[Mel Matsuoka]

[Bob Zelin]
your Netgear GS752TX is a very nice switch if you only want 10G connection to your server, and 1G connection to your client computers. For 10G performance, from any company, you need 10G on the server, and 10G at the clients – which means 10G PCIe cards or 10G thunderbolt to 10G adaptors on your iMac’s, Mac Pro Cylinders, etc. And a 10G switch, like the Negear XS712T.

“Your Netgear ReadyNAS 4220 is a 12 bay with 2 10G ports. Why is it crappy ? Exactly who set it up for you ?
You mention other excellent brands, like Terrablock, and ProMax, that will also do the job for you.
So will your ReadyNAS. And so will Maxx Digital ThunderShare -“

Hey Bob,

It’s a classic case of “IT” dude who thinks that his expertise (which is not in question) in setting up mission critical, Windows based, corporate IT infrastructures also qualifies him to spec out and deploy an all OS X based, professional video post-production network infrastructure. I warned my upper management about this when the initial rumblings about going this route started happening back in 2011 (in fact, much of my skepticism was based on reading your numerous admonitions about “IT people” over the years).

And now the chickens have finally all come home to roost (although some groups of chickens would come randomly flying through our windows over the past 4 years), and I’m trying very, VERY hard not to be the “I told you so” guy.

Because I’m the only guy in the facility who is technically savvy, I end up being the default network & NAS “troubleshooting guy” whom our other editors would come in and bother whenever they had problems with the network. But even though I’m a nerd who loves working at the command-line, I am completely unqualified when it comes to advanced networking. So I end up Googling crap, and asking questions on forums. I have much better uses for my time (such as making the company money from being booked as a full-time colorist and finishing editor, nearly every day of the week), and it’s absolutely exasperating.

All that said, as headache inducing that our current NAS setup has been, it probably paid for itself within two years, so we are not averse to starting from scratch, and using the old gear for things like backups and near-line archives.

It’s interesting that you characterized the GS752TX as a “nice” switch, because when I spoke with Small Tree back when we were acquiring the 10g cards to deploy the “IT dude”‘s network setup, they specifically advised me that the GS752TX will most likely cause us problems, due to it’s low amount of memory, as well as it being a “Store and Forward” Smart switch, vs a Fully Managed, “Cut through” switch. They also expressed concern about the latency and concurrency performance of the ReadyNAS 4200.

It’s much too late for me to care about who is right about all this, though. As I warned my management back in 2011, our company doesn’t have the time or resources to be beta-testing custom “solutions” that are based on theoretical assumptions that they should work well. We’re looking for solutions that are unequivocallyknown-to-work in the real world.

This is a long winded way of saying: PEOPLE WHO DON’T LISTEN TO BOB ZELIN DO SO AT THIER OWN PERIL!

[Mel Matsuoka]

[Joseph Owens] “but it is a little bit aggravating to move back into your (newly renovated?) house every 10 months or so and all the doors are moved, and the light switches are in different places, and the bathroom is now on the other side of the property and the laundry room is upstairs, and… yes, I also agree the thing is metastasizing into becoming predominantly not primarily a grading platform anymore. “

Thank you, JPO, for crystallizing my thoughts on the exciting, yet simultaneously frustrating yearly “remodeling” of the Resolve UI.

Aside from the fact that the continual lack of keyboard shortcuts for important tasks forces me to manually update my crazy Xkeys/Keyboard Maestro macros with every new update, it has also made it more difficult for me to be a beta-tester, because most of my grading sessions are client-supervised.

I simply cannot use the latest major version update to Resolve in as soon as it’s made available for private/public beta-testing, because all the “doors and lightswitches” have been completely changed, so soon after the last version’s radically updated “doors and lightswitches” have been committed to my muscle memory. It’s frustrating, because I fancy myself an excellent beta-tester who is able to supply copious amounts of detailed and useful feedback during the beta phase of a product. But since most of my sessions are supervised, the UI re-learning curve is just too steep to try and use the new release in a real-world situation.

I’m torn on how rapid the development of Resolve has become over the past 3 years. It’s awesome how the Resolve dev team has been addressing so many issues and adding so many great new features with each new release, but it seems a bit crazy that they feel the need to completely overhaul the UI every 12 months (beautiful as it undoubtedly is). It’s great for marketing, but I have to wonder if it may impact the quality of pre-release beta feedback, simply because more people like me are hesitant to run the pre-release versions only because they don’t have the time or opportunity to acclimate to the new UI?

[Mel Matsuoka]

Sorry to excavate this ancient thread, but I have a similar need to animate a realistic, single bubble, and this technique seems to work perfectly for me, except for the all important ability to animate the path of the bubble.

Setting keyframes for the Producer Point does not seem to have any effect on the location of the bubble over time, at least in AE CC (2014).

I’m also noticing that the bubble, when sized up (I’m my case Size: 3.0) has very ugly, aliased edges.

Is there a trick to overcoming either of these issues?

[Mel Matsuoka]

Yes. I mentioned this in my post.

[Mel Matsuoka]

[Rohit Gupta] “I think you’ll have to go through R9, R10 to R11. Maybe one of the steps is not required, but the project formats have changed significantly over releases. We guarantee one version backward as a minimum normally.”

Thanks Rohit…that’s a major bummer, to say the least. I had a client request a 4K render of a RED job that I graded years ago in R8…so much for the concept of 4K acquisition being a “future proof” workflow! 😛

Anyways, since the redesign of the BMD website––while aesthetically beautiful––it’s become really difficult to find downloads and other information.

Where is the link to download legacy versions of Resolve?

[Mel Matsuoka]

[Paul Provost] “Yes it does seem to work and mavericks 3rd party drivers work on it too.
It’s weird apple says not to discuss even though it’s public beta. “

I think one of the main reasons why Apple has NDAs–even for public betas–is that they don’t want bloggers, etc. to be “reviewing” the betas as if they were the actual, gold-master final product. In the past, Apple has been known to pull features at the last minute that appeared in the beta releases, and the NDA is probably their formal way of managing the expectations of both users and developers.

Unlike other companies, Apple doesn’t tend to use the “beta” moniker as a marketing device. Their betas are truly not-ready-for-primetime, and they want real people in real-world testing situations to find bugs, compatibility and usability issues that are generally overlooked in a private beta program.

Thank God for people like Sascha, who are willing to take the beta-bullet for all the working colorists in our community 🙂

[Mel Matsuoka]

I use an XK-60 on a daily basis with Resolve. It’s an absolute godsend, using it in conjunction with my Eclipse CX control surface. I have the Xkeys panel set up to trigger crazy macros and Applescripts I’ve built that allow me direct access to things like all of the Hue Curves panels, Qualifier +/- modes, Gallery Still & timeline node-graphs, panel expand/shrink widgets, All/Color/PTZR toggle modes etc.

It’s a bit tricky to control Resolve outside of it’s officially supported keyboard shortcuts, but for me, I find it to be a fun personal challenge to try and outwit Resolve’s impenetrable-to-Applescript-UIScripting custom interface, and roll my own shortcut functionality. I believe Resolve uses the “Qt” GUI framework, instead of Apple’s native Cocoa UI framework, which as far as I can tell makes it damn near impossible to address interface elements using AppleScript UI Scripting. But you’d be surprised just how far you can get using an utility like Keyboard Maestro or ControllerMate.

I’d recommend using Keyboard Maestro instead, if you find that the node-based system of ControllerMate tends to make your brain explode.

[Mel Matsuoka]

[Marc Wielage] “But again, I don’t know of anybody who’s been sued over a short demo reel in the last 10 years. I can imagine cases where there would be a phone call or a letter requesting that the clip be taken down, and YouTube frequently gets take-down letters from copyright holders.”

Yes, you are absolutely right. And that’s where this discussion became self-admittedly “pedantic”, because my original response took issue with the idea that by lending on-screen attribution or limiting the length of the excerpt to :30 or less, that it somehow makes it “Fair Use”. These are both very common misunderstandings of the Fair Use law, so I was specifically addressing and correcting those misunderstandings.

Granted, making a big issue about the specifics of Fair Use law in the context of an innocuous demo-reel might seem as douchey as someone taking a jaywalking person to task because they had an impending bout of explosive diarrhea, and the closest bathroom was across the street. But since Danny specifically asked about Fair Use rights, it seems appropriate to correct these common misconceptions, because a large majority of well-meaning people have these same misconceptions––the perpetuation of which has led to numerous urban legends about the nature of Copyright, even among otherwise well-enlightened people.

[Mel Matsuoka]

[Marc Wielage] “Show me some case law to support your opinion.”

It’s stated explicitly in Section 107 of the Copyright Law of The United States of America (Title 17 of the United States Code):

https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107

As is the case with nearly all laws, while there is undoubtedly room for “interpretation” depending on the specific case, the Fair Use doctrine is very clear about its intent: To protect expressions of criticism, archival requirements, analysis, parody, news reporting and/or any other commentary on the copyrighted work. It also goes out of its way to make clear that Fair Use exemptions only applies to cases where “direct or indirect commercial advantage” is not the intended outcome of the usage of the copyrighted work. Demo Reels clearly do not fall within the parameters of these exemptions.

But as I (and others here) have already and repeatedly asserted, unless you’re breaking an NDA or other legally binding agreement you’ve already made stating that you won’t use the work in question for your own promotional purposes, then you effectively have nothing to worry about. The main practical concerns you have at that point is from a moral, ethical, professional and political standpoint. Although it still doesn’t negate the fact that the action is still technically illegal.

So while it may be a “pedantic” argument in the context of making a demo-reel, it’s still an important fact that needs to be understood by all content creators, lest you find yourself unintentionally breaking the law by using material in a project that seems like it should be “fair” use (with a lowercase “f” and “u”) .

You know the old saying, “Ignorance of the law is not an excuse?”

[Mel Matsuoka]

[Marc Wielage] “I disagree, and you are being pedantic.”

I dont disagree with you that I’m being pedantic. But it’s really a bummer that you “disagree” about facts that are, well…facts.

You can’t just make up your own definitions of what Fair Use is, just because it’s convenient. The use case which you described (short, attributed excerpts of commercial media), and which you thought “pretty much defines the nature of Fair Use” is only “fair” from a non-legal, ethical standpoint. Only a bunghole of immense proportions would consider your actions to be “wrong” or worthy of moral judgement.

But that still doesn’t make it “Fair Use”, in the eyes of US Copyright Law.

Danny specifically voiced concerns about his Fair Use “rights” in constructing a demo reel using copyrighted material, and that is the question which should be addressed. I’m sorry if you took my correction of your misinterpretation of what “Fair Use” is as some kind of personal attack of your character or intellect. I certainly did not mean it as such. I have been following copyright & Fair Use issues as a bizarre hobby of mine for well over a decade, so I have a strong desire to correct (or at least be annoyed by) misinformation that is often given about these topics, because for content-creators like us, they are important topics to understand and not be wrong about…not unlike your (and my) disdain for people who throw around the term “LUT” without knowing what they really are.