FCP.co long term testing of FCP X and the new MacPro and my thoughts.

FCP.Co has an extensive article on long term testing of the new Mac Pro with Final Cut Pro X.

And the results do sound pretty impressive, even if there are some problems with expansion. Seems like you need to use Thunderbolt, as a NAS over GigE is just too slow, and you will quickly use up your thunderbolt ports and be daisy chaining, especially as new devices come out.

And this lack of expansion is what worries me. Do I stay with Mac which I love, or go with a huge expandable PC that can have all the internal storage and external expansion I could ever want? Not that Windows 8.1 is all that great. I have had my Bootcamp install go down multiple times in a short period, for no reason.

Having problems with Adobe Dynamic Link and Adobe Encore

Adobe’s Dynamic Link technology is one of the most exciting features of it’s Creative Cloud suite, with the ability to link to projects instead of having to render out movies. You can have an After Effects project within premiere and make changes and they dynamically update. Or you can use Media Encoder to render directly from project files. Or directly have Premiere Pro sequences within Encore. And I was even more excited when they hired and Put Wes Plate, the creator of Automatic Duck in charge of it.

The problem is that it does not always work well. With After Effects sequences within Premiere, many times they won’t link unless you already have the After Effects project open when you open the Premiere Pro sequence. This is usually simple enough to deal with, though does not always work, and gets even more complicated when you have things from multiple After Effects projects.

Really the coolest use of it is to select a sequence of clips in a Premiere Pro Timeline and send them into After Effects, though I don’t like how it handles it in Premiere. Your clips are immediately replaced with and After Effects sequence, losing the original clips, so you must first either duplicate the timeline or the clips, personally I wish there was a way to have it turn off the clips and lay the After Effects project on a layer above the clips in premiere, but for now that is nitpicking.

My big problem right now is with Adobe Encore. And it likely has something to do with it being End of Lifed by Adobe (yes Adobe I know most people just download clips now, but some of us still need to make discs, and a new more compatible version with CC would really help). I created a DVD of my editing and graphics reels to send out, and made a nice little menu for it, but I linked to the sequences using dynamic link, and now the project just won’t open anymore. Yes I can build it again, but I had nice looking menus all done, and it is a pain to have to make this again!

I wouldn’t be surprised at some point if Adobe creates some sort of Adobe Dynamic Link Server that runs in the background, and can keep the linking working without having to have all the apps open. but I have a feeling even if that happens Encore will be SOL on that one.

I know Dynamic Link is a complicated thing, but I just wish it worked better all the way around.

iCloud Bookmark sync on Mac is Garbage!

Was just on a bit of a vacation last week and realized that my iOS bookmarks were completely screwed up again.

I use Chrome as my main browser, with Firefox as my second browser (mainly for it’s plug-ins and tabs), and I only use Safari to sync my bookmarks with iOS. As I have written before, pre iOS 7 I used iTunes to directly sync my bookmarks from Safari, as my iCloud bookmarks constantly were screwed up. Well once again my bookmarks on iCloud were screwed.
I keep my bookmarks synched with xmarks ( http://www.xmarks.com ) and have a good very cleaned up set of bookmarks that I recently cleaned. I tried downloading these using xmarks for safari, but it would download and then sync with iCloud and be screwed up again.
So I booted up Windows 8.1 in Parallels, and booted up Chrome, opened xmarks settings and downloaded my clean new bookmarks, and amazingly iCloud sync for Safari correctly overwrote my iCloud bookmarks. Why does Safari on the mac not do this?
Apple still needs to add syncing control, so you can overwrite bookmarks on iCloud from your Mac, especially since it is the only way to get bookmarks to your iOS device! This whole simplicity thing only works when everything works, but bookmark cloud syncing often gets screwed up so you need advanced controls. Hide them from users if you want to Apple, but they should be there! And why the hell does the Windows syncing work better than Mac syncing!

Got Windows up last night then ran Advanced System Optimizer and it tanked my system

In fact it was the same problem as before, so it seems that it was the Registration Optimizer that killed my BootCamp install to begin with, or at least once I managed to get it to reboot one time. It seems the Registry repair just doesn’t work!

I just tried a system Refresh, and the computer came back up, and ran the Bootcamp installer, and on it’s restart it went back into the system repair loop failure. So I am trying a Refresh again, and hope the computer makes it. I could do a full install again, but I want my documents, only because all of the downloads are already there, so I can quickly re-install them.
Now I have been considering moving to Windows because of the lack of expansion in the new MacPro, but honestly if Windows is this picky, I might not. 
I was going to make a Recovery DVD when I got my system back up, but it was a 55 Gig backup, and that is a shitload of DVD’s. I need to do this, but I need to use a hard drive to make the backup, so when I screw the system up, I can recover back to exactly my system, and not go through all this crap again!

Never got Windows to boot again, just had to wipe and re-install

So I was never able to get my Bootcamp Windows 8.1 install to boot again or get it to repair, so i finally just used. Bootcamp Assistant to wipe the partition, and re-partition.

Now I ended up having to do this 7 times, as 6 times windows on it’s first restart it came to an error message loop saying “The Computer Restarted unexpectedly or encountered an unexpected error. Windows installation cannot proceed. To install Windows click OK to restart the computer, and reinstall Windows.” I finally found a fix for this ( https://avatargamingpc.com/support/951869-The-Computer-Restarted-unexpectedly-or-encountered-an-unexpected-error-during-installation-of-Windows ) but the Windows install had totally tanked by that time, and on the next re-partition and re-install, the install actually worked.

Have spent the day upgrading, and am now installing 8.1. Then time to re-install everything, and make a backup disc!

What a pain in the ass!

After one good restart Bootcamp Partition is toast

So after coming up yesterday and me running utilities, Windows needed to restart to fix Registry issues, and I never got it back up. It would not let me re-install over the old partition, and it would not let me do anything that would fix it, and the problems seemed to get worse until it is totally tanked, I am going to have to re-install. Activation will require a call to microsoft, but hopefully it will work, and they will let me re-install. Might be a problem because it is an OEM version, but those have to be re-installed.

What a total pain in my ass! I am mean seriously, I can’t believe how they make it to repair windows if there is a problem! The tied down OS is really such a pain. With Mac I can easily use another hard drive with another system install on it and run repairs at least.

After restart Windows was caught in a loop again

So after I ran the utilities Smart PC Care on Windows it needed to restart to finish fixing the registeries, and the computer got caught in a restart loop to Windows install dvd. I zapped the PRAM a couple of times to try and reset the startup disc, but that didn’t work, so i also reset the SMC, buy that didn’t work so I had to open the computer to eject the dvd from the tray and then the computer wouldn’t start at all.


Eventually i reseated all the hard drives and swapped out my PC GTX 670 for my GTX 270 and that managed to boot into OSX, and I set it as the startup disc. 

Windows is going in Automatic Repair again, and will likely fail, wonder if the MBR thing will work?

Got Windows 8.1 in BootCamp to boot, though not with USB Install

So I tried the whole re-install the system and it said that the USB Windows 8.1 was not right, so I was not able to use it, though I don’t know why. They are both Windows 8.1 Professional 64 Bit installs.

I then tried the command line, but ‘sfc /scannow’ failed and wouldn’t work. So I did more googling and tried ‘bootrec /fixmbr’ to fix the Master Boot Record and it quickly said it succeeded. Still I restarted into Mac and made a Windows 8.1 install DVD in my Parallels install and set the restart disc to it, to try to use repair off of it, but amazingly when I restarted it restarted into my Bootcamp, which seems to be working fine now.

I plan on running Smart PC Care on it, but it isn’t starting now, so I am going to re-install it and run some utilities, just as soon as my NVIDIA GeForce Experience update finally manages to finish! Then I am installing my CalDigit drivers so I don’t kill BootCamp if I happen to have something installed in it. And then I am making a backup DVD so I can try and repair from that.

I am actually amazed that there are no Utilities to run from a second hard drive installed in your Windows PC to fix another install. I guess it is finicky about that, but I easily boot into my Parallels, so I could run a Utility on my BootCamp install, but am not allowed to.