Need some more SD or CF cards ? B&H is again doing a Friday Sale with major discounts on SD and CF cards. 64G cards are now very reasonable, and 128's aren't bad if you need that much space per card.

This site does get a small commission if you use the links here...a little support goes a long ways and this is a great deal. 

Its been a while since I turned up something special to watch. Great music, great shooting, great editing. How often do I ever say that ? well today :) enjoy some pure pleasure.

One thing that may of been missed by a lot of folks in the release of Premiere Pro CS6 - support for real time full res full frame effects by using OpenCL in Mercury Playback Engine. Almost everything thats done with CUDA on nVidia cards is also now being done as well in OpenCL on ATI / AMD GPU's. Read more on adobe site for the details. So I wanted to try this out on my iMac 27" as I figure it had a new enough GPU and enough VRAM to work.

A Little Hacking To Get Your GPU To Work

The list of offically supported GPU's is short - just 2. However its pretty easy to get your own GPU to work provided it meets the major requirement ( at least for CUDA ) of at least 768mb of VRAM. The GPU in my 2010 iMac is a 5750 with 1G of VRAM. A slightly older GPU, but enough VRAM to give it a go. Here is how I did it.

Pre Update, 10.7.4 is highly recommended as it has major OpenCL improvements, so I'd do this update first.

1. Location the actual Premiere Pro application

2. right click on the Prem Pro icon and in the contextual menu select "Open Package Contents"

3. Open up the Contents folder

4. Right click on the file named opencl_supported_cards.txt and do Get Info on the file

5. At the bottom of the Get Info window click the lock icon, enter your admin password when asked

6. If Sharing and Permissions isn't spun down, do so. Change admin at least to Read & Write, I also changed everyone as well. This will allow you to write the file back after changes

7. Change to Read & Write

8. Close the Get Info window

9. Now open the opencl_supported_cards.txt file into TextEdit. You'll see 2 cards list there.

10. Go to the OS X's top left apple button menu and select About This Mac

11. In About This Mac hit the More Info Button.

12. On the first screen ( Overview ) you'll see your GPU model. Drag the mouse cursor over the text so it selects, then hit Command C ( copy )

13. Back to text edit, go to the end of the last line. Hit enter, then paste the name of the GPU in.

14. Hit Save and then close the file

15. Start Up Prem Pro and enjoy hardware MPE on your ATI / AMD GPU

What If It Doesn't Work ?

If you start up Prem Pro and it crashes, you need to go back into the opencl_supported_cards.txt  and remove your GPU. If you find, with hardware MPE enabled that you are not stable, quit Prem Pro and remove the listing. So far my 5750 works fine, of course YMMV, I'm not responsible for you trashing Prem Pro, ect. Do this at your own risk... and have fun seeing if your GPU works !

This wasn't what I was planning to post today,  but it was pretty cool. This is a factory walk thru at LEE Filters showing how their resin lens filters are made. I guess if you ask why filters are so expensive for what they seem to be, here is the answer.

The bits aren't even dry on the hard drive yet and a bunch of CS 6.0.1 updates are live via automatic updates. Of interest is AME 6.0.1 which adds "Smart Exporting". Whats that ? thats when AME just copies the original media file data from source into your export file without a decompression / compression pass. Saves a compression generation, makes the process much faster. However, let me also be clear that ANYTIME you do anything with the image - scale it, position it, add a color corrector or other filter, ect any NLE has to decompress that frame into full raster RGB, do the processing, then recompress. There is no getting around that. However, if you are doing what amounts to basically cuts only, or at least no effects except some dissolves this should make exporting go much faster. Can't wait to see what comes along next.

Its HERE ! :)

Its more than cool that Moasic Engineering now has an antialiasing filter for the 7D.... except what about the few million more 60D's out there ? I mean seriously, there are FAR FAR FAR more 60D's than 7D's. please give us a filter for the 60D. Cool for the 7D, but its an old camera at this point...

Dave and Chris talk about some really great behind the scenes stuff in what goes on in creating After Effects. They also talk specifically about CS6. Dave Simons was one of the original founders of COSA. The interview is up on FXguide . There is some great stuff here and its well worth the listen.