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when is rendering not rendering?
it seems the “missing features” in the mac version of resolve (okay not missing but just difficult to access with the right hardware:eg panels) have caused a split in the davinci camp. i have another concern that has yet to be addressed before i switch over. i keep hearing that color sucks because you have to render and with resolve there is no render time! i propose the following for discussion:
let’s suppose a client walks in your door with a hard drive which contains a media managed project. avid or fcp, it doesnt matter at this point. am i to believe that you just hook up his drive and copy the files across to somewhere and then create a project in resolve and import the media? or can you just use his drive and not copy anything?
having got the project open in resolve you now are free to grade away and make it all look wonderful! so now what? you just give the client back his drive and the job is done? i’m sure somewhere along the line new media must be created. at the very least the graded session must be played out to somewhere….in the bad old days of tape to tape grading there was never any rendering, however you had to record onto something and that meant playing the master tape through the color corrector onto a new tape with the corrections applied…we never called this rendering in those days because it was real time and it just happened. but still there was a playout process. it took time
now i keep hearing about the davinci resolve not having to render anything ever. so does that mean you finish the grade, hit save and send the client home? of course not! somewhere new media must be created..whether its playing out to quicktime or copying the created media onto the clients drive in a format that he can then open…..
and when does this happen? if it was happening in the background and was so fast fast that by the time you graded your last shot then i would very amazed and slightly baffled! this on a mac?
so lets stop all this nonsense about rendering time being the achilles heel of color. all digital grading systems must create new media from the original source material. how and when this happens can create the illusion of not having to render or playout but in the end we all need to quit fooling ourselves. -
3 Replies
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Hi, I wont comment on the details of Color or other applications, just Resolve. As you say, if the client wants to take files away, a render is required. If he wants to take a tape away, you can play to tape in real time, thus; both take some time. Often the render is faster than real time but this usually depends on the hardware and certainly on the amount of grading and resizing you perform.
In the workflow you describe, if the file format of the portable source disk is can be played in real time via the portable source disk I/O, and example would be r3d material from a Firewire drive into a MacPro, you do not need to copy those files into another disk to grade. In the Resolve preferences just add that portable drive to the drive pool. Clips from this drive can play on the timeline, you can grade and then render back to this drive. Again, if the drive I/O is sufficient this render can be faster than real time.
We have customers using the Resolve on Linux with 4GPU and rendering SD DPX files at +100fps. I know at BMD post here in Singapore we often render HD images at +40fps.
I think the reference many Resolve users make about rendering relates to rendering during the grading process. Resolve can play the source clips and apply the grade parameters and display the images on the HD-SDI monitor without the need for rendering, or render cache, or background render. Many if not most other applications that grade HD resolution RGB data per pixel do need to render cache prior to real time playback just to see the grade. Make a change and you need to render cache again.
Of course, all this still depends on the image resolution, format, bit depth, storage I/O bandwidth, number of GPU’s etc etc but in most cases, Resolve offer full bandwidth real time playback to the HD-SDI monitor without a render.
Peter -
thanks for clarifying that…..thats the first real honest answer i’ve found. i’m not a resolve user yet but am very open to the possibility in the future….both color and resolve have their strengths and weaknesses but i just get a bit fed up with people making false claims. i use color exclusively but would be the first one to curse its shortcomings. i really miss the soft clip features and dedicated hue control over individual vectors that davinci always had. i have never had to render a clip to play it in color so i dont understand that scenario! but when you put them both together and compare apples to apples (pun intended in this case) it does come down to comfort and convenience. also for me there is a cost factor. $1000 is cheap in america and europe but in south africa it is a different story, the software is actually closer to $1600 and there are some other tech issues that have to be considered. i hope people will realize this and stop comparing a high end resolve suite with all the goodies, to a single mac running color. the rendering thing is a real bone for me as well. even in a tape to tape situation you still had to output the grade to a new tape which meant having 2 decks and playing out…this causes the price to be much much higher than just rendering to the clients drive and sending them off. and i mean really the last time i rendered a 30 second commercial it only took 90 seconds and it was done…thats not much of an inconvenience in the real world!
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I think the beauty is that you can have Resolve on mac what makes it more affordable
to most people. It needs to have qualified mac and gpu and you are there if one will summarize a lot.
Still playing out, rendering etc. in real time.Rendering speed counts when you have lets say 3 minutes HD or feature.
It will take so much more time to render cache with different gradings.
Generally if you get more time to do your job you can make it more complex in
the same time and get better results. I have seen it on some other rendering.
It may seem to you as 90 second but count it in one year and there you can
get substantial number in saved time.And yes convenience.
One reason i swapped to the mac. All jobs were so much easy to complete.
Now i have the same feeling with Resolve.
Some things that i really need in my studio: quality, speed, convenience.—
Margus
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