Media Composer 8.8 musings... A.K.A. "Script Sync: The Return"

Hey, so I actually managed to skip and entire calendar year! 2016 is a blur, I guess I must have been busy. Anywho...

So to be honest I haven't actually used MC 8.whatever that much since it's release. I have used it a couple of times for small shorts that I've edited for friends but I haven't used it in a real production environment much. Most post facilities are still renting out MC 7.4 systems on "Cheese Grater" Mac Pro machines, as they're fairly unbuggy (yep, just made that word up) and still support Phrase Find and Script Sync.

Now the very latest, greatest version 8.8 supports Phrase Find and Script Sync (It was as if millions of Assistant Editors suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced...) so I'm sure we'll finally start to see a slow adoption of MC 8 in post houses. Most facilities are reluctant to shell out for the premium priced but under specced and non-upgradable "Trash Can" Mac Pros though, so I'm not sure what's going to happen there. It's likely that we'll soon all be forced to work on HP Winblows machines soon, much to every creative person's chagrin.

Ah the steady technological march forward, well unless you're Apple, then it's the steady crippling of your own products and adding the "Pro" moniker to decidedly consumer oriented products, but I digress...

GPUs, CUDA, OpenCL and how to leverage them for Post

So, there's a lot of confusion, misinformation and half-information on the internets about GPU acceleration in your favorite NLE, coloring or conforming app and unfortunately the companies that make the software we all know and love are not particularly helpful on explaining what makes for a good graphics card for their systems, so I decided to break down what I know on the subject.

Avid Log Exchange IS Discontinued. D'oh.

Apparently someone saw my query on the Avid forums and wrote a brief article HERE.

It really is disconcerting that ALE is gone, as 24p points out, it really helps when moving logs between software and when I was an AE, I was always in the habit of running ALE files from the lab through Avid Log Exchange to make sure they're "clean", which, usually at least once a week they weren't. It's also handy for converting EDLs into log files for batch capture if you're having to rebuild an old project.

Anyway, it's annoying that it's gone, I'm sure a lot of people are going to be cursing when, like me, they eventually bite the bullet and upgrade to MC8. MediaLog is gone too btw, which was a useful tool to help keep your 2nd AE busy for a few hours  if your production was too cheap to have a lab log your dailies.

I'm starting to get nostalgic for the old days of tapes and floppy disks arriving every morning...