Issues with Adobe SpeedGrade CC 2014

So I am a commercial editor and lately have really moved to Premiere Pro after the death of Final Cut Pro 7 (as you will know if you regularly read this blog). I do much of my work in Commercials and direct response and many of the houses I work at have moved over to Premiere Pro for it’s speed and integration with After Effects.

We have been using DaVinci Resolve for color correction, but with the upgrades to Adobe SpeedGrade with CC 2014 I learned it and have been wanting to give it a try. Mainly because of it’s integration with the adobe suite, and the fact that it puts the grade onto the clips as a plug in that can be easily removed, instead of having to render out a new sequence with clips with handles, which makes major changes to the sequence much harder. And with the addition of working with Black Magic Cards it was time to try it out.

So on the current 28:30 Direct Response show I have been editing I am doing the grade in SpeedGrade, and while some it has some very good features, it has some very glaring issues that adobe needs to fix immediately!

  • First and foremost if the fact that SpeedGrade is made to work on one monitor, with a second monitor being your view monitor. And if you use an AJA or Black Magic card, it still forces the whole interface into a single monitor. You can’t peel off any of the segments and move them to a separate monitor. This is especially troublesome with a complicated timeline! I have 14 video tracks in my current show, so my timeline needs to be fairly large, but you still need the controls to be big enough to use, so what suffers are the scopes, which have shrunk to a minuscule size and are very hard to use! PLEASE ADOBE FIX THIS IMMEDIATELY! We need to be able to re-arrange the window and move things to a second monitor as we see fit. It really makes this program hard to use!
  • Number 2 is certainly the issues with Insufficient Resources dialogue which kicks out the video card, so you are only using the CPU to render. And sometimes it makes your images get a crazy clue cast. Now I am using an NVIDIA GTX 680 Mac Edition, which isn’t the newest or greatest video card, but is pretty decent, but I don’t think it is the cards issue, but instead is with effects and the Mercury Render Engine. The problem always happens on clips with effects on them, but it transitions other than dissolves or even Warp Stabilizer or speed effects on clips. SpeedGrade just can’t handle them, and turns off your GPU and you have to at the least restart Speedgrade to get the GPU back on. The thing is that the problem will instantly occur if another filtered clips is hit when you restart. If the Mercury Playback Engine can’t handle this in SpeedGrade, Adobe should figure out a way to turn off these FX when they come into SpeedGrade and turn them back on when you go back to Premiere. You can do it manually by turning them off or removing them in Premiere, but then you have to remember to put them all back when you return your grade to Premiere, but that is a workaround and may cause you to miss important FX or transitions.
  • Number 3 is issues with Multi-Cam clips in Premiere Pro. If you have multi-cam clips in your sequence you can grade them in SpeedGrade, but they do not show up as a plug in in Premiere, neither on the multi-cam clip or within it’s sequence, though the grade does show up. To get around this I duplicate my multicam clips on another layer, and then flatten them. This creates another problem, which it makes each clip a separate instance instead of going back to the master clips, so for these clips you cannot do a single grade on a master clip. Now admittedly this is a Premiere Pro issue, but on that needs to be fixed to make SpeedGrade work better. As being able to user the Master Clip Grade is so much quicker and easier.
  • Number 4 for is the timeline. It needs to have better zoom controls instead on showing the whole timeline, 6 seconds or from your in to out. I want to be able to zoom in or out to where I desire.
  • Number 5 is a keyboard navigation issue. When I use the numerical controls for a grade and I type a number into a box, hitting the tab should move to the next box and activate the grade I have entered. Instead I have to click out of the box with the mouse, which is slow and not efficient. So Adobe, you need to let us navigate with the keyboard. This is faster and more efficient, especially for those of us without a dedicated color control board.
  • Number 6 is faster opening of Premiere Pro sequences. I am sure this has to do with converting the sequence to work, but it takes a long time, many minutes at times, and is especially painful if you keep getting hit with the insufficient resources bug from above.
That is it for now. The single monitor and Insufficient Resources could be deal breakers for many, but for now I love the conveniece, and love that it leaves my original sequence intact in Premiere Pro, but lets hope Adobe makes this program more adobe like in the near future (NAB please Adobe), so that the ease of going back and forth is complimented by a program that is easier to use and doesn’t have some glaring issues.
Honestly if Adobe makes this better, I see no reason to use DaVinci Resolve with Premiere even if it is a superior program, just because of the ease of use of SpeedGrade.

Kickstarter AllSteady-6Pro DSLR/RED 3 Axis Gimbal Stabilizer

The AllSteady-6Pro DSLR/RED 3 Axis Gimbal Stabilizer is a very impressive looking Gimbal that finishes funding on February 26th, and everything is supposed to ship by March 31st, 2015.

Of course no guarantee from Kickstarter, but would love to run to Orange and check one of these out at Turbo Ace, and the Kickstarter discount is huge! This looks like a really impressive and well manufactured piece of gear!

Bare Feats compared the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 with 10 other GPU’s in a 2010 Mac Pro

Not only does this card us standard six pin connectors so it will work fine in the MacPro, but in many tests it doubles the performance of a GTX 680 Mac edition! WOW!
If I had the money I would totally go for one of these, since it is literally twice as fast as the GTX 680 Mac Edition, and I currently run a GTX 670, though it does have 4 GB of RAM.
I WANT ONE SO BAD!!! Ha! Not happening anytime soon.
Your best bet for one is this one from MacVidCards which is $835 plus shipping, the cards has been flashed for Mac so you get the full startup with it (which I annoyingly don’t have with my GTX 670).

Rumors of a MacBook Air with only 2 Ports, and ditching Thunderbolt, let’s hope not

9 to 5 Mac has rumors and it’s own artist renders of what it claims to be the soon to be announced revamp of the MacBook Air.

The terrifying part, is that it has only 2 ports on it. A headphone jack and a USB Type C port. The USB 3 Port is more advanced than USB 3 with a reversible connector, that can drive a monitor and also power a computer.

I can’t even articulate what an awful idea this is. One connector means you need a hub to attach anything else to the laptop. My mom for example has her fitbit sync in the usb port, which would have to be left in the hub. And even worse is the removal of Thunderbolt.

Apple is really pushing Thunderbolt as it’s next generation connectivity, even giving up the much faster (and far superior) PCI Slots in it’s MacPro in favor of of Thunderbolt. And having Thunderbolt in the Air made it expandable to an amazing degree that would never have been possible with a machine like this, and you could use the same devices across the mac lineup. Even with it being USB 3.1, which can do 10 Gbps, or the same as Thunderbolt 1 (not 2 though, which can 20 Gbps), they should have the same ports across the whole range, so accessories are interchangeable. Unless Apple is getting rid of Thunderbolt all together in favor of USB 3.1, which to me should mean they need to go back to PCI Card expansion in later MacPro’s (and who the hell wanted the trashcan MacPro anyway), which I highly doubt, they should not do this.

I know Apple does not read this blog, nor care what I have to say, but PLEASE APPLE DON’T DO THIS!!!!

The Digital Bits has the first news on 4K Blu-Ray and it is called Ultra HD Blu-ray

Bill Hunt at Digital Bits has the first official word on 4K Blu-Ray, which will be known as Ultra HD Blu-Ray.

This is really exciting news. Everything has been moving to digital delivery of late, with higher compression, less quality and less features, but it is good to know that there will be a 4K disc based format which will deliver the best quality.

The only bad news is that it does not seem to include a 3D spec, which is likely a bandwidth issue, though it will be able to do 60P (hello Avatar in 60P). The spec has not been finalized but will use H.265, and will have a 66GB dual layer and 100GB 3 layer formats, and can even do 10 bit color and a wider color gamut as well as high dynamic range! It also will have a digital copy process to make local copies to a hard drive, likely in a specifically designed player.

Now I won’t be moving to this anytime soon, as I just got a 65″ 1080 display, and didn’t even consider 4K for lack of content and not knowing how 1080 will look blown up to 4K (I am assuming not good).

Diskwarrior 5 Issues in non standard configurations: UPDATED

Well I for one was very excited about Alsoft Diskwarrior 5, and it’s new USB Stick to run off and repair Macs, but unfortunately it has not worked out so well for me.

Now admittedly I am likely a strange case on this one. I have been trying to use it on 2 slightly out of the norm cases, and haven’t been able to to boot to the USB stick in either case. And though I have gotten it to run, it was via other means, and was not too impressed by the new 64 Bit Speeds.

The first case is my own computer, which is a MacPro 4,1, but the exception here is that I run a PC NVIDIA GTX 670 with 4 GB of RAM, so I am unable to hold down option and select a startup disc on boot, nor able to get into the recovery partition because I don’t get a screen booted until the desktop starts up. And these are the two methods to run diskwarrior from the USB Stick. The USB Stick does show up as a startup disc and I have tried starting up off of it, but the computer never boots this way for some reason.

To get it to work on my MacPro I used a competitor product in fact. Micromat’s Tech Tool Pro 7 has a way to create a recovery partition. And I was able to create it on one of my additional hard drives so as not to mess with the OS X recovery partition, and it allows you to install software there, so I installed Diskwarrior 5 and ran it.

Once running the new Diskwarrior worked fine, just like the old one, and in fact did not seem any faster. I do have a very full 3 TB main hard drive though, so it has a lot of files to check, but still it did not seem exceptionally faster than version 4.

A second place I run diskwarrior is at one of the offices that I work at (being freelance it isn’t always the same place, but I work here allot). And I got them to purchase a DVD of Diskwarrior 4.

Now I wanted to test Diskwarrior 5 here, to see if we could use it. Now while they do have one MacPro with a NVIDIA GTX 680 Mac Edition which I will be testing on later, they also have a QUO computing Hackintosh that I have been using mostly. Already to run Diskwarrior on it, I can’t boot from the DVD, but have to run from a Carbon Copy Cloner backup of the system SSD that has Diskwarrior 4 installed. Still I thought I would try the USB Stick.

And once again no, with the QUO it seems that I can’t hold down option to see the bootable hard drives, so I can’t boot from the USB stick to repair this system. I could install Diskwarrior on my backup, but would not do that with my serial number. I will test it later on the regular MacPro, just because I want to see if I can get Diskwarrior 5 to boot from the USB stick in any situation!

Now the one thing I have not tried is is the new Diskwarrior 5 Diskwarrior Recovery Maker, which updates the USB Flash to the latest OS that your system is, since new Macs have new boot requirements, but I know my MacPro can boot from 10.6.4, and I believe that is the starting system for any Hackintosh, so I though that would work for for the QUO.

I will updater his after I see if it works on the other more standard MacPro, but so far I have not been too impressed with Diskwarrior 5

UPDATE

Well I tested the Diskwarrior USB in the MacPro 4,1 with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 Mac Edition, and it froze on the startup screen. I started it by holding down option and selecting the Diskwarrior Recovery partition, and starting up. I left it there for an hour, and the Machine was just stopped.

Here is the Startup screen. It spun for a while then froze.

And the red light was solid on the USB Key so not accessing the disc
And when I tried it on my Quo holding down option, this is exactly what happened, it showed the startup screen and spun and then froze. And the same happened when I selected the USB on my home Mac as a startup disc.
Looks like it is time to contact Alsoft and see what is going on.
SECOND UPDATE
I was writing an e-mail to Alsoft Technical support, and think I figured out the issue, and will test it soon. The GTX 680 Mac Edition requires 10.8.x Operating system to run, and all 3 machines I have tried it on have either that card or a PC GTX 670, so it is likely that the system needs to have at least that system to run. So it looks like it is time to try out Diskwarrior Recover Maker and update my USB.
My only problem is that my home system is Yosemite already. Maybe I can find a system with 10.8.5 and run it, so it doesn’t get too new of a system on it.

Consumer Video Cameras hit 4K for under $1000

Both Sony and Panasonic have announced consumer 4K cameras for under $1000. Sony has announced the FDR-AX33 for $999 (you can read about it at Cinescopophilia) and Panasonic has announced the $899 HC-VX870 and it’s strange double shooting HC-WX970 for $999 (You can also read about it at Cinescopophilia).
This blows my mind. This is reaching back to the DV revolution. Not that most people need 4K, but as an editor 4K seems like such an opportunity. Just shoot a little wider and to be able to push in and still have full 1080 resolution is mind-blowing to me. And the ability to have 4K footage to do image stabilization (now that Premiere Pro has such good built in Image Stabilization) will really change things.
Now of course these are consumer cameras, with consumer compression (though Sony does mention 100MB compression) and consumer lenses, but still for grabbing quick b-roll shots these would be amazing.
I don’t think 4K will take off at home any time soon. The TV’s are still too expensive, and since most content is 1080, it will actually look worse on a 4k screen than a 1080 screen. And until they figure out how to broadcast in 4K easily (and my TV already shows how bad the compression looks on many shows in 1080!) or a disc based format for 4K it will not take off! I mean Netflix’s 4K compression is around 15 mb per second, which is about half of what a blu-ray is (sure it is probably newer and better compression, but still you are losing a huge amount of data there). And a disc format would always be superior just for bandwidth considerations.
4K excited me for what it could mean for 1080.
Of course this all depends on DP’s as I have had 5K footage for a 1080 broadcast that was shot so extreme close up that it was useless to me to push in or for it to be  5K at all, but the possibilities do exist.