Bugs in Adobe Premiere Pro Multi-Clip Seqeunces

If you read my blog you probably know that Adobe Premiere Pro has become my editing software of choice, especially for anything graphics heavy. It really is the spiritual successor to Final Cut Pro 7, though obviously more modern and high powered, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have bugs.

One major one that they really need to fix has to do with Multi-Clip Sequences. 
Multi-Clip Sequences are how Premiere deals with multi cam, and it has an awesome ability to sync clips on it’s own using embedded audio and to chose which audio is used for all clips (so say your good external audio can be used for all angles. This all works great, the problem comes when trying to resize any of these clips in a timeline.
If you try to resize a Multi-Clip sequence in a timeline the resize will not render, leaving the clip looking awful and very interlaced and low quality. And it shows in the timeline as not needing a render. To solve this you need to flatten the clips and then you can render and make the zoom look how they finally look. The problem is that it would be better to not ever have to flatten an image, so you can make changes at any point, and it is always better to have it look correct, especially when working with a client in the room.
One way to really notice is if you put an image with alpha over part of the Multi-Clip that has been resized. Having the alpha image over the Multi-Clip forces it to render correctly, but only for the portion with the alpha image over it, which can make the unrendered part look even more jarring!
The client or Producer often ask to push in on shots, so I run into this bug all the time. Adobe needs to fix this so these clips render properly while still in Multi-Clip sequences!
And I have discovered a second major bug with Multi-Clip Sequences, and that has to do with a roundtrip to Adobe SpeedGrade.
A major touted new feature of the Adobe Suite is being able to quickly and easily roundtrip your Adobe Premiere Pro sequences into SpeedGrade and back to Premiere. And your grade shows up in Premiere Pro as an effect that can be turned off or removed in Premiere Pro.
The problem comes when using Multi-Clip sequences and trying this round trip. Yes the grade works and shows up in Premiere Pro, but the effect does not. So you cannot turn it off or copy and paste it onto other clips. The Multi-Clip sequences in your sequence show up with the grade baked in, and the only way to change that is to go back to SpeedGrade.
So that is it for Multi-Clip Sequences for now. I have more bugs that I will be blogging about and reporting to Adobe in the near future so keep your eyes out for more of my posts.

Boris FX has acquired Imagineer Systems the makers of Mocha

Boris FX has purchased Imagineer Systems Mocha as of December 15th. Check out the FAQ at Boris’s web site for questions.

It sounds like the company will remain intact, and they will continue to bundle Mocha with After Effects. Lets hope this makes full versions of Mocha cheaper, as it is such a powerful tool for planar tracking. I have used Boris in the past, but it is the one suite I mostly stay away from, so I hope they don’t ruin Mocha, or force it into a Boris only route in the future.

I use Mohca all the time when you just can’t get a corner track, and though it is complicated, it does work so very well, so lets hope it stays as it is and just gets better from this integration and not get worse or go away.

iOS and other Space, Apple really needs to fix this!

Apple iOS has had a serious problem for a very long time, and it seems to be getting worse, or is at least for me. There is a space on iOS devices that is listed as other, and is supposed to be data, be that document data, caches, saves or other things from applications, but it quickly becomes bloated with random crap and can actually completely fill up your device very quickly. In fact I have hit the point where iTunes is in fact reporting that I have more other space than anything else, and enough other to actually not allow my iPhone to sync! Now that is a lot of other data, especially when I last restored my iPhone only a week ago (and a complete restore in iTunes, when you wipe it, re-install the OS and then restore your data and apps from a backup seems to be the only solution to this issue.
Now here is the space on my iPhone.
And here is what iTunes is reporting when I connect my iPhone.
Over 20 GB’s over capacity!
Here is the other space specifically.
And by contrast the Apps and Music space.

Now this is nuts. This is a fresh install of IOS with a restore of my Apps, and I heavily pruned them to make space for more music (as my iPod Classic bit it recently, the horror!).
Now my iPhone won’t even sync because iTunes reports it as over capacity, and yet I have 2 GB free on my iPhone. Now as I said the only real solution is to once again do a backup and restore in iTunes, but this is an imperfect process at best. First off it doesn’t even work from iCloud (I lost 4 months of data when I tried that and had to go back to my last non-cloud backup) and my first restore of my iPhone managed to forget all of my folders and randomly install my Apps until it filled all the pages and stopped installing (though I had more apps on my iPhone before). Another restore fixed this, but it still leaves issues.
You have to re-enter all passwords. And even worse much app data is lost. Google Authenticator will be empty (even with a safe local backup to my computer) so restoring both iOS devices at once is not a good idea, as getting into the things with 2 step authentication without your second password is a huge pain! And apps like SIZER to keep your friends and family clothing sizes just loses all of it data and you have to get it again! And don’t forget to re-log into to your settings for Messages or you will be getting different parts of conversations on different devices!
So just to do a restore, not only does it take at least overnight on your computer, but then you have to spend a good deal of time getting everything working again! Honestly when I backup my iPhone I expect a full backup onto my computer (I can understand a cloud backup being only partial), not a partial backup! Why not make a disc image of the whole install, so a restore literally restores it?

Apple, you need to fix the restore, and especially fix why this Other space bloats to begin with! It has done this since iOS 1, and the problem is only worse now as Apps get bigger and people take more photos and expect to carry more music!

Alsoft has released Diskwarrior 5

After a very long wait, Alsoft has released DiskWarrior 5. It has been a long time since anything but a point update, but that hasn’t kept DiskWarrior from remaining the single best utility for Mac OS X repairs around. And I am excited to see how good this next version is, especially now that it ships on a bootable USB Flash Drive, so it can start up faster and be updated more easily (the CD/DVD upgrade process always took a while).
Check out the new features, including 64 Bit for speed, the ability to update your Diskwarrior Recovery Flash to to the latest OS X, it can even run from OS X Recovery.
This is great news, as this has always been the best repair program! I do like TechTool’s emergency repair partition feature (on my machine I created it on a second hard drive and have Diskwarrior installed), but the USB will make this really use, especially to do repairs on my wife’s MacBook Air!

Video Copilot releases Element 3D V2

After a slight delay (they seemed to have some issues releasing yesterday) Video Copilot has released Element 3D V2 with shadows, 3D Noise and Deform, Bend and Twist, and a whole slew of new features for $199.95 with a $99.95 upgrade price.

Here is a video with more of the new features:

They also upgraded Pro Shaders to 2K graphics for $99.95, and upgraded Backlight with 8K HDRi Environment and Light Maps for $99.95. And Motion Design 2 High Tech and Industrial 3D Models also for $99.95 or you can buy the full Motion Design for $349.95 or $249.95 upgrade.

Element 3D is a fast and powerful 3D program for use within after effects and is really a must have plug in, so I am excited to see what the new features can do.

Apple OS X Yosemite Kills 3rd Party SSD Support!

This is huge news that is all over the internet, it seems that Apple with OS X Yosemite has removed support for third party SSD in OS X 10.10 Yosemite. If you are using it as a boot drive with TRIM enabled (which cleans up garbage on an SSD) it will not boot of of it. This is due to a security update called KEXT SIGNING. It is possible to disable KEXT SIGNING, but if you do it does it across the board and not just for TRIM and will leave your system insecure.

Now this doesn’t affect may except power users, and neither does it affect SSD’s from Other World Computing, which do not need TRIM to work correctly.

I wonder what this means for Hackintosh’s? Probably means turning off KEXT SIGNING.

I have always waned to upgrade my old MacPro to SSD to speed it up, but just couldn’t afford it. I was thinking a Sonnet Tech Temp SSD Pro Plus 6 Gb/s Host, and one 6 GB 480gb Mercury Extreme Pro 480 GB, but that would be around $700, but would leave room for a second SSD. It would be a pain to move everything from my personal drive to a second drive, but I think not only would the SSD speed things up, but it would be great to start with a fresh system again, as my system has some serious issues that a fresh install would likely fix.

Still not something that is going to happen any time soon.

BlackMagic Design releases Fusion for Windows for Free or $995 for Studio Version!

BlackMagic Design has done it again, and they have released their recently Purchased Fusion compositing program for free or $995 for the Studio Version with advanced 3D tools, OpenFX plug In support and unlimited distributed rendering.

Awesome news, and I would love to learn this. Going to give me a reason other than gaming to fire up BootCamp and boot into Windows 8 on my Mac, because since learning Shake back in the day I have loved Nodal compositing software. And the true 3D compositing and even 3D model rendering all in one will be pretty amazing.