[John Michaels]

Render them out as DNxHD MXF, put them in a numbered folder in your Avid MediaFiles directory, and bring them in to your project via the Media Tool in Avid.

[John Michaels]

This is not really an answer to your question (I’ll leave that to much smarter people), but have you tried Smoke? It sounds like it may be a better tool for this kind of project.

[John Michaels]

If you have your monitor attached to the Quadro, Davinci will use the Quadro for the GUI, and the GTX 580 for the rendering. So I think your setup will work well for you.

[John Michaels]

If it’s faded, it means it’s a format/codec Davinci doesn’t support. Check the official list of supported formats on the Blackmagic support site.

In Avid, you can transcode your footage to DNxHD.

[John Michaels]

Thanks for your input! Converting to MXF as I type this.

[John Michaels]

Well, I can find you a $10,000.00 storage solution that would work great. 😉 Do you have a general idea of how much you’re willing to spend?

At the very basic level, you should certainly find a laptop with a 7200 RPM hard drive. Even better would be a 7200 RPM external drive of some sort. If you’re doing this as a hobby, that will probably do you fine.

Also, I heard that if you use an external sound device, there’s been trouble syncing to the canon footage. Is this true?

I haven’t encountered this (I don’t work with DSLR stuff that often), but I could see it as a possibility if you’re working directly with the H.264 files off the camera via AMA. In your situation, if you’re using a laptop, I would definitely recommend transcoding all the footage to DNxHD upon import for much better performance and to avoid any syncing problem.

[John Michaels]

Are you talking about the timeline in the Conform tab? I can edit there just fine, although the tracks are locked by default. Make sure you click on the lock icon next to the track label (“V1”, etc) to unlock it.

Or am I misunderstanding?

[John Michaels]

Lately I’ve been doing a good 90% of my jobs on a Windows box with no regrets. Performance far exceeds what I was seeing on the Mac, and it has been every bit as stable for me. The only thing holding us back is the occasional need to render out to ProRes. As previously mentioned, we had this ability on an earlier beta and it got me really excited, but it seems to be gone for now.

“Are you using the suggested mother board/Z800/SuperMicro as mentioned in the Config Guide?”

Not really. I’m running two GTX 580, latest stable nvidia drivers, 16GB RAM, Decklink Studio. Other guys are running very different setups.

[John Michaels]

Thanks for the heads up! I just upgraded.

Has there been any official word on the ability to encode ProRes in Windows, as we saw briefly in an earlier beta? I was really hoping it would make a comeback in 8.2, but I guess not. A bit of a bummer there. But all in all, another very impressive release from Blackmagic! Thanks guys!

[John Michaels]

[John Christoforu] “what EDL setting should I use for exporting an EDL to resolve for final grading? “

I use an AAF, which retains multiple video tracks, basic transitions and other data.