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Gloria Messer wrote: "The ‘Small Things That Matter’ webinar was the best, most informative webinar ever.” Other viewers sent similar compliments. This session looked at organizing media, backups, optimizing preferences, and other tricks to setting up a project. Useful for all editors, both Final Cut and Premiere.
Link: CREATIVE SERIES: Small Things That (Really) Matter
Here's an excerpt from that webinar that explains the difference between USB-C and Thunderbolt 3/4 for media editors.
Link: What’s the Difference Between USB-C and Thunderbolt? [v]
This third excerpt discusses routine maintenance you can do to keep your editing system running smoothly.
Link: Routine Maintenance for Video Editing on a Mac [v]
Turning to technical issues, I planned to write two reviews last week. One on the OWC MiniStack, the other on the Asus AX1800 dual-channel wireless router. While the installation for the router went reasonably well, the actual performance was so slow as to make it unusable. It was half the speed of a ten-year-old Apple Airport. I sent it back and I'll let you know what I end up getting that works better.
More troubling, I had a video compression experience I've never had before. I edited last week's webinar in Adobe Premiere (latest version). Each of the three excerpts started with two full-screen PNGs along with a voice over. For the last twelve years, these intros compressed with no problems. This time, though, while the master file (ProRes 4444) looked perfect, when I compressed it in Apple Compressor OR Adobe Media Encoder, the second slide appeared about 8 seconds too early. Perfect in the master, but consistently screwed up in compression. I reedited each of these several different ways and adjusted compression settings, all to no effect. Finally, I tried HandBrake for compression. The default settings in HandBrake did not work either, but tweaking the settings finally did.
I'm not clear where the problem is, but something is badly screwed up. Because different compression programs had the same problem -- either editing to a shot eight to ten seconds early or severe pixelization blending two different shots, I suspect the difficulty is with Premiere's output The master export file looked fine, but not the compressed version. The moral of the story is that if you have compression problems, try a different program.
Webinars are taking the rest of August off and will return in September. As always, please share your subject ideas via email.
I'm writing this as Hurricane Hilary is sweeping into California, Maui is recovering from its devastating wild fire, and all of Canada seems covered in smoke and ash. Scary times.
Until next Monday, stay safe, stay hopeful and edit well.
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