[Erik Lindahl]

Well.. 10.6.5 is out now give us new cards PNY 🙂

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Erik Lindahl]

I presume they are referring to 10.6.5? 10.6.6 is likely far away.

It would be nice if we saw both the 4000 Quadro and a 4XX “game card”.

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Erik Lindahl]

Would a system be able to run dual Quadro 4000-cards, i.e one dedicated for displays / OpenGL acceleration and one soly for CUDA acceleration? Not all apps work like DaVinci, not even CS5 that’s written for CUDA.

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Erik Lindahl]

Doesn’t show in the Swedish store either..

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Erik Lindahl]

>>> So what do you mean by “it all depends on what you do of course?” 

Well as you’ve recognize as I work with adds it’s similar to feature-film work but in a very small, compact form. Other types of work could be a longer-form such as TV-series or corporate video work. Here you might have more need for higher through-put, less need for “per cut detail work” hence you’ve got more need for a very competent editor. 

I can’t say an AVID or FCP-system makes that huge of a difference, given a system with “true realtime” could help ALOT in some situations. But you also get into features like media and sequence handling. Premier Pro before CS4 I think didn’t support multiple projects / sequences open at the same time – a HUGE limitation in some situations (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on this one, it’s just an example of a feature I could never live without).

Also, and editor can be more of a “finishing system”. I’d say one of the more capable finishing systems out there is Autodesk Smoke. This however is a somewhat different realm than FCP / VEGAS and adds a real compositing solution with-in the editor. Anyhow, finishing features included things like color-correction and other image correction features (image stabilization for example). Here your editor should have a base of features but a very strong point of FCP here is the vast amount of add-ons and plug-ins for nearly anything you can think about. 

>>> I’m also trying to figure out why Avid is multiple times the cost of other NLEs..

There are a lot of reasons for this. They virtually owned the high-end editor market before Apple and FCP came into the scene in the late 90’s. Owning a market they could conduction features and price to their liking. Traditionally an AVID-system has been bundled soft- and hardware pushing up the price quite a lot. FCP, Premier Pro and other software-deraritives are more “build your own” system. This give you more options and adds competition amongst the hardware-vendors. 

Now, since the past year or two AVID has moved into the software only releases, given you still pay a premium for their product. And for people complaining about FCP using “it’s own fileformat” it’s been a lot more open than what it started to compete with – AVID. The latest release here seems to change that a bit however. 

Lots of text, hope it answers some of your questions. 🙂

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Erik Lindahl]

Correct. AVID, Premier Pro, FCP or say Vegas could be “the editor”. It all depends on what you do of course. In some situations you don’t want to leave this app if possible, in some situations it’s natural to do so.

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Erik Lindahl]

Windows has support of high resolution monitors, just as MacOS does. In fact, I get my drivers directly from nVidia… not sure about the Mac platform. But that’s optimal.. they know the graphic device better than anyone else.

This was a pretty interesting thing to say yeah.. MacOS and Window support the same displays and resolutions (more or less). In some cases you grab the drivers directly from the vender (i.e PNY nVidia Quadro card for example) where in general in OSX you rely on the built in drivers per OS-upgrade (10.6 came last summer and we’re at 10.6.4 now, 10.6.5 is just around the corner). Asaik it’s still nVidia / AMD writing the drivers, possibly in conjunction with Apple engineers. There are pro’s and cons with both these systems I’d say, we’ve seen Apple release poor updates and I know both nVidia and AMD have release poor driver to Windows (some even killed their hardware).

There is no need for an application to “support a graphics card”..

This of course depends on what you’re doing. CUDA- och OpenCL acceleration will require a minimum level of GPU and often a vendor will quality X amount of boards to keep it simple. Some software will simply run way better on card A vs card B (this was the case with Apple Color for a long time where ATI-boards ruled in performance). Speaking of Color, ATI-boards get the full range of rendering in 8-, 10-, 12- or 32-bit where nVidia-cards only can choose 8-bit or 32-bit float. This can very well be a programmer “fault” in the background but here I’d say Apple Color supports some cards better than others (in a perfect world it shouldn’t be like that though but reality isn’t often perfect ;-)).

If you’re doing serious video or graphics work on a Mac, you most certainly have a color calibration device (it’s easy to tell.. I get a nag every two weeks to run calibration again). Do you have support for this when you boot Windows, or is it Mac-only? That alone could be the difference in image quality that you’re seeing.

Depending on the calibration you’ll have to re-calibrate in Windows. The hardware-setting will of course follow, the software setting will of course not follow.

It can be some users use default profiles for their hardware in the software which might out of the box be better in OSX – hance they’ll find it “look better there”. This is just a theory though.

MacOSX with Apple monitors tend to be relatively accurate from the get-go. I’ve had some horrible experience with Samsung and Dell monitors and I’ve had to twist and bend them a bit – but they end up very nicely as well.

In regards of playback in FCP we have a few options.

– The canvas will always preview our sequence at an adequate level. As this window seldom is 100% scale at playback you might notice some aliasing from a “faster downscale” algorithm while playing your footage.

– You have the option of using the “Digital Cinema Display” feature which makes any monitor connected to the system (i.e computer monitor to the graphics card) a dedicated video-output source. Here you can choose to view it at 100% (i.e. 1 pixel is 1 pixel) or scale to fit the screen. Both work very well and always remain in sync with the canvas.

– The third (and best) option is an external video device via firewire or a PCI-card. What and how you can output things here depends on your video-hardware. The output also always remains in sync with your canvas.

– Color accuracy between your video-output and canvas can vary a bit. It’s always most accurate to use dedicated video hardware and reference monitor.

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Erik Lindahl]

One solution is going with one of the above camera and extending them with a Atomos Ninja or a Ki Pro / Mini from AJA. Here you end up with a far better, less compressed image directly from the camera in a very FCP-savvy file-format (QuickTime / ProRes).

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Erik Lindahl]

Sadly your Linux won’t run 85% of the applications one need so.. not open enough 😉

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se

[Erik Lindahl]

I think a lot of times an editor, be it a Final Cut Pro editor, will say what they prefer and usually I’d prefer a QuickTime file, uncompressed or ProRes (if HD/2K) and thus I think this is what you encounter.

Yes, I think it’s still only possible to decode ProRes on Windows at the moment which imo is a major issue Apple should fix if they really want to spread ProRes the way it seems. I think Telestream stated Episode can encode ProRes even on Windows, I’m not 100% sure on that one. This is however a major over-sight done by Apple if they really want a wide-spread format. Seing hardware from various manufactuers are supporting ProRes I would think software can / or will in the future as well.

You said “Apple does not make ProRes422 codec for the Windows version of Quicktime” which is somewhat incorrect. They make one it just isn’t a two-way-street.

Well, Cineform is a format that i theory could “bridge the gap” between say your Vega’s system and an FCP system. The problem is as you state – why would an FCP user go out and buy something they get for free (more or less)? So yeah, we’re again stuck. This is IMO an issue Apple has the power to fix if they really wanted to. A small royalty fee for ProRes I guess is what’s holding companies back from embracing it, I can’t really say. I can say that on MacOS in FCP ProRes works far better than in Premier Pro. The later can read it but it’s not very efficient.

Looking to the future I wouldn’t be surprised if MacOS / QuickTime and also FCP get’s a far more “open” structure (i.e. reads native file-formats rather than re-wrapping everything to QuickTime). QuickTime X in MacOSX 10.6 is to my knowledge built towards that idéa. At the moment we’re still stuck in QuickTime 7-land for production however. At the end of the day, in my opinion, it would be sweet to just add support centrally in QuickTime for .MXF, .MTS .M2V and so forth as well as adding the needed codecs. It shouldn’t matter if my MPEG2 stream is wrapped in a QuickTime or a .M2V really as long as we don’t end up with formats that have a bunch of limitations. This however won’t be known until MacOSX 10.7 and / or Final Cut Pro 8 / what ever the new version will be called as we’re still stuck in “old QuickTime land” for the time being.

I don’t have any HDV footage here but when ingesting digital formats such as RED, DVCPRO HD and so forth you go to the following steps:

– File > Log and transfer
– Click the “Add volume” in the top left corner (i.e. your P2 card with media)
– Navigate to the card and click “open”
– All the files on the card should now show in the transfer window, you can preview them, set in and out points and so forth.
– In the top right corner there is a “settings” button where you can set to retain the original codec or transcode to ProRes.

That said, I’ve got limited experience with HDV given we HAVE edited some HDV in FCP.

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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se