Black Magic DaVinci 10 will support the MacPro and it’s Dual GPU’s, and likely so will Adobe Premiere Pro Creative Cloud

Nonlinear has a post on a post from Grant Petty the CEO of BlackMagic saying that the full version of DaVinci 10 will support the Dual AMD GPU’s of the new MacPros. And Premiere Pro already supports AMD Firepros, and hopefully will soon support the duals of the new MacPro.

I will still rather see Dual NVIDIA GPU support, as CUDA would likely be faster, but this could make the MacPro a viable alternative to the current MacPro without the expansion. Still want to see some speed tests though as I would like to see Premiere Pro rocking Dual Titans!

EOSHD on H.264 Codec, ProRes 4444 Quality at 1% of File SIze

EOSHD has an article on the new h.265 Codec which is ProRes 4444 Quality at 1% of the File size. Of course i doesn’t talk about the computer power that is going to be needed. And that is going to need some power. Serious GPU power I am thinking.

Still you can try it right now with Cinemartin’s compressor, but it is not cheap! And the compressor is made for Windows 7, and I have no idea what will actually play it back right now, but the compressor also does ProRes. Would love to give it a try, but it is way too expensive to play with right now.

Submitted a support ticket with Fitbit, said to use a rubber band!

So I submitted a support ticket with Fitbit about the defective strap on the Fitbit Force, and got a reply.

They told me to watch this video on how to put it on. http://j.mp/16cgbdf And no I am not putting it on wrong!
And then they said to try using a rubber band! You have to be kidding me? The Force is so badly designed that they recommend using a rubber band? WTF!??!?!?! And how exactly? All the way around so it blocks the screen and presses on your wrist, or tied around the defective clasp, so it rubs wrong on your wrist? Neither is a viable solution!
Some designer decided to try and re-invent the watch clasp, but there is a reason they make watch clasps like they do, because they work, and they have for a long time! The watch band on the Fitbit Flex is just a bad design that falls off, so this product wilk get lost, or broken or fall in liquid and die!
Already there are more One Star Reviews of the Force on Amazon than 4 star reviews, because of this design flaw. And Fitbit has even started to respond. I have a review up already at http://www.amazon.com/review/R1VJ9GURZ4267F/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B00F6WRW2Q&linkCode=&nodeID=&tag= as do many others!
Fitbit needs to redesign and replace with a normal watch clasp, and recall the defective units!

Fitbit Force, a decent fitness tracker, with a horrible, defective watch strap

The Force is a wrist based fitness tracking, that tracks steps, stairs, distance and estimates calories. And it has a liitle screen to display your results or act as a watch (though you wear it on your dominant yand, so it is on my right wrist instead of left, which takes some gettimg used to). 


The Force is my third Fitbit product, I had an original fitbit which I washed and a Fitbit One which had it’s battery die, and support never repplied to me to get it fixed. And now my dad who gave me this also gave me the awesome wifi fitbit Aria scale to track weight. The Flex is a decent fitness tracker, though has some serious issues, the first of which is the strap!

Instead of a normal watch band that would stay on, you press it this together to hold it on, but it does not stay on. It falls off me at least once a day. And even went into the toilet once, and it is only splash resistant (not a good thing for something you wear all the time like a watch), though I saved it. And it comes off almost every night while I sleep, which does not help the sleep tracking. Fitbit tried to re-invent the watch band and failed miserably! A normal watch band would have earned this aa great review, but I have not even had this a month and am sure I will lose it soon!

The two metal pieces that fit into the watch band holes.
Snapped together, though not very well.


And the stair tracking is flawed at best. It doesn’t track going down stairs at all, and you have to really be swinging your arm for it to track while going up. I was holding my iphone while going up 8 flights and it only registered 3 flights, though it normally registers 8, which is just annoying.

Another complaint is that it has lost some functionality. The original FitBit and the One both had a fun little flower you grew based on your daily exercise. Useless but fun, but this is gone from the Force.


And while it does a pretty good of tracking even without arm swing, it does register steps where you don’t get them, like raking or working in the yard, which is kind if a cheat, but expected because it is on your wrist. I do like it on your wrist as you don’t forget it.

Battery life seems pretty goid, lasting a good week, even when bluetooth synced to my iphone for syncing, and only takes an hour and a half to charge.

A decent tracker, but they really need to put a normal watch strap clasp on it, so it doesn’t come off so easily, and water proofing would be nice too!


And i do think fitness trackers are great as you dp push yourself more because of it. I park further away, or go up more stairs because of the tracker, and wanting to do better. And seeing your friends and family results adds to that as you want to do well. I just wish the Force stayed on better!

Phil Hodgetts on Final Cut Pro 10.1 on new Mac Pro and my thoughts.

Phil Hodgetts has an article on running Final Cut Pro 10.1 on the new Mac Pro and what he was able to play back, 5 Red R2D 4K streams at different scales positions and rotations without rendering.

Pretty amazing, though now I want to see what happens when Adobe re-writes premiere for Dual Graphics Card support and what it can do, and even better if they carry that over to PC, so we can see this on dual NVIDIA CUDA cards. I would love to see what Premiere Pro could do using 2 GTX TITANS instead of AMD FirePro cards which are slower than gaming cards (much like NVIDIAs QUADRO line). The nice thing about the MacPro is it seems Apple is charging the gaming price for it’s FirePro cards, so you are paying for the Radeon editions and getting the FirePro.

I know that Final Cut pro X has gotten much better, but I am still not sold on it. I gave my 2 weeks at the beginning and the mess that it made of the timeline really makes it seem not viable for commercial or direct response, nor for anything that needs an audio mixer, as it will take so much longer to mix something that isn’t set specifically for an audio mixer.

Maybe I am biased by Final Cut Pro X 10.1, but all the improvements have not changed the timeline.

iCloud Boomarks Sync Update

Well since I heard you need 2 computers to get iCloud to work better, I have been working on getting iCloud Syncing installed in Windows 8 in Parallels to see if I could get my bookmarks cleaned up on iCloud, and it seems to have worked.

It seems that iCloud sync works much better on Windows than on Mac. First off they have included Chrome, Firefox and IE bookmarks sync, which they don’t have on the Mac side (trying to force you to only use Safari I am assuming), but I didn’t even have to erase my bookmarks to get it to work, I just downloaded my good bookmarks from X-Marks, installed iCloud Control Panel and iCloud extension for Chrome, and on my Mac, my bookmarks updated with my good X-Marks bookmarks and they showed up on my iOS devices. WTF!

Apple you need to fix this issue, because not everyone has parallels installed on their mac!