XtraFinder for OS X

XtraFinder

I recently discovered Tran Ky Nam’s XtraFinder for OS X.

It is a program that adds extra abilities to the OS X finder. It is intended to add tabs and control tabs within the finder, but since this has been added to Mavericks, it still has many other cool features.

Some of my favorites are recoloring the Finder Sidebar Icons, which I think makes them much easier to see.

ColoredSidebar

Another really cool feature is adding back the full colored label to labels in OS X. Mavericks had changed this behavior to tags, so that there is only a tiny colored dot, but you can turn back on full colored tags which I think makes them much easier to spot.

FinderLabels

You can also add items to finder menus:

AddItemsToFinderMenus

Here is show hidden items:

ShowHiddenItems

And the ability to launch an application as root!

LaunchAsRoot

Overall a very cool finder extension, especially for the power user!

The Verge on the 22 most important things Apple Announced at the WWDC

The Verge has an excellent look at the 22 biggest things Apple announced at this years World Wide Developer Conference for OS 10.10 and iOS 8.

Still I was surprised not to see any big new product announcement. Not that what they announced wasn’t cool, but a big new product announcement would certainly have driven up Apple’s stock prices. Be it the iWatch, some home automation device, a new Apple TV with apps, or a MacPro with real expansion and NVIDIA graphics cards (HA, never happen, but one can dream). Something would have been great, and it will continue the talk that Tim Cook can’t innovate until something new does get announced.

Still new features do sound great, especially extensibility in iOS. Lets hope that we can now set other apps as defaults, like you will be able to with 3rd party keyboards!

NVIDIA GTX Titan Z released

So NVIDIA’s new flagship GeForce GTX Titan Z has been released, and as I have said before it is a beast! A dual Titan Card with 5760 CUDA cores! Damn I want to see how this would run on Premiere Pro. Probably only be able to use One Core for now, but if you could use the other to run your monitors, that would rock! Still $3000, youch!

Makes me want to build a PC for my next editing machine. Still can’t believe the new MacPro’s make me want a PC!

2 Years since Open Heart Surgery!

Wow, it is the second anniversary of my open heart surgery! Can’t believe it has been that long!

Doing great! Well everything except weight wise.
Walking every day at least 2.1 miles. And trying to get 10,000 steps a day. Also being doing some Kettlebells, but need to do more, though my chest gets sore if I use too much weight.
As for weight, I am still way too heavy. Was doing 8 hour diet, but have been doing warriors diet for some time. And while working it is easy. I don’t eat till about 6:30 PM. And eat till about 8:30. The thing is on the weekend I often eat lunch with my wife, and don’t eat salad like I do all week, and end up gaining weight, which it takes me all week to lose again. This has kept me between 230 and 235 pounds, though I have gotten down to 225, but weekend food doesn’t help. Need to get down to at least 200!

After learning DaVinci Resolve, I decided to delve into Adobe SpeedGrade, so far I will be sticking with Resolve

After learning DaVinci Resolve, and being incredibly impressed with it, I decided to learn Adobe SpeedGrade for it’s integration with Adobe Premiere Pro (my current choice of edit software), but so far I have been less than impressed.

First off with Resolve and a good NVIDIA Cuda card, the program works great with BlackMagic or AJA video cards, is rocket fast and you get a recreation of the timeline from your edit program, and can remove shots as needed, or do basic editing. And you have such a great collection of edit controls and presets.

With SpeedGrade you only get a single video track (or 3 if you have dissolves or transitions as it puts the a & B on different tracks and the transition in between). So you need to prep your sequence, and the send from Premiere is even weirder. Instead of using the original media files, it converts everything into uncompressed DPX image sequences, which will take up a huge amount of space (uncompressed files after all) and it bakes in any effects you applied into the clips. So it basically ignores the awesome Mercury playback Engine from premiere, and it’s only real bonus is that your color correction returns to premiere as a filter applied to the clips.

You can work with original premiere pro clips, but not with the send from premiere command, instead you need to export and EDL from Premiere and import the clips into SpeedGrade that way.

And there there is the fact that it doesn’t export video a monitor using Black Magic video cards, only AJA! This sucks. It should work with everything Premiere Pro does!

And as for the color correction, the lack of curves is inexcusable! Curves are such a powerful color corrector and Adobe needs to fix this right away.

I know Adobe purchased this program to compete with Apple Color (now defunct) and DaVinci Resolve and round out their suite, but I would rather see them base the whole program on the amazing Mercury Playback engine from Premiere Pro, instead of having this current attempt at integrating the two programs, which seems more like a cludge than reel integration. Yes, having the color correction return as plug in corrections is very very cool, but so far that is really the only thing cool i am seeing about SpeedGrade.

I have not fully explored or gotten proficient with the program, and I will report back once I have, but so far my initial impressions don’t make me consider moving away from Resolve for my color correction needs.

PVC on the recent Adobe Cloud Outage and my thoughts

Scott Simmons at the Pro Video Coalition has a good article on the recent day long outage of Adobe Creative Cloud.

He does spend a little too much time on how many people he knows that weren’t affected, because it is the people that were that are really important. And honestly Creative Cloud kicks me out of my login way too often for me to be comfortable, and in fact was even worse for a job I was on.

I have been trying to get convince my boss that the Adobe Creative Cloud is the way to go for Direct Response commercials. Which are very graphics heavy and usually shot in multiple formats and even frame rates. Well we have been trying out creative cloud in it’s 30 day trial, and if it worked were going to get a month to month account for it on our machines, but unfortunately even time you open one of the demo version you must OK that you are using a trial and that did not work during the outage. And we couldn’t upgrade to full version to get that working either. Not a good selling point for creative cloud.

My personal versions at home kept working as I was logged in and they continued working, but any down time because of Cloud computer can be catastrophic when media has been bought so an airdate is set.

Adobe needs to make some sort of backup system that allows you to keep working for a day or two until Adobe can get their servers back together!

This really isn’t a good showing for subscription based software. Maybe there needs to be a way to keep it working for the whole period of the current subscription without checking in, and they need to keep Creative Cloud from accidentally logging your user out.

PVC on latest version of AVID Media Composer

Scott Simmons at the Pro Video Coalition has a great article on the latest version of AVID Media Composer that has just been released.

This is made mainly for the subscription model that AVID has moved to, but as a bonus they are letting existing users sign up for $299 a year for the support version which includes updates, and you can sign up for a year to get the latest versions at least through 2014, then it goes up to $1299 a year for the subscription with support.

This means for $299 you can get a year of updates for your current version, and hopefully get the next version of the software as well.

Oliver Peters at Digitalfilms has a great comparison of AVID Symphony, Adobe SpeedGrade, Davinci Resolve and Apple Color and my thoughts

Oliver Peters has posted an article with a great comparison of AVID Symphony, Adobe SpeedGrade, Davinci Resolve and Apple Color.

Personally I have been spending a lot of time with Davinci Resolve of late. With a proper video card it is really an awesome program, and is certainly my current choice for color correction. It is fast and easy to use and does a very good job.

The other interest is SpeedGrade which I am learning, mainly because of it’s ability to roundtrip a grade to Premiere Pro and put it on clips as a single filter on each clip. A very cool feature, but the program needs some work before it can really compete with Resolve. First off it needs support for Black Magic cards instead of just AJA cards. If Premiere Pro can do it, Resolve needs to do it. And second it really does need curves. Curves are such a powerful color correction method that many have come to rely on, and not having them seems a huge failing. Other issues I have are it’s abilities with multitrack video are limited, and I have just gotten so used to nodal vs layer based correcting, though that is certainly not going to change. SpeedGrade is powerful and does work well with Premiere, but needs to get some updates to be able to really rival Davinci even with it’s ability export it’s grades as color correction filters into Premiere.