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?

Apple has created a new video fromat, Apple ProRes RAW

Apple has created a new video format, Apple ProRES RAW and you can check out the White Paper here. They claim it will render 6.3 times faster than red .r3d format. It will be smaller file size than Apple Pro Res 4444. It will soon work with the DJI Xenmuse X7. And the Atomos Sumo 19 and the Shogun Inferno will support it, as well as the Panasonic EVA1 and the Varicam LT. It will allow for tweaking of the ISO and color balance in post.

I would be more impressed if they brought back ProRes Support for Windows, as without that it just can’t be a ubiquitous format.

Hopefully Adobe and AVID will support it soon.

it ships on April 9th with Final Cut Pro X 10.4.1.

So the next Apple Mac Pro is a 2019 product, you have to be kidding me?

So Matthew Panzarino from TechCrunch has had another meeting with Apple about Pro Machines, a year after their last roundtable when they announced the iMac Pro. It seems this is meant to assuage fears of the pro community and show that Apple is now focusing it’s attention on Pros and building a modular Mac Pro to work for them, that won’t appear until 2019 (Likely end of December just like the iMac Pro which means almost another 3 years wait from the initial announcement and almost 2 years from now).

OK it is good that Apple has hired pros to come in and work with them on projects and help shape the future of all Mac Pro products, and they claim to be working with 3rd party developers and not just apple products, though it sounds like Panzarino only saw Apple Logic and Apple Final Cut Pro X edit bays. And what really scares me is the modularity seems to be things like the external eGPU’s for Laptops, and using multiple iPad Pros with an iMac Pro as control surfaces. None of these are bad things, but they are not PCI slot rich MacPro’s that can use off the shelf PC Cards to expand and enhance the mac, and Thunderbolt is not ever going to be as fast as the fastest PCI slots.

And honestly if Apple is so into working with 3rd parties to make their products work, how about working with NVIDIA to include their Web Drivers in their system updates? Many of us struggling Mac Pro users are using the most powerful modern video cards in our old Cheese Grater Mac Pro’s and that means using NVIDIA cards. And while with some system updates have not required me to swap back to my old Apple flashed video card, most of them do. So I now dread system updates. Not because they are undoable, but because they take me so long to have to swap out my video card and run the update and then upgrade NVIDIA’s drivers, before I swap back to my old video card. And it never goes perfectly, and always takes hours. If you want to care about Pro users, help us NVIDIA users out!

Also Final Cut Pro X was my final straw in trusting Apple Pro software. I bought it and it just didn’t work for me at all. It forced an entirely new way of editing and seemed to only work with that one workflow. While with AVID and Premiere Pro every editor has their own methodology that they use, and that is how Editors like it, not being forced to work one way and one way only with a completely uncontrollable timeline. And Apple has killed so much great pro software. Final Cut Pro 7. Shake. Color. Aperature. I just don’t trust them anymore. And I almost wish they would get out of Pro Software completely and just work with AVID and ADOBE to make their software work better. Now they claim to be working with them in this article, but it doesn’t sound like they have AVID and Premiere Pro edit bays at Apple for their pros they have hired. And who are these pros? I would love to know. And I would love to hear them talk a bit, not just some tech writers.

I have said it before and I will say it again. I want the Cheese Grater Mac Pro upgraded with modern technology! Yes it should include Thunderbolt so it can be modular and use eGPU’s if I want to, but I want to use off the shelf PCI cards to upgrade it. And I want internal storage! And not just one hard drive, multiple hard drives. And hell an attachable RAID that takes drives directly without a sled would not be horrible, but I can always get an external. All this modular talk scares me.

The more I hear the more scared I get that I will end up replacing my aging MacPro with a Windows Box. And I know Windows has gotten better (I have a Surface Pro 3), but I still don’t like using it like I use a Mac. I am just worried that all this modularity talk sounds more and more like something like the Trashcan macpro that just isn’t what people want, as making a new cheesegrater should not take 2 years! It sounds like they are trying too hard. And when Apple tries too hard we get things like the Trashcan or the Mac Book Pro with weird ass touch strip instead of the touch screen that everyone actually wants.

Who is Apple talking too? Who have they hired? The high end people working big movies like those mentioned, are not working on their own gear. They have rental gear, or working at a company. What about us Editors who work on our own gear? Or small companies with a few Mac Pros? Are they in the mix and talking to Apple?

Or even worse maybe the Apple making it’s own Chips rumors is true, and they are waiting for that. Which would be a disaster. Making it harder to maintain Mac and Windows versions.

And what happens if my Mac Pro finally kicks the bucket before then? I have already replaced a -power supply. I am not moving to an iMac, so that will likely mean I move off the Mac completely.

Apple as a Pro users I am well and truly scared, and if you cared you would be working faster, and not taking 3 years to show a machine that might not work at all for me and might finally drive me well and completely to windows.

Fixed Issues in Adobe Premiere Pro April 2018 (Version 12.1) does it fix AAF export?

Adobe has posted it’s bug fixes for the new version of Premiere Pro.

One thing it does not mention is the OMF and AAF export which was totally messed up in the last version of Premiere. It did not stay in sync, and the solution was to export the sequence and open it in an earlier version of premiere and export from there.