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Hi all, we're happy to announce the pre-release of SCRATCH v9! If you haven't checked it out yet, you should do now - it's pretty awesome 🙂 . Here are the release-notes: General SCRATCH v9.0 requires an upgrade of your license. If you have a valid v8.6 license, your license is automatically updated to include the new 9.0 version. After installing v9.0 (or reverting to the 8.6 build) your have to re-activate your existing license key. Contact licensing@assimilateinc.com if you have any question on licensing for version 9.0. This version contains a number of changes from the current 8.6 release in how certain formats are processed. As such, it is not backward compatible. Before upgrading, you should maintain a backup and are advised not to upgrade in the middle of a project. UI Updates To reduce the learning curve for new SCRATCH users, we updated the interface in several ways. Introducing tab navigation at the bottom of the screen to more intuitively find your way across the various modules in SCRATCH. Introducing toolset selection. A toolset exposes a specific set of functions and parts of the interface. Toolsets can be dynamically switched through the toolset button at the bottom of the screen next to the tab navigation. Current available Toolsets: Player/Review, Dailies/CDL, Finish/Full. Relabeling certain SCRATCH specific terminology like Matrix (now ColorFX) and Construct (while the module name remains Construct, your project is built up of Timelines). Moved the Editor settings to the generic User Preferences dialog box (gear icon in the lower right corner), which combines all the settings for the different modules. Re-arranged the construct scroll bar and mini timeline above the menu bar Right click menu now contains more context related options rather than navigation between the various modules. The slot Dis-/Enable and -(re)name functions are now part of the right click menu in the Construct. Holding the Alt key down while selecting the Dis-/Enable Slot option, will dis-/enable all slots in the Construct. With a Custom Command you can now indicate whether that should be included in the Right click menu in the Player. Various First-time usage elements: Guided Tour when starting SCRATCH for the first time (the animation can also be started from the Logon screen), highlight Import Clip button when no media is loaded, popup dialog to update the resolution and/or framerate of the project when loading media of a different resolution/fps. Highlight the Close Construct button when using the Fetch function. Added explicit link-button for scaling controls to (un-)link X and Y scale. Note that dragging across the controls to (un)link them is still a valid method. You can quickly adjust the Timeline framerate and resolution by drag/dropping a node from the construct on the resolution label right of the the tab-navigation buttons (rather than having to open the Render tab and dropping the shot on the main output node). Formats We updated a number of file readers to provide increased performance and features. Existing nodes with these formats will still be processed the same as always. New imported clips will use the updated readers unless specified to use legacy readers. Affected formats: Canon Raw, Phantom Raw, AVCHD, Cineform, Codex Raw and Panasonic Raw. New H265 encoding (as well as improved decoding performance). New ARRI fast debayer with higher quality. Overall performance boost through GPU decoding for H264 media and compressed YUV formats. Added support in the QuickTime reader to handle multiple audio channels in separate tracks. Note though that this only works for tracks with identical codec and sample rate. Also, whenever ambisonic audio is detected, only the first audio track will be used. VR Support for 180 footage, including reading mesh data for the 180 projection and including that mesh data when publishing. Native 2D to Equirectangular warp in the fill/mat menu, eliminating the need to insert a plug-in. Headset support on OSX Support for live audio capture and possible conversion to ambisonic, using the Sennheiser Ambeo transformer. Support for the new K1 camera from ZCam; live capture and media management. The live capture can also be wrapped in a stereo node for a stereo workflow. To preserve image quality, the VR Transformer plugin now auto adjusts its resolution depending on the type of conversion selected (cubic, equirectangular, etc.). Media Management Improved memory management to better facility large projects (10.000+ nodes). Also improved initial loading speed of certain codecs. Added new note colors and option to create default notes from a quick key. You can create default notes from the System Settings dialog box. Updated the Report generator to more easily create a custom metadata column selection. A new option to select which proxy frame to use for the report. A progress bar and cancel option for generating the report. Automatic (re)calculating media size when selecting the size columns for a report. A new Scene/Take updater panel to auto update take numbers while you browse your imported clips. The Match Audio function now includes any sub folders within the selected location in its search. The setting to import scene/take data from the audio file to the shot is now available from the Media Browser itself and is a user setting (rather than an advanced system setting). Added the MOS (mit ohne sound) clip metadata property. Generate default metadata for each new loaded clip, using available #hash codes. You can create default metadata items in the Project Settings. A new AfterEffects Custom Command to send of shots to Adobe AfterEffects and automatically load rendered results back into the project (tray) in SCRATCH. Activating the Custom Commands requires a few additional steps in AfterEfects. These steps are provided from a link in the Custom Command tab in the System Settings dialog. The Event/Error log now includes the location of shots that reported missing / missing LUT files. Added support to read and write .cc files (a derivative cdl format used by other third party software). Added standard "Compression" and "Bit Depth" metadata items for compressed media formats such as DNx, QuickTime, H26x (note that in case of ProRes the bit depth cannot always be determined and as such is not displayed). By default any display color space transform and LUT are now included when exporting a snapshot or proxy images (for reports). Batch update timecodes from the Media Browser. When applying an output template, the framerate of all nodes in the template are now reset to the main parent node. Also, any fit width/height is re-applied when adding an output template. This makes output templates better applicable for different sized / framerate projects. (Note that this does not apply to DNx nodes as the encoder used in that node is tied to a specific framerate and resolution). SCRATCH now reads the pixel aspect from the metadata of QuickTime files, if present. Misc Added a "C" option in the Editor with the transition controls to enable/disable clipping of the A/B images in a transition. Animation editor now shows values of keyframes when hovering over or dragging them. Fixes in the Structure View to drag/drop plug-ins into your composite. Plug-ins browser. Explicitly select how to apply a selected plug-in: on a (new) layer or on the current node. Double click defaults to applying the plug-in on a (new) layer. Alt+double click will start a new drag/drop action for the selected plug-in. Also, when applying a plugin on a layer that requires no inputs SCRATCH now excplicitly sets the aspect and fps to that of the base node (size was already set). The Player now always switches to Output View when you have multiple video tracks and enter the Editor. This behavior can be switched off in the user preference. Also, when switching to audio view in the Editor while on a sub-track, the Player now always auto-switches to the base video track. Control Surface updates. Added Various new panel mappings (e.g. for Snapshots) and included a new default Elements panel mapping. Fix on the framing controls in the Editor that did not update when adjusting the framing through a panel. Automatically use the Tangent CP200 Full mapping when 2 or more panels are connected Added three new default framerates: 50, 96 and 120 fps. Show tooltips even when a control is disabled. Exiting the Media Browser in a large project could take a relatively long time. Added a popup message to ask to delete existing media when starting a new render of a node that would otherwise fail to overwrite the existing media and generate an error. Fix for incorrect sizing of derived output nodes with non-square aspect project setting. Space-drag not working in staging with clip attached to cursor. A new Collector node now uses the aspect of the main output node. Burn-in controls were not updating on the Render tab. Various fixes in Tray: dropping a shot into a in the Player did not always work. Starting a drag action from the Tray could sometimes pick the wrong shot. Editing the Tray label did not work correct. Applying the trim buffer could create node references rather than copies. Scroll the Construct to the correct position when returning to the Construct from Playing an output node. Using the Add or Delete version through a panel could result to unexpected results when the Player Stack was not showing. Noise parameter was not properly reset on a general reset. Incorrect Clip selection with Shift-click in Media Browser. The "No Bottom Swipe" user setting now includes the top Player menu bar to be non-swipeable. Adjusted control sensitivity for Canvas X/Y Scale controls in ColorFX. The EXR compression types ZIPS and ZIP where mixed up using one method while the other was selected. Project poster on the logon screen could show too big for shots with aspect not equal to 1. The Clear Audio button in the Media Browser did not clear the audio slip. Added an Advanced System Setting to enable loading Panasonic AVC Intra with our own codec (instead of FFMPEG/CSP) which is faster but does not support audio. ARRI Raw Red-gain behaved incorrectly with Fast debayer. The Match Grade function in the Curves menu was broken. The hash code ‘#md[key]’ for clips where the metadata-key-item did not exist, generated a wrong value. The Watch folder on the Mac was not working correctly. Various updates of external SDK versions: RED SDK version 7.0.7, AJA SDK 14.0.1, BMD DeckLink SDK 10.10. A trial of the current version can be obtained here for SCRATCH: http://register.assimilateinc.com/registration.aspx?p=1 and here for SCRATCH VR: http://register.assimilateinc.com/registration.aspx?p=3 Website and manual updates are in the works (hence the pre-release) and will be finished in the coming weeks 🙂 . Cheers everyone! Mazze