Mike Parfit
Forum Replies Created
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Many thanks for the comments. Unfortunately I’d already checked minimum memory, etc., and updated the CUDA version to 6.0.37, which is recommended.
Resolve 11 crashes in the same place no matter what I do, as it is loading Project Settings. I trashed my project settings, but it still crashed at the same place.
Any other ideas?
I know it’s fairly tacky complaining that a non-recommended computer can’t seem run the program, but this MacBook Pro is not even close to four years old and was at the top of its class at the time. It even has a Thunderbolt port, whee. And Resolve 10 ran fine except for being a little slow playing back graded timelines.
I found the crash log, so here’s the end of each one. Same every time. Not that it tells me anything, but maybe someone else can read it, so here it is:
12 FraunhoferDCP 0x0000000109f04fd8 _ZN3FhG5Tools15IISWorkerThread3runEv + 1016
13 QtCore 0x00000001081b1ecf _ZN7QThread5startENS_8PriorityE + 1569
14 libsystem_pthread.dylib 0x00007fff8db89899 _pthread_body + 138
15 libsystem_pthread.dylib 0x00007fff8db8972a _pthread_struct_init + 0
16 libsystem_pthread.dylib 0x00007fff8db8dfc9 thread_start + 13
Signal Number = 11Thanks,
Mike
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Jeremy, I gather from a search that you’re using the Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock. If so are they working OK for you? Any tips for getting them to work as advertised?
Thanks,
Mike
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Thanks.
Yes, I had tried repairing permissions. Didn’t help. Don’t have Disk Warrior for Mavericks.
Then I removed Compressor 4.1.1, along with its preferences.
Then Final Cut worked. (That’s what I said in the post that I removed, because I thought it was fixed.) It worked for about an hour. Enough to actually get a little work done.
Then it did it again. Beachball for a significant number of seconds each time I tried to play.
So, still no solution.
Any ideas?
Mike
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We’re seeing most people using Vimeo or other online options for things like nominations, festival submissions, prize judging, almost everything that requires convenience over quality.
But once you’re talking about showing it, festivals generally want Blu-ray. Many prefer it to DCP packages. More flexible with the projectors.
More relevant to this discussion, though, we do have some online sales for our films, and have more Blu-ray sales than we expected. We think that’s going to increase, for a number of reasons already mentioned in this thread.
In quizzing buyers, we see a significant lack of knowledge that Blu-ray even exists and about the difference in quality, this even from people who own HD TVs. But these days if you go into a big-box store to buy a DVD player, you can seldom find one that isn’t also a Blu-ray player, so we think understanding of the quality will grow and that the market for Blu-rays is more robust than the conventional wisdom would have it.
On a separate note, having released our film theatrically in 2011, I can say that in our experience the Blu-ray technology has had a huge impact on the theatrical distribution of indie films.
Since most digital projectors can ingest a signal from a cheap Blu-ray player, it has become miles cheaper to get into theaters. Anecdotally, if you look at the numbers of films being released theatrically in NY and LA, you see many more per week than there was when you had to put your movie on actual film. It’s gone from about six per week about three years ago, to over 20 a week now. (The NY Times has a policy of reviewing every film that opens, so I count ’em.)
This isn’t just because it’s cheaper and easier to make movies. Since the advent of DV and HDV the numbers of theatrical films submitted to Sundance have skyrocketed, but the increase in the numbers of films actually being released in major cities seems to have jumped only with the advent of Blu-ray.
We made two versions of our film. The first, released in 2008, was on film and showed for a few weeks in Canada. The second (remade after Ryan Reynolds did the narration), was distributed digitally, through Blu-ray and, partially, on the digital network of Emerging Pictures. Though we had almost no publicity and the actual box-office dollars hardly paid for the disks, the film was shown in a hell of a lot of US theaters for over 35 weeks.
My guess about the importance of Blu-ray might be clouded by the explosive spread of digital projection in the same time period. But back when we were first noticing the phenomenon, DCPs were very expensive, and smart indie theaters were promoting their blu-ray capacities, so we think the Blu-ray was more important to the trend than DCPs. We even showed the film in some massive-monster-mega-multiplexes on BR.
It looked great on BR, too, but I have to say a crowning technological moment came quite recently in a brand-new Jackie Chan theater in Beijing, when we were invited to the Beijing Film Festival. We showed the film there using a DCP we’d made in-house. All that great work the sound designer had done years before was finally all around us. Ahh.
Cheers,
Mike Parfit
https://www.thewhalemovie.com
https://www.mountainsidefilms.com -
Bill’s response is helpful in defining X’s speed advantage succinctly. In my experience keywording isn’t necessary in short projects in which you tend to get a pretty good mental image of all the assets after a couple of days. But in our feature doc we had 350 hours of our own footage and about 45 hours of other people’s stuff, and the organizational work, including keywording, which we did in CatDV, was absolutely necessary. Even when different loggers accidentally used different keywords (one used “puff” for a whale’s breath while another used “blow”) the ability to find what we needed and be pretty sure we hadn’t missed something great was vital.
That’s the most appealing part of FCPX to me. I don’t like FCPX’s timeline at present, I’ve found it slow on my 2011 Macbook Pro, and CatDV’s working fine for us, so we haven’t made the switch. But I’m comfortable with the idea that I simply haven’t messed around with it enough to fully recognize its strengths. The promise of a major upgrade any moment is intriguing, particularly in light of Adobe’s decisions.
Mike
Michael Parfit
https://www.mountainsidefilms.com
https://www.thewhalemovie.com -
[Herb Sevush] “Audiences always need less information than we think – it’s why night scenes always work so well, the less we see the more we can imagine.”
yes, yes, yes, yes. Sophisticated filmmakers and advertisers know this, but people who think audiences are stupid and have to be clobbered don’t. Then they wonder when audiences turn and run.
I mean, you do have to know which clues to give them or you can be obscure rather than evocative, and I guess that’s the art. Where do you put the motion in the frame, etc. Or in the frame before.
Cheers,
Mike
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I tried to use strictly library buttons and the automatic colour set, and finally got everything right, with uniformly white highlight colours. Then I went in and changed two pieces of text from regular to italic on one menu. After that, the colours started changing on other menus.
I thought I had it all nicely set up again with the white highlights. I saved the file, then rendered it out to a disk image. During that render somehow it changed two more menus, one to a situation in which a lot of the highlights were grey, but not all, and another in which highlight buttons were multicoloured.
I managed to get some of them back by flipping back and forth from the menu default colour set and the automatic set, but things just got more and more screwed up. Also during this time the program stopped letting me copy a button, and it also spontaneously joined two buttons into one frame so they just had one link, suddenly.
Either the program is hopelessly buggy or perhaps the program file is corrupt and I need to do a new install.
Does that help at all?
Thanks,
Mike
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So is it really a failure?
The argument goes on. However, as far as I can see the only serious marketing Apple did was to real pros in its private then public sneak previews, which were clearly designed to create buzz in the professional ranks.
It’s hard to imagine that those two events and the words and tone of the press release on the day of release (“the biggest advance in Pro video editing since the original Final Cut Pro”) were part of a conspiracy to dump professionals.
I think it’s less complex than that. Sure Apple most wants FCPX to appeal to everyone with any kind of camera, but it needs the pros to keep the program’s image burnished because consumers love feeling part of the great moviemaking machine. But the FCPX team simply failed to create the universally-useful tool that I suspect Apple — maybe Steve himself — had in mind.
In the long term, perhaps it’ll be OK, but right now just comparing FCPX to what Apple promised at those events and in the press release, FCPX is a failure. Promise>reality=uh oh. There are certainly recovery routes, but not until that failure is recognized by Apple.
Mike
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But, Jerry, isn’t that most of the problem here — the fact that they’ll say nothing?
In this case, in which genuine customers — and more importantly, trend-setters, early adopters, and other forms of leaders — are angry and deserting the ship, a genuine game plan for going forward from Apple would be a huge help.
All this secrecy starts to look like absurd aristocratic game-playing with masks and giggles when livelihoods are at stake outside the ballroom. And whatever happened to the importance of brand loyalty? There’s always that tipping point at which it turns to brand animosity.
Does Apple think the magic carpet ride will go on forever? Professional creative people responding to a class act set the tone that opened a lot of doors for Apple’s rise; why does the company now so disrespect those same people that it is unwilling to show them where it is going?
Mike Parfit
Co-director, The Whale -
Hi, David,
Thanks. We don’t have any problem getting a rendered clip or creating a timeline that renders fine — as long as we don’t render in 10-bit. I’m not sure how much we give up by going to non HQ, but my guess would be it could be the same level of loss (but not the same kind) that we get going from 10 bit to 8 bit with the HQ stuff. We get an instantly visible difference in image quality in some kinds of images when we render with 10 bit. But if we’re going to get these kinds of artifacts in some of the shots, that makes the whole thing questionable.
The problem only happens with 10-bit rendering, not with ProResHQ in 8-bit. That is what seems puzzling.
Thanks,
Mike