Premiere Pro Ingest is broken, Media Encoder keeps freezing and breaking the process

So I am running Premiere Pro CC 2018 12.1.1 and Adobe Media Encoder CC 2018 12.1.1.12 on a macOS Sierra 10.12.6 with a MacPro 5,1 dual 6 core 3.06 GHZ with 32 GB of RAM and and a GTX 97- 4096 MB mac flashed. I am running the latest CUDA 387.178 with NVIDIA Web Driver 378.06.25f03 and am using CUDA renderer. I am using UHD 29.97 footage from a Canon C300 in MXF format and converting it to ProRES on Ingest from Media Browser.

I am importing the footage from within Media Browser in premiere and it sends the footage to Media Encoder to convert it. The problem I am having is that Media Encoder keeps freezing and giving me the app “not responding” message. And if you force quit media encoder all the encodes are gone, and I have to delete the footage I imported and re-import all the footage into premiere to get the ingest going again. This is super frustrating. At least if I bring clips into media encoder myself and I have to force quit it, when I come back all the encodes are still in Media Encoder (sure some may have all compressed but that is an easy fix, just delete the encodes that already happened), it seems that Ingest can’t deal with any component breaking down, and it keeps breaking down for me.

It seems that the ingest only works if everything is working correctly, and it has not been working right, so as soon as you force media encoder to quit the Ingest is finished.

Honestly there should be a way to restart the conversions from within Premiere (not just creating proxys, but an actual ingest conversion). And it would be great if the ingest survived crashes, by leaving all the convertions within media encoder even after a crash so you could continue it later if something fails.

I know I can just do the conversion straight in Media Encoder (which I am doing now, but still getting not responding, but at least I can force quit and the conversions are still there and I can just delete the completed ones), but I was hoping to do the Ingest Process, but it does not seem to be working at all well for me.

And yes I know that Premiere can play back the MXF footage, but I have much better playback of the 4K footage once it is converted to ProRES.

I also posted this on the adobe forums, but don’t expect to get an answer that will fix the issue other than doing what I am doing and doing the conversions in Media Encoder directly. I just can’t believe how broken the ingest feature is that it can’t handle errors within Creative Cloud. It just expects that it will work, and it is not doing that for me.

Apple hosts WWDC 2018 and no new Hardware and nothing on MacPro

You can go to Apple and and see the new features announced for iOS, MacOS, AppleTV OS and Apple Watch OS. And things do look good, but there was no new hardware announcements at all. And especially no mention of the new MacPro. This is Apple flipping the bird at Pro users. As was all the talk of egpu support (which doesn’t support NVIDIA which most pros want).

Does this mean the MacPro won’t even be shown off until 2019? And if so WTF! And no mention if the next os will still support the MacPro 5,1! This is so insulting. Will pros be kicked off their machines with no sign of what the new pro machine will be?

I mean I like some of what was announced. The new OS sounds good, but can I run it?

Or should I have moved to Windows ages ago?

Apple has created a new video fromat, Apple ProRes RAW

Apple has created a new video format, Apple ProRES RAW and you can check out the White Paper here. They claim it will render 6.3 times faster than red .r3d format. It will be smaller file size than Apple Pro Res 4444. It will soon work with the DJI Xenmuse X7. And the Atomos Sumo 19 and the Shogun Inferno will support it, as well as the Panasonic EVA1 and the Varicam LT. It will allow for tweaking of the ISO and color balance in post.

I would be more impressed if they brought back ProRes Support for Windows, as without that it just can’t be a ubiquitous format.

Hopefully Adobe and AVID will support it soon.

it ships on April 9th with Final Cut Pro X 10.4.1.

So the next Apple Mac Pro is a 2019 product, you have to be kidding me?

So Matthew Panzarino from TechCrunch has had another meeting with Apple about Pro Machines, a year after their last roundtable when they announced the iMac Pro. It seems this is meant to assuage fears of the pro community and show that Apple is now focusing it’s attention on Pros and building a modular Mac Pro to work for them, that won’t appear until 2019 (Likely end of December just like the iMac Pro which means almost another 3 years wait from the initial announcement and almost 2 years from now).

OK it is good that Apple has hired pros to come in and work with them on projects and help shape the future of all Mac Pro products, and they claim to be working with 3rd party developers and not just apple products, though it sounds like Panzarino only saw Apple Logic and Apple Final Cut Pro X edit bays. And what really scares me is the modularity seems to be things like the external eGPU’s for Laptops, and using multiple iPad Pros with an iMac Pro as control surfaces. None of these are bad things, but they are not PCI slot rich MacPro’s that can use off the shelf PC Cards to expand and enhance the mac, and Thunderbolt is not ever going to be as fast as the fastest PCI slots.

And honestly if Apple is so into working with 3rd parties to make their products work, how about working with NVIDIA to include their Web Drivers in their system updates? Many of us struggling Mac Pro users are using the most powerful modern video cards in our old Cheese Grater Mac Pro’s and that means using NVIDIA cards. And while with some system updates have not required me to swap back to my old Apple flashed video card, most of them do. So I now dread system updates. Not because they are undoable, but because they take me so long to have to swap out my video card and run the update and then upgrade NVIDIA’s drivers, before I swap back to my old video card. And it never goes perfectly, and always takes hours. If you want to care about Pro users, help us NVIDIA users out!

Also Final Cut Pro X was my final straw in trusting Apple Pro software. I bought it and it just didn’t work for me at all. It forced an entirely new way of editing and seemed to only work with that one workflow. While with AVID and Premiere Pro every editor has their own methodology that they use, and that is how Editors like it, not being forced to work one way and one way only with a completely uncontrollable timeline. And Apple has killed so much great pro software. Final Cut Pro 7. Shake. Color. Aperature. I just don’t trust them anymore. And I almost wish they would get out of Pro Software completely and just work with AVID and ADOBE to make their software work better. Now they claim to be working with them in this article, but it doesn’t sound like they have AVID and Premiere Pro edit bays at Apple for their pros they have hired. And who are these pros? I would love to know. And I would love to hear them talk a bit, not just some tech writers.

I have said it before and I will say it again. I want the Cheese Grater Mac Pro upgraded with modern technology! Yes it should include Thunderbolt so it can be modular and use eGPU’s if I want to, but I want to use off the shelf PCI cards to upgrade it. And I want internal storage! And not just one hard drive, multiple hard drives. And hell an attachable RAID that takes drives directly without a sled would not be horrible, but I can always get an external. All this modular talk scares me.

The more I hear the more scared I get that I will end up replacing my aging MacPro with a Windows Box. And I know Windows has gotten better (I have a Surface Pro 3), but I still don’t like using it like I use a Mac. I am just worried that all this modularity talk sounds more and more like something like the Trashcan macpro that just isn’t what people want, as making a new cheesegrater should not take 2 years! It sounds like they are trying too hard. And when Apple tries too hard we get things like the Trashcan or the Mac Book Pro with weird ass touch strip instead of the touch screen that everyone actually wants.

Who is Apple talking too? Who have they hired? The high end people working big movies like those mentioned, are not working on their own gear. They have rental gear, or working at a company. What about us Editors who work on our own gear? Or small companies with a few Mac Pros? Are they in the mix and talking to Apple?

Or even worse maybe the Apple making it’s own Chips rumors is true, and they are waiting for that. Which would be a disaster. Making it harder to maintain Mac and Windows versions.

And what happens if my Mac Pro finally kicks the bucket before then? I have already replaced a -power supply. I am not moving to an iMac, so that will likely mean I move off the Mac completely.

Apple as a Pro users I am well and truly scared, and if you cared you would be working faster, and not taking 3 years to show a machine that might not work at all for me and might finally drive me well and completely to windows.

It’s December, where is the iMac Pro? And this doesn’t bode well for the Mac Pro!

So after being announced 6 months ago, the iMac Pro is said to be coming out in December. Well it is December 4th and there is no more word on it. In fact we still don’t know any real tech specs on the speed of processors or the like. And we are right at the end of the fiscal year, so if it doesn’t make it out this year, people just might hold off. After all the rumors seem to point to the fact that the processor speed will in fact be much slower than the current iMac 5K, so only being faster in apps that make heavy use of multi-core and faster graphics cards.

And I have to be honest this makes me worry more for the next “modular” MacPro. What the hell is taking so long? I get that the iMac had to have some heavy engineering to fit pro components into the iMac frame (though why it couldn’t have been bigger and easier to clean out I just don’t know). With the MacPro the last time Apple spent so much time on thinking they knew what people wanted and needed we got the un-expandable trashcan which was a disaster. I don’t want Apple to re-invent the wheel here, I want a cheese grater mac with new technology including thunderbolt. And standard off the shelf PCI expansion with USB 3.1. I don’t need it to be Modular, it doesn’t need to re-invent anything. In fact I don’t want it to.

Hell I would go for a bigger version of the cheese grater, with more PCI slots and more RAM slots and more hard drive slots. It could have built in raid with a chasis-less housing for hard drives.

The thing is if it was going to be that it wouldn’t have needed to take 6 months. It could have been done and released by now if that was the case. Apple is trying to come up with something new again, and that scares me.

I had been on the edge of buying a PC to replace my MacPro 4,1, but the announcement gave me hope that my next computer could be a MacPro instead of a Windows Machine, but no word on the MacPro and no word even on the iMac Pro gives me pause.

I don’t think Apple really gets the pro market, and I don’t think they care about it. It is too small of a market (even though it is the market that saved them in the dark years), but they used to understand that it was the pro market’s coolness that trickled down and made people use Macs at home. Now they will string us along and give us something new that we really don’t want. And I am scared that my MacPro may be the last Mac I ever own.

Apple releases iTunes downgrade to return App Management for iOS

Since Apple released itubes 12.7 they removed both App management and Ring Ztone management from itunes completely. Well because of complaints Apple has now released iTunes 12.6.3 which features app management, of course once you install it you will no longer get notices for new versions of iTunes and it will eventually break.

Apple should just admit they were wrong and either put the functionskity back or make a new app that has just iOS management.

Apple Giveth and Apple Taketh Away. Taking away ringtone support from iTunes 12.7.

So Apple has released iTunes 12.7 and after years of people complaining have removed some parts of itunes to relieve all it’s complaints of bloatware.

They have removed the iOS App store and the Ringtone manager completely from iTunes.

Unfortunately there is no way to now organize or control your ringtones from within iTunes. You can manually drag ringtones to your phone with iTunes, but they have removed the sync feature. This is a feature I used all the time, and this is just frustrating. I make my own ringtones, as I don’t want to pay Apple for them, but they obviously just want me to buy ringtones from them.

Of course I still want custom Ringtones. Luckily the latest version of Rogue Amoeba’s Fission has updated Ringtone support, that saves the files locally (since it can no longer install them) and you can manually install them using iTunes.

Of course there is the problem of getting the old Ringtones out, but luckily I have Ecamm’s PhoneView, which I could pull the ringtones back out to my Mac (as well as backup texts and messages and many other thing).

I hate how Apple has a propensity to remove features that they no longer care about, but many people use all the time and have been using for years!

And I am not looking forward to when I get my next phone and have to re-install all apps via download instead of directly from my Mac!

AMD Officially announces the Vega 56 and 64, shedding light on the graphics of the iMac Pro

Apple Insider has a report on the newly announced AMD Vega 56, 64 and 64 Liquid Cooled video cards, which will be featured in the new iMac Pro.

They sound powerful, though still much of the stuff where they blow NVIDIA out of the water is software specifically designed for AMD, so we shall see. I would still rather have an NVIDIA option.

Intel launches new Xeon’s, likely what will be in new MacPro

Intel is launching a new series of scalable Xeon processors. They have a new mesh architecture which will make them more optimized. They all can run dual processor from Bronze  with 8 cores at 1.7 GHz, silver with 12 cores at 2.2 GHz, gold can run up to 4 processors with 14 cores at 3.6 GHz or 22 cores at 3.4 GHz and Platinum with 28 cores at 3.6 GHz and support for 8 CPU’s.

I bet the 1.7 is too slow, but we could see the 2.2 GHz and up in a new MacPro though I doubt they have more than dual CPU options. These are certainly not the processors in the iMac Pro though.

These Skylake Xeons should have a 1.65 times performance boost over the current Broadwell Xeon’s which likely will be in the iMac Pro.

Let’s hope the new Mac Pro really is a great machine. We all just want the cheese grater though and not some design wonder.

If Apple really wants to support Pros they should make High Sierra compatible with MacPro 4,1’s!

So Apple showed off their next OS High Sierra today at WWDC, with Metal 2 for more graphics acceleration.

Well if they want to prove that they are supporting Pro users as they make a new Mac Pro and work on their iMac Pro, they should re-open the os to 4,1 MacPro’s and continue to support 5,1’s until the new models come out. They killed 4,1 support with Sierra (though users can hack their 4,1’s to becone 5,1’s but it is not officially supported!

The new iMac Pro looks amazing, but I still don’t want an all in one, get that new Mac Pro out soon!

EDIT: So they will continue to support the 5,1 but they should expand their support back as a sign of goodwill to Pro Users!