Adobe pulling an Apple with it’s awesome SpeedGrade and gutting it, and not updating it

As you can see from my last post, Adobe has just announced it’s next set of features for the Video Tools in Creative Cloud at IBC 2016. Unfortunately once again one program has been left out, Adobe SpeedGrade. Yes they are adding more color correction tools from SpeedGrade into Premiere Pro, but it has now been many years since SpeedGrade has had an update.

This is really a shame as it is a great color correction tool that needs some love, especially since it’s ability to do a grade, and have it roundtrip back to Premiere Pro as a plug in, makes it so much more powerful for projects that have many versions than doing a grade in the more powerful DaVinci Resolve, in which you have to render out your grade. With Master Clips Grades in SpeedGrade those grade would be there for whole clips in future versions while you edit.

I just think it is a shame that they seem to be gutting SpeedGrade and not giving it the love it deserves. It really needs multi-monitor support so you can pull your scopes to a different monitor, and it needs some updates, especially moving some of the tools they have created for Premiere and moving them back into SpeedGrade. The lack of updates make it looks like it will go the way of the dodo, much like Apple did with the amazing Shake and Color apps that they purchased and then killed.

The death of SpeedGrade is a real shame!

Adobe Creative Cloud Video and Audio Tools New Feature Reveals at IBC 2016

I just wish they would fix some of the bugs of 2015.3 quickly, as I have heard nothing but issues from people.

Check out an overview of the new features by Victoria Nece at the Adobe Creative Cloud Blog.

As for new features, the big one is Team Projects. A hosted service allowing collaboration between Premiere Pro, After Effects and Prelude. This could be huge if it works well. I like how media mapping can be different for each user. Finally something to fight AVID in large multi-user environments!

Premiere Pro and Media Encoder are next. Bronwyn Lewis has written about it at the Adobe Creative Cloud blog.

In addition to team projects, it now has enhanced Captions and Subtitle support.

Enhancements to the Lumetri Color Tool Sets, which rocks, though unfortunately likely also spells the death of the separate and more powerful Speed Grade Application which once again is not getting an update here.

There is even more expanded VR support.

And destination publishing (something I will likely not be using).

And something I likely will be using enhanced Live Text Templates from After Effects! As well as visual Keyboard Shortcut mapping tool like AVID has always had.

It also will work better with Apple Metal, and have faster Dynamic Linking, And Media Encoder will stitch together multiple clips to ease file management.

After Effects has new features gone over by Victoria Nece at the Adobe Creative Cloud.

It has the afore mentioned Team Projects, a new 3D rendering allowing bent planes and extruded 3D text and shapes within After Effects using Cinema 4D’s standard renderer!

It has faster performance with GPU’s and more GPU accelerated effects. The aforementioned Improved Live Text Templates, with TypeKit Font Sync.

And more Powerful Dynamic Linking.

And when creating projects from Templates settings like color management and folder structure can be passed on!

Dave Werner shares new features of Adobe Character Animator CC Beta.

Durin Gleaves talks about Audition CC’s new features. It has a cleaned User Interface, that more matches the rest of the creative suite and will work on high resolution monitors.

Installing Boot Camp on High Capacity Disks

Other World Computing has a great article on how to install a bootcamp partition on disk larger than 2.2TB.

I wish I had seen this earlier. As I recently replaced my 2TB that had bootcamp on a partition on it with a 3TB drive that I took out of my Synology, and I could not restore my old BootCamp partition using WinClone because I could not make the partition. I could do it again now, but would have to reback up the drive and then move it back afterwards, and am not sure I have enough hard drive space for this, unless I wipe out the old disc with BootCamp on it. And I have yet to do a WinClone Restore so I am not sure it will work and don’t want to lose the BootCamp partition just in case.

Batch Converting Pages Documents to Word Documents with Applescript

So if you read this blog you already know that I have pretty much come to the decision that my next computer will not be a Mac. I love my old MacPro 4,1 but it is getting long in the tooth, and I haven’t even been able to do the Firmware Upgrade to get it to 5,1, so the next OS Sierra will not work on my current MacPro as it will only work on a 5,1 (I haven’t tried putting in my old video card before the upgrade, which might help, but it looks like El Capitan makes it harder).

Unfortunately in 2007 I moved over to Pages to do my invoices, resumes and cover letter. Now you can individually export your documents to the modern word format docx, but I am talking hundreds and hundreds of files that I may want to access at some point, so I wanted a way to batch those files.

This requires applescript, and while I used to be OK at Applescript all those skills have since gone away.

A quick google search showed one page dedicated to scripting the iWorks suite, and it is iWorkAutomation. Specifically there is a script to Export to Word, but it is not a batch export, just a single use, and so not of use to me, except for stealing some of it’s commands.

So then I went back to the old faithful applescript forums MacSpripter, and did a search. And I found an awesome script from Yvan Keonig, which automates the process, allowing you to pick a folder with you pages documents and then chose a destination folder, and it batch converts to PDF files.

Luckily my limited Applescript skills and the fact that the script was so well written, let me use the Microsoft Word commands from iWork Automation and combine them to make a script to convert to Word documents.

Just copy this script and paste it into Script Editor and run the script. You can also save the script to your scripts folder.

set theSourceFolder to (choose folder with prompt “Select a folder whose files you wish to convert to word:”)
tell application “Finder”
set filesArray to every file of theSourceFolder whose name extension is “pages”
end tell
set theDestinationFolder to (choose folder with prompt “Select a folder where you want the converted files to be placed: “)
tell application “Pages” to activate
repeat with aFile in filesArray
tell application “Finder”
set fileAlias to aFile as alias
set fileName to name of fileAlias
set fileExtension to name extension of fileAlias
end tell
set theOriginalName to fileName
— remove extension
set prevTIDs to AppleScript’s text item delimiters
set AppleScript’s text item delimiters to “.” & fileExtension as string
set fileName to first text item of fileName
set AppleScript’s text item delimiters to prevTIDs
— prepare desktop folder path and name
set docPathAndName to (theDestinationFolder as text) & fileName & “.docx” # EDITED
tell application “Pages”
— open the file
set targetDocument to open fileAlias — EDITED : was aFile which is a Finder reference, not what Pages requires
repeat 10 times # I added a loop which may be useful if the original document is very long
try
export targetDocument to file docPathAndName as Microsoft Word
exit repeat
on error
tell me to delay 0.5
end try
end repeat
— close it
close targetDocument saving no
end tell
end repeat
tell application “Pages” to quit
display dialog “Done!”

Awesome, now I have batch updated all my pages documents to Word documents. Sure the formatting needs some updating, but at least they will all work on a PC!

Edelkrone SliderPlus, Target Module and Action Module

Edelkrone has released the SliderPlus system. This includes the impressive SliderPlus that can slide twice the distance of it’s size in 3 normal sizes and pro sizes that go from medium to xtra large for $399.99-$799.99.

More impressive is the $569.99 Action Module which records movement and replays it, allowing you to adjust the acceration and time of the move to recreate moves for vfx multiple passes.

And the Target Module for $569.99 where you set a distance and it will turn the camera so it keeps the subject in the same framing through the slide!

This means for $1500 you can literally get the ultimate product shot setup! And you can use it to dolly, and for so many other ways.

This is really mindblowingly impressive! I so want one!

DJI has released the Osmo+

DJI has released an updated version of it’s 3 axis stabilized camera, the DJI Osmo+. The new version includes a 22-77mm zoom lens, 3.5x optical and for 1080 video an additional 2x lossless digil zoom. It has a 50cm minimum focus distance, and support for motion timelapse! And it is $649.

The original Osmo for $569, includes a free spare battery, a $35 value, but the new camera should be worth the difference.

Damn I want one!

Davinci Resolve 12.5.1 Supports Quicktime ProRes on Windows, death knell for Quicktime

BlackMagicDesign’s Davinci Resolve 12.5.1 has been released and it includes Quicktime ProRES decoding on Windows! You can check out all the new features here.

With Apple having ended Quicktime support for Windows, and now Adobe and DaVinci adding Quicktime Pro Res playback on Windows, that basically means that you can use all the old ProRes files you have, but it is time to move on. And it is unfortunate as ProRES HQ had really become a great intermediate format and ProRES 444 is an awesome alpha format.

And it looks like it is time to move to AVID’s DNxHD format, since like ProRES it is pretty much visually lossless at higher bitrates.

Simple Background Music Player App for the Xbox One

Well a company called TroubleAcres has an app that can play music off a USB stick on your XBOX one. It is free and it works, but it is very simple. It only plays MP3, WMA and FLAC files on a FAT32 or NTFS USb drive within a folder called “Xbox Music Library” and it has a limitation of only 200 files and plays them in alphabetical order. It does read files in folders, but only to add to the alphabetical list.

It works and I can finally play my own music. Just have to keep it to 200, and put music on I want at the time.

I am on a Mac and use ALAC files, which are not supported, but luckily the $5 M3Unify app from the awesome Doug’s Scripts will convert to MP3 and put files in folders by artist and album. Of course for now those folders are useless, but hopefully it will work at some point. And ALAC support would be great too, since the One does support AAC in it’s Media Player app (which also supports a DLNA, and folders, but for some inexplicable reason doesn’t support Background Music making it next to useless).

Moving from Rapidweaver to a PC Web Site Creation Tool, any help would be appreciated! MacPro 4,1 EOL, so time to move to PC.

So if you have been reading my posts you know that my MacPro is nearing the end of it’s life. The next version of OS X, macOS Sierra, officially does not support my MacPro 4,1. Now it does support the MacPro 5,1, and I can do a firmware flash and make my Mac think it is a 5,1, since the only different was a firmware upgrade and newer processors. So I will be able to Install Sierra, but the writing is on the wall and Sierra will likely be the last OS to support a 5,1 MacPro.

And it is not like I have a stock 4,1, it has an SSD, an NVIDIA GTX 670 with 4GB of RAM, and a ton of Hard drives, but the big issue is that Adobe Creative Cloud big updates tend to only work with the latest Mac Upgrade so my MacPro has maybe a year or at best 2 before it can no longer get OS upgrades, and will literally be a paperweight. Sure I can still run it for some things, but it won’t be getting security upgrades, and software will stop working on it.

Now for most software I can easily move it to a PC, or if not easily it can at least be done. I can resave all my Pages files to word docs, and things like that, but for Web Site Creation it is not so Easy.

I run Rapidweaver 6 for web site creation. I used to make my own web sites in HTM, and have run many many programs from Net Objects Fusion when it was Mac, to Dreamweaver, but I don’t want to code anymore, as basically when the web moved heavily to CSS I moved to WYSIWYG completely and gave up on coding for the most part.

So now I run RapidWeaver 6 (I know 7 is out, but do I really want to upgrade, when in the next few years I will be likely be moving to windows? Not really!) and do my 2 web sites, as well as my mom’s web site for her business.

Of course RapidWeaver is unfortunately Mac only. So the question becomes what to rebuild my web sites in that would work on a PC. The obvious choices are not so obvious.

I already run Adobe Creative Cloud, so Dreamweaver makes sense if I wanted to code HTML, but I don’t.

So I recently took a look at Adobe Muse, it’s WYSIWYG web creation tool, that was created not by the Dreamweaver team, but by the Indesign team. And MUSE looks fantastic and powerful, except for one major thing, BLOGS!

And it is blogs that hurt the whole equation! I have one local WordPress Blog, my Movie review blog, and 4 google blogger blogs. Now I know that not having a blog local means that it won’t show up in search for the site, though I get around this in RapidWeaver by user the Loghound SiteMap plug in, which scans all of your blog entries and gives them local entries in your siteindex.xml. And honestly if I had to I could move all those Blogger blogs to local WordPress blogs, to have all the entries show up as local pages, but even that doesn’t help with Adobe Muse.

With Adobe Muse, there are no blogs. Sure a few third party plug ins have been made to make local blogs, and you can show blog entries from RSS, but there is literally no way to show your whole blog. Not even a local WordPress blog! And it sounds like even if they do it will have to be blog posted on Adobe Business Catalyst and not on your own hosted web site.

If Adobe would let you use locally published WordPress Blogs I would be fine, and could move my Blogger blogs to their own WordPress blogs, and publish locally, but that doesn’t sound like it will happen.

And so the point of this point, to ask, does anyone have a solution for me. The best solution would be a cross platform WYSIWYG solution that lets me remake my sites on my mac before I move to PC, and lets me integrate my WordPress and Blogger blogs into the site easily. Now I could also go for a PC Only solution, and run it in either Bootcamp or Parallels ( I currently have both, so I can do that), but then I need a powerful WYSIWG web site editor that can incorporate outsite and local blogs, and is something like Rapidweaver.

Any input would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!