Groovy Post on 7 Firefox Extensions for Managing Your Bookmarks

Sandy Writtenhouse at Groovy Poste has a great post on 7 great extensions for managing your bookmarks in Firefox.

And yes of course I still use Firefox, and you should do. It is independent of Google and it’s Chrome browser that you know monitors everything you do for Google, and it’s Blink engine is just used everywhere. Their is also Apple’s Safari which uses WebKit and I am forced to use that my iPhone and iPad, but on my desktop I prefer the customization of Firefox and Mozilla’s Gecko engine.

And Mozilla needs the support, it’s market share keeps going down in favor of Chrome, and we need the competition. If there is no competition why would google put the money it does into Chrome, so go check out Mozilla’s Firefox, it is a great browser!

I will sometime do a post about my favorite extensions, like Tree Style Tab which I find so much more convenient than top loading tabs.

PVC on Frame.io’s new partnerships, apps and updates

The Pro Video Coalition has report on the new announcements from Frame.io announced last month at NAB.

I am glad to have a creative cloud Frame.io account, and have been using Frame allot at work. I still think the direct from camera is more for features or tv than the commercials I work on, but it is very cool.

IFrame.io’s work from home features with built in proxy generation needs better Adobe integration. It doesn’t currently work with Adobe’s proxy feature, so files must be manually relinked (and Adobe’s proxy workflow won’t work with only proxys), and if you use low rez proxies for size moves and the like don’t scale, everything would need to be redone manually. Let’s hope Adobe works on this with Frame . And I hate H264, and h264 proxies. ProRes Proxys are so much better (i know they take up more space, but they are do much better), timelines play back great with any ProRes and even with M1 ProRes processors.

Video Copilot adds M1 support to all of it’s plug ins!

Video Copilot has added M1 support to all of it’s paid and free plug ins, and they are of course free updates.

Also nice to have download links to all the free plug ins in one place.

I love all these plug ins and use them all extensively, so this is great news.

In fact I am really using the free ORB for a short I am working on right now.

Apple has responded to “Final Cut Pro in TV and Film” Open Letter

This one is from FCP.Co and Peter Wiggins, and Apple has responded to the open letter from industry professionals about FCP.

And here is the Petition to Apple from a few weeks ago.

Nice that they are launching Certifications, though I find them mostly meaningless, but nice that there will be an official way to get certified I guess.

The big things are really an official way to make this program have collaborative editing features and be able to share media. A public beta like Adobe is doing would be nice as well.

I am fully versed in Final Cut Pro, but I am still not as sold on it as others, for some of their reasons, but a big list of of others I have previously posted about. I know some of these have been fixed, but a great many have not.

Adobe After Effects May 2022 (version 22.4) new feature

Adobe has released the May 2022 (Version 22.4) .

The one new feature is a separated Dimensions Preference, so you can use this checkbox and separate x & y positions in the timeline by default.

The April 2022 release (version 22.3) had many more features, including Frame.io integration, native silicon support, extended viewer, scene edit detection, binning indicators for 3D layers, coach marks, and constrained shapes.

Premiere Pro (May 2022 Release) New Features

Adobe has updated Premiere Pro to the May 2022 Release, and here is a quick overview of the new features.

Export GIFs with transparency.

Distribute objects in titles and graphics so they are equally distant from each other.

10x faster exports for 10-bit 4:2:0 HEVC on Mac OS for Intel and M1 systems.

Select HEVC from the Format drop-down under Export Settings to enable this option. Then under the Video tab, go to Encoding Settings. If the system supports hardware encoding, the Performance field is set to Hardware Encoding. Set the profile level to Main 10. Setting it to Software Encoding will disable hardware encoding, and Adobe Premiere Pro won’t use hardware to encode the media.

On Apple M1 systems, HEVC HLG 4:2:0 10-bit encoding still encodes via software.

10x faster exports for 10-bit 4:2:0 HEVC on AMD

To enable this option, select HEVC from the Format drop-down under Export Settings. Then under the Video tab, go to Encoding Settings. If the GPU card supports HW encoding, the Performance field will be set to Hardware Encoding. Set the profile level to Main 10. Setting it to Software Encoding will disable hardware encoding and Adobe Premiere Pro won’t use AMD hardware to encode the media. 

Improved Quicktime screen recording playback

Smart rendering improvments

HDR Proxies

Nice, the HEVC speed icnreases sound amazing, though it is still a format that I don’t use much except for capture on my iPhone.