Why is Mac OS Finder iOS Sync so inferior to the previous iTunes Sync

 I have said this before and I am sure I will it again, but why when Apple split up iTunes to make Music, Podcast and TV apps and moving iOS music sync to the finder did they make it so far inferior to the previous sync?

Now I know they want you to pay for Apple Music to get your music there, but they were already getting you to pay for music through them. I think they just don’t want you to sync your own music libraries anymore, they want you to just stream your music.

And why is it worse. Well first off if you plug in your iOS device and go to it in the finder, and try and sync any local music (going to the Music tab and selecting any songs or playlists the sync button switches from blue and and press-able to grey and not press-able).

Before any changes it has a sync that you could hit, but not if you make any changes.

This makes the whole iOS thing seem broken, but there is still a way to sync, but you have to get through the whole syncing process once, which can take a very long time. And all it shows for status bars, is a little circle in the sidebar and a syncing thing on the bottom, but both are extremely slow.

The sidebar shows the whole process.

And this is just showing the backup stage, but no indication of how much of the synching this is.

Of Course in some steps you get this wheel, which is pretty much as unhelpful as you can get.

And this process can easily take 30+ minutes.

One it has done a full backup and finished. You can then go into music and select what music you sync and hit sync (it will not be grayed out this time) and only then will your local music sync. And it has to do a whole other sync to get your music over.
Honestly What the Absolute Fuck??!?!?
And even worse sometimes it doesn’t work after 1 sync and you have to do another sync before you are able to move your music over. Really?!?!??!? FUCK YOU APPLE!!!
iTunes never did this.

And with iTunes I could use Wifi Sync. Now I am sure you are saying that you can use Wifi sync with Music, and yes you can, but you can’t stop it.

With iTunes if you had to stop any iOS sync you could force quit iTunes. Sure not an ideal solution, but it worked, and say you could restart or shutdown your computer.

With Music if you have WIFI sync on, you can’t restart or even quit the finder to get it to stop. The only way to get it to stop is to hard reset the computer, which is beyond not ideal.

You can least stop the cable based sync by unplugging the iOS device!

And don’t even get me started with Apple Music. If you sync your library with Apple Music you can get into tons of trouble. There are more forum posts about what this can do to your library than you can read in a lifetime. It has been known to overwrite all your music, replace it with lower quality music, or even different music. And without syncing Apple Music, you can never save any of their music, other than marking it as liked.

Honestly you should be able to keep your streaming music separate from your local library and not be forced to commingle them. And if they do commingle there should be no way that Apple can mess up your local library (which is why they should be kept permanently separate). 

The best solution would be able to have local music and streaming music apps that are separate. So nothing can screw each other up. I want to keep my music that I have ripped higher quality and not have anyone touch it or screw it up!

And Apple could now care less about people who have their own music all they care about is people who buy or rent music (yes paying for streaming music is renting music).

My favorite keyboard launcher, LaunchBar will speed up everything outside of your editing and graphics software

 

So I have written about LaunchBar in the past, but now I am writing about it as something to speed up your workflow when using editing or graphics software. I have been using the amazing LaunchBar from Objective Development for years, and whenever I am in an office using a computer there I feel stunted by not having it.

Now LaunchBar is a tool that does so many things, but my favorite is to the ability to launch application using keyboard shortcuts, and it will learn your shorcuts quickly to speed things up. You hit a quick keyboard shortcut, which brings up LaunchBar and then you type your keys and if the application shows up hit return or push to the down arrow and select what you want to launch. After selecting the thing a few time LaunchBar learns and moves your choice to the top of list.

So to launch I hit Command-Space and the last app I launch shows up, if I want to launch it, just hit enter and it launches.

Or more powerfully you type the initials of an app, and LaunchBar will give you a list, and you select what app you want.

If I want Word, I try Wo or MW.

Then select the App and return and it will learn your initials and move the app up the list and eventually to the top.

This way I can launch any application without ever touching the mouse, and this is HUGE! IT WILL SPEED UP EVERYTHING YOU DO ON THE COMPUTER OUTSIDE OF YOU EDITING OR GRAPHICS APPLICATION!
And Launchbar does so much more. You can do calculator functions, instant web searches, go to web sites, create e-mails from contacts, merge files, check your ClipBoard History, and it is all customizable.
LaunchBar is the so worth $29 or $49 for a family license. It speeds up everything I do on the computer and it can speed things up for you as well.

So Apple killed the iMac Pro, now it is all about seeing what video options M1 Macs have

 

So I got an iMac Pro because my old Mac Pro 4,1 died, and there was no new MacPro out as of yet. It was obviously a stop gap machine, and it’s only ugprade was removing the lowest multi-core version and an upgrade to the Radeon Pro Vega 64x 16 GB from the Vega 64 16GB, which is just a slight speed increase.

And the latest 27 inch iMac can in fact beat the performance for the iMac Pro. The top of the line can be upgraded to a 3.6GHz 10 Core Intel-Core i9 with turbo boost to 5.0GHZ, it can have up to 128GB of RAM, up to an 8TB internal SSD, an the top video card is a Radeo Pro 5700 XT  with 16GB of GDDR6 Memory. This machine should smash the 10 Core iMac Pro in performance, and the Xeon’s never really added anything to the Mac except multi-core and the ability to have dual processors. And you can even get the Matte finish from the MacPro displays for half the price, which is impressive, but they need a second display like that to match the price and look.

It is likely that the next M1 or it’s follow up chip will be an iMac, but the first M1 machines not only share video memory with the main memory, but also stop at 16GB of total RAM. And sure the performance of them has been impressive, but for heavy pro work Apple had better be doing some form of video card to really push the video end and GPU performance, and we have seen no sign of it, but I would hope that a high end iMac, MacBook Pro, and Mac Pro would have it to push the video performance.

Video editing software needs a separate GPU with it’s own memory, lets hope Apple agrees.

I can’t believe I didn’t know how to paste unformatted text until I read this post from OWC, I always just used TextEdit

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.

Pro Media Tools from Digital Rebellion is their tool for Media and Workflow Management

 

So I have been a user of the other Digital Rebellion tools, Post Haste, Preference Manager, and Pro Maintenance Tools, but I have never actually used it’s Pro Media Tools available for $99. It does have some tools that I would use on occasion if I had them.

Particularly it’s Batch File renamer with full support for Frame Numbers, it’s ability to manage markers, the ability to manage clup metadata, and especially it’s Timeline Tricks, where you can collapse tracks, remove disabled clips, strip filters and markers (this could be useful in emergencies and the collapse track would be quite useful at times. And it’s ability to scan for broadcast safe on files.

Again a batch of useful tools that if you need them it is good to know about them in the case that you do need them.

Pro Maintenance Tools from Digital Rebellion can help maintain, optimize and troubleshoot Premiere Pro, Avid Media Composer, Final Cut Pro X and and Final Cut Pro 7

 

So I have talked about Digital Rebellion before and Post Haste and Preference Manager, but they have 2 packages of programs to repair and I have been a user of Pro Maintenance Tools since Final Cut Pro 7.0.

This suite of tools has a tool to Analyze Crashes, Repair Corrupt Files in a project (or at least help you see which ones are corrupt), Look up error messages, Manage Plugins, Schedule clearing of caches and preferences and a plug in installer.

It has a huge amount of tools (though of course Post Haste and Preference Manager are free), and most you don’t need until you do. This has saved me on a few projects where some media got corrupted, so it is a great tool to have around just in case, or to get in an emergency.

Corrupt Clip Finder also has often shown me bad JPEG’s, though I have had the problems a lot less since I stopped using JPEG’s due to corruption issues.

If you are having issues the $129 is quite worth the price of admission.

Premiere Pro stability and compression, and why I don’t use JPEG images or MP3 audio in my projects

 

Stability. Stability seems to be the thing most people complain about with Premiere Pro. I see all the time people complaining about it crashing.

AVID of course is going to have more stability if you do it’s normal workflow of importing footage, because you are compressing into an AVID format and of course that is going to be more stable, AMA of course, using external formats in AVID was not every going to be as stable.

To keep Premiere Pro stable I try to go for less compression, and pick a format and stick with that. Most of my deliveries are ProRES HQ, and if that is the case I want my footage to be be ProRES because it is going to be less compressed than many other highly compressed formats, especially formats like H.264. This wouldn’t apply if I was using a RAW format like ProRES RAW or Blackmagic RAW, which I would use with Proxy’s to speed thing up (though I would use ProRES Proxy and not H.264 Proxys).

So before import, I like to recompress my heavily compressed footage to ProRES HQ (or straight ProRES if that is the delivery spec). Yes this of course takes more time, but I have found that the stability that it gives me means that I save time on the back end, so the up front time is certainly worth it. And I use Media Encoder to it instead of using Ingest in Premiere Pro.

With Ingest you can Transcode, create Proxies, Copy or Copy with Proxies, and it is a great workflow when it works, but I have had bad crashes that have screwed things up and not finish the import or transcode process, so I tend to do transcodes myself before I import them. And yes this means I can’t start working right away, but I think the lost time up front is saved at the end when you don’t have any export issues.

I will talk about the Proxy workflow in another post, but I tend to do that in the program, but let it do it on it’s own, not while continuing to work because of crashing issues I have had. Best to let the machine go overnight, and if you can check it in remotely all the better.

And my compression issues extend beyond just you video files.

Since my early days of editing on Final Cut Pro 4-7, there have been issues with JPG images. Sometimes they are fine, and sometimes they can stop an entire project from opening, and it can happen randomly after working fine. Bad things happen with JPG images so I do not import JPG images into my projects.

Before using a JPEG I convert it to another format. Now I have seen people complain about PNG images causing problems in project, though I haven’t had that problem. I tend to convert to PNG, though the less compressed the better. And if you want to go even better you can go TIFF files, but they can end up being absolutely huge.

To convert images in a batch I use the $39.95 GraphicConverter from Lemkesoft. 

I use the Convert And Modify command to convert my images from JPGS.

Setting Convert on the let, and PNG as the format (or TIFF if you would like). The folder with footage to covert is in the middle, and you select hte ones you want to convert, and the to folder is on the right, and you press start selected function.

I feel the same about Audio files, heavily compressed audio files like MP3 or M4A I convert to WAV files using Adobe Media Encoder.

And yes this is all in the “Assistant Editor Stage” before editing gets started. And the net result has been that Premiere Pro has been very stable for me. Sure sometimes I have issues, but since dealing with highly compressed footage, stills and audio before a project the program runs much more stable for me.

Honestly if you think about it, it is like using Premiere Pro more like AVID. You think of it as importing the footage to an AVID codec. And then everything is the same, and so will just run better.

And I often get A & B cameras that are different cameras, and thus different formats. Think about the computer having to uncompress different kinds of formats at once. Of course it is going to do better if everything is all one format.

And more compression means processing power, so the less compressed things are the less processing power you are using, and that can help with stability.

Everything you can do to make the whole thing run easier will mean less crashes and things working better.

Your GPU is very important with Adobe Premiere, so control your monitor resolution with SwitchResX to save video memory, especially on an iMac or iMac Pro

 

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 on Upgrading to Big Sur, all downsides except the Thunderbolt Hub support

  

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.

Stop mail spy pixel tracking on Mac Desktop in Apple Mail with this Plug In

 

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.