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.
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!!!!
Shawn Lam at Streaming Media Producer has released 2 out of parts of an awesome article on gearing up for 4K Production. This is a must read for anyone thinking about shooting 4K now or in the near future. Well worth reading. I am looking forward to part 3.You can read Part 1 Here and Part 2 Here.
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).
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…