[Luke Maslen]

Hi Illya,

As others have correctly commented, the exclusion of HDMI is only because of limited slots in the Mac Pro chassis. The HDMI features of DeckLink work fine with Resolve on a Mac Pro but the HDMI bracket takes up a slot. This would mean either doing away with a HBA card or butchering the Mac Pro chassis which I don’t recommend you do! An SDI to HDMI converter can be used so you don’t take up a valuable slot internally. Of the Blackmagic Design converters, I’d recommend the HDLink Pro 3D as it is the most versatile model of HDLink. It accepts both single and dual-link HD-SDI, can connect to DisplayPort, DVI and HDMI monitors, has 3D LUT support and also works in 2D and 3D.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Aless,

The lower optical bay just has a regular SATA connection. So there are no special cables required and you can just plug in your SATA hard disk. Of course this is only worth considering if using an internal disk array. You wouldn’t bother using the lower optical bay for a hard disk if you were using an external disk array.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Aurie,

Yes, the Impresario information is still available in the old Resolve manual. Please download the PDF and then search it for the phrase “control surface”. Any reference to the DaVinci Control Surface or Resolve Control Surface is referring to the previous Impresario panels which connect via ethernet networking. You can download the PDF from https://www.blackmagic-design.com/downloads/davinci/pdf/DaVinciResolveManual.pdf

Resolve v7.0 for Linux will continue to support the Impresario and 2K panels as well as the new Resolve Control Surface which connects via USB.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Jeremiah,

We’ve deliberately been non-specific about all of the Mac hardware requirements as we need more time to test a bunch of variables before publishing a definitive guide, which we will do.

I do know that Grant Petty was saying that Resolve will run on “the latest Mac Pro series” and I’m guessing our engineers simply haven’t had a chance to test older configurations. We have to balance the desire to use existing investment in computer hardware with the extra time that may take to release Resolve for Mac.

We’ve already managed to bring down the cost of Resolve by a huge amount even if new Mac and graphics hardware was needed. If we can work with older hardware, we’ll try to do that too but I really won’t know more until we get much closer to releasing Resolve for Mac. The primary aim will be provide a very solid first release on the Mac platform and I wouldn’t be surprised if we only certified current hardware for that release. We can then look at making many additional refinements including the use of lower cost hardware where possible.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Jeremiah,

The lack of slots is a problem for some users but should be much of a problem for people working in SD and HD. We’ve had a lot of ideas about how to overcome the slots issue and are fairly confident of finding a solution and then making that information available through the support pages of our website. I’m not sure whether that will happen before or after we ship the first version of Resolve for Mac but we are working on maximizing the already powerful Mac Pro configuration for use with Resolve.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

I’ve just learnt that virtually all of the USB 3.0 PCI Express cards use a Linux driver, or a port of a Linux driver, which does not have isochronous support and are only useful for hard disks with simple, slow speed, bulk transfers. That means that these cards will not be suitable for uncompressed HD capture and playback as they’ll just be too slow. Hopefully I didn’t get anyone too excited with the PCI Express card idea.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Aaron,

My apologies for typing the wrong name. I saw Brett’s name in the thread and mistakenly typed it. Further to my previous comments about the x58 series of motherboards, I’ve just learnt that virtually all of the USB 3.0 PCI Express cards use a Linux driver, or a port of a Linux driver, which does not have isochronous support and are only useful for hard disks with simple, slow speed, bulk transfers. That means that these cards will not be suitable for uncompressed HD capture and playback as they’ll just be too slow.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Jeff,

I’ve just learnt that virtually all of the USB 3.0 PCI Express cards use a Linux driver, or a port of a Linux driver, which does not have isochronous support and are only useful for hard disks with simple, slow speed, bulk transfers. That means that these cards will not be suitable for uncompressed HD capture and playback as they’ll just be too slow.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

Further to Dwaine’s information, the Resolve Coprocessor cannot be connected to a Mac due to the lack of InfiniBand on the Mac platform.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Brett,

Unfortunately not. It turns out that just because a computer has PCI Express 2.0 slots doesn’t mean they are being driven at full speed. In many cases that would not matter but the speed is vital for the USB 3.0 bus to work fast enough for uncompressed HD. That’s why we specify the Intel x58 series of motherboards.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design