Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
-
[Warren Eig] “My guess and it’s only a guess is it will have trouble. IIRC, FCP suite has issues with dual graphics cards. I might be mistaken on this as I’m recalling from memory.”
We ran FCP 7 for quite a while on a 2008 Mac Pro with two graphics cards. Given that FCP 7 seems to work fine on 10.9.1 I’d guess it will probably be OK on the new hardware.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
Export the project so you have a backup before you do the following.
Duplicate the project. Delete half the reels from one copy of it and the other half of the reels from the other copy. Then, for each project, in the media pool, show the ‘Usage’ column (right click the column headers). Select all the clips and choose ‘Update Usage Data’. Resolve will update the ‘Usage’ column for each clip with a number showing how many time it’s used. If you sort on this column, you’ll easily be able to select all the clips that aren’t being used at all by the sequences remaining in that project, and you can remove them from the media pool.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
A few people who ordered stock configurations have gotten their machines today, but none of the build-to-order systems have been shipped out yet, and those (particularly systems with D700 graphics) are probably of more interest to Resolve users. I got in an other for a 12-core/D700 within 15 minutes or so of the store going live, and will report numbers when it arrives if they’re not already all over the place by then.
It’s frustrating (if predictable) that the media outlets that were given review systems seem to have no idea how to actually put a pro video system through its paces. I haven’t seen a review yet where Resolve has been so much as mentioned, despite the fact that Apple itself features Resolve benchmarks for the system on their web site.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
[Craig Alan] “Before its release, there was a lot of talk about how or how not upgradable the graphics cards and cpu in the new mac pro would be. Even if you needed to take it in to your go-to-mac-repair-shop and have it done, it would keep the beast alive for many years to come. So now that it is out … what’s the verdict? “
We knew RAM was upgradable. Since the machine’s release Apple has posted a document with instructions for replacing the flash storage, which some feared wouldn’t be a user-servicible part, but apparently is. (Although it’s an Apple-specific form factor. OWC will probably make them, though.)
There’s no new word on graphics cards or CPUs, but we already knew a lot there before release. The graphics cards are independent boards (i.e. the GPUs aren’t soldered to the motherboard or anything) but they not standard PCIe cards. Also, because of the unified thermal design of this machine, they don’t have their own heat sinks. This means replacing them will require removing and correctly reapplying thermal paste. That’s not rocket science, but I can guarantee Apple will not consider this an end-user operation. The possibility of Apple selling GPU upgrades that you get installed at your local Apple Store remains, but I wouldn’t put the odds very high.
As far as CPU, unless there’s something very unexpected here (like Intel doing custom packages for Apple), the CPU will be socketed. This means the CPU will be theoretically replaceable, as was the case in earlier Mac Pros. Apple has never officially acknowledged the possibility of such CPU upgrades, and if you damage a machine while attempting it they’re certainly not going to cover it under warranty, but it should be possible. The design of this case may make the CPU a little harder to get at, but I doubt anything is glued in there like with an iMac. However, as always, CPU upgrade options will be limited by what socket types Intel users for future processors.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
[Jeremy Garchow] “I am thinking that we will repurchase video out and drive connection devices, but stick our data controllers (fibre/etc) in a TB2 enclosure as I haven’t seen any news on ATTO TB2 fibre connectors.
Just out of curiosity, what are you doing when switching to Thunderbolt?”
We’ve got two Thunderbolt PCIe enclosures, one two slot model (The Thunderbolt 2 upgradable Echo Express SE II) with an SAS RAID controller + an SAS HBA that’s more tape-drive friendly, the other with just an SAS RAID controller. This lets us buy cheaper SAS RAID gear instead of Thunderbolt gear, and move it not only between machines with Thunderbolt, but also to older non-Thunderbolt machines (that have SAS RAID controllers in PCIe slots). ATTO has Thunderbolt to SAS gear now, but we already had non-ATTO RAID controllers, and there’s more flexibility with a non-integrated solution. ATTO’s external Thunderbolt gear is also bulkier than we’d like and doesn’t have Thunderbolt 2 or an upgrade path, as far as they’ve announced.
If someone shipped a Thunderbolt 2 SAS RAID controller that was as compact as, say, Promise’s SANLink device, then I think at this point we’d probably buy a couple of those and ditch the PCIe enclosures. Alternatively if Thunderbolt RAID enclosures continue to get cheaper we might ditch the whole SAS route altogether for RAID (still need it for talking to tape drives). We’ve also recently been evaluating 10GbE/iSCSI and Fibre Channel shared storage solutions that could make direct-attach storage mostly irrelevant around here.
As far as video I/O, we just picked up an UltraStudio 4K (new Thunderbolt 2 version) in preparation for the new Mac Pro moving into our DI theater. We’ve had an UltraStudio Mini kicking around for about a year that we use with laptops, etc. and that has been really convenient. The DeckLink card we have been using for video output in our theater will be transferred to another older machine that will be used for ScopeBox.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
[KrickeT Ro] “My first question is: is it worth the $2,999 upgrade? Does anyone know even a guestimate of how long it will take to export a 40 minute sermon for Vimeo? Right now with the iMac it takes about 5 hours just for Vimeo compression.”
If you’re looking for an upgrade for this use case, I’d say the current 27″ iMac, perhaps with the 4GB 780M GPU upgrade and i7 CPU update, is probably a better choice than the new Mac Pro. You likely wouldn’t see a huge performance benefit for the entry-level Mac Pro over that iMac here. A 6-core would be faster, by the time you were done adding a monitor could easily cost ~$2000 more.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
[Blase Theodore] “I guess the question is, does Apple still have enough industry sway that all the CUDA based app and plugin developers will rewrite everything for OpenCL support?”
It’s not just Apple here; basically everyone except NVIDIA is better off with a vendor-neutral standard in the long run, and knows it. CUDA is a bit more mature, so some developers are still holding off, but OpenCL 2.0 (which should hit next year) will help here.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
[Ron Hurtibise] “OK guys, I watched the first three videos in the Ripple Training package, plus the Working with Libraries video. And I’m still not wrapping my head around it. (I never worked extensively in Legacy, so I’m not familiar with Bins). In 10.1, I get that we’re creating Libraries, ostensibly to serve as holding containers for all elements associated with what we used to call Projects. And we can move those Libraries across drives or store them on network drives to enable shared access. Within those Libraries are Events. Events are created to store distinctive types of clips (Interview A, Interview B, B-roll, Exteriors, Music, Animations, Photos, etc.). Why, then, is it recommended that we locate Projects (or timelines) inside individual Events when Projects typically consist of clips from all of the Events? Why would I want to go into Event folders to access my Projects/Timelines? Shouldn’t Projects be renamed Timelines and placed in a Timeline folder inside a Library, separate from the Events? And shouldn’t Libraries have been called Projects, so that within each “Project” (Library) folder, we would have Timelines and Events?”
It’s not as rigid as this. It’s not “one library per project (actual project, not FCP X sequence), it’s one library per collection of related footage and sequences, which may or may not belong to a single (actual) project — maybe you often share media across (actual) projects, in which case you’d probably want to put all of that media and all of the related sequences into a single library. This is part of why you might want to put sequences into events — if sequence belong to different (actual) projects you wouldn’t just want them all grouped at the top level of the library; it’s useful to have an additional level in the hierarchy there. Of course, you could always manually create a ‘Projects’ event in each library and put all of the projects it contains there — that’s what the automatic upgrading does (since it has no way of knowing, really, what else to do).
Basically, FCP X really doesn’t have a level in its organizational hierarchy that strictly maps to an (actual) project. It’s more flexible than that.
Which means, actually, they should just rename ‘projects’ to ‘sequences’ at this point. The fact that I have to keep putting ‘actual’ in front of ‘project’ in this post demonstrates that the current naming is awkward. It also seems to that now that sequences (‘projects’) live in events, compound clips could be converted into sequences and nested sequence support could be added in some future version, which would also simplify things somewhat.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
[Ron Hurtibise] “Why would knowing which events are associated with which project have to be automagical? In 10.0.9, you click on the project in the project library and the properties box lists the events tied to that project. Is this still true in 10.1 when all projects and events are lumped into one big library?”
Projects had a ‘default event’ but they could include clips from other events. FCP X would know this too (it obviously had to keep track of where clips were located), but it still wouldn’t necessarily know how you wanted things grouped. Basically, libraries are introducing a new conception level of organization, and computers still aren’t very good at ‘concepts’….
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
-
[Craig Alan] “An event is live and takes place at a certain place and time.
A Master folder or Project folder I think would be appropriate as the top level folder/container.
Granted that a library might be an appropriate label for a container of organized media that is used for multiple projects and/or a folder of exported media. I do understand that they got library from the finder level organization of their database as is used my mail, iphoto, contacts, etc.
However, I cannot see ‘library’ being used as a name for a video project.”
“Event” was never quite the right word, but it’s hard to think of a better one. ‘Media Collection’, maybe, but it’s annoyingly long, and wouldn’t fit anymore now that events contain sequences.
If you create one library for each project (real project, not FCP X ‘project’) then yes, it would make sense to just call a library a ‘project’, and an event, perhaps, a ‘bin’ or ‘folder’ or something along those lines. And organizing things that way probably will work best for some people (it’s probably what we’ll do). But I think Apple is trying to avoid terminology which implies such a rigid structure. For instance, some people may work on many (real) projects that share media with each other, and for those people it will likely make the most sense to keep collections of such projects in a single library. If you call a library a ‘project’ is discourages this pattern.
—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.