I had the opportunity to attend Adobe’s MAX conference at the LA Convention Center this week. Adobe showed me and 15K of my closest friends the newest updates to pretty much all of their Creative Cloud applications, as well as a number of interesting upcoming developments. From a post perspective, the most significant pieces of news are the release of Premiere Pro 14, and After Effects 17 (AKA the 2020 releases of those Creative Cloud apps). Continue reading
It has been a year since Loupedeck first announced support for Premiere Pro and After Effects with their Loupedeck+ hardware interface panel, originally designed for Lightroom users. I had seen it online prior to that, and had wished that they had something like that for Premiere, so I was pleased to see that announcement, and eager to try it out. It was a bit challenging to get it installed at first, as I was still on Windows 7, in Premiere 12, but I eventually got it working, and posted my initial impressions of using it here.
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The new BOXX APEXX A3 workstation is based on AMD’s newest Ryzen CPUs, and the X570 chipset. BOXX has taken these, added liquid CPU cooling, professional GPUs, and a compact solid case to create an optimal 3rd generation Ryzen system configured for professional users. It can support dual GPUs and two 3.5″ hard drives, as well as the 3 M.2 slots on the board, and anything that can fit into its 5 PCIe slots. The system I am reviewing came with AMD’s top CPU, the 12 core 3900X running at 3.8Ghz, as well as 64GB of DDR4-2666 RAM, and a Quadro RTX 4000 GPU. I also tested it with a 40GbE network card, and a variety of other GPUs.
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I wrote an in late 2017 about DCP creation options, in an Adobe environment. One of the options I examined has released a new update that changes the equation rather significantly, and is worth sharing. Adobe Media Encoder’s default integrated DCP export option is Quvis’ Wraptor, which I discussed in comparison to Fjord’s JPEG2000 frame exporter. While exporting frame files solves the 23.976p to 24p issue (if applicable), the amount of time required for the JPEG2000 encode is far longer than the combined time for the retime, XYZ-conversion, encrypting, and MXF wrapping steps. So increasing the speed of that encoding step enough would justify changing the rest of the workflow.
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This year, I oversaw the editing process for a large international film production. This involved setting up a collaborative editing facility at the director’s home, and there was a lot of footage in the project. While there was “only” 6.5 TB of offline DNxHR files, they shot around 150TB of Red footage that we needed to have available for onsite VFX, conform, etc. Once we finished the edit, we were actually using 40TB of that footage in the cut, which we needed at another location for collaboration. So I was in the market for some large storage solutions.
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A number of new technologies and products were just announced at this year’s Computex event in Taiwan. This focuses on the ones that seem relevant to media creation professionals. Continue reading
The HP Z-Book X2 is not your average mobile workstation. With its detachable keyboard, integrated kickstand, and EMR pen support, it is designed to be the ideal artistic tool for digital illustration and drawing. But the unique form-factor offers some other interesting possibilities as well, which I have been curious to explore since I first saw a prototype of the device a few years back. While HP offers a variety of convertible tablets with the X2’s detachable design, the Z-Book version is clearly its most powerful and advanced option available. Continue reading
I am always looking for the most powerful tools in the smallest packages, so the Razer Blade 15″ laptop with a GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q was worth checking out. The Max-Q variants are optimized for better thermals and power usage, at the potential expense of performance, in order to allow more powerful GPUs to be utilized in smaller laptops. The RTX 2080 is NVidia’s top end mobile GPU, with 2944 CUDA cores, 8GB of DDR6 Memory, running at 384GB/s and 13.6Billion transistors on the chip.
I have been to NAB for the last twelve straight years, and it looked like I would break my streak this year, being booked on a travel job through the middle of April. But that phase of the project wrapped early, and so I was headed home a week early, and was able to arrange my layover in Vegas, to make a last minute visit to the NAB Show. Do to the short notice, I didn’t have many scheduled events, and instead just browsed the halls for new products, and crossed paths with people I have met in years past.
I am testing out and reviewing the Loupedeck+ edit controller in the Adobe Creative Cloud apps. This article is Part 1 of 2, where I talk about my initial reactions to trying out the device, and the process of getting it working with my systems. It will take a while to really get used to the functionality that the device has to offer, so I will be using it on my next big film project. Then I will write up a follow on piece in a few months detailing my experiences with it once I have setup my custom settings and memorized that the functions, to give me a degree of efficiency with the tactile interface.
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