Stereoscopic grading on the Mac

[Jack Jones]

Only going by the web information available (couldn’t make NAB this year) then I would say the minimum requirements appear to be roughly as follows;

DeckLink HD Extreme 3D.
Tangent Wave, DaVinci 2k/Resolve Panels (More support to be added soon).
Intel MacPro with OS X 10.6.
CUDA enabled nVidia graphics card such as the GTX 285 or Quadro.

As for 3D – Looks like it! It’s in the current package as standard and most of the promo stuff mentions Avatar was graded on it.

I’ve already got some big plans for it, especially as it’s so expandable, and hopefully there will be some newer, more powerful nVidia CUDA cards for Mac Pros in time for DaVinci OS X’s big summer launch!

Disclaimer: I’m only clawing together early release rumours and information.

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Arnie,

That’s a very good question and I wasn’t sure myself if one Mac Pro could do 3D so I referred your question to Grant Petty.

Grant said that Resolve software for Mac has all the same powerful features, including 3D support, as the Linux version. However 3D requires two NVIDIA cards for the left eye and right eye and no testing has been done with two GPU cards on Mac OS X and you might run out of PCIe slots for disk storage as the GPU cards take up a lot of space. Stereoscopic 3D also halves the number of realtime effects you would get on the same hardware so we’re just not sure how well 3D would perform on a single Mac Pro.

So this is something that we will look at after we’ve shipped the initial Mac version but we can’t look at it now so we’re not advertizing or promising 3D support. As Macs and graphics cards become faster, it might be possible to do 3D with enough realtime performance and effects to be useful. That would be nice and I’m sure our engineers will want to check that out in the future.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Jack Jones]

Fantastic to get an answer for the team themselves!

Cheers Luke!

[Stuart Ferreyra]

I guess some of us will have to consider the Linux license for professional 3D finishing. Nothing wrong with that in my opinion. Why??? Because….

I have done extensive research the last few months on professional solutions besides Apple Color with investments running $100K+. They didn’t include DaVinci Resolve nor Quantel Pablo (both definitely unreachable at the time). But now, with this business move by Blackmagic and if the press release is correct ($150K giving you the most powerful Resolve to date), I see no point in forking over $100K for color grading solutions that do not have the DaVinci brand recognition.

This is bold move that I suppose Iridas, Scratch, Digital Vision and maybe even Autodesk and Quantel are watching closely and probably losing sleep over it. Hopefully, we the artists and business owners that started with no investors nor family money but hard relentless work are the winners knowing that quality-proven top-of-the-line tools are reachable again.

Stuart Ferreyra
Timecode Multimedia
Colorist / Post Supervisor
West Los Angeles, CA

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[Arnie Schlissel]

Beautifully said, Stuart.

Arnie
Post production is not an afterthought!
https://www.arniepix.com/

[Arnie Schlissel]

Thanks, Luke. I wonder if it would be possible to use an expansion chassis to overcome these limits. Of course, that’s an imperfect solution because all of the slots in the expansion chassis share only the bandwidth of the slot it’s plugged into.

Regardless, I look forward to learning more. I think I see a Mac Resolve in my future!

Arnie
Post production is not an afterthought!
https://www.arniepix.com/

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Arnie,

We will look at any options to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the computer but I don’t think a PCI expansion chassis will help due to the shared bandwidth on a single slot. GPU cards demand all the speed that a dedicated slot can provide. 3D will continue to require a Linux system for the foreseeable future but our engineers would love to make it possible on a Mac Pro if they can.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Arnie Schlissel]

Thanks, Luke. That’s kind of what I thought. It would be interesting, if we could get a 2nd graphics card into the Mac to see what we could get out of it.

Perhaps we Mac Pro users should start a petition campaign for more slots…

Arnie
Post production is not an afterthought!
https://www.arniepix.com/

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Arnie,

More slots and InfiniBand support would allow multiple computers to be clustered together just like the Linux PCs. That would be nice!

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Steve Macmillan]

Will the Mac version of DaVinci support stereo? If so, graphics card would be recommended? And should I assume a Decklink HD Extreme 3D is recommended for playback?

Yes, on the Mac you need the Decklink HD Extreme 3D. At NAB they talked about making the system as open as possible, but for starters this is the card you’ll need.

STeve