[Walter Soyka]

[melissa kern] “I should make a Quicktime .mov with RGB+Alpha.. and then do a “second pass” as a DPX Sequence. correct?”

Not quite. You’ll render two DPX sequences: one with RGB channels selected in the output module, and the other with Alpha channel selected in the output module.

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 Soyka]

[simon chmiewliski] “is it possible to create on big comp and render out the 4 display areas as 4 single 1920 x 1080 (for example) videos?”

Yes. Create one single working comp that’s the full size of all your displays (with space for bezels).

Then create four render comps at 1920×1080. Drop your working comp into each of these render comps and re-position it as necessary.

You’ll continue to work in your working comp, but when it comes time for output, add all four render comps to the render queue and go. There’s no need to render the working comp.

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 Soyka]

[Tim Wilson] “Which brings us back to the ATI. My biggest disappointment with Macs over the years has been the poor, sometimes outright pathetic, range of options for high-end graphics. This looks like a step back. As disappointed as I’ve historically been by Mac graphics, I’m still kinda surprised by this.”

Agreed — high-end consumer ATI cards are a bizarre choice. I understand that Apple wants to push OpenCL, but there’s a tremendous amount of cross-industry momentum behind CUDA, so Apple not shipping these with NVIDIA has me puzzled.

So who exactly is the target market for Apple’s workstation, if not video, 3D, CAD, or science professionals?

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 Soyka]

[walter biscardi] “”The new Mac Pros are swell!” Steve”

Nice! How about this:

“CUDA is a big bag of hurt.”

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 Soyka]

[Tim Wilson] “Apple has rarely been first in line. They developed FW of course, but USB came out in 1996, and the first Mac to support it was the iMac G3 in 1998. “

Apple didn’t develop USB, but I think they played a large role in popularizing it. Windows didn’t support USB devices without third-party drivers until Windows 98, and a great many early USB devices were translucent Bondi blue to match the iMac.

[Tim Wilson] “That is in fact what Steve reiterated about Blu-ray in another of his recent customer emails, that BD is a transitional format, already well along the way to being replaced by streaming and downloads. I don’t think it’s that simple, but I agree more than I don’t. As noted earlier in this thread, though, Walter is right. You could have had a Blu-ray drive for your Mac years ago. You can have one today. No excuses. If you want one, get one.”

Like you’ve both mentioned, I’ve been using Blu-ray with my Mac for a couple years — but it would be really nice if I could actually play a Blu-ray disc in my Mac.

The lack of NVIDIA cards and USB 3 in the overdue Mac Pro update does make it look like Apple is either unaware of — or doesn’t care about — the developers building a production ecosystem around the Apple platform. I’d be curious to see how Adobe, Autodesk, and Blackmagic Design feel about the new systems.

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 Soyka]

[Cory Andrews] “I was going to reverse telecine the original movie file then hide it from Final Cut. When Final Cut asked me to find it I would link it to the new file which has been reversed telecined. I guess the problem then is I editted a 30 fps file and the one I’m linking it to will be 23.98 fp”

You’re right, the different timebases will be a problem.

[Cory Andrews] “I’ll also try the reverse telecine in Compressor again. It got kind of choppy results in the end when I did that but maybe the file was just too big for the computer?”

Choppy how? If you step through frame by frame, does it correctly process the broken cadence?

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 Soyka]

Compressor’s reverse telecine feature detects and processes broken cadence automatically – I’d try that first before de-interlacing.

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 Soyka]

[Adam Bloemink] “Does anyone know of a lightweight OSX app that can do simple video tasks (like muxing separate audio and video files) very easily?”

Quicktime Player Pro. Since you have FCP, it should already be licensed on your machine.

If you need to work with MPEG files, you’ll want to listen to Dave’s suggestion of MPEG Streamclip.

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 Soyka]

[Rossi Vitello] “so now i want some kind of histogram information of the resulting edges only image for my expression, a single value of how the image is more black or white. can i get that somehow, or do you have any completely different idea of how to get a value for the blurriness/sharpness of the frame? sampleImage function didn’t really help me… but maybe there’s some way…”

sampleImage is averaged, so I can imagine that it wouldn’t really give you the data you’re looking for. What about iterating through a series of small samples and keeping a running total of the brightness of each sample?

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 Soyka]

So all the footage is overcranked, whether it was supposed to be or not?

You could open the image sequence in Quicktime Pro at 50 fps, and export it as a new TIFF sequence at 25 fps.

That said, simply using every other frame might not look right — the effective shutter speed might be too fast, giving the footage a very staccato feel. I’d probably bring this into After Effects and render out a new TIFF sequence at the proper frame rate. This will give you the option of blending frames for smoother output.

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