Brad Hurley
Forum Replies Created
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“What is baffling is that Apple won’t include the free BRAW decode in FCPX. Equally baffling is that BM won’t license ProResRAW for Resolve. So far I’ve not seen any ProResRAW in productions I’ve worked on. Plenty of BRAW however so that problem is yet to manifest itself for me.”
At some point last year on BMD’s DaVinci Resolve forum, someone from BMD explained that it’s up to Apple to add BRAW support to FCPX and if enough people don’t demand it, it won’t happen. A lot of people have been asking BMD to make BRAW available in FCPX, but they’re asking the wrong party (according to BMD). They need to take it up with Apple.
As for ProRes Raw in Resolve, I suspect Apple sees ProRes Raw as a selling point for Final Cut (and by extension Macs), so there’s not much incentive for them to make it available to competing NLEs…especially competing NLEs that work on Windows as well as Mac. The Atomos recorders can now record ProRes Raw from a growing number of cameras (from Nikon, Panasonic, Fuji, Sigma, and possibly Sony when the new A7s iii is announced later this month), so we might start to see more use of it. Apple published a white paper in January with several alternative workflows for ProRes Raw in FCPX.
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“he other idea would perhaps be to have each commentator join the VOIP call using headphones (so as to confine the performance audio to just their ears) and record their voice using their iPhone’s Voice Memos app. Do you see anything wrong with this workaround?”
It could work as long as the headphones don’t bleed too much. Syncing them up to the video in post shouldn’t be too hard, since you won’t be filming them and thus don’t need to be super-precise.
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Wow, that’s going to be a great camera, congratulations.
Native ISO is 800 according to John Brawley (who knows, because he’s used it): https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=117834#p648209
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“Unfortunately, LoopBack is great but I don’t think the commentators will want to pay the license fee for just this one use. ”
They wouldn’t, only you need it on your computer. I’ve been using Loopback to record calls with three participants (me at the computer doing the recording, one remote participant on Skype, one remote participant on Google Hangouts). Using Loopback I can send them each a mix-minus so they can hear each other but not themselves, and all of our voices go on separate tracks in my DAW so I can mix them to taste later.
I’m tied up for the rest of the day but will see if I can dig up names of some of these online podcast services; if you do a Google search for “online podcast recording service” you’ll probably find them. What you want to do is very similar to recording a three- or four-way podcast with remote participants.
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Thanks for the summary; it’s useful to have the key points in one place.
Also worth noting that Grant said the Ursa serves as their test platform for new technologies, implying that things developed on the Ursa will trickle down to new smaller cameras eventually.
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This doesn’t sound very different from recording a podcast episode with two remote participants. To get the best sound, ideally each of the former college mates would record their commentary into a good microphone into a recorder locally, but assuming that’s not possible (a good assumption), it could be done on your Mac. The tricky thing is creating a mix-minus, where each commentator hears the soundtrack and the other commentator, but not themselves (which would create an echo). There are a number of ways to do this. I use the Loopback app from Rogue Amoeba; I think Audio Hijack Pro (also from Rogue Amoeba) can do this; there are also online services that can host these kinds of three- or four-way conversations.
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My understanding is that Cine4 is fairly close to Rec709, so unlike S-Log you don’t actually need a camera LUT (aka technical LUT) to bring the footage into the Rec709 colorspace. You should be able to do it through a simple lift-gamma-gain adjustment or using an s-curve, if you are grading by hand, or if you prefer using LUTs you could apply any third-party LUT such as a film emulation LUT or a “look” LUT. In other words, I don’t think you need a Sony-specific camera LUT for Cine4; those would be more typically used for transforming log footage to Rec 709.
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And one other thought: before you despair and decide you need a new computer, you could at least try some of these settings to improve playback:
https://blog.frame.io/2020/02/24/davinci-resolve-performance/
When you say Resolve is “slow” it’s not clear whether you mean it can’t play back at full speed or whether it takes a long time for it to complete tasks you ask it to do, especially on the color page.
Final Cut “seems” faster and maybe it is because it’s optimized for the Mac, but a lot of the apparent speed difference is an illusion because by default FCPX render-caches everything for smooth playback. You can set up Resolve to do this as well, and you can render-cache every clip individually or just some clips, or even nodes on the color page.
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Following up with a quote from the Resolve 15 configuration guide, with some light editing to fix punctuation errors and typos (I just checked and it has not yet been updated for v. 16):
“The key thing to keep in mind when selecting your config is that unlike traditional editing, grading, audio post or finishing systems, imaging processing in DaVinci Resolve is graphics processor (GPU) based and so some of the features require a higher end GPU than you might be accustomed to. High-performance GPUs or multiple GPUs will offer the best experience.”
Also with respect to iMacs: “The 27″ Retina 5K iMac with 4GB GPU RAM will reach the GPU capabilities sooner with UHD timelines and when using optical flow speed changes, temporal processing and noise reduction, even at lower resolutions and with fewer editing tracks or color grading nodes. Performance of many of the older model iMacs with 2GB of GPU memory is limited even with HD images.”
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With Resolve, everything is about the GPU. You could have the fastest processor in the world, 600 terabytes of RAM, and lightning-fast drives and they won’t make a difference if your GPU is not up to spec. Your 4-gigabyte GPU is likely the bottleneck here.
BMD hasn’t updated their hardware configuration guide for Resolve 16 (unless they recently did so, I haven’t checked), but your GPU is under spec even for Resolve 15.