No Film School on How the Philosophy of Blackmagic Design Changed Cinema Cameras Forever

Jourdan Aldredge on No Film School has a great article on how Blackmagic’s cinema cameras have changed Cinema Camera’s forever.

And it is so true. They have made incredible inexpensive cameras that can compete with high end super expensive cameras.

Issues I am having with 6K BRAW in After Effects on my aging iMac Pro

So I am in the middle of making 2 short films shot on my BlackMagicDesign 6k Pro, and I am shooting in 6k 23.976 Blackmagic Raw Constant 8:1, and both have serious visual effects. And I have been having issues with running out of memory in After Effects.

Now my machine is getting old, it is a an iMac Pro with the upgraded Radeon Pro Vega 64X with 16 GB of RAM, but I only have 64 GB of DDR4 RAM, which I am thinking is the main issue. And I am running of a RAID 5 with 36 GB of mechanical drive space, which has at least half empty. And I have even moved the After Effects Disk Cache to a fast external SSD with a 250 GB cache.

For BRAW support I am using the amazing BRAW Studio from Autokroma. This plug in really is great in Premiere Pro because it allows selection of multiple BRAW clips to allow editing if they are all shot the same, and also to save out a sidecar file easily so any program can see what you have done. It works in Premiere Pro and After Effects and replaces Blackmagic’s BRAW plugin which has more limited functionality.

Still using this I do seem to be having RAM issues with RAM previews where my RAM is running out very quickly and won’t render out a whole shot. I find myself having to restart after effects to get a longer RAM preview, and many times even a computer restart.

Now I am also doing a lot of green screen and using Maxon formerly Red Giant’s Primatte Keyer 6 to key, so that might be also a RAM hog here. I have never had an issue with 4k Alexa ProRES footage in green screen though.

I tend to think it might be the BRAW , as on some shots I used BRAW Studio to do the initial grade and save out a sidecar, and then render them in Media Composer in ProRES HQ. With this footage I get much longer renders. Now I know it is less compressed, as the files are larger, and with the LUT added, there is less to decode, but this is very drive intensive.

And sure the 6K is bigger than 4K, and eating more RAM.

And the new M1 chips with ProRES processor wouldn’t help here, because it is BRAW, and 128 GB of shared memory and video memory doesn’t seem like a whole bunch more.

I am hoping the whole lesson isn’t that BRAW 6K is just too processor intensive.

Adobe has released Adobe Premiere Pro Best Practices Workflow Guide for Long Form and Episodic, and it is a must read

Adobe has followed in the footsteps of Blackmagic and done a really great in depth manual, but this one specifically for Long Form and Episodic Workflows in Premiere Pro.

You can Download the PDF here, and it really is a must read for pros.

It goes in Depth on Hardware and settings, workflows with Dailies, Proxy workflows, working with Productions, Mutli-Camera editing, dynamic link with after effects, turnovers, remote & cloud workflows, panels and integrations, and resources & tutorials.

And right on the first stage of text it tells you why not to use Merged clips (though it doesn’t tell about the exporting XML workaround to fix it, and honestly would rather have Adobe remove the feature if they are going to say this, though really I would rather have them FIX IT).

This guide is a must read for all editors working in Premiere Pro. I love that Adobe has done this.

OWC’s Rocket Yard on Online Vs. Offline Editing: Why You Still Need To Consider Proxy Videos

Conner Stirling at Rocket Yard on Online Vs. Offline Editing: Why You Still need to Consider Proxy Videos.

Most things I work on professionally are 4K for a 1080 delivery, so you really don’t need Proxy with a fast enough RAID and mechanical hard drives, but my experience with 6K DaVinci Resolve RAW footage I have realized that a proxy workflow may be back in my future.

The problem is that for VFX work I need to work with RAW and my iMac Pro with only 64 GB of RAM is really starting to show it’s age.

Some Hyperlapse footage I shot on my OSMO Pocket 2 at San Diego Comic Con 2022, SDCC

My wife and I were at Comic Con for a screening of her film GROUNDED which played at the San Diego International Children’s Film Festival 2022, after having screened at the Los Angeles International Children’s Film Festival 2022, Love Your Shorts 2022, and Kids First! Film Festival 2021. It was an awesome experience.

Scott Simmons at PVC on Avid Media Composer 2022.7 adding keyboard layouts for Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve

Scott Simmons posted this article Avid Media Composer updated to 2022.7, now with competing keyboard layouts.

I can honestly say I never though I would see the day when AVID was really trying to get people from Premiere and DaVinci.

Personally I always learn the default keyboard setup of a program, but this is great for a quick jump for people.

Oliver Peters at digitalfilms on six Premiere Pro Game Changers

Oliver Peters at digitalfilms on Six Premiere Pro Game Changers. And these are on fairly recent adds.

The Auto Transcribe is really a huge game changer, though I don’t use for Captioning though, I use it for Testimonials, and it is amazing and could really use a new interface for that use. It is amazing, and makes cutting testimonials so much faster and better.

iPad OS 15.6 fixed an issue with Mail I have been having, if only it fixed safari as well

I have been having an issue with Mail on my iPad Pro of late. For some reason the mail app was having issues loading. I would open it and it would be empty and blank, and take up to a minute to load if it loaded without crashing. This also meant I was unable to send e-mail from other apps unless, I first got Mail itself to load. And this only started recently.

I had tried turning off all my mail except my Apple mail account, and even tried resetting network settings, but mail was not working correctly for the last couple of weeks, and it was driving me nuts. I was about to backup and wipe the ipad, but was waiting for the update to see if it fixed it.

Yesterday apple released iPad OS 15.6 and after updating the Mail issue has been solved, if only that was the only issue that recently cropped up on my iPad.

At the same time as the mail issue, Safari has started losing logins for web sites. Sites that for years have stayed logged in, must be logged in every time that I got to the site. So every time I use bing or google I need to log in again. Super frustrating, and unfortunately not fixed by 15.6.