Get your Library unhidden in Lion

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For those of you who are annoyed by the Library folder being hidden in your user folder in lion. Here is the terminal command to make it unhidden. You will have to change to you superuser to do it though.

chflags nohidden /Users//Library


Now if only I can change back the permissions on my Utilities folder so I can read and write…

A Quick Note: It looks like then 10.7.1 update reset this, so I guess you will have to keep making this change if you want to be able to see your library at all times.

Premiere Pro not working on Lion

I am having issues running Premiere Pro on OS X Lion with an NVIDIA Geforce GTX 285. It is crashing on launch, and seems to be a driver issues in Lion.

It seems that there is a new NVIDIA driver in Lion, as it is listed as 270.05.05f01, while the most recent NVIDIA drivers on their web site is 256.02.25f01.

And checking the CUDA Preferences it lists the current CUDA Driver 4.0.19 but says an Update is Required (though it is the latest CUDA for Mac Driver on NVIDIA’s Web site).

Since this is the relevant part of the crash log, it looks like a driver crash to me, but the driver info is the 270.05.00 NVIDIA Driver.
 

0   libcuda_270.05.00.dylib           0x000000011769286f cuGraphicsGLRegisterImage + 4359831   libcuda_270.05.00.dylib           0x00000001176c1e25 cuGraphicsGLRegisterImage + 6299572   libcuda_270.05.00.dylib           0x000000011766efa9 cuGraphicsGLRegisterImage + 2903773   libcuda_270.05.00.dylib           0x0000000117669a8b cuGraphicsGLRegisterImage + 2685874   libcuda_270.05.00.dylib           0x0000000117671b0c cuGraphicsGLRegisterImage + 3014845   libcuda_270.05.00.dylib           0x000000011766e2a7 cuGraphicsGLRegisterImage + 2870476   libcuda_270.05.00.dylib           0x00000001176372f2 cuGraphicsGLRegisterImage + 618427   libcuda_270.05.00.dylib           0x0000000117637caf cuGraphicsGLRegisterImage + 643358   libcuda_270.05.00.dylib           0x00000001176d83c8 cudbgGetAPIVersion + 869529   libcuda_270.05.00.dylib           0x000000011762715c cuGLCtxCreate_v2 + 10810  com.adobe.GPUFoundation.framework    0x000000010cf3fe4c GF::Device::InitializeContextAndLoadKernels() + 194811  com.adobe.dvacore.framework       0x0000000100190b3e dvacore::threads::ExecuteTopLevelFunction(dvacore::threads::Allocated FunctionT > const&) + 4612  com.adobe.dvacore.framework       0x0000000100190438 dvacore::threads::(anonymous namespace)::WrapGCDAsyncCall(void*) + 2413  libdispatch.dylib                 0x00007fff8f9887e9 _dispatch_worker_thread2 + 25514  libsystem_c.dylib                 0x00007fff8b2913da _pthread_wqthread + 31615  libsystem_c.dylib                 0x00007fff8b292b85 start_wqthread + 13This looks like it is a driver issue with the new Lion Drivers for the Geforce GTX 285.


The only way I was able to get Premiere to launch was getting rid of the 5.5 folder from the Application Support:Adobe:Premiere Pro: folder. The program launched, but would not show any video in the sequence or from any clips, and once I quit the program, when I tried to relaunch I got the same crash again.

Here is my Thread at Adobe forums on the matter. I also called Adobe Tech supper and got a case number. They had me install the older driver from NVIDIA’s web site, but that froze my Mac at the spinning wheel (the wheel just kept going and going) so I had to do a restore using Command-R. It works, but is slow as it has to re-download the Lion install.

Editing Software on Lion

So I am checking Editing Software Compatibility of Mac OS X Lion.

As Apple Said Final Cut Pro 7.0.3 does open fine in Lion, though it does ask me to register, though the button to register is grayed out.

The Demo of AVID Media Composer 5.5.2 boots and runs just fine.

Adobe Premiere Pro 5.5 I am having issues with. and it won’t start. Adobe claims it should run fine, so I am going to try and re-install and see what happens. It is weird as After Effects and Photoshop work fine, but just Premiere won’t boot.

What I don’t like about OS X Lion So far

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Well it just came out today, so I have obviously not dealt enough with Lion to really know, but i have a few annoyances already.
I hate the new scroll bars and how they disappear, and even though you can make them always show up, I hate the removal of the arrows at the ends. I was always a fan of double arrows at both ends, but to not have them at all is stupid.
I don’t like the new Address book, as it is harder to add an entry and then add it to a group as it is on 2 different pages and takes extra steps to do so.
The death of Power PC apps completely is annoying, though only affects one app I have, which was an app that published my now playing song in iTunes to my FTP server. I will have to find a reasonable alternative.
The death of the spaces control panel. I for one use spaces all the time, and I love it. I have different screens for Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, After Effects and Photoshop, and could easily use the spaces control panel to pick which app showed up where, and have some apps show up everywhere, like Safari and iTunes. Now this has been taken away. At least it still remembers my old settings (though I had to turn off the auto rearranging of spaces which just confused things). I get mission control, but I would love to be able to name my spaces, and once again have real control over what apps show up where. Hopefully someone will release a 3rd party app to return this functionality. I mean I am glad it remembered my old Spaces settings, but not being able to easily change them is a real pain.
Not sure I like the new Mail. I was fine with how it was, and think it actually shows less info now than it did before, but at least the classic view is still available, so i can switch back if it really annoys me.
Launchpad is useless to me, and I have way too many apps for it, but might be nice for a novice user.
I am sure I will have more as I use it.
For a thorough review check out Ars-Technica’s Extensive Review, which you can also get in ebook or pdf format, though you will have to pay for it to get it in those formats.

EDIT:
I have some additions. I don’t like that in Finder windows the custom icons for hard drives no longer show up. I use custom hard drive icons for a reason for easy visual identification of drives, and not having this just slows things down.
I hate that the user library is now a hidden file, as I want to be able to go there if I need to easily. And the Utilities folder now requires administrator privileges to make changes, and strangely it won’t let me add myself in the info panel. Hopefully this is just a bug, because I trust myself with my own Utilities folder!
Another thing I hate. The ability to turn off the backwards scrolling requires either a Trackpad or a magic mouse! Well what if you only have a 3rd party mouse? That needs to be settable no matter what!
I find the Address book to be a major step backward, as it takes extra steps to do what it could do before. To add a new entry you must be within a group, but to add an entry to different groups, you have to click to see groups. I would rather have a 3 way window pane than a 2 way pane as it is now.

ADDITIONAL:

I don’t know if it is because I use a third party mouse driver (SteerMouse from Japan which I have used to enable a third mouse button on my EOL Microsoft Trackball Explorer, the best trackball ever made, which I used when using Shake and Color, both of which I probably won’t be using anymore) or if it is a feature of Lion, but moving the mouse no longer wakes my computer up. I have to hit the keyboard, which is just annoying! Is this a feature?

The Edit Blog at PVC has 100 Questions answered about FCPX

The Article has some good answers and also says some interesting things that I believe to be true.

In its current state I would not use FCPX in a professional, client heavy environment. At this time I don’t consider it an FCP7 replacement as it lacks so many features that I’ve come to rely on. It’s a brand new piece of software so it will take years to mature into the full featured application that FCP7 is … that is if Apple chooses to add back a lot of the features missing from FCP7. At this point in time I don’t know when / if it could replace FCP7 (or Avid Media Composer or Adobe Premiere Pro).


and

23) Do you think Apple is moving away from the Pro Video market towards the wider prosumer market with FCPX.


Most definitely.


and

51) Does your knowledge of FC7 help or get in the way of learning FC10?


That’s a great question. I’d almost say it gets in the way as FCP7 uses long established editing paradigms that work very well. In some aspects FCPX is trying to reinvent the wheel. Where there are some great things in FCPX there’s other instances where, IMHO, the wheel doesn’t really need to be reinvented because it works so well.


and

63) how does the magnetic timeline handle a music video where the main audio should be locked permanently?


My music video testing has found that I would create a synchronized clip with the master audio to place in the primary storyline and then connect all my angles to it via Connect to Primary Storyline. In theory that should keep them all in sync. Truth be told the inability to really lock a clip in place and lack of multiclips / group clips would make me look elsewhere for music video editing.


and

77) Worthwhile building new edit suite around FCPX or still shrink-wrapped FCPStudio 7… etc?


Personally I would never build an edit suite around a single NLE so I certainly don’t feel the current release of FCPX is enough to build an entire edit suite around. As one tool in that suite yes but the only tool? Not in its current form and probably not for a long while. Plus, if Apple is going to rely on 3rd parties to supply many of the pro-workflow tools that we need for FCPX then the final cost is going to end up well above $299 to run FCPX in a professional / broadcast environment.


and

83) What’s your favorite new feature, and new disappointment?


Favorite new features are the many different background processes from rendering to transcoding to media management. Auditions is another strong new feature. Disappointment is the Magnetic Timeline and single Viewer that changes between source clips and the timeline.


The rest has some interesting points, and tells how to do may good things, but these are things that really stand out to me about what is wrong with the software.

Dylan Reeve says Apple has Abanonded Pros

And I have to agree. He has an excellent blog post on the subject, which talks about defining Pros, as people working working in Broadcast Television and Film and not just people making money editing.

This is how he ends the article:

Businesses in the film and TV industry, that have to deliver a product to a strict standard within a strict deadline, can’t pin their hopes on a future upgrades or the next version while relying on an increasingly ageing product that has been EOL’ed. They need certainty and at the moment the only certainty that exists with FCP is that the current version has no future hopes and the current version isn’t suitable for their work. They have no choice but to look elsewhere.


It simply makes no financial sense for Apple – selling a $300 product that appeals, as is, to millions of people – to pursue a small market with very specific and complicated demands.


In the end Final Cut Pro X will be a success, it is a powerful and innovative application. But it will no longer be a big part of the film and TV post-production industry.


FCP X will work for a lot of the smaller people, and will eventually, with a slew of plugs in (driving it’s price right back up to what it used to be) will do even more, but it will never be the the pro app that it once was. Apple has nixed that market, and it is just too bad they don’t have the decency to rename FCP X into iMovie Pro to show that they really are going a completely new direction and instantly saying to all pros that they need to find another home, instead of doing it in such a backhanded way.

Dylan Reeve and the FCP X Disconnect

Dylan Reeve has an excellent post on the FCP X Disconnect, which is about how FCP was used by professional users and how Apple sees FCP.

He has some excellent graphs that show what he thinks is the potential market for FCP and how Apple just doesn’t see it as an important segment of it’s market, because it is so incredibly small, and I completely agree.

Apple is going lowest common denominator, and it can even be seen in Lion. Making everything more iOS like, instead of making iOS more mac like, because iOS is great for portable devices, but too simple, but they want to make the mac more like iOS and that personally scares me.

Avid Event gives some tantalizing clues

There is a great article over at EditBlog on some tweets from this weeks AVID Media Composer Committed to Professionals event held at Warner Bros.

There is some pretty amazing stuff here. LiveToEdit tweets:

3D, 7.1, new U.I., Kona, Decklink, Matrox, Bluefish support coming soon


and

3rd party I/O: no announcements,  other than ‘we’re working with them for the future’


and

80% of pro systems are Avid, 50% of #Avid employees used to be in production


And even cooler

future is 64bit, new interface, WILL NOT lose known features, keyboard short cuts, etc.


And @comebackshane has this interesting tidbit.

Third party hardware support (Matrox, AJA, BMD, MOTU)…Plugin support from more vendors (Red Giant)…external control surfaces… #avid


93e721f7eb9c4c338ea7c4cb7c737bec_7

And thanks to Pietari Creative for this awesome pic of the possible AVID Media Composer 64 Bit Interface.

•••••••••••

Pretty amazing news, though no timeline given. Still I love the look of the new interface, especially if is fully 64 bit, and does not lose all the features of previous AVID (see it can be done Apple).

And Black Magic and AJA support is huge, as is Red Giant Support, does that mean we may be getting Collorista 2 for AVID soon? Awesome.

It can’t come soon enough!

Mathew Levie comments on the Magnetic Timeline

Matthew Levie in his fifth and final article on using FCP X to cut has some things to say on the Magnetic Timeline that mirror my thoughts, and are the main reason I am in the process of moving to Premiere to edit.

Which brings me back to where I was on day two: the “magnetic timeline” is cute, but it keeps me from making the sequence I want and therefore it really has to go.


It reminds me a little bit of when Apple was introducing FCP 1.0 and Steve Jobs showed us how we could take a clip from the Viewer and drop it on this beautiful transparent overlay in the Canvas to choose insert/overwrite/replace/etc. and the crowd went, “oooooooh.” But who edits that way?


Maybe you’ll say I didn’t give it enough of a chance. That might be fair. I just played around with it for a few days. But the truth is that we have an editing paradigm that works for us in FCP 7. It’s not enough to show us that if we completely rethink our workflow then we can do the same things in FCP X as we can in FCP 7 with a couple of extra steps. What can we do that’s more efficient, faster, better? Yes, the infrastructure is improved; yes, the 64-bit implementation and background rendering mean things will be much faster… if we can still figure out a way to tell the stories we want to tell.


In conclusion, I think if Apple’s FCP X team really is serious about wanting professionals to use this program — and maybe they’re not, and that’s okay — we will need to see it go back to a track-based editing metaphor, at least as an option. If that happens, I can’t see why I wouldn’t use it eventually. I don’t really care about the feature set: they can always add multicam and OMF export and whatever else, and I’m sure they will. But if they add those features while retaining the current editing paradigm, it will still be very difficult to use professionally.


My biggest complaint about FXP X is that I think the basic editing paradigm is broken and much too simplistic for a professional editing program. The magnetic timeline is what the program is built around and for me it makes things harder and not easier, as Matthew points out, it actually makes many things take more steps than they did in Final Cut Pro 7.

Sure there are some cool new features, but we would have been better off having those added to a 64 bit upgrade to Final Cut Pro 7 and not this monstrosity that is Final Cut Pro X.

Apple has obviously given up on the professional editing market and done it in the most insulting way possible, and I don’t think they realized the bad press and loss of sales they will get for not taking their professional market seriously.