Adobe releases NAB Sneak Peaks of it’s video apps! UPDATED

AdobeNAB

Check it out over at Adobe where they have a bunch of videos of new features being shown at NAB! Woohoo, wish I was there!

Premiere is really getting controllable paste attributes! WOOHOO!!! I am so excited about Premiere Pro, it finally looks like it really is Final Cut Pro 8, but with so much more. And the Link & Locate was so necessary. And really powerful audio, and the integration with speedgrade and realtime looks very exciting. And it looks so much better working with audio, and I am hoping that it’s control surfaces works with any MIDI controlled surface. I love that Adobe listens to it’s users!!!

After Effects just looks amazing. And the Warp Stabilizer VFX seems unbelievably powerful. And the 3D pipeline looks awesome, though it makes me wish I had Cinema and knew Cinema 4D!

And is it just me or is it cool to see Wes Plate from Automatic Duck running Prelude? And the script integration just seems amazing! Especially with transcripts! That will speed things up so much, and be useful across the industry! Wow! And being able to edit using the script is insane. You can make a paper cut so fast it is a joke!

Speedgrade gets a more of an adobe makeover, and lets you rename grades in layers and add snapshots and save them so you can easily make different grades, and work better on portable machines, and even have 2 playheads in the timeline to easily pick frames you want to grade to and from, or have 3 up as well! Sounds much improved!!!

Adobe Story has really grown up and looks incredibly powerful!

Really need to spend time with Speedgrade as the new color match looks powerful and it’s engine integration in Premiere Pro looks especially impressive. And being able to use Targa files from Photoshop or Lightroom (has to be exported from Photoshop not Lightroom) to drive shot matching looks very very cool.

And the Audition Loudness radar seems very interesting.

PVC on new After Effects Technology Preview

PVC has an awesome preview of their next version of After Effects, that will be available to Creative Cloud users soon.

•They focus on intense Cinema 4D integration, which is going to be huge!

•Already mentioned Roto Brush & Refine Edge

•Warp Stabilizer VFX, which has gotten a major upgrade

•3D Camera tracker has gotten an upgrade

•Layer Snapping is new

•Bicubic Scaling

•Find Missing for Fonts and Effects

•Purge all memory and DIsk Cache

•Pixel Motion Blur

EVGA Announces GeForce GTX 680 Mac Edition!

evga_gtx_680_mac

Macnn has the news on this exciting new video card for macs! And EVGA has it’s page up on this monster. Finally a great Mac video card for a reasonable price. It has 1536 CUDA cores, 2GB of GDDR5 RAM and an HDMI, Display Port, and 2 DVI connections, and Newegg is claiming it comes out APril 8th for $600. Must have solved the power issue, as usually the 680’s require 8 pin power and draw more than a MacPro can handle, which is why I have an EVGA GTX 670 in my mac.

Obviously they have not gotten around the Apple enforced 2 GB limit on Video cards, which is why I had to hack my machine to get my 4GB card running, but hopefully it does mean better video drivers for the 6 series Kepler cards! Woohoo! Should give me a performance boost for sure!

You can download the PDF spec sheet right here and start drooling!

Finally Premiere Pro has an official video card that will really kick ass and not break the bank.

Pebble Watch and iPhone 4 and Battery Life

Yes, I was a backer of the Pebble Smartwatch Kickstarter Campaign and got a black Pebble when it came out. And they can now be ordered for $150, though through Kickstarter I got it for less. It is a pretty impressive watch, with the ability to display notifications from your iPhone or Android, though it is still a little buggy, with me having to reset Notifications on my iPhone a few times a day.

Overall I enjoy it, and like that the SDK is now out so third parties will be able to write there own watch faces and applications.

Still it needs to get better. The RunKeeper application has not been included yet, even in Beta for iOS (though Android users have been able to try a BETA), and my biggest complaint is battery life.

Not only does having it on, and bluetooth in use drain my iPhone 4 very quickly (we are talking down to 20% by the end of the day), but the old school bluetooth in my iPhone 4 really drains the Pebble quickly. In fact while it has gotten better (it used to not last 24 hours), but now with the latest firmware 1.10 I would say it lasts more like 36 hours without a charge. Still not so good. And even worse is what happened last night. I connected my Pebble to it’s charger and left it. It was still connected to my phone, so vibrating, and somehow managed to unconnected the power. So today my watch is on it’s last legs, and not likely to even make it through half the day because it disconnected itself last night! Certainly not so good.

I am sure the battery life would be much better if I connected to my iPad 3, but since I don’t currently have cellular hooked up to it, that would only work when near a wifi connection, so not all that often. I am sure it would be better if I ever got an iPhone 5, or 5s when that comes out, but I find that unlikely right now!

Overall I really like the Pebble. I like being able to see my e-mails and preview them, so I know when I really need to check e-mail, as I am usually editing on other people’s computers, so I don’t have a dedicated e-mail program open and must stop and check to see if I got e-mail. Of course it can also get annoying, as some times my watch is buzzing allot, and it sucks that you can only see your latest message, especially when you get a bunch of messages at once!

I am looking forward to RunKeeper and other 3rd party applications, and better battery life would be great!

PVC on using a Hackintosh

Mark Christiansen at the Pro Video Coalition has a good article on running a Hackintosh instead of a MacPro. Well worth the read, and I especially like the ending.

Let’s be clear: the situation with Apple and the Mac Pro right now is identical to what was going on with Final Cut Studio in the years between its final version and Final Cut X.

In other words, there’s no reason for Apple to be stealthy or mysterious with its plans, unless they are likely to upset a large set of Mac users

Or dislike it, but agree. If Apple really is going to release an amazing new MacPro that will please professionals, why not just talk about the damn thing. Sure they won’t sell any more MacPro’s, but the ancient machines can’t be selling too well as is, and has already been pulled from Europe.

It would be so nice to know if it is time to move to windows (ugh, I do really hate Windows 8) and be able to run inexpensive but powerful NVIDIA cards to propel Adobe programs to insane speeds.

Apple has better make the announcements at the WWDC rumored to be in June or it will be time to really think giving up on Mac all together, no matter how much I don’t want to!

Been trying out FeedAFever or Fever˚ RSS reader

If you read this blog at all you know I am not at all happy with the closing of Google Reader, and have been searching for an alternative that I am happy with. So far a combination of Feedly and Pinboard seems the best solution, but I really want to be able to keep using Reeder on my iPad, and the iPhone version is able to work with FeedAFever, a personal server based solution, so I have decided to give it a try.

Fever is a web based solution that you install on your web server. It is a fairly painless process, though it did require a bit of fiddling with server settings (had to move to a newer version of PHP), and then a $30 purchase to activate it.

After that the import of my exported google RSS feeds was easy, and only took a few hours. And all my feeds and groups came over intact, and it does work fairly well. I do have say the refresh on it is interminably slow though. I am on bluehost and have never had an issue with my sites, but I don’t have a dedicated server, and when I click to refresh, it seems to take forever! And I am talking over an hour with over 1000 feeds, and that is just way to slow, though you can keep using it while it refreshes.

The Fever web interface, and you can see the red refreshing status bar on the left.

The web app is very usable, with easy drag and drop. And you can add 4 different share links (though I have not figured one out to share with facebook, but have gotten e-mail, pinboard and Twitter working fine), though I would like to have those as individual buttons instead of a drop down menu (but the keyboard shortcuts make up for this on a desktop, but not on iOS).

The iOS version works fairly well and has a specific interface, though I don’t like how the only way to refresh is to refresh the browser, which takes forever. And it really isn’t as functional as the full web version, but is much better than the iPad version, which while it has some more features, seems buggy and not great.

On the iOS I would recommend using the excellent Reeder, though it doesn’t help with the slow refresh times.

Of course the big feature of Fever˚ is the Hot list, which takes your RSS feeds, and then you can add other feeds, which you don’t read much to it’s Sparks setting, and it will give you the hottest links in your RSS feeds based on what is trending in the other links. So far it seems to work as advertised, though I tend to like to read all the news on my own, so I am not sure how much I will use this feature, but it is a pretty cool feature. I will add some more feeds to Spark and see what happens, but will have to report more in the future.

It has a blacklist to keep things out of the list as well, though it should be easier to use, like I would like to be able to keep whole groups out of the feature, and you have to enter URL’s individually.

Overall a very impressive program and I will continue to play with it, though the refresh time may be the thing that drives me someplace else.

digg adds a survey on RSS Reader

Digg has added a survey to talk about your current RSS usage and how you would like the new digg rss reader to be.

I of course filled it out immediately, and talked about my use of Reeder (which was one of the survey choices, nice) and wanting integration with more sharing services, like Pinboard, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Link-ed in, Buffer, Pocket, anything you can thing of should be built in.