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.

Problems with OWC ThunderBay 4 and AVID Media Composer

 OK so if you saw my last post, I have been issues with my ThunderBay 4 with Raid 5 via full SoftRaid from the awesome OWC. This is different from the discs ejecting post and has to do with AVID Media Composer.Because I am on Catalina 10.15.6 on my iMac Pro with 3GHZ 10 Core, with 64 GB of Memory and a Radeon Pro Vega 64x 16 GB I am running Media Composer 2020.8.0.55115.0. I have actually been running some assistant editor training courses, as I have never used Script Sync and wanted to learn all the ins and out. Anyway, the course came with a project and it's own media.I put the media on my Raid, in an Avid MediaFiles:MXF:1 folder. And when I opened the project which was also on the raid everything is online. The weirdness is when I go to the Media Creation tool and try and select the raid for the render files, and it just doesn't show up. It is like the drive doesn't exist, and yes I have tried going to the console and typing alldrives, but it has made no difference.Now I did find this thread on the AVID forum, which is about this happening with G-SPEED raids, but this is an OWC RAID, but the issue seems to be longstanding and continues.I have contacted OWC support and will see what they have to say, but I think it is an AVID issue, and it looks like it hasn't been fixed in a very long time.Super Frustrating!**I have put a case in with AVID as well as I think this is an AVID issue and the same as the G-Speed issue in the thread I linked to. We shall see if they do anything about it, but it is something that needs to be looked into.

AVID bug stopping MacPro’s from rebooting turns out to be Chrome

So news reports have been popping up that 2013 MacPro’s running AVID Media Composer have been not restarting just going black. And the only fix was to re-install the Mac OS to get the system running again. Reports seemed to mostly focus on 2013 MacPro’s but from many rental houses, but also sone other macs were affected. It seemed to be that the user folder was having it’s permissions changed from admin to a normal user.Well it seems that issue was not caused by Media Composer per se. In fact, according to ProVideoCoalition and Engadget it is a Chrome update that is screwing up the user folder. And it is only on macs that have System Integrity Protection (SIP) disabled. This means that in fact AVID is partially responsible, since AVID requires SIP to be turned off so it can get direct access to a Mac’s Graphic Systems. Of course neither Final Cut or Premiere or DaVinci require this, but AVID does.AVID needs to fix this or work with Apple, because such an expensive and important software shouldn’t require you to lower your Macs defenses. And of course a Company as big as Google should know better as well, but why would they test with SIP disabled? I mean now they need to, but it is not something you would normally test for.

Macnn Feature Thief article on Final Cut Pro, iMovie and iDVD

William Gallagher and Charles Martin have an interesting article on Apple and it's changes to it's video lineup. It goes into iMovie, Final Cut Pro and iDVD, and how Apple upgraded the first 2 with less features, but slowly made better versions.My biggest complaint with the article would be on who they polled as they say that most of the people who were angry over Apple's switch from Final Cut Pro 7 to Final Cut Pro X have moved back X (with a cursory mention of Premiere Pro as an alternative).Personally being a professional editor, I did give the initial Final Cut Pro X a try, and hated it. And got a refund and have not gone back. There are some features that I do really like in X (especially it's handling of Meta Data), but since I edit complicated graphics heavy shows, it is the timeline that is the deal breaker for me, and it is the fundamental feature of X, so no matter how many updates they do, the timeline is too unorganized and broken for it to make sense for a 15 track highly organized video project.And of all the editors that I know, I have only heard of one that has gone back to X and really likes it now. And while features are starting to make their move to Premiere Pro, there have only been a few instances I have heard of big houses moving to X. Most of the big houses I know that were basically all Final Cut Pro have moved to AVID at the studios insistence (kick backs?!??!), while most commercial houses have moved to Premiere Pro for it's fidelity with graphics.I just don't see Final Cut Pro X as a viable solution, and with Apple's history of dropping software, I don't trust Apple to keep it going anyway!

AVID will once again be releasing a free version of Media Composer

It is called AVID Media Composer FIRST, and will be heavily feature limited. Including only being able to save a limited number of saves and those saves can only be made to the cloud, and you can pay for more space.It is a good idea for AVID to do for sure, and I would like to see Adobe do it with Premiere Elements at least.

AVID Announced 4K and Resolution Independence at IBC

Scott Simmons at the Pro Video Coalition has the story. 4K, resolution independence, a new compression format DNxHR, LUTs as timeline effects, and the ability export projects as DPX Also coming soon is Background Rendering, Favorite Bins and Search Across Bins for Markers.The funny part being you need a third party video card to do 2K or 4K, since no AVID hardware can do that (and honestly they should move software only and work more with AJA, BlackMagic and Matrox)And it is a good thing too. With Adobe offering up Updates in their Creative Cloud very quickly, and it is great to see AVID finally getting on that bandwagon, which they should since they are now subscription based as well.

AVID Media Composer 8.1 Update

AVID Blogs has the news on AVID releasing the 8.1 update to Media Composer. This is the first update since releasing their subscription model, and has come fairly quickly. Lets hope AVID keeps moving this quickly with updates. This was what I was worried about as AVID usually has a fairly slow update cycle.

PVC on latest version of AVID Media Composer

Scott Simmons at the Pro Video Coalition has a great article on the latest version of AVID Media Composer that has just been released.This is made mainly for the subscription model that AVID has moved to, but as a bonus they are letting existing users sign up for $299 a year for the support version which includes updates, and you can sign up for a year to get the latest versions at least through 2014, then it goes up to $1299 a year for the subscription with support.This means for $299 you can get a year of updates for your current version, and hopefully get the next version of the software as well.

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.