Apple releases Mountain Lion OS X 10.8 for Mac

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So Apple has released Mountain Lion OS X 10.8 via the Mac App store for $19.99! Sure are undercutting Microsoft there, and with a year between released they can really add in the near and the short term.

So far my favorite part if that Contacts has returned to a 3 pain view so you can see the groups and contacts at the same time as you could before lion. Still hate the B&W icons in the Finder Sidebar, and the stupidification of the OS (such as hiding the User/Library folder).

Also had some issues, lost the icons in the sidebar and had to dump the sidebar preferences to fix them. The finder also ground to a halt after the upgrade, but I fixed it with Diskwarrior. And I have had some scrolling issues where I would scroll and it would instantly jump back to the top. And Launchbar had to wait for the OS to re-index with Spotlight before it worked (wow, I can barely function without Launchbar at this point). Had to change the settings to allow all apps to launch, so I could install apps from anywhere to get everything working though.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 is unofficially supported in MacPro

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Tej’s Tech Blog has a post on installed an NVIDIA GTX 570 PC card into a MacPro and it seems to work except for EFI (so it goes straight to desktop or login screen, you don’t see the spinning ball at the start. Guess you can’t do safe mode or boot to another drive then from startup, though not positive on that).

You will have to do some Terminal tricks to get the Adobe suite to see it as compatible as the card is not listed for Mac, but it can be done.

This is great news. Wonder if NVIDIA is going towards one driver for all their cards, or if it means that Apple is planning to include NVIDIA if and when it ever updates the MacPro?

No matter what, more NVIDIA support for Macs is a good thing. And it is great that the new MacBook Pro and the MacBook Pro Retina are run by NVIDIA cards, as more CUDA support means more realtime with the Adobe Suite.

Biscardi Creative FCP to CS6 Part 3

Biscardi Creative has posted part 3 of it’s switch to CS6 from Final Cut Pro 7. A good read with interesting points.

•Because of Native editing, they their render time is basically down to realtime render, so a 30 minute show has around a 30 minute render! That is a huge change!

•It requires more setup before hand, and it is smart to organize everything before import.

•Still using FCP 7 for videotape ingest!

•Use Davinci Resolve for grading, though it does not support all the files that Premiere Pro does, so a flattened ProRes Quicktime file is created from final timeline and use resolve’s scene detect tool!

There is of course more, and this is a must read for switchers!

Netkas Forums got a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 working in a MacPro

Now this is some seriously exciting news at Hardmac, it seems the members at Netkas forums using the new mac NVIDIA drivers for the MacPro have managed to get an NVIDIA GeForve GTX 680 running in a MacPro.

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Now lets hope that Mountain Lion come with drivers and new cards are released, or are at least hackable to work, because I want a new video card in a big way!

Went to an Apple Store and checked out a MacBook Pro with Retina Display and it is awesome

I already have a the New iPad with Retina display and love it, and haven’t owned a Laptop in years (my last was the black plastic Mac Laptop, which was fantastic), and have been unpleased with the lac of NVIDIA cards in mac laptops to work with CUDA, but this answers that problem in spades.

And the screen is fantastic. Being able to switch to a 1920×1080 resolution for editing is fantastic, I could really use one of these. The screen is gorgeous and this is a powerful machine, just have to upgrade when you get it, as it is not user upgradeable, so spend more on the high end and the bigger hard drive and more RAM, so it would cost an arm and a leg. Still it would be worth it to have a portable editing machine this powerful!

I so want one, but can’t afford it, though I sure wish I could.

Oliver Peters at Digital Sky on using FCP X in a Production Environment

Oliver Peters at Digital Sky has an article on using Final Cut Pro X in a full production environment with clients in the bay for the first time. Now he seems positive on the experience, but to me it makes it sound even less ready for a production environment! First off he has to use Final Cut Pro 7 in many stages of the preparation for the project, as FCP X seems less well suited for a project that ever needs to be handed off or moved and doesn’t actually modify the original files for things like changing reel numbers.

Now the metadata features do sound great for finding files once you have spent the time to organize, but I have never had an issue with organization once I have a project ready to edit.

And things like this give me even greater pause.

Due to the “rubbery-ness” of the magnetic timeline, it did appear that removing transitions at the beginning and end of spots and removing the slomo clips caused some shifting of the spots within this string of six spots on a single Project timeline. No sync issues, but definitely not as locked into position as with an FCP 7 timeline.

This program still is not even close to ready for primetime, and I am not sure it ever will be. I have said it before, but if they had added some of these features onto a 64 Bit Final Cut Pro 8, people would love it, but by taking so much away, and trying to force people to edit in a very strict way they have shown how little they understand of the world of editing, where no 2 editors do things the same exact way!