Rich Young posted his December 2021 After Effects Roundup almost a month ago. As usual it has a ton of links and videos and is a must read for After Effects Users. And even a built in Unmult Preset!
Now I don’t think this has anything to do with the hardway, but more not been working on the code for Motion, instead focusing on Final Cut, but it is disturbing since it is pretty much as shared graphics engine between the two. And interestingly it gives more perspective on AVID being so slow on updating for M1, because you obviously need to really update the code to make it faster, and if even Apple is slow to update, then how can you expect 3rd parties to be fast (with the exception of Blackmagic who could not be faster on their updates).
Let’s hope Apple gets on this and updates the Motion codebase, as for me the best features of FCP are what Motion can do.
And this seems like a pretty big duh, of course.
The Apple Silicon MacPro will have to set itself apart with impressive CPU and GPU power as you are not going to be able to add either of these and I am even doubtful of PCI support. And I doubt there will ever be external GPU support through Thunderbolt on M1 Macs either, unless apple ever figures this out for their own hardware, but likely they would just like you to buy a new machine.
I am tending to doubt their will even be additional bays for RAM or Hard drives, though with a likely dual or quad M1 MAX, it will certainly be larger than a Mac Mini and need more cooling, but I doubt it will need to be too much bigger.
I would like to see more Thunderbolt ports though. The 4 Thunderbolt Ports on my iMac Pro are kind of a joke, and the MacPro has more and the video cards also add 4 additional ports, so 8 or more thunderbolt ports would be awesome (and 12 would be better, or at least 8 thunderbolt and 4 USB.
And maybe the ability to have 2 raided hard drives for video, but with the prices Apple charge for SSD hard drives, that would cost a fortune, but it would be great for video editing.
Any which way it will be the raw processing power of the chips and the included ProRES accelerators that really makes this machine rock and roll for video editors.
This is of course not going to work as well as a dedicated streaming box. And though he says the audio from Premiere will also now playback on your machine (not sure how it does that, but he says it works, but I doubt they can hear you talk, so I would recommend LoopBack to the mix so you can combine Premiere and your Microphone to make audio (and run your computer through headphones so their isn’t audio feedback).
Pretty that you can try getting this running for free (or $99 for Loopback), though obviously dedicated hardware will run better.
Yes AVID has finally added Monterey Support 12.1 as well as M1 Support in AVID Media Composer. Of course M1 support is only through emulation, it is not a native app. Amazing how Black Magic Designs and Adobe have been able to release true M1 support so much more quickly. And getting rid of Dongle support on Mac doesn’t seem like a good idea either.
You would think it would be so much easier at this point, but AVID is still so slow to respond. I mean there won’t be Intel Macs at all soon. Come on AVID, get on the ball. I know they are always slow with updates, but come on. And yes I know that AVID has to have systems that work on so many systems to keep going, but if you get a new license you only get recent versions anyway.
Honestly even with all the recent updated whenever I get on AVID I feel like I have stepped into the past and not in a good way. Even getting footage from DaVinci Resolve is not as simple as it is with Premiere. I know backwards compatibility, but AVID users really need to try out Premiere Pro with Productions and a single compression format (like ProRES) and see how well Premiere runs.
Charles Yeager at the Beat blog at PremiumBeat has an article 10 Underrated After Effects Plugins, Scripts, and Presets. I already use Neat Video which is by far the best noise reduction plug in out there. Color Vibrance from Video Copilot is also good and free. And I use Decompose Text which makes working with text in After effects so much easier.
OK, so not always the most thrilling subject, but after arguing with a post super about this, I wanted to give my 2 cents on file and sequence naming conventions, and for some of the reasons behind why I think the way I do.
So first off is spaces, and I am a firm believer that there should be no spaces in your file/sequence names. I know that modern computers mostly deal fine with spaces, but to be on the safe size I think you should use underscores instead of spaces.
Now file names should start with the job identification and name that your company specifies that you should figure out, and as much identifying info as you need.
So lets say you are doing a short Star Wars commercial that is 2 minutes long and is job 040477, and it is titled Millennium Falcon Kessel Run in so I would say it should be SW_040477_120_MFKR_ to start. And a quick note, 120 for 120 seconds, and you would do 060 for a 60 second.
And then as shown in my earlier posts about using PostHaste to set up sequences, I use STRINGOUTS, ROUGHCUT, OFFLINE and ONLINE as the nomenclature for the sequence.
Now I have been told by a post super from television that they only use the job name, info and title and a version number, nothing else, but at least for commercial work, bts works and short films I have worked on, I totally don’t agree.
Personally I think if you can do it, ROUGHCUTS are for internal distribution mostly and the OFFLINE is when it starts going to the client, and should be much more finished, and have a decent audio mix, color correct, graphics, as much as you can get so you don’t end up with the I don’t know how to watch a rough cut lady.
And I think you need ONLINE to designate the final exports, so you can keep track of them, as sometimes you go back to Ofllines and keep working then make new ones, and just version numbers can be confusing. Honestly I have had 3 or 4 Onlines at times, because you can’t guarantee the client won’t come back.
Now this is something else that I think should be in your filenames, especially with remote work, and that is Initials of the editor/graphics artist. And even more so because with the job I am on, we have a graphics guy, who has been doing the graphics, but not only is too busy, but the ProRES 4444 takes a long time to upload and download, so he has been handing off his After Effects Projects, and After Effects projects are big and unwieldy, and hard to break down into individual comps. This means different people are rendering out graphics, and to make changes, it would be easiest to have initials in the file name of the graphics. And our Online editor also prefers initials in the file name, so she can easily see who gave her the file in case there needs to be a change. So I think you should have the initials in the file name of all your files.
Then of course I think you should have the date in your file name, and you need the date to be automatically sort able by any computer. Problems will arise if you you go month day year and work from December to January, so you should do the date year month day. So for February first 2022 you would use 220201 instead of 020122 as the sorting works better between years (and believe me I know as I often work on jobs from December through January.
And of course a version number. Most people do V1, but I think you should have at least 1 proceeding 0 for many version numbers (I have had over 50 rough cuts before). Now at the company I am on the version number is after the job name, and identifying info, so it would be SW_040477_120_MFKR_V01_ROUGCUT_JLW_220201, though personally I always put the version number at the end. So SW_040477_120MFKR_ROUGHCUT_JLW_220201_V01, and the reason I do this is because of After Effects. When you duplicate a sequence in Premiere Pro it adds Copy at the end, but in after effects it duplicates and if there is a number at the end adds a digit to the number, so if it ends with V01 the copy will automatically be V02, now if it doesn’t have a digit at the end it adds a space and a number. This is why I have always had version number at the end, but obviously you should put it wherever your company wants it.
Honestly it is all about organization, and the more organized your file names, and the more info they can convey quickly the better. And it comes down to when the job is done and you go back to it.
If you need to make changes on a graphic that was in an old project, it is obviously going to be easier if you can tell which person did the original right from the filename and which version it is. With remote editing, sometimes only they will have the files, but if multiple people worked on graphics, the most efficient way to find something if to have the names right in the file.
And if you are on an easier job, with only one editor/graphics artist it may not matter as much, but still going back to that project after months and years, it will be easier to find things if the files have as much info as them as possible.
Mike Thorton has an extensive article AAF and OMFs – Post Audio Export Panel On the Good, the Bad and The Ugly. It goes pretty into depth, and I know there have been a lot of issues with AAF’s in the past, but I think most of them have to do with the whole Premiere Pro and linked clips completely breaking AAF export.
