Chris Zwar has posted an overview of his 18 part in depth series on Adobe After Effects and performance. He has been writing these must read articles since 2019 and every pro after effects user should have a look. It goes about as in depth as you can on what After Effects does and why it can be very hard to speed up.
So I came across this compression software on one of my Premiere Pro forums on Facebook, having not hear of it before. Someone was asking for a batch compressor that could set a file size for all your files and this was recommended.
Shutter Encoder bills itself as a converter designed by Video Editors and it does have some pretty impressive functionality in a very simple interface.
It uses the same FFmpeg engine as the awesome Handbrake software, so you know it has impressive results.
It can trim videos without re-encoding, replace audio, rewrap, merge, subtitle, and do so much more. And unlike Handbrake it does all the important pro formats, it even has file renaming and an ftp program for uploads and downloading of web video, and can open multiple instances of the app. And it is donation ware and is for Mac, Windows, Ubunti and Linux and it has a whole slew of presets you can download.
This is an impressive piece of kit that should be added to every editors arsenal, and please consider donating if you use it professionally.
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9to5Mac is reporting the news on the latest versions of Audacity.
I would recommend not using Audacity from it’s current owner. This is an app that should not even be online and is stealing user data, WTF!
Now a Temporary-audacity is a fork of the audacity code which removes Sentry Telemetry and Crash Reporting, but you need to build it from the source code. Hopefully they will build a version that is easy to install for all OSes, but it will not be as easy as the main version, but at least it can exist because of the opensource nature of the source code.
Now Mashable is reporting on the company refuting that it is spyware. Don’t trust them though they want to steal your data, if they didn’t they wouldn’t be saying you have to be older than 13 to use the software.
EDIT:
So according to Engadget Muse is updating’s it’s privacy policy and won’t be selling any of the user information it collects. And it claims it needs to do this to add the automatic software update it is adding.
Honestly yes they need to update that atrocious privacy policy, but I don’t want them collecting anything unless I expressly allow it, and an offline program doesn’t need to know anything about my computer. Sure I could just use little snitch to block it, but i want a program fork on principle now.
Film Editing Pro has an good article on using Multicams vs Merge Clips in Premiere Pro.
Now like Sofi Marshall I do like Merge clips, but just wish Adobe would fix them, getting rid of meta data and not being able to go back to original clips without exporting an xml and re-importing (and the fact that this works shows that Merge clips still has the data somewhere). And I don’t like single angle clips to be multicam, but they are right that as it is now Multi-cam is slightly superior.
Still might just switch back to using Red Giant (or should I say Maxon) Plural eyes and sequences unless Adobe does something about Merge clips.
Now I am running the new Safari within Big Sur in the Safari Technology Preview, and I am on an iMac Pro with a second 27″ monitor, so 2 27″ monitors running at 2560×1440. To me the new safari is only trying to save space, but doing it at the cost of usability.
The tabs in Monterey become illegible and hard to find too quickly and all so the tab bar can take up less space. All well and good for a small screened laptops users, but useless for large displays! And even more useless for power users who have lots of plug ins which also take up space!
And you can’t even activate the old functionality in Safari, only the new tabs are available.
And this is Firefox with Tree Style tabs. They are always legible and you can have so many of them. Once again, maybe not so good for a small laptop, but for a big monitor it is essential. If only firefox would have a true dark mode and allow me to get rid of the light title bar at the top, but at least it means you can read the web site title. Still I wish I could turn the top tabs off and just have tree style tabs.
Of course there is also Vivaldi, which has tree style tabs built in. It is a gorgeous and fast browser, built on chrome, while I would prefer Firefox for it being a different engine and the most customizable browser.
And that isn’t even the worst of it. If you have Safari at default settings, when you switch tabs you get the tabs changing color based on the web site. For some web sites, it isn’t so bad, but for others…
Luckily you can turn this off in advanced tabs.
Just make sure to check Never Use Background Color in Toolbar.
Fstoppers has an article with a video on the awesome X-Rite Color Checker (why doesn’t Premiere support it?) of which I personally use the Passport edition.
I do find that sometimes it doesn’t work (and I have yet to figure out why) but when it does it gives an awesome baseline for every shot. You just have to convince the camera department to shoot it every time the lighting or setup changes.
Still this is an awesome tool and one everyone should shoot with.
Daria Fissuon literally wrote the DaVinci Resolve 17 Training Guide, and she has some great tips and tricks for using DaVinci.
And this one from Craig Beckta at FStoppers which I need to watch again, because she goes into how to setup and export your videos to deal with the Mac Color shift, which is huge!!!!
Blackmagic Design has upgraded it’s BlackMagic RAW plugin to version 2.1 with M1 support and improved Premiere Pro Performance.
Improvements to performance are always welcome and M1 support is as well.
Adobe has added Speech to Text to the Public Beta, you no longer need to sign up to use it. Of course if you you are already signed up you can also use it in the release version.
Speech to Text is so good for doing testimonials I don’t know how i ever lived without it. It is fast and works so incredibly well. And having the script helps with comprehension so my edits just go faster. This is the most impressive feature in years, and it has quickly become essential to my workflow.
I was rendering some graphics in After Effects for use in Premiere Pro and started thinking about Alpha interpretation. I have been doing graphics professionally since I started editing the behind the scenes footage for Lord of the Rings , The Fellowship of the Ring and over the years I worked out that Straight alphas almost always worked out better for me, with better edges. Now I have read that Final Cut Pro prefers a premultiplied alpha, but I have certainly had better luck with with a straight alpha. I wanted to dive into what the differences really are, and a great definition is in Help for After Effects.
Image files with alpha channels store transparency information in one of two ways: straight or premultiplied. Although the alpha channels are the same, the color channels differ.
With straight (or unmatted) channels, transparency information is stored only in the alpha channel, not in any of the visible color channels. With straight channels, the results of transparency aren’t visible until the image is displayed in an application that supports straight channels.
With premultiplied (or matted) channels, transparency information is stored in the alpha channel and also in the visible RGB channels, which are multiplied with a background color. Premultiplied channels are sometimes said to be matted with color. The colors of semitransparent areas, such as feathered edges, are shifted toward the background color in proportion to their degree of transparency.
Some software lets you specify the background color with which the channels are premultiplied; otherwise, the background color is usually black or white.
Straight channels retain more accurate color information than premultiplied channels. Premultiplied channels are compatible with a wider range of programs, such as Apple QuickTime Player. Often, the choice of whether to use images with straight or premultiplied channels has been made before you receive the assets to edit and composite. Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects recognize both straight and premultiplied channels, but only the first alpha channel they encounter in a file containing multiple alpha channels.
Setting the alpha channel interpretation correctly can prevent problems when you import a file, such as undesirable colors at the edge of an image or a loss of image quality at the edges of the alpha channel. For example, if channels are interpreted as straight when they are actually premultiplied, semitransparent areas retain some of the background color. If a color inaccuracy, such as a halo, appears along the semitransparent edges in a composition, try changing the interpretation method.
And that explains it, since with premultiplies the edges can get some of the background color leaking into them in some cases, which is not the case with straight alphas.
And while quicktime and Apple may prefer premultiplied alphas that does not make them better or desirable, Apple already has it’s whole gamma shift issue with quicktime that is a disaster, so adhering to what they want isn’t always the best idea.