[Toby Risk]

Hi
We had a serious issue two weeks ago on both Mac resolve system and a windows resolve system, the Mac couldn’t give us 2K playback and the Windows system BSOD on starting Resolve.
This happened with various Nvidia drivers and both Resolve 10.1.1 and 10.1.2 Both had a quadro 4000 along with a GTX card (Windows a GTX Titan and Mac a GTX 670). After five days of pain. I finally uninstalled the Desktop Video version 10.0 and reverted back to a previous version, (9.8.x on win and 9.9.3 on mac).

Both systems are now working fine.

Colourist | Editor | Post-Production Consultant — 23 years at the post-production coalface, and still loving it.

[Toby Risk]

Test different workflows and see what works for you.
Grade 709 / convert using open DCP
or grade XYZ with a xyz to 709 display lut on resolve, render to 16 bit TIFFS and just do a straight mxf package on openDCP

Alternatively if you can find any facility that runs QUBE as their DCP encoding software, its colour transform is near perfect, we’ve looked and looked and never seen any visible difference, after about 10 feature films and umpteen trailers/commercrials.

Now we grade features natively in p3 and render to XYZ. We only use 709 to XYZ for commercials as they are usually TV originated.

Colourist | Editor | Post-Production Consultant — 23 years at the post-production coalface, and still loving it.

[Toby Risk]

If mac is not an option, the Media Reactor plugin from Drastic Tech should work well on windows with adobe media encoder and some other software like quicktime, no plugin for resolve as yet though.

We use it on a Windows Version of scratch to produce prores422hq and prores 444. results are identical to a FCP generated prores

Colourist | Editor | Post-Production Consultant — 23 years at the post-production coalface, and still loving it.

[Toby Risk]

Different setup ideas.

If all monitors were perfect then we’d be in heaven but they aren’t.
Clients get a nice big plasma with a LUT on it’s input to correct for deviation from REC 709. That’s a LUT produced by a 4 hour probe on Cinespace with a Klein K10 probe.

If I apply this LUT in Davinci then sure the plasma is equally well aligned but then it affects the GUI monitor, and all the SDI outputs which make the stand alone scopes incorrect.

Although the plasma is colour accurate it’s a little too far away for the colourist for fine detail work.

So we’d like a colour accurate monitor on the desk for the grader.

Ideally this would be the GUI monitor to avoid introducing yet another different coloured monitor into the room. Sure I know that there will be differences between the two according to the characteristics of the individual monitor, mainly the respective black points of the monitors, but we have several senior colourists come through here operating exactly this way on Scratch, which allows for seperate GUI and SDI path LUT’s.

So yes a GUI LUT would be a very useful addition.

Client monitor with LUT loaded into eeColor LUT box = correct Rec709
GUI display LUT on DaVinci = correct colourist monitor.
SDI output clean = scopes accurate.

Thanks

Colourist | Editor | Post-Production Consultant — 23 years at the post-production coalface, and still loving it.

[Toby Risk]

Hi Peter

I have tried it with a 2nd GPU, an FX4000. There is an improvement, but not significantly so. The speed creeps up to 24fps and drops a couple of frames every 2 or 3 seconds, but I don’t think this was a fair test as I am limited with how much reconfiguring I can do on this machine.

I appreciate what you say about the GPU resources and bw requirements. Therefore, I am going to hold off for a bit until I can check it out thoroughly with a system I can play around without risk of losing our production machine.

I’ll let you know how it goes when I get to it.

Thanks

Toby

Colourist | Editor | Post-Production Consultant — 23 years at the post-production coalface, and still loving it.

[Toby Risk]

Thanks Peter

I’ll see if I can put in another GPU and run some more tests. If that fixes it then I’ll be happy.

I’ll let you know we get on.

Regards

Toby

Colourist | Editor | Post-Production Consultant — 23 years at the post-production coalface, and still loving it.

[Toby Risk]

Hi Rohit and Margus, thanks for the interest

Firstly I should clear up something in my previous post, comparing a 2K playback on Resolve with a 4K playback on Scratch.

Scratch did indeed play the 4K (3996×2160) stereo at 24fps realtime. After I posted the first post I manage to run exactly the same test on Resolve with the 4K files.

The same files played at 10fps on Resolve, which is double the data throughput performance of the 2K playback (half as quick, not a quarter, as suggested, as Scratch).

In terms of Disk IO this was about 800MB/s on Resolve and 1.7GB/s on the Scratch.

I only need 400MB/s for the stereo 2K, so Resolve CAN pull enough data through quick enough for the 2K stereo playback, but something is throttling it.

Regarding whether it could be a GPU issue or not. It’s possible, I don’t know enough about DaVinci’s internal workings to say otherwise. But if the GPU was topping out with a stereo 1998×1080 stream then it should have topped out at around 5.5fps with the 3996×2160 files, not 10fps. However, if BMD say that’s the issue then I’ll put one in tomorrow. My feeling is the FX6000 is more than adequate for this throughput test. This playback is without any LUT’s, grade, resizing or image manipulation whatsoever.

In regards to the SDI setup. This was to be a test to see if Resolve worked well on the Globalstor. At the moment it is our Scratch production machine and currently uses the SDI daughter board of the 6000 for the SDI output which Resolve obviously can’t use. If Resolve is proven on the machine then I’ll go buy the Decklink 3D.

So I am monitoring just on the GUI monitor and going by the fps indicator at the top left of frame. Stereo is toggled on, (I am assuming this is reading both frames as the playback speed slows down as opposed to mono where it plays realtime), but I have selected ‘none’ on the stereo viewer setup, so as not to tax any gpu in processing the gui.

If the feeling is that this is the issue then I’ll see if I can put one of my old decklinks (not 3D) and an FX4000 in it tomorrow and see what happens. I’ll also check the Bilinear setting and video optimisation setting and let you know how it goes.

My personal belief is that it’s something in the Disk I/O calls or the size of the chunks of the frames it reads from the disk. There was an issue (now fixed) with an older version of Scratch that if a file’s size, say DPX was not perfectly aligned in 8KB blocks then Scratch would read each file twice necessitating double the IO bandwidth. Maybe there’s something like that in Resolve.

(feature request) It would be nice if Resolve had a popup box with a complete system stats readout somewhere to monitor the cpu/memory/IO/GPU performance of the machine.

Thanks again and sorry for my ramblings

Toby

Colourist | Editor | Post-Production Consultant — 25 years at the post-production coalface, and still loving it.

[Toby Risk]

I’m not sure about the power requirements for the 580 but I am using a GTX 670 with an ATI 2600 on a 2008 8 core Mac Pro.

The GTX 670 uses both the extra 6 pin power connectors but the 2600 doesn’t need one. So there is enough. if the 580 needs 8 pin power connectors then it’s a new power supply setup, otherwise you should be good to go.

So far it’s a similar speed to the 2600 / fx 4000 combo I was using before.

ah yes and I had to upgrade to Mountain Lion and the latest Cuda driver for this to work, the 670 wasn’t supported in Lion as far as I could establish.

Cheers

Toby

Colourist | Editor | Post-Production Consultant — 23 years at the post-production coalface, and still loving it.

[Toby Risk]

Hi
I had this problem.

On my system for some reason Resolve 9 had reverted to a very old cache setting referencing a volume that no longer resides on my system. Despite Resolve 8 having worked ok with cache files on my current volume.

I changed it in the Preferences | General Options Cache Files and Cache Stills setting

Now I’m happy.

Toby

Colourist | Editor | Post-Production Consultant — 23 years at the post-production coalface, and still loving it.

[Toby Risk]

Running a small post studio, with about 10 machines, I run Mac, Linux and Windows. They all have their plus points and all have their problems. But when a company like Blackmagic Design announces a Windows release of Davinci you know the writing is on the wall for the venerable old Mac’s.

I first met Grant Petty of BMD in Indonesia in 1994 and was mightily impressed that he could drive a Sony BVH3100 one inch VTR from his Mac laptop’s RS232 port. That night Grant established an engineering partnership which would eventually lead him to producing some ground breaking hardware and eventually Blackmagic Design.

Grant was and as far as I know still is a hard core Apple / Mac fan, and I know he’s had good reason to dislike Apple over the years as well. But now it seems even Grant and BMD feel that Apple’s enthusiasms are concentrated elsewhere.

Mac’s have had the edge on style for a long time and if that’s your thing then go for it. As for OS, gee sure, I enjoy switching the machine back to 32 bit mode just to read a NTFS hard drive, and it’s real cool that I have to take my Nvidia FX 4000 OUT of the machine risking hardware damage, just to update the driver. As for networking. AFP is just pants, NFS sort of works and SAMBA is well, just SAMBA.

Shall we talk about RAM prices, GPU compatibility and my favourite subject FCP X / ‘pro’apps (X where I come from means ‘Wrong’) What about customer support. It’s got to be there somewhere right?

Apple survived through the nineties only because the pro / design market stuck with them. Now Apple have moved on and found success in other areas with the iphone and ipad. If you love your Mac’s then enjoy, but Windows realises the CPU/GPU power of CURRENT hardware, not hardware which is 2 years old, which is essential in keeping a competitive edge in our industry. Linux is king for networking and reliability, albeit with a smaller application use.

In the end Apple are a hardware company and Microsoft software. Personal computing is a mature market. Apple couldn’t compete forever with patents on technologies which only vary the users experience. They had to reinvent the user experience. They chose to do that with mobile devices, and did it superbly well.

Mac Pro’s are good machines, but they are way behind the bleeding edge. And really if you were Apple, where would your focus be.

Personally, I don’t want to be an ‘also ran’ customer. I want my suppliers to be hungry for my patronage.

Just my two penneth. 🙂

Toby

Colourist | Editor | Post-Production Consultant — 23 years at the post-production coalface, and still loving it.