Robert Ruffo
Forum Replies Created
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Jake, not all my jobs are supervised like that. Most are a situation where they come in for a talk, and come back later to see, make notes, and come back again. I think this is more of an East Coast thing, because distances are very small, and there are cafes on every corner, and its’ just part of the lifestyle.
Its’ only the final finesse pass that’s 100% supervised, IF I am only the colorist
Much of my work (like many people here) even involves me being my own client for grading on music videos and feature DP work. In Music Videos, even for major labels, the client only comments when we hand the thing in, and usually simply is happy with the color grade.
I take color grading seriously and have apprenticed several times with senior colorists, and taken post graduate courses in color theory, but it’s just one thing I do here in a boutique service house that has many configurations. My situation is not altogether atypical. I think a dedicated full time colorist is becoming less common as the typical user of DaVinci, for better or worse.
Filmmaster sounds amazing. I am by no means a Davinci fanboy, even less a fan of BM and their business practices. How much is a Filmmaster license? Their website stated no prices. Do they have a good tracker/power windows system?
My hourly rate might be lower than yours, but is still quite high, but I pass off the tedious pixel pushing to off-site vendors. Again, it’s notes, then a to do list, then an FTP transfer of the shots to guys who fix them. Often 2 hours later the fixed shots are on the timeline.
If I were quickly adding a genarts glow or something it might take less time to drop it in, and just set-up a proxy render – than to try and emulate the same look fo teh same quality in Davinci native tools.
The Gnearts glow interface is very simple and fast. Rendering a proxy takes maybe 20 seconds for most clip lengths – then we are flying in real time again.
I stand by the notion that certain very desirable results (we’ll let specifically noise reduction aside for now) related to grading are best done in systems that do not operate in real time, and that having a real time only philosophy limits possibilities.
Even without OFX present, Resolve 10 crashes often and hard, and I would say it really is just a Beta, maybe even an Alpha at this time. I;m sure it will improve in stability.
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[Margus Voll] “I found that cms was really fast with my setup.
1d+3d 17 step profiling took just an hour.
“That depends on the probe. You may also be using slide times that are too short for good precision. I use 10 seconds with my Hubble.
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Red and Aces are just not a good mix. Could be Resolve’s fault, or Red’s not sure which.
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[jake blackstone] “Robert.
We’re keep talking past each other.
I’m not advocating less choice. I’m rather for more creative choices. I use OFX Genarts plugins with Nucoda FilmMaster and I love it. Thee reason I enjoy using then with Nucoda, I don’t have to worry about real time performance hit. It’s always real time no matter how many plugins or layers or “nodes” I use.
As far as offloading NR to other systems, on the contrary, I strongly believe, that noise reduction SHOULD be done during the grading session. it had always been done that way, even going back to telecine times using real time noise reduction courtesy of the same Nucoda company- DVNR. The problem, that I’m talking about is that now with V10 colorist faces this choice:
1. Do I do NR, that although it may provide better quality, the resulting playback will not be anywhere near real time playback.
2. Do I use built in NR and while getting a decent quality, I could maintain real time playback.
I propose, that there should be no need for such choice. All BMD needs to do is to implement a true persistent background cache. That’s it. In the absence of such, all this OFX business is useless in a true client supervised post production environment. Well, at least to me…
Final note. As we all know there is no free lunch. One of the most important traits of Resolve is it’s pretty much bulletproof. It hardly ever crashes. Plug ins are written by a third parties. Therefore one would hope, that their plugins conform to the vigorous testing of BMD. So far, for me, I found, that many Genarts plugins consistently crash Resolve. Said that, this is still just a beta version, so I will reserve the final judgement on the system stability till the final product ships.”Jake, I don’t mena to “talk past you”. I have tremendous respect for the extremely beautiful work you do, particularly in fashion related pieces. I’m sure (kinda sure…) that stability will improve, but that’s another matter.
I think real-time has lost some of it’s prominence in many workflows. One main reason is there is no tape to dump to any more, much of the time. Another is that “stop and work” is now much more common than “grade as tape flies by” . We have to stop anyway, to do things like set-up power windows and so on, so taking a second to set-up a pre-render of a proxy and coming back to it later is no biggle – the client is used to waiting for things to happen, and from their perspective waiting on the operator or on the machine is not that different.
i would add that dense east-coast style cities where clients live within a mile or two of the studio are much more conducive to coming back and checking in many times In L.A. it’s hours of horrible traffic, so things may end up working differently.
Expectations are also much higher these days – and much of what clients ask for from a colorist does border on VFX and could never be real-time. And… Quiet frankly I have never seen any noise reduction that was as good as Neat Video and could work in real time in 1080p, let alone 4K, even at Big Iron shops.
The system you speak of uses extremely expensive dedicated hardware. Budgets being what they are, it would loose value faster than billings could come in for most people in most market in 2013. So, sadly, sounds great, but I could never pay that off and neither could many people here.
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It might be possible to create a driver/utility that “fools’ your computer and/or Resolve into thinking it is another panel. Do other working panels have similar numbers of buttons and displays for this to work?
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Jake, the results is different, so whether there is a chunk of shared code under the hood or not, the added controls and “noise learning tools (box around what should be solid in color)” of neat video give a better result – so who cares if they get there using the same underlying code. Me-thinks the result is what matters. I’m sure there are other plugins that get better results than Neat Video while requiring much less user input but Resolve’s new noise reduction is not one of them, at least not on number of shot types.
My real-time comment was mis-worded and/or a typo. I simply meant “more convenient” “more expedient”.
I don’t see where I said eternal VFX artists should be kept out of the loop. I was suggesting the contrary, that some things, like good noise reduction, should be done “off session”, by the colorist or someone better qualified to do whatever needs doing, depending on what that thing is . Who is doing it is not the issue, trying to ram too many things into what can be done in real time, when much higher quality non-real time solutions exists is the issue – it is letting the client down.
WIth the budgets and fees most of deal with here, many of the options you suggest would never be amortized, so we must choose between affordable possibilities, Neat Video being one of them. The cost of buying or renting extremely expensive solutions is not a wise investment compared to cost of spending a few off-client or off-sire minutes fiddling with Neat Video when particular shots require it.
That said we see more and more people like me who have training and experience on a variety of sectors of post. “Modern post/D.I.” is often post where there is very limited budgets, and no time or money to hire a large group of specialists. What one guy can’t do just won’t get done.
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Jake, that’s not the same. Neat video applies to the whole image (of course you can always qualify it later) , but uses selection for “learning” what is noise vs what is image data. Let’s say you have a grey panel and it’s supposed to be solid, but it’s full of blu-ish noise because of the sensor used. Resolve has no way of you telling it that panel within the image is supposed to be solid, so it has less information to go on to learn what the noise patterns are, and differentiate them from image texture.
I would also add that real time is an easy fix. Grading with a client is one thing, but noise reduction is often done “off session”, on a noted “to do list”, just like 3D animations and other CPU-hungry or operator-time-hungry effects. In some cases, if your entire DI is restricted only to what can render in real time you are selling your client short on (WAY short) on the full rainbow of possibilities of computer image enhancement.
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I tried latest version last week. Yes it’s better now, but CMS is still light years ahead.
CALMAN is for home theater calibration and that often shows. Its’ really more than good enough for a home theater, but not for us. For one thing, their cube simply does not have enough points. But that makes sense for their market, as it would be impractical for a home calibrator to spend 8 hours waiting for that many slides to go by. He would have to go to his client’s house twice, and make sure they disturbed nothing, did not turn on the lights, etc. during his absence At a color facility, we can just lock up, go home, and it’s ready the next morning.
The long way CMS uses is still way better.
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Jake, Neat Video is different in that it allows you to define an area of what is solid/uniform (or what would be, if not for noise) using a square that you drag out. If find results from Neat Video are a bit better, maybe for that reason.
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I have both Calman and Lightspace/ Calman’s LUT math is far inferior – resulting in far less precision and more banding.
LUT math is like 3D rendering math – each take on it will give you different results.
I would also warn that a cheap monitor will have poor blacks, poor screen uniformity, poor detail in the darks and other issues that cannot be resolved via calibration.