Bill Davis
Forum Replies Created
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Yeah, but what seasoned pro has EVER listened to a 20 something telling them what they need with other than cautious curiosity?
That’s not how the world works. Folks with long, hard earned experience always listen with a certain bit of tolerance to younger voices. It’s the natural way of things. The gamers arguing compute efficiency through the lens of THEIR needs, may not be relevant to someone trying to suss out something like video workflows for a multicam weekly live broadcast show.
Nothing more natural than this tension. It’s reflected here over and over. Totally normal.
It’s why I keep writing from my odd little corporate producer prospective facing general deadlines that are non broadcast, but which (this week) might be WAY more sensitive to information security issues than fps ones, something those gamers won’t give a whit about.
The more voices the merrier. But that means you need to figure out which ones are the ones YOU need to pay attention to.
And so it goes.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
If you haven’t already done this, there’s a nicel app called Audio Hijack that lets you route a computers various audio input streams to various record/monitor locations.
It would let you route the Skype call to a fresh recording and overlay the program playback into the same file.
Worth checking out.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Neil Goodman] “its kind of funny. like all these 20 year old girls/guys on youtube who were rented $10,000 computers who generally make, make-up tip videos are going to tell me why the new mac pro is worth it to me.”
Yeah, it’s every bit as stupid as 20-someting year old me telling the Broadcast Pros of my day that instead of waiting around until I could afford to pay $250 a quarter hour to get access to a 4 channel ADO unit in a bespoke production house to make useful videos, I could start producing stuff on DV with my Mac and make enough money to comfortably support myself and my family.
What was I thinking?
; )
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Oliver Peters] “Also this is with FCPX. Hopefully the same (or similar) ProRes performance will be there in other apps.”
From the general web discussions, I suspect Resolve and FCP X will both be close to optimized. But the Adobe suite being CUDA centric and maybe not looking as directly for Metal code, might not benefit as much.
Still, you’ve got to figure with THAT much horsepower, not being coded as optimized for CUDA might not matter quite so much?
I’m sure we’ll hear the user story drumbeats soon surrounding a wide variety of configurations.
I also suspect that the Afterburner story might be the one to really watch. As I understand it, there are slots in the MacPro that could support up to 3 Afterburner cards, theoretically each of which might eventually be able to be flashed to support a particular editors or shops regularly encountered codecs?
This “Afterburner” Programmable ASICS deal might be just the beginning of some very interesting things.
Time will tell.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
I doubt it will be the same as the IMac Pro monitors. From everything I’ve read, Apple pretty much re-imagined the Pro Display XDR from the light emitters out.
The only thing I’m sure of is that I spent 30 years pretty much as a slave to Vectorscopes and Waveform monitors. But over the past 5 years of so I ONLY seem to use them if third party content comes in looking wrong.
Once signals hit my screen and are scoped as OK, the rest of the pathway to distribution seeks to be ROCK SOLID – and when I see the work later via broadcast, on the web – or on a personal digital device – the experience is pretty universally reliable.
Pretty sure that’s because Apple built their “managed color” pipeline to enable that.
But I hardly think about color anomalies in my post pipeline much any more.
Huge difference from the early days.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
I think the salient point is to ask what the “reference” actually IS any more?
It used to be so simple when your countries broadcast system HAD a specific technical standard.But obviously, today the viewing landscape has dramatically changed with FAR more content consumed on personal devices than via broadcast feeds.
Decades ago in radio we used to use main studio speakers and cheap bridge monitors to be able to hear what something sounded like on both home audio systems AND on crappy single speaker car radios because THATS where more people heard the commercials and music we were creating,
Today, in addition to my computer monitor, my production desk has a decent consumer level TV, an older gen non-Retina iPad and an current gen iPhone and I check things like type legibility on all of them before I send the work out.
Same idea.
Notice how the work is likely to look on the devices it’s most likely to be consumed on.
The New $6k Apple XDR monitor probably (at least partially) hopes to establish a new de facto standard for assessing managed color for the coming era.
Basically, there’s a chance IT could become a new color delivery standard should it’s price verses capability prove compelling in tomorrow’s edit suites and it’s colorimetry proves acceptable to a wide enough slice of the market.
We’ll see.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
Skype does this pretty reliably.
Live screen sharing is found under the “three dots” icon when you’re inside a video call.
As always, your internet bandwitdth and the stability of the connection on both ends effects the quality of the image you send and the overall success of passing real-time frames. But with a good connection it can be very effective.
Good luck.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Oliver Peters] “For example, if I were to outfit a facility with 10 editors on shared storage in an “open office” style facility, then I probably wouldn’t go with 10 beefy workstations.”
This makes great sense to me.
And maybe you get 9 iMacs and ONE NeuvoCheesegrater – Everyone works day to day on the iMacs/iMacPros – and when some contractor sends you a huge assed multi-layer Maya file that slows things down, you plop it on the big box – and let it crank through the complex renders.
When it’s done, you send the files back to the regular working machines.
It’s kinda sorta (not really) like the old workgroup laser printer model. Share the hub.
Seems like a decent plan to me.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
If you can’t afford Flanders, I have a small NP-F powered Marshall that does a pretty decent job.
I think it ran about $500 back when I bought it years ago.
The thing I really appreciate is its “false color” exposure display mode. I use it a TON for stuff like quick chroma and luma key light setups and for when I’m renting a camera type that I’m not overly familiar with. It’s pink 80 ire swath across most of a face lets me know I’ve got the exposure nailed on THAT. And the colors surrounding it let me know what’s over and under-exposed, by comparison.
It will be interesting to see if the new Apple Pro Display turns out to be as good at color as they hint it might. If I could invest $6k on a BIG computer display that would double as a RELIABLE field monitor and NOT need something from Flanders – that might turn out to be a game changer.
We’ll see.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Mark Suszko] “When the walls are potentially delicate, you should be spreading the weight with a wooden pad and something under it to help protect the wall surface”
THIS.
If I”m using my autopoles horizontally in an unknown location, you should some 12″ squares of 1/4″ plywood, or maybe raid your kitchen for a few cookie sheets to act as force spreaders for the walls.
If the surface is particularly delicate, you can use stick-on hardwood floor furniture pads on the wall side of the plywood, providing even more protection.
This business is a continual learning process, for sure.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.