"Ruthless Reviews" Ain't Bad At All, Right?

A little while ago I sat in our Mr Alex Lindsay’s Office Hours again. I love sitting in on that panel to attempt to answer questions from the creative community as well as LEARN more stuff for my own skillset. Periodically, he and the panel conduct “ruthless reviews” of each other. The reviews range audio, to video, to set, and so forth. All about making the online/virtual meeting experience better for the panelist and their audience. I was a part of this ruthless review and it was quite helpful. Click below to watch the first hour of q&a and then watch the second hour of the video as we get into ruthless reviews. Enjoy.

Screenshot via Alex Lindsay and Office Hours

CANON C70: Not Your Average Cinema Camera

So for about two weeks, I had the chance to play around with the Canon C70* cinema camera. I wish I had more time with it because during those two weeks, I was pretty busy with some other stuff. Lol! Funny how that works out, right? Anyway, I shot a segment for our show Hands On Tech at work regarding this camera from Canon. It’s a 4K cinema camera* that’s built about like a beefy DSLR. Click on the image below to check out my video and thoughts on this. I appreciate Canon* showing me some love by sending over the loaner for me to play with. I appreciate all of you supporting me and the content I create. Be well, yall. Do well, yall.

#CreateAndDominate

Image by Ant Pruitt all rights reserved

(*) Affiliate link used. When you use my affiliate links, I receive a small commission from your purchase at no additional cost to you as the consumer. Thank you for your support

Canon Controversy and More Discussed with Don Komarechka

This week I had the honor and pleasure of joining my friend Don Komarechka on his podcast, Photo Geek Weekly. The discussions ranged from light-hearted to heavy to geektastic around the world of photography. I also share my pick of the week, which is a camera I absolutely loved. I really enjoyed being on his show. Click through here to check out the show notes of the episode on his page. Or you can just click here to play the episode.

Also, make sure you check out his new book about the world of macro photography. I was gifted the book and it’s UNBELIEVABLE. Get it here. It’s truly a “universe at your feet” when it comes to macro photography

Image by Ant Pruitt All rights reserved

Adobe "Modernizes" Premiere Pro With New Beta UI

Most content creators are familiar with Adobe’s video creation tool, Premiere Pro*. Yes, there’s a bit of a love hate relationship with this software, but it really does do a good job making high quality video creation accessible to many. The UI has been fine for me, but apparently, Adobe and the community thought the user interface could be improved. So, the Adobe video team is doing just that via a public beta.

Image by Adobe

Phase 1 of the beta update: removing the techno mumbo jumbo

When launching Premiere Pro, the existing opening dialog to create a new project is fairly extensive. You have the open to name the file, but then you also have scratch disk, ingest and processing options to address. Most of the items on that opening dialog really isn’t needed just to “create” a new project. Adobe and the community has realized that and is getting rid of this information. Adobe is streamlining this opening dialog for a more visual interface allowing you to see your media and set necessary project parameters on one screen instead of multiple tabs. It ALMOST looks like the opening screen of Premiere Rush. Almost.

Image by Adobe

Once you’re into your project, the timeline interface and workspace looks fairly similar with a few tweaks to the menus and panel headings. For example, the main header bar is not as big as it used to be. This now gives you a few more pixels of screen space for your source and program monitors. Adobe states that this is an effort to not only give a few more pixels of screen real estate, but also an effort to unify the user experience (UX) across other Adobe products such as Photoshop, Lightroom and After Effects.

Exporting the content you create is very similar to the Premiere Rush interface. You get a couple presets to handle the export based on the platform where the content will be viewed. Video formatting varies from platform to platform. Having presets allows your content to be viewed in its best format on the platform without a bunch of compression and artifacts.

As a Premiere Pro* user, I will have to ease into the new redesign. I’m a creature of habit when it comes to using my creative apps. Heck my current layout of Premiere Pro has a custom workspace that I set up to better fit my needs. Fortunately, this will still be an option for us old dogs struggling to learn new tricks.

This is only the first phase of the new interface redesign. Adobe didn’t specify a timeline for subsequent phases, but wanted to reiterate that phase one is all about getting started with a project as well as the export process. Adobe did mention that more updates are coming to the Lumetri color panel as well as background video rendering beyond using Adobe Media Encoder software. Find out more about the beta here on the Adobe blog.

(*) Affiliate link used. When you use my affiliate links, I receive a small commission from your purchase at no additional cost to you as the consumer. Thank you for your support

Learning A Lot From Office Hours With Alex Lindsay

I’ve had the pleasure to meet Mr. Alex Lindsay a few years ago since moving west. There was so much I didn’t know about him beyond the world of seeing him on TWiT TV. After meeting him and shooting a show with him, the pandemic happened. For him, the pandemic mattered not. He and his business partners pivoted and created something I enjoy each week that’s designed to help content creators learn more about the craft. It also serves as a great community for open discussions about the topics shared and learned. it’s called Office Hours.

Every now and then I’ve joined Office Hours as a panelist to answer questions that I may actually be familiar with. A lot of the time, I have no idea as I’m not a creator that’s out on movie sets in Hollywood or someone that livestreams large productions on a regular basis. But it’s nice to be able to contribute where I can.

On this episode below, the second hour of Office Hours focused on orchestral recording and how to position the mics. It’s such a nuance skill. The presentation was handled by Karl Asmussen of Australia. Sorry, I can’t find a website or social media profile to link to him. Anyway, watch his presentation by clicking the image below. You’ll learn a LOT.

Image screencap from Karl Asmussen

Adobe Continues Performance Boost for M1 Macs

Coming off the heels of WWDC, Adobe announces more updates for its Creative Cloud product line. Specifically, those compatible with the Apple M1 silicon. A lot of the products have been supported for a little while with others still being in beta status, but today some performance updates were announced.

Performance Boosted

Adobe teamed up with Pheiffer Report to take a look at performance of the Creative Cloud apps running on M1 Macs from Apple. The test hardware included the M1 Macbook Pro (16GB RAM), Intel Core i5 Macbook Pro (16GB RAM) where both were connected to an Apple Pro Display XDR. Lots of benchmarking test were completed looking at Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and more focusing on not only the simple use of the user interface (UI), but also some graphic-heavy or CPU-intensive functions of each app. It’s found that on average, the Creative Cloud apps are 80% faster using the M1 systems. Pretty impressive. Adobe and Pheiffer had a bunch of charts and information here showing all the details of the testing.

With that said, the video editor for Adobe, Premiere Pro, is still in beta status. I’ve not heard anything bad about the beta other than a few “quirks,” but it’s believed that the beta runs circles around the Intel version on performance.

Better Collaboration Tools and More Tools for Lightroom

I tend to focus more on the photography side of things when it comes to the Creative Cloud. Yes, I use Premiere, and After Effects, but I open Lightroom and Photoshop more often. Unfortunately, I’m not on an M1 so I don’t see these particular performance boosts. But Adobe has added more ways to collaborate on the photography front with cloud collaboration capability. This allows you to get an extra set of eyes on your photos project and tweak the editing before clicking “post” to Instagram or whatever your platform of choice is.

Image by Adobe

Far as the editing tools, the AI tool found in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) which enabled you to convert an image to a much higher resolution image is now available in Lightroom Classic as well as Lightroom. This Super Resolution feature touts increasing your photog resolution by up to 4X. In my experience, the previous iteration was “ok.” Wasn’t great, but it did make a difference.

Adobe has a lot more information on its blog regarding the updates for Lightroom, Photoshop with its new custom brushes, Illustrator and more. I guess I better get myself ready to install these updates as well as find a way to get my hands on an M1 Mac. Ha!

I Shared My Experience Shooting Photos in China

A few years ago I had the opportunity to cover CES Asia in Shanghai, China. It was my second opportunity to visit another country for my work and my first time in Asia. It was AMAZING and I’ll never forget it. A little while ago, I was approached by my man Steve Brazill to be a guest on his podcast Behind The Shot to discuss a particular photograph I captured while I was in China. No, it’s not the photo below, but if you click on the photo below, you’ll be able to watch the video and see the image I captured. For the record, the show below was actually captured in China. THANKS for checking it out and thanks to Steve Brazill for having me on. And thanks for buying me a beer. 🤜🏾

Images by Ant Pruitt - all rights reserved

Nikon Announces Rebates and Deals on Cameras

As an Adorama affiliate, I’m notified of certain deals regarding photography gear quite regularly. Sometimes, the deals are not all that, but then there’s the deals like this one going on for the Nikon line of photography. At the time of this blog post, Nikon is offering up to $500 in rebates on select camera bodies and camera bundles. Here are a few of note below.

Lenses

Nikkor 70-300mm f/4.6- 5.6. Was $596, now $396.

NIKKOR 35mm f/1.4G AF-S BUNDLE. Was $1696. Now $1546.

NIKKOR 35mm f/1.8G AF-S Bundle was $196. Now $166

Cameras

D780 FX-Format DSLR with 24-120mm kit lens bundle was $2796. Now $2496.

Z50 Mirroless with 16-50mm f/3.5-6.3 kit lens bundle. Was $996. Now $896.

Those are just a few of the items I thought were worth mentioning. Go to Adorama via my affiliate link to see more of the deals. Thanks for checking it out and supporting my content.

New Discount For BlackMagic Design ATEM Mini Pro Line

BlackMagic Design is now offering $100 discount on its ATEM Mini Pro and ATEM Mini Pro ISO. These devices are quite popular in the world of video production and became even more popular with the 2020 pandemic as more people were creating content remotely.

More about the ATEM Mini Pro and ATEM Mini Pro ISO

The ATEM Mini line of products is a cool piece of hardware offered by BlackMagic Design to be used for video switching. Well, that’s the simplistic explanation. The ATEM Mini line has a couple of different SKUs. You have the ATEM Mini, the ATEM Mini Pro , ATEM Mini Pro ISO, ATEM Mini Extreme and ATEM Mini Extreme ISO. Whew that’s a lot. Thing is, they’re pretty useful for whatever level of video production you need.

The ATEM Mini Pro and Pro ISO are popular because of their livestreaming integration as well as the isolated track recording. Not something everyone needs, but still useful. I usually recommend the base ATEM Mini as it’s useful for most anyone.

The discount is $100 off on the ATEM Mini Pro and the Pro ISO on Amazon and Adorama , which are my affiliate links.

image by BlackMagic Design

I'm Trying The NFT World

Ok so I FINALLY created something to put into the NFT market. What is NFT, you ask? Well it’s basically a way to create digital art/items for the world of crypto. A better explanation is found here at the 3min45sec mark on the show. Explanation was offered up by Mr Trey Ratcliff, one of my favorite photographers.

Why try NFT?

My answer to this question is a question. Why not? I have a couple crypto wallets with some assets just sitting there. No I’m not rich on crypto, but it was just sitting there. I figured I could use it to invest in myself and see if I could earn a few more dollars with my work.

Creating an NFT wasn’t too difficult for me, but creating an NFT account was a little bit more challenging. At least, I can see why it would be challenging. I had to move crypto assets around into an Ethereum (ETH) currency, figure out an NFT marketplace to utilize, create a profile said marketplace, upload my content, connect a crypto wallet to the NFT market and see what happens.

Over on Twitter, Miss Roxanne has a very nice thread to help walk you through selling NFTs. She did a lot of the leg work for you. You just have to follow the steps. The thread is here. Be sure to give her a follow and thank her for this aide.

View my NFT (UPDATE: The below NFT has sold, but I added more)

You can get a look at my NFT on the official market on this link. Here’s a watermarked screenshot of it. If you can afford to take a look at creating your own NFT work, I say do it. It’s a bet on yourself. I’m listing this initially for just a few days. If it doesn’t sell, I’ll re-list it later for a longer duration. Either way, I’m happy to be trying this out as a digital content creator.