Adobe Premiere Pro is getting Generative AI and it is exciting and a little scared

You can also read about it at the Adobe Blog from Ashley Still.

There is some amazing stuff there, but the generative AI certainly scares me a bit. I mean who will shoot stock footage when you can just generate new shots, and since adobe generative AI is trained off stock footage will we see diminishing returns and higher costs (at the least in electricity and processing power, but also in the subscriptions to various AI models that every editor will need access too).

I can see many DR spots wanting AI generated B-roll and wanting the editor to foot the subscription bill, so they will basically be getting free b-roll.

In some ways I am excited, but still, it is crazy what is going to be happening soon, and what if your internet goes down. And after seeing some on using Sora to make a short, just how badly it responded to film making terms, so it is not going to the panacea we think it is.

NAB Is on and Blackmagic Design has knocked it out of the park! New hardware, cameras, color panels, and DaVinci Resolve (which now includes color density and negative saturation)

Wow, I can’t believe how much that Blackmagic Design announced and released this year at NAB. And so much people have been asking for. Now I can only touch on what is important to me, so am skipping a huge amount of what they announced.

So lets start with DaVinci Resolve 19, now in Beta, you can see what is new here.

So there are a so many new features that will be helpful like Intelligent Media Management:

DaVinci Resolve 19 adds intelligent media location management, so that when you are collaborating you can quickly link media to your unique file paths. Now you don’t need to manually relink or search for assets when you work remotely. So you have more time for creativity and less time on file admin!

Text Based Timeline Editing and multiple voices in AI Speech to Text Transcription brings it up to Premiere, which is great.

There is AI Based Voice Isolation:

The AI based voice isolation track FX let’s you remove loud, undesirable sounds from voice recordings. Isolating dialog from background sounds in a recording, you can eliminate everything else from moderate noise to aircraft and explosions leaving only the voice. Voice isolation is perfect for interviews and dialogue recordings from noisy locations.

A Built-in Dialogue Leveler:

The dialogue leveler track FX in the inspector processes and smoothes dialogue recordings without the need for tedious level adjustments on clip gain or automation curves. Controls include real time scrolling waveform display, focus presets and three process options which allow you to easily achieve natural sounding results.

AI Driven Ultra NR Noise Reduction:

UltraNR is a new DaVinci Neural Engine driven denoise mode in the Color page’s spatial noise reduction palette. Use it to dramatically reduce digital noise from a frame while maintaining image clarity. Combine with temporal noise reduction for even more effective denoising in images with motion!

Composite Mode within Nodes will speed things up:

Corrector nodes in the color page node editor now features composite mode. These composite modes will allow you to affect how node values blend into the pipeline without the need of a layer mixer. This means that your node graph looks cleaner and it’s faster and easier to follow the signal flow.

The Defocus Background plugin looks to vastly improve background blurs with harder edges to make shots look more filmic and less processed.

The game changing Film Look Creator:

The new Film Look Creator lets you add cinematic looks that replicate film properties like halation, bloom, grain, flicker, gate weave and vignetting. Adjust exposure in stops and use subtractive saturation, richness and split tone controls to achieve looks usually found on the big screen!

And ColorSlice Six Vector Grading:

The ColorSlice palette uses subtractive color processes to adjust image color density, saturation and hue, allowing you to produce rich filmic colors and looks. Parameters in each customizable vector slice let you enhance and deepen color without spill, in a way that looks naturally pleasing.

This is probably the stand out new feature for me, as the last few years everyone has been using both paid and free DCTL plugins to add a much more filmic Color Density to an image, and they have also included negative saturation, which increases saturation by lowering the saturation of the opposite colors, giving a much more filmic look.

I might have to go back and play with my short to see what these features can really do!

And then we have Blackmagic PYXIS 6K, which takes the 6K Full frame sensor they recently relased and puts in a fully riggable size (Unlike the old BMPCC cameras) an has the options of PL EF or L- Mount for $2995 to $3195. This is basically what everyone has been asking for, with the only complaints being the lens mounts aren’t interchangeable, and the screen doesn’t fold out (and the URSA Cine EVF is an additional $1695, youch). I do love the side mount with the straps for an SSD though!

And I love my 6K Pro, and don’t need this, since I have mine rigged out, I would love it, but this just means when I need a new one, they will have something even better!

Then we have the new DaVinci Resolve Micro Color Panel for $499:

While without the screens or jog wheel of the Tangent Wave 2, but adding the 2 shift keys it actually likely has more functionality (though without labels for the changing shift functionality) than the $1000 device, plus the slot for an iPad at the top and a huge battery to run wireless. Honestly they just need to make the Gain wheel function as the jog wheel, and they will have replaced the usefulness of the Tangent Wave 2 (Except it working in programs other than Resolve.

And of course the Blackmagic URSACINE V2, moving it’s incredible 12K camera forward another step. Sure I will never own one of these, though I would love to, though at $16,495 with EVF and no $1695 8TB Media Modules. It is pretty amazing that the sensor has a color filter array, which means it can use the full sensor for lower resolutions, so you can use the whole sensor.

And they released so much more hardware, like the Replay Editor, which I don’t do live so I don’t really understand. Wow.

Intuit Turbotax is a joke on Mac

I always thought it was awful software and ran so slow, but this year on my Mac Studio with M2 Ultra, it is barely functional. It literally takes 30 minutes or more every time I enter anything or try and save, in fact it might be more like an hour between clicks, WTF. I have barely got past the very first few steps, it just beachballs constantly. And looking at the App it is of course an Intel App (Intuit hasn’t bothered to update the app to work on Apple Silicon even this many years into the Apple Silicon transition).

Now I see other people having problems online, but none as severe, but I bet it is m2 Ultra that is throwing a wrench in the works since Intuit can’t be bothered to make an Apple Silicon version of software and still release Intel only software when there isn’t a single Intel Mac in existence.

I tried contacting customer support, but got no help, so I bought H&R Block since it is Apple Silicon as of this year, and it even imported my tax file from Intuit.

So goodbye Turbtotax. I have always thought you were a joke and barely functional on Mac, but you finally went too far.