Apple Announces new iPad Pro and Pencil, MacBook Air and Mac Mini

Apple had a Keynote today, and announced some cool new products.

The new iPad Pro looks impressive, as does it’s new wireless charging Pencil, and I love my 1st Gen 12.9 inch iPad Pro, but still don’t see it as a pro device. And I can’t see how the hard edges will make it easier to hold. Still I want one. Especially as it is lighter and thinner (though the camera sure looks to stick out allot! And I still don’t see it as a pro device, though I use mine every day! The near $200 price increase totally sucks though!

The New MacBook Air is impressive as well, finally getting retina, but also moving exclusively to USB C Thunderbolt ports. This is what my wife needs for sure.

And finally a new MacMini in quad and 6 core models, and you can even get 10 Gigabit Ethernet as an option, which will make it much more useful in high end facilities!

And they announced, though did not price, that in late November, the MacBook Pro will be getting optional Radeon Pro Vega Graphics as an option. If only they would get rid of the damn touch bar and give back function keys and make the screen touch based! Can’t get everything.

And OF COURSE NO MENTION OF THE 2019 MACPRO! I am already worried about it, especially since Mojave basically does not support NVIDIA cards (and they already have released the first point release of the OS today). So what is the point of even having PCI slots if you can’t use the most powerful and power efficient graphics cards in them!

Will NVIDIA release video card drives for Mac OS Mojave?

So Apple has released it’s latest OS, OS X 10.14 Mojave, and it dropped Open CL support, breaking many legacy programs and also unfortunately breaking NVIDIA’s CUDA.

Apple has released a list of cards that are compatible with Metal and will work with Mojave. It lists 2 old Mac Edition NVIDIA cards as working (though with really old drivers that won’t work with any modern card) and a slew of AMD cards (also with issues I will get into later).

So for many OSes NVIDIA has been releasing Web Drivers and CUDA drivers that gave support to 3rd party NVIDIA cards within a MacPro 5,1 (or flashed 4,1).

Unfortunately it seems that Mojave broke CUDA support, and NVIDIA has not been able to get it working, so they haven’t even released Web Drivers. The link says that they need to work with Apple to get it working, which may mean it will never happen. As Apple has only released machines with AMD cards since someone at NVIDIA leaked the specs on a computer before a Steve Jobs Keynote.

So anyone with an NVIDIA card can’t upgrade to Mojave (well you can but without any video card acceleration it will be a mostly useless computing experience).

This does not give confidence that the promised new Mac Pro for 2019 will be able to use NVIDIA cards either. And I for one have been greatly impressed with NVIDIA cards and CUDA acceleration.

And the issue above with AMD cards come into play here. AMD cards do support metal and do it very well, but they are continually beaten by NVIDIA cards not only in performance, but especially in power consumption and heat generation.

And the fact that AMD cards will work in a MacPro 5,1 in Mojave is great (though without any boot screens as they are not flashed for Mac), but the power consumption of those cards is not. So even the consumer Radeon RX 580, 570 or even 560 can draw too much power for a MacPro and cause power spikes and crashes. The solution is to either hack your mac’s power supply by tapping into all the power cables to draw enough power, or run an external power supply for your video card (made more difficult since all my PCI cards are full with a USB 3 card, a Blackmagic card and an ssd hard drive).

And NVIDIA cards use so much less power that you can easily run an NVIDIA GTX 1080 8GB in a MacPro and it will outperform an RX 580 (check this out at Barefeat). And sure the RX Vega 64 beats the GTX 1080, but it requires an external power supply and if you were going to go that the GTX 1080Ti beats the AMD. And it gets even worse if you check the Metal scores, as even the GTX 1070 beats the RX VEGA 64 significantly in Metal scores, and the Vega 64 has huge issues with Fans and drivers support.

So will NVIDIA fix CUDA, or are they giving up on Mac? And if they are giving up on Mac what is the solution for us NVIDIA card users in our old MacPros? The new MacPro is still vaporware. So it looks like sticking to High Sierra is the only solution and hope Adobe keeps supporting High Sierra till the new MacPro comes out.

And then it will be time to see if it is time to move to Windows or get a new MacPro.

EDIT: Mojave was released September 24th and it is October 27th. Am really starting to think this is not happening at all.

Adobe has released Premiere Rush for the iPad

The formerly only available through an invited beta, Adobe Rush has been released for the iPad and iPhone. It is an online editing system that converts everything to H.264 and can do simple edits, and they can even be exported to Premiere Pro though he desktop version requires 10.13 on the mac.

It seems to be a simple and quick editing program to upload web videos, and has to be better than the previous adobe clip, which was pretty basic.

I have downloaded to my ipad, but have not played with it yet.

Adobe has release After Effects 16 also known as After Effects CC October 15th 2019

You can check out all the features at Adobe.

I am most excited about the new JavaScript Engine for expressions and especially the ability to save your favorite expressions in a library!

And I am excited that the new Mocha included is a plug in instead of a stand alone application. I have not upgraded to the latest Mocha as it is a bit expensive, so am glad that this has been updated.

I am just hoping that this fixes some of the problems I have been having lately with UHD projects and not being able to open without either trashing my prefs (which also trashed my Workspaces) or importing the project into a fresh project which works until I have to re-open it. This has been incredibly frustrating!

Adobe released Premiere Pro 13 Today, also known as Premiere Pro 2019 October 15 Update

You can check out the full release notes at Adobe.

I am most excited about being able to access multiple lumetri effects from the Lumetri Panel, instead of only being able to access the last added one, and having to make changes in the effects panel.

Also looking forward to trying the Intelligent Audio Cleanup Tools.

I haven’t really played with Templates from After Effects, since I do my own graphics, and it just seems easier to make the graphics all the way in After Effects, but I will eventually play with it more.

No mention of having fixed the having to render audio to see audio in a multicam clip in the timeline. I am hoping that bug is fixed. I hate having to render every time I open the project, it is just frustrating and unnecessary.

My iPhone X doesn’t charge unless I unlock it when connected with any cable

I have been seeing reports all over of the new iPhones not charging unless the screen is turned on, and in fact that is what the iOS 12.0.1 update purported to fix, but my iPhone X has not charged unless I unlock it since I got it. It will charge wireless while the screen is off, but if I plug it in, I need to unlock it or I don’t get any charge. And yes I have tried 6 different cables and I have the issue with any cable and different chargers or my MacPro 5,1.

This is super frustrating and in fact I have had quite a few days where I go to use my phone and it is almost dead though was plugged in all night.

Scott Simmons at PVC article on editing a complex feature in Premiere Pro with no crashes

Scott Simmons at ProVideo Coalition has a great article on how he edited a whole feature on Premiere Pro without any crashes.

It is certainly worth a read. Now I don’t see how he edits a whole doc with only one sequence, as I like to make stringouts of shots and use markers to mark them up, and he must subclips things, which I find slower.

And I already render at ProRES, but I have also started rendering everything over to ProRES before editing, because highly compressed formats cause too many issues (as do JPGs), though I have had to do it before import, because I have found that using the Ingest feature doens’t work, as it often crashes and loses it’s progress completely.

And I am going to start moving more sequences out of my project into archive projects as I go to see if that helps with stability.

After Effects error: Unable to allocate enough memory to render the current frame

So I am running After Effects CC 15.1.2 on a MacPro 5,1 with 32 GB of RAM NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 with 4GB of VRAM on MacOS High Sierra 10.13.4. I have 6GB reserved for other applications, so am running with 26GB of RAM.

I am running UHD 29.97 P ProRES HQ footage, and it mostly works fine while I am running, but I do get crashes sometimes, and the problem is either with a crash or with saving and closing and re-opening the project. When I re-open the project I get the error After Effects error: Unable to allocate enough memory to render the current frame.

Screen Shot 2018-10-03 at 5.33.32 PM.png

This happens as soon as the project has re-opened, and happens immediately as soon as the project opens, and it happening every time with different projects and different footage (though all UHD 29.97 ProRES HQ.

I have found 2 workarounds that let me keep working, but are both a major pain in rear end.

The first workaround is If I open a new project and import the old project things work fine until I close AE or it crashes, then the same problems occurs.

The second is to hold down shift-option-command and delete the preferences when I re-open, but this also trashes my custom workspaces. And it seems Custom Workspaces no longer sync anymore? As if I restore my Preferences from the Sync my workspaces don’t come back (I know these used to sync, why don’t they sync anymore?).

Any solutions would be greatly appreciated as this is really frustrating.