Obviously the most exciting new features is the content-aware fill for video in After Effects.
I am pretty excited to try this one out, as the results from the demos look impressive, but I think it will work best with moving footage so the pixels exist somewhere.
And the new expression engine in After Effects looks amazing.
I can’t wait to try that out.
For Premiere we get the Freeform view as a kind of visual storyboard.
This is pretty neat, though not a mind blower for me.
And the new rules and guides will make placing things much easier.
Pretty neat. And Faster Mask tracking will always be helpful.
Overall some cool new features, though I am hoping for more stability overall.
Now I use Firefox as my primary browser, and I have for years. I have enough if my life in google because I use a gmail account, and google search is too much of my life so I don’t want to use Chrome, even if it is marginally faster. And Safari I don’t really use on my mac, because I use Firefox, but I have to use it on my iPad and my iPhone.
My problem is, as it has been for years since they introduced iCloud syncing of bookmarks, is that it constantly fucks up and my bookmarks get destroyed. I end up with empty folders and bookmarks moved all over with all these new random folders. And this happens all the damn time!
Now when it existed I used Xmarks to sync my bookmarks between firefox and safari on my mac, but it never worked well and I tended to get messed up bookmarks both ways, but now that Xmarks is officially gone I realize that the issue is much deeper within iCloud.
In fact I don’t save any bookmarks in any version of Safari. I only add them to Firefox to keep them and I back them up when I add them so that I can restore and don’t have to fix my bookmarks ever. I even e-mail myself the links from my iPad so that I can add them to Firefox on my desktop. It is a pain but it means keeping my bookmarks safe.
And it means that I am constantly fixing my Safari bookmarks. And I know how to do that. You turn off iCloud syncing of Safari on all your devices, and let it sit for a bit, and tell the iOS devices to delete your bookmarks when you do this. Then I export my clean bookmarks from Firefox and import them into safari, then re-organize them so they are correct (bookmarks toolbar into favorites and move the rest of the bookmarks out of the folder they get stuck in). Then you turn back on iCloud Safari on all your devices and hope everything was cleared up. If it was, you will get your clean bookmarks back until iCloud messes them up again.
The stupid part is this is an easy problem to fix for Apple. Instead of always merging your bookmarks add a damn option to upload and overwrite bookmarks. This way I could easily clean them up in a single step! Xmarks had this. And so do other bookmarks sync programs. Apple just acts like it never fucks up, but it fucks up all the time!
Do people just live with their fucked up bookmarks? I don’t understand! WTF! Fix this shit Apple!
9 to 5 Mac has pulled images of the rumored Powerbeats Pro headphones out of ios 12.2. It looks the rumors are true and they remove the wire and charge in their case. I have the previous versions of these and think it is a huge mistake. I think the cable is a feature! It keeps them together and you can take them off and let it hang around your neck! Sure the around ear pieces keep them in your ears better, but I still knock them out once in while! And these had better be truly waterproof!
Also with my orevious ones sometimes the bluetooth messes up, will this now happen more often with individual ears? I think this a downgrade. I do hope they have actual waterproofing now though@
Along with some impressive new capture cards, Blackmagic has released a new Ursa Mini Pro G2 with a super 35mm HDR image sensor, 15 stops of exposure and 120 fps at 4.6 K and 300 fps at cropped 1080p. All for $5999.
And more exciting for lower end is an update to the Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K to add full Blackmagic RAW support with 1:1, 3:1, 5:1, 8P1 and 12:1 compression (as well as removing cinema dng codec because of licensing issues). This is a huge update to this impressive little camera!
Of course no Blackmagic raw support yet in premiere so you will need to purchase something like this from BRAW Studio. It is only $29 so worth it if you have a camera that uses it.
So a YouTube Channel called Tailosive Tech has released a video on an inside source from apple on the new 2019 macpro.
And AppleInsider has also covered it (easier to read, especially since the edit is very trimmed, but not very covered and hurts my brain a bit as an editor).
Not only does this cover the new rumored 6K 31 inch monitor, but the new macpro, claiming the modular mac works like stackable legos, with a brain module with a soldered in cpu, and 8 slots of upgradeable RAM. Then you can add GPU modules, and storage modules, possibly modules with the unanounced thunderbolt 4, and eventually possibly third party modules eventually. Each module with it’s own power supply and cooling. And possibly not available until 2020.
This would seem to cover “modular” and why it has taken so long. Giving people an upgraded cheesgrater would not have taken this long, but Apple wouldn’t have made money off every upgrade in that scenario, while with this stackable design they would, including third party modules from licensing their propriety connector. And upgrades likely won’t be cheap. Instead of just a gpu, you are also getting a case, the custom connector a power supply and cooling system (and likely a reason for dropping NVIDIA support, as NVIDIA doesn’t like customized boxes and shapes, but AMD is all in with that).
And depending on the modules, this could be a very cool machine, though also very very expensive. Lets hope they have sone SATA modules as large ammounts of SSD storage are still prohibitively expensive. And let’s hope third party support comes quickly as a blackmagicdesign module for video i/o would be essential. And a sledless 4 drive sata raid module wouldn’t be a bad thing either.
I know this is all rumor, but it makes total sense. This lets Apple give expandability, but lets them control it completely and make money off of every bit of it. And Apple will have delivered what they said, and can charge what they want for it. It will not make everyone happy, especially since it will not be easily user upgradeable, and will be significantly more expensive than a machine that is user upgradeable, but it will ge a true pro machine.
I just hope they show it off at WWDC on June 3rd, but if they aren’t releasing until at least December 31st 2019, that may be way too early.
OK Canon, what the hell? What are they thinking with the EOS R and EOS RP mirrorless cameras? 4 year old sensors that were behind the times on video quality when they came out.
I mean Canon made the DSLR Camera Video revolution, but when they made their C series video cameras they decided it was time to depricate video functionality on their still cameras in favor of their C series video cameras.
Then the mirrorless revolution started and by Sony, but followed by Fuji, Panasonic, Olympus and recently even Nikon, but Canon glass was so good, that people couldn’t wait for Canon to join in. And finally they have with insultingly old technology, and new very expensive lenses! It is a huge middle finger to everyone with a ton of canon lenses!
Really it makes the new BlackMagic Pocket Cinema 4K the last bastion of video for someone with Canon EF lenses and even that is heavily cropped and a small sensor leading to small depth of field.
Canon has betrayed it’s users, opting for usefull video features only with it’s expensive C series video cameras. And the best part is that by doing so they have also betrayed the still users they are supposedly aiming for. Who wants to spend thousands on old technology? A new sensor could have vastly improved both still and video quality, with better low light as well as color technology. Instead they opted for old tech to not canibalize their video cameras and screwed everyone.
Canon has screwed all it’s loyal customers and lost the race for both still and video users. They have betrayed the low end video movement they started and need to nan up and create sone new tech, but at this point it is too late. With the bigger lenses negating their entire line of EF lenses they have lost their advantage (no matter how good their new super expensive lenses are). And even their still feature advantages will eventually not save them (sony’s lack of hdr photography is a huge hit).
I picked up a camranger mini for my wife for christmas to use a a director’s monitor for a dslr.
The Device is mainly used to control a dslr for still photography, but also works for video, though at a very low frame rate. It is works by connecting a small device to your dslr via a USB cable and then connecting your iOS or Android device via wifi. And you can nominally control the camera from the device.
As a director’s monitor it works from framing, but not performances as the frame rate is just too low.
Still cool to be able to see without an attached monitor, especially if the camera is in motion, but a higher frame rate would be welcome.
Maybe the announced Camranger 2 which comes out this year will do better.
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While I was working on an idea for a short film, I realized the footage I had wasn;t good enough, so I decided to do a test between my DJI OSmo+ and my DJI Osmo Pocket to see the difference in quality.
It turned out to be a huge difference. The Osmo+ with Z-Axis is much more stable, but the DJI Osmo Pocket is so much sharper. The image quality on the pocket is just so much better.
An interesting comparison, and I wish that the Pocket had a Z-Axis stabilizer, though it would be much harder because of all of the phone connected to it.
I got a DJI Omso Pocket for Christmas and this is all of my initial footage that I shot to test it out, as well as some of my thoughts on it. I shot it all with the Osmo Pocket including the footage of me.
The footage was shot at UHD 59.94 progressive, though I shot my interview footage at 29.97 so I could try out the face tracking.
So far I am really impressed with the footage, and this amazing little camera, and it’s little tiny screen. I love that I can just drop it in my pocket and have it at a moments notice.
William Gallagher and Mike Wuerthele at AppleInsider hacve an article on how someone at Apple Management doesn’t want NVIDIA support in MacOS.
I have been talking about this for years. Apple doesn’t care about the pros. They care about what they want. And they want the companies that kowtow to them.
And the new “modular” macpro is obviously not going to be what Pros want if you can’t use the components that you want. It seems any new MacPro will only work with AMD video cards. And many video pros want NVIDIA and CUDA, as well as for science people who need proprietary CUDA support! Honestly it means that likely there will be no accessible pci slots in the new MacPro, and not even thunderbolt support for NVIDIA.
There were all these rumors that the exclusivity with AMD ended as of 2019, but it seems Apple is done with NVIDIA. Hell there were even rumors that 2xxx series work with startup unlike all non-supported apple cards, and if that is true Apple is actively supressing NVIDIA!
Now I hear from friends that the new iMac Pro is awesome, but I hate no PCI slots or extra internal storage! Hell you can get PC’s with built in Raids that don’t even require sleds for spinning hard drives. I mean a macpro with an external raid would blow people’s minds! Even if it was a “module” you could add on!
I don’t want to move to Windows. I love my surface, because I can run real photoshop, but would rather have it be a mac, and I want my computer to ge a mac, but am more and more scared that a mac will not be great for a pro.