Adobe Photoshop version 22.2 February 2021 releases most exciting new feature is Super Resolution for scaling an image in Camera Raw’s version 13.2 March 2021 release

 

So Adobe Photoshops February 2021 version 22.2 update only had a couple of new features, the ability to invite others to edit, and to sync your presets.

It is the Camera RAW version 13.2 March 2021 release that has the most exciting new feature. It had some normal updates, like Support for new camera and lenses, other enhancements, and Apple ProRAW profile, but the most exciting feature is Super Resolution.

Super Resolution helps create an enhanced image with 2x the width and 2x the height of the original image, or 4x the total pixel count. Most file types such as JPEG and TIFF are supported. You can especially use Super Resolution when you have to make large prints or increase the resolution of a cropped image.

This could be a huge feature for video editors, as I am always getting images that are way too small for what I need. 

Now from what I see this need to be either activated through Adobe Bridge 2021 for non RAW images, or by opening a RAW image in Photoshop, activating the RAW panel form within Photoshop doesn’t seem to allow this happen.

So open the image from within Camera RAW.

Now if the Open in Camera Raw doesn’t show up for JPEG or HVEC files, you can go to the Camera Raw Preferences.

And select File Handing.

And under JPEG, HEIC, and TIFF Handing you should select Automatically open JPEGs and HEICs with settings.

Once you get the image in Camera RAW, you right click on it (or control click if you don’t have a right mouse button on Mac) and chose Enhance or hit Shift+Command+D.

This will bring up the Super Resolution Dialogue box.

And when you hit Enhance, it will a little time and double the size of the image, quadrupling the resolution and amaz�ingly it looks damn good. Way better than previous scaling. The image will be an Adobe DNG file.
I wish they would put this in as a feature in Photoshop itself to do it easier, and let you chose format, but the results can’t be argued with.
I have a feeling I will be using this quite a bit!

Stu Maschwitz has updated his Prolost EDC Presets to version 2.5

Stu Maschwitz, author of the DV Rebel’s Guide and designer of the Magic Bullet color grading system for Red Giant and now Chief Creative Office of Maxon has updated his Prolost EDC Presets for Adobe After Effects. You can pay what you want, though they default is $4.

EDC, as in “everyday carry” — the stuff you don’t leave the house without. Whenever I install a new version of After Effects, these are the handy little timesaving presets that I drop in first.

Most of the EDC presets are simple. Shortcuts to common settings, better defaults for often-used effects, or better interfaces for my favorite expressions.

But hey, Prolost EDC has been around since 2015, and some of these tools have gotten quite powerful. Check out Prolost Array, or Prolost Levels, both new in v2.5.

I update this set from time to time, and you’ll receive a fresh download link every time I do. It’s like subscribing to my personal After Effects toolbox.

And these include 2 new powerful filters, Prolost Levels and Prolost Array, for a total of 48 presets. Well worth picking up for any price.

Adobe releases March 2021 of After Effects version 18

 Adobe has updated After Effects to version 18.0 with it’s March 2021 release.

They added Media Replacement in Motion Graphics Templates and essential Properties.

Real-Time 3D Draft Preview.

A 3D Ground Plane to give a sense of 3D Perspective.

Improved Composition Toolbar.

Team Projects Performance Improvements.

And the most exciting thing to me that is currently in beta testing, which is Mult-Frame Rendering using multi-core CPU that can have up to 300% Render improvements.

Adobe releases Premiere Pro March 2021 version 15.0 Update

 Adobe has released the official 2021 Release of Premiere Pro with version 15.0.

New features include a much needed all new Captions engine.

Media Replacement in Motion Graphics Templates.

Equitable Language with changes in terminology to reflect diversity and inclusion.

A woohoo feature is a Faster Warp Stablizer.

Team Projects has had improvements.

You can now copy and paste audio effects in the audio track mixer and legacy audio effects have been removed.

I just wish the Speach to Text feature was out of beta, but it hasn’t even hit a public beta yet, so I am guessing it will be a while, damn.

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.