bittersweet…

[Joakim Ziegler]

Yeah, we already have a test system running, it’s pretty great, and with Resolve 8, it’s going to be even better. We’re doing a 4-GPU system.

—
Joakim Ziegler – Postproduction Supervisor

[Jay Moffat]

[Joakim Ziegler] “nd please, spare me the “out here in the real world” thing. It’s a bit insulting,”

[Joakim Ziegler] “Whining about your customers not valuing you highly enough is hardly the right answer.”

I may have missed it, but I’m pretty sure I’ve not used or implied the phrase ‘out in the real world”, and I’m certainly not whining about my customers or anything else for that matter, this was I thought a mature conversation not an attack. I can only speak for the UK market, and I have alone this week been asked three times what system I use, it’s Wednesday as I type this, so I think I’m at least qualified to report what’s going on over here.

The last time I engage in this sort of discussion I think.

All best

J

[Craig Harris]

Equipment is important. Talented people are more important.
If a potential client makes choices based on the equipment and not the colorist, then somethings wrong. If you want to work with clients that demand Baselight / Filmmaster etc., then make the big, risky investment and go after that market. Warming though… just having the equipment they want won’t guarantee the work. At that point it’s all about the people.

C
Colorist, Vancouver

[Joakim Ziegler]

Totally agree. Resume also counts for a lot. It used to be that everyone but the most well-known colorists were not known at all, you went to a post house because of the equipment, but not because of a specific colorist. I expect individual colorists to have much more currency in the future, name recognition and all. Which is not a bad thing at all, it just means budding colorists have to be prepared to work their way up.

—
Joakim Ziegler – Postproduction Supervisor

[Toby Risk]

“We saw it from companies with Avid suites when FCP came along”

Interesting point. The result was that we saw NLE development stagnate for 12 years.

Avid focussed on their hard core users, offering small incremental tweaks. FCP updates allowed users to throw anything on a timeline and to hell with the mess and disorganisation it created. This left Adobe with plenty of time to catch up which they eventually did.

Finally, we have just seen some real innovation in NLE’s with FCP X and its magnetic timeline. This one development will save millions of hours of Editor’s time and will result in better quality edits, as Editors can concentrate on editing and not timeline management.

Apple have finally put some resources into FCP because their position is finally being threatened with Avid MC’s price drop and compatibility with AJA hardware, and Adobe’s powerhouse in CS5. To top it all the Mac hardware platform lacks support for the fastest GPU’s out there. Without FCP X Apple will lose a lot of MBP and Mac Pro sales.

In response to FCP X, Avid and Adobe will have to innovate as well, which is fantastic, albeit a long time in coming.

This sort of innovation could have happened 7 years ago had FCP and Avid been competitive.
It didn’t, and they weren’t, because Apple didn’t need to price FCP at a point to make a profit and fund R&D, they priced it to sell hardware. Now they are at risk of losing hardware sales, they have been driven to do it.

All along Avid’s NLE was a better editor, maybe not as flexible but quicker to operate and far more robust in terms of media management. But the price positioning of FCP could only have resulted in 1 of 2 outcomes. 1) Avid didn’t feel they needed to innovate hugely because they were continuously told by their user base that their’s was the better product. 2) If Avid had entered a price war with Apple they would have lost and the chances are they would not have remained in the NLE business.

Is either of those scenarios what you want to happen to Assimilate, Iridas, Baselight, Quantel, Mystica and the others.

Time will tell whether the BMD pricing of Resolve will cause the same effect with colour grading systems.

So far I am pleased to say they are doing just the opposite, but we are still in their growth stage with the software. I wonder what will happen when DaVinci’s penetration flattens off, or when BMD gets bought by a much larger entity with more control from accountants not engineers or creatives.

Time will tell.

PS. Don’t believe this ‘democratization’ crap. It’s marketing speak. FCP and now DaVinci are primarily being driven by the prospect of hardware sales.

Colourist | Editor | Post-Production Consultant — 23 years at the post-production coalface, and still loving it.

[Marc Wielage]

[Arthur Puig] “But the interesting thing is that the majority of other vendors were saying the same thing, and something I kept hearing since day 1, “Blackmagic is destroying the post industry””

I don’t think it’s quite that bad. This is no different than what’s going on in the audio industry, where you can go out and get the $295 version of Pro Tools and call yourself a mixer. It’s not quite the same as having the $20,000 version of Pro Tools HD3, tons of plug-ins, and a mixing stage.

There will always be bottom-feeders who try to compete with the big facilities, but I like to believe that talent and experience makes the difference. I would trust a guy who’s done a hundred studio feature films on almost any system, vs. a guy who’s got Resolve Lite in his garage.

I have no problem with filmmakers who want to make a stab at color timing their own feature, but my experience is that it’s even harder than mixing. And very few try to mix major projects on a desktop.

[Franz Jaeger]

I know people mixing audio for broadcast, on a laptop.. they use a few pro plug-ins for mastering, and the quality is quite good.. it is the skill and experience required that makes the difference here, not the hardware..

to get a much better result in a regular mix studio.. you would need something more than an expensive digital rig.. you’d need some serious and very expensive analog mastering hardware..

[Margus Voll]

You need proper room to hear all the audio details with pair of really nice speakers.

I hear every day audio that is made by some enthusiast and compare those with
audio that i make in my dedicated room – it is like vhs and digibeta side by side.

—

Margus

https://iconstudios.eu

[Jake Blackstone]

[Arthur Puig] “After spending sometime at the Autodesk booth, I have to admit Smoke is looking really good, I had situations where I was asked to do some quick compositing/VFX in a color session, and going to AE was a pain. I was able to see a color timing demonstration and I was impressed, the color tools looks like they’re getting closer to Lustre with every release, and now they even support control panels.
“

I don’t want to highjack the discussion, but how are Smoke’s color tools “getting closer to Lustre with every release”? They had never changed color tools in Smoke, since Smoke came out on a Mac. CC is as useless as ever and CW is as basic as it ever was…

[Arthur Puig]

Yeah, that was my mistake, it must have been Flame premium what I was playing with then, because the Smoke color tools are not that deep.

Now going back to the price debacle, I’m not complaining that Resolve costs $1K, (although I’d pay $5K), I’m complaining that is freaking FREE!!!

And what’s alarming to me, and all this started with Color, is the pace at which movies with terrible color correction jobs are growing , forget about scene-to scene matching, I’m talking about making stuff so dark that you cannot see the actor’s eyes, or shots with blacks way above the zero line (and some movies I’m talking about have Oscar winning actors), which tells me two things:

1 – The director or editor (which sometimes is the same person) is doing the color correction in his house, probably on a laptop, or they hired an iMac-mouse color timer which charge $800 to do the whole movie (I’ve seen this in Craigslist) now probably on a Davinci Resolve

2 – They and their producers cannot tell that the job is bad, or they don’t care, they’re just happy they saved money.

Which comes to the final conclusion:

Yes, talent is important, but what happens when it doesn’t get recognized? Or even worse, is the art of color timing also getting devaluated along with Resolve?