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.

Adobe After Effects (Beta) Version 17.1.0 (Build 55) once again works with Alexa Footage

So Adobe today released Beta’s of apps in the Creative Cloud app that anyone can download, and so I decided to test the Alexa test footage and my own footage, and all of it works fine. So this was certainly a bug and it is fixed in the Beta.

I would love to be able to check the release notes to see what they fixed, but I haven’t figured out if there are release notes for these public betas.

EDIT:

OK was still having some weirdness when I opened up a project that is working fine in 2020. I was still getting the weirdness when trying to play back the sequences, but if I reload the footage it then works fine, and this did not work in 2020. WTF!

Oh well it actually works now, so no complaints.

Adobe After Effects 2020 17.0.6 still does not work with ALEXA footage!

So Adobe released a new version of After Effects today 17.0.6 and I tested it again this shot from Alexa’s test footage page. Obviously it still does not work. Now it wasn’t listed as being fixed, but their is a lot of ALEXA footage out there, how can no one else have run into this issue? Come on Adobe get on the ball.

I have posted about it the adobe community forums, and in the bug report/feature request segment to little avail.

Adobe needs to stop with new features in their video suite and speed up what already exists. Things like Roto-Brush is way too slow!

I have been an editor for almost 20 years now, and though it has it’s issues I do still love the Adobe suite, but it has so many issues, and Adobe needs to stop updating with new features and work on their old features, making them faster and streamlining, and work on stability.

I have already recently the fact that After Effects 2020 does not work with Footage that has the damn AMIRA Lut attached to it. Adobe needs to fix this shit right now, and they need to remove the automatic AMIRA lut. You shouldn’t be forced to have it clogging up your project. Adding any lut should be voluntary and should be able to be removed! WTF!

The thing is this is not the only problem with adobe today. Stability is a huge issue that many people have.  Of course their are ways to make the program more stable. Personally I ignore the fact that Adobe can basically play back any footage and treat it like AVID, compressing everything to a finishing format. Being on a Mac I use ProRES. And I don’t import any footage that isn’t some flavor of ProRES, even temp stock footage I recompress. Also don’t let any JPEG images into the project, converting everything to at least a PNG. And that does help with stability.

Then there are things that are just plain slow. I have a 3Gz 10-Core iMac Pro with a Radeon Pro Vega 64x and 64GB of RAM, so it is a fairly fast machine. I have a short for a short that needs to be slowed down, but the normal tools look bad, and even twixtor is having issues because of all the motion blur. So to let Twixtor work better I need to pull the subject out of the background and decided to try out the Roto-Brush tool to pull the subject out of the background, but it is interminably slow. I am having to go frame by frame and fix the roto, each brush stroke, if it even works can take 5-15 minutes to get results. And this is with 3.5 K ProRES HQ footage. And a good portion of the time, the stroke stops working a beachball appears and the stroke ends up randomly going across half the image, and it can take a good 10-20 minutes to get to where I can undo it and go back to the previous undo state! I know this is a complicated tool, but if anything it feels slower than when it was released!

Here is a screenshot, the little green at the top was what I was trying to make, but then the beachball started and everntually the line appears, and a good 10 minutes later I can under this reandom line that it has added to what I drew. And this happens more than 1 in 10 strokes! 

Annoyance in Catalina save dialogue box

OK so I have found a new annoyance with Catalina and it is in the save dialogue box.

Often when I am rendering something in After Effects I overwrite an old render with a new one. But when I make the file, it adds a _1 to the filename, so I open the save dialogue and hit the right arrow to go the rightmost character and delete the two characters. Before Catalina that is how it worked, but now it goes to the end of the .mov so if you delete, you delete the .mov instead of the last 2 characters.

This is a new behavior, and completely changes how I have worked for years. It is a huge annoyance!

After Effects 2020 does not work with an ARRI footage that automatically adds the AMIRA lut in Premiere, THIS IS A HUGE BUG!

So when Adobe first released After Effects 2020, I tried opening a 2019 project that I have been working on and saw some scary results. None of the footage was working properly. This was January 5th, 2019.

I posted about it on the Adobe Forums, but the response from an Adobe employee was it is a bad graphics card or the footage is corrupted. The computer is new and the footage and project work perfectly in After Effects 2019, as well as Premiere 2019 and 2020, which made me doubt the response, as did it when someone else was having the issue.

I then recently went on a job, and all of their footage was shot on Alexa, and when I tried to move the footage to After Effects on Adobe Dynamic Link the footage had exactly the same response as as the footage on my home machine.

And it was all ALEXA footage that when imported into Premiere Pro automatically has the unremovable AMIRA LUT added to it.

So to prove that it was not in fact my footage, but in fact Alexa footage today I decided to to download some ALEXA footage from ARRI, and try that out.

Here is the Alexa LF ProRES footage download page, and I downloaded the first video. I took this ProRES clip and opened it in Premiere Pro 2020 and it imported and automatically added the AMIRA LUT just as I thought it would. I then imported that footage directly into After Effects 2020, and low and behold I am getting the exact same effect.

So this is most certainly a bug in After Effects 2020 to do with ARRI Alexa footage and probably something to do with why the damn AMIRA lut is automatically added in Premiere. Whatever metadata that makes the AMIRA LUT is what seems to be causing this. The footage works fine in every other Creative Cloud version.

THIS IS A HUGE BUG AND NEEDS TO BE FIXED!