Does Apple Silicon mean that it is less likely that iPad software will make it to the Mac?

So the follow up to Catalina, Big Sur has been revealed and as I talked about in my last post it is all the start of a transition for Apple from Intel to ARM based Apple Silicon. And a huge new feature is that basically all iPad and iPhone apps will now run on a Macs without any changes. This is a very cool thing, but it sounds like it leaves all of us with Intel macs out of the loop.

They have Rosetta 2 to convert Intel software to run on Apple Silicon, and they were previously working on tech called Catalyst to convert iOS and iPad Software quickly and easily to a Mac, but will this fall by the wayside for us Intel users? Is there no Rosetta to run Apple Silicon software on Intel? There was no mention of it so it seems unlikely it will be there, as they obviously will want people to move to Apple Silicon, but what about Pro Users, who are at least 2 years away from having pro Apple Silicon?

Apple’s move to ARM from Intel Processors will only take 2 years

At Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference, the WWDC yesterday Apple announced that they will be moving all of their processors from Intel to Apple Silicon ARM processors in 2 years.

Rumors of this switch have been going on for years now, since Apple has been creating it’s own ARM processors for iPhones and iPads for the last 20 years. And it makes sense for their laptops for sure, since they use less power, and have better graphics than Intel’s low and mid range processors. It will mean more speed and more battery life for most laptops.

And they have brought back Rosetta which was used in the Power PC to Intel transition and showed it using Maya in their keynote. And Universal 2 will allow developers to compile versions for both Intel and Apple Silicon in a single binary. And they said Adobe is working on the transition already, so some software will certainly work, but what about other pro software, like AVID and DaVinci and all the plug ins.

My question has always been what will it mean for the high end pro market. And their are currently no high end ARM processors that match Xeon processors. And can they even support PCI cards? Hell the Dev box they are letting developers buy doesn’t even have Thunderbolt, which is an Intel technology and that all pros have moved to including me. Will none of my hard drives work on new Mac hardware ever again? That will be a huge fuck you to Pros. Was the new MacPro a hoodwink to bring pros back and then it is the last truly pro machine that Apple every releases? And all it’s vaunted upgradeability is useless because Apple will never release any new hardware for it. If so what a fucking waste. It does look like Intel is open sourcing Thunderbolt, but not having it on the first hardware is scary.

Sure it is possible that Apple plans a MacPro with Apple Silicon, but it seems unlikely, especially since they never mentioned it when they could have. Sure it would stop or slow down current sales, but it would give some assurance.

I mean it took AVID this long to get a version that works for Catalina, and it is basically a re-write that breaks all compatibility with past versions. Hopefully this switch won’t be as drastic, but who the fuck knows?

Will all plug ins need to be re-written, that is very likely, which means years for Apple to catch up again with where it is, and a huge expense as you know most will involve a cost to the end user.

And so if it turns out the high end can’t compete with Intel, and not even AMD graphics cards, Pros will be done with Apple for good. And maybe iPad’s with Keyboards will end up as the high end of macs, as it is likely that more high end software will be more easily ported since it will be on the same silicon.

So once again I come away from a WWDC more scared for Apple’s future than I was before it. Maybe Apple has solutions or maybe they will just be going for the low end portable market and dropping the high end, but that is a question I would love answered.

Sure Intel will remain supported for years, but not forever.

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.