Darren Roark
Forum Replies Created
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[Oliver Peters] “The downside of this whole discussion about hardware is that AMD showed some really nice GPU cards at NAB that are only PC-compatible for now. “
I spoke with one of the AMD engineers at NAB who told me they make the GPUs, they then give them to Apple, who then “Do what they want with them” referring to coding the drivers.
AMD doesn’t write the OS X drivers at all which is interesting.
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[Shane Ross] “I am going to wager that we will never see another MacPro update.”
How much are you willing to wager?
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[Oliver Peters] “As far as the full system, good colorists get outstanding results and there seem to be advantages in grading over how Resolve operates. I haven’t run it so I can’t say for sure, but I’ve sent some projects off to colorists working with it and the results are great. However, those same colorists would also do great work with Resolve.”
I’d really like to know more about the advantages of Lustre or Baselight over Resolve. As I don’t always have control over what color finishing vendors my clients use I am trying understand what makes one system substantially better than another.
Not to take the lemming approach but Company 3 is a Resolve shop and have gone from being a commercial shop to doing a big percentage of the major studio features. If one of the other systems were that much better they could certainly afford to switch.
The round trip to Resolve and back to FCPX works well enough that it’s a major time saver, I’m trying to gain an understanding so I can give informed advice.
And thank you Oliver for your well thought out reviews, you are one of the few people who actually write about post production systems without bias.
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What’s interesting is it was the great tape drought of 2011 from the Japan tsunami and iTunes making international standards have had more to do with the decline of tape than just progress.
The tape cost that year quadrupled during the shortage* so file based delivery suddenly became acceptable for a few major networks.
Funny how that works.
* I was able to sell used 126min HDCAMSR tapes for twice what I paid for them new during that time, and people were grateful.
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DCP is nearly 20 year old tech now, the main reason it hangs on is the encryption key system which most indies don’t need or want for festival screenings.
They are better off playing a ProRes file as a DCP is just a glorified JPEG sequence.
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I agree with you Bob 100%, expecting an editor to be a shared storage engineer is like expecting a family doctor to perform occasional heart transplants.
I’m seeing more and more that this is becoming the new normal at smaller shops.
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[Oliver Peters] “This is an area that Avid has down to a science and why, when a lot is on the line with a large project, most experienced film/TV editors will pick Media Composer + Isis. For better or worse, it’s the known and reliable workhorse.”
If they could implement something similar to Avid’s bin locking in FCPX, it would change some minds in LA. It’s the last remaining deal breaker.
The irony is that any AE’s worth their weight in salt knows how to easily work around it in a pinch.
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The slowdowns were mainly due to the limited storage speeds.
The server was hooked up via the gigabit ethernet ports on the iMac to the shared storage server as production didn’t budget for 10GE. It worked impressively well considering the limited bandwidth of around 120mb r/w.
When I hooked my Mac Pro up via a 10GE thunderbolt box it was getting 800mb read and write. I didn’t get any slowdowns even when exporting, I was able to work ahead on the next task while it was rendering without issue.
The slowdowns I did experience was when optical flow was enabled for the upscaling and frame rate conversion on the two hour long deposition tape clips as FCP X analyzes the entire clip regardless of how much you are using. The analysis files for one tape could reach 100GB! That had to be turned on before leaving for the night.
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Hi Shane,
I came in on this project at picture lock to do the finishing, what we ended up doing regarding the Ken Burns effect was to remove any color corrections and old schooled it by exporting master ProRes QT’s of the photo montages.
We overcut them back in the sequence so the finishing place would have the original photo in case they wanted to tweak the animations for any reason.
Not ideal but it got done.