Clayton Burkhart
Forum Replies Created
-
Thanks Neil, that feels pretty true to my experience.
It seems clear at this point that either I lose a GPU card (I have two GTX 470’s) to free up a PCIe slot for an SAS host controller and a raid tower, or that I create a RAID in the interior of the Mac. It has been suggested to put a SSD in the optical bay for my system and use the four drive bays to create my RAID. Either way it would mean updating my GPU, perhaps to a dual core because I would need that power which I am currently steaing from an optical bay for one of the cards to drive the SSD. -
Hi Jim,
Normally, the 2 cables that pass to the motherboard are furnished with the card. If you can’t find them, go to a local shop that has video cards and composes PC machines for the general public and ask them if they have any spare cables lying around. They usually do, or will sell them really cheap.With the Davinci it’s important to know that your monitor cable will come from the 8800 and the GT is just used as a processor (GPU) for the application, so no monitoring from it!
-
Hi Jim,
If there is a free slot then I would dedicate the 8800’s card instead to the drive bay feed and use both original slots for the GT card. You do need to be aware of the order and placement of the cards though. Generally, I believe the first two slots of the machine (on the bottom) should always be reserved for your video cards and I would put the GT on the very bottom (slot 1) because it should have the most lanes. -
I agree with this last statement. (Charles Haine)
Most clients are not impressed with software anyhow, they are impressed with grading suites.When they come into a comfortable properly lit grading space with a serious control surface and monitoring, as well as an efficient experienced colorist, they know it. That is what they pay for. A committed individual and a committed grading environment.
In any case, almost all experienced colorists know more than one application and choose the right one for the work ahead of them, and sometimes even tweak things through several different ones based on the limitations of each.
-
Yes, I think this really makes sense in terms of where the market has been going. It just seems impossible to control the destiny of software once it arrives at a certain level of distribution.
I didn’t know about Lightworks. Fascinating – good idea.
-
[Robert Houllahan] “All of the other grading apps (Films Master, Baselight, etc.) are also software. I wouldn’t buy a Scratch system over Resolve because it’s not as good (IMO) and does not have it’s own panels. Watch what happens with Adobe I bet CS6 has a grading app included.”
Adobe CS6 will have a new grading application included. It is what was known as Iridas Speedgrade.
I think BM has read correctly the writing that was on the wall. The importance of grading has now dawned on the common man, because EVERYONE is shooting video these days. Any new Adobe grading app WILL become the defacto standard, if only because there will be so many pirated copies out there. Resolve will always be a more complex application and the only way to get people to use it, is for them to try it – for free. But as we all we know there are some pretty heavy duty hardware requirements to really use it properly. Better to sell a card to every home than an app to a select few, because everyone will get it for free one day anyhow.
The real market for this app anyhow as a pro tool remains the 2K or more environment, 3D, multiple GPU’s, distributed processing, networked, etc. Paying 995 USD for that still makes sense, because it is a drop in the bucket for them anyhow, and any new employee will now be self trained in Resolve BEFORE they arrive.
-
I think the unannounced reality is that the cracked version of 7.1 has been out there for quite some time now. So many of the users for whom the Lite version appealed were already on top of that. As even the cracked version requires a Blackmagic card, they probably figured it was only a matter of time before someone created a dongle emulator. The reality in that instance is that the only people who would be buying are more serious pros with cubix expanders, networking, distributed processing, etc. This short circuits the need and desire of the hacking community to even go there. So really nothing changes for them and it opens up the markets even more to their cards. The goal is a BM card in every home!
What of course they continue to neglect saying is that their Extreme 3D card is really only a recommended config and that even their less expensive cards do the basic i/o job.
I think the reality today is that software must come down and it must be in the service of some kind of hardware because the consumer market will never have the same needs as the pros and if you are smart you find a way to market to both.
However, even more than ever the necessity of having a real grading monitor, an actual physical grading interface, the horsepower to do 4K in real time and the ability to switch between multiple color platforms based on the job before you is what will really determine a colorist’s value in the marketplace.
Will Lustre and Baselite be the new gold standard? Undoubtedly, but as someone mentioned before the kind of environment the work is graded in will show the degree of commitment the colorist has to this profession or not.
-
I have worked in Apple Color for a long period of time before coming to Resolve. It is true that it is a much easier quicker interface, especially when you use a Tangent Wave Panel. I also find the Parades scopes surprisingly more accurate than Resolve.
That said, I think Resolve gives a degree of finesse et subtlety in output compared to Apple Color that I often find surprising as well. Even on the older v7 without the denoise module the images are often far less noisy. I notice this when creating even simple shadow gradations on a grey wall for instance. Something is going on under the hood which is far more sophisticated. Combined with a simply fantastic tracker (Color was a nightmare on that front) and now the new denoising possiblity in v8, I see a whole lot to love even if the workflow and learning curve is more complicated.
I do have one or two pet peeves with Resolve, the most glaring of which is the silly way in which you have to manually manipulate this tiny little line on a sequence in the render module merely to chose your in and out points. I strikes me as a supremely inaccurate way to sort things out at the end of a very sohisticated process. The number of times I have come up short a frame or two as a result is just annoying, especially if it is the last sequence on a timeline.
Ultimately though I am very grateful for access to this application on such a reasonable cost basis.
I think you are probably a candidate for Speedgrade when Adobe comes out with their next suite of applications and that is a very honorable alternative.
-
My pleasure. It took me ages to sort through all the possibilities and half truths myself and in the end this was the most expedient way.
Why should anyone else waste their time if the answer is already in my hip pocket?Good luck with that mod.
Cheers,
Clayton -
Ok there is a smart way to do this which allows you to cable internally without having to keep the door of your Mac Pro open:
If you look very carefully you will notice there is only one small place where you can pass your wires through from the drive bay to the lower portion of your computer. It is in the front upper corner just above the 1st hard drive bay. That is where you will pass the Molex wires through.
Next you need to determine if it is a conventional molex or an Sata adapter in your optical drive bay. I forget which generation Mac passed over to Sata. If it is Sata you will need this kind of adapter (ignore the French, you can find this in the US as well):
https://cgi.ebay.fr/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=350384917315
You will then need a molex extension cable which you are going to cut off the male plug on. This can be a Y splitter cable if you need two power plugs (as on a GTX 285 or GTX 470) or only a single cable for something like the Quadro 4000.
You then pass the cables through the corner slot I spoke about and reattach a new male plug from a cheap kit like this:
What I did actually was very carefully break the original male molex plug, keeping the wires intact on their little pins. I then just reslotted them into a replacement plug from this kit.
After you just need to connect a cable like the following to your extension cable:
This cable can be found much cheaper elsewhere and if you are near a cheap reseller for gamers, he probably has a ton of extra cables like this which come with many video cards today.
I use the app “Hardware Monitor” to check temperature and power usage for my two cards, but honestly I have never seen my two internal GTX 470’s go over 380 Watts combined when working in Davinci, FCP, AE etc. For gaming it might be an issue, but for our work there really is not an excessive load on the power supply.