Oliver Peters on Audio Plug-ins for editors

Oliver Peters at his digitalfilms blog has written 2 article son Audio Plug-ins for Editors. Parts 1 & 2 focus on categories, such as equalizers and compressors, part 3 is on the audio plug-ins from FabFilter Software Instruments and 4 is on Free Plug-ins.

You should go to his blog and check out parts 1, 2 , 3 and 4.

Sound is my worst part of editing. So often of late I am working for companies that expect me to mix, when an audio guy can add so much to a mix. Maybe this can help a little with audio if you want to dive into it.

Bloomberg thinks Apple will hit it’s 2 year deadline on Apple Silicon and release a MacPro

So both 9to5 mac and AppleInsider are reporting that Mark Gurman at Bloomberg believes Apple will hit it’s 2 year deadline on Apple SIlicon in it’s whole lineup including a new MacPro.

With the whole microprocessor issues hitting the world right now this will be impressive if true, but I assume they don’t need too many MacPros compared to their other machines, though that depends if the price is right.

The rumors point to a very powerful machine for the new MacPro. Who knows if it will be expandable or have any PCI slots, but if it has Thunderbolt 5, that might not be an issue. If they don’t have PCI slots, will they still offer an Apple Afterburner, or if they have a version of the MacPro with it built in?

If the Mac Pro is like current M1 macs it will likely not be expandable after the fact, so might need a larger initial expense, maxing out RAM and everything else you need because of lack of expansion ability after the initial purchase. And you will really need to maximize the RAM since it will likely share the video ram with the normal ram like all the M1 Macs do.

AppleInsider reports that Thunderbolt 4 details were accidentally leaked by an Intel Exec’s photo on Twitter

Malcolm Owen has an article at AppleInsider on Thunderbolt 5 details leak via deleted Twitter photo by Intel Executive.

So pretty exciting, especially since it keeps the USB C form factor and doubles it’s speed from 40Gbps to 80Gbps.

Already I love being able to use Thunderbolt 4 hubs on my Mac, and hopefully the new Mac Pro will use Thunderbolt 5 for impressive speeds from it’s ports.

RedShark News on the Global Chip Shortage

Phil Rhodes at RedShark News has an interesting article on the Glocal Chip Shortage and how it is affecting the industry.

I would bet it is pushing back the Apple Silicon pro releases as well. Sure they won’t be big sellers but why waste their chips where there won’t be huge sales. And even if Apple is designing it’s own chips, it isn’t manufacturing them themselves, so…

MacRumors reports that Monterey Beta 4 includes Live Text for Intel Macs

Sami Fathi at Macrumors is reporting that the latest Beta of MacOS Monterey includes Live Text for Intel Macs.

This is great news. I have to say I really hated that Apple was already disabling features for non-Apple Silicon Macs. And while they are still doing that, this is one of the features I was most likely to want of the missing features. Honestly they should have feature parity until at least their is a Pro Apple Silicon released. And sure they have specific new hardware in M1 and Apple Silicon, but it isn’t like you couldn’t write something to let Intel run this, as they have proved here.

9to5Mac reporting on a new intel Mac Pro

Jose Adorno at 9to5Mac is reporting that a leaker says that Apple will release one more Intel Mac Pro and it will be based on the Intel Ice Lake Xeon W-3300.

Not only would this give a nice boost to the Intel Mac Pro line, it would make up for the fact that they made a modular machine that could be easily upgraded and never bothered releasing a single upgrade for it. And as the article says they are also working on the Apple Silicon version of the MacPro, which will likely be a smaller version of the MacPro, more like a Cube, and it will likely not be upgrade-able, so it would be smart for Apple to release one more upgrade-able machine before they dump the idea of upgrade ability all together.

It seems likely that the Apple Silicon based MacPro will be like every other Apple Silicon with soldered Memory, and fixed gpu on the motherboard, and without the ability to run an external GPU. Now hopefully that also ends up being shown in the price which should be allot less than a fully loaded Intel MacPro, but I doubt it will still be considered inexpensive.

Backblaze cloud backup version 8 on Mac increases threading and reduced disk load according to 9to5 Mac

Bradley Chambers at 9 to 5 Mac has an article on the latest update to the Backblaze app for Mac. They have increased the threads from 30 to 100 and reduced disk load by 80% which can be nothing but good.

I moved to BackBlaze when my previous backup went corporate only. Now it took me a year to get my backup (and I haven’t backed up most of my video files which are just too big) but I use this and time machine to know that my important files will be safe.

Once you lose a hard drive you will always run a couple of backup solutions and having them run better is always a good thing.

Toolfarm’s top 5 plug-ins for under $99 for Premiere, DaVinci Resolve, AVID, Final Cut Pro X, and more

Toolfarm, the plug-in seller has posted it’s top 5 plug-ins for under $99 for various software. For Premiere Pro, Davinci Resolve, AVID, Final Cut Pro X, Audio and various 3D packages.

Always good to see lists of inexpensive plug ins.

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!