Open source audio app Audacity has been dubbed spyware after new owner starts user data collection

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 on Multicams or Merge Clips in Premiere Pro

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.

Safari’s tab setup for Mac OS Monterey could not be more of an awful step backwards

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.

This is current safari’s bar with 3 tabs
And Monterey’s Safari with 3 tabs, you already lose the title of the web site.
Current safari with 9 tabs
Monterey with 9 tabs, much less legible and even worse with no ICO files
Big Sur Safari with 15 tabs
Monterey with 15 tabs, already you can see tabs stacking on top of each other
And 18 tabs in Big Sur Safari

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…

Look how it changes, especially when it hits BBC news, this is completely distracting.

Luckily you can turn this off in advanced tabs.

Just make sure to check Never Use Background Color in Toolbar.

Fstoppers on getting perfect color with X-Rite Color Checker and DaVinci Resolve

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.

Some videos by Daria Fissuon who wrote black magic design training on DaVinci Resolve 17

Daria Fissuon literally wrote the DaVinci Resolve 17 Training Guide, and she has some great tips and tricks for using DaVinci.

From Casey Faris

Aslo from Casey Faris’s YouTube Channel

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 RAW has been updated to 2.1 with improved Premiere Pro Performance and M1 Support

Blackmagic Design has upgraded it’s BlackMagic RAW plugin to version 2.1 with M1 support and improved Premiere Pro Performance.

  • Added native support for Apple Silicon on Mac.
  • Added optimised CPU decoding for clips captured by Blackmagic URSA Mini Pro 12K.
  • Added Blackmagic Generation 5 Color Science Technical Reference document.
  • Added support for Panasonic Lumix S1H, S1 and S5 Blackmagic RAW clips captured by Blackmagic Video Assist.
  • Added support for Nikon Z 6II and Z 7II Blackmagic RAW clips captured by Blackmagic Video Assist.
  • Blackmagic RAW Adobe Premiere Pro plugin performance and stability improvements.
  • General performance and stability improvements.

Improvements to performance are always welcome and M1 support is as well.

Adobe adds Speech to Text to the Public Beta

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.

Should graphics with transparency use Straight or Premultiplied Alphas

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.

Adobe needs to bring back SpeedGrade as Lumetri Pro and have a proper finishing workflow

Now I was a huge fan of SpeedGrade when it existed, and greatly lamented it’s passing when it went away. For those of you who don’t know, SpeedGrade was a professional color correction software much like DaVinci Resolve that Adobe purchased and added to their creative suite for a while, and then gutted it and that is where the Lumetri color panel came from. What I miss the most was that unlike with DaVinci where you render out movies with the grade baked in, the grade from SpeedGrade could be exported a single movie or movies of each shot, but you could also roundtrip to premiere and the entire grade came back to Premiere as the Lumetri plug in on your clips! Not only was this much faster, especially since most Lumetri grades would play back in real time without rendering in Premiere, but it saved hard drive space too and made the whole round-tripping thing a real pleasure.

Sure it wasn’t quite as powerful as DaVinci Resolve at the time, but it was plenty powerful and at the time even beat DaVinci on a couple of things.

Of course by this point DaVinci has vastly moved on from SpeedGrade, but this is Adobe we are talking about, and they could certainly update it (and give it multi-monitor support). And maybe bake in some After Effects tools for masks and tracking and the like.

Now Premiere Pro has the Lumetri Color Panel, but it isn’t near what SpeedGrade was and no where near what Premiere can do. So the Adobe Creative Suit really needs a high end color correction package and it could be the evolution of SpeedGrade or as Randi Altman called it Lumetri Pro (I wish I could take credit for the name).

Arclight Sherman Oaks movie theater being Re-Opened as a Regal Cinemas Theater and getting an upgrade

Deadline is reporting that Regal Cinemas has signed a new lease for the Arclight Sherman Oaks.

Regal will reportedly sink $10M into renovating the cinemas bringing it up to date on par with its Regal Irvine Spectrum which reopened last fall for Tenet. Regal recently opened a brand spanking new multiplex in North Hollywood, six miles East of Arclight Sherman Oaks. The new Regal at Sherman Oaks will have 4DX, PLF screens as well as ScreenX which is a three-screen wraparound auditorium (Regal already has one at their Valencia Town Center location in Valencia, CA). Both Regal and Douglas Emmett acknowledged the new lease in the L.A. Times report.

Woohoo, the theater was never one of the best Arclights (though vastly superior to the Santa Monica), as it really only has 2 impressive theaters.

Living in the valley I am so glad it will be back. Now I just hope Decurion, which stills own the land under the Cinerama Dome (though not the Arclight Hollywood next to it) and the Pacific Winnetka, opens the Winnetka back up. The Winnetka used to be a crappy theater, big screens, but crappy seats, but they recently upgraded every theater but the biggest one with recliners and took out multiple rows to do it, so unlike AMC you can still walk in front of the reclines seats, and this made it my favorite theater in the valley. So Decurion come on and re-open your damn theater!