Adobe Premiere Pro 12.1.2 Update, July 2018, didn’t fix multicam audio render bug!

Eric Philpott at the Adobe Blog has listed the new features of this new point update of Adobe Premiere Pro to 12.1.2.

The new features are limited to Performance enhancements and format support including Hardware Accelerated H.264 and HEVC decoding on the new MacBook Pro and iMac Pro, and Accelerated Encoding on Windows 10 with seventh generation and later processors, as well as improved RED Decoding and Sony RAW/X-OCN formats. They have also added export to 8K H.264 and a few other formats, but mostly it is about bug fixes.

Already I have seen the Recent warnings about incompatible fonts having gone away.

This release did not fix the really f***ing annoying Multicam Audio bug, where to see the waveform in your multicam clips, you need to render the audio. This would be OK if it kept the render between restarts of the program (or crashes), but every damn time you have to re-render the audio to see the waveforms! COME ON ADOBE, THIS ISSUE HAS BEEN AROUND FOR WAY TOO LONG FOR YOU TO HAVE NOT FIXED IT!

Adobe working on a full version of Photoshop for the iPad, some thoughts

So it is being reported that Adobe is working on a full version of Photoshop to work on the iPad. And they do need a better version as their current iPad apps are all very limited, and blown out of the water by apps by other vendors, but I am still wary.

I have an original iPad pro and an Apple pencil and was overjoyed to start doing real artwork on my iPad, but my experience so far has been so bad that I have basically given up. I just don’t think that iOS is a robust enough system to support it. Even in the best apps I have had way too many crashes that make me lose all the work that I have done, till where I have just given up and use my Surface Pro, which is a real computer with a robust OS and full versions of apps.

And dealing with documents is just so convoluted on the iPad, that it isn’t easy to get documents on and off easily, except by saving them to cloud services, but that isn’t just an integrated system wide feature.

It has really made me think that the iPad is not a pro device and can’t be used as such. It is much more a web terminal and game system with some ability to play with more powerful apps, but not really a computer that can be trusted with my pro work.

Blackmagic has created an eGPU to work with Apple

BlackMagic has worked with Apple to create an thunderbolt 3 eGPU with a Radeon Pro 580 in it. It is not upgradeable, but has an HDMI and four usb 3.1 connections and a thunberbolt passthrough as well as 85W of power. It is $699 and sells from Apple to work with their laptops.

Very cool, though I think they might have missed an opportunity in not combining it with a Decklink, Intensity or UltraStudio for playback to an external monitor. Even if it used 2 Thunderbolt connectors I think the addition of at least a playback card would have made this a must have solution.

Apple has released a much more Pro version of the MacBook Pro but reatains the very non -pro Touch Bar

So Apple has finally updated the MacPro with Touchbar to be much more of a Pro Machine, with the 15inch model  being able to have an insanely expensive 4tb SSD, quite expensive 32GB of RAM and a fairly reasonable 6 Core intel Core i9 processor, and a Radeon Pro 560x with 4GB of Memory and true tone display, as well as having 4 USB 3.1 Gen 2 Thunderbolt Ports and a supposedly improved keyboard.

Horribly they keep the horrific idea of the Touch Bar. While it sounds like a great idea, the whole concept of a keyboard is so that you don’t have to look at it, and with the touchbar you are looking down from the screen to the keyboard to interact with it (if an application even uses it). Honestly keys with screens in them would be so much more useful, as would a touch screen, but apple always things they are smarter than everyone else.

Still a 6 core i9 with 32 GB of ram would be great, especially if added to the with the new black magic external video card for Resolve.

Adobe Premiere Pro 2018 Multicam Audio Bug

So I am using Adobe Premiere Pro 2018 with multicam sequences of UHD ProRES clips and separate 24 bit audio. And to see the waveform in Premiere the Audio needs to be rendered. The bug is that Premiere Pro loses this render each time I open Premiere, so I once again need to render the audio to see the waveform.

And this has been going on for a long time, as you can see from this post at the Adobe Forums, they were going to fix this ASAP as of February 2017, but is July 2018, and the bug still persists.

I have also posted about it on the new feature and bug request page.

Rogue Amoeba blog on the sad state of Mac Hardware

Quentin Carnicelli recently posed a great article on the sad state of upgrades across the whole line of the Macintosh Computers. Basically it comes down to the fact that other than the iMac Pro which came out in December (half a year ago) there isn’t a single mac that has been updated in a year.

This is really a sad state. And the Mac Mini has been almost 4 years without an update or a price drop for old as hell hardware. Macs used to at least get processor upgrades once in a while with the form staying the same, but it seems we are not even getting that anymore.

Apple really has become a phone company that occasionally releases some new computer hardware.

And this makes me worry even more for the supposed new MacPro which we will learn about in 2019! Honestly no computer should take 3 years to design and ship. Especially when what Pros really want is the old cheese-grater with updated hardware. All the hints at a modular design really scares me. I don’t want modular, I want upgradeable with off the shelf PC components. Not some proprietary monstrosity that is upgradeable with over-expensive modules that only follow Apple’s upgrade schedule, which is slow at best. And most of us want some choice, mostly the choice to use NVIDIA graphics cards and not have to run it externally via thunderbolt which is not and never will be as fast as a 16x PCI bus.

Premiere Pro Ingest is broken, Media Encoder keeps freezing and breaking the process

So I am running Premiere Pro CC 2018 12.1.1 and Adobe Media Encoder CC 2018 12.1.1.12 on a macOS Sierra 10.12.6 with a MacPro 5,1 dual 6 core 3.06 GHZ with 32 GB of RAM and and a GTX 97- 4096 MB mac flashed. I am running the latest CUDA 387.178 with NVIDIA Web Driver 378.06.25f03 and am using CUDA renderer. I am using UHD 29.97 footage from a Canon C300 in MXF format and converting it to ProRES on Ingest from Media Browser.

I am importing the footage from within Media Browser in premiere and it sends the footage to Media Encoder to convert it. The problem I am having is that Media Encoder keeps freezing and giving me the app “not responding” message. And if you force quit media encoder all the encodes are gone, and I have to delete the footage I imported and re-import all the footage into premiere to get the ingest going again. This is super frustrating. At least if I bring clips into media encoder myself and I have to force quit it, when I come back all the encodes are still in Media Encoder (sure some may have all compressed but that is an easy fix, just delete the encodes that already happened), it seems that Ingest can’t deal with any component breaking down, and it keeps breaking down for me.

It seems that the ingest only works if everything is working correctly, and it has not been working right, so as soon as you force media encoder to quit the Ingest is finished.

Honestly there should be a way to restart the conversions from within Premiere (not just creating proxys, but an actual ingest conversion). And it would be great if the ingest survived crashes, by leaving all the convertions within media encoder even after a crash so you could continue it later if something fails.

I know I can just do the conversion straight in Media Encoder (which I am doing now, but still getting not responding, but at least I can force quit and the conversions are still there and I can just delete the completed ones), but I was hoping to do the Ingest Process, but it does not seem to be working at all well for me.

And yes I know that Premiere can play back the MXF footage, but I have much better playback of the 4K footage once it is converted to ProRES.

I also posted this on the adobe forums, but don’t expect to get an answer that will fix the issue other than doing what I am doing and doing the conversions in Media Encoder directly. I just can’t believe how broken the ingest feature is that it can’t handle errors within Creative Cloud. It just expects that it will work, and it is not doing that for me.

Apple hosts WWDC 2018 and no new Hardware and nothing on MacPro

You can go to Apple and and see the new features announced for iOS, MacOS, AppleTV OS and Apple Watch OS. And things do look good, but there was no new hardware announcements at all. And especially no mention of the new MacPro. This is Apple flipping the bird at Pro users. As was all the talk of egpu support (which doesn’t support NVIDIA which most pros want).

Does this mean the MacPro won’t even be shown off until 2019? And if so WTF! And no mention if the next os will still support the MacPro 5,1! This is so insulting. Will pros be kicked off their machines with no sign of what the new pro machine will be?

I mean I like some of what was announced. The new OS sounds good, but can I run it?

Or should I have moved to Windows ages ago?