[Joseph Owens]

[Joseph Murray] “taking power from the second superdrive. What adaptor would that be?”

There should be a piggyback second power connector in the upper compartment that would be used to run a second optical drive. With some adaptation, you might be able to tap into that and fish the cable down into the PCIe group. May not be that straightforward with full-length cards.

jPo

You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?

[Joseph Owens]

[David Roth Weiss] “So, DaVinci here I come…”

The water is fine. The AAF round trip now works better than the FCP/COLOR path ever did. You can choose to apply the “Motion” tab, the secondaries are far superior, the tracker works, you can grade greenscreens in context with an alpha generated composite in the Resolve timeline, you can import rotoshape travelling mattes… it plays real time, it supports chase audio… its a long list that Apple was never going to be able to incorporate.

jPo

You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?

[Joseph Owens]

[Bill Davis] “BTW, only a fools fails to realize that those very “suits” are as necessary as any other group in a stable enterprise. But as with all other groups, in times of stress they tend to see the world with the narrow eyes of their discipline, rather than how their practice “fits in” to the overall health of things.

It’s going to take a long time to regroup after an era where “right-sizing” came to mean “starve the enterprise to make the bank/shareholders short-term happy.””

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/28/maximizing-shareholder-value-the-dumbest-idea-in-the-world/

I find it interesting that one of the three companies that is cited as best resisting the bingo-playing on the stock market is Apple, and that stance is attributed solely to one Steve Jobs. But no longer is that true, and probably the company is now doomed once that charismatic leader, the one who actually believed in creating value, and “delighting the customer”, is lost. Because evidently there are a lot of “not delighted” customers at the moment.

We see that modern business is rife with a deadly disease and it is in fact the “suits”, who are vampiring the very companies that they are supposedly husbanding.

Is the FCX debacle a wiggle on the seismometer?

And a corollary question for the “versatile relational database container facilitators”, when do you think we will see an AMPAS category for “fastest editor”?

jPo

You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?

[Joseph Owens]

[Christopher Adams] “at this point can anyone confirm that there isn’t a way to get 3 cards in the mac pro directly?”

I think it would be an issue with lane width/ bit transfer rates, in that you really need a 16x PCIe slot, and the upper two slots in the current MacPros don’t support that, so you’re stuck with using them for I/O video and storage drive interfaces.

jPo

You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?

[Joseph Owens]

[Jamal Howard] ” Calabrated [sic] using color bars (All I have access to at the moment).”

“Sort of lined up” is what you get using color bars as a reference. Calibrated, not so much, and I’d be surprised if a LUT made any difference under these circumstances.

You’ve been working in 709 all along, and otherwise the whole idea of a LUT is a waste of time and processing cycles. BluRay? fine. Automatic Quicktime gamma conversion in Compressor? Also, pretty much okay.

Maybe I’ve been at this for too long, but I just don’t “get” this multiple layers of LUTs.
In a sense, every correction is a LUT. Unless you are traversing media with entirely different primary stimulus emitters, LUTs are not necessary.

jPo

You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?

[Joseph Owens]

Propose name change to “SSDD”. Look it up.

Further to corporate psychology, I’m shocked (shocked!) that so little is known about “The Corporation”:
https://www.thecorporation.com/index.cfm?page_id=2

Modern incorporated business entities and their invariable behaviour passes all the tests with flying colours to qualify as certifiably psychotic sociopaths. And this is the de facto governance we have as a civilization, since elected officials are all beholden to the financial sector — with the possible exception of energy producers – the worst violators.

I’m starting to pine for the days of Caligula, who was simply criminally insane.

jPo

You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?

[Joseph Owens]

Video I/O cards function as an interface between the file-based and serial-stream worlds. They can look into the encoded source media, and if its an understandable codec, in a recognized wrapper, whether its Quicktime ProRes, MXF DNxHD, or “Uncompressed 8/10-bit”, it will be able to map that data onto a memory raster that humans would be able to recognize if it was mapped onto a visual display.

In the file based world, the entire clip, for its duration, resides as data on some form of storage. There are ways of displaying every frame at once. In the serial world, each pixel comes out like water coming out of a hose, and we only see a recognizable image when they have been organized on a display (live), or going to tape and played back, another serial (single-stream, as opposed to parallel-stream) process that is time dependent. The frames follow each other like rolling stock in a train, and while they are in this temporal domain, they don’t actually conform to any codec, and are defined by resolution, frame-rate, and colorspace. You can playback MXF DNxHD from a Blackmagic SDI card, and capture it as Quicktime ProRes on a Kona card. For the brief instant that the data stream is in transit between the SDI output of one card and the input on the receiving card, it is “live” and for all intents “Uncompressed” and doesn’t exist as anything other than bits of data flying down the pipeline.

Some codecs are dependent on a stream of frames (long-GOP) since they need a group of spanned-data images to produce a coherent frame progression. Even in the file-based world, these codecs need to be processed in groups by editing programs in a serial manner, similar to adding water to a powder-based drink.

TMI?

jPo

You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?

[Joseph Owens]

There is a configuration guide on the Blackmagic site that details every requirement.

I am running MC6 under Snow Leopard.
Don’t see the need for Lion. Don’t need that kind of access to, or intrusions by, Apple’s AppStore.

jPo

You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?

[Joseph Owens]

[Spazz Nielsen] “Is there a solution to this if this is caused by wrong IRE information?”

There is an option in Resolve (right click on the clip in Conform) to change the applied scaling.

jPo

You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?

[Joseph Owens]

Quite likely its the difference between full scale RGB and legal linear 709 video.

ProRes4444 especially is a questionable choice for swapping between systems as it can contain either RGB or Y’CbCr media, and there are applications which won’t know which — unless you deliberately flag it as such. When you say the blacks are “crushed”, I’d also bet that your whites are well below where they should be. This is a result of plotting 94-940 (0-100 IRE) as if they were 0-1023, which will result in severely negative black. The opposite also occurs, and people complain about flat, milky values.

These issues are painfully obvious in scopes.

jPo

You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?