[Joseph Owens]

[Chris Martin] “Titan cards can only run on macs with cubix FYI.”

Not entirely true, in the sense that the outboard card rack is the most straightforward implementation, plus more open-ended. But *a* Titan can be coaxed to run in a pre-coffee-can MacPro (under Mountain Lion or later) with its own, dedicated power-supply strapped to the chassis. Its a kind of Frankenstein Cubix, and you do end up with a Medusa-head of cable snakes, and bolts through the neck and so on. It also starts robbing the USB bus… so even your keyboard and mouse starts needing a powered hub. Seriously, the nuke plant down your street will have to bring another reactor on line.

Having a rack full of them is an appealing idea, though, and once I get beyond a bunch of legacy jobs hanging around under Resolve9, I may get around to replacing all those flashed GTX480s populating my current Cubix.

And…. errr… there is a whole forum dedicated to “Resolve Basics and Configuration” that someone took the trouble to set up, but is rarely used. Why is that?

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Jesse Glucksman] “I guess, as with so much of color correction, it’s largely subjective.”

Not so much… more like what are the concatenated effect priorities that you are trying to achieve?

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Martin Gaumond] “So is the 16-235=0-100IRE and 0-255= -10-120IRE?”

Yes, that is pretty much the way Y’CbCr is mapped and is appropriate for HD video workflows destined for broadcast. It allows for “overshoot” and “undershoot”, and is a kind of hangover from the days of composite baseband video.

If you are dealing with RGB media, Animation codec, ProRes4444, dpx scans or rendered graphics, then you might want to choose the full scale rendition… 0-255 in 8-bit, 0-1023 in 10-bit… and then pick the correct SDI interpretation for export to a viewing environment. Most of the time, at least for broadcast, we are interested in 709, but that is only one delivery destination. Different if you are delivering thatrical — for some it is more appropriate to view in XYZ DCI space, and then, of course you need to pick the right monitor mode.

Different horses for different courses.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Clark Bierbaum] “Also, if your not willing to pay anything, please don’t post as this is self evident.”

I already work for free, or at least it feels like it.

Seems like there are a lot of third-party add-ons that do cost money already, and we buy them from example companies like Fraunhofer and GenArts, neither of which I have subscribed to.

I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that this is a product that Blackmagic is responsible to develop — its probably Tangent that should be doing it, so maybe its actually their business case. Nonetheless, lets look at the Tangent Elements collection, retailing at about $3500 for the set. $1K-$2K would represent another 30-50% premium, which I am *pretty sure* (Danny Moynihan Jersey-accent) most users would baulk at.
$250-$300? 10%.

I am also not at all sure that numeric keypads are even possible to be mapped to the USB interface.
Although -2{preview] is a command that I dearly miss, yes you are spot on with that. Although I am getting used to [middle-click].

Probably $29,000 plus a license of Resolve would be too much…
(although it is still a tiny fraction of the MSRP for a 2K+.)

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Todd Hallam] “How often do you use the Kb and Bt panels? “

All the time. Grabbing and playing stills, next-next-next keyframes, trimming luminance (far finer control than even the balls)… the beat goes on.

The older daVinci panels had a ballistic feature which made “Large” changes if you moved the balls fast, and really “fine” changes if you moved them slow… -After a while, the “on-the-fly” scaling becomes a muscle memory like throwing three-pointers from outside the key, and gets you inside the 20-second limit much much faster.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Harris Charalambous] “3. New Power window features in v10 are great but are still lacking the ability to Add to one another, Subtract, Intersect etc without the use of a Key Mixer. This would be a time saver.

4. Give us the ability to select multiple points on a Power Curve Window and move them together. Just like one could do in compositing applications from 15 years ago (love you BM but this is half implemented).”

You should be able to synthesize Boolean operations between power windows on the same node with the mask and invert controls that exist.

But I am with you with being able to “lasso” portions of a rotoshape — this might be complicated because part of the code architecture may conflict with interactive tracking. For the moment if I have to roto anything, I exit the program and build one in SHAKE. Ancient, but allows me to create rock-solid, almost impossible tracking scripts with MochaPro and parent and boolean multiple shapes — because things rotate, they revolve, they pass in front of and behind other things…

The stabilize mode also suffers from “rubbery” solutions, simply because it is a point tracker… even if the multipoint starts approaching a planar surface track, no real consideration is given to perspective.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Todd Hallam] “advice. “

Advice is free. Sometimes you get what you pay for.

Can’t comment on the MC Color or ethernet issues. I ran a set of Tangent-200s with Final Touch/Apple COLOR for a couple of years (For Sale-Cheap! if anyone wants them), prior to that a series of (small-d) daVinci proprietary panels, not the current incarnation. I own a Wave for out-of-office work, and a full set of Elements here at my studio.

You will definitely need to interface through a powered hub if you go for the USB – Elements, that is not optional.

Be mighty aware that all of these are extremely susceptible to static discharge problems, and it would not surprise me if we later find out that most of the system halts that we see are related to spike faults.
I get bouts of them in bad spells of extremely dry weather, which we experience here on the sub-arctic edge of the polar boreal forest. All I have to do is shift my cheeks on my leather chair and reach for the mouse – zap – done.

I do miss the “heavy” balls of the original daVinci control panels. There is something about physical inertia/momentum that enhances the sculptural feel of moving the image values around. After 20 years of that man/machine connection, I cannot even remotely imagine the mouse/stylus approach — just seems chainsaw-crude. And I am not talking about numerical precision, I could not give a rat’s tuckus about number matching. (Except for that one job where the animated characters had target RGB values, which was a throwback to the golden age of cartoons).

My own criteria for making a decision between the two would be to examine the most common actions employed in setting up a correction and correlating that to the first-level access offered by the panels.

Not everyone does this, but most colorists need primary RGB, lift/gamma/gain balance “on top”, followed by secondary hue “trims”, and then window/vignetting. Not everyone dives straight into complex compositing with separation keys, travelling mattes, overlays, and parallel node operations, so if they are a layer down, or even prioritized under window menus… maybe that’s what would work for you.

So check the layout and which is going to be your better investment, if time=money, like Einstein proved.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Bill Davis] “GET A DEPOSIT up front. As big as you can!”

The day has come when I agree with something Bill has written.

I would add that most of the time, that deposit will be the last money you see from that client.
And what will “lose” you that client is your annoying insistence on getting paid.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[William Edwards] “I tried doing this with ‘normally scaled legal’ and ‘auto’ settings, and that doesn’t make a difference at all.”

Something is not right with the scaling applied somewhere in the round trip — If your dpx workflow works, then somewhere you have full-scale RGB set as the normal import/export interpretation. It is very difficult to generate out of gamut values in Resolve, unless there is a mixup somewhere in RGB/Y’CbCr.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Shane Ross] ” You’ll have to look for it for sale on eBAY or Craigslist. Nearly 3 years gone now…”

Looking back on things now…. Apple may have actually done a lot of us a financial favour of some kind.

True, I did buy Symphony and Media Composer (but at sharply reduced prices), and did pick up the Adobe Creative Suite, but it was almost completely because I wanted Encore for BluRay authoring… Still have no clue what I would do with Premiere. Never opened it. Adobe’s Media Encoder was an unexpected bonus.

But, also haven’t purchased a lot of software.. certainly not Apple… almost 3 years, as you say, and… what was all that frantic purchasing all about anyway, for the odd incremental feature bump?

Oddly, still able to edit video. Go figure… Apple’s real accomplishment might be that they simply succeeded in removing their hand from my pocket. Stopped buying MacPros… don’t need their OS upgrades… (probably better to avoid, other than to persuade the old MacPro to see the nVidia Titan for Resolve, but…) otherwise? Meh.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.