[Joe Loria]

Im lost lol. I here one thing on one thread and another here. Light space users told me they grade with a similar setup to mine, but now I’m not too sure. Thanks for the responses.

[Joe Loria]

I am??? Could you elaborate please? Any info is greatly appreciated.

[Joe Loria]

Here’s my situation, I have a computer monitor (lg 31mu97), which claims 97% dci. From my understanding (and previous attempts) , I can’t simply calibrate this monitor using the on-display controls as I will never get an accurate result. Using a 3D LUT within my software is my best bet. Unfortunately, I’m on a tight budget at this point and can’t shell out another 1k for an external I/o device. My workaround for this was to calibrate my display using light space, creating a P3 LUT which I use in Davinci resolves “display LUT ” option. This allows me to do all my grading accurately within resolve. Wondering if there is a way to do this within FCPX. My apologies if I didn’t make my situation clear ☹ I’m fairly new to grading. 🙂

[Joe Loria]

Thanks for the input. Ultimately I think I’m gonna create a LUT (both DCI P3 and Rec709) with lightspace, Windows virtualization, and an i1 display pro and use that as a display LUT in resolve. I’ll output to whatever color space I intend it to be viewed in; whether it be Cinema DCI or Rec or whatever. I think by creating those 2 LUTs, and having the output options of Resolve, will give me all the options I need without having to purchase more hardware. That’s what I hope anyway…..

[Joe Loria]

Where would something like Motion 5 fit in, if at all? After export from grading?

[Joe Loria]

Your not the first to say that. A few over at reduser said the same thing. And the more I search, the more I see people dumping FCPX. Shame if i didn’t use a $300 piece of software that I own…lol
Thanks

[Joe Loria]

Sorry should have been clearer. I meant for importing RAW workflow. I know fcpx can work with RED .r3d footage with plugin. But for the sake of working with other raw formats such as cinemadng from a Blackmagic camera. I’m assuming you would use resolve to convert the raw footage to something fcpx can use, then do the edit, then round back to resolve for the final grade. Also, what if I want to change ISO and other settings that I can only do with a raw file format?
Thanks

[Joe Loria]

All internal SATA connections in the mac pro 4,1 / 5,1 are SATA 2.0 not 3.0. Which gives you about 3g speed per drive bay, as oppose to 6g speed performance in a newer computer equipped with SATA 3. This means if you were to install a modern solid state drive which is capable of SATA 3 speeds, (a read / write performance of about 500 to 550 MB/s) into one of the hard drive bays, your speed would be capped by the SATA2 connection, giving you about half the read/write performance the SSD is capable of (giving you about 250 to 280 MB/s). This means that it would take 2 SSD’s in RAID 0 on your Mac Pro to reach the performance of one single SSD connected to a SATA 3 capable computer.

In contrast, most mechanical spinning disk hard drives (say 7200 rpm) will never be able to reach the SATA 2 connection speed and average about 110 to 150 MB/s transfer speeds. So for the sake of argument, lets say you were to install 4 mechanical hard drives into all 4 hard drive bays of your Mac Pro and set them up in RAID 0. You should expect about 4x read/write performance of 1 single disk (about 440 to 600 MB/s but probably closer to 500).

Now its important to note that the 4 internal hard drive bays in the 4,1/5,1 Mac Pro share a controller that is limited to about 800 MB/s. This is fine for any mechanical drives out there because they will never exceed that limit. Unfortunately though, if you were to install 4 SSD’s in all 4 drive bays, and set them up in RAID 0 thinking you would get 250-280MB/s multiplied by 4 giving you about 1000 MB/s, your speed would be capped by the controller giving you about 750-800MB/s.

You can also install mechanical and/or solid state drives in the optical bays (with a 5.25 to 3.5 or 5.25 to 2.5 adapter bracket) as there are two SATA 2 connections for the optical drives. Of course you would have to remove or disconnect the one optical drive if you wanted to use both for hard drives. Other wise you can keep the top optical drive and place a hard drive in the bottom optical bay. Or you can remove the optical drive, buy an external enclosure for it, and connect it as an external. Allowing you to have 2 hard drives in the optical bays. It’s also important to note that the SATA 2 connections in the optical bays are on a separate controller to the one for the 4 hard drive bays. So even if you max out the read/write performance of the hard drive bays with SSD’s in raid 0, you can still increase that by using the optical bays for hard drives.

With all that said, you still have more options via the 4 PCIE slots. These slots are PCIE 2.0. The bottom two slots are x16 the top two are x4. Most likely your graphics card will be in the bottom most slot #1. That leaves you with 3 more slots. Now, there are a whole slew of pcie options out there for connecting internal and external drives at really high speeds, including but not limited to : RAID controllers, esata internal/ external cards, cards for adding 1 or more SSD’s, m.2 cards, mSATA cards, SAS, you name it, the list goes on and on.

Depending on what you plan on doing as far editing and grading footage is concerned, that will determine what your best options are.

1. What resolution will you be working with, 720, 1080, 4k? Generally speaking, the higher the resolution the larger and faster the storage needs to be for real time playback. However, this can be worked around by working with proxies and cutting your resolution down while editing and then exporting at the original resolution.

2. What type of file is the footage? Prores, RAW, h.264? Is it 8 bit, 10 bit or 12 bit? 8 bit h.264 720 24p would require the least amount of overall computer performance and storage space whereas 4k 12 bit RAW would require the most. Again this can be dealt with by working with proxies and such. Also, Prores comes in a variety or flavors to consider.

3. Effects and amount of grading also has a huge effect on what you will want to purchase. More effects, more grading, more editing, more files = more money!

As far as graphics cards go, you want something with as much memory as possible because Resolve is very gpu intensive. They say 4gb will let you grade 1080 prores with little to no issues. With 4k RAW you are going to have to work at much lower resolutions, proxies ect.. and I doubt you will get real time playback. DaVinci recommends 6 to 8gb cards for intensive professional work. These can be pricey and as far as I know their are none available for mac. You can purchase certain high quality graphics cards meant for PC and they will work in your mac pro with certain limitations. Or you can go to macvidcards website (very reputable) and check out what they have available.

CPU’s and memory are also extremely important. You said you have a quad core which means you have a single CPU. This will have an impact on your limitations. When it comes to video editing, more cores = better performance. And in most cases the same goes with RAM.