MacTech is reported that RE:Vision has announced a new version of their amazing slow motion plug in TWIXTOR. This includes GPU Support for NUKE and SCRATCH.
Love this plug in. The most amazing slow motion plug in yet created. Well worth it if you need it, though not cheap!
MacRumors has the news that iTunes 11.1.6 Beta has returned local iTunes Contact and Calendar sync to your iOS devices. I have railed about this because iCloud syncing is very very broken, especially without the ability to easily overwrite the iCloud information from your computer. Now if only they would add back Bookmark syncing so I could forget about the damn iCloud which seems to constantly screw up my bookmarks! Honestly I have now figured the only solution which seems to get clean bookmarks to my iOS devices. I use x-marks to sync my bookmarks, as I use Chrome as my primary browser with Mozilla as my secondary browser. Since I am not a PC (which has the great iCloud Sync extension for Windows) I have to get my bookmarks into Safari on my mac to be able to sync bookmarks to my iOS devices, so I use X-marks, but while my Safari seems to then have good clean bookmarks, it does not follow that my iCloud bookmarks are at all the same. Instead I seem to end up with many duplicate folders, but most of which are empty in random orders. In order to fix this, I have found that the aforementioned iCloud plug in for Safari only available on PC’s seems to actually overwrite the iCloud bookmarks, which I can’t seem to manage from my Mac. So I boot up Windows 8.1 in Parallels (can also be done in BootCamp) and launch Chrome for PC. Then I download clean bookmarks from Xmarks and wait for iCloud to sync, and that seems to clean up my bookmarks for a little while at least. Why Apple can’t add a control to iCloud to control overwrite, like they used to have for syncing, or like x-marks has I will never know. I mean if there weren’t issues they wouldn’t have brought back local syncing in any for. Lets hope they bring back local syncing of bookmarks soon, so I can forget about the broken iCloud bookmark syncing!!!
Red Giant has released a new set of GPU accelerated plug ins called Universe. Right now you can try out the Free plan which includes 32 free plug ins, and you will be able to get Premium plug ins, or create your own. They are also updating many of their old plug ins to work GPU enhanced in universe.
Supernova: Behind the Scenes of Red Giant Universe from Red Giant on Vimeo.
There is the free membership, a $10 a month Premium Plan or a $99 per year plan, or a $399 Lifetime plan that does not expire!
The Plugs include:
Universe Free Tools
Universe Blur (7 plugins)
Universe Distort (8 plugins)
Universe Generators (4 plugins)
Universe Glow (3 plugins)
Universe Transitions (9 plugins)
Universe Premium Tools
Universe Chromatic Glow
Universe Holomatrix
Universe Knoll Light Factory EZ
Universe Noise
Universe Premium Transitions
Universe Prism Displacement
Universe Retrograde
Universe Toonit
This sounds very cool, and I have already installed and am looking forward to trying them out. Not sure about the monthly pricing unless they do add as many effects as they say they will, but the Lifetime is probably the best deal here, especially seeing things like Knoll Light Factory being added with GPU support.
Also is an addition is called Red Giant Supernova, which allows you to program plug ins quickly using the Red Giant Universe Library. So it fairly easy to create your own plug ins.
Supernova: Behind the Scenes of Red Giant Universe from Red Giant on Vimeo.
Mac Performance Guide tests 6GB SSD drives in various enclosures with Thunderbolt and USB 3, and USB 3 holds up quite well at least with a single SSD drive.
With 2880 CUDA cores and 6 GB of 7.0 Gbps Speed Memory this thing should fly! It can perform single precision at 5.1 TFLOPS and double precision at 1.3TFLOPS so should be beating the GTX 780i for professional applications.
Personally I was hoping my next computer had 2 of these, and certainly not AMD cards!
Macnn is reporting that NVIDIA has updated it’s graphics card drivers, but you need CUDA 5.5.28 to work with them.
I tried installing them in my MacPro with a PC NVIDIA Geforce 670 and it wouldn’t restart, had to zap the PRAM, so be careful with these!
Todd Kopriva has announced the release of NVIDIA Cuda Drivers 5.5.47. You can download them from the CUDA control panel or NVIDIA’s CUDA site.
I had to update to 5.5.28 first to get the 5.5.47 update, guess I have not updated in a while.
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.
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.
Was just on a bit of a vacation last week and realized that my iOS bookmarks were completely screwed up again.