Appleinsider on the fact that the new M1 Macs support USB 4 instead of just Thunderbolt 3 before Intel has even released support for it’s own standard

 AppleInsider has an article on how the new M1 Macs in fact support USB 4, and not just Thunderbolt 3.  I hadn’t realized this at all, but it makes sense as it is new open standard, but amazing that it is before Intel managed to release it. They do need to add more ports though, 2 ports on the laptops when it includes charging is nuts. I have problems with only 4 thunderbolt 3 ports on my imac pro as is.

MacWorld article on how you to think of memory differently with new Apple M1 Chip

 

MacWorld has an interesting article on how you have to think of memory differently because of how it is used in the M1 chip and because it is part of the processor it is so much faster.

I still hope for external graphics card support in the MacPro, but think it is less and less likely that will happen, but maybe I will pleasantly surprised. And if not just how much memory will a pro need to run the graphics and system memory? And it won’t be expandable, you are stuck with what you buy.

Apple has released the first M1 Macs with it’s second processor transition

 

Apple has released it’s first 3 Macs with the M1 chip it is designing itself making for the 2nd processor transition in the history of the mac and the first ARM based Macs, now on the same platform as the ipad and iPhone.

Apple’s stats make it look really fast and the first benchmarks make it a very impressive machine and 3 of the fastest macs apple has every released.

Of course for now it is useless to me as Adobe software does not yet run or at least run well under Rosetta. Still the performance of Final Cut Pro sounds impressive and I love that the latest beta of DaVinci Resolve 17.1 runs on M1 Macs already. And Adobe has a beta of Photoshop out as well.

What scares me is the single thunderbolt channel and only 2 ports and the fact that it can’t run an external graphic card even with it’s thunderbolt port.

And what is even scarier for me is that the M1 shares it’s memory between the graphics card and the onboard memory. So you had better get the 16GB because you are sharing them with the video processing. If this continues you will need to really get more RAM on high end machines (which hopefully won’t top out at 16GB as the current machines do.

Still the processors do have impressive performance already so the higher end version will likely be very impressive.

And it is amazing that basically the MacBook Air is only different in a single GPU core being disabled, and the MacBook Pro and Mini having fans to cool the system down.

I look forward to what the truly pro Apple M1 Machines will look like, but I don’t look forward to the software update cost that will go along with it, and the software that will break and end up going by the wayside.

What is up with sort order in Adobe Premiere Pro? Can someone explain to me it’s behavior?

 

OK, this is an issue that has been bugging me for a while, and I would really love to hear an explanation for the behavior of Premiere Pro.

The graphic above shows the sort order of my bins, I am sorting by Media Start so I can merge my audio and video using the merge clips function.

This is an image of my bin with the 2 clips selected that I am going to merge in a bin sorted by Media Start.

This is the same bin, now showing the merged clip as soon as I have merged the clips. The bin is still sorted by Media Start, and the Media start of the new clip is 11:39:19:19, so why does it move to the top of the bin (well almost the top, under the folder in the bin) as soon as it is created. Why isn’t in the sort order? And if you close the bin and re-open it, or create a new file, that file then moves into the sort order of the bin, but when created it jumps to the top of the bin. WHAT IS GOING ON?

Here is another case.

Here I have the files sorted by Name, and I have a version B of a file that I want to update to be the version 12, so I change the name and date of the file to be after that of V11.

The file is renamed, and the folder is still sorted by name, but the file is not sorting by name. What the hell is going on?

When adding new music to Apple Music, formerly iTunes who wants it to autoplay? I sure as hell don’t!

 When using Apple’s Music, formerly iTunes to import music, why does it automatically play what you are importing? There used to be a choice in iTunes to keep it from doing this, but Apple purposely removed this feature. So now every time you import something it automatically plays that, even if you are already playing something else.

Now I don’t know about you, but importing and wanting to play are seperate things, and I would always rather chose to hit play than to have auto-play.

Why does this feature even exist? And it gets ridiculous when importing downloads of multi-disc albums, when it plays some random track off all 4 discs, starting one, then another, then another, then another.

I know apple doesn’t want me to own any of my own music anymore unless I buy it from them or stream it from them, but I don’t buy any music from them, and I wish they would have a more hands off approach.

Mac OS Catalina Finder Save Dialogue box selection inconsistencies

 A huge annoyance that I have run into in Catalina, is a major inconsistency of the Finder’s Save Dialogue box. In previous OS’s when I saved a file, the name of the file was always selected when the window popped up. This window shows what I mean.

The problem is that in Catalina the selection of the name seems to be random. Sometimes when I output a file I get it selected where I can use keyboard shortcuts to alter the name if necessary, as always used to happen previous to Catalina. The problem is that sometimes, and I can’t say why or when the selection dialogue shows up unselected, so I can’t use keyboard shortcuts to change the name, but have to use the mouse (or trackball as it is for me) to select the name and change it.

I can’t understand why sometimes the text is selected and sometimes it isn’t. This seems totally random, and I can’t figure out why it happens.

I have posted about it at the Apple community forums, though I don’t expect to hear a response.

OWC Thunderbay Update

 So I talked to Other World Computing and they sent me a replacement. I screwed up though, I went by the Thunderbolt id in softraid, but when i pulled a drive the id numbers changed, so I realized I didn’t know if I had the drive that was going offline. When I put the 4th drive back in (with no changes to the other drives) it took 2 days to re-sink the drives, with nary a thing to tell me how long it would take. I decided to back up my raid as quickly as I could. And when they came back they came back I wasn’t dropping a drive again, but now I was nervous.

So I upgraded my RAID from 2 tb drives to 12 tb and reformatted. I was quite surprised as when I formatted the 4 2 tb drives to make it RAID 5 and it took all of 30 seconds. This apposed to when I made the 6 TB raid, which just a couple of years ago took 4 days, which makes me wonder if there wasn’t an issue on one of the 2 TB drives to begin with. As the 36 RAID 5 took 30 seconds to create.

And I worry again because on the first night after formatting one if the drives went offline. Now it cane back with a restart, but it makes me worry that the housing was the issue all along, though OWC hasn’t responded to my further issues. 

OWC ThunderBay 4 Firmware update did not fix the issue of the drives ejecting

 

So after taking the time to do the upgrade on the firmware on my OWC Thunderbay as I saw in this post on their forums, and shutting down my computer over the night, I restarted and one of the drives disappeared.

Sure SoftRaid managed to fix it in under 10 minutes, but having this happen every restart or wake from sleep is not OK!
So I don’t want to have to do it, but I am going to try turning off Put Hard Drives to Sleep when Possible in my Energy saver to see if I can get around this issue (the post on OWC said that is the issue).

We shall see if that helps. And I have allot of spinning discs that I actually would like to have spin down when possible, but just not have my whole raid go down by dropping drives.
Super frustrating.

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.

My OWC ThunderBay 4 Thunderbolt 3 has been having drive ejects, Firmware Update Available

 

So I want to preface this with the fact of just how much I love OWC. I have been buying their gear for many many years, and it has always been very reliable, and they have amazing customer service. I have had them replace ram, and quickly get back to me on issues for years and years.

Lately though I have been a few issues, and this post is about one of them.
So I have a fairly new Thunderbay 4 Thunderbolt 3 and am running a full version of OWC’s amazing Softraid to run it in RAID 5. It is way too small with 4 2TB drives, for a 6TB raid. I am on an iMac Pro running Catalina 10.15.6 and all the sudden have been getting drive drops often on waking up from sleep, or when restarting, forcing a quick rebuild or making me restart to get the drives back. And constantly having the drives be out of sync, though Softraid fixed this in a minute or two each time.
Now it hasn’t happen while I was working and I haven’t lost anything, but it has been annoying.
Now while looking at their forums for another issue I will post about in another post, I ran into this post about Disk Ejecting a firmware update. I quickly downloaded and went through the steps to install. It basically says it has to do with allowing drives to sleep in the energy saver control panel, but this firmware should permanently fix the issue.
As with most things of the sort it is made a bit of a longer process, because of having to disable SIP or System Integrity Protection, and is a multi-step process since you have to then install a kext file, restart and then eject your drives, and install the firmware update.
Now this is where I would add a note to the process, because while the instructions said it would take about 30 seconds, once I selected the firmware and hit the FWUpdate button. It did not take 30 seconds, in fact my computer sat beachballing for well over 30 minutes, before it successfully did the update. This is fine if it fixes the issue, but 30 SECONDS IT DID NOT TAKE!!!
The process then has you uninstall the KEXT, turn SIP back on restart and then turn back on all of your networking which you have turned off earlier.
When I restarted the final time Softraid again said the drives were out of sync, but lets hope that has fixed the issue.