[Pat Horridge]

Well the way post production is going I suspect it’s a little of both!

Pat Horridge
Technical Director, Trainer, Avid Certified Instructor
VET
Production Editing Digital Media Design DVD
T +44 (0)20 7505 4701 | F +44 (0)20 7505 4800 | E pat@vet.co.uk |
http://www.vet.co.uk | Lux Building 2-4 Hoxton Square London N1 6US

[Pat Horridge]

A follow up to progress on Resolve in the Z800

We now have a Quadro 4000 card as the GUI and the GTX 580 3Gb as the GPU card. The decklink HD Extreme 3D card for IO

Some tips for otehr builders that aren’t included int he Black Magic config (which implies these all just drop in and work)

You won;t have enough power connectors to have those graphics cards installed. The Z800 comes with 2 6 pin graphic card molex connectors. The Quadro 4000 needs 1 the GTX 580 needs 1 and an 8 pin molex power connector.

So the solution I used was to order a 6 pin to 8 pin Molex adapter

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/6pin-PCI-8pin-PCI-E-Power-Cable-Adapter-M-F-PC-/290675282130?pt=UK_Computing_CablesConnectors_RL&hash=item43ad98d0d2

This sorted the GTX 580 card but left nothing for the Quadro 4000 so I ordered:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Pci-E-2-x-Molex-4-pin-6-pin-Power-Cable-gfx-cards-/140651248079?pt=UK_Computing_CablesConnectors_RL&hash=item20bf77b9cf

Cut the two 4 pin power connectors off and soldered the wired direct to the SATA power chain that feeds the internal DVD drive. I went the solder root as those 4 pin molex connectors aren’t a great fit and can drop voltage under load.

Had the machine running and all is working well.

The decklink card went in slot 1 and the flying back plane went in the space above slot one (that has no motherboard PCI-e slot.

The Quadro in Slot 2 and the GTX in slot 5

All running well and looks realy need inside.

Pat Horridge
Technical Director, Trainer, Avid Certified Instructor
VET
Production Editing Digital Media Design DVD
T +44 (0)20 7505 4701 | F +44 (0)20 7505 4800 | E pat@vet.co.uk |
http://www.vet.co.uk | Lux Building 2-4 Hoxton Square London N1 6US

[Pat Horridge]

The empty timeline blacks should be digital black which for 601 is 16.
If your sliding in shot looks blacker chances are you’ve pushed it sub black.
Do you have scopes externally? do they show that?
If not you can bring up the Y waveeform in the CC tool and check the range. If white is showing at the bottom of the waveform (which is normally green) then you are sub black.
SO you need to fix the sub black not make the correct black wrong.
There is a upper lower clip limit in the CC tool that i set to 16 and 235 you just have to enable it. But depending how you graded the shot you may have still pushed it sub black after that limter. So you could Alt drop the safe colour limiter on the clip or on a filler clip on a track above and that will clip off the sub blacks and the blacks should then match.
Sorry if that sounds complex. It’s a simple thing to do and show but harder to describe!

Pat Horridge
Technical Director, Trainer, Avid Certified Instructor
VET
Production Editing Digital Media Design DVD
T +44 (0)20 7505 4701 | F +44 (0)20 7505 4800 | E pat@vet.co.uk |
http://www.vet.co.uk | Lux Building 2-4 Hoxton Square London N1 6US

[Pat Horridge]

Yes the key factor with AMA is the codec it’s been aquired in. MPEG2 is a low demand codec so it’s easy to code and decode. H264 is the other extreme and takes a massive amount of CPU power to unpack. But does come as very small file footprint.
So if you have a fast powerful CPU you can access H264 content and play ok but for anything less AMA, make selects, don;t trash anything just tuck unused AMA clips away in a bin. Transcode the rest either to offline or direct online and edit (if the offline route the re-link back at the end)
I’ve created a course for VET
https://www.vet.co.uk/site/training/scheduled_courses/avid_ama_ingest_and_export_vet_short_courses

That specifically covers the various workflows for getting the best from AMA

Pat Horridge
Technical Director, Trainer, Avid Certified Instructor
VET
Production Editing Digital Media Design DVD
T +44 (0)20 7505 4701 | F +44 (0)20 7505 4800 | E pat@vet.co.uk |
http://www.vet.co.uk | Lux Building 2-4 Hoxton Square London N1 6US

[Pat Horridge]

Books and online tutorials are great but they can’t reposnd to your questions or adapt to your learning needs. They make a great reference and resource but a class is far more useful and quicker at instilling the skills you need.
I suggest an FCP to Avid Transition course (and make sure it’s taught by a real editor skilled in FCP and Avid) This is the first step in understanding how the two slightly different working practices translate.
Then do an Avid 101 course. Avid has lots and lots of cool brilliant features that make life for the editor fast and fun and many never discover them. I still show many editors who have used Avid for decades editing tips that we teach in Avid 101 and they’ve never even known it existed and missed the gains they bring.
A shameles plug but check out https://www.vet.co.uk/training
But there are Avid training centres all over the world if Hoxton Square Londons a stretch 🙂

Pat Horridge
Technical Director, Trainer, Avid Certified Instructor
VET
Production Editing Digital Media Design DVD
T +44 (0)20 7505 4701 | F +44 (0)20 7505 4800 | E pat@vet.co.uk |
http://www.vet.co.uk | Lux Building 2-4 Hoxton Square London N1 6US

[Pat Horridge]

This is an interesting topic and I think recent developments on the FCP side have caused some people to think of the bigger picture.
Unless you hope and intend to make your money in a very short window or oppertunity in Post production (and I think there’s little hope of that) then you need to be woring on a long term plan.
That requires investment in kit and skills and doing that with the wrong product is a massive waste of effort and time.
For me Avid was and still is a company that exists by making editing tools. Not phones or TV’s just tools for editing. And they have to get it right to survive. They’ve lost touch before and seen the result and had to adapt to recover. That’s not the same for Apple and the like. they can and will mkae more from trading one small client base for a much bigger wealthier one.
And to a lesser extend I’d worry about the Adobe route. Adobe could decide that the FCPX route is the smart route to go and CS7 could be a tablet application with very different features. Who knows?
So I invest my time in working with Avid on their software in testing and teaching and using it and it’s great to be using a tool I actually have a real input into how it develops.

Pat Horridge
Technical Director, Trainer, Avid Certified Instructor
VET
Production Editing Digital Media Design DVD
T +44 (0)20 7505 4701 | F +44 (0)20 7505 4800 | E pat@vet.co.uk |
http://www.vet.co.uk | Lux Building 2-4 Hoxton Square London N1 6US

[Pat Horridge]

There ar two steps to bringing a project from FCP to Avid. the first is the sequence information the second the media and linking to it or embedding it in the AAF.
You can test if Avid can see your source media by using AMA in Avid to try and manually link to some of your source footage. If that won’t AMA then you need to resolve that (but it looks like it should)
But Automatic duck should have produced an AAF that you could import into Avid and that should have given you a Sequence with offline clips in it. Did you get that?

Pat Horridge
Technical Director, Trainer, Avid Certified Instructor
VET
Production Editing Digital Media Design DVD
T +44 (0)20 7505 4701 | F +44 (0)20 7505 4800 | E pat@vet.co.uk |
http://www.vet.co.uk | Lux Building 2-4 Hoxton Square London N1 6US

[Pat Horridge]

Not tried the scarlet footage (happy to take a few short clips and test them out) but with the Red one and the Epic MCV6 support is realy good now.
On a fast machine like a Z800 with a fast media array I can get realtime playback of the R3D clips linked by AMA.
You have set source settings that allows RedCine-X type control over the RAW data and metadata maniplulation so you can AMA link the red clips. Make selects (and even subclip up)
Do a first Set source settings pre adjustment (important to show clips can be recovered or not)
Then for a short simple job just edit or for a longer job Transcode to offline or online res.
Final sequence re-links back to original Reds and you can tweak sources and then grade.
Unless you lay out direct to tape you will need to Transcode at the very end to make media you can export easily.
Do it a lot and it works really well. We even have workflow routes for slower editing systems if need be.

Pat Horridge
Technical Director, Trainer, Avid Certified Instructor
VET
Production Editing Digital Media Design DVD
T +44 (0)20 7505 4701 | F +44 (0)20 7505 4800 | E pat@vet.co.uk |
http://www.vet.co.uk | Lux Building 2-4 Hoxton Square London N1 6US

[Pat Horridge]

I have a loan Decklink HD Extreme 3D card and got it installed last night on my Z800. Annoying that I now have an unknown device lurking in the device manager after all the BM driver installed fine. But everything seems to work so it’s not a problem.
I only had time to check MCV6 could see it and Resolve could see it and initial tests with both seem to look encouraging.
On the Avid side an LG monitor on the HDMI out looks very odd in anything other then full quality mode. Loads of stepping across the picture which the component SD monitor doesn’t show. But in full quality it looks good. Nice that I can have SD PAL commponent out and HDMI and HD_SDI output at the same time.
Seems responsive so far.
Next we start testing on the range of codec support round tripping from Avid to Resolve and then the level of effect support.
When we have a robust workflow we’ll start on some teaching notes and we plan to have a cource available to help editors fast track the pitfalls.

Pat Horridge
Technical Director, Trainer, Avid Certified Instructor
VET
Production Editing Digital Media Design DVD
T +44 (0)20 7505 4701 | F +44 (0)20 7505 4800 | E pat@vet.co.uk |
http://www.vet.co.uk | Lux Building 2-4 Hoxton Square London N1 6US

[Pat Horridge]

Yes that’s right buy re doing mount AMA volume to a new bin it will populate again. Bit this will bring the old bins clips back online. And as you say you can trash that bin when done or store away. No media is made or moved so its not an issue.
AMA volumes don’t often drop off line as long as you make sure the drives are all online before you launch MC

Pat Horridge
Technical Director, Trainer, Avid Certified Instructor
VET
Production Editing Digital Media Design DVD
T +44 (0)20 7505 4701 | F +44 (0)20 7505 4800 | E pat@vet.co.uk |
http://www.vet.co.uk | Lux Building 2-4 Hoxton Square London N1 6US