Charles Haine
Forum Replies Created
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Markets inevitably change, and that item you paid for a few months earlier frequently is available for cheaper just a few months after you bought it; it’s part of life. I don’t regret the $1k we paid for Da Vinci earlier in the year; we’ve already booked enough work with it to have paid for itself.
From where I’m sitting this is a brilliant move on Da Vinci’s part.
Real coloring facilities that are billing regularly will end up paying the $1k for multiple GPU’s or the RED Rocket card without batting an eye; it’s the best deal in color grading. And then they’ll have a few lite stations for prepping projects or grading small 7d jobs that come through.
The folks that lite will appeal too were never likely to pay the $1k in the first place; it just didn’t make sense for them to do so, since they aren’t likely billing their grading on to clients (as it would be hard to do without GPUs and RED Rockets). So why give it to them?
It gives thousands of film students, DPs, editors, directors and especially wannabe colorist an opportunity to learn the tools of color grading. The entire next wave of colorists will be learning on Da Vinci for free. And while most won’t stick with it long enough, some real artists will come out of it. And they will have a lot of Da Vinci loyalty built in because it’s the system they have on their home machine, that they learned on and know intimately, and when they book jobs at bigger facilities they’ll expect Da Vinci to be there.
It’s one of the major ways that FCP built market share vs. Avid; FCP was functionally free (through lax security and heavy student discounts), and it built a market of up and coming editors and directors who knew it and expected it when they did real jobs.
Secondly, Da Vinci is building their brand. I know to old school folks it feels like a dissolution of a hallowed name, but you have to remember that many, many producers don’t know a baselight from a pogle. Most clients hiring colorist because they like that colorists work, or as part of a package deal, and for those clients, Da Vinci is a brand they’ve heard of that means “color,” and by giving away Lite for free, Da Vinci is going to increase that direct connection for clients between “color grading” and “da Vinci.” I’ve been teaching film for 5 years, and 5 years ago, 1 student in 20 had heard of da Vinci, and now they all have. It’s a hugely powerful marketing tool for them, with little to no lost revenue (since, of course, those people using lite wouldn’t have bought it anyway).
That’s a powerful thing for a brand to do.
I think these guys are being absolutely brilliant.
Rates are going to come down (and, let’s face it, already have) not because the software costs are decreasing, but because hardware costs are decreasing, and that’s nobody’s fault, it’s a natural consequence of computer technology increasing. Might as well blame Moore’s Law.
But in the end, they’ll sell more $1k license’s, and more panels, because of this, and it’ll be for the best for our industry.
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I’ll chip in with a 3rd: we have the FSI as our main monitor, with a 2 year old panny pro plasma set up for client monitoring.
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Is all of your media the same?
I’ve gotten “out of memory” errors a few times when I had a project that was 99% one thing (ProRes, RED, etc.) but one 1-2 shots that were memory hogs. The example I’m thinking off was a time-lapse shot made with a still camera, so it was 5000 or more pixels across, and they had baked it into animation codec, so this one 3 second shot was clogging the memory in Da Vinci.
Got rid of that shot and the error went away.
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I’d absolutely love thought control, but I’d settle for a foot pedal in the short term.
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Also remember that I turned off “gang custom curves.” Every time it crashes I forget to uncheck this until I go to tweak a curve and they all move together.
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Well, you can render that workflow with whatever handles you need, so you’ll end up with handles back in FCP that you might need.
That gives you handles while also being a cut you can watch with the client that matches the final edit.
Charles Haine
Colorist, Professor
ColorCorrection.Com -
If you don’t mind, why don’t you just render with handles using the Final Cut Pro XML workflow?
Charles Haine
Colorist, Professor
ColorCorrection.Com -
In my experience the blackmagic and kona drivers conflict with each other and you can’t get image out of either from any application (let alone Da Vinci) with drivers installed for both.
That might have changed recently, but it’s an issue I’ve had in the past.
Charles Haine
Colorist, Professor
ColorCorrection.Com -
Thanks, much appreciated.
Charles Haine
Colorist, Professor
ColorCorrection.Com -
It’s a feature for a client so I don’t know how they’d feel about upscaling the whole thing unless we went to something like a teranex or a genum, but on future jobs I might pitch something like that.
Under “Input Scaling” (is that what you mean by import settings?) I’ve tried all 4 settings and none of them seem to work with “HD 1080” selected in video monitoring. It just affects how the 720 is scaled with it’s 720 box on the 1080 monitor, but doesn’t scale it up to 1080.
What’s weird is there is no 720p25 option in the video monitoring format, and Resolve seems to treat 720p50 (which should be referring to 720i50, I would think) as being 50 reel frames per second and playing back at that rate.
Very strange.
Charles Haine
Colorist, Professor
ColorCorrection.Com