[Paul Nordin]

The thing to remember is that you are not really streching the video at all. You are shrinking the HD footage to fit in a non-widescreen frame. So width-wise your square pixels have to be mapped across 720 pixels which when played through a DVD payer, will be stretched to rectangles 1.21w x 1h. Visually the image will still be displayed across the same 16:9 frame as your native HD footage. So it’s not streched at that point. It appears normal.

And this is the only-way it is done…from hobyists to Hollywood. It all has to fit in a container 720×480, with a pixel aspect ration of 1.21

_______________________
EMB Studios
http://www.EMBstudios.com
Emeryville, CA
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[Paul Nordin]

Hi Vladimir,
Do you have any idea how prior versions of MacDrive for Windows performed? I haven’t upgraded from v8 to v9, yet. But if it performs better I may pay for the upgrade.
I’ve always had problems when copying large data blocks through it. Usually resulting in a lost connection to the drive.

_______________________
EMB Studios
http://www.EMBstudios.com
Emeryville, CA
_______________________

[Paul Nordin]

The thin bars on either side of your video are a result of a pixel aspect dimension mismatch between the square pixels in your ProRes source file and the 1.21 aspect ratio needed for MPeg2 NTSC widescreen DVDs. They will NOT go away in the process of burning/duplicating/whatever. They are baked into the video signal.

I’m sure there are more elegant and easy ways to get rid of them, but the solution I would use is this:

• Import your ProRes file into an After Effects project.

• Create a new composition using the NTSC Widescreen preset. Make sure your new comp has a frame rate that matches your ProRes file.
• Drop your ProRes file into this new composition.
• In the Layers menu select the option to make layer dimensions match composition. I think its in Layer/Modify but I’m not looking at AE right now. This will stretch your HD footage with square pixels to fit in a format that has NTSC rectangular pixels.
• Save the project and close AE.
• Open either Encore or AME, use the menu to import an asset. Navigate to your saved AE project and select it. A browser will come up listing the compositions in the AE project. Select the NTSC Widescreen comp you just created.
• The rest is what you would expect: select your render options as needed and render/transcode.

Sounds more complicated than it really is. But this will get rid of the letterboxing.

Cheers,
Paul

_______________________
El Mundo Bueno Studios
Film * Audio
http://www.EMBstudios.com
Emeryville, CA
_______________________

[Paul Nordin]

Yes Ola, that is correct.
Or 2 GPUs and 2 RedRockets, or whatever combination makes sense. Each slot is a generous double-wide so plenty of room for up to 4 double-wide cards. Cooling is great, and the powersupply seems beefy enough to handle any reasonable combination of cards.

I own an Epic and have loaded 2-GTX285s plus a RR and a ATTO H680 in mine. I’m hoping Red comes out with an updated Rocket card as the current RR is just barely fast enough for Epic 5k footage, and I don’t get realtime with HDRx footage. After the dust settles I may swap out my 285s with the new 680s.

_______________________
El Mundo Bueno Studios
Film * Audio
http://www.EMBstudios.com
Emeryville, CA
_______________________

[Paul Nordin]

The model of Cubix I have Desktop 4 Pro has 4 double-wide slots, and 2x power leads for each of those slots. The Cubix website is pretty hard to navigate, so I can understand your confusion!

_______________________
El Mundo Bueno Studios
Film * Audio
http://www.EMBstudios.com
Emeryville, CA
_______________________

[Paul Nordin]

In the Configuration Guide, they list Cubix. Why try something outside their recommendation? I’ve got a cubix and it works great.

_______________________
El Mundo Bueno Studios
Film * Audio
http://www.EMBstudios.com
Emeryville, CA
_______________________

[Paul Nordin]

OK, after a LOT of testing I’ve found one workflow that is maintaining the gamma/sat.

• Davinci Resolve – render DPX sequences
• to Premiere Pro & embedded AE for finalizing (assebling reels, titles etc) – render DPX
• Render from PPro a final DPX Master
• DPX Master into Apple Compressor h.246-BluRay setting for BR render
• h264 Render into Encore DVD for authoring and burning

Steps 3 & 4 are only there to deal with the gamma slipping. I also think this may be highlighting a problem between OSX10.7.3 and the Mainconcept MPEG compressor as this workflow is the only one I have tried that bypasses it. (All adobe apps use it, and so does Squeeze)

_______________________
El Mundo Bueno Studios
Film * Audio
http://www.EMBstudios.com
Emeryville, CA
_______________________

[Paul Nordin]

The only other system I have to use is a older MacBook Pro running snow leopard, which would take 3 days to render this feature. ..too long. I’ll try a test. The thing that is most troublesome is three days ago my renders looked as they should: BluRay matching the DPX masters nicely.

Now, three days later, they have elevated blacks and are desaturated. And I have not installed any new software or drivers.

_______________________
El Mundo Bueno Studios
Film * Audio
http://www.EMBstudios.com
Emeryville, CA
_______________________

[Paul Nordin]

I’m having the same problem on my MacPro system.
(OSX 10.3.7, CUDA 4.1.29, Nvidia driver 270)

is there a way for me to make a similar switch to the NVideo config?

_______________________
El Mundo Bueno Studios
Film * Audio
http://www.EMBstudios.com
Emeryville, CA
_______________________

[Paul Nordin]

Hi Margus,
Might you be able to repost your CiniStyle cube LUT? The link seems to be broken. I would love to use it on a 5D project I just got.
Thanks,
Paul

_______________________
El Mundo Bueno Studios
Film * Audio
http://www.EMBstudios.com
Emeryville, CA
_______________________