Some more adverse effects of California law AB5, not only can I not right off employee expenses, but I have lost the ability to use Individual 401K or SEP IRA plans!

Since the damned California AB5 has taken effect, which basically banned 1099 employment forcing you to work as an employee at companies, I have already lost the ability to write off employee expenses, which I previously was able to do with a schedule C (I know it is the worst for getting audited, but it let me write off expenses at least), but what I hadn’t realize is how much it screws up retirement plans.

Yes I knew about ROTH and regular IRA contributions, which max out at $6000, but as a 1099 employee in addition you can do either a Individual 401(k) with contributions up to $19500, or $26000 if over 50 or a SEP IRA which lets you d0 25% of eligible compensation or 20% of Net earnings or $58,000! And that is in addition to the IRA.

The only other solution is do an S Corp if the companies will even hire me that way and incur the $800 fee, but all the additional tax filing fees and accountant fees to have a corporation that has to pay me, and my accountant says it isn’t worth it unless I am making over 100,000 a year.

And with COVID-19 I now literally work full time on my home machine and equipment, and have to keep all software and hardware up to do, but not being able to file a schedule C means that I can’t write any of that off, and I can’t do additional retirement plans being a traditional IRA or ROTH IRA? Seriously?

Does AB5 actually help anyone?

Why is Cinematic Mode on the iPhone 13 and 13 Pro only 30 FPS and not 23.976?

So with the iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro, Apple added a cinemtatic mode to video that is basically Portrait Mode for video, which does a post processed Depth of field using the different lenses to create a depth map. It is not going to be perfect, but certainly will look more cinematic than the deep depth of field you normally get with an iPhone lens, and you can re-focus after the fact in Final Cut Pro, iMovie and in the Photos app. It even has HDR color depth, but then why is it only at 30 Frames Per second?

I just don’t get what Apple was thinking here, especially since it should be easier to process 23.976 than 30 frames a second. And films in movie theaters are in 23.976, and our eyes are used to that amount of motion blur to be cinematic, and not 30 frames, which is much more TV looking, as everything is sharper.

I think eventually will add 23.976 to cinematic mode, but likely not till IOS 16 or the next iPhone with better Cinematic mode.

Honestly I have an iPhone 11 Pro and Cinematic Mode would possibly tip me to getting a new iPhone, but it is the 30 FPS thing that really screws it up for me.

Now I do have a weird relationship with 23.976 vs 29.97, as when I am cutting commercials I would prefer 29.97 because Motion graphics looks less stuttery at 29.97, but we are talking “CINEMATIC” here and for “CINEMATIC” that is 23.976!

I think Apple made a mistep here, and hope they will fix it sooner rather than later.

Of course I also think that they should have figured out a way to use the LIDAR on the Pro model which is used for low light photos to make a better depth map. I know it would split cinematic mode for the 12 and the 13 pro models, but a better depth map would be welcome.

ProVideoCoalition on using OpenEXR format in After Effects

Chris Zwar has an article at ProVideoCoalition on using OpenEXR format for rendering in After Effects.

OpenEXR support has recently been updated to include compression, and it is a stll format in case of crashes, you save your renders (though have to also render out audio if necessary). EXR is a format developed by VFX Proffesionals for the purpose.

Sony has announced the forthcoming Alpha 7 IV for $2500 arriving in December

Sony has announced it’s new Alpha 7 IV camera with 33 Megapixel Full Frame Image Sensor and 4K Video at 60 FPS in 10 Bit 4:2:2 vs 4K 30 in 8 bit for the mark III.

The 4K at up to 30 FPS uses the entire 7K Width of the Sensor, which 4K 60 FPS uses a 1.5x crop, which uses 4.6K and can use SD UHS II cards except one setting which needs a CFExpress Type A card. And it can record for more than hour without overheating!

The one big video issue is that unlike the III you can’t do 16 Bit RAW Video to an external recorder, in fact their is now RAW video, which is very unfortunate.

Still I would love this camera, but the video capabilities of the BlackMagic 6K Pro are superior, but it doesn’t have the still capabilities of this camera. My current still camera is non full frame DSLR the Canon 60 D, so I have lenses that would work for the Blackmagic, but this would be an amazing replacement.

ProVideoCoalition Adobe Insights on Performance Improvements for workflows and adobe sensei in Premiere Pro

ProVideoCoalition has an aticle on streamlined workflows with Productions in Premiere Pro as well Speech to Text using Adobe Sensei as well as the upgraded Roto Brush 2.

I can honestly say I don’t ever want to work without Speech to Text, it is amazing, and game-changing, it really is.

And Roto Brush 2 I can’t say that I think it is a better roto necessarily, but it is so much damn faster that it is mindblowing.

Knights of the Editing Table has a new tool called Grave Robber to Un-nest nested or Multicam Sequences in Premiere Pro

Knights of the Editing Table has created a new tool called Grave Robber for $15 (currently on sale for $12). It un-nest nested sequences or multi-cam sequences (not just flatten).

This company is amazing, Excalibur has become my favorite tool for Premiere Pro in how it speeds things up. And they just keep coming out with new tools.

Chris Zwar at ProVideoCoalition on After Effects Binning, and layer rendering order

Chris Zwar at ProVideoCoalition has an article on Bining and After Effects Rending order in the public beta of After Effects. The embedded video is about 45 minutes long, but well worth checking out. And you should also check out his 18 part series on After Effects and Performance which I have talked about before.

The video goes into 2D layers and precomps (rendering from the bottom up), and then 3D layers which is where Binning comes in, which connects all 3d layers that are next to each other in the timeline as a single render so you don’t get motion blur issues of individual layers in a created object. The new beta includes labels to show you how 3d layers are binned in the timeline, which will prove very useful to anyone who does a lot of 3d within After Effects.

It is funny, he started on After Effects 3, and I believe I started on version 4, though he is certainly more of a master than I am.

Some more posts with low votes at Adobe User Voice for Adobe Premiere Pro that deserve huge upvotes!

I have posted about this before, but here are some more topics that I can’t believe don’t have more upvotes.

The first is with a problem that has been bugging me lately that Essential Graqhics automatically scale when you change the sequence size, and I want them not to, or to have control if they automatically scale as you can do with Motion Effects. I often have to do a 1920×1080 and a 1080×1080 sequence so I cut it in 1920×1080 then do a 1080 version. Now I want the graphics to stay the same, but they don’t.

Bug: Essential Graphics scale when changing sequence frame size with 5 votes.

Option to not resize graphics when resizing a sequence with 2 votes.

So I have long hated the AMIRA lut added to Alexa Footage. It has been notorious since it was added, and has been known to cause project bloat. It used to show up as a Master Clip effect (now a source clip effect) but this has been changed (though strangely I can’t find it anywhere in the Premiere Pro help files) to be in the new Interpret Footage Color Management section.

Moving the AMIRA LUT to Interpret Footage Color Management takes more steps to remove the AMIRA LUT, How about an option to not apply ever. And yes this is mine.

Option to disable or delete Amira LUT with 8 Votes.

These are just a few more issues that Adobe needs to deal with, let me know if you have any that you think should be dealt with quickly by Adobe.