So NVIDIA's new flagship GeForce GTX Titan Z has been released, and as I have said before it is a beast! A dual Titan Card with 5760 CUDA cores! Damn I want to see how this would run on Premiere Pro. Probably only be able to use One Core for now, but if you could use the other to run your monitors, that would rock! Still $3000, youch!Makes me want to build a PC for my next editing machine. Still can't believe the new MacPro's make me want a PC!
Video Copilot has released another new plug in, and free. Color Vibrance does one thing, but it does it well and easily. Download it from there site.I love how they will do a tutorial and realize they could create a tool to make it easier, then release it free. Awesome company!
Wow, it is the second anniversary of my open heart surgery! Can't believe it has been that long!Doing great! Well everything except weight wise.Walking every day at least 2.1 miles. And trying to get 10,000 steps a day. Also being doing some Kettlebells, but need to do more, though my chest gets sore if I use too much weight.As for weight, I am still way too heavy. Was doing 8 hour diet, but have been doing warriors diet for some time. And while working it is easy. I don't eat till about 6:30 PM. And eat till about 8:30. The thing is on the weekend I often eat lunch with my wife, and don't eat salad like I do all week, and end up gaining weight, which it takes me all week to lose again. This has kept me between 230 and 235 pounds, though I have gotten down to 225, but weekend food doesn't help. Need to get down to at least 200!
After learning DaVinci Resolve, and being incredibly impressed with it, I decided to learn Adobe SpeedGrade for it's integration with Adobe Premiere Pro (my current choice of edit software), but so far I have been less than impressed.First off with Resolve and a good NVIDIA Cuda card, the program works great with BlackMagic or AJA video cards, is rocket fast and you get a recreation of the timeline from your edit program, and can remove shots as needed, or do basic editing. And you have such a great collection of edit controls and presets.With SpeedGrade you only get a single video track (or 3 if you have dissolves or transitions as it puts the a & B on different tracks and the transition in between). So you need to prep your sequence, and the send from Premiere is even weirder. Instead of using the original media files, it converts everything into uncompressed DPX image sequences, which will take up a huge amount of space (uncompressed files after all) and it bakes in any effects you applied into the clips. So it basically ignores the awesome Mercury playback Engine from premiere, and it's only real bonus is that your color correction returns to premiere as a filter applied to the clips.You can work with original premiere pro clips, but not with the send from premiere command, instead you need to export and EDL from Premiere and import the clips into SpeedGrade that way.And there there is the fact that it doesn't export video a monitor using Black Magic video cards, only AJA! This sucks. It should work with everything Premiere Pro does!And as for the color correction, the lack of curves is inexcusable! Curves are such a powerful color corrector and Adobe needs to fix this right away.I know Adobe purchased this program to compete with Apple Color (now defunct) and DaVinci Resolve and round out their suite, but I would rather see them base the whole program on the amazing Mercury Playback engine from Premiere Pro, instead of having this current attempt at integrating the two programs, which seems more like a cludge than reel integration. Yes, having the color correction return as plug in corrections is very very cool, but so far that is really the only thing cool i am seeing about SpeedGrade.I have not fully explored or gotten proficient with the program, and I will report back once I have, but so far my initial impressions don't make me consider moving away from Resolve for my color correction needs.
Scott Simmons at the Pro Video Coalition has a good article on the recent day long outage of Adobe Creative Cloud.He does spend a little too much time on how many people he knows that weren't affected, because it is the people that were that are really important. And honestly Creative Cloud kicks me out of my login way too often for me to be comfortable, and in fact was even worse for a job I was on.I have been trying to get convince my boss that the Adobe Creative Cloud is the way to go for Direct Response commercials. Which are very graphics heavy and usually shot in multiple formats and even frame rates. Well we have been trying out creative cloud in it's 30 day trial, and if it worked were going to get a month to month account for it on our machines, but unfortunately even time you open one of the demo version you must OK that you are using a trial and that did not work during the outage. And we couldn't upgrade to full version to get that working either. Not a good selling point for creative cloud.My personal versions at home kept working as I was logged in and they continued working, but any down time because of Cloud computer can be catastrophic when media has been bought so an airdate is set.Adobe needs to make some sort of backup system that allows you to keep working for a day or two until Adobe can get their servers back together!This really isn't a good showing for subscription based software. Maybe there needs to be a way to keep it working for the whole period of the current subscription without checking in, and they need to keep Creative Cloud from accidentally logging your user out.
Scott Simmons at the Pro Video Coalition has a great article on the latest version of AVID Media Composer that has just been released.This is made mainly for the subscription model that AVID has moved to, but as a bonus they are letting existing users sign up for $299 a year for the support version which includes updates, and you can sign up for a year to get the latest versions at least through 2014, then it goes up to $1299 a year for the subscription with support.This means for $299 you can get a year of updates for your current version, and hopefully get the next version of the software as well.
Oliver Peters has posted an article with a great comparison of AVID Symphony, Adobe SpeedGrade, Davinci Resolve and Apple Color.Personally I have been spending a lot of time with Davinci Resolve of late. With a proper video card it is really an awesome program, and is certainly my current choice for color correction. It is fast and easy to use and does a very good job.The other interest is SpeedGrade which I am learning, mainly because of it's ability to roundtrip a grade to Premiere Pro and put it on clips as a single filter on each clip. A very cool feature, but the program needs some work before it can really compete with Resolve. First off it needs support for Black Magic cards instead of just AJA cards. If Premiere Pro can do it, Resolve needs to do it. And second it really does need curves. Curves are such a powerful color correction method that many have come to rely on, and not having them seems a huge failing. Other issues I have are it's abilities with multitrack video are limited, and I have just gotten so used to nodal vs layer based correcting, though that is certainly not going to change. SpeedGrade is powerful and does work well with Premiere, but needs to get some updates to be able to really rival Davinci even with it's ability export it's grades as color correction filters into Premiere.
Nebula Construction Kit examples from Peder Norrby on Vimeo.Red Giant has released a Nebula Construction Kit and Tutorial using Trapcode Mir and Form.Very cool! Going to have to play with this one.Check out their tutorial and download the kit from Red Giant.
I have been a gamer since I was a kid, and have had a lot of game systems through the years, but as of the Original XBOX I have really been a Microsoft Gamer. Sure I had a Sony Playstation 3, but I had only 3 games for it, and really only used it as a blu-ray player.I went from the Original XBOX to the XBOX 360, and had 6 Red Ring of Death failures on it, before it finally went out of warranty and died and I moved to a slimline XBOX 360 finally with HDMI out. I loved the system and it's online capabilities or I would have given up with all of it's failures.And I was so excited for the XBOX ONE, and even luckier that my mom ordered me one for my birthday (getting it on release day). It sounded like a great idea, a center for your media in your living room. You can even play television through it, and it would really be the main thing you need, but just hasn't quite worked out that way, even if it is a good game system.First off the ONE has been $499 VS $399 for the PS4. And the excuse was that it was because of the Kinect it came with, which was integrated into the system for motion and voice control. The problem is that there was no killer Kinect game that showed the need for it. It should have come with Kinect Sports Rivals at least, but even that is only a decent game (not better than the previous XBOX 360 Kinect Sports Games). And the system control with the Kinect is not even that good. You have to repeat yourself, and the movement controls are awkward at best.Sure the ONE is a very good gaming system, but the fact that Microsoft went for a cheap video card, means it is much less powerful than the Sony Playstation 4, and really isn't capable of doing 1080P output. More like 720p. And that is really unacceptable in this day where basically everyone has a 1080 HDTV. Really it should have been able to do Rock Solid 1080P 3D out of the box.And the ONE has huge overhead, running literally 3 OS's at once. For the system there is the Gaming Layer, the system layer, and the TV layer (which is not a DVR, but will just let watch TV and control it somewhat with a new guide and vocal commands, but they don't work very well). So you are running 3 OS's at once, and having to run the Kinect as well, further eating performance. Sure it is really cool to be able to instantly jump out of what you are doing and into the main menu and then jump back, but it does eat system power, which would be fine with more power, but since for raw power the system is already behind it's cheaper rival the PS4 (I know not anymore), you are…
RedShark News has a great review of the new Panasonic GH4 4K camera. Great article on the camera, though it is for PAL users instead of NTSC, but that is the only fault.Also talks about an interesting program from Thomas Worth that is a Mac Command line app to convert the 4K 4:2:0 footage to 1080 4:4:4 footage using the extra picture resolution. Which sounds great, though I don't know how it could have more color data.This camera sounds amazing. I wish Canon would take these lessons to heart and make their lower end cameras have amazing features like this camera.