Any IRIDAS Speedgrade users care to weigh in?

[Oliver Peters]

[William Edwards] “Is it not possible to go from a Thunderbolt connection out to something like an Ultrastudio 3D Blackmagic to SDI connection into a calibrated monitor?”

I don’t think so. AFAIK, SG is designed to send the UI to one display and a video signal out through the SDI port of an NVIDIA card with internal SDI outputs. That’s the same thing Assimilate has done with Scratch, but something Apple has never supported.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[David Jahns]

As I understand it, SG does NOT talk to the Mercury Transmit module, which is what gets sent out to the KONA/BM card – via either PCI or Thunderbolt…

In it’s current form, the only way to go out to a proper monitor via SDI is to use a Windows system, and to have a 2nd NVIDIA graphics card with SDI output on the card.

David Jahns
—
Joint Editorial
Portland, OR

[Dennis Radeke]

For CS6, SpeedGrade needs an NVIDIA SDI board to monitor output. Given it’s past pedigree in film workflows, this wasn’t a big deal, but as we bring SpeedGrade to a wider audience (like now), this is a huge issue.

We know we need to address this.

For what it’s worth, I love the NVIDIA guys and products but I’ve been very upfront with them that their SDI board is too expensive. If they had an i/o board that was $1500 more or less, then you guys could have a monitoring solution and CUDA acceleration in a single solution. That would be nice.

Dennis

[Mike Molenda]

I think one of the great things Apple did with Color, and is missing from SG, is the ease of roundtripping.

You hit “Send to Color” and an XML was generated for you, brought into Color, and connected to your original media. Start your grading right away, no fuss, no muss. When you were done grading, you rendered, hit “Send to Final Cut Pro,” and your sequence was magically right back in Final Cut, with your correction applied. If nothing went wrong during the process, that is.

Even though Color was kind of a leap out of the comfort zone for FCS users, it never felt like Apple was sending you too far out into the woods. Sending an EDL to SpeedGrade feels a whole lot like the conform process in Resolve, and I feel like that’s going to be a turnoff for a lot of new users. But people seem to be flocking to Resolve Lite, so what do I know?

I’ve done a decent amount of work in Color, and a bit in Resolve Lite. So far there is nothing too unusual about the way SpeedGrade works in comparison to these applications. From a colorist’s perspective, everything either makes sense, or you can at least understand the thought process behind it.

Most of the work I do ends up distributed over the web, so the lack of broadcast monitoring isn’t a huge deal-breaker for me. If I need a calibrated monitor, it’s usually in a situation where it makes sense to pay for use of someone’s grading suite for a day or two (or exchange an in-kind favor). But I can see how this is going to limit SpeedGrade’s day-to-day usability for a whole lot of people, especially given the limited number of I/O devices it can talk to.

[Michael Gissing]

I thought the PPro send to SG worked. EDL is an alternate from the videos I have seen. Not got my hands on the software trial yet so can’t say for sure.

Also from what I hear dynamic linking with SG and Pr will be implemented soonish so it will be more integrated round tripping than FCP and Color managed, much like AE is now.

[Mike Molenda]

I should clarify. Send to SpeedGrade does work, and is pretty foolproof. However, the way it works is not ideal for every project.

It renders your sequence out to DPX first, and sends that to SpeedGrade. So there’s some waiting, and arguably a significant amount of disk space needlessly eaten up. Final Cut Send to Color outputs an XML, and then relinks your original footage in Color automagically. Using your original footage is the key here. Which is what using an EDL does and Dynamic Link would do.

And the EDL workflow in SG is pretty smooth after you get used to it. If your clips are not all in the same directory, the reel loading process will take you some time, but it’s not too bad.

But getting your graded sequence from SpeedGrade back into Premiere is no picnic. Again, this was something FCP/Color handled for you. The only solutions I’ve been able to figure out so far:

A) Render, Reconstruct a timeline with your graded media in SG, Export EDL. But this is dependent on rendering with the “position in sequence” TC option, or adding the clip number to the head of the clip filenames. Rendering your clips with handles is out of the question here, too.

B) Render, Reconstruct your sequence in Premiere. Again dependent on sequence TC and/or clip order naming.

C) Render, Duplicate Premiere project, Relink to graded online media. This one is dependent on using the “source” TC option, and maintaining the original clip filenames. Seems like it could easily fall apart with duplicate timecodes, say from a DSLR, or if the clips lack unique filenames, like footage from Panasonic AVCHD cameras.

I am also stuck on the export options themselves. I’m using a 2 minute, 58 second long test sequence. Every clip is coming out as 2:58 long (the exact length of the sequence), where it will hold on the first frame of the clip until it gets to that clip’s position in the timeline, then it will play through the clip, then it will hold on the last frame of the clip for the remainder of the 2:58.

I think I was able to solve this on the demo version, and get my renders to export at the proper clip length. Can’t seem to remember the setting or whatever I used now that I’ve installed the full version.

Also can’t figure out for the life of me how to add handles to the graded clips. That option is grayed out by default.

If anyone’s curious, I’ve been making my way through the manual here on Adobe’s site:
https://helpx.adobe.com/speedgrade/topics.html
But it is still kind of incomplete, and missing a lot of specifics.

I posted about SpeedGrade in another thread, and was also pointed to the old IRIDAS manual by the Adobe SG Engineering Manager / Founder of IRIDAS. Because this is Adobe, and if you have a technical problem, the friggin’ project lead will track you down and answer you personally. 🙂 You can find it here:
https://doc.iridas.com/index.php/Category:SpeedGrade