Pro Media Tools from Digital Rebellion is their tool for Media and Workflow Management

 

So I have been a user of the other Digital Rebellion tools, Post Haste, Preference Manager, and Pro Maintenance Tools, but I have never actually used it’s Pro Media Tools available for $99. It does have some tools that I would use on occasion if I had them.

Particularly it’s Batch File renamer with full support for Frame Numbers, it’s ability to manage markers, the ability to manage clup metadata, and especially it’s Timeline Tricks, where you can collapse tracks, remove disabled clips, strip filters and markers (this could be useful in emergencies and the collapse track would be quite useful at times. And it’s ability to scan for broadcast safe on files.

Again a batch of useful tools that if you need them it is good to know about them in the case that you do need them.

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.

Premiere Pro stability and compression, and why I don’t use JPEG images or MP3 audio in my projects

 

Stability. Stability seems to be the thing most people complain about with Premiere Pro. I see all the time people complaining about it crashing.

AVID of course is going to have more stability if you do it’s normal workflow of importing footage, because you are compressing into an AVID format and of course that is going to be more stable, AMA of course, using external formats in AVID was not every going to be as stable.

To keep Premiere Pro stable I try to go for less compression, and pick a format and stick with that. Most of my deliveries are ProRES HQ, and if that is the case I want my footage to be be ProRES because it is going to be less compressed than many other highly compressed formats, especially formats like H.264. This wouldn’t apply if I was using a RAW format like ProRES RAW or Blackmagic RAW, which I would use with Proxy’s to speed thing up (though I would use ProRES Proxy and not H.264 Proxys).

So before import, I like to recompress my heavily compressed footage to ProRES HQ (or straight ProRES if that is the delivery spec). Yes this of course takes more time, but I have found that the stability that it gives me means that I save time on the back end, so the up front time is certainly worth it. And I use Media Encoder to it instead of using Ingest in Premiere Pro.

With Ingest you can Transcode, create Proxies, Copy or Copy with Proxies, and it is a great workflow when it works, but I have had bad crashes that have screwed things up and not finish the import or transcode process, so I tend to do transcodes myself before I import them. And yes this means I can’t start working right away, but I think the lost time up front is saved at the end when you don’t have any export issues.

I will talk about the Proxy workflow in another post, but I tend to do that in the program, but let it do it on it’s own, not while continuing to work because of crashing issues I have had. Best to let the machine go overnight, and if you can check it in remotely all the better.

And my compression issues extend beyond just you video files.

Since my early days of editing on Final Cut Pro 4-7, there have been issues with JPG images. Sometimes they are fine, and sometimes they can stop an entire project from opening, and it can happen randomly after working fine. Bad things happen with JPG images so I do not import JPG images into my projects.

Before using a JPEG I convert it to another format. Now I have seen people complain about PNG images causing problems in project, though I haven’t had that problem. I tend to convert to PNG, though the less compressed the better. And if you want to go even better you can go TIFF files, but they can end up being absolutely huge.

To convert images in a batch I use the $39.95 GraphicConverter from Lemkesoft. 

I use the Convert And Modify command to convert my images from JPGS.

Setting Convert on the let, and PNG as the format (or TIFF if you would like). The folder with footage to covert is in the middle, and you select hte ones you want to convert, and the to folder is on the right, and you press start selected function.

I feel the same about Audio files, heavily compressed audio files like MP3 or M4A I convert to WAV files using Adobe Media Encoder.

And yes this is all in the “Assistant Editor Stage” before editing gets started. And the net result has been that Premiere Pro has been very stable for me. Sure sometimes I have issues, but since dealing with highly compressed footage, stills and audio before a project the program runs much more stable for me.

Honestly if you think about it, it is like using Premiere Pro more like AVID. You think of it as importing the footage to an AVID codec. And then everything is the same, and so will just run better.

And I often get A & B cameras that are different cameras, and thus different formats. Think about the computer having to uncompress different kinds of formats at once. Of course it is going to do better if everything is all one format.

And more compression means processing power, so the less compressed things are the less processing power you are using, and that can help with stability.

Everything you can do to make the whole thing run easier will mean less crashes and things working better.

Your GPU is very important with Adobe Premiere, so control your monitor resolution with SwitchResX to save video memory, especially on an iMac or iMac Pro

 

When my MacPro 4,1 finally kicked the bucket I was devastated, especially since the new MacPro wasn’t out yet, and I needed a machine to edit on. The solution was the very powerful iMac Pro with the Radeon Pro Vega 64X 16GB. Now that blew my old video card out of the water, but video editing apps can use every bit of power you have and more, so you want to save as much video processing power as you can.

The problem is that the default settings or even scaled settings on an iMac Pro or even an iMac are made to make the screen look amazing, not save on video memory, and for a long time the OS X control panels have removed the important statistics on the display control panel.

Now if you hover over the choices it tells you what resolution it is like and that scaled resolutions might affect performance, but they don’t tell you what the default resolution is actually doing.

This is where the awesome SwitchResX comes in. The app is $16, or $250 for a site license. It takes a little playing to get it all set up nicely (especially turning off all the resolutions that you don’t want).

It runs in your menu bar, and you can customize to remove all the resolutions you don’t want, but when you go into the iMac Pro or iMac’s resolutions you see where I am going.

You can see I have chosen 2560×1440 which is the normal default resolution, but I have not chosen the HiDPI version. HiDPI is what Apple does to make the monitor look great, it takes your resolution and runs it twice to subsample and make it look better, but basically whatever video ram it is using for your primary display it is doubling it to make the display look nicer.

For a video editor this is a huge no no, don’t waste your video memory, it is precious! Make sure to set your display to a non HiDPI resolution so that you are not wasting your video memory!

Of course this isn’t all that SwitchResX can do, you can actually set different resolutions for different apps and have it change as you switch apps. Now I have tried that out and it worked very well, but I have realized I just like one resolution for my 2 monitors, and try and save as much video memory as I can, so that is why I use SwitchResX, and the less video memory you have the more important this is.

I am assuming this will be the same with M1 iMacs, but they don’t exist yet. If they stay like the current M1 macs and share memory with the mac, then it is even more important to use less memory for your display so that you can use more for editing!

Mac Performance Guide on Upgrading to Big Sur, all downsides except the Thunderbolt Hub support

  

Mac Performance Guide has as an article on how the upgrade to Big Sur has been nothing but negatives, except that you need to upgrade to it to get Thunderbolt Hub Support which was added in Big Sur.

I know this site is usually very negative on the coverage of Mac OS upgrades, but the upgrades do seem to add more problems than they add, and usually add hits to performance.

And I have personally held off on the upgrade to Big Sur, though I really do need the Thunderbolt hub support so I can have more drives connected than I currently do.

Of course I also can’t upgrade because where I am currently working refuses to upgrade past Adobe Creative Cloud 2019, and that version does not work on Big Sur, you need to run at least 2020 to run on Big Sur. Now when the built in Speech to Text comes out of Beta maybe I can upgrade, though I might as well hold off for now.

Stop mail spy pixel tracking on Mac Desktop in Apple Mail with this Plug In

 

This awesome little plug in for Apple Mail, MailTrackerBlocker hosted at Github is a must install. If you don’t know, companies install something called a tracker pixel into the html of an e-mail they send you, and when it loads the image off their server they can track your location and often more information. These spy pixels should be illegal, but they aren’t so do what you can to stop them!

Honestly I would think Apple would do something about them, and especially on the iPhone and iPad. They are so into not letting companies track, then they should stop this insidious behavior. At least you can do something about it on the desktop.

It is scary how many e-mails have these built in trackers, which you can see once you install this app. Basically every e-mail with html formatting has one. 

Got my final issue of Cinefex, can’t believe this is it

 

And no I am not sure I will open it, depends if they are still delivering the Digital Issue, as I would rather read that and keep this pristine, though the fact that it hasn’t been released yet doesn’t give me hope.

Also wondering about the digital app, will it never be updated now, so it might not work on newer versions of iOS, that would be a goddamn tragedy.

Man I wish some film greats would band together and put the money into Cinefex to save it!

The first thing to try if there is an issue with Adobe Premiere Pro, is to reset the Preferences

 

So the first tip I can give if you are having something going wrong in Premiere Pro is to reset your preferences. This can be easily done on a Mac by holding down Option on the Mac or the ALT key on windows till the splash screen appears, you can also reset the preferences and the plug-in cache by hitting Shift-Option on Mac or Shift-Alt on Windows.

I find that this solves a good deal of problems that occur on in Premiere, and is a great thing to try first. 

 

This will reset a whole lot including your recent projects, and I usually then go to my Sync Settings to download my recent Preferences. You will often have to sign into your adobe account first.

To do sync settings normally you can find them in the preferences, they are near the bottom in Sync Settings:

And here you can chose what is synced, it shows your account, and the 3 settings, as well as to Ask my preference when syncing. I do this so I don’t accidentally overwrite any good preferences.

Now sometimes the preferences on the server can also be bad and you have to start fresh, but hopefully that won’t happen.

If you find that happens, there is another 3rd party solution, Preference Manager from Digital Rebellion, that can made backups and restorations for Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composter, Final Cut Pro 7, Lightworks and Pro Tools. I will post about that next.

Patently Apple has spotted a change in apple’s trademark on Final Cut Pro X in Europe that could mean a subscription is coming

The web site Patently Apple has posted an article about a change in Final Cut Pro X’s trademark in Europe that could open the door to a Subscription model.

Now this has been one of the great things about Final Cut Pro X, if you bought it once you own it for good, and that is how DaVinci Resolve works, but Premiere Pro from Adobe is a subscription service. 

The question does Apple just subsidize Final Cut Pro X with computer sales, or do they want it to make some money and make it subscription. I understand wanting it to pay for some of it’s development costs, but if they are going to do that I expect updates, and fixes.

Honestly I think a better idea is to have upgrade fees to new versions, not full price, but pay for the upgrade how things used to be. I can justify the subscription to Adobe as I make my living using it, as very few companies edit in Final Cut Pro X. I think they should update the App store to allow upgrades instead of just subscriptions, or full priced new versions.

And with a subscription Apple has better take a long hard look, and start looking into the many issues the program has as I have posted about before. If they go subscription I want them to seriously be developing, and it would be nice to have forums that the developers actually read and work on issues that professionals are having.

It is funny to see so much outrage, and how everyone will now move to DaVinci. Well as a professional, since both AVID and Premiere are subscription, I am totally used to it. I will get a month to month as needed and it won’t bother me, but I won’t keep the subscription around because I see it having too many problems that I just don’t think they will every fix or even care about. If I need it I would get it basically.

Blackmagic Design has released the full version of DaVinci Resolve 17

 

So Blackmagic Design has brought DaVinci Resolve 17 out of Beta and released it today.

Check out the What’s New section for the new features, which are extensive.

Some highlights include

  • Next Generation HDR Grading Tools, let you grade in very specific tonal ranges, and control the exposure and saturation for each zone. (this is awesome, as I loved have more granular controls in speedgrade way back when).
  • Color Warper for Refined Grading.
  • Targeted Grading with Magic Mask. I have not tried this out yet, but look forward to giving it a try as anything to get better masks easier is a good thing and will speed up any work flow.
  • DaVinci Wide Gammut Color Space and Advanced Color Management
  • Updated 3D Professional Scopes
  • Additional LUT support (easier to make 17 point 3D luts from Timeline
  • New Viewer Wipe Modes including diagonal, venetian blond and checkerboard.
And many many more.
Looking forward to diving into the 350 page New Feature Guide and really seeing what this thing can do.