[Michael Gissing]

[Bernard Newnham] “I imagine that the big money for Nvidia is still in the consumer PC market – and maybe currently Bitcoin mining – so wait 18 months and you’ll be able to slot a GTX something into your editing machine at reasonable cost.”

Maybe you only need wait another week to hear about the RTX 2080ti which will be half the price of the Quadro’s and likely available just as soon.

[Michael Gissing]

In Photoshop what color profile are you exporting? From memory it should be sRGB.

[Michael Gissing]

Is your graphics driver up to date also? Resolve is GPU dependent so you might be maxing out your GPU causing the crash. I have noticed that I was getting a crash in 15beta6&7 when stabilising a program with grades & NR. Eventually the GPU would give an error message and I had to force quit. I’m on Windows but I suspect there might be a video frame buffer issue with 15 that shows up when the GPU doen’t have enough onboard VRAM.

[Michael Gissing]

[Joseph Owen] “Hope it’s not just VLC… Resolve doesn’t see that threading.”

Too early to tell as these cards are not yet released but the way the new card link was touted it’s nothing like SLI and it effectively doubles video frame buffer memory so I suspect it is aimed at video. Resolve was listed along with Adobe as development partners so lets see when they are released and Blackmagic let us know if linking is worthwhile or just having two unlinked cards.

Also the RTX 2080 is said to blow away the 1080ti in performance so I’m interested in seeing if two of those linked might outperform the entry level RTX Quadro because they might be around the half price point of the RTX Quadro

[Michael Gissing]

I’m about to do two annual teaching events. A location & post masterclass for emerging film makers and a half day with media students at a local high school on Resolve. What I find is certainly the impatience and some pre knowledge of how software works. But what is lacking is the ‘why’ aspect. Explaining the creative motivation for on set and post decisions is something that they don’t seem to get from YouTube videos. Also entertaining anecdotes of real life experience both on location and in the studio to explain how problems were avoided or solved and the interplay between different creative departments. The social politic of film making.

I’m also giving them an idea of what it on set etiquette is like, how things were done in the olden days so they appreciate the power of the hardware and software at their fingertips. I see no point in just telling them what the different bits of software and hardware do.

I always get good feedback because I plug gaps in their knowledge that YouTube doesn’t supply. There’s nothing like face to face and I absolutely applaud those that do it every day in the classroom because it’s hard work.

[Michael Gissing]

Rumours are that the RTX 2080 might be announced in the next week or two which will be much cheaper than the Quadros but 40% more performance than the GTX1080. The new RTX cards also have a way to link two cards that doubles the frame buffers so two 2080’s linked have 32gig of onboard VRAM, a joy for 8K

[Michael Gissing]

It’s a hard lesson to learn that Resolve will not allow you to change frame rates once a timeline is started. I don’t know why they have that limitation. Other NLEs don’t.

[Michael Gissing]

I have done this once before for a friend who got the frame rate wrong. I exported an XML, opened that in Premiere (CS6) then changed the frame rate and re-exported an xml which I then opened in a new Resolve project with the correct frame rate set. The timeline had some gaps which needed to be fixed but it meant a total recut to conform was not necessary.

[Michael Gissing]

I’m just watching the NVIDIA announcement of their new Turing chip GPUs which are 6 x more powerful than the Pascal chipset. I’m still trying to get my head around the leap in performance with these new chips. I know a lot is about CGI but the implication for video is also amazing.

https://www.redsharknews.com/technology/item/5721-nvidia-s-staggeringly-powerful-new-gpu-means-the-future-just-got-closer-by-ten-years

One thing that strikes me is how much better denoise, optical flow and stabilisation can become. Using AI I can see manipulation of images speeding up enormously and getting smarter as the AI learns. Object removal, generated sky enhancement/replacement – all sorts of combinations of photo real CGI with live action. Even for docos have I been needing this sort of compute power. All this with reduced power consumption

EDIT: towards the end they list companies working with these new RTX cards. Adobe CC and Resolve are the only NLEs. The implications for Apple in their ongoing NVIDIA snub might be significant.

[Michael Gissing]

[Oliver Peters]”One interesting thing is that Resolve’s H264 export is even faster than FCPX’s.”

Whilst Resolve is blindingly fast, I have been constantly frustrated that it has problems with strong saturated GFX colors, constantly giving me flashing block errors. And not just these pure colors. It seems the encode is purely single pass as these errors are close to picture cuts and are likely the failure to create a proper I frame on the cut.

I’m on a grunty PC but clients and other editors are mighty impressed by render speeds in Resolve 15 (b6) but less impressed by these artifacts.
EDIT. This is only with H264. Other codecs are fast and accurate without these block errors