Weekend Reads - 7-28-12

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.