How To Export An Archive Of Your Gmail Mailbox, And Open It "Offline" With Thunderbird On Mac - PART ONE - Gmail Export

 Warning! This is a loooong thread, thanks Google, so hang in there!

PART ONE, let's export from Gmail:

1. Click on the Gmail account Icon, click on "Manage your Google Account"

2. When in your Google account page, click on the Data & privacy tab on the left.

3. When in the Data & privacy page, scroll down to get to the "Download your data" area.

4. Click on the Download your data. It will open the Google Takeout page. This is where you can choose what data you want to export. There are TONS of data, and some selection is already made by default as you can see. But we do not want that.

5. So click on "Deselect all". That will deselect some of the data, not all unfortunately, so you have to scroll down and deselect each box manually. Continue to scroll down and deselect all the boxes, until you get to the Mail area.

6. Click to select Mail. By default, "All Mail data included" is selected which will export EVERYTHING. You may or may not want to export your entire Mail content. If you do, you can skip the next steps and go directly to step 13.

7. On the other end, if you want to choose which part of Mail to export, click on "All Mail data included". This will open the "Mail content option" page. And by default "Include all messages in Mail" is selected.

8. From there you can choose to select only some mailbox folders to export.

9. If needed then, deselect "Include all messages in Mail", and scroll down and deselect the default folders you do not wish to export / select the folders you only want to export.

10. For example, I do not wish to export "Archived", "Chat", "Drafts", "Inbox" that are all selected by default, so I uncheck them all.

11. I only want to export "Work/Moviola", so I checked that. I previously exported "Work/DVDList". And I click "OK".

12. Now instead of the default "All Mail data included", it shows "1 label selected", which corresponds to my single selection of "Work/Moviola".

13. Now scroll down and click on "Next step"

14. In the "Choose file type, frequency & destination" you are presented with frequency, file type, and file size options. I leave everything at default. Then click "Export".

15. Google asks for identification, so fill-in your info.

16. When Google finishes prepping the export, you will get an email with a link to download. You can also view the available download sets by clicking on "Manage exports".

17. I have two completed Data backups available to download. The one I want is the most recent, so I click on the top arrow.

18. From there I can click on the Download button to get it transferred to my computer.

19. The Zip file is downloaded onto my computer.

And we are done with the Google Mail export. Go to PART TWO for the Thunderbird How-to.

Adobe Premiere 25.5.0 Crashes When Using "Replace with After Effects Composition" - With Solution

 Premiere 25.5.0, After Effects 25.5.0, Mac M1 Sequoia 15.6.1

SYMPTOM:

Each time I call "Replace with After Effects Composition", AE loads, the Save as window comes up, and I immediately get the beach ball of death, impossible to save the AE project.

SOLUTION:

Force quit AE, Premiere is frozen. Force quit Premiere.

IN PREMIERE:

Preferences, Media Cache, Remove all media caches (Delete.) Select Delete all media cache files (require restart.)

Delete all media cache files (require restart.)

Hold Option while restarting Premiere. Reset options: check all but "Disable third party plugins (one time only.) Continue.

Reset all these but last

IN AFTER EFFECTS:

Settings, Startup & Repair, "Empty All Caches..."

Settings, Media & Disk Cache, "Empty Disk Cache", and "Clean Database & Cache".

Restart AE.

And now "Replace with After Effects Composition" is working as expected.

Adobe Premiere Pro "Frame Substitution Recursion Attempt Aborting After Multiple Attempts On File ... Inserting Black For Frame Number ..." Bug

 Premiere hates you just as much as Avid. In a different way, but just as much.

 Here is the new fuckup:

 "Frame substitution recursion attempt aborting after multiple attempts on file... inserting black for frame number..."

Uh? What?

Of course looking up the problem online is a deluge of "your files are corrupted", or "the media is bad", or "what are you editing on?" or whatever fucking reason, but never Premiere is fucking up, which it is obviously what's happening.

HELLO Adobe!??? Didn't you just came up with Premiere for iOS? Better make Premiere for Mac actually work before adding yet another dysfunctional app to your arsenal.

 Cringe. What is going on Adobe?

Vimeo Sold To Bending Spoons

  OK so on Sept 10 2025 Vimeo has quietly agreed to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.3 Billion. 

 Shares of VMEO (that became public in May 2021) jumped 91% as a result. Almost doubled overnight, some people got lucky.

 Not early stock holders though because from the time it entered the stock exchange to today, VMEO lost almost all of its value. From $57 a share at introduction to 7.73 today, post Bending Spoons promise of acquisition.

 Bending Spoons - an Italian company - is rapidly becoming a behemoth of digital tech following multiple acquisitions. You might remember them when they bought FILMiCPro some years ago and moved the app into a subscription only model, creating a bit of a backlash from legacy users.

 Vimeo is already subscription only, so no surprises in that department. They've already implemented so many changes to their offering that I have a hard time tracking or even remembering them all.

 They started in 2004, 20 years ago, all this time they seemed to struggle, even though they reported revenues over $400 million in 2024.

 I would argue that Vimeo is somewhat of a unique offering in today's online video/streaming world and I would really like for them to hold the fort.

 Will they? What will happen to us Vimeo users under this new ownership?... I'm not sure.

 Share your thoughts in the comments.

Can We Have Incremental Exports in Final Cut Pro?

 You've heard of incremental sync, also named block level sync or delta sync. It is a process that only syncs the bytes that have changed within a file. Dropbox among others does have incremental sync features.

 Say you are syncing a folder on your computer to the cloud, the first time you sync, the whole file is uploaded.

 If you modify the file on your computer, with regular sync the entire file is uploaded again.

 With incremental sync, only the bytes that have changed within the file are uploaded, hence saving a ton of upload time if the modification is a small one.

 It's a big deal with video because video files are usually pretty large. So if you modify 30 seconds in a hour long video file, you immediately see the advantage.

 You may also have heard of Cinedeck's CineXTools. Like incremental sync, CineXTools allows for patching just the sections that have been modified on a previously exported file.

 Or you may have heard of ProTools' destructive punch. Which kind of like CineXTools is a feature of the software that allows for patching a selected audio region into a previously bounced file.

 I wish that an implementation of CineXTool/ProTools and incremental sync tech be incorporated inside Final Cut Pro so that when re-exporting the same file over and over again as you more than likely do when sending clients screeners, or last minute revisions to master files, the computing time of the export is only used to deal with the sections that has been altered, not the entire file.

 FCP would look at, or remember metadata about the previous iteration, and devise an "export and patch only the mods" strategy.

 Then you would upload the revised file for client review to a shared service that also implements incremental sync and save tons of time!

 How can this tech make it to FCP and other NLEs? I can't wait. Literally.

Avid Hates You - MC Crashes On Launch Scanning For "AMPIPluginDSM.avx"

 Avid hates you that's a given. Avid MC is a wonderful piece of software, it's also the most aggravating piece of software.

 All right so today MC crashes on launch on my Mac while scanning for "AMPIPluginDSM.avx". That's MC telling you right now it doesn't like your audio plugins.

 It didn't have a problem a moment ago, and times and times before that, but that does not matter with Avid, now it decided to crash.

 Tomorrow it'll open fine, or something else will make it crash. It won't tell you what makes it crash either, why would it?

 So for the moment you cannot open MC because of this tantrum.

 No worries. Go to: BootDrive/Library/Application Support/Avid/Audio/

 In there you will see a "Plug-Ins" folder. All your audio plugins live in there.

 Add another folder and name it "Plug-Ins (Unused)".

 Move all your plugins from "Plug-Ins" folder to "Plug-Ins (Unused)" folder.

 Launch MC, lo and behold it opens. Wonderful! Except that now you have no access to your wonderful audio plugins.

 Quit MC. This time move all your plugins the other way around from "Plug-Ins (Unused)" folder to "Plug-Ins" folder.

 Launch MC. Lo and behold, it opens fine!!! What a piece of crap.

 OK, now go edit you lazy ponce.

Variable Frame Rates From Phone Footage Creating Problems In Premiere - No External Playback

 We have to deal with a lot of phone footage nowadays, and the phones are prone to creating clips with variable frame rates, with some hit and miss results in post, particularly when using Premiere.

 Have a look at this phone video clip specs:

Variable frame rate clip from iPhone, seen as such in Media Conch

 If you are like me using BMD 3G Monitor with Desktop Video, with non legit frame rates in Premiere Source window, you get no output. Even though Premiere is content playing back the clip internally, no go with external monitoring.

 Now if you create a legit frame rate Timeline and drop the variable FR clip into it, all is well because Premiere conforms the non-legit frame rate clip to the (legit) Timeline frame rate.

 When bringing such variable FR clips into Premiere, the FR stamping gets somewhat fantastical. In this example I have 5 clips, all from the same phone. They are all recognized in the metadata as 29.98 fps:

All VFR clips stamped as 29.98fps in Premiere

Same thing in the Media File Properties: 29.98. It should be 30fps, but because of variable FR, Premiere stamps them at 29.98.

Same thing in the Media File Properties window.

 For some reasons the first three clips playback just fine on the external monitor via Desktop Video/3G Monitor, the last two clips do not playback at all. Again, I'm talking about the Source window playback, not Timeline playback.

 On closer inspection, these clips show fantastical frame rates when invoking the Modify/Interpret Footage function. The Frame Rate is all over the place:

 Clip 1 = 29.9775

 Clip 2 = 29.9782

 Clip 3 = 29.9793

 Clip 4 = 29.9869

 Clip 5 = 29.9845

 Remember all five clips frame rate is rounded and stamped as 29.98 by Premiere.

 For some reason, only the first three clips will play through external playback in Premiere, not the last two. Maybe 29.97xx is an acceptable frame rate to BMD, but not 29.98xx? Who knows.

 A workaround is to manually stamp all these VFR iPhones clips to the proper 30 fps, (or 29.98 fps) in the selected "Assume this frame rate" and clicking OK. Batch processing is possible.

 Now all clips playback through the Source window / external monitor 3G Monitor device just fine. But it is changing the source frame rate, so it might not be desirable beyond permitting Source Monitor external playback via BlackmagicDesign DV/3G Monitor. You be the judge of that.

PP 25.5.0

macOS Sequoia 15.6.1