Jack Jones
Forum Replies Created
-
I would definitely recommend AKA.
The best chairs, desks and inbuilt furniture solutions going! A little pricy yes, but the clients really value the additional cost.
-
Thanks for recommending my mini-review Peter!
Like I said “You can take any project, with great ease, from any offline software on the market and get it into Resolve without batting an eyelid.”
-
– Yes to multi-layers.
– No to XML. Does AAF and EDL nicely. Easily the one of the best conforming tools that I’ve seen! Far more robust that Apple Color.
– Mixed media was fine from what I remember.
– Don’t see why there would be an issue with spanned R3Ds but I never asked. Going on the rest of the product I’d say it’ll have not issues.
– I would say no to ‘Buy & Download.’ UK website specifies a dongle. Maybe there will be a period you can use it in the lead up to a dongle arriving? -
If you haven’t seen the latest version you’ll be very impressed. I wanted to hate it! However, after seeing it in action I can’t knock it one bit.
Fantastic software. Makes Color look like a piece of old hack. The conforming is just sublime as is the tracking.
I for one wanted to say Color can do everything DaVinci can do… Simple fact is it can’t. Sure you can use a few work arounds, and grade to an incredibly high standard, but you simply can not achieve the same amount with the same ease as the new software. Forget realtime playback, and audio playback. The keying is superior, as is the tracking, pan & scan and conforming.
You can take any project, with great ease, from any offline software on the market and get it into Resolve without batting an eyelid. Got some RED files that have fallen out of structure and been renamed… No problem! The auto-conform finds them and relinks them.
It’s so well meta-data driven it really is one of the modern grading tools rivaling DV FilmMaster’s tracking and conforming, Scratch’s data-driven file management and Baselight’s speed of approach. I still think the minimum pro setup will set you back around £20k pre-DaVinci panel but nontheless it will be worth it!
-
The issue goes far deeper than you think Vladimir.
If you use two ‘exits’ for the BMD 3D Extreme, one ‘exit’ for the GT120, two ‘exits’ for the GTX285/Quadro then you are left with no ‘exits’ for Fibre or eSata and a fast RAID will surely be a must to get realtime DaVinci OS X playback.
Therefore you have to ignore the HDMI monitoring side of things unless you get a SDI to HDMI monitoring thing.
Bit of a ball ache! It would be nice if the next Mac Pro adds room for 6 cards with space for 8 exits. Multiple GPU support + GTX480 would be nice too. A big PSU would be a must though!
-
This has been mentioned before. If I’m correct in thinking, Apple have OS X basically locked to 1x GPU for monitoring and 1x GPU for Software. Can’t quite remember where I read that though.
Certainly there would be no reason BMD would ever want to allow this anyway. It would completely knock out their early Linux systems if you could line-up 4x GPUs within a £10-15k Mac combination. The entry points would go from that £10k mark all the way up to maybe a £60/70k jump.
Well, I wouldn’t if I owned their business… I’d develop my own costly add-on!
(Secretly fingers are crossed though!)
I don’t know how it works, but if it replicated a single GPU you might get away with it, but then again OS X limited the power of the individual cards (hence flashing 295 NVidia’s won’t give you more power).
-
I’m not sure either. I know that the 3D is definitely supported whereas I don’t know about the latest Decklink Studio… I think I’ve read somewhere previously that it might be.
I’d firstly say there is probably a speed and compatibility advantage to a better I/O. As for 3D, why not get one? You might as well spend and extra $200 or so on something a bit more future proof. Who’s to say that 3D won’t be a possibility in a September Mac Pro release?
I’m planning on going 3D and hoping that a late 2010 Mac Pro has more graphics options and slots to allow for full 3D capability. Then I’m sure we’ll all start seeing more 3D short films being offered to us!! (Hopefully commercial and music promo stuff to be more realistic!).
Genuinely getting very excited about it now. Would really like some official specs, as I’d kinda like to hold off on a new GPU until September, and we have a few GTX285’s lying around the place. Will probably need a 3D Extreme myself though as I’m currently an MXO2 person and don’t imagine support for that coming for a good 6 months or so. (In fact I might just go ask that of them now).
-
In the UK it is the skill of the colourist, however you will never get the same rate for a £15k Apple Color suite as you would for a Baselight suite. We’re talking around a 50% rate drop based on the name!
When you say 80% as capable as a Fuse, I think it’s probably more like 95% as full of features. They each have their own feature sets, I just think I would prefer Fuse based on my enjoyment of FilmMaster. My understanding of Fuse is that the base model is £20k and the top model around £40k. Translate into American money and it’s competitive with the first Linux model and Scratch.
I spent most of my time looking at the Linux machine so I will try to answer your questions the best I can.
The Mac system was snappy, and to be honest, no different in terms of working speed to the dual machine Linux setup. Both were doing monitor out and using the BMD Ultrascopes (which were also snappier than I’d been told they were!). The Mac version was using the Tangent Wave, the Linux used the BMD Panel. As I said, too many button pushes to do a single thing. Hopefully mouse support for ‘renegade graders’ but realistically you NEED a controller for this.
I only overheard a conversation about the GPU and believe they were using the GTX285, although it would be nice if someone else who was there could back that up as I’m only about 70% sure that was what the outcome of the conversation was!
Saw nothing regarding a background render cache. I’d say it’s unlikely. That said you can always hope! I think that if you’re planning on doing 2k out or grading at 2k then you’ll probably want to move on to a dual Linux machine or something like Fuse (pretty much the same value in $ – decision down to feature set). That would also give you 3D on both setups.
As for Dual Link 4:4:4 I see no reason why not? You have to use the Decklink Extreme 3/3D which is capable of 3Gb/s SDI as well as Dual Link. It’s the same full system as the Linux version, no features are disabled, they just don’t work if you try to use them. Fingers crossed a new Mac Pro with more slots and better GPUs could allow for more secondaries and even 3D… More chance of a video iPad though.
-
From what I understand.
If you only have one SuperDrive you have a spare Molex connector available to take power from. That would mean the 8800 and 285 are possible… Theoretically!
-
I say that I’d want to opt for the panel as I felt there were so many different (and fairly unnecessary) steps involved, especially when it got to secondaries, that the full panel would be really quite important.
Take for example adding a shape, just a circular one. You have to add a node layer, select the shape and then activate it. 3 buttons on the full panel to access a single feature. Didn’t really like that the panel required a mouse for a large amount of it but hey ho.
I have a Tangent Wave for Apple Color, probably one of the earliest adopters in the UK, and it works beautifully for Color. With DaVinci OS X I can easily see it reaching incredible key combinations to do something relatively simple. Originally I read a quote somewhere (vague I know) that said a controller was compulsory. It doesn’t have to be by the looks of it, but there is no way in hell I’d like to run it with a mouse!
I do hate the way it’s similar to Baselight. The whole add layer, add function (shape) and activate it. It’s hard to explain but it just seems like once you say you’re going to use a secondary it should just do it in one or two buttons. Example being the second you add a secondary you should be able to start on a function and therefore it activates it. As I said, hard to explain without showing you!
No XML or ALE yet but the support for AAF kinda voids that to a large enough extent.
As mentioned previously I really love it’s use as the finishing system. You could take the offline cut, vfx cut-ins and the final audio (personally I’d layoff the audio to tape from the audio suite) then online and grade it in one suite. Much more friendly than Color’s ‘back-to-Final-Cut-we-go!’ approach.
You can even take a chump’s offline RED cut with renamed folders the lot and run a metadata search – Very impressive as it finds the clips that could fit that edit on the sequence and lets you select them if more than one fit is found. Especially useful if you have an offline reference to help you choose between. Scene detect was fairly useful as well. Very similar to the way Assimilate Scratch manages it’s metadata. Fits in nicely with Kevin Shaw’s ‘Integrated DI Workflow’
which seems like a sensible progression in the industry.It’s slick, functional and a dramatic improvement over Apple Color. I would straight away say it’s a more useful system to a Baselight as you can finish in it. FilmMaster is my personal preference but this isn’t far short of that. I also would say I prefer DaVinci OS X to Scratch, but haven’t used Scratch enough to rule it a home run. Mistika is still something I’m yet to use and I imagine it would be a superior product based on what I’ve seen of it. Not vastly superior by any measure though.
Like mentioned in my first post. Value for money tells me that the base-end Fuse (roughly £20k) is better value than DaVinci Mac OS X plus a Panel. The high-end Fuse (at around £40k) would be pretty 50/50 when compared to the base Linux system. Fuse would probably be faster based on the fact that all Nucoda systems run on a single machine so they probably have more experience with getting the most out of a single system (top DaVinci Linux can have 16 systems I believe). Still that’s me guessing at that point.
It’s nice to see colourists picking suites based on features as much as price. Hopefully it’ll bring back the value of the colourist, stopping all of this ‘I need a x colourist’. You wouldn’t tell a DOP what camera you want to use!
If there are any specific questions do ask away and I’ll do the best to answer from my experiences.
Jack.