[Herb Sevush]

[steve Zavo] “What adapter card did you use to add your PCIe M.2 NVMe SSD drive”

OWC Accelsior 4M2

[steve Zavo] “Are there others you approve?”

Sonnet M.2 4×4 PCIe card

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Drew Lahat] “You can use those as USB ports, no? For example with this $8 cable:”

After spending 10K you’d think they could include more than 2 ports, whatever the format. I ended up sticking a $30 multiport into one of the top 2 ports, giving me 3 USB and some media card ports. Of course now I have this ridiculous dongle sitting on top of my gorgeously designed computer case. I guess that’s another reason for putting it under the desk, where it’s impossible to take the case off.

Apple design, nothing can beat it.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Michael Hadley] “wonder why it’s not been a commercial success and not officially on the list of approved cards.”

The Radeon VII already been discontinued. AMD created it purely for PR reasons as a placeholder till their line of Navi cards (5800X) were ready and were actually happy that it didn’t sell much as they were losing money on every card they sold.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Michael Hadley] “Curious as to why you went with the AMD Radeon VII GPU”

There was an article that said that the VII was actually one of Radeon’s more expensive server GPU’s that Radeon hurriedly renamed and released it to compete with Nvidia cards before Radeon had their latest Vega and Navi based graphics cards ready. As such it was actually a loss leader, being sold for less than it cost to build, and then discontinued once they had their cheaper cards ready for release. As such it’s supposed to be very good for GPU calculations and when twinned with the cheap 580X that comes standard with the Mac Pro it becomes very efficient: The 580X is used for sending video to the monitors, which it is very capable of handling, and the Radeon VII is used solely for computations.

This was the theory anyhow. It’s $1800 cheaper than going with the Duo Vega card and PPro uses the CPU more than the GPU so it seemed a good idea. As for how it’s working – it’s working fine, it’s immediately recognized by OS X Catalina and so far it seems like a good deal.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Jeremy Garchow] “It is weird to have to “allow” and “accept” so many actions that we used to take for granted.”

Yes, this is very noticeable in Catalina. Apple is trying very hard to make us secure and sometimes it’s driving me batty.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Bob Zelin] ” You HAVE to use these plug ins, and well – the plug in companies just don’t keep up, and the “major manufacturers” just don’t care.
Sorry for getting off topic – but it’s the same thing.”

Your not off topic, that is the topic. I appreciate the sympathy but it’s a pain we’ve all felt at one time or another.

Some good news, Mocha Pro, upgraded to the latest version is working fine.

I’m probably not going to even load Colorista IV, it has a couple of unique settings that I like, but Lumetri can handle my grading needs for now.

Waves Vocal Rider is still unable to configure on Catalina and if anyone knows of a similar app that works in Ppro I’d love to hear about it, as I’ve grown very fond of automatic gain riding in post.

Still haven’t tried Cine X, I’m figuring it was the culprit of all my Ppro crashing, but I need to do some actual editing now on a stable platform. Will test it out over the weekend.

As of now the biggest problem is Adobe/Catalina/dynamic link broken. Major PITA, but only the strong survive ( I think Jerry Butler said that.)

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Martin Jaeger] “Any chance you could expound on which plugins you suspect were giving you issues”

I’m up and running but there are still a few plug-ins I haven’t re-installed and I’m guessing one or more of these is the culprit.

Before I get to naming names I must say here that Catalina is an all devouring monster, especially if you’re running Adobe Apps. Dyamic link between Ppro and Audition (which is a huge part of my workflow) is broken and has been broken for months. Adobe upgrades come and go, but still no answer in sight. This is NOT GOOD !!! and has nothing to do with the computer you’re on – its a Catalina/Adobe issue.

I use a Blackmagic Ultrastudio Mini Monitor to get SDI to my Flanders Scientific broadcast monitor – but the latest BM drivers doesn’t work for me, I had to roll back to the 10.8 driver.

Izotope RX 7 was eventually installed, but not without a fight. First make sure you have the latest download, 7.0.1 (not 7.01) then you have to restart OS X in safe mode (hold down the shift key when starting) then keep manually setting the permissions to Read-Wright for all possible choices and in all possible locations, then restart again in safe mode and keep trying to install till it finally takes.

Uninstalled (as of yet) Plug-ins:

Mocha Pro 5
Cine X tools
Colorista IV
Waves Vocal Rider

I’m having problems getting the Waves installer to work on Catalina but I think it’s solvable.

Colorista IV was easy to load yesterday and I don’t think it caused any crashing, but I’m going one plug-in at a time today (tonight?)

Mocha Pro 5 is on the highly suspect list, but I don’t know if I have the latest version, so maybe that will help.

Cine X is my guess for the culprit, but that would be a shame. Cine X allows you to do “punch ins” on a finished ProRes file from within your native editor. For anyone who has to deal with QC deliveries of ProRes material it’s a miracle app, but it will be the last thing I test.

So as of right now the biggest problem is with Adobe, and I might just have to go back to working on the trashcan while I play with this in my “off” (when is that?) hours.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Martin Jaeger] ” which plugins you suspect were giving you issues? “

I’m still working on it, will post something if I ever figure it out.

[Martin Jaeger] ” Setting up a new Mac Pro today”

If you’re not using it with FCPX you have my sympathies.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Oliver Peters] “Did you check 64-bit compatibility with all of what you had installed before beginning this process?”

Yes.

[Oliver Peters] “Personally I would only advise doing a fresh start on this machine, de-authorizing and then re-authorizing any licensed third party apps and plug-ins. This is a new machine and the T2 security chip introduces a lot of gotchas.”

Eventually I tried that. Still had problems with Ppro that I’m guessing is tied to one or more of my Plug-Ins, they might be 64 Bit but that doesn’t mean their aren’t any bugs.

[Oliver Peters] ” He had to first update his trash can to Catalina and then create a new Time Machine back-up of it. Then that could be used to “recover” onto the new Mac Pro.”

I will give that a shot before sending it back. thanks for the tip.

[Oliver Peters] “As far as OS roll-back, you generally have never been able to do that with Macs. At least not in a supported way.”

Supported or not, in the past if I used Carbon Copy Cloner I could clone a drive from an older machine and then use the clone as a startup disk on a new piece of Apple hardware. Once I was up and running I could then use CCC to clone the external to the internal startup drive and voila, new machine with rolled back OSX. This is now no longer possible, he says after wiping up his tears.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf

[Herb Sevush]

[Shane Ross] “That’s not the case?”

Not the case. Apparently any new computer that comes with Catalina installed is very difficult to roll back to Mojave, including new Macbook Pros and Imacs, but as far as I can tell it’s currently not possible at all with the 2019 Mac Pro.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf