Message to Grant Petty

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Arthur,

Grant would fully agree with you and in fact covered this topic in some of the PR back at NAB 2010 when Resolve for Mac was first announced. He not only wants to have a choice of Blackmagic and third party capture cards but similarly more choices of control surface than just the DaVinci Control Surface and the Tangent Devices Wave. He would also like more choices for the GUI and GPU cards although that might be more tricky.

Resolve 7.0 for Mac has been a massive undertaking and is the first Mac version of Resolve and initially supports a limited range of hardware. Once it has been released, Grant wants to build upon the existing foundation and add support for other third party hardware and I know he’s specifically mentioned Kona cards before.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Rick Turners]

Are the other IO devices not working at all? (Matrox, Kona)?
Or are they just not fully tested and approved?

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Arthur,

Further to my last message, I notice that the same post from which you quoted also contained the following quote from Grant Petty:

“This is also the reason why we even visited the NAB booths of other capture card and control surface manufacturers on the very day DaVinci Resolve on the Mac was announced at NAB 2010. We wanted them to know we were going to open up DaVinci if they wanted to support it on their producers. So far, some have responded very positively to that, so that’s exciting.”

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Rick,

Other IO devices, including other DeckLink cards, are not detected by Resolve at the moment. We just want the first release to be as solid as it can be and there are lots of other cards we could add but would require lots of extra testing and time before we could release reliable support for them.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Arthur Puig]

I understand, and even though it’s been known that Resolve will support other video cards in the future, in the present it doesn’t, so it is probably just a momentarily bit of irony…

[Joseph Owens]

So…. any estimates on how many MacBook Pros and MacPro systems are out there that officially cannot support Resolve or even be modified to do so?
A.) because they are more than one year old, and
B.) were specifically built to support software that was shipping;

last point, I would “like to” own an Italian sports car, there are plenty of dealers who would “like to” sell me one…. or more!

jPo

You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?

[Joseph Owens]

Well, just reviewed all my MacPro machines and none of them qualify. Makes for a very easy decision as to whether or not to bother… maybe next version software… but I doubt it.

jPo

You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Joseph,

Resolve really does require a very powerful computer system with fast CPUs and GPUs. The certified Mac Pro’s start at early 2009 and the MacBook Pro’s at mid 2009.

I have heard of some people trying 2008 models and having success but there’s no doubt that the realtime performance would be significantly lower. 2007 and older Mac Pro’s have no chance as PCI Express 2.0 slots are required for both GPU cards. Similarly older MacBook Pro’s did not include a high performance GPU and so are incapable of running Resolve. Software updates to Resolve won’t change these demanding hardware requirements.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Vladimir Kucherov]

I’m curious if anyone’s benchmarked a 2008 system for performance. I believe every time I’ve seen it discussed words like “performance would be lower” are used, implying a theoretical estimation. But I haven’t quite heard anyone come out and say “yes, we’ve ran it, and this is how it’s limiting”

I’m just a little confused because from what I understand the 2009 model differs from 2008 by including 4 PCIe x16 slots, newer type RAM, and a faster processor architecture (not necessarily clock speed). But since the 2 GPUs will run on 2008’s 16x lanes, and DaVinci does all graphics computation on the GPU, I am not sure what’s going to be slowing the system down.

I’d love to know what it is that proves to be problematic on the 2008 models and how it actually affects performance.

[Peter Chamberlain]

While Resolve uses GPU for image processing there are many file handling tasks and codecs that are CPU based. Decoding Prores for example, or r3d. Recent feedback from two beta testers on 2008MacPros say they can get 444 HD @24fps, most of the time. Clearly every facility will have different drive systems and image codecs and formats they prefer and different resolution requirements too. While a 2008MacPro will work for SD, we have set 444 HD as the must do MacPro spec and the 2009 model, even the dual quad core 2.26 works well. Keep an eye on the forums as I am sure more user feedback will provide the real world performance reports you are looking for.
Peter