OWC on which used Mac for Video Users

Brian Levin at Other World Computings Rocket Yard Blog has a great article on the pros and cons of various used Macs for video editors.

A great article and something to consider because of the lack of pro M1 computers with more than 16 GB of combined ram, and the possibility than sone plug ins or software might not yet work in an M1.

Jonny Elwyn on Affordable Color Grading Monitors

Affordable Colour Grading Monitors

Jonny Elwyn has a great and extensive article on Affordable Colour Grading Monitors, from computer Monitors to high end color correction screens. This is a seriously in depth article, and I wish something like this existed when I got my last monitor.

I just got a Samsung because it at least it has a blue only mode which certainly helps with color correction.

Video Editor Chris Salters with 2 levels if remote Collaboration Worklows for any budget

Trailer editor Chris Salters has posted 2 remote collaboration workflows, one free and one including a second computer. Great to see an almost free solution and a much more robust solution as well as solutions better than Zoom though much more expensive (starting at $399 a month). 

I like that he sets up a solution that will work with other programs as well.

The budget solution creates a new video monitor which means you are eating more of your precious video memory, which worries me a little, but for screening should be ok.

And the other solution requires another computer and some hardware, so might be more for where companies can provide hardware.

Animation program Cavalry has been updated to version 1.1

 

Cavalry the new 2D animation software has been updated to version 1.1. You can check out the announcement here. The most exciting is the text features which are already supposed to be better than any other program out there, but it’s versions 2.0 should be really impressive.

I have barely played with the subscription based Cavalry, but it does seem pretty easy to understand and use for someone who has used After Effects at least. You can try it for Free at limited resolution with watermarked output, but its $20 pounds or month or 16 Pounds if you do a yearly.

There are quite a few videos to get you started with the app. I really do need to delve into it, because it seems like they were trying to make a modern After Effects, and especially when the new font tool is out this should be well worth checking out.

Adobe Desperately needs to enable reading of iXML in Audio Tracks in Premiere Pro

 

Adobe Premiere Pro desperately needs to add support for iXML audio date for secondary audio in Premiere Pro. Currently when you add your external audio in Premiere Pro you get zero of the Metadata that the Audio Recordist has added, you just get the audio.

This is the same Audio in DaVinci Resolve, in which the engineer has added Mix and TrkA and TrkB to the metadata! Why can’t we see this in Premiere?

Being able to see which track is what would make my whole life so much easier. Especially with lav and boom and mix. If the data is there, Premiere Pro should be able to read it for sure, and export it for the mixer to see as well.

Now this is in various places on Adobe Voice, but I have voted for them all but this hasn’t gotten enough votes for sure. 11 votes here. 5 Votes here. And 20 votes here.

Adobe please add ability to see both video and audio waveform in viewer window like DaVinci Resolve

 

Now as full fledged editor I still much prefer Adobe Premiere Pro over DaVinci Resolve. DaVinci Edit is functional, but just doesn’t feel as fully functional, and I like that I can setup the windows on Premiere Pro however the hell I want to, while I am much more forced into how they want me to do it on DaVinci, and that is my big complaint with Final Cut Pro X, engineers forcing you to do things there way. Also I am not a big fan of the new Cut Page. It feels very Final Cut Pro X to me. Yes I like how you can quickly scan through a folder as if it is a single sequence, but the actual editing is just not how I edit, and I would much rather have an edit control surface for the Edit page than for the Cut Page.

That being said there is certainly one feature in DaVinci’s Edit page that is far superior to Premiere Pro’s the Monitor window and the ability to overlay your Audio on the video either in zoomed in or the full audio. To activate this click on the 3 dots on the upper right of the viewer window and you can seelct either show zoomed Audio Waveform or Show Full Clip Audio Waveform. 

Premiere is either or, and you can do that in Resolve, but I just find this so much faster.

Either Video

Or audio in Premiere

But both together is such a time saver! Please Adobe I hope they adopt this soon.

There are over 500 votes for this at Adobe Voice, but if you agree please add your opinion. This is a timesaving feature that I really love and would love to see added to premiere.

OWC’s Rocket Yard on how to get 67% more performance on an external drive on an M1 Mac

OWC is reporting on what is obviously a bug with M1 Macs, because you shouldn’t have to connect a second display to get full speed write on the thunderbolt ports, but at least for now it seems you do.

Man Big Sur has been having some serious software issues when it comes to drives (losing support for SoftRaid for a full versions was huge!).

EDIT:

Since writing this OWC has figured out more ways to get the speed boost, check it out.

Amazing article at Frame.io on Batch Syncing Audio in Premiere Pro

 Sofi Marshall (who wrote the amazing article on setting up for remote editing with Premiere Pro) has another must read article on Batch Syncing Audio in Adobe Premiere Pro.

I too prefer Merge Clips to multi-cam clips if there is only one video track because it acts more like a clip, but the problems are very frustrating. Why there is no batch ability for Merge Clips is beyond me, and why not ability to flatten back to source as you can do with Multicam?

But the biggest gotchas are with Proxy and Audio.

If you are going to be doing Proxy always do it before you Merge Clips otherwise it doesn’t work.

The number one issue with Merge clips for me has been that it breaks AAF export and removes all the audio clip metadata. And her solution to export an FINAL CUT PRO XML and re-import and it will fix the audio tracks and return audio metadata is awesome (and if you get rid of the video you can just cut this audio in for your mix). Sure it is an extra step, but a quick one that will work easily, but remember to switch off linked selection before deleting video or you will have more problems with your sequence.

Now the thing that Sofi Marshall doesn’t mention that is a huge got you for Merge Clips, is that using Merge clips breaks Project Manager in Premiere. So if you need to use Project Manager, then Merge Clips is not your solution and maybe just stick with Multi-Cam clips.

And I have always done Merge Clips in a different way than she does. She uses Multi-Cam Batch to sync all of her clips, then goes into each Multi-Cam sequences and merges clips, using the multi-Cam batch to do the syncing.

Personally I just sort each folder by Media start and select the audio and video that corresponds (with similar start time code) and right click and merge clips.

And from the dialogue sync by audio and remove cameras audio.

My only complaint with this method is the weird sort issues of Premiere Pro’s bins, that even though I am sorting by start timecode, the new merge clips jumps to the top of the bin after it’s creation, and until I make a new clip won’t sort into timecode order. I never figured out if this is a feature or a bug, but to me it is a bug, if I am sorted in a certain order, I always want every clip to sort that way and anything else is just confusion.

Now there are literally a ton of threads on issues with Merge Clips at Adobe Voice, and I hope anyone who reads this will click on many of these to try and get Adobe to work on these issues.

Bloomberg on new Apple Silicon for MacBook Pro, Air, Mac Mini and the MacPro

Bloomberg is reporting on rumors of the new versions of Apple Silicon. There will be a redesigned MacBook Pro, then MacBook Air, new lower end MacBook Pro and finally the Apple Silicon Mac Pro.

The next M1’s will support 64 gigs if RAM with 8 high energy cores and 2 energy efficient cores and either 16 or 32 graphics cores. The M1 currently 4 high performance and 4 efficiency with 8 graphics cores.

The chips for the Apple Silicon MacPro will have 20 and 40 core with either 16 or 32 high performance cores and either 64 or 128 core graphics. 

Let’s hope the MacPro doesn’t top out at 64 gigs of combined RAM, but the rest of the specs sound impressive.

If performance scales with the cores, the performance will be impressive.

HandbrakePM has been updated to 2.3 with M1 support, it is a batch version of the compression tool handbrake

 The open source video transcoder Handbrake has always been an awesome tool for compressing video, and should be in every video pros arsenal.

It’s lesser known sibling HandBrakePM, which is based on Handbrake (so uses the Handbrake CLI or command line interface) to do batch conversions. And it has been updated to include working on M1 processors. You should have Handbrake already installed for it to work.

You might not think you need this, but someday when you have a bunch of files to compress you will realize just how useful this is.