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.

Using a Quo Computer to run Final Cut Pro 7

I have been considering building a hackintosh to replace my venerable 4,1 Mac Pro for some time. Either that or even moving to Windows, because the new MacPro does not seem like a viable replacement. It just isn’t expandable enough, and I can’t use NVIDIA graphics cards which are key to so many high end graphics programs. I don’t want to leave Mac, but I want NVIDIA and more expandability, and more internal storage.

Well one of the companies I work for picked up a Quo Computer to run as a Mac for editing with Final Cut Pro 7 (and we will be testing it on Premiere Pro on the job starting now). If you don’t know about Quo, they started as a Kickstarter Campaign to make a Hackintosh computer that can be legally sold as they don’t sell or install OS X for you, but the motherboard is built with many standard Mac components to make it the most compatible Hackintosh board out there. It is a Micro-ATX motherboard, so it is limited in PCI slots, but does have built in capabilities for Firewire 800, USB 3 and Thunderbolt. It is an older board design, so does not use the latest Haswell processors, but is still quite adequate for using Final Cut Pro 7.

There is a great article on the systems over at TechSpot, that is worth checking out.

This is is how it shows up in About this Mac.

This version includes an SSD for startup, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 for Graphics, and 3 internal Drive bays. It has USB 3 on the back as well as USB 2, Ethernet, 1 Thunberbolt and a Firewire 400 port. On the breakout in Front it has 2 USB 2, 2 audio ports, another Firewire 400 and an ESATA that is not hooked up. Unfortunately though it is on the motherboard there are no Firewire 800 ports (it really needs a custom breakout in front with USB 3 and Firewire 800) which can be a bottleneck when you have a ton of Firewire 800 drives laying around!

We tried a Thunderbolt to Firewire adapter, but didn’t realize it is not hot swappable, so it must be attached when the computer turns on to work, which is really inconvenient for external drives. No hot swap with Thunberbolt. Yuck!

Also the PCI Slots are a little spare because of the size of the board, it has 1 PCI2x16, 1 PCIx8 and a couple of PCIe x1 for USB 4 and Wifi cards, which are used up. So with a single graphics card, you get one slot, so you might want to consider a USB 3 or Thunderbolt video in and out card, though we are running an Intensity Pro, filling our single expansion slot.

Overall I have to say the machine is pretty kick ass. It seems rock solid going through a the edit and graphics on a 28:30 Direct Response Infomercial with no problems whatsoever. We had a little scare when out MacPro went down and we had to put an ATTO SAS card into the machine, and once installed it showed command line before boot, but it booted fine.

The only complaint, other then the lack of Firewire 800 ports, and an SATA slot that is not connected, is that the support from Quo is not the best. They don’t get back to you too quickly, which is really a shame. Honestly they could be really filling the niche left for expandable Macs. And if they made a full ATX Haswell board, they could really take over the high end Mac Market, especially as the machines are considerably less expensive than a new MacPro Trashcan!

Honestly this thing works so well I am much less worried about Hackintosh Machines, now if only we can guarantee that NVIDIA cards will still work even without a machine to install them into in Apple’s lineup of machines!

Chris Hocking at Late Nite Films on Final Cut Pro X, Premiere Pro CC and Avid Media Composer

Chris Hocking at Late Nite Films has an awesome article, where he goes into not only the best things about AVID and Premiere Pro, but also his first attempt at using FCP X. And his is the first article that makes me interested in taking a look again at FCP X, though maybe once they fix audio issues.

And I still say that for graphics heavy projects, even longform (at least 28:30 Direct Response), I think Premiere Pro with a proper video card can easily outdo AVID, which is still archaic in how it deals with Alphas (and importing them) even if it is the king of media management. And those same projects would be a mess in FCP X without the ability to have tracks for organization.

I mean my current sequence has 18 tracks of video going all organized into different layers.

Larry Jordan compares Apple Compressor 4.1 to Adobe Media Encorder CC

Larry Jordan did an extensive comparison of the latest Apple Compressor to Adobe Media Encoder.

He ran the tests twice, as at first he used default settings and didn’t check image quality, but his seconds test are more equivalent, and the results surprised me as I gave up on Compressor a long time ago.

Basically it looks like for Single Pass encoding Compressor is faster, but for Multi-Pass (though it defaults to single pass) or resized compressing Media Encoder is faster, and it looks better at lower file sizes, though Compressor has more ability to customize settings.

The article is certainly worth a read, especially for all those who do a lot of compression.