Jason at CGMeetup has a great article on Cinema 4D Release 16’s New Features.
Wish I could afford the full version as I have the lite version from After Effects, which does not get the updates like this, but have been very impressed with the speed and Power of Cinema 4D, and love it’s integration with After Effects.
Red Giant has updated it’s new realtime effects plug in system Universe to 1.2 with 3 new free effects and 6 new Pro effects, as well as Native Style Effects. You can get Universe from Red Giant for free, or with a subscription for Premium, or a lifetime payout.
Check out the new features and plugs in in the video here.
What's new in Universe 1.2 from Red Giant on Vimeo.
I have been very impressed with Universe so far. And am looking forward to trying out the free Exposure Blur Effect as a transition in After Effects. And CrumblePop Half Light for the Pro section, which has light leak effects.
I have been a long time user of Password managers, just for the convenience. And with internet security crumbling around us, we might need them even more. I actually use 2 password managers, but might have to consider changing up based on future features, many of which have been announced.
Now about the two programs I use and why.
For web browser based password management I have used LastPass for years. Now Cloud based security has always scared me, but they use plug in based encryption, and 2 Step Verification (I used Google Authenticator to get a second password to log in). It is a great paid service (yearly fee) and offers security checks on passwords and warns of security breaches, but the interface is a bit archaic, and it does seem to have many problems with ending up with many different password entries for many web sites, and it can be hard to tell which one is correct. It has an iOS APP, but doesn’t integrate with iOS Safari as it does with browsers on Android, so I don’t like it’s interface, and use another solution. I do already use it’s sister app Xmarks to sync bookmarks though so I have always gotten a discount for both!
For an iOS and Mac based password manager I used Spashdata‘s Splash ID Safe. It has Mac and Windows based apps, as well as iOS Android and many other apps. I went with Splash ID as I had been using their apps since old Palm Pilot days. Now originally you could buy Splash ID and it synced via iTunes sync (or Android syncing) to your phone, and kept in sync with your computer with your passwords. It never had problems with multiple entries as it did not work as a browser based system, so you enter everything, and can organize it easily as you see fit. And yes I do enter all my passwords in it, and then let LastPass also have my passwords. Of course now it has moved to a cloud based system, though you can chose to not go cloud, but to sync between devices you need Cloud, which I have always felt it was less secure, but now it has 2 pass verification, but I still prefred to have something online.
Now there has been a 3rd solution for a long time, which I do not use which is 1Password. It is browser, App and Phone based, kind of combining 1Pass and SplashiD safe (i now LastPass has iOS and Android apps, but I never liked it much, and the iOS one can’t integrate with your browser anyway, though it can on android) but without the cloud based solutions, so it is more secure, though less portable to say a work computer. Still this does mean more security, which I do like, and it can do iCloud, Dropbox or WIFI only sync.
According to SpashData’s SplashID Safe Blog, SplashID 8 is coming soon. It is updating the apps and making the UI even better, with automatic backup, new plug-ins for Chrome, Safari and Firefox to make it fully browser usable, and with a security feature to alert and one step fix compromised, outdated, weak and duplicate passwords, which would be awesome! My only question is if it will also do an iOS 8 Extension so it works with Mobile Safari?
So what to do? Hmmm, not sure yet, but I am going to research 1Password, and see if I can easily move to it, but wait to see about SplashID, because it would be great to be able to move to a single Password manager I can sue across all devices!
I recently spent the time to get decent at DaVinci Resolve, and really enjoyed it. It is a powerful and impressive grading program, and I will certainly be making extensive use of it in the future. I of course have Adobe SpeedGrade though, as it is part of the Adobe Suite, and with the latest version of Creative Cloud 2014 it has not only allowed for your whole timeline to translate over to SpeedGrade (it used to only take on track at a time), but it also applies the looks that you create almost instantly back into Premiere Pro and puts them on the clips as Lumetri Filter FX that play back in reel time on most clips, and mean you don’t have to render out the clips as new clips, you can have your Color correct attached to the original clips! Not only that you can always go back and edit the effects in SpeedGrade at any time! THIS IS AWESOME!
And it works great, at least in initial testing! I was able to quickly come up with a pretty good grade, and quickly send it back to Premiere Pro where it was put back onto the original clips in the sequence! Wow! And I love the new Master Clips setting, which lets you set a grade for every instance of a source in the timeline, what a time saver!
I have to admit SpeedGrade is a little quirky though. It doesn’t handle dual monitors well, not letting you split parts of it’s interface off at all (which meant my scopes were too small). And it basically has no menus everything being in the interface, which seems very un-Adobe like. Not too hard to use once you learn the basics, but certainly confusing for a beginner.
And I hate the lack of Curves. Sure you can go in and you have 9 levels of control over individual luminance levels of an image and can do different color effects to each, and that is certainly powerful and has it’s place, but curves such a quick and easy way of control the look of a whole image at once, that it would be a very powerful addition to SpeedGrade.
The other would be support for more than just AJA Video Output. They need to get BlackMagic support in their as more places have the less expensive alternative to AJA. And you really need video output to get a great grade.
Still, even with these issues I would consider using SpeedGrade for grading with Premiere Pro because it is so easy to do, and just have the grade within Premiere Pro, easily changeable and easily removable. For now I will still go with DaVinci for things that need reel precision, as it works with Black Magic (and that is what most machines I work on use) and has curves, and even some editing functionality, but the integration with Premiere Pro means that I will be turning to Adobe SpeedGrade for much of my color grading needs!
This morning I re-installed After Effects, though it said it failed on aeselflink being open, but when I forced quit it it still would not finish install. I restarted and started after effects again. And this time Warp Stabilizer worked on 5 out of 6 clips. Quickly working in under a minute per clip, but on the last clip, aeselflink crashed again, and once again I can’t get Warp Stabilizer to work in After Effects. Frustrating! Especially when it works just find in Premiere Pro.
And zero responses on Adobe Forums.
So I made a post at the Adobe Forums to see if I can get any help, you can check it out here.
I tried the second solution from Adobe Forums here as well, and am down to these quicktime components.
And interestingly I didn’t see any not responding in the Activity Monitor,
but I still got the DynamicLink Server timeout.
And the Analysis never started. Very frustrating!
OK, more on the problem.
First off I got After Effects to open after one crash after one crash (you can see the crash log in TXT form here). I re-opened the project, which was created via dynamic link from a sequence in Premiere Pro, though has since been relinked to the the ProRES footage I created. I tried re-starting the Warp Stabilizer analysis, and again it just gave me initializing.
And the blue was frozen on the image:
I checked Activity Monitor and 2 Adobe Processes are not responding, The Adobe QT32 Server and the aeselflink.
And after a minute I got the following error message:
Strangely when I try Warp Stabilizer in Premiere Pro it processes in less than a minute per clip, working just fine in the background, but it does not work at all in After Effects.
I have run permission repairs with both Disk Utility and Onyx, with a full user permissions reset, but that did nothing. Nor did using Onyx to run the daily, weekly and monthly scripts and cleaning out the Caches.
I am going to post on the Adobe Forums now, and see if I can get any help there. This is really frustrating!
Shot some test footage of my puppy Indiana Bones yesterday, and wanted to process it. Was trying to use the Warp Stabilizer Effect in CC 2014 on about 7 clips I shot yesterday on Canon 60D, and ran into the issue where the background processing would not work in After Effects. It just got to initializing, and nothing every happened.
At first I thought it might be having trouble with the Long GOP files from the 60D, so I converted everything to ProRes HQ, but that didn’t help at all. I then saved the project down to just CC and tried it there, but am having the exact same issue.
I tried to find solutions on the Adobe forums, and saw it could be Firewall or issues with Virus Protection or Port blocking software, but I am running none of that on this machine, so that isn’t it. I also saw a post about logging out of creative cloud and back in and it would install a new version of creative cloud, but it just logged me back in, with no new version, and didn’t solve any of the possible folder permission errors it was supposed to fix.
I tried deleting the opm.db file at ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/OOBE/opm.db, but that just left Creative Cloud with a spinning beach ball, so that is no good.
Now I am re-downloading and re-installing the Creative Cloud app to see if that helps. Anyone else think the new adobe site is much harder to navigate? Took me a while to find the Creative Cloud desktop app download (it can currently be found here).
OK, re-installed the Creative Cloud desktop app and it let me log in easily and am booting After Effects CC 2014. Will report on how it goes.
VFXER has a great new review of the new Zaxwerks ProAnimator 8. It is a good review and does the comparisons with Element 3D and Cinema 4D.
Here is the first video from Zaxwerks on new features. And it seems that the newest feature is speed, as they say fast many many many times in the video! And it does look fast even with Ray Tracing turned on, which Element 3D cannot do.
And the Shadows sounds great, as you don’t get shadows from Element 3D, and it includes Lens Flares and Lighting Rigs within the plug in (or stand alone app) which you need Optical Flares to do this with Element 3D.
Honestly I had written off 3D Invigorator Pro as soon as I tried out Element 3D, as it was just so much easier to use and more powerful and quick. And I like how Element 3D integrates the 3D so well into After Effects 3D world (which it looks like it still does better), but this version is the first to impress me in a while. The biggest issue for me is price. $399 is more than basic Element 3D and Optical Flares from VideoCopilot. And even the $149 upgrade price seems a bit steep. And I don’t know that I need it now that I have element 3D and can use Cinema 4D within after effects. Still looks like the upgrade they should have done long ago!