[Adriano Castaldini]

Hi, I run Davinci 17 on an hackintosh. I work mainly on cDNG 14-bit RAW uncompressed 2K-flat (scaling original HD to 2K flat).

Main issues I experienced with Davinci are: GPU and drive-speed.
For this reason I set my hackintosh in this way:
-CPU: old i7 EXTREME 10-core 6950X;
-MB: old Gigabyte X99P SLI (with 1x TB3);
-Ram: 64 GB;
-2 GPUs: 2x Radeon VII;
-ssd-OS: Samsung EVO 1TB nvme-M2;
-ssd-scratch/data: raid-PCIe (HighPoint SSD7101A-1) with 4x 2TB Samsung EVO nvme-M2 (tot. 8TB) RAID-0;
-Decklink Mini Monitor 4K.

The 2 GPUs and the RAID-0 HighPoint are the 2 main strengths of my setup.

Obviously I have also external storage connected via thunderbolt: 2x G-Speed Studio 48TB raid where I store all the footage. But I DON’T use the external raid for editing/grading. For that I use only the HighPoint internal raid.

I hope I was helpful

[Adriano Castaldini]

Hi Don. I can give you a personal opinion only about audio side. I love Audition too, and I used it a lot. Logic is not a replacement for Audition. Logic is a completely different software, much more composition-oriented. Audition, instead, has a “scientific attitude” about audio, and many great features of its waveform tab are simply unobtainable with any other software (mainly thanks to good old Syntrillium, certainly not to Adobe, of course!) The best option you have for “the great escape” from Adobe is going for Reaper. Reaper is “substantially” free and way more audio accurate than Logic, for sure! Anyway, in order to replace Audition’s spectrum features, you will want to add iZotope Iris 2 plugin to Reaper.
About Fairlight: I’m a Davinci Studio proud and happy user, and I obviously tested Fairlight a lot. It’s terrible: rigid and buggy (the plugins slots sector is absurd…) I really can’t understand how can be possible using it in a serious production. The worst audio software I ever used. Simply my humble opinion, of course.
About Affinity I can only say that up to now Publisher can’t handle plugins, and if you are a Blurb guy this could be a little point for InDesign. But it’s also true that if you are a Blurb guy you can always use their own software, right?
I hope I have been of some help.

[Adriano Castaldini]

Carissimo Luca,

thanks so much for Your kind reply. Your post is an appreciated confirmation of the decision I took very-few days ago: I finally bought the Rode NT-SF1. As You wrote, ambisonic «can ease some of the burden of creating a basic environment.» I completely agree.
So, I’ll test the mic in these days and I’ll see.

Thanks so much.

Cheers,

Adriano

[Adriano Castaldini]

Dear Mr. Ford, many thanks for Your kind reply.

Just a question: let say I’d start with an ambient recording in order to use that as a simple sound “base” for a scene, and over that “base” I’d add some mono-foley-sounds for the “main” objects in the scene. Now, moving a mono-sound in a 5.1 space is not so-difficult, but my question is about the ”base“: if my “base” is in stereo, and my project is 5.1, which are good/effective tips to “expand” the stereo-base toward the rear speakers?

In this scenario, an ambisonic-base could be a better option, isn’t it?

Thanks a lot in advance.

[Adriano Castaldini]

Thanks for your reply.
🙂

[Adriano Castaldini]

Great info! Thanks Brian.

[Adriano Castaldini]

I agree with Mr. Mark. Cool Edit 2000 was a great piece of software. It had a “scientific” approach to the audio and all the filters/effects were at very good quality. It was Windows only. It evolved into Adobe Audition CC (Win/Mac) with a LOT of great features: for example you can see the sonogram of your recordings so that you can attenuate/delete/correct/move every piece of the sound spectrum with “pencil” and “eraser” tools (like a sort of Photoshop for the audio, and like IRCAM’s Audiosculpt). It can also recognize a noise/sound with variable frequency (like an alarm siren) and delete it. This software is NOT a DAW (no MIDI instrument, audio only!) but in my opinion it has some of the best analysis tools on the market, and analysis is so important in audio treatment!

Anyway I don’t recommend to edit/process audio within a video-editor: the all-in-one approach is fast but too limiting (this is only my opinion, obviously).

[Adriano Castaldini]

Ahahah!!! ☺

[Adriano Castaldini]

Thank you Mr. Ford!
Yes, it’s not real fur ☺ Anyway my fur behaves like a true one: the first time I tried to dress the blimp, it lost a lot of hair in the air… on the blimp… on my clothes… (damn stupid pricey beaver…) Sorry, I know mine is not a professional attitude, but this little stream of consciousness gives the idea of my irritation ☺

[Adriano Castaldini]

Sorry Mr. Ford, but my English is a bit inaccurate: When you say “it’s not real fur, but he blimp by itself, will knock down most of the wind“, what will knock down most of the wind? The fur or the blimp?