Next Week at NAB Adobe will be showing off the next release of Adobe Creative Cloud's video suite with updates to apps. We knew this was coming as Adobe announced on March 18th that the next version of Creative Cloud will only work with Mac Os X 10.9 Yosemite and higher. Check out this video that shows the most exciting new features!
Adam Garstone at Definition Magazine gives a quick overview of these 3 powerful 3D Compositing Programs. Work a read.After learning Shake years back I would love to get into one of these, but can't afford either Nuke or Smoke, but once a free Mac version is released of Fusion by BlackMagic Designs I will probably spend the time to learn it, and hopefully they will have added a good 3D camera tracker by then.
I was handed a DVCAM tape yesterday and work was going to rent a DVCAM deck to capture. I said I would do it myself since I have a Sony DS-20 in my office. I used to use it all the time, but it mostly gathers dust now, so it was good to give it a run, and I decided to try it out with Premiere Pro.Now I knew that Premiere had a very simple capture engine that would work with HDV or DV, so I decided to give it a try. It has very few settings, just which capture setting, then you can set in's and outs, change clip and tape names and capture a clip or a tape. The problem is that the tape was old, and it kept failing on the capture, and it doesn't seem to have a setting to automatically break up clips when there is a break in timecode. After many many attempts that failed, I gave up and switched to Final Cut Pro 7.Final Cut Pro 7 still has a much more powerful capture engine, and will in fact break up a capture if you set it to, so you get clips around the breaks, but surprisingly it managed to capture the whole 1 hour and 50 minutes in one go, not making any breaks.So honestly I am glad Final Cut Pro 7 still runs on Yosemite, as it does still have some uses. Looks like I will need to keep a backup of this system state before the next OS which will likely break Final Cut Pro 7 completely so I can still capture DV easily if need be.
So I have been working more with Speedgrade, finishing the grade on this twenty eight and a half minute long show, and I realized another issue.Actually it is very like the issue with the multicam clips, where you can grade them, and the grade shows up in Premiere, but the Lumetri Effect does not on clips with an Alpha or that or Premiere Pro Text layers.This is an issue when replacing graphics with textless versions and you can't just take the same grade from existing clips, because the while the grade shows up, it is does not show up as an effect that you can edit or copy or do anything with in Premiere Pro.This gives me memories of precomputes and AVID! The horror!I really hope Adobe fixes this and the the other issues I previously posted with a new update of Creative Cloud at NAB this year, as I really do love how the grade ends up on your original sequence (for the most part). I do really like the program, but some of the issues really do make DaVinci seem more viable for the moment.
And I totally want one. I love my original pebble, and a color one that has a week battery life sounds amazing! And others seem to think so as when I looked this morning it had 2 Million and now it is up to 3.5 Million with 21 days to go! Yes it is not an Apple watch, but they work great with great battery life and more features, and color, works in sun!
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…
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!
Red Shark has what it knows about the new RED Weapon that Jared Land has been playing with (and controlling via WIFI). It will likely be revealed at NAB.Always exciting to see a new RED, though I am still hoping for less expensive cameras, but a larger sensor as rumored and wifi will likely mean more expensive.
Bare Feats has a great comparison of the new NVIDIA GTX 980 installed in a MacPro and runs it against 10 other GPU options. 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).
Cinescopophilia has an article on the impressively small DEFY G2X 2 Axis Gimbal, which is under $2000.It is amazing how fast this technology is evolving and how quickly the price is going down! Let's hope that shaky cam makes it's way out in the near future.