Jason Snell at Six Colors is right, you’re not backing up enough

Jason Snell at the awesome six colors blog has a great article on the fact that you are not backing up enough.

And it is true, you need to be backing up in every way possible and with local and cloud based copies, just in case something happens.

I use both Time Machine and Backblaze and even with that I can’t backup everything. I don’t have a drobo to be able to backup everything locally (my video is on a RAID 5, so if a drive fails I should be able to recover that, but even my Backblaze took the better part of a year to backup everything I had set to backup.

Losing a drive one or a whole computer will be the lesson to get you to start backing up, but you need to backup as much as you can and as often as you can, preferable constantly!

CanonRumors is on the possibility of a $799 full frame camera

CanonRumors is reporting that they are hearing from a reliable source that Canon is working on a $799 full frame camera body!

And that could mean a sub $1000 with lens, and with a $100 lens adapter you can use your EF and EF-S lenses. Wow, that would be really amazing.

Of course canon has really given up on amazing video in their cameras when they really started it in DSLR, so it likely wouldn’t be a video power house, but would really push full frame EOS-R as the standard. Maybe someday BlackMagic will update the EOS-R, letting you use R and EF and EF-S lenses.

Neat Video has updated it’s awesome Noise Reduction plug-ins to 5.4.6

Neat Video the creator of the best Noise Reduction software out there has updated it’s software to version 5.4.6.

It has expanded AMD support, optimization for Apple’s M1 chips, and support for the latest Adobe releases. You can read about the changes here.

Neat Video is incredibly good and they keep getting better and faster, the only rival is noise reduction in the Studio version of DaVinci Resolve, but I have found they are great companions, and tend to work on software that the other doesn’t do well on. I try out one and then switch to the other if that one isn’t working as well. And I have Neat for Premiere Pro and After Effects as well.

No Film School on kitting out a Blackmagic 6K Pro Camera

No Film School has an article on kitting out a BlackMagic Design 6K Pro camera to get the most out of it. It is by no means a full look, but it has some great options to look at including cages, storage, batteries and battery handles.

Certainly worth a read.

I so want a BlackMagic 6K Pro. My Canon 60D just shoots such crappy video that my Osmo Pocket looks so much better even without things like lenses. And the fact that I have some canon lenses (though of course not the best glass) means I could have some glass to shoot with it.

And the tilting back screen and view finder really sell it for me if only I was making enough money.

Adobe Illustrator has been updated with M1 support and the ability to rotate the canvas

This morning Adobe updated Illustrator to version 25.3 it’s June 2021 release. It has 2 new features.

Rotate View has been added. Now you can easily edit in a rotated view and quickly return to a normal view.

And full Apple M1 support has been added.

I do love that Adobe is steadily adding full M1 support to creative cloud.

Adobe has updated After Effects to Version 18.4

So adobe updated After Effects to version 18.4. The July 2021 update has the following features:

Improved Default Property naming in Essential Graphics Panel.

Support for MKV Files.

Automatic default audio device switching on Windows.

And it looks like Multi-Frame Rendering has remained in the beta for the moment.

Nothing too monumental here, unlike the Premiere Pro update today.

Adobe has updated Premiere Pro to 15.4 with Free Speech to Text and Full M1 support

So I woke up way too early today because the air conditioner is not working too well, and I was too hot to keep sleeping and low and behold Adobe has updated Premiere Pro to Version 15.4!

This update brings the amazing Speech to Text out of Beta and into the normal version and out of the Beta program which I have been running for a bit. This quickly became my favorite feature when cutting testimonials, and I am so happy that i is available to all. It also includes new Transcript Editing Tools and the ability to Generate Captions Automatically.

And adds native support for Apple M1 Computers which was previously only available in the beta.

Other new features of Note:

New Titling and Caption Styling Tools.

You can now upgrade Legacy Titles to Essential Graphics. ARE YOU LISTENING AVID?

Color improvements with Tetahedral LUT interpolation. And the beta now includes a colorized vectorscope for more detail in grading.

The Speed of Saving of Team Projects has improved thanks to a new file structure. And in the Public Beta is progressive project loading to work faster, and improved media relinking.

You can now also label colors and clip names and have the option of limiting changes to the current sequence or applying changes to your source media.

Faster Scene Edit Detection.

On Windows you get automatic Audio Device Switching.

And CUDA and OpenCL have been discontinued completely in favor of Metal on the Mac.

Looking forward to running it through it’s paces, this is huge news.

Monitor what’s filling your mac hard drives with WhatSize or DaisyDisk

As an editor at some point you are going to fill your hard drives, and before they get too full you are going to want to clear up some space and to do that you need to see exactly what is filling them up. To do that I have 2 really good paid utilities that you can use to see exactly what is taking up so much space on your mac. These are WhatSize and DaisyDisk.

Now I have been using and continue to use WhatSize as my primary, mainly because I prefer it’s interface. It is more expensive at $14.99, but it has a 30 day trial and works on Big Sur just fine.

Why do iOS mobile sync’s take up so much damn space?

And it also includes a graph form interface if that is your thing, though I prefer the lists view which I find makes much more sense.

DaisyDisk on the other hand is all built along it’s graph view, which is very pretty, but I do find it much harder to use than the column view of WhatSize.

It is very pretty, but column view just makes more sense to my mind.

As an added bonus it also works on M1 Macs already.

Both programs take a bit of time to scan a disk and then give you the results. As I have said I prefer WhatSize, but that is entirely your decision and you can try them both out before you buy, so…

Either way being able to delve into your files and find out what is taking up so much space on your hard drives in a quick and easy way is tool every editor and graphics artist should have in their tool belt.

9to5Mac commentary on Apple’s Inflexibility on flexible working hours

Ben Lovejoy at 9to5Mac has a great article Comment: Apple’s inflexibility on flexible working seems likely to backfire, is really worth a read. I don’t see this as just applying to Apple but to the entertainment industry as well.

As an editor sure some interaction is great at times, but for the most part I am in a dark room by myself and I am so much more comfortable at home, and even better not having to drive. And I can work on my own computer which is set up exactly like I want. Now certainly there should be some discussion about equipment rentals since we won’t be in the office using their gear or bay (or need to have as many editing bays).

And yes there is something to be said for live screenings, but I really do want to setup a remote workflow so like the one Sofi Marshall talked about and I posted about.  Often times just screening for someone will make me as an editor see stuff that I need to fix, and I think doing a remote session would solve this in most cases.

Sure sometimes editors will need to screen in person, but with Covid-19 and mask mandates returning to Los Angeles on Saturday I don’t want to be in an office even fully vaccinated. And with me having had open heart surgery, I seem to catch everything I come in contact with.