Blog Archives

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“Because the creative industry sits at the intersection of arts & technology, it finds itself broken in many ways.” Larry Jordan interviews Brian Meaney, Head of Product, at Alteon, about AI, technology and the media industry.

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This collection provides easy links to the nine detailed testing and performance reviews Larry Jordan wrote about the 2023 M2 Mac mini computer from Apple.

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For video editors, any M-series Mac computer is a vast improvement over any Intel system. In this detailed review, Larry Jordan looks at setup and performance tests of the M2 Mac Studio computer using Adobe Premiere Pro.

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One of the great strengths of Premiere is how much it can be customized. But all that choice also becomes overwhelming. Hopefully these tips help explain the settings you might want to consider modifying for yourself.

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If all your audio clips sound different, audio presets may not help. But, much more often, we are making the same changes to our audio over and over … and over. Audio presets in Adobe Premiere Pro make applying these adjustments blindingly fast.

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With its latest releases, Apple now offers M2 versions of the Mac mini, Mac Studio and Mac Pro. This article is to help you decide which hardware best meets the needs of media creators, then provide tips on how to best configure the system.

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The OWC Express 4M2 is really, really fast. Well-built. And, provided you format your storage as RAID 4 or 5, expandable. Here’s a detailed review along with suggestions on how to optimize it for your media editing,.

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This audio transition technique is a godsend for smoothing those “too-tight” transitions that seem to crop up in every edit. Best of all, it only requires three steps and takes less than a second.

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Audio is a huge part of any project. In this short video tutorial, Larry Jordan shows how to record a voice over directly in the timeline of Adobe Premiere.

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Audio is a huge part of any project. In this short video tutorial, Larry Jordan shows how to create audio fades across multiple tracks by setting master track keyframes.

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Recently, while writing a review of the BenQ PD2725U monitor, I realized that I have described how to change color space settings on external monitors incorrectly for years. Here’s the key rule you need to know.

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Displaying video full-screen in Adobe Premiere is as easy as pressing a single key. However, for best results, when you have two monitors, this quick tutorial shows how to change preference settings to create a separate view and grading monitor.

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If you are frustrated trying to make your audio sound better, the Crumblepop AI-assisted audio plug-ins will decrease your stress and improve your audio without requiring an advanced audio degree. And, when it comes to noise reduction, they can do magic.

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Peter asked me recently to write an article on how to optimize files for posting to YouTube, download or streaming. As Internet speeds continue to improve, and YouTube adjusts its rules, now is a good time for an update on my recommendations.

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A reader requested help in creating a video with burned-in timecode so he could send clips to a client for review. Premiere has supported this feature for a long times. Here’s what you need to know.

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The Rate Stretch tool is a very fast way to change the duration of a clip without changing the content. However, this tool is hidden by default. Here’s where it is and what it does.

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Changing the playback speed of a clip is a fast and easy way to create an eye-catching visual effect. In this short video, Larry Jordan shows how to use the rate stretch tool to create clip speed effects on demand.

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There are five different ways to create slow motion video effects in Premiere. In this short video, Larry Jordan illustrates the image quality differences between them.

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Changing the playback speed of a clip is a fast and easy way to create an eye-catching visual effect. In this short video, Larry Jordan shows how to create hold frames to pause, then restart, the action.

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The news presents events in the real world to help viewers understand what it going on. A documentary deconstructs real people and real events to explain and illuminate them. Given the state of AI, how do you convince viewers that your images and sounds are not fake?

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As AI continues to sweep through creative industries, I was introduced to a relatively new product specifically for video professionals: Colourlab Ai. To learn more, I interviewed Dado Valentic, CEO of Colorlab. Here is our conversation.

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The AI genie is fully out of the bottle. AI is a significant, watershed event for the creative arts. But… it will cost jobs; especially in creative industries. This is very troubling. Share your thoughts in the comments.

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It seems counterintutive, but you don’t need massive amounts of RAM for video editing. This explains why the duration of your video project does not determine the hardware you need. It also explains what DOES require faster hardware.

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If you want power to burn in a space small enough to fit on your desk and still have a desk left, the 2023 Mac mini with the M2 Pro SoC is impossible to ignore. Here are my thoughts on strengths, weaknesses and configuration.

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This articles details the performance of the M2 Pro Mac mini, specifically the speed of rendering visual effects and exporting projects in Apple Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere Pro. 77 tests were performed and some of the answers are surprising!

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I am often asked which NLE is “better.” That question can’t be answered, except to say “It depends…” However, we CAN test render and export speeds, along with multicam streaming support using the new 2023 M2 Pro Mac mini. I did – and here are the results.

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This review specifically looks at video editing performance using Adobe Premiere Pro with the new 2023 Mac mini with an M2 Pro SoC. This concentrates on render and export speeds, along with multicam editing.

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Still photographs, slides and digital images are a common component in many video projects. In this short video Larry Jordan shows how to animate their movement, including moving on curves, in Adobe Premiere Pro.

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Premiere Pro is not bad at multicam editing. If you are only editing a few clips, Premiere will be fine. But, for complex projects, or where you want to customize proxy compression settings, Premiere is not the fastest or most capable choice. Here are the details.

A frequent question is whether a computer has the power an editor needs. Here I look at what Adobe Premiere Pro needs for 4K multicam editing and the speeds your storage needs to support. The answer is not what you expect.

While both ProRes 422 and ProRes 4444 are much larger than the original HEVC (or H.264, for that matter), the structural design of ProRes makes it more suitable for faster editing performance, especially for multicam editing. These details illustrate the difference.

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Earlier this week Alteon.io announced Alteon Accelerator, a new desktop application that maximizes upload speeds. Here’s an interview with Matt Cimaglia, CEO of Alteon, to learn more about what this service offers.

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Motion tracking used to work really well in Premiere Pro, but, recently, something broke. In this short video tutorial, Larry Jordan shows what motion tracking is, what’s wrong with it, and provide a workaround you can use until this gets fixed.

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In this short video tutorial, Larry Jordan illustrates a relatively new feature in Premiere which can instantly simplify complex sequences without actually changing your edit. This is very cool.

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In this short video tutorial, Larry Jordan explains what speech-to-text is in Premiere, then shows how to create transcripts from your sequences using it.

Digital video no longer requires state-of-the-art hardware. We no longer need the biggest, fastest, most powerful system to get our work done. Here’s what you need to consider for a video editing system today.

Motion tracking effects has long been a feature in Premiere Pro. However, in recent versions, it no longer works reliably. Here’s an outline of the problem and a workaround.

Apple is famous for killing useful technology. For media creators, meant the death of software to create DVDs. With his livelihood at stake, Richard Osso went on a mission to find a way to continue creating DVDs for clients. This is his story.

Adding a few dozen To-Do markers to any Final Cut project won’t cause any problems. However, if you regularly import transcripts into FCP, take the time to read this thread, especially if your system seems to be slower than usual.

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As we increasingly move to hand-held cameras, shaky shots are a fact of life. The Warp Stabilizer effect in Adobe Premiere Pro is a great way to keep your audience involved in your story without them losing their lunch. Here’s how to use it effectively.

Here are some real-world speed tests of 2-, 3-, and 4-drive SSD RAIDs using the OWC Thunderblade. Speeds are fast, but none fully fill a Thunderbolt 3/4 connection. Still, they are more than fast enough for almost all editing.

macOS Ventura is significantly (masses of megabytes!) slower than macOS Monterey for both ExFAT- and APFS-formatted SSD drives. No one know why. Worse, formatting drives is now harder than before. Here are the details.

“Ask Larry Anything!” is a free-form conversation about video editing technology.In this short tutorial, Larry Jordan illustrates how to read the video scopes inside Apple Final Cut Pro and, by extension, Adobe Premiere Pro, because they share similar scopes. He also provides a table describing where to set skin tones to make people on camera look “normal.”

“Ask Larry Anything!” is a free-form conversation about video editing technology. In this short tutorial, Larry Jordan illustrates real-world speeds for SSDs and RAIDs, along with details on how much storage speed we actually need for editing video smoothly. The answers will surprise you.

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How fast does our storage need to be to edit video successfully? In other words: How fast is “fast enough?” Surprising, the answer is: Not as fast as you think. Here’s what you need to know.

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Measuring the speed of storage is an exercise in futility for a whole lot of reasons. Here’s what you need to know when you want to measure the speed of your system.

Recently, Alteon.io announced a new workflow extension for Final Cut Pro that provides an end-to-end media workflow from within FCP. (They also have one for Adobe Premiere Pro.) In this interview with Larry Jordan, CEO Matt Cimaglia explains why Alteon is, why video editors should consider it and how it compares to the competition.

Here’s a collection of two dozen websites with free – or mostly free resources for video editors.

In this short video tutorial, Larry Jordan explains that Thunderbolt, though very fast, still has speed limits, especially for video editing. And those speed limits vary, depending upon what you are doing.

In this short video tutorial, Larry Jordan explains what affects computer system performance for video editing, what can slow down your data and what speeds we should expect from our gear. There’s a lot that can affect the performance of your system.

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