Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
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[Andrew Stone] “I see all the DNxHD MXF codec settings on Windows 7 in Resolve 9.1”
Full, or lite? I generally test new versions on one of our dailies transcoding machines, which run lite, so I haven’t installed the full version of 9.1 yet.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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Not seeing any DNxHD MXF options in Lite 9.1 on Windows 7 either.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Chris Kenny] “I don’t see Apple dropping all the way down to quad core, which means socket 1155 isn’t an option. Where i7 might come in is that maybe they could drop dual sockets for a single 2011 socket. They could then hypothetically offer the six core i7 3930 (which is socket 2011) as the base level option, with an eight core Xeon E5 as a BTO upgrade option.”
Just taking a look at some Intel roadmaps. Ivy Bridge E Xeons (which should be socket 2011) are supposed to be available in Q3 or Q4 with up to ten cores per processor. I think Apple would be pretty comfortable ditching dual socket if it only lost them two cores vs. the highest end previous generation model. They could just offer good-better-best models with 6, 8, and 10 cores. Or perhaps 4, 6, 8 cores, with 10-core as a BTO option on the 8-core model.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Marcus Moore] “No one knows what Apple’s schedule on this is beyond “2013”. But I think a timeframe of 6-10 months is probably a reasonable assumption.”
I would imagine that at this point Apple will wait for Intel’s Ivy Bridge E processors, which would indeed be Q3 or Q4 according to Intel’s roadmap.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Kent Beeson] “May get an new iMac 27” – should I go for 1TB regular or 1TB Fusion drive, what are potential pitfalls for the fusion drive?
“The potential downside of Fusion Drive is that it makes performance somewhat unpredictable. You might read a file once and see one level of performance, then read it another time and see a completely different level of performance. That said, in theory performance should always be better than with a regular drive, so there’s no downside here, really; it’s just something to be aware of, particularly if you’re e.g. testing whether your system can handle a certain format.
Fusion Drive is just clever software, though. You can ‘break apart’ the HDD and SSD, if you want to, and just use the SSD for boot and applications and the HDD for bulk storage. That’s a nice way to set up a system in general. So even if the Fusion Drive functionality does cause some problem, you’re still fine with this as a fallback position.
Personally, I wouldn’t buy a new computer that didn’t have an SSD these days, and the way to get an SSD in a new iMac is to order it with Fusion Drive. So for me there wouldn’t be much question.
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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] “I wonder why people are riding the Xeon and Xeon chipset train. Given what most people think the new box might be (if there is any) there is very little a xeon will provide that is of any advantage compared to an i7. Performance wise, there is very little difference. Xeons can even be used in certain desktop motherboards for the i7 1155 socket.”
I don’t see Apple dropping all the way down to quad core, which means socket 1155 isn’t an option. Where i7 might come in is that maybe they could drop dual sockets for a single 2011 socket. They could then hypothetically offer the six core i7 3930 (which is socket 2011) as the base level option, with an eight core Xeon E5 as a BTO upgrade option.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Mark Dobson] “The way I have learnt to work with FCPX is to spilt the edit into fairly short sections and then bring these together in a master project as they become formalised.”
This is just a good practice in general with longer pieces. It makes everything much more manageable. Colorists will usually want to work off of 20-30 minute reels, for instance (it’s in our deliverables specs), and sometimes final programs are even delivered in reels, if they’re delivered in formats like DPX. Most feature editors seem to work like this by default.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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I don’t know. With the ~3 nodes I get on my rMBP I wouldn’t consider using the machine for client supervised sessions (though since we got an UltraStudio mini and some external storage fast enough to handle 2K DPX I use it for unsupervised work and rendering on a pretty regular basis), but 9 nodes? I graded at least a dozen feature films on a 2008 Mac Pro GTX 285 + GT 120 combo with that sort of performance (perhaps even slightly worse). Sure, it would be a step down from the i7 3930K + GTX 580 Classified system I built for our larger suite, but… not much of one, in real-world use. At least the way I grade, there probably aren’t more than a half-dozen shots in a feature-length project that actually need more than 9 nodes, and there’s always render caching for those.
And what’ll it be on next year’s iMacs? 12 nodes? 15? Unless 4K finishing suddenly becomes the norm over the next 12 months, dual-socket Xeon workstations are bordering on being surplus to requirements for most work.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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The GPU. A higher-end Decklink card will let you output more formats — which you probably don’t really need — but won’t contribute to Resolve performance at all.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[charlie seetoh] “I think this is a good interim solution for me while waiting for the supposed new macpro.”
With Thunderbolt and a couple more years of CPU/GPU advances, some people waiting for a new Mac Pro might decide they don’t actually need one anymore. People used to buy $20,000 machines to run Photoshop better. Now Photoshop (unless you’re doing something very odd with it) just isn’t that demanding; it runs quite well on pretty much any modern system. While it’s not quite there yet, Resolve is well on its way to achieving that same status.
The whole way Blackmagic has handled Resolve since acquiring it — from their pricing, to their OS X and Windows ports, to the work they’ve done to optimize Resolve for single GPU systems — shows that they understand this very well and are eagerly embracing it. There are some other companies in pro video, on both the hardware and software side, that could learn from this.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.