High Def Magazine reviews Smoke for Mac 2013

High Definition Magazine has a review of Smoke for Mac 2013. Sounds to be almost an editor, but mostly for finishing and compositing, though the editing tools are getting better, but lack of export options means you couldn’t kick it back to your NLE of choice.

I gave the beta a play, but couldn’t get imports to work right, so gave up and the beta ran out, though I still think this is a great idea, and would love to play with it’s high end compositing features.

Mac Performance Guide on the 2013 MacPro

The Mac Performance Guide has a new article on the speed of the new MacPro and it is obvious that this person shares my sentiment on the new MacPro and what a mistake it is!

Losing 5 internal drive bays, losing relatively inexpensive memory exansion to 48GB or 64GB or 128GB, losing three PCIe slots, losing the internal optical drive, and adding the associated rat’s nest of pile of cables and boxes should give pause to anyone considering a Mac Pro.

and

Form before function might be one early warning sign of the long term decline of Apple. It’s not just the Mac Pro. All great companies eventually decline, victims of their own hubris sooner or later, and a failure to Serve their users. I see Apple on that path. The 2013 Mac Pro is just one manifestation which follows ill-conceived changes with no substantive improvements in OS X, and the stick in the eye to Final Cut Pro users which forced them away from Apple. And many other things that most won’t notice, but are like small lesions here and there.

Literally I am wondering if my next Tower will be a PC. I would like to consider a Hackintosh, but the lack of expansion in the new MacPro really makes me wonder if anyone will even keep making Mac drivers for PCI cards for the Mac. And it is not like I really like Windows 8. The Metro start screen is awful, but at least I can get expansion, upgradeability and NVIDIA graphics cards with CUDA support!

Kylee Wall at Creative Cow on Premiere Pro

Kylee Wall has an article on using Premiere Pro CC.

I have completely lost my aversion to Premiere Pro, and in fact really like it now, and love the After Effects integration. I do agree that Adobe software does get random problems that are hard to solve (I find a complete uninstall usually helps, but is a total pain), but it is a really powerful editor. And honestly being back on Media Composer feels like using a dinosaur. Sure it is mostly stable, but it is not like it does not have issues too.

And FCP 7, well I loved it, and will miss it, but FCP X is not it’s replacement. It is a powerful editing program, but I don’t like it’s timeline or how it forces you to do things in certain ways, so it will never work for much of what I do (though I am sure some day I will have to delve back into it’s dark waters).

Mac Performance on Apple’s iCloud being broken like I have been saying!

MacPerformance Guide has a great article on Apple’s iCloud being broken for him, just like it is broken for me!

I have been talking for some time about how my iCloud Bookmarks are completely messed up and I can’t fix them! There is no option to wipe out what is on the server, and my server bookmarks are screwed up! Now it may have something to do with me using X-Marks, but that is how I keep my bookmarks synced between Chrome, Firefox and Safari, but my Safari bookmarks constantly were screwing up the mix, so I had to turn off iCloud for bookmarks and just manually sync my bookmarks if I want them to end up on my iPhone and iPad.

I first posted about my problems on May 20th of 2012, and again on March of this year!

Apple Updates iMacs with Haswell Processors and NVIDIA 7 Series GPU’s

Apple has once again updated it’s iMacs, now with Haswell Processors, PCI SSD cards and NVIDIA 7 series GPU’s!. Now that the MacPro is going fully AMD only, people wanting CUDA will have iMacs as their main option, as you can go up to a GTX 780M with 4GB of GDDR5 Memory. Would rather have a non-mobile version of the processor, but these should still rock for CUDA.

If only APPLE would relent and release a MacPro that is actually expandable, and doesn’t use just thunderbolt for expansion, but that is unlikely to happen. Thinking a hackintosh looks more and more likely in my Future!

Oliver Peters on how FCP 7 makes a great companion to FCP X

Oliver Peters has an interesting article on how he uses Final Cut pro 7 as a companion to Final Cut Pro X to make up for it’s missing features.

Personally I see it as indictment of FCP X. As a program is pretty broken if you have to use an older EOL version of itself to support many high end features, especially when said program could not work on the next OS X Mavericks!