[Kevin Cannon]

Hi Jay,

Yeah, it’s a little confusing… “split” in the media pool refers to making separate media pool entries out of a single piece of media (usually camera takes) so that Resolve won’t automatically share grades between them. It doesn’t split them into shots in the timeline.

For what you want to do, to use an EDL as a cut list, you should navigate to the DPX sequence in the media browser and right click it to use it for “scene cut detection.” The will load it into the scene tab where you can either use the automatic cut detection (which you don’t need to, because you have an EDL) or “load EDL” which will insert all the edits listed in the EDL.

Then hit “split” to split your DPX sequence into multiple media pool entries and you are good to go. The Scene Detection window is also a good place to check the EDL you have, and remove through-edits or add ones that might need to be put in for grading purposes…

KC

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[Kevin Cannon]

In the media pool you can sort by “usage” (you may have to right click and “update” to see the usage numbers) and then you should get a lot of clips towards the bottom that have a usage number of 0… those would be your unused clips and you can just shift-click to select and remove them all. If that’s the same as what you mean.

KC

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[Kevin Cannon]

Thanks Joshua,

A sort of related question: instead of sending out mixed signals, does Blackmagic make an adapter that could used to down-convert a 2K 3GSDI signal to 1080p?

The issue there is that the BM Ultrascope doesn’t accept a 2K 24p RGB signal in any fashion, but I need to have the decklink set to 2K… I can make all the other devices work taking in 2K over SDI, but need to send 1080p to the scopes at the same time…

KC

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[Kevin Cannon]

I have a more similar set-up than Sacha perhaps, Resolve 8.0.1 Lion 10.7.1 with a GTX285, GT120, and this week I’ve been working with mostly 2:1 4K and 4.5K RED footage. I’ve had a few problems with the upgrade to Lion; in the end I stepped back to CUDA driver 4.0.17 (.19 wasn’t being found by resolve).

I’ve had a couple of those errors – rendering to ProRes4444 I had the frame rate drop to zero and I got an error along the lines of “timeout occurred on frame 4” and I’ve also seen the “Error occured communicating w/ Digital Powerhouse Decoder” but that one I got occasionally on 10.6. But I didn’t get those errors as often as you (maybe once on 7 short renders, and none on a big DPX render today).

It could be unrelated, but I changed a lot of the power saving settings in Lion (it’s pretty aggressive in sleeping hard disks and such) and I saw improvements in Resolve’s responsiveness…

KC

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[Kevin Cannon]

Yup, just preview a still on the color page (you’ll need to capture one if your stills page is empty) then change “reference mode” to offline and you’ll see your offline. You can also change the wipe mode to “wipe-m” to see a full frame blend of the offline and online.

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[Kevin Cannon]

Thanks Joshua,

Unfortunately it looks like the Decklink quad is only HD, I’m hoping to output 2K dual-link and 2K 3G so it looks like I’ll have to use my current card or the 4K to output 3G and then add something in front of my one dual-link device.

KC

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[Kevin Cannon]

The Caldigit card is a great option but it no longer will control the internal drives on newer Mac Pros and as far as I know it will only work with the Caldigit HD Elements that are four-drive solutions.

It’s pretty great in that you can attach one, two, or three HD Elements in a combined RAID. I started with one, and now have two. I use them as separate 4-drive RAIDs and have no problem with 2048×1152 DPX sequences at 24fps, but you might find that 2048×1556 is stretching it… potentially you would need to combine two for 24fps playback…

Mine have been extremely reliable…

KC

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[Kevin Cannon]

Having extra GPUs might not help you much on this job if your grades are fairly few nodes and you are not using the noise reduction or other GPU intensive functions… Having multiple GPUs helps to ensure that you don’t run out of resources as your grade gets more and more complicated.

Yeah, the R3D is a unique problem that requires a Rocket card or a very fast processor. The other compressed formats (ProRes, h.264, Alexa) all benefit from a faster processor, but are easier to decode and don’t require their own cards usually.

Definitely try running some tests as soon as you can – even with Davinci Resolve Lite if you can – to see how quickly you can decode Epic footage at half res premium without a Rocket Card on your workstation…

KC

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[Kevin Cannon]

Here’s my understanding of the way Resolve works with the hardware to render RED footage into HD quicktimes is this:

1. It reads the RED file from the storage.
2. It feeds the compressed RED into the decoder (which is kind of separate) and decodes it using the CPU or RED Rocket card. This sends a completely uncompressed RGB image to Resolve.
3. It takes that uncompressed RGB image and applies your grades using the GPUs.
4. It takes the final image and sends it out to the decklink card for monitoring.
5. When rendering, it does all the above and also encodes to your specified format
6. And writes the file to the storage.

So you have a fiber card and large array, so steps 1 and 6 should be performed quickly. For step 4 you really only have one choice, the Decklink Extreme 3D+. Step 5 is based on your CPU (I think).

The trick is to make sure that you have a good balance between step 2 and 3… there’s no point in having three GTX285s if you can only decode RED at 12fps… the GPUs will be no help whatsoever and you’ll be limited by the CPU.

As far as RED decoding, I can’t speak for the Epic, but my project today was 4K and I was grading in “half-res, good debayer” and there were some pretty ugly moire-pattern artifacts. Before rendering, I switched to “half-res, premium” and they we solved. I personally would definitely never create something for broadcast at “good” debayer, but it might be acceptable for offline editorial if they intend to return to the Red files for an online color correction.

But just to be clear, are you delivering 130 hours of graded footage, or receiving 130 hours of ungraded footage and conforming for a 1 or 2 hour program?

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[Kevin Cannon]

Is this dailies timing/transcoding? I ask because you might have different needs than if you are looking at supervised finishing sessions…

The GTX285 will do an admirable job keeping realtime for basic grades (like one might do with dailies) so I don’t imagine that would be your first bottleneck. If you start to get into lots of blurs, soft keys, etc, it might become a limitation.

Your 8-core likely won’t get you real-time RED decoding without a RED Rocket; I have a 12-core that just barely does real-time for 4K RED at 1/2 res “good” debayer. If you need to render 130 hours in a week, I would definitely consider that a likely limiting factor, and the RED Rocket would help you there, especially if you need “premium” quality debayer.

You can put a Red Rocket, Decklink, GT 120 and GTX285 in one Mac Pro without a Cubix (I think, check the config guide) if you don’t need a slot for storage interfaces. I imagine that would be a practical set-up for getting through a lot of RED footage with basic grades… if you need more GPU grading power or storage interfaces, you might need the Cubix there…

KC

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