Over 150 New Features being added to Adobe Creative Cloud Video

Yes, just 4 months after their last upgrade, Adobe is good to it’s word and is turning around much faster upgrades with creative cloud, and in October are upgrading Premiere Pro, After Effects, Speed Grade, Prelude, Media Encoder, Story and are adding the iOS app Prelude Live Logger. Awesome! You can check out the upgrades at Adobe.

Steve Forde at the Adobe After Effects Blog has a post on the new After Effects Features.

The Adobe Premiere Pro Work area Blog has more on Premiere Pro, Media Encoder (which now has GPU enabled rendering!) and Prelude and Prelude Live Logger.

The Adobe Moving Colors blog has more on the SpeedGrade Upgrade which includes direct link (an improvement over Dynamic Linking which you can see more about here) and GPU acceleration.

Thank you Adobe, looking forward to it! And here’s to hoping that Adobe permanently keeps up this rapid pace of development, except it will certainly keep us editors on our toes, as I have just scratched the surface of CC by now! Ha!

Decompose broken with Imported Media in Media Composer?!?!?

Now this is just showing how long it has been since I have worked in offline resolutions in AVID Media composer, but I didn’t realize that basically Decompose doesn’t work with imported clips. It leaves the clips their whole length, not subclipping anything to consolidate space. So if you were to re-import you are taking entire clips.

I tried Consolidating the media to make smaller clips and then Decomposing, but AVID only imports black clips this way. 
So with all imported Media, you have to import the whole clips and at 1 to 1 that can take a very large amount of hard drive space and time! This is insanity!
This makes the argument to use AMA if you can, but AMA is not working on either Media Composer 5.0.3 box I have access to right now with this copied P2 media. And if it wasn’t working at some point I don’t see how they initially managed to get the Media as DNxHD 36!
So frustrated right now!

My biggest worry of building a Hackintosh

I have not been quiet about my disdain for the new MacPro. Having Thunderbolt instead of PCI is not a solution.

A single PCI slot at 1x is 8 Gbps, while Thunderbolt is 10 Gbps, and Thunderbolt 2 is 20 Gbps. So Thunderbolt 2 is slower than 3x PCI (24 Gbps vs 20 Gbps). Every MacPro since 2009 has had 2 x 4x PCI slots which are 32 Gbps and 2 x 16x which 128 Gbps (or so much faster than even the next gen 50 Gbps Thunderbolt). So Thunderbolt will never be fast enough for a 16x Graphics card!
And my bigger worry is that without PCI expansion why will anyone write drivers for PCI cards for Macs now that there will be no Macs with PCI cards!
I have been thinking my next Mac will be a custom built PC, as NVIDIA and CUDA are important to me and my work, but I want a Mac! So I was hoping to build a Hackintosh, a custom built PC hacked to run Mac software. You can make a Hackintosh more powerful than the new MacPro (not cheaply as Decent 6x Xeons run around $1400 each, so almost $3000 for 2) and have huge amounts of expansion, but without future PCI drivers it won’t last! Maybe drivers will still work, as they will need to write Thunderbolt drivers which should still go through the PCI bus, but who knows. And why will NVIDIA keep writing universal graphics drivers like they have been doing?
So does that mean a PC is in my future? Maybe. Maybe a Mac laptop and a PC for editing and graphics work? That seems expensive! Of course so does giving up a Mac with all the software I have bought over the years.
Honest I just don’t know! No solution seems cheap, or to really fulfill my needs like a new MacPro with expansion like the current MacPro would have been.
If I had unlimited funds I would probably just move to PC and get a Wacom Tablet to replace my iPad. And replace all my software, and maybe a Retina MacPro laptop, or maybe a Razer gaming laptop. I just don’t know!

My big job has ended, and a surgery and diet update

Arrggggghhh, just wrote this long blog post and it crashed while saving, so I will try and write it again.

Just finished my big and long job, and have a few days off before the next one starts. And I realized 12 hours a day 6 days a week is just too much for me. I was getting too tired and too irritable working those long hours, so about half way through the job had to cut back to 11 hour days and 5 days a week, which helped, but I was still pretty exhausted overall. Quite a stressful job too. Glad to be done. And I was starting at 5:30 AM, and eating lunch at my desk so I could leave at 5:30 PM, and I kept that up after cutting down hours so I could leave at 4:30 PM and get home a little after 6. Just a long day, especially with getting up around 3:30 AM after going to bed around 10:30 PM.

And the worst part is that with the long hours and stress I stopped losing weight, and even went back up to around 245. And it didn’t help that I sprained my left foot half way through the job and stopped doing my 2.1 mile walk, just doing the subway (still a long walk and about 15 flights of stairs). Now I have since managed to get back down to 242, but was down to 238, so I really need to get losing again. And I am still doing the 8 hour diet, even if I did break it some days (the bagel friday was hard to turn down some weeks).

Have actually been seeing more on intermittent fasting, and there is now a 5:2 diet, where you eat normally for 5 days and then eat only 500-1000 calories on 2 days a week and will lose weight. I am actually thinking about combining the 2 diets and seeing what happens. Of course I also eat as many salads as I can for meals, many days eating salad for lunch and dinner.

Actually the most impressive thing has been not getting sick. Before surgery I got sick a lot. I caught everything I came in contact with. And this is actually going back years, and even asked my cardiologist about it, but he didn’t think it was connected, but this last job I think has proved that it was. I mean this was the most stressful job I have done in a long time with the longest hours, and I was in close contact with sick people and I DID NOT GET SICK! Before even without running into sick people I can bet I would have been sick, and i did not. I wonder if anyone else post Septal Myectomy has noticed the same thing? This is a huge change, and I love it!

As for energy, I do have so much more energy than I used to. Kelly and I went on a long hike a couple of weekends back and it was not a problem other than my excessive sweating, and the fact that my hiking boots caused a huge blister. Still I could do it, and that is huge. Now I just need to lose 50 more pounds and get in as good shape as I can for my age, but no matter where I am going I am in better shape than I have ever been, just need to get my body to catch up now that I have a heart that works right.

My scar is about the same.

Scar13-08-21

As you can see it is still pretty red and has not turned white as it should before it can see sunlight (no swimming for me). I think it has been kept pretty irritated by my carrying 3 big bags to work every day, with 3 straps rubbing on it. So I still try and use my pillow in the car when I can (when it is not too damn hot, which is pretty often in Los Angeles summer).

So back to work next week, but closer to home and direct response so should not be quite so much stress as the last job! Looking forward to it.