[Paul Golden]

I have found that rendering to an external Thunderbolt drive is faster than rendering to the same media drives where my AE project lives. For example, I have all of my media and AE project file on a 6 drive RAID 5. It might be 50% faster to render out to a connected SSD on Thunderbolt because the system is reading and writing with two different places. Is this what you’re wondering about?

[Paul Golden]

The “fail” was Apple calling it FCPX as opposed to something else like New Edit 1.0. Then everyone would have cut it some slack and realized it was beta software and been really excited about the future.

[Paul Golden]

Not really much of a threat to the Cintiq, because animators/illustrators don’t really draw at that angle and need a sturdier platform to press down on like a light table. The Cintiq has unique thumb controls mounted on the monitor to allow for easier modal switching. I’m curious as to whether the parallax of pen to screen will be acceptable to artists.

[Paul Golden]

The Ultra Studio Mini Monitor goes HDMI or SDI with embedded audio out. As does the T-Tap. But then it’s usually easy to pull analog audio as a loop through from the audio out of most monitors.

[Paul Golden]

One other thing about dynamic range: don’t get hung about it if you’re lighting an indoor set!

Presumably you’ll have time to adjust your lighting ratios, test shoot, and look at footage before committing to a final shot. Stop motion is rarely shot under uncontrollable conditions where dynamic range is crucial for good image acquisition.

Dynamic range is definitely more important in time-lapse or outdoor scenarios where lighting can change quickly or momentarily (clouds flying in e.g.), but I’ve found that if you’re careful about your lighting and nothing is either clipping white (besides highlights) or super black, you can usually push or pull areas of the frame to taste.

That said, you should still capture RAW if at all possible.

[Paul Golden]

Hi Stephen…

Your Canon 70D, which shoots RAW, is not equivalent, but superior, to the BMPC, which also shoots RAW, but only internally. The dynamic range, being RAW, is also similar. You can’t capture single frame RAW from a Black Magic camera because it does not allow single frame triggering. You can capture, via SDI and a capture device, an uncompressed 422 video signal, but not RAW. No Blackmagic cameras allow for single frame capture of RAW, except in time-lapse mode, which doesn’t apply to stop motion.

Using Dragonframe software will allow you to capture the full frame of your Canon footage and then downscale it or crop it to whatever flavor of 4K you want. If you’re not delivering in 4K, but in something like HD, then you can downscale it further.

I would recommend that you not try to deal with RAW stop-motion image sequences in FCPX. It does not have a native scheme for image sequences and can’t take advantage of all the RAW image controls. It will show you essentially a JPEG thumbnail of

Here’s the workflow I”d recommend:

1) Capture using Dragonframe to full Canon CR2 files.

2) Bring Canon CR2 image sequences into either DaVinci Resolve or Adobe After Effects. Use Resolve or AfterEffects Camera Raw to color correct and create ProRes dailies. Your dailies can be scaled or full sized, depending on what you wish. ProRes will be easier to edit with than Image Sequences

3) Edit your film in FCPX and export an XML of your approved cut.

4) Import the XML into Resolve and do a final grading on the edited material. Export ProRes and bring into After Effects or any other compositing software you plan to do cleanup and rig removal.

5) Render out final clean clips from After Effects (e.g.) and bring back to FCPX for a final conform.

The is a general suggestion as I did not specify all the technical settings required to perform this successfully. It is highly dependent on your footage (green screen, multi-pass, rigs etc.) , its EFX and cleanup requirements and your knowledge of these other programs.

My basic observation is that FCPX is not the place to deal with RAW image sequences for color correction or compositing but ProRes footage in an editorial workflow.

[Paul Golden]

If I’m trying to run Resolve 12.5, I’m not sure I can roll that far safely back in Desktop Video.

[Paul Golden]

Work:
For editorial:
nMP 8-core/64gbRAM/500gb/2xD700
HP Dreamcolor z27x for GUI
Flanders CM240 for fullscreen/grading & BMD UltraStudio Mini Monitor
Dell 24 for additional scopes etc.
Promise R6 RAID for Media & OWC Thunderbay 4 disk raid for Time Machine
KRK Rokit 8 Monitors

2012 MacBook Pro & 30″ Cinema Display (business)

Home: my wife’s 17″ 2009 MacBook Pro
I don’t work at home, so it’s just email and farting around

[Paul Golden]

This is where I’m a little confused as to who’s responsible. If the BMD UltraStudio MiniMonitor works fine with Resolve and Premiere, but not FCPX, is it Apple who needs to look at FCPX’s AV Output or BMD who needs to update their drivers?

I will try to test by getting an AJA T-Tap and seeing if there’s an improvement.

[Paul Golden]

I can confirm that this is happening on my setup as well.

Specs: nMP 2013; 8-core; 64gb RAM; 2xD700; Pegasus R6 TB Raid; BMD UltraStudio MiniMonitor TB; FCPX 10.2.3; BMD Desktop Video 10.6.8

I have noticed that the problem is especially painful when cutting with JPEGs as storyboard reels. If I check the “warn of dropped frames” pref, it stops playback almost immediately. I thought maybe this was a graphics card brand issue, so I tried my 2012 MBP with Nvidia cards connected to the same RAID and monitor. Same result. Dropped frames.

I exported the sequence out as XML and brought it Premiere Pro CC 2015.3 and it plays back fine with no hiccup.

For me, it seems worse when cutting with JPEGs. If I turn off AV Output, the sequence plays fine. I guess the only thing left to try is another TB output device like an AJA T-Tap and switch to the BMD Mini Monitor when working in Resolve.

Does anyone have experience using a different output device?