Here are some of the more interesting bugs we came across this week.

Adobe Premiere

• Swap edits bug (thanks Strypes)
• Issues with AVCHD media on OS X 10.8
• Color correction tools clamp to broadcast levels inconsistently
• Dragging video and audio clips together can move them out of sync
• AVI import options disappearing on Windows

Final Cut Pro X

• Many people have been unable to Share with 10.0.5
• Negative render progress
• Several threads documenting issues after installing OS X 10.8

Avid Media Composer

• Workaround for clips in an AAF not being seen by Resolve
• Dongle problems after updating to OS X 10.8

In the Preferences dialog for Premiere Pro there is a section called Memory that allows you to specify how Premiere Pro and other Adobe applications will use your RAM.

Premiere will allow itself a certain percentage of memory by default and you can decrease this by increasing the RAM reserved for other applications and the operating system. This is a maximum limit and the memory is only used up if it is actually needed.

Premiere, After Effects, Encore, Prelude, Media Encoder and Photoshop all use the same memory pool so the RAM is assigned between them. Premiere and After Effects are assigned the highest priority within the pool so closing these applications can improve performance in the other apps.

Adobe applications are designed to share data in realtime through dynamic linking so it is common for users to run multiple apps at once. It is therefore recommended to set these settings as high as possible. The default is around 70-75% of total RAM. Note that it's possible for third-party plugins and importers to exceed the memory limit.

After Effects has a Details button in its Memory & Multiprocessing pane that for some reason the other applications don't have. If you click this button you can see which Adobe apps are running, how much memory they are using and what priority has been assigned to them. As you switch applications from foreground to background, watch the maximum allowed memory change as the priority is lowered.

If you install additional memory in your system and it is not reflected in the Memory dialog, close all Adobe apps and delete the file ~/Library/Preferences/Adobe/dynamiclinkmanager/6.0/memorybalancercs6v2.xml (or whatever version you are using). On Windows 7 the file is located at C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\dynamiclinkmanager\6.0. When you relaunch Premiere the file will be recreated and it should see your new memory.

In the Memory pane you can also optimize rendering for performance or memory. In performance mode Premiere runs several tasks in parallel and uses all of your processor cores (up to 16). In memory mode it runs fewer tasks simultaneously so these settings will lower both CPU and memory usage.

Tips for optimizing memory usage

• Close Adobe applications that are not in use
• Turn off thumbnails and waveform displays
• Reduce the size of large images
• Optimize rendering for memory
• On Windows, try increasing the size of your page file (virtual memory). It should be at least the size of total RAM and some people recommend that it is twice as large.

Here are some interesting articles we discovered over the past week.

Automatic Duck Somewhat-Almost-Best Practices

Lots of tips, tricks and gotchas for using Automatic Duck.

How to create a DCP

A video tutorial on creating a cheap DCP for digital projection. You still need somewhere to test it though.

DaVinci Resolve Lite for transcoding Avid MXF media

Workflow for applying LUTs to ARRI Alexa footage for bringing into Avid.

Best Mac GPUs in 3D Game Shootout

The range of graphics cards for Mac Pros is poor so Bare Feats tested how fast Windows-compatible cards were after being flashed to work on OS X.

They also confirmed that the difference between Lion and Mountain Lion for graphics processing is negligible.

Adobe recommends OS X 10.8 for Premiere Pro

Premiere Pro CS 6 makes use of OpenCL so Adobe is recommending OS X 10.8 due to its OpenCL improvements. We'd recommend not using a brand-new OS for critical work though.

Switching to Premiere Pro: Day 1: Prelude to a fall

Michael Murie details his first impressions of Adobe Prelude. (It's also interesting to note from the comments that Wes Plate, formerly of Automatic Duck, is now the product manager of Prelude.)

Carbon Copy Cloner goes commercial

Useful backup tool Carbon Copy Cloner is becoming a paid tool but previous versions will remain free. Users who donated in the past will get free licenses.

Details on Xsan 3.0

Alongside Mountain Lion, Apple launched Xsan 3.0 without fanfare. It's based on StorNext 4.2 but there aren't a great number of new features.

The Foundry Summer Sale

The Foundry is offering 30% off their products if you switch from a competing product. I'm still running Shake so this is very tempting.

New encoding presets for Adobe Media Encoder

Adobe has released additional encoding presets covering mobile devices like the Kindle Fire and Nook and new presets for XDCAM EX and AVC-Intra in MXF wrappers.

How to re-download Lion from the Mac App Store

Now that Mountain Lion has been released, Lion no longer appears as an option in the Mac App Store. You can get it back if you've already purchased it by Option-clicking the Purchased tab.

How I installed Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion on my 2006 MacPro 1,1

Older Mac models such as the 2006 Mac Pro 1,1 are incompatible with Mountain Lion. Here's how to install it, but it's complicated and has drawbacks so it's not recommended for a working environment.

We've just started a new blog series called Bugs of the Week. This will be a weekly post that highlights bugs in popular editing software that we've come across in the past seven days.

Adobe Premiere

• Clip in/out is ignored when exporting via AME
• Various issues with MXF files
• If you put mono clips on stereo tracks, you may end up with duplicate audio channels in an OMF
• Autosaves not occurring if you're playing back when the autosave interval comes around
• Timeline redraw problems can be caused by an overheating GPU

Avid

• Workaround for getting external video out from Magic Bullet Looks 2.0
• Avid applications are not yet compatible with OS X 10.8's Gatekeeper feature

Final Cut Pro X

• Optical flow reverting to frame blending

Final Cut Pro 7

• Old third party plugins may cause crashes on OS X 10.8
• Certain XDCAM clips can crash FCP
• How to fix Out of Memory errors

(Crash Analyzer has some additional suggestions for fixing that last one.)

We recently released Pro Versioner 2.0.3, a minor update to our project backup and versioning tool.

Mountain Lion support

Pro Versioner now officially supports the recently released OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.

Mass removal options

If you are running low on disk space and need to clear out some backups, the new Remove Backups options in the Edit menu can help.

You can choose to remove all backups, all except the x most recent, or all older than x days.

The full list of changes is here.

Pro Versioner is an essential tool for safety and peace of mind when editing your project. To find out more, watch the overview video, read the user manual or download the free 15-day trial.

We recently released Video Space Calculator 1.0.4 for iOS and 1.0.2 for Mac.

In addition to the 75+ codecs already supported, we've added support for AVCHD FX, DVCPRO HD 50 and 60 fps, Canon XF 25, 35 and 50Mbps and 3K and 5K support for EPIC.

Video Space Calculator is a useful tool for calculating the disk space taken up by a wide range of codecs. It is available on the app stores for iOS and Mac.

Last week we released Pro Maintenance Tools 2.0.10, a minor update to our suite of tools for keeping your editing system running smoothly.

Mountain Lion support

Pro Maintenance Tools now officially supports the upcoming OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion release later this month.

Faster QuickFix performance

We've made lots of improvements to QuickFix so that it will repair your problems even faster, letting you get back to work sooner.

Media Salvage interlacing support

You can now specify interlacing settings to be applied to the salvaged media file.

Plugin Manager installer improvements

We've had lots of interest in our plugin installer from developers so we've made several improvements to the customizability of the installer. You can now add a license agreement (EULA) that the user must accept before installing, and you can modify the look with a background image and custom icon.

This is a subset of the changes in this version; see the changelog for more.

Pro Maintenance Tools is an essential tool for video professionals that is used by studios, broadcasters and freelancers worldwide. To find out more watch the overview video, read the feature list, check out the user manual or download the 15-day trial.

If you run Avid Media Composer 6 on Lion you may have experienced an issue where a process called hasplmd crashes literally every 10 seconds. This fills up your Console logs very quickly and causes the crash reporter to be constantly running and writing to the hard drive.

Here's a an example of my Console log (abridged):

7/15/12 8:18:10.906 PM ReportCrash: Saved crash report for hasplmd[70958] version ??? (???) to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/hasplmd_2012-07-15-201810_localhost.crash
7/15/12 8:18:21.040 PM ReportCrash: Saved crash report for hasplmd[70968] version ??? (???) to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/hasplmd_2012-07-15-201821_localhost.crash
7/15/12 8:18:31.208 PM ReportCrash: Saved crash report for hasplmd[70969] version ??? (???) to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/hasplmd_2012-07-15-201831_localhost.crash
7/15/12 8:18:41.378 PM ReportCrash: Saved crash report for hasplmd[70974] version ??? (???) to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/hasplmd_2012-07-15-201841_localhost.crash
7/15/12 8:18:51.620 PM ReportCrash: Saved crash report for hasplmd[70986] version ??? (???) to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/hasplmd_2012-07-15-201851_localhost.crash

hasplmd is used for dongle verification, although it took me a while to notice because I use Avid with a dongle and it worked just fine in spite of the crashes.

To fix this, download the newer 6.23 version of the drivers here (I chose the GUI version).

Alternatively, to disable hasplmd completely, type the following command in the Terminal:

sudo launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.aladdin.hasplmd.plist

You'll need to type your password after doing this.

We've just launched our newest application, Film Terms, for iOS and Mac.

Film Terms is a searchable glossary of over 400 filmmaking terms (and counting) and is a great way of keeping your knowledge up to date.

We're keen to hear what people think (and please request any terms you'd like to be included), so feedback is much appreciated.

I had this question asked to me the other day so I thought I'd write a quick article on it. You may have noticed that Compressor does not create H.264 files with timecode tracks when using the Apple Devices presets.

The reason for this is that MP4 and M4V files do not support timecode. However, the MP4 specification is based on the QuickTime file format so it's easy to create a QuickTime movie (.mov) instead of an MP4 and the file will still be recognized by iOS devices and the Apple TV.

To do this, simply add an Apple Devices preset to a file and then change the file extension to mov in the Encoder tab of the Settings window. Compressor will then create an iOS and Apple TV-compatible H.264 with a timecode track.