[Job Ter burg]

Sounds dodgy to me. Think it may be an Academic version.

[Job Ter burg]

Avid qualifies a few specific systems, which they guarantee will work. https://www.avid.com/US/products/media-composer#specifications But it sounds like your dealer will be able to support this particular config with MC, so you will have someone to turn to if it doesn’t work.

It sounds like a very powerful machine for your purpose. i7 is a very fast and mordern processor; I don’t think Avid has qualified any PC’s with i7, but they have qualified some Macs with i7 procs. 3.2Ghz 6-core should cut like a knife through butter.

The heaviest workstation Avid qualifies has dual 6-core Xeon processors. That means a total of 12 cores. That’s mostly needed if you do a lot of transcoding of H264 and Red type stuff. If not, 6 cores will surely suffice to run MC. The Avid Qualified medium workstation (HP z400) is single 6-core Xeon at 2.93GHz, that tells you that it should work.

GeForce is generally not supported by Avid, they always qualify the Quadros. Lots of people work with GeForce nonetheless. Again, Avid won’t support it, but if your reseller will support it, you may not run into any trouble at all.

What will you use as media drive(s)? A SSD system drive means fast booting. The 2TB for projects is rather big, you could easily go with a smaller drive. I would not recommend having project and media on the same drive.

[Job Ter burg]

Isn’t this more easily done editing the segments in 23.976p, then assembling them in a 29.97i project? Avid would add the pulldown there.

[Job Ter burg]

I’m fairly sure that 5.8 shipped with MC 5.x, and that you need AvidFX 6 with MC6.

The downloaded installer for MC6 contains an installer for this. Your Avid store purchase should be listed in your Avid account, and it should include 3rd party serials, like Avid FX (in fact equal to Boris Red).

[Job Ter burg]

Been doing that since waaaaay before (the current) v6.

[Job Ter burg]

You can try this for free:
https://www.3prong.com/FlickerFiX.htm

[Job Ter burg]

Download the HD Test Chart from Belle-Nuit.com. Open it on your desktop. Do you see brightness difference between 255 and 251? If not, you need to turn down the contrast on your computer monitor.

[Job Ter burg]

Stig, as I wrote in the other thread, if you cannot distinguish between the 231 and 235 whites in the document, then your monitor is not set up correctly, and you should turn down the contrast.

Or, and this is also very possible, a straight remap from 16-235 to 0-255 might just look different on a computer monitor, and you may prefer to use a LUT with a slight gamma curve to have it look nicer on your computer screen.

[Job Ter burg]

I leave it 709, export same-as-source or QT Ref, and then when encoding for the web I set a Black Restore and White Restore in Squeeze.

You can however export as RGB. That will remap your legal 16-235 to 0-255, and that should be fine.

I don’t think your assumption of blown-out highlights is correct. If your luma range in Avid/DaVinci is between 16 and 235, an RGB export will remap that to 0-255, and nothing will be crushed or clipped.

Also see this document for some tests:
https://www.xs4all.nl/~terburg/Publications/601_709_RGB.pdf

Do note that using Quicktime (which is what Avid uses when you do anything other than Same-As-Source or QT Reference) to export to certain codecs (like ProRes and H264) will cause gamma shifts. Better to handle it in a decent external encoder.

On a sidenote: I’m no big supporter of the double remap you are using (709 to RGB then RGB to 709), as it is bound to cause rounding errors. In essence, you are doing two passes of rendered color corrections on top of each other, the second undoing the first. Not a clean workflow, in my book.

But I’m not sure if you can get your encoder to go around it.

[Job Ter burg]

Level are not untouched, though, with H264 sources…