Now I know why Adobe denied my request for years on apps, they have made all apps in the same category the same color, so they are harder to tell apart!

So I opened Adobe’s updates today and low and behold, they have updated a great swatch of apps, but even worse they have updated the icons so that applications in the same category are the same color. Sure it means you can tell this years apps from earlier versions, but now it is easier to confuse different apps for each other as all the video apps are now the same damn color, WTF! And this will get even worse when they release next years versions with the same damn app icon (why can’t they put some versioning in the icon?).

These are the swath of Adobe Apps I keep in my Dock, and without dragging over them with a cursor it is a pain in the ass to tell them apart (and yes I need the different versions as some companies I work with run older versions because of stability issues).

Hell even the beta icons are changing already, though at least they will let me keep breaking up the apps

I guess at least this year for individual apps it will be easier, but what about when the previous 2 versions have the same damn icon, and they are all the same color?

For a company that makes applications for designers they sure have a shitty sense of design!

Adobe denied my feature request to put the year on the application icons without allowing anyone to vote on it

So adobe very quickly denied my feature request to add the year to the product icon, saying since they have removed the year form the product name. Though they have not. They removed the CC for Creative Cloud for the name.

And as they have always done the updates for the year stay at 2020, until the next version will be 2021.

And they should have differentiated icons, WTF!

Why do Adobe Application Icons not include the year of the application so they are easier to tell apart at a glance?

 

So these are the application icons for Premiere Pro and After Effects 2019 and 2020 in my dock. Why do they have the exact same icon? Yes if I hover my cursor over each one it will tell me the whole application name, but why don’t you just put the version number in the icon?

And yes I need to have both versions. I am a professional commercial video editor, and very often I have to match a companies version so that the project files will open in the version that they are using. And then there was the whole Arri files not working in 2020 After Effects, but that is another story.

Now I used to customize the icons on my own, but that is a pain in the ass, and they get replaced every update, so if I am paying over $600 a year for a subscription to Creative Cloud can’t they update the icons for each yearly version? And I don’t mean just change the Icon, like they did for Photoshop with 2020.

That is 2019 on the left and 2020 on the right. And sure it helps, but I still have to think, oh yea the rounded icon is the new one.

So I made a couple of examples of what I used to do and what they could do. Here is a Premiere pro with the 2020 included.

Now this totally works for me, but I have fairly large monitors set a 2560 by 1440, so the 2020 so can get small on small monitors, so how about just the last 2 numbers?

This is easier to read on any screen. I used the same PR that came from the original icon and just added a large 20, not it is Arial black and not whatever font Adobe is using, but at least it quickly tells you the version!

And yes I have posted this at Adobe User Voice, and I didn’t see any other posts about it, so if you care about this like I do, please vote.

Will Adobe add X-Rite ColorChecker support into Premiere Pro CC?

So for years DaVinci Resolve has had support for X-Rite’s ColorChecker products. These are color cards that you can use to shoot video (they also have Photo versions) and you can use them to balance different cameras to the same color correction. I personally use a ColorChecker Passport Video. Sure I have had some difficulty on shoots where the script supervisor did not give me enough notes on shot Color Temp, but this is still usable.

For years I have hoped Adobe would implement this in Lumetri in Premiere, as it would be quick and fast for certain projects that don’t need the full color correction of DaVinci. And it seems they are listening as they have commented on User Voice.

Of course they do comment that it won’t happen as soon as they are working on stability and performance, though that never seems the case with Premiere. The whole Adobe suite gets more and more unstable and gets features that aren’t needed, when features many professionals could use right now are bypassed.

More ways that Apple Music is messed up for those who moved from iTunes and some ways to fix things with some work

I have been chronicling all the problems I have had since moving my iMac Pro to Catalina with Music, formerly iTunes. Since Apple broke iTunes into multiple apps I have had nothing but problems with the app.

One of the big ones for me is that in the move to Music, Apple decided to ignore all the years of column organization you did with your playlists. They defaulted every playlist to the Playlist view, which only shows your album artwork, song titles, album title and time of the track.

There is a much superior Songs view, but even it starts with only limited columns, but as with iTunes if you customized the main songs list to have the columns and widths that you want, then they would propagate to all new playlists you create. Now the problem arrises, because all your playlists from iTunes were reset to the default Songs layout, so you either need to change each and every playlist (over 3100 for me) or it is time for a trip to Doug’s Scripts.

Doug’s Scripts has been around for a while now previously having the best applescripts for iTunes, and now slowly updating scripts to work with Music if they work. My only complaint with the site is that you should be able to search for scripts that just work with Music, and maybe it could use a voting system to vote on old scripts and see if they can be made to work on Music, as their are few that I really miss. Still it is just an awesome site.

And Doug has updated an old script to fix this very problem, Assimilate View Options V 5.1. This script brings up a window with all of your playlists and you can select them and hit process and it will go through and duplicate the playlist and add all the tracks in the same order with the current View Options baked in. It’s only issue, is that pesky view being automatically set to the Playlist view instead of the Songs view you want. So you will still need to switch every playlist to Songs, view, but Doug has a tip to set a keyboard shortcut to the Songs view so you can at least speed up the process.

I still can’t fathom why apple doesn’t let you specify a default view in Music. And it is worse that Apple chose to ignore your organization from iTunes when importing into Music, but I am assuming that was easier for them, but hell if they would have just let you update the view options first so that all the playlists imported with your default would have been amazing. That is assuming Apple still cares about people using local music libraries and I am pretty sure they don’t. So for now this is at least a solution.

Why is there no Motion Blur for moving objects in Adobe Premiere Pro?

This is an oldy but a huge annoyance for me. Why is there way to activate Motion Blur on moving objects in Premiere Pro? This was a feature in Apple Final Cut Pro 7, sure it had a slow render, but the machines are faster now. And so many places I work at just do their graphics within Premiere Pro because it is faster and easier (and so many people can’t or won’t use After Effects) and when moving graphics it just looks awful without Motion Blur.
Don’t premiere and After Effects share at least some of the engine? Premiere Pro needs damn Motion Blur and has for a long time!

Red Giant Updates VFX Suite to 1.5 a paid upgrade

Red Giant has released a paid upgrade to it’s VFX Suite to version 1.5. It is a $199 upgrade unless you are subscriber to Red Giant Complete (feels like a 1.5 should have been a free upgrade).
It includes a new Lens Distortion tool to easily figure out lens distortion to help composite and even track.
And they have updated Supercomp with an automatic color matching, color space options, optical glow and layer glow tools, though I am mostly pissed that they have not figured out how to include motion blur which has been my main objection to supercomp.
Optical Glow has been updated with the ability to control radiate which gives directionality, control per channel size and size xy. This certainly makes for an impressive update over the built in glow.
And Shadow and Reflection has added the ability to show shadows only as well as distort based on the image.
I am glad for the update, though as I said I would like them to put motion blur into supercomp to really make it usefull.

Roger Deakins has started a podcast on filmmaking, and it is a must listen

Roger A. Deakins is one of the best cinematographers around, in fact his work on 1917 I think proves that he is absolutely the best there is (thankfully the Academy awarded him for it, though that film deserved many more awards than it got). If you haven’t read my review of 1917 on my sister site, Whale of a Tale Productions you should check it out.

So he and his wife have started a Podcast and it is well worth checking out. You can see it at his web site or you can download it from Apple Podcasts.

Apple should do one more separation of itunes, having Apple Music it’s own app

So Apple broke up iTunes with Catalina, making Music, TV, Podcasts and putting local sync into the finder. I have made no qualms of what a mess I think they have made, but since this is how things are going to be I think they should make more break and remove Apple Music from your local music library, and then put local sync back into “itunes” the app for your local library.

I already can’t use Apple Music to it’s fullest, because I don’t pay extra to sync my local music to the cloud (i put my music on my iPhone or a decent subset) so i can’t save playlists or songs from Apple Music. And yea this is a ripoff as I don’t want to sync my local library, but would love likely playlists on Apple Music to sync between devices. And a separate app would completely solve this problem.

And bringing back “itunes” for just your local music would be great, it would solve all confusion between local and Apple Music , and even better if they put sync back in an app it would solve so many issues. Pre-Catalina I enabled wifi sync, and automatic sync when connected so I always had current backups of my iOs devices, but I had to shut both of these off with Catalina. Moving iOS sync to the find means there is no way to cancel the sync. Previously you could always force quit itunes, but the find reboots if you force quite it and the sync continues. This is a problem when I am running video editing software which has crashed and necessitates a restart, but you can’t because an iOS device synching! And the sync seems so much slower, but maybe that is because there is no progress bar until the actual copying of music takes place, and it is  so damn slow!

And maybe, just maybe it would fix the fact that I have to sync twice to sync and local music. If i try and pick anything to sync on the first sync, the apply button becomes greyed out. After the first sync i can then chose music to sync and hit apply and music is synched. This takes a huge amount of tine because I back up locally. I like to have full backups with passwords and the like, plus the restore is faster than icloud. And when i first tried icloud backups, the restore failed on ipad and iphone and I list a year because i went back to my previous local backup.

Now I am sure Apple doesn’t care to do this because they expect us to just use Apple Music, but I use both and hate how local sync has become a second class citizen!

Adobe introduced Creative Cloud Public Beta

So Adobe is releasing Public Beta from within creative cloud.

If you look in your creative cloud application you will see the Beta Apps on the left, which I have highlighted with red. Currently it is for the Video Suite, though they will add all apps eventually. The apps use the same plug ins as the current version.

And when you open the app you get 2 new buttons.

The will be blue every time their are new features and you can read about them.

And the second lets you report bugs and go the forum for the beta.

Already there have been almost daily updates.

And they fixed the issue I was having with After Effects 2020 and Alexa footage, though I wish you could remove the damn forced AMIRA LUT entirely from the workflow.