[Kevin Cannon]

I definitely thought of that myself – a lot of DPs I work for are savvy enough to do this themselves. I expect it will be a little better because unlike Apple Color, the GUI doesn’t allow you to enlarge the window, so you at least need a Decklink card and SDI monitor, plus the two node limit, but I could definitely see some productions expecting that their DP could do it for free…

…of course, I’m sure that’s what everybody who had quarter-million dollar installations from 5 years ago thought when it became a $999 Mac option… since they’ve already gone and done it, I suppose I’ll just have to enjoy turning every mac I encounter into a prep station…

KC

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[Kevin Cannon]

In the conform page, right click on the timeline you want to add audio to and select “audio options” then use the “on-disk audio.” It doesn’t need to be in the media pool, so it’s a little different than the reference video.

KC

prehistoricdigital.com
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[Kevin Cannon]

Cool so a multi-channel AIFF plays back over SDI as it should – I don’t have the ability presently to monitor more than channels 1&2 on the HDMI, so I’d be curious about that as well…

KC

prehistoricdigital.com
hardworkingpixels.com

[Kevin Cannon]

Thanks Rohit! I’ll test out creating a 6 channel AIFF (which I did not know existed). Perhaps I can replace the HDP2 with an HDLink or SDI>HDMI mini-converter that can get that sound into a receiver or amp…

It will be fun to review grades and outputs as completely finished projects…

KC

prehistoricdigital.com
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[Kevin Cannon]

Yeah, the Decklink is definitely capable, in FCP I can send 8 stereo tracks to 16 channels over SDI, no way presently to see what is going out on the HDMI…

In Resolve, playing back an L/R aiff I definitely see on my scopes that 8 channels are being output from the Decklink, but channels 3-8 are exactly the same levels as 2, so it looks like either Resolve or the Decklink is just filling them in…

The manual doesn’t seem to explicitly state that ‘on-disk audio’ is limited to 2 channels, but with WAV and AIFF, I’m not sure how you would get more… It would be fun though.

If anybody is using the LTC option to sync with another device that plays back 5.1, I’d be curious to know what the set-up looks like.

KC

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[Kevin Cannon]

When I first started setting up Resolve I switched from Color and started setting things up in an order, here’s kind of a necessary order:

Must haves:

– Mac Pro Tower (specs are really determined by how processor-intensive you expect your material to be)
– CUDA capable GPU (I think the cheapest are still the “flashed” GTX 285s on eBay – for me a single GTX285 has handled 90% of grades I do on narrative material – less on commercials or music videos)
– GUI card (if using a GTX285 I think you need a single height GT120)
– Decklink card
– Monitoring for SDI or HDMI

With that stuff, you should be able to get the program up and running, but won’t necessarily be able to read uncompressed, DPX, and RED material in realtime, and your grades might exceed what the GPU can do in real-time. So to ensure real-time playback, you may need some of these items:

– Internal drives, RAID card or card to interface with external RAID (consider adding a cheap eSATA connection)
– Additional GPUs (requiring a Cubix expander usually)
– Hardware scopes (will improve performance to not use the Resolve scopes)
– Red Rocket card (only if you use a lot of RED – you can avoid this one with a higher-end processor or by pre-rendering into DPX)

After that, it’s just a matter of improving working speed with a control surface, perhaps peripherals like the Logitech G13, additional displays. I believe they’ve made every control accessible with mouse and keyboard now (especially if you assign keyboard shortcuts yourself) but I’m not 100% sure if I’m missing anything.

KC

prehistoricdigital.com
hardworkingpixels.com

[Kevin Cannon]

I definitely have been looking for some way that clients could use an iPad during a session – because usually they already are…

I was imagining a HUD with the two timelines (so they know where we are in relation to other shots), a big TC display, perhaps the ability to create a marker on a shot they have notes on… Seeing the stills gallery might be nice too, but could be a misleading image…

For the colorist, I really want a digital color meter where I can just tap a part of the frame, pinch and stretch to average a larger region, multitouch to compare regions…

KC

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[Kevin Cannon]

Definitely consult with your lab as Todd suggests – unfortunately going to hard drives does not always equal savings – if the lab would spend 1 hour with your footage on the telecine, laying off to an HD/SD tape in real-time, going to a drive might take the same hour on the same telecine, plus putting your media on their storage, plus encoding it to your requested format, plus transferring it to your drive… only they will be able to tell you for sure, as some labs have worked out better ways than that…

If you don’t have regular access to a deck (of the format you want) it can definitely help there. ProRes 422HQ or ProRes4444 are codecs that are of a pretty high quality, and at 1080 24p can usually be played back in real-time on a desktop or good laptop. They strike a good balance between quality and lightweight-ness, especially if the project won’t be traditionally on-lined… I like to keep a ProRes422HQ file of my finished products for reels and the like.

DPX files are larger, and since most people using them are using them as the basis for a digital intermediate at 2K/4K resolution, I think labs are more used to passing along a “flat” pass of some kind – so you would get a file that is too large to edit with, and doesn’t resemble the intended look. But if you are comfortable doing a rough color correct and creating offline media with identical timecode to the DPX files, and will be at some point going back to the DPX in a traditional on-line… they’re definitely high-quality. Keep in mind that at 12MB or so per frame, having drive space and a backup can be expensive…

KC

prehistoricdigital.com
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[Kevin Cannon]

You can add an output LUT that will scale (or clip) DaVinci’s internally 0-1023 into 64-940. Davinci provides a DataToVideoScale LUT, but nobody has been able to tell me why the provided one seems to clip information in the shadows and highlights.

I recently used the “generate soft clip LUT” tool to create a LUT with 64-940 range and “scale” enabled. With that LUT and “monitoring in full range” the show looked identical to how it did without the LUT and “monitoring in scaled legal values” was enabled.

That LUT should be applied to any file outputs (I only have tried it with DPX though)…

KC

prehistoricdigital.com
hardworkingpixels.com

[Kevin Cannon]

No need to guesstimate – the Arri study at the top of the thread measures the ideal 35mm exposure on a 200 ASA stock, saying that the smallest resolvable detail is .006mm large on the negative…

Super 16mm is 12.35mm x 7.42mm or 2058 x 1237 “points”
Super 35mm is 24.92mm x 18.67 or 4153 x 3112 “points”
65mm is 52.48mm x 23.01 mm or 8746 x 3835 “points”

and Imax would be 69.95mm x 52.48mm (if the aspect ratio is 1.5 on the neg) so something like 13119 x 8746 “points”.

but since the grains move around, the digital grid should be twice as fine… so 20k is an overestimate for 35mm film, but there’s definitely a difference between 4K, 8K, and potentially 10K scans…

But my understanding is that digital IMAX projection is just two 2K projectors overlapping…so certainly not an equivalent to IMAX film projection…

KC

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