Roto Brush 2 in the After Effects Beta is a vast improvement

So I have been using Roto Brush for years in After Effects. It was a tool that worked with a lot of user input, but it was so incredibly slow. And honestly with footage getting larger I think it had actually gotten slower, but Adobe has finally been working on an upgrade that is available in the current Beta.

Roto Brush 2 stills needs user input and it doesn’t do well with a lot of motion blur, but it is so much faster! It used to take sometimes minutes to calculate a single frame, and now in minutes it can calculate a whole clip.

I am not sure how much better of a roto that it does than the old version, but the speed in which it works means you can make changes and even work frame by frame, and work quickly enough to do a basic roto very quickly.

I am so glad for the public betas and them letting us use unreleased features.

I missed this, the Blackmagic URSA Mini Pro 12K Data rates are insane!

Ok so I missed this first looking at the URSA Mini Pro 12k, but they have listed the data rates for it’s video settings in the tech specs and they look great!

Storage Rates

Storage rates based on 24 frames per second.

12K – 12,288 x 6480
Blackmagic RAW 5:1 – 578 MB/s
Blackmagic RAW 8:1 – 361 MB/s
Blackmagic RAW 12:1 – 241 MB/s
Blackmagic RAW 18:1 – 160 MB/s
Blackmagic RAW Q0 – 241 to 578 MB/s 1
Blackmagic RAW Q1 – 144 to 361 MB/s 2
Blackmagic RAW Q3 – 96 to 241 MB/s 3
Blackmagic RAW Q5 – 72 to 180 MB/s 4

8K – 8192 x 4320
Blackmagic RAW 5:1 – 258 MB/s
Blackmagic RAW 8:1 – 161 MB/s
Blackmagic RAW 12:1 – 107 MB/s
Blackmagic RAW 18:1 – 72 MB/s
Blackmagic RAW Q0 – 107 to 258 MB/s 1
Blackmagic RAW Q1 – 64 to 161 MB/s 2
Blackmagic RAW Q3 – 43 to 107 MB/s 3
Blackmagic RAW Q5 – 32 to 81 MB/s 4

6K – 6144 x 3240
Blackmagic RAW 5:1 – 145 MB/s
Blackmagic RAW 8:1 – 91 MB/s
Blackmagic RAW 12:1 – 61 MB/s
Blackmagic RAW 18:1 – 40 MB/s
Blackmagic RAW Q0 – 61 to 145 MB/s 1
Blackmagic RAW Q1 – 36 to 91 MB/s 2
Blackmagic RAW Q3 – 24 to 61 MB/s 3
Blackmagic RAW Q5 – 18 to 45 MB/s 4

4K – 4096 x 2160
Blackmagic RAW 5:1 – 65 MB/s
Blackmagic RAW 8:1 – 41 MB/s
Blackmagic RAW 12:1 – 27 MB/s
Blackmagic RAW 18:1 – 18 MB/s
Blackmagic RAW Q0 – 27 to 65 MB/s 1
Blackmagic RAW Q1 – 16 to 41 MB/s 2
Blackmagic RAW Q3 – 11 to 27 MB/s 3
Blackmagic RAW Q5 – 8 to 20 MB/s 4

Recording Formats

Blackmagic RAW Q0, Q1, Q3, Q5, 5:1, 8:1, 12:1 and 18:1 at 12,288 x 6480, 11,520 x 6480, 12,288 x 5112, 7680 x 6408, 8192 x 4320, 7680 x 4320, 8192 x 3408, 5120 x 4272, 6144 x 3240, 4096 x 2160, 3840 x 2160, 4096 x 1704 and 2560 x 2136 stored as 12 bit non-linear with film, extended video, video or custom 3D LUT embedded in metadata.

1 Constant Quality setting Q0 storage rates quoted are indicative only, based on a 5:1 – 12:1 compression range.
2 Constant Quality setting Q1 storage rates quoted are indicative only, based on a 8:1 – 20:1 compression range.
3 Constant Quality setting Q3 storage rates quoted are indicative only, based on a 12:1 – 30:1 compression range.
4 Constant Quality setting Q5 storage rates quoted are indicative only, based on a 16:1 – 40:1 compression range.
Actual storage rates are entirely dependent on image subject matter.

These data rates are insanely low, wow! Honestly this blows the Canon R5 and R6 out of the water. Wow, will this move down to the BMPCC? Lets hope so!

BlackMagic updates the Ursa Mini Pro to 12K and improves BlackMagic RAW to deal with it

Wow, so BlackMagic has done it again and instead of going full throttle with 8K like Canon, has jumped right to 12K for $9.999 with the new 12K Ursa Mini Pro! And with a full 35mm sensor that has no pixel binning and can supposedly do different resolutions with the full sensor. Wow, will have to see it, but if so that is really impressive. And they showed playback with BlackMagic RAW 12K on an Apple Macbook, and they said that Metal is in fact ahead of windows right now.

I have to admit I was hoping for a full frame BPCC 6K or 8K, but this is a very impressive high end camera. Wonder what it is going to do for high end cinema.

NBC/Universal’s new streaming service Peacock has launched, and it claims to be free, free, free, free, but it really isn’t

So NBC/Universal launched it’s much vaunted Peacock streaming service last night and I took a look at what is available.

And yes there is free content with commercials, but all their original shows and even shows like Cheers only allow you to watch one episode for free before you have to pay for their premium content starting at $4.99 a month with commercials.

What first struck me was it’s dearth of content. Each category that came up seemed awful short and so many of the shows repeat again and again.

And how much of the content is paid. And I wouldn’t mind that since some is free if it with adds, but it the campaigns that said Free, free, free, free, free, free, free, free which makes me question it more. It actually makes me think they are going to get sued for saying it was all free!

As for the content, this to me is just like CBS all access, if there is something I will watch I will pay for a month, and if not I won’t care a lick about it. Maybe once the new Battlestar Galactica comes out, but really I would be happier with a continuation of the original instead of the reboot.

Jean-Louis Gassée on Apple Silicon and the passing of Wintel

Jean-Louis Gassee formerly of Apple and also fo BeOS has an article on the new Apple Silicon and how it could be the death knell for Wintel, the powerful combination of Intel hardware and Windows.

His take is that since ARM is in fact a more efficient processor and if Apple manages to push the hardware and software to be faster than Wintel (which is could be since it is RISC instead of CISC) it will push Microsoft to really get behind it’s ARM version of Windows that it has been playing with and releasing, but without enough support. And that will push Intel to have to get back into ARM processor development or break the WINTEL partnerdship.

Let’s hope Apple Silicon is eventually that much more powerful and faster and more efficient than anything Intel comes out with, because with Apple writing the software it will mean a sea chance, and for once it would be awesome for Apple to be faster than WINTEL, but pushing Microsoft to ARM I hadn’t even thought about as the fact that Microsoft haven’t even made versions of all their software for their arm hardware, and yet they are working on it for Apple Silicon.

Canon has announced the R5 and R6 and at least on paper the video specs are impressive, with 8K internal Recording on R5 and full autofocus during video recording

The high end Canon EOS R5 for $4000.

And the more consumer $2500 dollar EOS R6 have been announced.

They use the new RF Lens Group, and must use and adapter to use EF or EF Lens with a slight crop.

The R5 is 45 Megapixels with an ASA up to 102400 while the R6 is only 20.1. with an ASA up to 204800. They both have super fast 1053 zone autofocus with up to 20 FPS and both use dual cards, though the R6 is just UHS-II while the R5 has a single CFExpress which is required to required to run 8K RAW (and strangely it doesn’t do 4k RAW at all).

So for video the R5 does 8K DCI and 8K UHD, as well as 4k DCI and 4k UHD at 120 FPS, with a 20 minute recording time. And the 1 TB CFExpress card for about $800 will hold 53 minutes.

The R6 only shoots 4K UHD at 29.97 or 23.976, and doesn’t record in RAW at all.

The screens on the back are fully articulated and touch screen, but the R5 has a slightly larger higher resolution screen and the R6 also removes the LED from the top of the camera.

Can’t wait to see how these cameras shoot video, because we know the stills will be good, but lets hope for little jello.

It looks like Canon has finally stepped up with DSLR’s for video that are very impressive, if a bit expensive!

If I have my mac not restart apps when it restarts, why does it launch all previously launched apps if it crashes?

I pretty much said it all in the title, but if I have my mac set to not restart apps when it restarts, why when it crashes does it restart all the previously open apps? In all likelyhood it is one of the apps that crashed, so why not honor the setting that I have been using and not open apps if it crashed?

H.266 is coming out and like H.265 does the same quality at half the data rate

So the H.266 video compression standard has been announced, and just like H.265 it again cuts the data rate by half while keeping the same quality, which is very impressive.

And this will be great for video streaming and camera compression and the like, but once again it is going to be very processor intensive, and from what I have seen not many people are even using H.265 because it is so processor intensive both on compression side and playback side, and H.266 will be so much more processor intensive.

Better compression for video is always a good thing, but it will be a while before anyone sees any benefits from this.

AppleInsider reports on the possibility of Apple not supporting 3rd party GPU’s with Apple Silicon

Credit: Apple

AppleInsider has an article on the possibility that Apple Silicon will only support their own GPU’s and not 3rd Party GPU’s. This graphics shows that Apple Silicon Mac doesn’t support NVIDIA or the currently supported AMD GPU.

This is really scary. The Apple Silicon GPU will certainly be OK for laptops or low end machines, but for high end computers this would literally be a death knell.

Let’s hope this just means for the current development system, because otherwise it means the new MacPro was a huge bait and switch. Oh look at this we can make the highest and most powerful machine, but you know at the same time they were already working on End of Life-ing that machine with Apple Silicon.

I don’t want to move to Wintel, but if their is no 3rd party GPU support, WINTEL will be the only solution.