[Luke Maslen]

Hi Sascha,

[Sascha Haber] ” will run it on the iMac”

Resolve requires a technology named CUDA which is exclusive to some NVIDIA graphics processors. Unfortunately the 2009 and 2010 models of iMac do not use NVIDIA graphics at all so unfortunately these excellent iMacs can’t be used for Resolve. Hopefully that might change in a future revision to the iMac graphics hardware.

Even if the iMacs did have NVIDIA CUDA graphics support, my guess is that their performance might be similar to a MacBook Pro notebook rather than the fantastic performance that a Mac Pro tower computer offers to Resolve.

[Sascha Haber] “The question is should I get a MacPro or rather a MacBookPro.”

The Mac Pro is vastly preferable for Resolve. It can use a far more powerful GPU for color grading than is provided in the MacBook Pro. The Mac Pro also has extra CPU processing which is very important for dealing with compressed file formats such as ProRes.

I hope this helps.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Arthur,

The other bracket options, which allow you to install 2 hard drives, seem to be for 2.5 inch hard disks. These hard disks are for laptop computers and run slower than the 3.5 inch disks so that’s why we’ve suggested the 3.5” to 5.25” bracket.

There may well be other brands of brackets with other options and they should be fine too but we haven’t tested with them.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Illya,

I checked with the engineers who mentioned that the original Resolve spec was always designed to run full screen. In the old days of Resolve, you actually had to buy their GUI monitor too!

While a smaller interface is something that could be considered, it would be a difficult task as the interface is already very busy so it’s a little hard to know how that might best be implemented. Large displays are so cheap these days that there are few reasons not to use one. You mentioned Dell and they make some great 24″ displays. The Dell range usually has several displays at the same size but from a regular price down to really cheap. The model at the regular price has a much better viewing angle and color than the really cheap models. Another option is to get a physically smaller monitor which still supports 1920 x 1080 or 1920 x 1200.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Joseph,

Resolve really does require a very powerful computer system with fast CPUs and GPUs. The certified Mac Pro’s start at early 2009 and the MacBook Pro’s at mid 2009.

I have heard of some people trying 2008 models and having success but there’s no doubt that the realtime performance would be significantly lower. 2007 and older Mac Pro’s have no chance as PCI Express 2.0 slots are required for both GPU cards. Similarly older MacBook Pro’s did not include a high performance GPU and so are incapable of running Resolve. Software updates to Resolve won’t change these demanding hardware requirements.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Rick,

Other IO devices, including other DeckLink cards, are not detected by Resolve at the moment. We just want the first release to be as solid as it can be and there are lots of other cards we could add but would require lots of extra testing and time before we could release reliable support for them.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Arthur,

Further to my last message, I notice that the same post from which you quoted also contained the following quote from Grant Petty:

“This is also the reason why we even visited the NAB booths of other capture card and control surface manufacturers on the very day DaVinci Resolve on the Mac was announced at NAB 2010. We wanted them to know we were going to open up DaVinci if they wanted to support it on their producers. So far, some have responded very positively to that, so that’s exciting.”

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Arthur,

Grant would fully agree with you and in fact covered this topic in some of the PR back at NAB 2010 when Resolve for Mac was first announced. He not only wants to have a choice of Blackmagic and third party capture cards but similarly more choices of control surface than just the DaVinci Control Surface and the Tangent Devices Wave. He would also like more choices for the GUI and GPU cards although that might be more tricky.

Resolve 7.0 for Mac has been a massive undertaking and is the first Mac version of Resolve and initially supports a limited range of hardware. Once it has been released, Grant wants to build upon the existing foundation and add support for other third party hardware and I know he’s specifically mentioned Kona cards before.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Illya,

Resolve 7.0 is currently locked to either a 1920 x 1080 or 1920 x 1200 interface. There are many things we’d like to add to Resolve once the initial version has been released and perhaps support for larger 27″ and 30″ monitors is something we can look at.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Margus,

Thanks for mentioning the SuperShare model as I hadn’t noticed it and it does look very interesting given it connects directly to PCI Express.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Margus,

One of the pitfalls of certifying disk arrays is that there are so many brands and models of disk arrays that one could spend an endless amount of time testing and certifying every variant that exists. So the guide mentions just a few that we’ve certified but also mentions “Almost any storage, designed for Mac OS X and high bandwidth media, will be suitable for use with Resolve.”

In other words if you already have a disk array that is suitable for capture and playback of uncompressed video, it should be perfect for use with Resolve for Mac.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design