[Simon Ubsdell]

So my initial sense is that this is a massive release with very considerable consequences for the VFX community.

I haven’t yet been able to look at the Studio version, but a few things really stand out in terms of what’s now on offer.

The all-new Studio Player seems to be offering very significant realtime performance on a scale we haven’t seen before and this on its own looks to be huge.

The planar and camera tracking functionality, including planar transforms of roto, are going to make a massive difference and on their own make the new price for Studio ludicrously good value.

The whole VR thing has absolutely no interest for me and never will, but I can see why they need to do it. I suspect that VR will be a dodo in less than a few years, but that’s another story.

As someone who has spent a lot of time working on keyer technology, I have to confess I am seriously underwhelmed by the new Delta Keyer option. I think this is the weakest part of the offering, but then again it’s always good to have multiple keyer offerings and Fusion now has a very impressive line-up.

From a marketing point of view, I think it’s good sense to hive off the tracking and Studio Player options from the free offering – I don’t think there was enough of a penalty before it you chose the free option. That said, the new price point is absurdly low and makes adding multiple seats a very attractive option.

Is this the tipping point that will start to see a move away from the increasingly over-priced dominance of Nuke?

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Shawn Miller] ” it would just be foolish to not have these tools in the toolset.
“

It’s clearly worth the price just for the tracking options alone, but with Ultimatte on top of that it’s a must-have.

There’s a lot of talk about what makes us excited about new software, and for me this is as good as it gets, without question.

BMD are on an unstoppable roll!

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Shawn Miller] “I want BMD to take my money now!”

It’s pretty insane, if true. And as you say, if they can get the kind of “automagical” results you get from the Resolve tracker, then it’s going to be a game changer.

But let’s not underestimate how major the Ultimatte thing is likely to be – I think that has the potential to be massive as well.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

Not just that, but planar AND camera tracking, if that leak is to be believed.

AND a whole new keyer built on Ultimatte.

Now that will be some update if it’s all true.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Oliver Peters] “I found it fascinating how much the addition of film grain enhanced the perception of sharpness.”

I’d have liked to know more about his approach to adding grain. This is rarely done correctly to emulate what actually happens with film. To do it right you need a separate grain pattern for each channel, and a larger grain size for the blue channel, and so on. It’s by no means as straightforward as just tweaking the controls on your compositor’s Grain filter. There is often a really nasty “stuck-on” look to artificial grain that comes from it’s not being composited correctly and popular Grain overlay packages are especially guilty of this.

I suspect the perception of sharpness is partly due to the fact that the grain is more noticeable in the midtones which gives the effect of a slight gamma reduction which makes the image look a bit punchier. But I liked his explanation too.

[Oliver Peters] “my takeaway from the video was that the Alexa65 looked damned good.”

Hard to disagree with that. Even though this wasn’t meant as a “shoot-out”, there did seem to be a clear overall winner.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Oliver Peters] “But to get the most out of the image, the key is in the math to turn monochrome data from RGB-assigned photosites into actual RGB, color video.”

And ARRI do it really beautifully and in a way that gives results that feel like we like to think film looks like.

RED, not so much. What was startling to me in Steve’s tests was that it brought home yet again how unattractive the RED images tend to look. At least to my eyes.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Oliver Peters] “the video clearly shows that not all 4K (or higher) is equal”

I think in many ways the video reinforced the notion that 2K had already reached the crossover point where adding more pixels was perceptually irrelevant, at least for cinema.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

Obviously the tests here involve high end cameras, but the overall take-away about more pixels not necessarily being the answer reminded me of the issues that come from trying to throw more pixels at the cameras at the lower end of the scale.

Back when the GH4 came out there was a lot of excitement about how amazing the pictures looked and I found one particular test promoted by nofilmschool that suggested there was a favourable comparison to be drawn between the GH4 and the RED EPIC.

So I grabbed the test footage to see what the GH4 really looked like when you break it down into its component channels.

You can download my test here.

(I used the original 4K footage at its actual size, and inside BM Fusion I comped it over a 1080 background without scaling, which effectively cropped it to the area I wanted to test. I rendered ProRes4444 for ease of sharing, but I don’t think this is masking or exaggerating anything relevant to the test.)

The point I would make is that it’s far too easy to be seduced by how the combined RGB output seems to look and ignore the very serious issues in the individual channels. In this example, the green looks OK, the red is pretty atrocious, and the blue is utterly unacceptable with massive blocky artefacts.

My impression from this (and from other GH4 footage that I have analysed) is that the quest for more pixels comes at the expense of very undesirable compression.

This might not matter if you’re not going to be doing much with the image, but as soon as you start colour correcting it, for example, then you are immediately going to be exposing these hidden issues. Worst of all is if you expect to be able to get a passable key from footage like this, as so many users want to do.

This is not a specific criticism of the GH4 which can produce very nice pictures under the right circumstances and when you are fully aware of the limitations, but because the market has told us all that more pixels means a better image, many users are unaware of the trade-offs they are making which can quickly become problematic.

One final point to stress – when making comparisons/evaluations of moving images, always make sure to check out the integrity or otherwise of the individual colour channels. It’s amazing what nastiness gets hidden away. And once you’ve spotted the problem in the isolated channels, you will be able to go back to the combined RGB and clearly see the issues that you missed on first inspection. I would have liked to see how the cameras in Steve Yedlin’s tests compared from the point of view of the individual channels, but that’s a whole other story that was not directly relevant to his point, of course.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

Absolutely fascinating and a must-watch for anyone involved in image acquisition.

Thanks for sharing.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

In the Text tool, right-click on the Styled Text box, select Expression and enter the following expression:

Text(iif(time<50, max(1, time*20), max(1, 2000-time*20)))

This will count up from 1-1000 over 50 frames and then down from 1000-1 over the next 50 frames.

There are many different ways of doing this depending on what you want to achieve.

You could control it in a different way by simply adding an expression that links the Text to an animated parameter on another tool. So for example, you could animate the Size of a Transform tool (it doesn’t even need to be connected to anything) from 1-1000 and then instead of the above expression in the Styled text field you could use the following:

Text(Xf.Size)

(To make that work rename your Transform tool to “Xf”.)

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki