Sata SSD Exhibiting Erratic Speed, Slowing Down Considerably. Why? Read on! For A Possible Solution.

 A word of Caution regarding Sata SSDs In drive dock enclosures.

 One of my Sata SSD started exhibiting erratic speeds, slowing down randomly to a meager 10MB/s, then jumping to 100MB/s, then 200MB/s, to slow down again to sub 10MB/s operating speed.

 I started questioning the dock I'm using, the cables. I swapped the dock for another one, swapped cables, used a different usb connection, no go. Erratic behavior re. operating speed.

 I'm used to a consistent 300-350MB/s with this exact SSD in the same dock, so what's happening? I almost started a RMA with the manufacturer, then decided to test further.

 I wiped the SSD clean, formatted it anew. No change. Again getting speeds in the 240MB/s, to slow down randomly again to 100MB/s and 20MB/s or even less. Swapped dock enclosures again, used different cables, plugged it to a different computer even. Same erratic behavior.

 Could it be the heat? I let it completely cool down, I added an external fan blowing directly onto it. And, same slow erratic speed, out of whack performances.

 Mind you, it didn't stopped working or failed completely. It passed all fix disk and other tests. Just being slow to goddam slow like molasses.

Totally puzzling.

 Then I don't know why I thought about the SSD Sata connectors. What if they were dirty? Now I realize I should have looked with a magnifying glass to see if I could identify any dirt / hair / some crap sticking to the connectors, but I didn't.

 In any case, I proceeded to gently wipe the gold connectors with a piece of cloth, reset the SSD into the dock, fired Disk Speed Test, and what do you know? Full speed ahead!

 So the lesson is: if you are using SSDs in drive docks (or HDDs as well I suppose, although SSDs might be more sensitive to this than HDDs?) and all of a sudden are experiencing erratic, slow speeds, think about checking the disk connectors, and wipe then clean gently with soft cloth before trying anything else. Chances are debris are stuck in there, creating some electrical interference, and somehow are affecting the drive performances.

Gently wipe clean these gold connectors.

Apple Motion 5.8 And Compressor 4.8 Updates

 With Final Cut Pro 10.8, Apple also update Motion to 5.8 and Compressor to 4.8.

Like FCP, Motion 5.8 gets Enhance Light and Color Filter powered by machine learning. But no sign of Smooth Slo Motion powered by ML. Hmmm. Testing soon. The rest is mostly (and welcomed) bug fixes.

Compressor 4.8 gets bug fixes, spacial video enhancements and new Canon codec support.

And that is all folks.

Apple Final Cut Pro 10.8 Update June 20, 2024

 Yoohoo! The day before summer apple releases FCP 10.8! Let's see what's in store.

Final Cut Pro release notes

Learn about current and previous updates for Final Cut Pro on Mac.

Before installing a Final Cut Pro update, verify that your system still meets Final Cut Pro system requirements. Then make sure to back up your current version of the Final Cut Pro application and your Final Cut Pro libraries.

New in Final Cut Pro 10.8

Released June 20, 2024

Final Cut Pro 10.8 includes the following enhancements and bug fixes:

• Automatically improve the color, color balance, contrast, and brightness of video or still images using the new Enhance Light and Color effect, powered by machine learning.

• Enable Smooth Slo-Mo to create amazing slow-motion visuals with an AI-enhanced algorithm on Mac models with Apple silicon.

• Stay organized by renaming color corrections and video effects in the inspector.

• Drag effects right from the inspector to other clips in the timeline or viewer.

• Use new filters in the timeline index to quickly identify clips with audio effects, video effects, retiming changes, missing media, or missing effects.

• Search in the timeline index by reel, scene, camera angle, camera name, custom metadata, or effect name.

• Search in the timeline index for user-created roles.

• Search for clips in the browser using new “Starts With” and “Ends With” search criteria.

• Enable or disable timeline scrolling using a new toolbar button.

• Improves timeline scrolling behavior during reverse playback.

• Fixes an issue where captions would sometimes flicker when timeline scrolling is enabled.

• Fixes an issue where browser items would be appear to be renamed when naming a folder.

• Fixes an issue that caused disabling the audio roles of a clip to make the video roles appear disabled.

• Accurately tone-maps HDR video content in 360° view for 360° projects.

• Fixes an issue that could cause ProRes RAW clips to be displayed incorrectly in the viewer on Intel-based Mac models.

• Fixes an issue that caused a freeze frame from a log-encoded clip to appear too bright in an HLG timeline.

• Fixes an issue that caused a disabled Color Board effect to be incorrectly enabled after exporting and reimporting an FCPXML of the timeline.

• Fixes an issue that caused the Space Designer audio effect to show presets as missing.

• Fixes an issue that could cause Final Cut Pro to stop responding when rendering with another app active.

• Fixes an issue that caused switching between the angle viewer and the video scopes to change the angle viewer selection back to “Enable video and audio switching.”

• Fixes an issue that caused Final Cut Pro to stop responding when both a folder and an enclosed item were selected in the browser.

• Adds support for sharing 8K ProRes MXF files.

• Improves support for Canon C2 AVC media.

• Adds support for Canon XF-AVC 1920x1080 59.94i/50i H.264 25Mbps.

• Removes support for disc burning.

• Updates FCPXML to version 1.12.

Get complete step-by-step how-to instructions and information on all features in Final Cut Pro. For a list of recent enhancements in Final Cut Pro, refer to What's New in Final Cut Pro.

OK, so a bunch of interesting things here. Notable to me are these three:

In YELLOW we have machine learning enabled Light and Color Enhancement, and Smooth Slow Motion. I'm very curious about these two, and I will test asap what kind of features and results we can get.

In ORANGE, search expansion, including audio and video effects, missing media, missing effects! Yes! finally Apple! It only took 9 years.

I have a 5 parts rant saga about missing effects in FCP and how extremely difficult it is to track them here: Part1, Part2, Part3, Part4, Part5. So much so that I had to report this to Apple, and likely many of you did as well, maybe, just maybe, Apple listened? But come on, 9 years?... I will be reporting how useful these improvements really are. Fingers crossed.

In RED, here goes the disc burning share option. Oh well, no one burns disks anymore, and when I did I used Toast anyway. I actually never used this once. But I understand it makes some people upset, not fun to loose a tool when you rely on it in your workflow.

Apple is yet again giving us crumbles when we are hungry for a full meal. No improvements on role based mixing or anything of the sort, which to me, and to many advanced users would be the feature to propel FCP to another level. Maybe in 2033.

Focusrite stops development of iOS Control app

 

Real bummer.

And I don't know if they are doing this because they want to push their own hardware controller, or because Apple has been so difficult to deal with that it's not worth the hassle for them.

Do you know anything about the matter?

Adobe, Photoshop (25.6.0), Why Is "Make Frames From Layers" Completely Out Of Whack?

 Adobe Photoshop 25.6.0 weirdness...

Adobe, what on earth are you thinking? I have stills, numbered 001 through 005. I use File / Script / Load Files into Stack.

I select my 5 pictures, click on Sort By Name, and OK.

Photoshop imports all 5 slides and stacks them in order, great. I now have 5 layers with 001 at top, and 005 at the bottom. So far so good.

001 being selected, I click on Create Frame Animation. The Timeline populates with 001 as the first image of the animation, OK.

Then I go to the Timeline hamburger menu, click and select Make Frames From Layers.

Photoshop populates the Timeline with 5 frames, except... they are in REVERSE ORDER! 👀😡 👿 005, 004, 003, 002, 001.

Why Adobe?

So then I have to add a step, select all the frames in the animation, click again on the hamburger and select Reverse Frames. Now it's in the correct order.

This behavior DOES NOT MAKE ANY SENSE. Why would we want to sequence images in reverse order as default? Seriously?

See for yourself.

How To Copy The Names From A Bunch Of Files In macOs Finder, And Copy Them Into Numbers

 In the Finder window, select all the files you want to copy, and Copy (Command + C.)

If you go to Numbers spreadsheet directly and try to Paste the content of the clipboard, it might work, or it might not work. Depending on the file, it will paste the content of the file instead of the names of the files, which is what we want.

For some reason it works with this list of pdfs:

But sometimes it does not work with other files, even pdfs. In other apps, we could use "Paste Special / Paste as Text" or something similar. No such function in Numbers - Hmm, hmm, hello Apple?

So we have to use a workaround with TexEdit:

Open Textedit, create a new document, then select Format / Make Plain Text. Paste the clipboard (Command+V) and the list of names appears.

Copy the list of names from the TexEdit document, and paste it into Numbers, this time it works! The list of names is being copied as text, as we intended.

Final Cut Pro Incorrect Timecode From Sony A1 On Import - Fix

 When importing media from some Sony Cameras, A1 point in case, the timecode is not recognized, all clips start at 00:00:00:00. NO GOOD!!

It appears that Final Cut Pro is expecting the card structure to contain a "PRIVATE" folder. If the Private folder is not present, FCP defaults all Timecode to zero. Dumb.

Here is the YT explanation and fix by Felipe Baez.

Example, this Sony card is structured with DCIM (photos) and M4ROOT (video) folders, the PRIVATE folder is missing:

As a result, FCP default all Clips Timecode to zero. In the list you can see that the Timecode for each clip starts at 00:00:00:00 No good!!!

After copying the content of the card onto my drives, I added a PRIVATE folder at the top of the arborescence and put the M4ROOT folder into it. It looks like this now, the M4RROT folder is inside a PRIVATE top folder:

Lo and behold, now FCP reads the Timecode properly! Whoa!

Note: you have to IMPORT the media. Drag and drop does not work, if you drag and drop media the Timecode is still not recognized no matter what.

Thumbs up to André Fernandez and Felipe Baez, for figuring this out.