Red Giant Releases Universe Plug In

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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.

NVIDIA has updated the Titan to the Titan Black

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After updating the GTX 700 series, NVIDIA needed to put the Titan back on top, and it has with the Black!

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!

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!