[Mel Matsuoka]

[Toby Tomkins] “Get the brightness/contrast right with the desired brightness from the light space set up images. Work out a patch size that works for you (I went for smallest in davinci, so ABL wouldn’t effect the profile, but arguably you could go for larger patches….)”

Did PatchSize support get added into the LightSpace calibration panel in Resolve 10.0.2 ? I’ve packed up the laptop I used for Lightspace in my XMas vacation luggage, so I haven’t had a chance to test this yet.

[Mel Matsuoka]

It’s really disappointing that Tangent doesn’t seem to be attempting to evolve beyond a skeuomorphic vision of what a colorist control surface on a touch based interface could be.

Peter Salvia reposted my criticism of their previous vWave app here: https://petersalvia.wordpress.com/tag/mel-matsuoka/ , and everything I said back then appears to hold true. This certainly looks cool, and could even be useful in limited specific situations, but to just develop a tabletized mirror of a physical control surface wastes a lot of the potential that a gesture driven, touch based interface could offer.

[Mel Matsuoka]

[Peter Garaway] “Hi Mel,

A few questions. By drop out do you mean your external monitor receives no signal? Does this happen with both SDI and HDMI? What Mac OS are you running? Do you have a GPU? “

Hi Peter,

Yes…my external monitor (Panasonic TH-58PF12UK ProPlasma) will drop out and actually display its “NO SIGNAL” on-screen message when this happens, as if I had actually pulled the HDMI cable out of the port.

I dont have an SDI input card for this display, so I’m feeding it via HDMI directly from the Decklink 4K Extreme card.

I’m not sure why I’m noticing this all of a sudden, but I’m now wondering if it has something to do with the fact that I just recently installed the Decklink 4K Extreme Card, to replace the older Decklink 3D Extreme card I was previously using. I was using the older card for over 2 years, but only noticed this “issue” only recently, after the new card was installed. I uninstalled the old Decklink driver and reinstalled the 4K Extreme Decklink driver when I upgraded the card. Other than that, nothing else has changed with my system, hardware or OS wise.

I’m on a 2010 8 Core MacPro with 64GB system RAM, running 10.8.4. My display GPU is a 2.5GB GTX570 (from MacVidCards), and I have an external Cyclone 2707 PCIe chassis which houses an additional 2.5GB GTX570 and REDRocket card.

[Mel Matsuoka]

[Gary Alan] “Mel, I read one sentence and I felt I had no need to read the rest of you babbling on. And I said it’s great that you are happy with what you do. I say a few meaningful sentences and you reply with five? paragraphs? LOL
I merely pointed out to you why we who shoot raw want to use it for it’s main reason, 14 bit source files. Not some offline workaround using some intermediate codec like cineform. We have been doing what you suggest for a long time now and hopefully we want to get away from those workarounds and round trips. Don’t get your panties all in a bunch.”

Thanks very much for the thoughtful response, Gary! Much appreciated.

[Mel Matsuoka]

[Gary Alan] “Mel, I think you need to understand that not everyone works like you do. In fact, I can’t believe anyone would edit offline anymore with all the technology we have these days. We had no choice, maybe 20 years ago, to offline, but today??

It’s great that you are happy and enjoy what they give us today. But please do not tell others to lower expectations because that is what you choose to do.
“

Gary,

I’m not telling anyone how or what they should do. If you go back and re-read the post that I was replying to, I hope you are able to see that I was offering a reasoned, contrary perspective to Per Holmes’ rather dogmatic statement that current state of PP 7.1’s raw CinemaDNG support is a “pointless non-feature”, and that access to camera-raw settings within Premiere is “the one and the only reason anyone would use RAW in the first place”. In other words, you are being the “pot” to my “kettle” by ascribing such workflow dogmatism to me.

The “offline vs. online” debate is as tiresome as “Mac vs. PC” debates. The bottom line is that if you don’t understand the need for an offline-to-online workflow, then you probably have never had a need for such a workflow in the first place. If I was a one-man-band editor who is commonly faced with single-handedly dealing with the tasks of creative editorial, colorgrading, motion-graphics, sound and final finishing, then I would be in full agreement with you and Per Holmes that the lack of ACR support significantly diminishes the usefulness of CinemaDNG playback support.

But the reason why offline/online workflows still exist (and will continue to exist for a LONG time) is due to talent, and not necessarily technology. While it’s within the realms of possibility to do everything that’s required to finish a video project from entirely within a single NLE, it’s an extraordinary rare person who possesses higher-than-average talent and experience in all of said tasks. For the type of work that I do (advertising-agency directed broadcast commercial work), the offline/online paradigm is de rigeur, because our clientele wants to work with people who specialize in the specific task they are hired for: For the same reason why you don’t ask a carpenter to fix your toilet, even though he probably owns the same tools that a plumber does.

This is why the current lack of camera raw settings access in Premiere will not be missed by our offline editors. If they need to do a quick temp grade on a shot just to boost the exposure or desaturate the image in order to drive creative-editorial decisions, they’ll almost always drop a simple 3-way color correction filter on the clip and do it that way, rather than dick around with a separate ACR window. Since I will end up removing any color correction settings they apply anyways, theres no need for them to deal with anything more complicated than that.

I wont speak for Adobe, but I would have to assume that they understand this, and as such, they are taking advantage of the software-update model of Creative Cloud in order to deliver basic––but necessary––functionality to CinemaDNG support, so as to appease people like me, who care more about realtime playback performance and workflow speed than having the ability to clumsily grade raw DNG files from an dedicated ACR window within Premiere itself. After all, what is the point of giving you access to the raw settings, if you cant even play the damn clip back in the first place?

This is what frustrates me about some of the complaints about CC. Back in the pre-CC days, people would whine and complain that Adobe wasn’t responsive to the needs of their users by not delivering needed functionality on a time scale that we wanted them in. Yet, when they decide to release the same feature requests in a more “frequently-iterative” timeframe as they are now, people still complain that they don’t deliver the things they want/need in a more feature-complete manner.

All my point was trying to make is that we should have a more rational perspective on the way Adobe is rolling these features out to us. CinemaDNG as a mainstream acquisition and editing format is in its literal infancy (the only reason why anyone cares about this format now is because of the existence and near ubiquity of the BMCC), so it stands to reason that Adobe needs time to get the feature right, and balancing basic performance and functionality vs trying to deliver a half-baked attempt at having feature parity with the ACR window in Photoshop.

[Mel Matsuoka]

[Per Holmes] “This is kind of a mega deal-breaker, since the only reason anyone would use RAW in the first place would be to access the full tonal range.”

I would have to strongly disagree with this. For myself, I was eagerly anticipating the CinemaDNG support in the PP update, if only because I hoped that we could offline BMCC raw footage without having to transcode it to ProRes first. It’d be nice to be able to access the raw settings from within the PP timeline, but at the offline stage, it’s more important for us to be able to play the raw footage in any form, since the offline will get sent to me for colorcorrection anyways, it’s not really a big deal that the offline editors cant tweak the BMC footage at the raw level.

I’ve been testing the CinemaDNG offline/colorgrade/roundtrip workflow between Premiere Pro 7.1 and Resolve 10RC3, and I’m shocked to discover that it actually works (even with speed changes!). The only downside is that CinemaDNG sequences dont play out of the PP Source Viewer window though my Decklink card, but it’s still better than nothing.

I think you need to dial down your expectations of how exhaustive Adobe’s feature updates should be. It should be clear to everyone by now that their new release model is to release new updates more often, but at a more iterative pace. It’s certainly better than having to wait two years for them to release feature-complete updates, dont you think?

[Mel Matsuoka]

I’m guessing this is a problem with Decklink’s support for Premiere’s Mercury Transmit integration. I would have to assume the card is fully capable of this downconversion (Resolve doesn’t have a problem downconverting the same 4K R3D sequences to 1080p on the fly), but BMD’s implementation with Adobe products is still incomplete.

Major bummer, to say the least.

[Mel Matsuoka]

All you need to do is boot your system from the cloned backup that you made of your Mountain Lion partition (or whatever OS version you were running before Mavericks), and you should have your “color grading back” without any hassle. Just reboot your system, then hold down the Option key when the startup chime sounds, then choose a non-Mavericks partition to boot your computer from.

You DID clone your system partition before upgrading to Mavericks, right?

If the answer is “no”, then why in god’s name are you upgrading your working system to a new OS on the very first day of its release? GPU related stuff is always among the first things to break in every OS update.

[Mel Matsuoka]

[Chris Martin] “+1 to Jake’s sentiments about having visual UI confirmation. I would consider this a very big deal.”

Abso-freakin-lutely!

This lack of obvious UI feedback is also a huge problem when invoking qualifier highlighting as well (see my post from last year about this very issue) . There have been HUNDREDS of times when I’ve been jamming along quickly, and accidentally turned on qualifier highlighting on a node which has no qualifier applied to it. I’ll sit there freaking out for a moment, wondering where the hell my grade went, and why my control surface is not responding.

In this particular case, the lack of obvious UI feedback is actually not the real problem, but rather the inscrutable fact that Resolve allows you to put a non-qualified node into Highlight mode in the first place! If there is some sort of design logic in the current behavior, then that’s all fine and dandy, but at the very least, there should be some sort of immediate visual cue––either in the node graph, or in the video preview window––that you’re currently in Qualifier highlighting mode.

[Mel Matsuoka]

[Sascha Haber] “1. Does the movie file exist ?
No – Just render
Yes – Ask to overwrite or offer a new version (can be set to auto)

2. if its a file sequence
Yes – check if the grading changed actually changed
If Yes – just render or proceed to 1 (new Version)
if No – skip the frames and save render time.”

Holy crap, you pretty much mirrored one of my top feature requests for Resolve.

When V9 came out, I thought that the timeline “filtering” options would be helpful in sorting out shots you’ve graded/modified in the last hour/day etc etc. But in real world usage, I’ve found that the filters are not intelligent enough to be very useful for rendering out only the clips you’ve modified since the last render. For large projects, I find myself rendering modified grades one at a time, on the fly as I finish modifying them…not the most efficient workflow, to say the least.

It seems to me that since Resolve is already keeping track of the time since you last modified clip grades (for the sake of the timeline filtering options) that it wouldnt be a stretch for it to remember when each clip was rendered, and only offer to render clips that were modified since the last time they were physically rendered out. It would be a huge workflow timesaver!

Also, one of the (very few) things I miss about Apple Color is the way that it automatically backs up old renderfiles when re-rendering clips (i.e. appending “copy 1”, “copy 2” , etc etc to the old renderfiles). It would be nice to have similar functionality in Resolve.