Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
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[Douglas K. Dempsey] “It IS of concern because it possibly expresses Apple’s overall intent to keep X skewed consumer and not so much pro. “Events” is a concept shared with the Instamatic-like iPhoto app, and makes you feel that Apple sees everyone as a Mom & Pop Home Movie Maker, who in turn see the stuff that comes out of their camera as an important “Event” in their lives: Baby’s first step, Grandma’s birthday, Vacation at the Shore etc.”
You’re reading too much into this, I think. FCP X has “projects” in “events” in “libraries.” While I agree this terminology is a little odd for a pro video app, it doesn’t actually map to consumer taxonomy any better. When have consumers ever talked about keeping their events in libraries?
“Events” is the only one of these terms that even slightly implies the sort of orientation you’re suggesting, and even then, not really. It’s an exceedingly vague term. Yes, a birthday party is an “event,” but so is a feature film shoot. The sun exploding would be an “event.” The word covers a lot of territory.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[David Mathis] “I currently own a Blackmagic Cinema Camera and looking for a reasonably priced storage solution. I mainly shoot in the RAW format. Considering a RAID drive, looking for advice on enclosure and drives. I have the old school Mac Pro so thunderbolt connection is not an option at this time. Is it possible to go with Ethernet or would another connection be a better option? Any advice is greatly appreciated.”
This is the 2.5K camera? I don’t know why you’re getting all these responses about needing 8+ drives. This isn’t uncompressed 16-bit 4K DPX or something, it’s 2.5K raw. It’s only about 120 MB/s — a single 7200 RPM drive will do that, though not solidly enough to rely on. Your cheapest option on an old Mac Pro would be to get a USB 3 or eSATA card, a dual drive enclosure, and a couple of 7200 RPM drives, and run the thing RAID 0 (this would work, by the numbers, though I haven’t used that particular model). Of course, you’d want to keep really good backups of footage and probably store project files, etc. somewhere else with RAID 0, since you’d lose everything if either drive died.
You could also just use Disk Utility to set up software RAID 0 across two or three internal drives, if all your footage will fit into that sort of storage space.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “I don’t know enough to know – but does the, now complete, long four year walk back to what is once again effectively an FCP7 project file with basically everything else external if you want – right down to render files – solve the problems raised with the use of X in a shared facility? Or at least that it has as many or as few problems as 7 had that way?”
As of this update FCP X libraries are better than FCP 7 projects in this respect, as storage locations can be designated on a per-library basis.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Oliver Peters] “In the context of collaboration and Avid, we are talking about project sharing (Unity) and integrated asset management (Interplay/Media Central). Arguably that’s a niche within a niche. I don’t believe Apple has interest in doing the R&D to make that happen, although they are happy to create hooks for third parties to extend FCP X into that arena if they can (like Cantemo Portal).”
Thing is, for low-bandwidth offline video formats there’s basically no problem left to solve in terms of media sharing — built-in OS file sharing over gigabit ethernet can pretty easily handle serving up several streams of ProRes LT or whatever.
So all that really needs to happen for ‘real’ collaborative workflow (at least for small teams) is some sort of library/event sharing. Some versions of that — letting two people interactively edit on the same timeline, for instance — would be complicated to implement, while others — letting multiple users open a library at the same time and exclusively ‘lock’ and work on different events — should actually be pretty easy.
Apple might want to focus on other things first, of course, but I wouldn’t be too surprised to see this eventually.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Santiago MartÃ] “As excited as I was with those two cameras, I decided to keep my Red One MX, waiting for Dragon update with my Epic and seriously thinking about an Arri Amira, though I keep hearing good things about the Sony F55, but for my conservative clients, Arri will always be Arri. Tough choice.”
Just finished grading a project shot 4K raw on F55. It is, in my opinion, the least compromised system currently on the market (well, except the F65, I suppose). Compared with Alexa there’s more resolution, a compressed raw workflow that makes shooting raw much more practical, and the camera is much smaller and has substantially better battery life. Compared with the Epic, color is better right out of camera, I find it’s easier to take it in the direction I want it in a grade, and working with the footage is smoother without any specialized hardware than working with Epic footage is even with a Rocket.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Frank Gothmann] “As Tim said before, all this is a non-issue. There are several solutions available on Windows to output directly from within the app to Prores. From within Avid, Premiere, Edius, Vegas, you name it.
It IS strange that a majority of people still seem to not know about all these options.”As far as I’ve been able to tell there’s one option that exports ProRes directly from video apps on Windows, it hasn’t been around for very long, it’s pretty slow, it doesn’t work in Resolve, and gamma might be wrong out of RCX.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Tim Wilson] “Please please please look through the COW archives. This is simply not true, as has been reported every time it comes up. There have been multiple ways to handle this for years, including solutions that are free.”
With a Windows app that can’t output ProRes directly (i.e. still most of them, including, critically for us, Resolve), if you want ProRes with no loss of quality vs. what you’d get via direct output, you first need to render to an uncompressed format and then feed that into external ProRes encoding software. For feature-length 1080p/2K content that means you’ll need around a terabyte of storage to hold that temporary render, and if you want to output at full speed it needs to be fast. For instance, the Mac Pro in our main suite can render a 1080p/2K sequence out of Resolve at ~70-90 fps. Doing that to, say, 10-bit DPX requires storage that pushes over 700 MB/s. Then you need to take that output and separately encode it to ProRes, which can easily increase the total time required to get your ProRes output by 100% vs. rendering directly to that format.
For short-form content or occasional use this might be fine. For a busy facility with deadlines, it’s a deal breaker.
That said, there are lots of other factors that cause us to continue to prefer OS X — and I say this in the aftermath of an ~18 month attempt to shift some of our core operations (color grading, transcoding) to Windows during the period where Apple wasn’t updating the Mac Pro.
As far as creative editing goes… that’s generally not something that requires some dual socket 24-core monster with a couple of Titans, or some other thing you can’t get in the Mac world. Most of the projects we do post on (indie features) seem to be cut on someone’s MacBook Pro these days. That means going to Windows for this task is mostly just about saving a little money, but for a pro using a tool 40+ hours a week, this seems like a poor place to try to economize — unless you actively prefer Windows, you’d be crazy to switch just to save a few hundred bucks, i.e. less than a dollar a day over the expected lifespan of the machine.
We will probably go to Windows in-house for disc authoring though. There’s no actively maintained non-consumer disc authoring software for OS X anymore since Adobe EOL’d Encore. And of course we have to keep Linux around for DCP replication (although running it in a VM under OS X saves some hassle).
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Margus Voll] “Here we tend to “burn in” all the titles. As most of the festivals having problems with titling time to time.”
We recommend this to clients as well. Not as flexible… but a lot more foolproof. The full version of easyDCP makes this easy — load the subtitle XML file, and you can either use it as a ‘soft’ subtitle track or have easyDCP burn it in while encoding the image.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Oliver Peters] “Were you running the version that matched the OS on that iMac? Avid software is temperamental about running on machines that match the qualified specs. iMacs work fine, but you have to make sure it’s the right version.”
Yes, correct version. It launched on the second attempt and hasn’t crashed during launch since. (Plenty of other odd issues, of course.)
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Andy Neil] “I feel that Avid’s reliability is more based on reputation than actual working software. I’m working on it now and I have plenty of reliability issues. As close to as many as I have with X or Premiere. “
Yeah, a couple of months ago I had Media Composer crash during launch the first time it was ever opened on an iMac that had just been unboxed 20 minutes earlier and had basically nothing else installed on it yet. It’s as temperamental as anything else, in my experience.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.