Robert Ruffo
Forum Replies Created
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You can use an Intensity Pro card – since you won’t be bending the signal (the LUT takes care of that at the software level before the card) you don’t need more than 8 bit HDMI. Intensity Pro is about $130.
i do not feel one should grade in 10 bit for Rec 709- one should grade in the same color space as final use whenever possible. Blu-ray and cable TV are both 8 bit as is web delivery – so for what we do we grade on a “perfected average” of user screen capability.
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I was speaking from the P.O.V. of a small, indy boutique, in a city where space is very, very expensive. We have just one shared monitor carefully positioned so that both the colorist and the client can see it easily.
Hey, it works.For us, every dollar counts and being able to save ourselves buying an external box, plus an SDI card figured into some math. That math also looked at the price of a Flanders and other factors.
If we were to expand and get a second monitor, we would probably need to get an external box, although if both monitors were the same model unit variance would probably be sufficiently small to easily correct within the panel’s settings, and we could get away with not doing that. Anyway, the external box could be Fed a lut that corrects for Davinci + display lut of first monitor + problems with 2nd monitor itself. But we like that we can grow in smaller steps, and not have to buy all that gear at once. The same Lighstcape license will adjust the box, if/when we will need it.
I was also a little imprecise in my language in my OP. When I said “Delta 0” what I meant was zero at a practical, human vision level. I do realize that perfect 0 does not exist in reality, anywhere.
If an i1 display is so spot-on that no one in the room, in a room full of highly trained eyes, can tell the difference between its results and those of a $10 000 meter, no matter what sample images you run, then really, who cares what those differences are at a tech level. For some clients, we will rent that $10 000 meter and calibrate with it before the session so they can rest easier. WIll its calibration result end in different color grading decisions vs. the i1 display calibration? Probably not.
I also realize that delta-E is only one measure among many, and perhaps not the best one. but I bring it up because it is familiar to many.
Somebody sent me a PM saying that gamut should be left wider for working. I disagree. I think everything should be correct to Rec 709 and as such look as much as possible like the perfect middle between all the TV sets out there with all their individuated color pushes. “What you see is the average of what they will get” We do broadcast, however, not P3. In P3 I might chose a different approach. MAny here might have different opinions and I’d love to hear them.
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Yes, you are right – this is only if you have a better meter. But Delta <1 is no problem. You can always get a better meter later, plus if you take measurements slowly and average them (what Lightspace does) you can get very good precision.
Still, the point is you don’t need a LUT box, or even an SDI card.
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Yes. it is possible to control any vector on Wave
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Audio render-out would save precious minutes – just pass through the audio if found in the XML – if not found fine, but many times it would be there and save us time.
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On a good 8 core 2009 or 12 core 2010 you can do Red in real time with 20 nodes. at worst, VERY RARELY, it will dip down to 22-23 fps. You can work at half-re good, and then of course render at any level, which will be slower, but doing music videos and commercials the client has a coffee and it’s rendered before it gets cold. A one hour show, rendered at Full Premium, would no more than 7 hours to final render on a Mac 2008 8 core, and maybe 4 hours on a 2009 8 core, and 2.5 – 3 hours on a Mac 2010 12 core. You can WORK in real-time, it’s just the final render that is not. That said, add a Red Rocket card and it is a real time render as well, on above-said macs.
Not sure what high-end you are talking about. 100% of broadcast television, including all ads and all music videos are mastered in 1080p, as are most non-fiction features. 2K is really no problem either on a Mac system with one good GPU, even without a rocket card.
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You can grade Red with 1080p output on a Mac with one GPU no issues at all. 1080p output is 99% of gigs.
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But you don’t need a Decklink card – you can use an Intensity Pro card and it works fine, and I would say it is preferable to monitor in 8bit if your final output is TV (which is 8bit). With a Vt25 or Vt30 plasma, you can go into the primaries of your monitor via a serial cable, and so no LUT boxes needed.
So at this point, all they got from me is $125 for a card (with small margins, it costs a lot to make a card) vs. the $1000 they would have gotten for the software had I not returned it.
I think they should offer refunds to anyone who bought DaVinci within the last 2 months
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I just thought this meme should be out there. In all of this I am trying to defend high standards and living wages for all involved in the industry – from software developers to indy colorists to DPs.
Often young artists do not see the big business picture – democratization is not always a good thing when pushed too far (the opposite, pushed too far is not good either – but we are at little risk of that these days.)
It’s great that many people have a chance to get in the business, less great if there is no business left on the other side.