Alan Okey
5
COW Coins
2
DaVinci Coins
Forum Replies Created
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[Oliver Peters] “A nice presentation, but fundamentally skewed to pitch his preference for FCPX.”
Agreed. It also ignores the very real constraints that are imposed by editing for television, for example, in which the importance of timecode is central to workflow.
Horses for courses.
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[David Roth Weiss] “Revolutionary for its time, the GPU performance outclassed anything else available.”
The author is either wrong, or the author is referring to computers as they ship right from the factory?
“I thought the same thing. The only way the author is correct is if he’s speaking only about Macs. As in, “the GPU performance outclassed anything else available from Apple.”
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[Andrew Kimery] “is such a low frame rate that w/o enough blur the motion will look very choppy.”
Bingo. Shutter angle has a HUGE effect on the perceived choppiness of a scene. Some famous examples include the beach scene in Saving Private Ryan and some of the action scenes in Spike Lee’s Inside Man. Both shot at 24fps, but with a very tight shutter.
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[Jasper Sharp] “Would you advise buying this Aja tether on B&H?
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=&sku=652048&gclid=CNmd5Kz...”
Absolutely not. That’s just a cable to connect the card to a breakout box (worthless without the breakout box), and it’s extremely expensive.
You can find the breakout box with the tether cable included for less money on eBay:
Good luck!
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The Kona LHe and LHi were originally sold with a bundled breakout cable. The breakout cable is not a generic cable, it’s specifically made for the card, so there’s no third-party alternative.
You can attach generic SDI and HDMI cables to their respective connectors on the card, but for any of the other inputs and outputs, you need the original breakout cable.
It would be easier if you simply don’t buy the card unless it comes with the breakout cable. Kona LHi cards with the breakout cable pop up on eBay all the time. Alternately, you could buy the card without the breakout cable, and then buy the breakout box with the breakout box connector cable separately.
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[Harry Brockman] “All footage was shot at 24 frames and was then converted to 29.97 using Premiere Pro early on in the post process.
My understanding is this “software conversion” yields less desirable results than conversions via “hardware”.”
Not necessarily true. The traditional way to bring 24p footage into NTSC broadcast land is to add 3:2 pulldown, which introduces a cadence of three progressive frames followed by two “split” interlaced frames. Premiere Pro can do this automatically, provided that sequence settings are correct. The sequence needs to be a 29.97fps interlaced sequence in order for this to work properly. As long as the field order settings are correct for the format in which you are delivering (upper field first for HD, lower field first for NTSC D1 SD), software “conversion” (adding pulldown) should look identical to hardware conversion. There is no interpolation or blending happening with 3:2 pulldown. Where you might see a difference between hardware and software conversion methods is when cross-converting (720p to 1080i or reverse), downconverting (HD to SD) or standards converting (NTSC to PAL or reverse).
Most likely what is happening is that either your field order was incorrect in your initial Premiere Pro sequence, or the field order was reversed in the subsequent transfer/downconversion to Betacam SP. It’s going to be difficult to see what’s wrong without viewing the footage on a broadcast monitor fed by proper video output hardware (AJA/Matrox/Blackmagic etc.).
Make sure that your initial conversion is correct – that is, your initial Premiere Pro conversion created 1080i60 footage (29.97fps) with upper field first and 3:2 pulldown. If your footage appears correct up to the point that it was downconverter to SD by the third party, then the issue most likely lies with their conversion method.
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[Dennis Radeke] “Umm, we supported VST in Premiere Pro 1.0 circa 2003. Yes, I’m the Adobe guy, but you really have to put some facts out there to convince me that Resolve is more powerful when it comes to audio. “
I meant that between Smoke and Resolve, Resolve has the upper hand in audio. I wasn’t comparing Resolve to PP. And from what I’ve read, audio was a sore point in Resolve prior to v12.
Regarding multicam, of course it’s a big deal to certain types of editing, which is why I mentioned it. I primarily do promos and finishing, so for me, Smoke is ideal. I’m not bashing PP/AE, but for my needs, Smoke is the ideal tool. For any non FX-heavy finishing, I like Resolve even better due to its superior color grading toolset and rendering speed.
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[Herb Sevush] “So to answer – ideally I would like to have all aspects of my work under one roof, but not at the cost of having inferior tools to work with. Pragmatically, round tripping is a form of unified “roof” and at the moment Ppro supplies the best version of it that I’m aware of.”
Resolve and Smoke come to mind. Smoke doesn’t have multicam editing, but in terms of integration of editing and effects, I’d argue that it’s far ahead of the Adobe CC suite. No round tripping necessary, as all tools are available in one app. In terms of audio, Resolve has the edge because it now supports VST plugins right within the app, including custom plugin GUIs.
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[Mitch Ives] “You’d have to prove that to me. I’ve been using RAIDs longer than most people have been in this business, and I’ve never had a RAID that matches these TB2 models…
“I was speaking specifically about available GPU bandwidth, not bandwidth available to RAIDs. RAIDs aren’t generally bottlenecked by Thunderbolt, but GPU bandwidth is. Even if OS X were to support GPUs over Thunderbolt, throughput would be restricted compared to what is available via PCIe slots.
In terms of maximum available bandwidth, there is no comparison between PCIe and Thunderbolt. A PCIe 3.0 x16 slot provides 16GBps (gigaBYTES per second) in each direction. Thunderbolt 2 has two bidirectional 20Gbps (gigaBITS per second) lanes, which is only 2.5GBps in each direction. Putting it another way, a PCIe 3.0 x16 slot provides 128Gbps in either direction vs Thunderbolt 2’s 20Gbps. Even a PCIe 2.0 x16 slot, which provides 64Gbps in each direction, still has greater bandwidth than Thunderbolt 2.
I only mention this because some have suggested that the new Mac Pro’s GPUs might be upgraded by using external GPUs over Thunderbolt.
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Has your older tower been upgraded to this configuration?
https://barefeats.com/tube16.html
I think the point of the article was to show that in many ways, the older design has a much greater useful lifespan by virtue of its internal expandability/upgradability. It’s impossible for the new Mac Pro to have more than a single CPU, nor is it currently possible to upgrade the GPUs.
While it may be hyperbolic to call the new Mac Pro a “failure,” I do think it’s acceptable to point out that it is a somewhat limited/compromised design compared to what is available at the high end of non-Apple hardware. If you need more than a single CPU, nVidia GPUs, or PCIe slots, Apple doesn’t offer a system that can meet your needs.
This becomes an issue for certain applications that can make use of more powerful hardware than what Apple offers, such as Resolve or Flame. Although Autodesk recently announced their porting of Flame to OS X, the Mac version has a reduced feature set due to Apple’s hardware limitations.
Thunderbolt is not a panacea. OS X doesn’t support external GPUs, and Thunderbolt 2 is a bottleneck for GPU processing when compared with PCIe bandwidth. While it’s true that Thunderbolt 3 will raise the bandwidth, the PCIe spec isn’t standing still, and will leapfrog Thunderbolt 3.
As someone said earlier in the thread, horses for courses. I don’t think it’s impertinent to wish that Apple made a computer that has the same potential for power and expandability that we see from non-Apple hardware. Unfortunately, it’s clear that for Apple, there’s really no financial benefit to producing such hardware.