Thomas Mathai
Forum Replies Created
-
It makes sense that Black Magic to create their own format if Cinema DNG has limitations.
Why would Arri want to use BRaw when they’ve had lots of success with ArriRaw , ProRes and their own color science. They’ve been doing this long before Black Magic got into the game.
All the other major camera makers have their own RAW formats and color science. I only see some DIY project using it because it’s open source
ProRes RAW could be preferable because Apple isn’t competing as a camera maker.
-
To be accurate I do mean for capture and playback, not GPUs or control surfaces.
Maybe Adobe will do smaller bundles like they have with Photoshop and Lightroom.
Though considering how video is integrating into other areas of media, having the extra apps just gives me more versatility. Some of the work I’m doing now is bringing video into Unity for VR or tablets for interactive magazines.
I’m happy to have them all, but to each their own.
-
I assume Black Magic makes a lot of their money off the hardware. You can’t use Resolve with anything but their hardware, so they could easily give away the software.
I doubt Adobe can compete against free. Look how SpeedGrade is just withering away. Adobe is just folding the best parts into Premiere and After Effects.
Adobe has the cheapest subscription prices I’ve seen. $50 a month for like 20 applications. I don’t think anyone else is giving anything close to that deal. Certainly not Autodesk or Foundry.
Somehow that’s not cheap enough.
Fusion may give After Effects a run for it’s money only because Black Magic cut the price drastically. Both have been around for decades, and outside a dedicated group, Fusion hasn’t had a large user base. Even after Shake was killed, a lot of vfx houses adopted Nuke instead of Fusion.
-
> And the idea of jumping ship was made easier when Adobe fully developed it’s platform agnostic creative suite.<
In being agnostic, it doesn’t take advantage of a lot of OS X specific APIs, like FCP X does. I think software written with the OS in mind, no matter the OS, work better than software that tries to be platform agnostic.
I never felt the nMP was a failure. I’ve used several over the past few years and had no problems with it. It wasn’t made upgradable, and that puzzled me, because the whole thing seemed modular based on their initial unveiling.
-
Every tech site was talking about September being an iPhone 7 event. The rumor sites have already pointed to a possible October event, where presumably new Macs and MacOS will launch.
I’m interested in the iPhone 7 Plus because of the potential augmented and virtual reality possiblities.
For the past few years, Apple bought a few interesting companies:
PrimeSense, which made the original Kinect for Microsoft Xbox, which is a depth sensing camera.
Metaio, an AR app developer.
Faceshift, a facial motion capture company. Their software was used to drive some of the puppet animatronics in the latest Star Wars movie.
Flyby Media, which provided image-recognition software for Google’s Project Tango.I bought a Tango dev kit last year. It’s a platform Google is developing for AR, 3d mapping and indoor navigation.
The 7 Plus dual lens camera system looks like it could be the beginnings of a depth sensor that could be very useful for AR apps like Pokemon Go. Apple even teased an upcoming app that can change focus on photos after the fact. I’m also interested in the fact it can shoot RAW in Adobe DNG.
As the camera system gets better, I can see it being used for 3D scanning and motion and gesture capture, since Kinect has already been hacked for those tasks. When this system hits the iPad Pro, I’ll be even more interested.
I’m also interested in the AirPods. They have a wifi chip, accelerometers for motion and voice control, and IR sensors. I bet some developers could use those for head tracking for future VR applications.
As far as the Mac. I think Apple isn’t abandoning the “Pro”, but thinks the “Pro” is more middle of the road, than high end.
I personally work in a mixed OS environment. It’s not easy to manage at times, but I feel I’m not beholden to one side or other.
While I always thought about setting up a hackintosh, I don’t have the knowledge or friends with the knowledge to deal with the troubleshooting. Also isn’t it kinda illegal based on the EULA?
I can relate to the need for dealing with ProRes. If Telestream is going to the cloud with Episode Encoder, maybe that could be an option. Maybe even cost effective.
-
>>If they do, I think they are waiting for a youtube kind of delivery world for all media. And in my estimation that is still about twenty years away.<< That's been available for already a number of years. It may not be universally adopted, but it's readily available.
-
>>And when they need to CONFORM to the “big stuff” that you want to do, they conform on a Quantel Pablo Rio, or Clipster, with NO SHARED STORAGE,<<< That's funny, I've worked on many DIs where the conform was done WITH SHARED STORAGE. Maybe we were doing it wrong 😉
-
What we call a workstation today may not be what we call a workstation by the end of the decade.
For our immediate needs, it would be nice to have a big tower with lots of space, if our needs today require using high end speciallized add ons that don’t come standard.
It’s possible to see that maybe by the end of the decade, the workstation could be the size of 2 or 3 Mac Minis stacked up. Think the original Apple Cube size, but light years faster.
We’re getting faster I/O, higher capacity storage, and more powerful chips that use less power. It’s very conceivable that our future workstation doesn’t need to be opened much if at all.
It depends on the needs of content creators too. A lot of them may be using high end iMacs or MacBook Pros because they don’t have the need for large workstations. Others need the large workstations because they require additional hardware.
HP released the Z1 all in one workstation, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that becomes popular with content creators. I’ve taken a look at one opened up, and it’s very modular. I’ve requested the screen be replaceable when they decide to make the Z2.
-
You shouldn’t give your camera originals to your client.
The first thing to do is to make backups of your original media. This will vary depending on your budget and needs.
You could look into a tape backup system that may be expensive but provides ease of use.
You could back up to DVD-R or other hard drives since those are cheaper options, but probably need to be babysat to ensure that all the media is currectly archived.
I have no idea of the reliablilty of hard drives for long term storage.
Is it possible a hard drive can sit on a shelf for years , then be plugged in and everything works fine?
You should have 2 or more firewire drives you can shuttle back and forth between you and your client.
Make sure that you and your client can mount these drives on each of your systems, especially if you are using different OSes.
You can read an NTSF drive on a Mac, but you can’t write to it. Windows PCs can only see Mac HSF+ drives with MacDrive installed.
Both Mac and Windows are see Fat32 formatted drives, though there has been times when some data isn’t visible when mounted on a Mac, but is visible when mounted on a Windows PC.
Firewire drives, no matter how sturdy a shipping case they are in, will eventually begin to fail. I get client firewire drives daily and there is always a point when the drive will either not mount or isn’t working properly.
On the other note of the Varicam. I would still go with a Varicam given a chance. There is a lot to be said about better glass and electronics. The codec may be the same, but that is only one part of the whole.
Even with DV, I never heard anyone say that a PD150 was just as good as a DSR-500.
I take an educated guess that a 720 image uprezed to 1080 from the varicam would look just as good as an image captured in 1080 from the HVX200.
Of course this is using high quality image processing tools.
-
Do you think you have enough time to test the HVX once you get it? I mean this isn’t just a new camera, it’s a whole new workflow.