[Bill Davis]

Messy 24 hours- then everything seems back to normal.

I’m slammed with deadlines, but X is chewing through the edits with no problems.

No time to experiment, since paid work deadlines are almost daily so far this month.

More when I have time, but all seems well in both my laptop and MacPro where I’m alternating on two different projects (one video, one stills against VO)

All appears well.

Suspect Oliver may be correct about background indexing.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

[Michael Aranyshev] “KiPro doesn’t make the problem go away because video out on the Red One camera is either 60 or 50 fps no matter what actual shooting fps is and the timecode embedded in the Red One video out signal is 3 to 6 frames ahead of the actual timecode in recorded R3D.”

I’m out of my depth with RED stuff, but that sounds suspiciously like a digital cousin of the “sound over distance’ audio latency I’ve been dealing with for my whole career on live events.

If it’s constant, can’t you just RE-ID the signals frame to offset all the TC values by whatever the miss-match is? The digital equivalent of inserting a fractional signal DELAY when doing live audio and you need to “time sync” multiple speakers at variable distances from a stage?

If the problem is any kind of simple “math offset” I can’t believe it will be long before someone writes a few lines of updated code to fix it.

Seems kinda trivial. But that’s probably because I don’t actually understand the issues you’re facing well enough.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

I’m actually having some similar issues today.

Long renderers that seemed to go on forever.

I was also getting what appeared to be phantom “shared disk” messages and broken links to render files. – stuff that I tend to associate with Unix file management stuff, rightly or wrongly.

I just rebuilt my Disk Premissions and that seems to have made things a lot better.

I think there’s a LOT of new code in this beast – and the old projects and files are having to sort themselves into the new array and stuff is getting messed up along the way. But that’s just an un-educated suspicion. I haven’t a clue what’s going on under the hood.

I’m going to go slower and make sure I give the program time to re-render and reconnect stuff and try to stop being impatient and shutting down if something doesn’t work instantly after a few clicks.

Hopefully, whatever “background tasks” that appear to keep auto-running have finally done what they need to do and things are stabilizing.

We’ll see.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

[Michael Hancock] “[Bill Davis] “Since X is a modern work in progress – it’s up to the reader to consider whether as X moves into the future where Red, DPX and ARRIRAW are increasingly relevant – X might adapt really well to those needs.”

Current, smaller data formats – how does it handle P2, AVC-Intra, AVCHD, and XDCam? Native file format, or does it require a rewrap?
“

And what does “require a re-wrap” mean in the modern context.

Every NLE has to, at some point, take whatevr’s tossed on it’s timeline and transcode it to whatever you want as a target export steam. NOBODY with a brain wants to put an XDCAM clip next to a go-pro clip and want those two clips output into separate files. So one (or both) is going to have to be transcoded. Period.

What Apple re-built X to do was to accept a variety of formats on ingest (not universal, but pretty functional, IMO) and then do the transcoding in the background while letting the editor go about the business of doing the work of editing.

It’s a smart modern approach that I understand other software employs as well.

Obviously “codecs” are a moving target. As long as the capability to do background transcoding is in place – the stopper for working with ANY format in a system like X’s must be how easy or difficult the placed format is to transcode. Encodings with fewer “actual” frames and more “predictive” or “calculated” frames” will obviously be harder for any software to work with rapidly. But we’re already seen that it’s possible to build hardware level encoder/decoders that rapidly handle stuff like this. And I suspect that as workflows like X’s grow in popularity – we might see more “transcoder boxes” that let you add hardware t to work efficiently with your particular flavor of footage. Isn’t this essentially what the KiPro and it’s kin are? They take a feed and do a ProRes transcode on the fly.

So only those that NEED the ability for super-rapid conversion have to pay for it.

Everyone else has to deal with the “slow but built-in” CPU or GPU based transcoding.

Seems perfectly fair to me since the other path is that the engineers have to “optimized” the software for all manner of footage types that I may never actually use.

Remember, this is general purpose affordable software. If you wish to use it with RED footage, isn’t the presumption that you have the budget for access to something like a KiPro that simply makes the problem go away?

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

[Walter Soyka] “Apple may be trying to leapfrog the competition on user experience, or on data model — but with respect to infrastructure, they’re playing catch-up.”

Thanks for the link. Interesing.

So would it be fair to extend the “plumbing” analogy to aver that with Avid and Premier, they’ve been working inside their houses to remodel not only the shape and color of the structure, but they’ve been installing new plumbing and wiring on an incremental basis as it is needed? This has resulted in a house that has the same basic shape and functions (compatibility) but more modern internal services available.

Apple, at some point, looked at their huge mansion that had to accept that while their “visitor load” was significantly larger than the A’s and likely was serving a much broader range of visitors, the infrastructure hadn’t developed as rapidly. So rather than taking the path that the A’s took to retrofit – they decided to “scrape” and start over.

They essentially choose to build the new building based on their assessment of what modern visitors would likely want and need in the future.

The other buildings still largely look like their did over the past few years. But Apple has a new building that some people love and other hate. But that inarguably has been refreshed with new building techniques that while not as “standard” – appears to be built on the premis that theres a better way to do primary functions (perhaps like heating and cooling”) than the traditional AC systems and boilers of the past?

Or are you saying that the engineers at Adobe and AVID were simply “smarter” than those at Apple and found a way to keep everything that had been built over time, and make it just as capable as the rebuild that Apple was forced into?

That seems to be the big knock on Apple. That they didn’t “really ‘have to scrape anything – and that if they’d just done it like Adobe and AVID, they could have gone as far as fast and never missed a step.

If so, this is a pretty large inditement of their “vision.”

And they seem to be a company who’s “vision” is precisely what’s propelled them to such amazing business success.

Do you think they got it totally “wrong” Walter?

Just curious.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

Hover your cursor over the vertical line between the EB and the viewer and you should be able to expand left to give more space to the Viewer and scope.

Also hover your cursor over the boundry between the timeline and the viewer and you should be able to drag down to expand the vertical size of the monitoring array.

No, you can’t “fully collapse” them. But you should be able to make the upper right screen array larger.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

[James Mortner] “Agreed ! Do you think there will be further cross-over though ? I could see the other NLE adopting a keyword and tagging system ?
“

I believe it’s inevitable.

Look at how Apple’s iPad has led to every company computer company trying to put out a similar form factor tablet.

This industry has always been centered on “leapfrogging.”

The big change in this case, is that Apple was the first to take the BIG move of gutting a successful product in order to target a future where they felt that the ground up re-build was worth the cost, the disruption, and the risk.

(Actually, to be fair, Adobe did quite a bit of re-invention with Premier a couple of years previously – but in features and capabilities – not so much the underlying foundational core technologies (if my understanding of that stuff is accurate.)

Apple, in completely jettisoning their own Quicktime underpinnings for AV Foundation and Core Services – kinda did the real estate equivalent of a “scrape” rather than a re-model.

Apple now has brand new “state of the art” plumbing, AC ducts and electrical underneath their brand new building. That building is smaller and much more modest than the old mansion, but there’s plenty of land to expand into – and over time, they have freedom to build with new ideas.

Their competitors are betting that the existing infrastructure of their platforms will serve their needs long enough to make better business sense.

Businesses have succeeded on both the more conservative approach (stick with the existing plumbing) and the more progressive one (jettison the past now, so you can have a clean slate to build something better in the future.)

I’m comfortable with Apple’s direction because in my mind, that view better matches the larger forces of change in the wider industry. New output possibilities, workflows, devices, consumer habits, etc. etc.

Time will tell which view drives more success.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

Bulbs explode.

Not regularly, and thankfully not often – but the ones that generate a lot of heat likely always will.

One classic “insider” piece of knowledge, is if you have lamps that heat up and cool significantly every time you use them – it’s critical that you not touch the glass of the lamp with your bare fingers.

Doing do will leave skin oil on the surface of the glass. That in turn can cause uneven heat distribution at the point where the oils are deposited, and with regular expansion and contraction via heat – that area can weaken and cause a lamp to “blow up” earlier than it otherwise would.

Use clean gloves or a paper towel or similar whenever you handle a lamp that’s going to be used in a “high heat” environment.

FWIW.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

[David Roth Weiss] “BTW, effective immediately, I begin a new career phase as I move over to ProMax Systems, where I’ll be joining the post-production sales team in the ProMax Burbank offices.

David Roth Weiss”

Congratulations, David.

Your company founder, Charles McConathy was a huge force in adapting hard drives into Mac workflows in the early days. I was privileged to sit with him at quite a few NABs back in the day learning a modest amount about the ins and outs of storage technology out of his immense wealth of deep, deep knowledge.

I bought my first few DV based systems from him, bypassing more local vendors because he always knew “what worked best” for a given configuration.

He is greatly missed by all of us who got to know him.

Glad to see you continuing that proud ProMax tradition.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Bill Davis]

[Bob Kessler] “here is even a company that install headphones into pistol range ear protectors (don’t remember the name right now) for those who need to record audio in high dB situations. “

Pretty sure Location Audio in CA sells the units that remount Sony 7506 cans into Aviation headsets – which is kinda the “big gun” solution for monitoring in loud locations.

YMMV.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor