I first saw this on RedShark News, but if you head over to BlackMagic Design’s URSA page and scroll down you can see the video. It is mostly unlit, and only basicaly color corrected, but not only does it look impressive, but it also seems to solve the horrible black sun problem of the URSA 4K Sensor. This looks impressive!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Stu Maschwitz of ProLost and RedGiant has posted about what he saw and was impressed with at NAB. Worth checking out.
Here are his big hits, and then all of his twitter posts here.
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!
The telegraph is reporting that Adobe is considering buying The Foundry. It seems The Foundry’s private equity owners have put it up for sale, and Adobe might be interested.
Now this will likely scare some of the high end users of the Foundry‘s software, but seems like a perfect fit for Adobe who would like to get into the high end of film compositing. as well as 3D. And the foundry has the high end node based compositor Nuke, Modo for 3D sculpting, Mari for 3D painting as well as powerful Plug Ins including a 3D Camera Tracker, Keylight for Green Screen keying, Kronos for CUDA accelerated After Effects retiming and Motion blur and Furnace for 2D problem solving in Nuke. Of course they also have Ocula for 3D imagery in Nuke, and Katana for relighting shots, as well as Flix for Visual Story Development, and Colorway for Design colaboration and Heiro for shot management, conform and review, which would likely just be rolled into Adobe Dyanmic Link.
And it would be just awesome to have all or most of this rolled into your Creative Cloud subscription, and hopefully Adobe would keep developing all these applications and not just do Dynamic Link enhancements (which they seem to have done with SpeedGrade, worrying more about putting the tech into Premiere than enhancing the original app when it really needs some upgrades).
Of course Linux users will likely be worried, as most Nuke users run on Linux, and Adobe has only ever released one version of Photoshop for Linux, and then killed it.
Still I would be much happier with this, than say Apple’s purchase of Shake, which while it did drop the price, really just ended with them stealing some tech and killing the program.
And with Black Magic making Fusion so cheap or even free for most users, The Foundry really needs to compete with Nuke, so this would likely do it.
Just saw an ad for this in Post magazine, and I guess they showed it off at NAB this year. The new JMR Lightning Quad Tower for Mac Pro is a PCIE expansion tower via thunberbolt for the new MacPro, that includes four full sized PCIE expansion slots, a built in RAID controler wth 9.6TG capacity, and brings your USB, Ethernet and Audio ports to the front.
Very cool. I am sure it is not going to be cheap, but what a great idea! Make a real MacPro out of a new one, if only Thunderbolt was a little faster.
I was just importing my photos off of my iPhone into the new Photos for Mac, Photos being the replacement to iPhoto that Apple recently released, and I noticed a major issue.
In iPhoto when you imported your photos you had the option to delete them on import. Well in Photos that option is completely gone. There is only the option to import your photos. Well I just imported 2 gigs of photos, and want to clear up the space off my iPhone. Now I have to what, delete them off my iPhone myself? Well the only way to do that is individually, and this is 300+ photos and videos!
And I thought maybe I missed something and imported the photos again, and it happily imported the same photos and put them into my Photo library right next to the previously imported photos! What is going on here?
I get that the new iCloud features are to keep all your photos forever and safe, but the idea is to keep your full sized photos in the cloud, so you can access them from anywhere, not to never be able to delete your photos from your iPhone. If that is the case people are going to run out of space really fast!
And besides who can afford the iCloud feature? Apple is charging way too much for online space, especially when Amazon lets you store your photos for free!
And the removal of a trash can isn’t a good idea either? What if you accidentally delete a file? (I was wrong about this, there is a way to view Recently deleted photos, just now a menu item instead of a section on the sidebar)
Why has Apple changed to a company that doesn’t give you a choice on how you use your Apple devices, you have to use them how they tell you to and there is no other way (exactly why I don’t like Final Cut Pro X)?
••••
Well I think I figured this out, I had to turn off iCloud Photos on my iPhone, now when I import I get the option to Delete items after Import. So if I was to keep iCloud Photos on, my phone would fill with all my Photos.
So now I had to re-import all my photos again (making duplicates in Photos) with the checkbox checked and now I can have it remove the photos from my iPhone, though this doesn’t seem to work well as it only did about half the photos the first time, and I am having to do the process multiple times to get the photos off my phone, creating duplicates in Photos every time. And now it seems frozen about half way through!
Is this seriously a feature? Being unable to remove photos from my phone? Seriously? This is a joke, if I want to store all my photos in iCloud I don’t want to keep copies on my iPhone or it will completely fill up really fast! This is completely broken! FIX THIS APPLE!
Not only that, but Apple help doesn’t work for me with Photos. So how am I supposed to figure out how this works?