64 Bit Mac OS Catalina will disable a lot of apps, the steps I am taking, but still can’t upgrade right now: UPDATE

Apple has released Mac Os 10.15 Catalina, and it is the first to make the jump completely to 64 bit, abandoning the ability to run any 32 bit code. It is always recommended to wait a while to upgrade you system, or even better wait for 10.15.1 to work out some of the bugs. I am very interested in it though as I want to try out SideCar with my iPad Pro and Pencil.

Since there is no more 32 bit code many programs will not run, and you can tell which ones that will be in Mojave. Just to to your apple menu and About This Mac.

Then Select System Report:

Then go to Applications:

Then check the column that reads 64 bit and the applications that say no will certainly not work.

I have a lot of applications that will not work, but most are from old versions of Adobe that I still have installed.

Now I am certain to need some 32 bit application at some point in the future, and if you make the move to Catalina before taking some steps to ensure you can still run the applications you will never be able to.

My first step was to make a clone of my hard drive at Mojave for that I head over to Bombich and get the latest paid version of Carbon Copy Cloner. This is an amazing program I have used for years that will clone a hard drive and make a bootable copy. Now I have an iMac pro, so there are additional steps to be able to boot from an external drive thanks to the T2 security chip (you need to restart while holding down command and r and then change the startup security utility to allow external boot with at least Medium security instead of Full Security).

And to keep running 32 bit apps, since I own Parallels to be able to run Windows Applications on my Mac. Tidbits actually has a great article on how to do this using your Mojave Recovery Partition to create a clean install. Sure you will have to re-install the 32 bit apps to get them to run, but a nice clean install won’t take up the space that a full backup of my system would.

And finally it turns out I can’t upgrade to Catalina right now, as I run an external RAID using Softraid for my OWC Thunderbay. Now it will mount in Catalina, but will run slower and have no ability to recover hard drive that die or basically do anything with it in version 5.7.5. Now Softraid and OWC are an amazing company so they are working on it, but since Catalina is much more restrictive on running system extensions this one is going to be hard. It will first be available in 5.8, then in the new version 6 they are developing. I do hope it comes out soon.

••••

UPDATE!

Wow, so I got an e-mail from SoftRaid and OWC and they said that they should be releasing 5.8 within 24 hours with Catalina support! AWESOME!!!

iOS 13.1 on iPhone is messing up badly on playlist artwork for playlists I have synced from my computer

So I have noticed a really frustrating issue on my iPhone X on iOS 13.1 with the music app. I have all of my music organized into playlists by albums and I sync them by playlist, but on iOS 13.1 the album artwork is wrong and consistently changing on many of my playlists.

Here is an example.

The Playlist for Brittany Howard’s album Jaime shows as Tim Michin, but I click on the playlist it shows the proper artwork.

Even weirder is if click on <library the artwork has changed.

And it is again correct once I go into the playlist, but then it changes again when I come back out.

This behavior is incorrect and obviously not supposed to be happening.

I have posted about this at Apple Forums as well, and tried submitting a bug report, but it doesn’t allow pictures an this one you really need to see the pictures to see what the heck is going on.

AVID bug stopping MacPro’s from rebooting turns out to be Chrome

So news reports have been popping up that 2013 MacPro’s running AVID Media Composer have been not restarting just going black. And the only fix was to re-install the Mac OS to get the system running again. Reports seemed to mostly focus on 2013 MacPro’s but from many rental houses, but also sone other macs were affected. It seemed to be that the user folder was having it’s permissions changed from admin to a normal user.

Well it seems that issue was not caused by Media Composer per se. In fact, according to ProVideoCoalition and Engadget it is a Chrome update that is screwing up the user folder. And it is only on macs that have System Integrity Protection (SIP) disabled. This means that in fact AVID is partially responsible, since AVID requires SIP to be turned off so it can get direct access to a Mac’s Graphic Systems. Of course neither Final Cut or Premiere or DaVinci require this, but AVID does.

AVID needs to fix this or work with Apple, because such an expensive and important software shouldn’t require you to lower your Macs defenses. And of course a Company as big as Google should know better as well, but why would they test with SIP disabled? I mean now they need to, but it is not something you would normally test for.

A second line for J.K. Growling, she left this world too early and will always be missed

 So most of you will have seen that we lost J.K. Growling, our little 4 year old Shar Pei last week. Well I made this video as a little memoriam of her life. It is in the format of a second line starting off sad, and then a celebration of her life.

I do not have the rights to the music, the songs are Just A Closer Walk With Thee and You Are My Sunshine by The Treme Brass Brand, all rights reserved.

Blackmagic replaces the loud and hot Ultrastudio 4K with the mini

Blackmagic has replaced it’s Ultrastudio 4K with the Ultrastudio 4K mini, for the same price of $995 with an upgrade from Thunderbolt 2 to 3, and a headphone jack with volume, an sd slot and a usb port as well moving from 6GB SDI to 12GB and a much smaler form factor!

Damn! I want one! I have an Ultrastudio 4K, and while a powerful machine, I mean it plays back anything I send to it, but it is thunderbolt 2 (so requires a thunderbolt 2 to 3 adapter) and it gets hot, I mean real hot, and it’s fans are so loud! It is painfully loud!

Too bad their isn’t an upgrade path!

Blackmagic announces the Pocket Cinema Camera 6K

So Blackmagic surprised everyone and announced the new Blackmagic Pocket Cinema 6K camera, which has a Super 35mm Sensor and an EOS lens mount. The sensor is an impressive 6144×3456 sensor, and the Super 35mm means aps-c size which means a 1.6x crop factor vs the 2x crop of the 4K mft version. And it is $2495 vs $1295, but doesn’t need a Speed Booster, which would have fixed the crop factor, and increased the lens speed, but also added more glass between the sensor and lens.

Now the camera will eat more battery than the already battery eating 4k (That it turns out is why they made the battery grip). And the new camera only shoots ProRes in 4k and UHD, saving BRAW for 6k. And the current manual only lists 4k speeds for drives and Cfast cards.

For someone with EF lenses this is a dream camera, if only I could afford it right now!

Supercomp in Red Giant VFX suite seems to not work with Motion Blur

So I was playing with Red Giant Supercomp, which is pretty powerful, but it seems to be missing the ability to deal with Motion Blur.

I was hoping to use supercomp for a comp I was doing, but the comp had motion blur in it. And the motion blur doesn’t show up in supercomp. It must interact with all the other comp features.

I was actually hoping to use the features to deliver in RAW, as the background plate was RAW and the item I was comping in was not, so I wanted to deliver it all in RAW without straight eyeballing it.

So just know that Motion Blur doesn’t currently work with Supercomp.

Red Giant releases new awesome VFX Suite, but in doing so have killed the Keying Suite and the Effects Suite

So Red Giant has released the new VFX Suite for Keying, Tracking, Cleanup and Visual Effects Compositing. They have a full blog post with many YouTube videos on features and how to use the new tools.

The only bummer is that they have killed their Keying and Effects suits to do so. I say bummer, not because the new tools don’t look awesome, but because you have to owned the previous to get a special offer upgrade (it isn’t just available on the site) and you get no discount for owning both previous suits.

Supercomp looks impressive though, basically it makes compositing much easier, and allows all layers to effect your comp, so you don’t have to do a bunch of pre-composing to make your comps looks the best they can, and it is all GPU accelerated.

And Primatte has reached version 6. Many people just go with Keylight, but I have always found that Primatte is faster and easier to reach a good key, so I am excited about this.

Key Pin tracker seems to supercharge corner pin tracking (though the demo does show some features they need to add, like copying the from and to points automatically by a single button).

Spot Clone Tracker looks super easy and powerful.

Optical Glow also looks amazing, and should negate the need to every use the built in After Effects glow which never was very good.

I already have some ideas for the new Chromatic Displacement plug in.

Will have to see how the new Knoll Light Factory 3.1 is. I used to use it all the time, but have completely given up on it, because of Video Copilot’s Optical Flares plug in, which I think surpassed it years ago.

And Shadow and Refection looks cool when needed.

Problems with iMac Pro and OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock and displayport connector

So when I got my new iMac Pro (as my MacPro 4,1 finally bit the bullet) I decided to get an OWC Thunberbolt 3 Dock with 14 ports and 85 watts of power to connect more peripherals to my Mac.

Overall I love Other World Computings products and their service. They are a great company, but the problem with this device for me is the mini displayport.

I have the iMac Pro and an LG 4k 27 inch monitor. I was trying to hook up the LG via the mini displayport in the dock. First I tried an Amazon basics mini displayport cable to displayport cable and it just didn’t work at all.

Then I tried an Amazon basics mini displayport to HDMI connector. This seemed to work, and both monitors worked, but whenever the computer slept the displays and woke back up the second monitor acted as if it was just found, and all the windows that were on it would be moved to the iMac Monitor. Super frustrating especially when using, Premiere Pro, After Effects or DaVinci Resolve across both monitors. The display also did the same thing when I connected or disconnected anything to the dock, including my iPhone or iPad using the front high powered ports, or the SD cards!

I thought maybe it was the connector, so I spent quite a bit more money and went to apple and got the Belkin mini display port to HDMI that they listed since I didn’t see a direct one from Apple. When I got it, it had the exact same problems.

I contacted support, and they got back to me very quickly, and after some back and forth, basically it came down turning sleep off, but I didn’t want to do that, nor turn off let hard drives sleep, as I don’t want to ruin my RAIDs by having them run all the time.

So after being frustrated for a while I went for a USB 3.1 to HDMI adapter, and this I connected to the back of my awesome OWC ThunderBay 4’s Thunderbolt port, and the monitor works great now! Everything (well almost everything, as Messages seems to jump back to the iMac monitor quite a bit) stays on the second monitor when the computer sleeps and I can leave everything going to sleep!

And I can connected and disconnect things with the dock without any issues. The dock works great when I am not using it for it’s mini displayport connector. I am not sure if my dock has an issue with it’s mini displayport, or if this is just an issue with this dock and an iMac Pro, but it is something to know in advance.

My faith in Apple mostly restored with the new Mac Pro!

So Apple officially showed off the new MacPro at the WWDC, and it is pretty F***ING AWESOME!!!!

First off it looks like a Cheese-grater, which was literally to please the fans of the old Cheese-grater!

And it has handles, and you can even get wheels. And the metal case comes off so you can access it from all sides.

It has 8, 12, 16, 24 or 28 core Xeon processors, getting 300 kw of power so they never get throttled, with a special air cooled system.

It has 12 RAM slots capable of 1.5 Terrabytes of RAM (I can’t wait to laugh at the price of that from Apple).

And it has 8  PCI SLOTS! Well, 7 really, but DAMN! 4 double wide slots for graphics cards (both with an additional new PCI connector for the MPX modules) with 1 x16 and 2 x8 gen 3 for video cards. And the top slot is a half wife slot for Apple’s I/O card (which means it can be upgraded or changed out).

And the MPX Modules are special PCI graphics cards in containers. There is a half heigh one fro the AMD Radeon Pro 580x which comes standard. And then full size modules that fill 2 double wide PCI slots, for either the AMD Radeon Pro Vega II with 32 GB of Memory, or the AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo which is 2 cards in one with super fast connection between the cards (and you can install 2 of these! Wow that will cost a ton). And these all have extra thunderbolt ports (as there are 2 on top and 2 on the I/O card). And these can get 300 wats of power

The system has an unbelievable 1.4 kilowatts of power supply!

And my favorite addition, the Afterburner ProRES and ProRES RAW Accelerator PCI Card which can play 3 streams of 8K ProRes RAW or 12 streams of 4K ProRes Raw without touching the CPU or GPU! WOW! They said you can do realitime color correction and effects on DaVinci in 8K in realtime! My question is will it be supported via thunderbolt 3 for the iMacPro maybe along with a video card like the BlackMagic kit they support? And it would be even better if it also supported BlackMagic RAW!

And up to a 4GB SSD.

And there is also a rack mounted version!

WOW! This is a powerhouse, and the 6K monitor would make an amazing, though expensive addition!

My only complaints are AMD only, no NVIDIA. And sure NVIDIA wouldn’t let them do these MPX modules with Thunderbolt, nor support those new fangled PCI slots that allow them, but 4 NVIDIA cards in here would be screaming! And the 4GB SSD. I know people don’t like spinning platters anymore, but man I have so much stuff on drives now, 4GB which will be insanely expensive is just not enough storage! Hell I could only afford 2GB in my iMac Pro! I was hoping for some sort of built in raid when you could put in your own hard drives, but that was alas just a ridiculous dream.