta.
I had posted about this and was using it in Safari Technology Preview in Big Sur. A new version hasn’t been released, but I will take a look at it once it comes out, to see if it is improved. Now if only Apple would add the option of tree style tabs, ha one can only dream.
Don’t get me wrong, I am a big fan of Apple’s addition of Lossless music up to 24bit 192hz and Spatial Audio (a new Dolby Audio suround mix for stereo headphones, here with Apple’s proprietary chip), but my big problem is finding what music is available. Sure there are Spatial Audio playlists, but no Lossless Playlists but I would like to be able to search by album and spatial or lossless to find music to listen to.
And yes I know most people can’t hear the difference with Lossless, but if it is mixed well I have an Emotiva XDA-1 DAC a good headphone amp and nice headphones, so it does sound pretty damn good.
And I have been impressive with Spatial Audio, at least well mixed spatial audio and my PowerBeats Pro headphones. It does sound pretty damn impressive for bluetooth headphones, much like Dolby on my headphones on my XBOX. Pretty impressive when mixed well.
And there lies the problem, make it easier to search for Apple! I know they are all for simplicity, but simplicity at the cost of functionality is not worth it.
I know this is a weird little thing, but it always bothers me. I sort my mail so that the newest is at the bottom (this was the default for Eudora which I used for many many years as my default mail program). Now Apple Mail if I sort so that the oldest is at the top, every time I open it it scrolls so that the I am seeing the oldest first. Just because I want my newest mail at the bottom of the list doesn’t mean I want to see my oldest e-mail in my inbox every time I open the app!
I know I should switch to newest at the top then, but I hate being told how to do things, and should be able to chose. Honestly it is a lot of why I don’t like Final Cut Pro X, it is a program that forces you to do everything one way, as chosen by an engineer and not an editor. I like when there are many ways to do something as in Premier Pro and AVID. Don’t tell me that the way I do something is wrong, put in many ways to do something and let me chose which way works for me, but especially don’t leave a way in but handicap it!
It is well worth checking out the differences. And it seems that ProRes RAW does seem better, but it doesn’t work in DaVinci Resolve, and BRAW works better in DaVinci Resolve. So it depends on how you are finishing, and I would assume ProRES RAW works better in Final Cut Pro X.
