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.

Should the XBOX ONE be called the XBOX ZERO?

I have been a gamer since I was a kid, and have had a lot of game systems through the years, but as of the Original XBOX I have really been a Microsoft Gamer. Sure I had a Sony Playstation 3, but I had only 3 games for it, and really only used it as a blu-ray player.

I went from the Original XBOX to the XBOX 360, and had 6 Red Ring of Death failures on it, before it finally went out of warranty and died and I moved to a slimline XBOX 360 finally with HDMI out. I loved the system and it’s online capabilities or I would have given up with all of it’s failures.

And I was so excited for the XBOX ONE, and even luckier that my mom ordered me one for my birthday (getting it on release day). It sounded like a great idea, a center for your media in your living room. You can even play television through it, and it would really be the main thing you need, but just hasn’t quite worked out that way, even if it is a good game system.

First off the ONE has been $499 VS $399 for the PS4. And the excuse was that it was because of the Kinect it came with, which was integrated into the system for motion and voice control. The problem is that there was no killer Kinect game that showed the need for it. It should have come with Kinect Sports Rivals at least, but even that is only a decent game (not better than the previous XBOX 360 Kinect Sports Games). And the system control with the Kinect is not even that good. You have to repeat yourself, and the movement controls are awkward at best.

Sure the ONE is a very good gaming system, but the fact that Microsoft went for a cheap video card, means it is much less powerful than the Sony Playstation 4, and really isn’t capable of doing 1080P output. More like 720p. And that is really unacceptable in this day where basically everyone has a 1080 HDTV. Really it should have been able to do Rock Solid 1080P 3D out of the box.

And the ONE has huge overhead, running literally 3 OS’s at once. For the system there is the Gaming Layer, the system layer, and the TV layer (which is not a DVR, but will just let watch TV and control it somewhat with a new guide and vocal commands, but they don’t work very well). So you are running 3 OS’s at once, and having to run the Kinect as well, further eating performance. Sure it is really cool to be able to instantly jump out of what you are doing and into the main menu and then jump back, but it does eat system power, which would be fine with more power, but since for raw power the system is already behind it’s cheaper rival the PS4 (I know not anymore), you are eating more performance. And the ability to snap other apps on the screen is interesting, but is not really something you want to do while gaming, since it shrinks your screen and resolution further.

And to add insult to injury Microsoft has announced that they are releasing a $399 system with no Kinect. So it seems the integral system component is not so integral. Maybe this will mean that in the future developers can have the power back from the system that the Kinect functionality was using within games, but with cross platform games it seems unlikely except for exclusive titles. And it means less Kinect games will be developed, and makes it seem less important. Microsoft should really have eaten the price of the Kinect, and made the system $399 at launch with the Kinect. Now the Kinect has been moved to the sidelines, and can never be a guaranteed part of games or the system, so it will likely not get the attention it deserves.

And for me I haven’t yet gotten to the worst of what is missing from the ONE. This system which is supposed to be the “ONE” system that you need has so much less functionality than it’s predecessor the XBOX 360. In fact even less than the 360 had at launch since it added many more features along it’s life span! Xplore Gaming has a great article on this.

For me the biggest and worst thing, is a feature that was added late in the life cycle of the original XBOX. That is the ability to play your own music during games. In fact with the 360 you could plug in your iPod and play music right away, since you needed something to serve a music from Mac (though you could do it from Windows right away) and control the music from your XBOX controller by just hitting pause. Sure some games you listen to the music when playing, as some games have great music, but most of the time you eventually get sick of it. Especially with racing games or online multiplayer games. I mean who hasn’t wanted to blast some heavy rock or electronica during a multi-player online match to get pumped up!

With the XBOX One, it is possible to get music to play from your Windows computer t the XBOX ONE, but only with the XBOX MUSIC app being open! And you can’t control it from your XBOX ONE, you have to control it from the computer. Some people have managed this with a music server n their computer and using an app on a smartphone to control the music, but I haven’t gotten it to work on my setup. And even with this you can’t play the music in the game only in the app, unless you want to snap the App onto the screen, taking up a good portion of the side of your screen and shrinking and lowering the resolution of your game, which is totally unacceptable. Plus the game would still be playing it’s own music and sound as well.

And even the paid XBOX Music App can’t do it. It has the same restrictions and can only play from the app be it full screen or snapped.

Why can’t these apps play in the background and through existing games as you have been able to on XBOX games for years?

And the second biggest feature, which may be bigger for many if you really want this to be the center of your media functionality is the ability to act as a head for Windows Media Center! This would allow your music and shows to play through your ONE and be able to control them, just like you have been able to with the XBOX 360 for years. Not having this functionality basically makes the name ONE not work at all.

The Third would be the XBOX 360’s power management features. The ONE has an instant on setting that allows you to turn it on with the Kinect, but this literally eats power, and even it’s power saving settings still drain a lot of power. I have had to add a switch that lets me kill the power completely to save power. The 360 on the other hand had settings to allow it to fully power down, and you could even let it do it after it finished downloading files it was downloading.

And Fourth is really the lack of Apps! The 360 has a ton of apps, and it has been out a long time, but the One as the center of your media needs to have more apps. Especially with reports that it takes less than a day to port a windows 8 app to the XBOX ONE. If that is the case, we need a ton of more apps and choices, and we need them now!

And honestly backward compatibility with 360 games would have been amazing, because it really can’t be the one system if you need to keep your 360 to play your old games.

And finally the ONE just doesn’t have many games and they seem to be coming out very slowly. At least Microsoft is finally moving it’s free GAMES WITH GOLD where they release 2 free older games for free every month to the ONE next month, though unfortunately they are changing it a bit. On the 360 version the games are yours free and clear forever if you download them in the 2 week period where they are available. With the ONE they are by subscription, so they are only yours as long as you are a gold subscriber. And I do get that, but it still means more restrictions on a system that already has enough issues.

Yes the XBOX ONE has some great games, and the games look great. I have greatly enjoyed Assassin’s Creed 4 and Titanfall (though it’s lack of a single player game is a huge problem for me), and they do look great. I just think that if Microsoft wanted to expand their focus from games to being the center of your media center, they need to not cut features, and instead include everything that the 360 could do with the new features like TV control and Blu-Ray. And if they are planning to add these features back, they need to talk about it and give a timeline, because right now the XBOX ONE seems misnamed. It is not the ONE system you need and it really does lack focus as to exactly what it is.

RedShark News on Panasonic GH4 4K Camera

RedShark News has a great review of the new Panasonic GH4 4K camera. Great article on the camera, though it is for PAL users instead of NTSC, but that is the only fault.

Also talks about an interesting program from Thomas Worth that is a Mac Command line app to convert the 4K 4:2:0 footage to 1080 4:4:4 footage using the extra picture resolution. Which sounds great, though I don’t know how it could have more color data.

This camera sounds amazing. I wish Canon would take these lessons to heart and make their lower end cameras have amazing features like this camera.

Parrott announced Bebop Camera Drone


Parrot has announced it’s replacement to the AR2, the Bebop, and it looks awesome!

It has a full HD camera, with a undistorted fish eye lens and 3 axis image stabilization and 180 degree field of view.

The Bebop also has a built in GPS, so it doesn’t need an additional module like the AR.2

The Freeflight app is being upgraded to version 3, but even more exciting is the SkyController addition.

This has an almost 2 Kilometer range, and use flight sticks instead of the virtual controls on your smart phone. And you can even connect first person glasses, or even the Oculus Rift for head tracking camera moves!

No word on price, but likely more expensive than the $300 AR.2. Still looks very cool, and with a full HD camera, could be a valid camera for some productions.

Pretty exciting and something to look forward to.