Larry Jordan on why Final Cut Pro 7 editors should consider Adobe Premiere Pro CC and some of my thoughts

Larry Jordan has a very informative and in depth article on why Final Cut Pro 7 Editors should consider Premiere Pro.

I long ago made the switch on my personal system, and am starting to see companies move away from Final Cut Pro 7.

I know that Trailer Park made the move fully to AVID Media Composer for all of it’s bays, but they have graphics departments, so you basically are only cutting graphics into your edit there. And I have heard rumored that it is the studios forcing many companies to move to AVID. I actually wonder if they are getting kickbacks or if it is just older people more familiar with AVID? It is a rock solid system, but it seems so dated compared to Premiere Pro which I would say is a much more modern editing software.

As for Direct Response Beach Body made the move to Premiere Pro, which to me only makes sense for Graphics Heavy projects. Especially with a fast video card.

An argument against Xeon Processors, QuickSync and H.264 Compression

Mac Performance Guide has a new test showing a MacBook Pro vs a MacPro doing h.264 encoding. The MacPro has a consumer CPU which has QuickSync. Now you have to do specific encoder settings to get this result, but it clearly shows the MacPro being thoroughly beat by the MacBookPro!

It is pretty idiotic that Intel would actual have better features in their consumer chips than their much more expensive professional Xeon chips! Really for most uses the Xeon is really best because you can have more cores and you can have dual processors, but since you can get higher core i7 chips now, maybe a hackintosh with a Core i7 would be better in many circumstances!

Apple kills Aperture, really getting out of Pro Apps

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The Loop has the story.
Since iPhoto is being replaced with Photos in Yosemite, they are killing Aperture. Looks like Adobe Lightroom (always the better program) is the only solution, but it loses the great integration that iPhoto had with Aperture.
Seems pros have less to trust in Apple. Is Logic next to go? Will Apple kill FCP X after that? I wouldn’t mind that, but for a company that has killed so many great Pro Apps, they are making less trust for Pro users. They already killed Shake and Final Cut Pro 7. What is next?
I love Apple computers and OS X, but I don’t trust them. The new MacPro is powerful, but not expandable enough. Are they pushing pros to Windows? Or do they want us to make Hackintoshes?

iCloud iOS bookmarks are messed up again

Well it seems to have happened again. My iOS Bookmarks are totally screwed up again, and I can’t seem to get them to clear up.

I will explain my situation again, which has changed slightly. I run Firefox as my primary browser (used to be Chrome, but I am starting to not feel comfortable with Google having dominion over everything I do on the web), but I still use Chrome for some things. To keep my Bookmarks in sync I run Xmarks, and to get my bookmarks on iOS I run Xmarks for Safari, but it doesn’t seem to do the trick.

Even though my bookmarks on my Mac in Safari match my bookmarks in both Firefox and Chrome, this doesn’t seem to make it over to my iOS devices.

In the past I have run Chrome in Windows 8.1 in Parallels. I would download the latest bookmarks with Xmarks, and the Chrome iCloud plug in seemed to overwrite the iCloud bookmarks with clean ones, but this doesn’t seem to be working currently.

I just wish Apple would go back to allowing direct bookmark overwrite via iTunes. They used to allow this, and have gone back to allowing it for Contacts and Calendars, but not for Bookmarks! If they aren’t going to give you settings to overwrite things on iCloud, they need to at least let you just overwrite from your computer!

PLEASE APPLE, LET ME OVERWRITE BOOKMARKS WITH MY COMPUTER! PLEASE!!!!

Looks like a Bluetooth LE Adapter will not enable handoff in older Macs

MacRumors is reporting that Bluetooth LE Adapters do not add Handoff support to older Macs.

If this happens in the final release (which seems likely) it is really shitty of Apple, and just a way of trying to get users who want the feature to buy new Macs.

Especially annoying when something like the IOGEAR Bluetooth 4.0 USB Micro Adapter adds full Bluetooth LE support out of the box without software. So it looks like it is a physical lockout on the part of Apple on older machines instead of a technical issue.

Hopefully if it is the case someone will release a 3rd party hack that enables this very cool feature.

What Machines will OS X Yosemite’s Handoff work on?

Macgasm has a chart, and it shows may users won’t be happy.

Handoff is the very cool new feature where with OS X Yosemite, you will be able to hand off things from iOS to your Mac, such as composing an e-mail or looking at a web page. And even answer phone calls from your cell phone via your mac and it’s microphones.

That’s a no for non 2013 MacPro’s. Hopefully a 3rd Party bluetooth 4.9 adapter will solve that (or some 3rd party software), as it shouldn’t matter if it is built in or via a 3rd party adapter. Or at least we can hope!

LaunchBar 6 has been released by Objective Development

Objective Development has updated their awesome all purpose launch for Mac OS X to version 6. This is an awesome program that allows you to launch applications or documents using keyboard shortcuts, but is smart and learns your shortcuts so you can quickly launch apps or do things on the computer with a few simple keystrokes. And you can do custom keyboard shortcuts for different thing, even launching an e-mail addressed to a specific person. It is $29 for a single user or $48 for a 5 user Family License.

The new version adds a new interface and themes, and is now extensible. You can do live searches of Google, Wikipedia, DuckDuckGo or dict.cc. It adds information browsing to items by hitting shift and the right arrow.

Personally I have replaced the command-space spotlight search with Launchbar (moving spotlight to ctr-space), and can hit a few simple keys to launch apps. Such as command-space ap to launch adobe photoshop. or command space apr to launch adobe premiere. It is an amazingly fast and versatile app.

Honestly it has so many features that I don’t even know, but is worth it just for it’s launching features. It will speed up your computer usage so much. Honestly I miss it whenever I am on a clients computer as it really speeds everything up. This is the power user app that you should really check out.

XtraFinder for OS X

XtraFinder

I recently discovered Tran Ky Nam’s XtraFinder for OS X.

It is a program that adds extra abilities to the OS X finder. It is intended to add tabs and control tabs within the finder, but since this has been added to Mavericks, it still has many other cool features.

Some of my favorites are recoloring the Finder Sidebar Icons, which I think makes them much easier to see.

ColoredSidebar

Another really cool feature is adding back the full colored label to labels in OS X. Mavericks had changed this behavior to tags, so that there is only a tiny colored dot, but you can turn back on full colored tags which I think makes them much easier to spot.

FinderLabels

You can also add items to finder menus:

AddItemsToFinderMenus

Here is show hidden items:

ShowHiddenItems

And the ability to launch an application as root!

LaunchAsRoot

Overall a very cool finder extension, especially for the power user!

The Verge on the 22 most important things Apple Announced at the WWDC

The Verge has an excellent look at the 22 biggest things Apple announced at this years World Wide Developer Conference for OS 10.10 and iOS 8.

Still I was surprised not to see any big new product announcement. Not that what they announced wasn’t cool, but a big new product announcement would certainly have driven up Apple’s stock prices. Be it the iWatch, some home automation device, a new Apple TV with apps, or a MacPro with real expansion and NVIDIA graphics cards (HA, never happen, but one can dream). Something would have been great, and it will continue the talk that Tim Cook can’t innovate until something new does get announced.

Still new features do sound great, especially extensibility in iOS. Lets hope that we can now set other apps as defaults, like you will be able to with 3rd party keyboards!

Oliver Peters at Digitalfilms has a great comparison of AVID Symphony, Adobe SpeedGrade, Davinci Resolve and Apple Color and my thoughts

Oliver Peters has posted an article with a great comparison of AVID Symphony, Adobe SpeedGrade, Davinci Resolve and Apple Color.

Personally I have been spending a lot of time with Davinci Resolve of late. With a proper video card it is really an awesome program, and is certainly my current choice for color correction. It is fast and easy to use and does a very good job.

The other interest is SpeedGrade which I am learning, mainly because of it’s ability to roundtrip a grade to Premiere Pro and put it on clips as a single filter on each clip. A very cool feature, but the program needs some work before it can really compete with Resolve. First off it needs support for Black Magic cards instead of just AJA cards. If Premiere Pro can do it, Resolve needs to do it. And second it really does need curves. Curves are such a powerful color correction method that many have come to rely on, and not having them seems a huge failing. Other issues I have are it’s abilities with multitrack video are limited, and I have just gotten so used to nodal vs layer based correcting, though that is certainly not going to change. SpeedGrade is powerful and does work well with Premiere, but needs to get some updates to be able to really rival Davinci even with it’s ability export it’s grades as color correction filters into Premiere.