[Richard Herd]

[Herb Sevush] “then get a Wintel box and find out “ … how much you’ll miss AFP. 😉

[Richard Herd]

I came over here researching 5.1 system signal flow, but thought I might give my 2 cents here.

That “feel” you’re talking about is truly the mastering stage. To get mastering at very high quality requires hardware, and “hardware” is a misnomer because it’s not necessarily digital-computer stuff, but analog: tubes! Google, for example, “audio mastering equipment” and behold. OMG. There is no ceiling to the price.

A couple of years ago, I toured the studio of the guy who masters top 40 albums. He was kind enough to let me look at his rack, which was roughly 4 feet high and full of compressors, limiters, eqs, and then I asked him about “this one,” and he explained in glorious detail why he purchased that particular piece of equipment: the tubes were of a certain quality, the coils did a particular thing to the mid range….to be honest, it was another level altogether. The takeaway I was left with is this: That special “feel” is created during the mastering through an analog FX loop (a special sauce that mastering engineers geek-out on) and then when the master is “set,” it is digitized and laid back to the deliverable — which was my first real paying job in this industry. I was the “video guy” for a grammy award winning studio and the engineer simply sent me the files and I laid back to tape–where I was under strict orders not to touch the sound file in any way.

IMO, here, the starting place is researching and investing in a mastering studio that includes a rack of analog, tube-driven mastering equipment that (properly gain staged) loops into your I/O and into your NLE.

Compressors, EQs, Sidechaining, Dynamics — all of those are actual analog pieces of equipment in the FX loop of a live mixing console and NOT the software-based equivalents inside of the non-linear editing software. Without question, that is the difference you’re hearing. Kudos to you for being able to hear it 🙂

[Richard Herd]

Yeah, that’s the better link, thanks!

I guess the actual detail I can’t quite figure out is the difference between GPUs and Hardware Accelerators (eg Red Rocket, AJA, Bluefish, etc.).

[Richard Herd]

[Andrew Kimery] ” Apple’s court about whether or not it will enable support for external GPUs”

So now I’m actually confused. I thought the Red Rocket is an external GPU (and I’m not sure what else to call it), and it supposedly plays nicely with OSX via Sonnet Tech thunderbolt to PCIE chassis. And nofilm school says there is a GPU expander box [LINK].

If it’s just a driver problem, then that’s NVIDIA — but what would they gain by not offering an osx driver?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29BoqCMRBFk

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[Richard Herd]

[Walter Soyka] “GTX 1080s at 9 teraflops “

WOuld a PCIe thunderbolt chassis (and OpenCL) make it work (properly) on nMP?

[Richard Herd]

[Simon Ubsdell] “underexposed green screen”

Getting back to the basics. What does underexposed mean?

Let’s make it easy. We have 5 stops of latitude: 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8

IMO “underexposed” means everything darker than 2, and overexposed means everything brighter than 8.

Supposing we place the talent at f/4, in a reflection heavy environment, at what f/stop should we light the greenscreen?

Thanks!

[Richard Herd]

[Walter Soyka] “aggro nMP”

with only 1 thunderbolt?

It’s like 1/6 nMP. 🙂

[Richard Herd]

and of course Uncle Sam will be there https://www.irs.gov/uac/four-things-to-know-about-bartering-1

[Richard Herd]

I understand your point, lol. Touching the inspector is not as great as it seems, however. I’m saying this having used the Surface Book for a while now (granted there isn’t quite the same interface in Win10).

One big silly problem is that the touch screen on a lap top does not have a kickstand, so when you tap the screen the whole thing tilts and jiggles. More often than not, by a wide margin, the taps just don’t register, and often when they do, it jumps into “right click mode.” Urban Armor does a pretty good job with their Surface Pro cases and include a very strong, very stable kickstand. They need to do this with the Surface Book cases.

An additional problem is more ergonomic: my hands are here on the keyboard and here next to the mouse (actually for me, Wacom), but when I want to tap, my arm is no longer supported by stuff and I end up holding my arm in the air, a permanent isometric exercise. There is no way to edit in that position.

Also I bought the Surface Book with the beefed-up GPU (NVIDIA gadget) hoping to improve rendering and such, but it doesn’t. It seems to me, and I leave a wide margin for error here, that the NVIDIA GPU in Surface Book enhances the touch screen capability, and does not add to rendering. I’d be very interested in actual specs here, and I can’t seem to find them. So this is a round about way of saying (and maybe Bill’s lurking), if Apple puts in a touchscreen then I sure hope they don’t decrease rendering ability, ’cause that’d be an uproar for sure.

Another problem is that the “stuff” we tap is pretty tiny, and I’m thinking of the twirls in After Effects for example. Sometimes it registers the tap as “selected layer” when I wanted the twirly, among other problems, and this is the crux of the (potential) revolution in my opinion: the computer can “predict” what input is available based on what I have just done. For example, if I’ve just opened an After Effects project, I have to go through 4 or 5 steps before I can use the commands for adjusting a camera, yet they are in two places before I can even use them. Why is the interface dipslaying input options that are not available — taking up a reasonable amount of screen space, and so here we are back at square one. The tap function is basically a Cartesian Coordinate system, and we tap/click the defined section ON THE SCREEN and everything we could possibly do is all right there all the time ON THE SCREEN.

Whereas, it should be like this: we open our lap tops and the keyboard is totally replaced with an iPad-style touchscreen. If you want to type something, then turn on the keyboard interface device. If you are comfortable doing your job on a keyboard, then the keyboard is still there, but if we want to use a “Super Touchbar” then the whole damn thing could be Contextual; the stuff that’s irrelevant goes away until it’s relevant. In other words, you could line up all your inspectors on the hypothetical iPad-doo-dad I called the Super Touchbar AWAY FROM THE SCREEN.

I personally would like the market to move like that, but I don’t think it will because folks on balance really do not like change.

Here’s an analogy because this forum loves analogies ☺ My uncle is a Mercedes Benz mechanic (retired) and his tool box only contains tools that are in metric.

[Richard Herd]

WOW! That is fancy, so clever. I hope the price is competitive enough so it can get in the market.