Joseph Owens
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COW Coins
16
DaVinci Coins
Forum Replies Created
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Perhaps the client is naïve enough to think that what they are getting is some kind of “secret sauce” that is going to be a magic wand they can wave over the rest of their revisions, or other projects… it just doesn’t work that way. The corrections within a grade are *always* dependent on the source material, and are usually absolutely unique to that clip. An exported project is ONLY valid for that particular timeline, that’s all there is to it. If the client wants a backup, great. Should I be keeping 10 years worth of grades on my system? Maybe, if its a great look that resulted from a creative session. That raises the question — does the original booking client, who ostensibly paid for that development, “own” that look? Or is it “mine” to sell to everybody else?
jPo
“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.
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[andrew Finch] ” at random times”
Hmmm. I note that most of the time that this happens to me, its when I am playing or jogging back and forth across a cut.
jPo
“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.
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[Itai Bachar] “In what way apple monitors are worse?”
One part of my reservations about Apple generally is that they have consistently shown a fairly limited understanding of SMPTE/EBU CCIR practices. They cannot decide what gamma to use for display transfer functions and this has lead to an almost universal mistrust of exported media. Depending on decoders, displays, and operating systems, you *might*, but usually *might not* get back what you thought you were sending out. Beyond that, at least the Apple Cinema Displays are *not* designed to tell the truth — they are juiced to make everything look “great”… and they are all glossy now, you can’t get the matte low-glare glass anymore. Its actually harder to find something ‘right’ with them than it is to list everything that is wrong with them, which is just about everything. The power supplies fail regularly, and it is pretty much impossible to fix or replace them… shall I go on?
As far as the green/magenta flip/flop, its another argument against using mouse/stylus controls as a User Interface. Even back when we were exclusively grading in SD, daVinci systems were famous for over-sampling, not just at 4:4:4, but at 8:8:8 (which resulted in the name of their intermediate SD grade system). The current spec for Resolve is to process the source data in 32-bit float, which should have a very high degree of fine-ness.
It sort of reminds me of an incident that occurred while there was a pan-and-scan job in the telecine gate a number of years ago. A trainee was assisting, and noted that my X-Y coordinates were “not exactly” half of the maximum/minimum excursion values for a centred image. One issue with that is that the 8:8:8 displayed all its parameters in hexadecimal… so math in base-16 is not the same as base-10, that’s just one issue, but the other reality is that interlaced 525i29.97 doesn’t really have a 0/0 center value — in the world of 262.5 interlaced lines, 240 of which are active in any particular field, there will always be a slight geometric offset, but nothing below .5% is gong to make any difference at all because we are dealing, once again, with a sampled system. That means something else in the greater field of Communication Theory. So the reality was that there was no “line” that would be exactly centred vertically… its an even number of lines, so half would have to be above a certain point, and the other half would need to be below that value. Its a little like the joke that half of the people you might meet are “below average.”
You might note that you can really only adjust blur/mist in Resolve in 2-pixel increments (that has an effect), and certainly only even-number amounts are actually saved and retrieved. You mibght get the feeling that what we do is an inexact science…
jPo
“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.
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[Itai Bachar] “nothing out of the ordinary, monitoring on a calibrated apple cinema.”
For starters, you’re more than likely monitoring in 8-bit, so what you think is a .001 change is quite a bit more than that even if you are working in full scale 0-255, less if you’re working in 709. Hues are going to pop in large increments, more than one degree at a time, if you do the math. (360/255, roughly, at full saturation.)
If not for any other reason, the coarseness of an 8-bit display, which describes most graphics monitors, disqualifies them for grading. Apple Cinema Displays are particularly bad, “calibrated” or not.
As far as tetrachromatic color vision goes, I thought that was genetically impossible for males, my understanding being that the trait resides on the second X-chromosome. But that reflects an imperfect understanding on my part, probably.
jPo
“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.
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Sounds like you are exporting out of an anamorphic timeline, so you may have to adjust that so that you are dealing with square pixels… either as an export parameter or a duplicate timeline that is explicitly set up for (ie) 1920×1080… rather than something like 1440×1080…
jPo
“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.
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[Richard Walton] “Natural History Services”
It would be like experimenting with Ice Age animals and how they might survive in the tropics.
Or whether “Grand Prix Legends” would be really hot on Windows 8.People are having enough trouble trying to sort out why Mavericks is killing their applications, even as recent as Resolve 10. God “bless” you, Apple…
However, a fresh install and instant update from FCP6 to 7 still might work… worth a try.
There are tricky ways to have 7 and FCPX coexist on the same hard drive, but it is not simply a matter of installing one after the other. They are mutually incompatible in a large number of ways. I’d try FCP6–>7 first, then protect it (if the install works) by building all the alternate folders you need to move around its assets so that the hunter-killer components of FCPX don’t find and destroy them…. which they will.Before X was actually released, there were a lot of advisories describing alternate boot drives to address keeping 7 and X apart, but experience shows that to be kind of inconvenient. Especially if you have a lot of support apps that you would like to keep running in parallel. Then you have to re-install all of them.
* on that note, it might be easier to either re-format or create a new boot drive and roll it back to Snow Leopard, for example.jPo
“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.
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[Katy Johnson] “Would it have be better not to media manage the render files and then have done a render after it was media managed to the clients drive. “
When I accept Media Managed files, I don’t usually expect the Render Files directory to be part of the deal, but maybe that’s just me. They are expendable, as far as I am concerned, and if they are taking a long time to process — who can say whether they would be faster to generate at the receiving end, and the next question on the agenda would be — if the receiving end is going to re-edit the sequence, those render files are likely moot.
I accept Media Managed files to load into Resolve for grading, so the render files are utterly useless. For a client accepting a project, they may be convenient — unless they change anything. Then it depends on where their FCP a/v preferences and system settings expects to pull the render files for playback/preview, and if your transport drive is not fast enough, they will have to move them again.
jPo
“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.
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[andrew sableton] “I used to buy the cool aid on the wonderful AVID media management system……but now realise it is at least as buggy and much less flexible than the FCP 7 setup….”
Its a philosophical proposition that only someone who is conversant with both can really judge. I don’t know AVID nearly well enough to be able to comment definitively, but I do find its “Avid MediaFiles or nothing”, don’t even spell it wrong and make sure there is no space between Media and Files… to be a bit prehistorically rigid (calcified, petrified?). I also find that unless an editor has… oh, something equivalent to an engineering degree, they are all terrified and distrustful of AMA. “Oh, no, we’re pretty sure that Media will go off line and will be lost to us, and that’s why we can’t send the project to you…”
That’s what I hear, over and over. And you would have to hold a gun to the editor’s head to get them to even attempt a reconnect.
Meanwhile, having navigated a couple of season cycles of a drama, I find that I have better luck roundtripping AAFs that I have opened in my own instance of Media Composer and/or Symphony, made my own indigenous version, and opened and regenerated that through Resolve. Works almost every time, with no juice loss. Also works better if you clean the list of stuff that Resolve can’t or won’t handle.
jPo
“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.
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[Joe Severino] “The client wants the project delivered in an Avid MC 7 project”
Depending on how complicated the sequence is, with time remaps, geometry changes, text, and so on… there is even a chance that “washing” your FCP7 XML through DaVinci Resolve, and exporting an AAF is worth a try… Some things will not translate, but the media structure would be there.
Duck would be the best for interpreting all the non-media generators, etc.
jPo
“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.
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[Nina Sargsyan] ” I’ve been looking for the save files and project files all over my computer for Resolve,”
It would be of fairly limited value to be able to access these files as they are a “no user serviceable parts” kind of proposition. They are part of a database.
If what you are trying to do is backup, archive, or move the projects, there is an “export” option that does just that and you can direct those to wherever you want.
There used to be an advantage to being able to drill down through the old Apple COLOR package, when there were no real extraction tools and exportability was not really an option, but why you would want to do this with Resolve would be an item of curiosity, at least for me…
jPo
“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.