Darren Roark
Forum Replies Created
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[Andre van Berlo] “now I’m very curious to see the price of the GH4 and that brick combined!
Also: The BMD4K can do recording on SSD’s and has great dynamic range and has a bigger sensor so I’d love to see a comparison of the image quality.All in all in the end Black Magic might still have an edge over the GH4 unless the GH has a really competitive price tag.”
The ability to shoot 4K directly in Prores HQ is a huge plus for me. And they dropped the price, I wonder what they will announce at NAB?
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Matt Lauer already looks too real for comfort to me in HD. Just as HD workflow gets easy, now they are hellbent on changing it up again. I’m not happy about any of this, but it’s happening much faster than when HD rolled out here in the states.
You can download and watch 4K movies with Sony’s overpriced media player right now. At about 40GB each, depending on their servers, that would take about three hours per to download on my connection. Not great, but still doable, HEVC will make it easier. The BDA announced 4K Blu-Ray discs are on the way last month, and Netflix will be testing 4K in certain areas with the next season of “House of Cards”.
This 4K youtube video of footage from that new panasonic camera steams at 4K just fine. (It’s only 3 mins, a 90min film at that compression would be 13GB) https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=hHKJ5eE7I1k
Sears is selling a Seiki 4K 55″ tv right now for $850 and they have pretty good reviews, they already have cheap affordable sets. Most people don’t understand resolution is only part of it, but it didn’t stop them from calling 1080 “TrueHD” which was total BS to make people buy yet another TV.
The broadcast side I totally agree. Most people are unaware they are usually watching a heavily degraded 720p signal at best from most broadcasters. That and some are finally phasing out tape as a delivery medium in spite of the HDCAM SR decks they had to buy at $100K a pop. (from Sony) For broadcast, they will change when they have to and it won’t be soon.
The point is if they can sell people new TVs and make money, they will. Then everything else has to catch up to that standard. We just saw all this happen in the mid-2000s and now it’s happening again ten years later. Sony is a TV maker and a major movie studio who master all their current films and TV shows in 4K. (Breaking Bad is in 4K on their media player.) That way they have the content to lure people into buying a TV they don’t need.
Again, I don’t agree with it, but any new content I make I am going to be keeping this in mind.
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I agree with this. It’s the changing expectations of the people who pay us that will change things.
Thinking back to 2008, most of the post houses I dealt with for commercials in LA charged around double for HD workflow. Then suddenly a year later the 7D came out and the 5D had the 24p firmware update. A bunch of ad agency creatives went out and bought them much to the dismay of many DPs I know who for a time were expected to shoot jobs on those. The cat was out of the bag and our clients were unwilling to pay the HD surcharge any longer.
Now that PP and FCPX can both edit in native 5K footage, clients shooting lower budget jobs on the upcoming inexpensive 4K cameras will have raised expectations. It will be like 2009 all over again. I’m still happy with my 720p 50″ plasma that I sit six feet away from, but the 4K 39″ crappy Seiki monitor I bought showing Red footage looks stunning up close. Most people stand right up close to the TVs in the stores and judge the picture quality and I bet 4K will sell a lot of them unfortunately.
The bright side is there will be a point where this will eventually stop as the human eye has it’s limits. Unless Sony is currently developing bionic retinal implants, I am optimistic it will end at 4K.
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “[Darren Roark] “Looking at the price of the workstation PC versions of those cards it’s a steal.”
… and there’s the myth again.
Franz.”
The reviewer states “Interestingly the D700 (Practically a Rebrand) has not been physically disabled any further than the W9000 yet it gives about 0.5 TeraFlops less compute than the AMD FirePro W9000.”
So instead of 4 TeraFlops it does 3.5 which is a lot, otherwise it’s the exact same card that costs $6800 for a pair of them. Some theories are that the D700s are more like the gamer 7970 cards which still go for about $1000 for a pair of them. If you get applecare, you are covered on them for three years should they fail, so I’m guessing they must be pretty durable.
Since we have no idea what upgrade possibilities there will be in the future, the extra $600 for much better GPUs makes sense. Adobe, Apple, and Resolve keep increasing the importance of the GPU and I think it will gain even more importance in the next few years.
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[Oliver Peters] “Or, if you don’t believe in the future of 4K mastering and don’t use FCP X near-exclusively, you could go with the 6-core and D500. Faster processors than the 8 or 12-core.”
The six core with the D500s will leave every computer I have ever owned in the dust, but I still am getting the D700s. To me it’s not about mastering in 4K at the moment, it’s about being able to get jobs started quicker without transcoding first. FCP X and Premiere with GPU muscle both do great at this, and both have ways of creating proxies later.
With Premiere Pro and AE having much better OpenCL performance on CC along with Resolve, the D700s really help future proof the investment. The extra $600 for double the VRAM and performance is an easy choice for me. Looking at the price of the workstation PC versions of those cards it’s a steal.
The great thing about the ‘classic’ Mac Pros is how useful the six year old models still are with an upgraded GPU. But with no way of knowing if there will be an option to upgrade them in the future, I’m not going to regret spending extra on it now.
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If you are going to be doing color grading I would recommend the 12 core. You can do full 6K debayer with Red Dragon footage. The 8 core can do it, just not as consistently.
For editing, the 8 core is the way to go.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Yes, there are other considerations to think about in media management (FCPX Optimized and Proxy files being in the Library and nowhere else at the moment), but even with those limitations, there are some really easy media management options in FCPX for a shared environment, and it stems from being Library based.”
Funny thing, when I prep a long form job that will be cut in FCP 7 I prep it in FCP X. I just make sure that create optimized is on, sync all the footage, then use Xto7 to send the stringouts. Once in 7 I can make bins pretty easily using the timelines. It’s so much easier than waiting for compressor batches. Then I wonder, why don’t they just cut in FCP X? But I get it, people are comfortable with what they know.
I think it will take a bit of time for the new “library” aka “project” structure of 10.1 to gain trust.
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[Chris Conlee] “This sort of mirrors my experience in the Los Angeles market. I think it would take a real fan with real power to bring it on a network show, as the general consensus seems to be: FCP X is for consumers, and therefore isn’t even part of the conversation anymore. I know editors who’ve bought it to edit their daughter’s wedding videos with, but it never enters their conscience that it could be used for more than that, because they’re so accustomed to using Avid at work.
“It is like deja vu all over again. Discrete Edit, Fast, Media 100 (which was great in it’s day) were all phased out by FCP by the time version 4 came out. It was only four years old by then, and FCP X is only two and a half years old now. It wasn’t really until 2005 where I was working 50/50 Avid/FCP jobs while an assistant. FCP took time to mature and become trustworthy and as for how far FCP X has come in two and a half years it’s a good sign.
Whoever said on this thread “Once you realize how much harder you are working it gets old quick” hit the nail on the head. When I am forced to work on other systems, all the steps necessary to even begin editing are really tiresome. In the fifteen years working with different NLEs, I just like FCP X better.
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As a non scientific test, I made a copy of my library and then duplicated the events x6 so it has about 36K clips, so far so good. I’ll have to find enough projects to have 36K different clips. That could take a while.
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You can use Assisted Editing’s Xto7 and it will make an XML that can be imported into AE. Then in AE, use the File > Import > ProImport Ae menu.
There is also clip exporter that works for basic straight cuts but I haven’t used it in a while.