Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
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[Tim Wilson] “Far be it from me to start a thread that might lead to some positive energy LOL but I’m curious. Is anybody looking at this and saying, “Wow, what a great update,” or “This has exactly the features I was waiting for,” or, “This update makes me feel better about myself” — anything like that?”
Libraries are a big improvement for us. We have several RAID systems with lots of projects on them. All elements related to a project (which can include consolidated footage used by Resolve, reel renders out of Resolve, numerous versions of audio mixes, final master ProRes files, DPX sequences, DCPs, etc.) are stored in a folder for that project. Previously, however, we couldn’t store FCP X events/projects in those folders. Libraries let us do that handily — just create one library per project. We might even start actually letting FCP X import the media files (instead of linking to external files) now that this is the case, which will help with file system clutter.
Custom frame sizes are also great. We’re working on feature content, which means we often need ‘cinema’ resolutions — primarily 2048×858 and 1998×1080 (DCI scope and flat). It’s a little odd that these aren’t just standard choices (since DCI ‘full’ — 2048×1080 is, but you essentially never actually use that for anything), but now I can just dial them in.
Workflow wise, the three things I’d still really like to see are built-in LUT support, support for image sequence formats (DPX, TIFF, Cinema DNG, maybe Arri Raw while they’re at it), and batch exporting. At that point FCP X would be a fairly serious online editing tool.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Mitch Ives] “Actually, I did. I pulled the batteries and restarted the machine and they’re back.
Well, that’s a hell of a thing. FCP X 10.1, or possibly 10.9.1 OSX isn’t compatible with an Apple branded Trackpad. Ouch, that’s embarrassing…
Thanks James… you’ve saved me a few hours today”
This isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. If you’re using a pointing device with touch scrolling, the OS switches to hiding scroll bars when you’re not scrolling, iOS-style. You can tell it to just always show them regardless in the ‘General’ panel in System Preferences.
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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’m not sure FCP X actually decodes Red footage at 4K in “better performance” mode. It might just be doing a half-res decode. Still impressive; even a half-res decode decode is very CPU-intensive without a RedRocket.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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Decided to just go for it on the 12-core. We’re doing more and more DCP authoring jobs, and the encode times are seriously brutal at 4K.
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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 ‘right’ way to do this is to connect to the projector with the Digital Cinema Communicator app (DCC) and create a title for Rec. 709 input. DCC is a Windows app (runs fine in a virtual machine on a Mac, though) that can be downloaded from the projector itself if you can get on the same network the projector is on, find out its IP address, and connect to its internal web server. You might also need a service code for the projector to get it to let you set up titles.
If that’s not possible, applying the Rec. 709 to P3 LUT in Resolve should work in theory, but I haven’t tested that particular workflow. I have tested feeding Rec. 709 to a cinema projector displaying XYZ color via the Rec. 709 to XYZ LUT in Resolve 10, and that seems to work fine.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “I guess it’s time to start the “Is Avid Professional or Not: The Debate Saga of the Millennium” forum.
N’est-ce pas?”
Heh. Honestly, Media Composer has a lot of issues/limitations that you just know would be constantly used to support an “it’s not professional” narrative if FCP X had them. We ran into an entertaining example of this just last week involving timecode metadata on AMA clips getting lost.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Glenn Grant] “I guess we won’t be seeing a 4K monitor from Apple along side the new Mac Pro.”
So, here’s something odd. One of the photos of that display in the store showed it next to something that looked exactly like the current generation Time Capsule… in much the same way one would expect to see a display photographed next to a desktop computer. Maybe it was just there for scale or something… but there has also been speculation about a next-generation Mac mini with that form factor.
Why am I talking in past tense? Well, just to make things even more intriguing, the listing for the display now seems to have been pulled.
Did Apple just accidentally spill the beans on a next-generation 4K-capable Mac mini?
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[James Ewart] “Can anybody give me any idea how long the boffins Apple will have been working on FCPX. How many years ago will this work have started?”
I would guess Apple started the transition to working on the new codebase as they were finishing up FCP 7, which would have been a couple of years before the release of X.
[James Ewart] “Is the Architecture actually based upon Imovie?”
It doesn’t appear to be. FCP X uses a largely GPU-based ‘float’ processing pipeline which is not the case for iMovie (or at least wasn’t when FCP X shipped) and uses AVFoundation for file access, video I/O and manipulating timed media, where iMovie uses (or at least used) QuickTime. Any superficial similarities between FCP X and iMovie were likely just a consequence of the general direction of Apple’s thinking about editing user interface.
It’s quite likely FCP X borrowed some code from Motion, however. And while I haven’t really been keeping tabs on iMovie, it wouldn’t surprise me if iMovie started borrowing code from FCP X — that would make sense, as Apple seems to be trying to unify its consumer apps more across iOS and OS X (we just saw a big push in this direction with iWork), and that would require the OS X version of iMovie to ditch QuickTime, as it’s not present on iOS.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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Those TIFF sequences are the only thing that’ll really push a storage system; native Red footage and ProRes are compressed enough that storage speeds aren’t generally a bottleneck unless you’re doing something silly like trying to work from USB 2 drives.
Speed on those TIFF sequence outputs is going to get hit hard over gigabit ethernet. Those TIFF frames are ~12 MB each (at 1998×1080 1.85 DCI resolution), so real-time output requires ~288 MB/s of disk performance, and you’ll likely get under 100 MB/s over gigabit ethernet. As far as Velociraptor vs. 7200 RPM, personally I wouldn’t take the space hit. A 5 drive array with 7200 RPM drives will push over 500 MB/s easily; more than enough for considerably better-than-real time output of those TIFF sequences (if your CPU/GPU are fast enough), for grading from 2K DPX if you ever need to do that, etc.
You might also want to consider getting an SAS RAID controller with external ports and using external RAID boxes, so you can have multiple projects immediately accessible by plugging in different boxes or move boxes between systems. That way you won’t have to rotate projects on and off of internal drives. Or, of course, you could consider shared storage that would be fast enough to keep up with uncompressed workflows (10 GbE or FibreChannel, generally), but that starts to run into pretty serious cash.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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Either the Mac Pro with an aftermarket graphics card or the 27″ iMac with the GeForce GTX 780M 4GB GDDR5 upgrade. The latter is what I’d do if I had to buy right now. (Otherwise I’d wait for the new Mac Pro.)
The other systems you mention have Intel GPUs which Resolve can’t use. Mavericks adds OpenCL support for Intel GPUs, which might make them usable eventually (they still don’t work at present, apparently), but I wouldn’t bet on good performance from them.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.