Can’t save Premiere Pro 2015 Projects to earlier version

The latest and greatest Adobe Creative Cloud 2015 came out, and you should be warned of some issues.

First off the new version requires OS X Yosemite on a Mac, the latest OS Version. This means if you have a computer that is going to be slow on Yosemite or doesn’t have enough memory you are SOL even with a subscription to Creative Cloud. And this makes 2 other major problems.

The first is that when you install the new version the default setting is to remove 2014 from your system. You can get around this if you know by going to advanced settings and not allowing this, or by re-installing the old versions, but this is an annoyance that was never hear before. Normally it kept all your old versions.

And the second and worse part is that projects saved in Premiere Pro 2015 cannot be opened in 2014, and even worse there is not a way to save down a version like Premiere used to have. In fact you could save down a version in each version then open in that version and save down again. Now you can only save projects to 2015.

The only workaround is to export a Final Cut Pro XML and import that in 2015, but that can be messy. On my first attempt at that, the clip size got messed up (making ever clip 33% wider, which was fine for clips that had not been resized, but for resized clips make for a lot of work). And even worse for projects with lots of text created in Premiere Pro, it all gets wiped out, and leaves a clip with some of the text (but not all) as a marker. This is nuts!

Adobe needs to put back in the ability to save down a version, as not everyone upgrades right away or at all!

I have of course reported this as a bug to Adobe (you can see the form right here) and you should to, because if they get enough complaints they will have to put this feature back in!

The CalDigit FASTA-6Gu3 USB 3 and ESATA PCI card for Mac does not and will not work with Yosemite

So I have a CalDigit FASTA-6GU3 USB and ESATA PCI Card for my MacPro to add USB 3 to my old MacPro 4,1. And it worked great for a long time, but not since Yosemite came out.

I checked there web site about it, and it says this:

It does not support OS 10.10, so I wrote to CalDigit, and got this response:

Dear Jonah,

We regret to inform you that the mac OSX platform is no longer supporting the chipset used on the FASTA-6GU3 card after 10.9. Therefore, it has become impossible for us to develop a viable driver for the 10.10 platform that will work with the card. Unless you’re able to revert to a previous version of OSX, you will be unable to regain functionality out of the card’s USB 3.0 ports. We apologize for the inconvenience this causes.

Regards,

CalDigit Support
CalDigit, Inc.

It seems you must now buy the Pro version to have OS X 10.10 support.

Total bullshit! I am staying away from this company!

More on the site update

So yes I have done a major update to the site so it works on mobile devices from phones, to tablets and to desktop web browsers. It will even change on a tablet in landscape or portrait mode.

I do still plan to do more with the backgrounds and the like as I get some time.

I have also updated the The Misadventures of Bear page and the The Foam Hedz page, and they are unfortunately no longer working as podcasts on iTunes (I pretty much couldn’t get it to work in Rapidweaver 6 like it did in 5) and you can subscribe via the RSS feeds in the sidebar for each page.

Just updated the site

The site has a new look, and totally different feel, and I eventually plan on doing the same to Whale of a Tale as well.

Mostly this was because the new google search policy downplays sites that don’t play well with mobile browsers, and this new look should do just that.

I don’t have it as customized as I would like, and I had to lose my old banners, but overall I think it looks pretty nice.

Problems Batch Relinking MXF files in After Effects that were sent from Premiere Pro using Adobe Dynamic Link

So I am working multiple projects right now, primarily on a single machine, but had to render out some 30 minute very complicated projects in Adobe Media Encorder, and I have found it is very unstable with the long complicated projects, so we copied the media to an alternate drive and I moved to another machine. Premiere Pro easily relinked my whole project in a few seconds, but with after effects it was not so easy.

I had quite a few After Effects compositions that I had sent from Premiere Pro, and the problem arose from the fact that the media are MXF files from a P2 card. Normally in after effects if you replace a single file with it’s original file, it looks and relinks all the files it can in that same structure, but this does not work with MXF files.

MXF files that were imported using Adobe Dynamic Link from Premiere pro show up without their extension in After Effects, while the actual files have the .mxf extension. If you import the same files normally in After Effects they show up fine with extension, so this is a Dynamic Link issue. And the problem is that when you replace a file with it’s correct original, it does not see the other files as the correct file because they don’t have the correct extension in After Effects.

These are the MXF files after relinking.

This means that you have to manually relink the files in After Effects one at a time, which is a major time waster. I am pretty sure that this is an Adobe Dynamic Link issue, so I have reported this to adobe and hope that someday they fix this bug (you can report bugs and features requests to Adobe here).

Of course this wasn’t my only issue, as when I brought the project back to the original system after using File Synchronization to bring the projects back to the original issue, the Premiere Pro project got messed up. The timeline is completely screwed up and doesn’t show correctly.

Here is the messed up version, and zooming, scrolling or anything doesn’t help.
Here is what the sequence should look like.

Now I was able to work around this, by opening the earlier project in Premiere and using the Media Browser to import the new sequence into Premiere Pro. The cool part is that it also imported all the new files that I had imported into the proper places within the project. They were offline, but it was easy enough to relink the files. Still not sure what happened here, but it is furstrating!

Red Shark News on DSLR Revolution being over

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Red Shark News has an interesting opinion piece on the DSLR revolution being over.

And I think they are right. With the URSA mini being able to up and running for $6000-$7000, only super low budget productions are going to keep using a DSLR. And really global shutters are going to be the new standard. The Canon C300 is an amazing camera, with great low light, but not having a global shutter for $15,000 seems like a huge mistake when the competition has it for so much less.

Macnn Feature Thief article on Final Cut Pro, iMovie and iDVD

William Gallagher and Charles Martin have an interesting article on Apple and it’s changes to it’s video lineup. It goes into iMovie, Final Cut Pro and iDVD, and how Apple upgraded the first 2 with less features, but slowly made better versions.

My biggest complaint with the article would be on who they polled as they say that most of the people who were angry over Apple’s switch from Final Cut Pro 7 to Final Cut Pro X have moved back X (with a cursory mention of Premiere Pro as an alternative).

Personally being a professional editor, I did give the initial Final Cut Pro X a try, and hated it. And got a refund and have not gone back. There are some features that I do really like in X (especially it’s handling of Meta Data), but since I edit complicated graphics heavy shows, it is the timeline that is the deal breaker for me, and it is the fundamental feature of X, so no matter how many updates they do, the timeline is too unorganized and broken for it to make sense for a 15 track highly organized video project.

And of all the editors that I know, I have only heard of one that has gone back to X and really likes it now. And while features are starting to make their move to Premiere Pro, there have only been a few instances I have heard of big houses moving to X. Most of the big houses I know that were basically all Final Cut Pro have moved to AVID at the studios insistence (kick backs?!??!), while most commercial houses have moved to Premiere Pro for it’s fidelity with graphics.

I just don’t see Final Cut Pro X as a viable solution, and with Apple’s history of dropping software, I don’t trust Apple to keep it going anyway!