Walter Soyka
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Dave’s advice, as always, is right on. Just one thing I’d add:
[Pierre Paré-Blais] “I’m responsible of a large number of cg shot. all of them will be leaving me from after effects to go to the editor/director in Avid MC.”
I’d discuss your workflow in detail with the editor, who will ultimately be responsible for managing the shots you deliver, and delivering legal and compliant video to the broadcaster.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
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[cherlique lilienthal] “I was wondering, is there a way to make sd video (shot with 3ccd true color) into hdr video? I saw some great hdr photos out there and i was wodering if video could get that awsome. I saw some great examples on the topaz website.”
As others have mentioned, you can’t make true HDR from your existing footage — but if you like the Topaz Adjust look, I think you could fake it with Photoshop Extended and the Topaz plugin.
Open your video in Photoshop, convert it to a smart object, apply your filter, then File > Export > Render video.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
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[Hollie Osborn] “You say the frames still exist but if they have been dropped, how do you retrieve them?”
No — no actual frames are dropped — just the numbers that refer to them. Time code is like a unique address for a frame.
Think of it like floors in a high rise; thanks to triskaidekaphobia, some older buildings go from floor 12 to floor 14 on the elevator control panel. Of course, there is not a “skipped floor” — but what is really the 13th floor is addressed as the 14th floor.
[Hollie Osborn] “Also I work with pal i think, english format?”
Drop frame time code does not apply to PAL — so you can forget everything I’ve said, and just consider it background information.
[Hollie Osborn] “Also whats the visual differnce between ntsc (29.9fps) and pal (25fps), does ntsc provide a clearer picture?”
Standard definition NTSC has lower resolution than PAL, but a higher frame rate. Roughly said, it’s softer, but smoother. But don’t choose one or the other for artistic reasons — you should work in the format you are expected to deliver in.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[walter biscardi] “Color is a simple solution if you create a good workflow to back and forth. But for folks who don’t want to use it, you can always buy plug-ins like Colorista II.”
I just bought Colorista II last week — it’s perfect for “quickie” corrections like this. It’s got nice controls, an easy-to-use keyer, and a pretty fast renderer.
I wouldn’t necessarily want to grade a complicated shot or an entire project with it, but it’s perfect for the scenario Rich is describing.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Blake Porter] “If Adobe is on the NVidia side… Which side is After Effects?”
The After Effects renderer runs on the CPU, not the GPU. Your graphics card makes no difference to AE (with the notable exception of a few plugins, like Magic Bullet, Colorista II, Knoll Light Factory, Optical Flares, and the entire FxFactory suite).
That said, Adobe publishes After Effects, so IF future versions render on the GPU, my guess is that they’d be CUDA-accelerated and benefit from NVIDIA.
[Blake Porter] “Or Lightwave”
All the big 3D applications use CPU renderers, too. The GPU typically accelerates the viewport with OpenGL, and this is where the high-end cards like the NVIDIA Quadro or ATI FirePro line really shine. I’m not a Lightwave user, though, so I’m not sure if there’s a preferred system.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
And if you’re working in NTSC, you should get familiar with the idea of drop frame (DF) vs. non-drop frame (NDF) timecode.
Because the NTSC frame rate is 29.97 frames per second, but NDF code counts 30 frames per second, there’s a slight discrepancy (108 frames per hour) between time code and run time.
To compensate, drop frame time code was developed. The first two frames of each minute are dropped from the counter, except for every 10th minute. DF time code will jump from 01:00:59;29 to 01:01:00;02 — there are no frames addressed as 01:01:00;00 and 01:01:00;01.
01:00:00;00 and 01:00:00;01 do exist, as do 01:10:00;00 and 01:10:00;01, etc.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Blake Porter] “I’m trying to determine which core amount is of value to me.
So Software that’s important to me every day is:
FCP
Compressor
Photoshop
After Effects”Compressor and After Effects can both use however many cores you can throw at them, provided you have loads of RAM.
In my workflows, Photoshop is always more RAM-intensive than CPU-intensive.
FCP is the only app here that is currently limited to 32-bit (meaning it can only access up to 4 GB of RAM), and single-threaded (meaning it doesn’t benefit from multiple cores). As Jean-Christophe mentioned, this is expected to change soon.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Jean-Christophe Boulay] “Do developers have to specifically integrate GC or does the OS take over the duties on its own? A question for the developers… I’ll report back if I find a concrete answer to that.”
Developers must implement it. See the Wikipedia article on GCD for more.
I don’t know if this will see wide adoption in our industry, outside of Apple. Many other apps — like CS5 — are cross-platform, so it’d be extra work and complication to code for Grand Central on the Mac platform only. I’d wager these developers will probably choose to continue managing their own threads instead of allowing Grand Central to do it for them.
Grand Central makes it easier to leverage multiple cores, but it isn’t essential.
[Jean-Christophe Boulay] “Like many apps, the current FCP is built on some very old foundations which make this kind of thing trickier. The rumour mill talks about FCP foundations being renewed for the next version, so GC support would be expected there.”
I was hoping for this in FCP7, but since we’ve all heard that the next release of FCP will be awesome, perhaps it will finally be 64-bit and multi-threaded.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Michael Sacci] “Yeap, most of the new power apps (CS5 and DaVinci) are being written to take advantage of high end NVidia cards and more RAM”
This is a great point. Parallel computing is way more than just CPU cores — and NVIDIA’s CUDA technology has huge cross-industry momentum.
After Effects has been able to use multiple cores since CS3, but the RAM requirements for effective multiprocessing are steep — 2-4 GB of RAM per core for CS3 and CS4 (32-bit), with the option of using more than 4 GB/core with CS5 (64-bit).
Most 3D programs use bucket renderers, which can break a single frame into chunks and distribute processing across multiple threads on multiple CPUs.
To come back Blake’s original question from another angle, are there any apps in particular whose multi-core performance you’re curious about?
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Jean-Christophe Boulay] “In fact, since Grand Central has made its entrance in Mac OS, all software using it would use all available cores, or whichever cores GC deems are necessary and available. Most serious software used in media production has been updated to do so. Most, but not all…”
Like Final Cut Pro, which is still single-threaded and 32-bit.
Are any major apps using Grand Central yet? I can think of plenty of multi-threaded applications, but no Grand Central-enabled apps.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events