[Tim Kolb]

GPU acceleration can make quite a difference…

While I haven’t been able to follow up with more testing (I find it strange that I get better performance than you do…), I would say that these plugs all have a place. Speed is always a factor.

However, the Digieffects Lightwrap plug still accomplishes the task at a high quality level for a 49.00 USD effect (you can buy it ‘a la carte’).

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

First off, the preview files becoming unlinked from the project on a Mac usually has something to do with where you’re having those files written (what drive/directory, etc) and what permissions the application has to make changes on that drive…

Dynamic link works on one machine and knows when files are being worked on and altered, automatically update when you make changes.

In the workflow you describe, the AE comps you are bringing into your projects are being altered on the iMac and PPro on your edit machine has no “link” to the project being changed on the fly as the dynamic link server isn’t managing data across two machines, so if you keep PPro open while you bring over another AE project revision, PPro sees it as a new file, not an alteration to the existing file.

As you found out, all you can do is shut down PPro and relaunch with the new file replacing the old one in name and location.

However, even if you were making those changes on the same machine, an AE comp that PPro rendered as a preview woulod certainly have to re-render once you made changes…it’s an AE comp. You have to render it someplace, you’re just trading rendering the comp in PPro for rendering it in AE.

In your situation, you’d probably be as well served by just rendering the files out of the iMac as Dynamic Link doesn’t help you with any “live” updating in your workflow.

Being able to load the AE comps in your situation just means that now you have to wait for the render on your video edit machine vs have the effects render “offline” on the machine doing the AE work, allowing the edit machine to keep “editing”.

Unfortunately you get all the drawbacks and none of the gains in productivity using dynamic link in the way you describe.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

The most likely explanation is that you are making some adjustment that has very little effect on the defined range. In the three way color corrector, the three wheels always apply to their specific ranges (lift, gamma, gain or shadows, mid grays, highlights) but the rest of the controls act on the tonal range you have defined: “Highlights, Midtones, Shadows, or Master” If you pick “Master” the interface looks like the Fast CC with only one color wheel.

BTW, a little known capability in the Adobe color correctors is the ability to define where those tonal ranges are defined…which makes the effect far more versatile.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Hi Todd,

I mentioned the film-throughout post theory because of your note in a post earlier in the thread:

Todd Terry: “The only way to get really really high resolution (actually much much higher than 4K) is with a project that is shot on film, edited on film, and projected on film.”

…no mention of a DI there.

🙂

I agree that a DI in place of multi-generation film post preserves resolution to the extent of the DI’s capability.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Excellent input across the board on this topic…I’ve had to become a bit more restrictive on releasing material to clients myself.

I’ve been looking at re-tooling my client proofing to work with an online video hosting service with the video viewable online, but protected.

The client can also leave notes, and I can actually see what parts of the video have actually been viewed.

Alternately, I can stage video for my website there. Since my website has been basically ignored for years, I’m looking at using that account for several purposes.

vidforweb.com is the website.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Just stumbled on this thread so I’m a bit late to the topic…

I think what Kevin mentions is the key to what “looks good” on a movie screen. Film has the resolutions that film advocates usually quote…out-of-the-camera. After a couple stages of re-imaging (inter-negs, etc) to get through a traditional film edit, and then get to a distribution print, that film has gone through several generations of degradation.

The “organic” (if I may use an over-used term) look of film has a lot to do with the varying grain structure. Digital pixels can look a bit antiseptic because the “dots” are in a fixed grid, and film seems somehow more “natural” because of the somewhat random distribution of the grain structure from frame to frame.

That’s all great, but once you start to make those film copies, the next piece of stock has different random grain distribution…in digital, each pixel this generation correlates to a pixel (assuming you’re not scaling) in the next generation…in film, nothing says that film grains would line up the same way, and in fact they almost never do. The detail in film drops off through this process.

Panavision did a really informative lecture on MTF some time ago. In the later parts I think many may say they make a bit too much of an effort to push the Genesis over the RED, but the rest of the material is really very informative.

John Galt’s statement regarding distribution prints for theaters was rather telling…the target for MTF on distribution prints roughly equates the cycles per millimeter to 1000 TV lines if you can truly make this comparison “apples and somewhat different apples” which is also up for debate.

If you can get the dynamic range to perform adequately through the use of the right camera and informed post, HD resolution just shy of 2K should actually easily put up -at least- the resolution that 35mm film would in the theater.

Now…we haven’t even addressed the fact that contrast plays a lead role in human perception of “sharpness” and having really good contrast at a lower limiting resolution will always look “sharper” to a human viewer than very high resolution alone (and any of us who have ever aimed a camera at a resolution chart know that the highest resolution a camera/lens system is capable of is imaged at almost zero contrast).

Whether or not you feel the aesthetic is adequately comparable is an artistic viewpoint and will depend on who had influence on the production, the relative projection systems, and the viewer’s eye of course…

You can talk specs, but very few of us actually viscerally respond to resolution…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

[Alex Udell] “Do you mean use MPEG Stream Clip to convert to a clip that is compatible with a XDCamHD EX Seqeucne in PPro?”

Unfortunately, yes… It wouldn’t be ideal as you’d give up some image quality (4:2:2 to 4:2:0…50 Mbit to 35 Mbit), but PPro CS3 does not have the format options that CS5 does. DVCProHD is sub-raster…the options available that won’t require a purchase of some type aren’t that appealing.

CineForm is probably the best way to preserve quality and edit without constant rendering.

The codec is very fast, and very high quality. (though I’m not sure they officially support CS3 any more…you’re 2 versions…probably getting close to 3 versions off of the current release.)

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

What are your sequence settings? Are you working on a sequence in 32 bit float?

What is the source material?

There HAS to be a catch here somewhere…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

Wow…that’s pretty strange.

I had an alpha channel photoshop doc on top of a layer of black…placed both Light Wrap effects…and then hit the ‘enter’ key to render work area effects.

Footage was 1920×1080 23.976 fps.

The 4 processor cores all went to about 60%…but it was so quick that they didn’t get to top out. The chart in the performance tab confirmed that all processor cores came up…

I have 2 sockets, each with two physical cores (AMD 2220s) on the particular machine I was testing it on…are you referring to an i7 970 with 6 physical cores and 12 on hyperthreading?

I can try to use Ultra and the lightwrap effects together and see what happens… Keeping in mind of course that a CUDA GPU card will have to do some switching between the CUDA pipeline (for Ultra) and the more traditional GPU duties that Boris and Digieffects ask for…no third party effects use the CUDA pipeline.

But that doesn’t explain an 8 minute render on an 8 second light wrap effect alone.

What kind of source material is it?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tim Kolb]

AJA is another option for I/O for PPro.

I use an LHi card.

Very good equipment. Solid signal quality.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,