DaVinci for Mac, game changer or game over?

[Arttie Puig]

So I guess the question now is, can Assimilate keep charging what they charge for their software license? Right now Scratch just runs in one computer with Windows, no Linux, no Infiniband on Linux, just like a DaVinci for Mac at $999.
I mean, I love Scratch, but I'm never going to pay what they ask for it when I can do DaVinci now, specially since it can do RED.
Now, Scratch for $999, that'd be a great contender!
Is it game over for many now, or will they be able to adapt and survive?

 

[michael zaletel]

I remember this happening with image editing back in the early 90's. Quantel Paintbox, Scitex, Barco, Alias Eclipse all holding on to their high-price points until Photoshop matured at which point image editing software would never again be more than $1,000. DaVinci just decided they'd rather be Photoshop than one of those high-end image editors that held on to their premium price a couple years too long.

-michael zaletel

 

[Sid Idris]

I tend to agree even if Scratch is rocket ready. Does anyone know if Scratch is still file based? Or have they migrated to a relational database yet? I saw a demo once that was entirely xml based.

 

[David Battistella]

It seems to me that whenever there is a new development in RED post, Assimilate SCRATCH is the software that leads. They are often first because of their close relationship with RED.

First wtih r3d stereo. First with REDROCKET support, etc.

I think that the term "gamechanger" needs to go away for a while.

A better comparrison might be 50K for the LINUX license for Davinci on a LINUX box. This would give you the ability to cluster machines and add GPU power.

Has anyone seen Davinci on the Mac? Is the performamce Realtime like SCRATCH or more the way APPLE Color operates with GPU power?

What are you basing your theory on?

I'm pretty sure Lucas from Assimilate might jump into this thread at some point.

David

 

[Arttie Puig]

Well of course there will be thousands or arguments about how it's worth what's worth, but in my opinion, the cards are laid on the table and it seems pretty tough to top it, even to stay in the game.
I'm a Scratch user, and I never got to see it realtime at 4K without a RED rocket.
But really, playing the RED rocket card will give you air to breathe for a little while only.

 

[John Tissavary]

I agree that the game is changing. I also think Resolve at $995 (or $50k for a really professional basis) is a truly phenomenal deal, and not only will it change the game, but it'll change the players, too.

I'm a daily Scratch user, and the day I heard the DaVinci announcement (night before they announced it at NAB) I had the urge to panic and run out and buy Resolve (forget that it's not available at that price, yet...). But after a little thought of what that would do, in reality, to my pipeline and overall workflow and I realized things are not as cut and dry as they may seem.

Scratch is a complete finishing tool - it's about more than just color correction, Resolve is not. A large percentage of Assimilate's userbase doesn't use Scratch for color at all, rather for data conform. Not as sexy, but crucial. I need top level conform tools, it's not possible for me to service the kind of work that I do (r3d, film scans, etc...) without a fast, reliable, and flexible conform tool, even though 80% of what I do is color grading.

Also, since r3d is a large percentage of my work, I need something that works fast, stable, and squeezes every last bit of goodness out of the raw footage. Scratch does that. I've tried doing r3d work in a Resolve pipeline, and frankly I'd rather use Scratch (but that's me). When DaVinci gets mature handling of r3d and arri raw in Resolve then I'll be able to consider it as a grading tool for my work, but I prefer to work from raw over transcoded log dpx whenever possible, so for now it's not quite fitting my needs. Also, there's no telling if and when Redrocket support will exist for Resolve, and anyone that's used a Redrocket knows there's no going back from that!

I do believe everyone, including Assimilate, will have to make changes to their pricing structure - I think that's a good thing for the industry at large.

 

[lionel2p]

I had a Scratch for 1 month in order to test it as a new station. I was looking for buying one in march. The Davinci announce killed this decision in one second, I think it's easy to understand. I'm not R3D only, so Scratch was more a "second" choice because I couldn't buy a 150K system. It's a wonderfull machine, but I'm conforming dozen of formats Scratch can't read natively. My idea was to use it as a color grading station for R3D native and DPX previously conformed on my Smoke Advanced for other formats.

Before making plans, I will test this new Resolve solution to see what I can do with it. It doesn't mean I will not buy another solution, but I really can't buy a 50K$ Scratch now with this 995$ Davinci.

This announce is going to stop lot of decisions from guys like me. For free-lance colorists, it could be a way for new opportunities. So yes, it's a game changer just now, in our mind, but let's see on real life in a near future.

Anyway, and lot of posts are going this way in other threads, grading is a small part of the work you have to do on a film. A 2 hours feature represents a huge amount of data and it's not so easy to move it from one place to another. Resolve couldn't be a solution for everything.

BM is doing his business, but I really had a feeling of "extreme violence" with this annoucement, especially for post-facilities. Things are changing, sure, but too fast !

 

[David Battistella]

Looking at this thread again, it is hard to imagine people shelling out for Baselight (unless they change their pricing model) when there are very capable tools available.

even at 995 if I get 80% of the performance with a tangent wave panel then I would be pleased with that over spending an extra 28K for 20% more functionality.

995 also puts Davinci into the hands of everybody to help make it a preffered tool.

This will change things.

David

 

[Laco Zamba]

Sooooo, where I can find some demo, tutorial or comparison review?
I want to learn more about it.

 

[David Battistella]

You can download the manual from the Davinci site.

David

 

[mikeburton]

There are quite a few factors that will make this port to Mac a significant one and price is only one. For me, stability is going to be crucial. If your pushing around heavy material, ie 1080p - 2K DPX, R3D etc and you can't get stable performance or the app crashes often etc I don't care how much it costs, I won't use it. Nothing is worse than working in a client session and having the app crash on you. Also, the app doesn't get released to the public until July. By then they should have the ability to write in RedRocket support. If they don't have this feature upon release I would say it's a pretty safe bet they aren't really interested in ever giving the Mac version the power to play in a professional environment. One GPU ie 4800Quadro for example plus a 650mB's RAID will play 2K DPX in realtime but R3D will require a lot more. In Scratch, (before the RedRocket card came out) the only way to acheive 2K Half Res High was to have the new Nahelem 3.2 Ghz processors overclocked to 4.0Ghz. That's a lot of horespower! The Rocket solves that problem obviously so it will be intersting and quite telling to me if they enable Rocket support out of the gate. If they do and the app can run quite stable it will be make an impact in the market. If not, it's Color with a more reputable name.

 

[M Most]

Looking at this thread again, it is hard to imagine people shelling out for Baselight (unless they change their pricing model) when there are very capable tools available.

Just as not everyone shoots with Red even though it's very full featured, higher resolution, and much cheaper than almost anything else, not everyone will go to Resolve. Everyone has reasons why they prefer the tools they prefer. Sometimes it's price, but in real post facilities that do higher end work, it's usually more about user preferences, the tool's ability to handle the file formats that are common to that facility (and, BTW, Baselight probably handles more formats natively than just about anything available, including Red, Arri Raw, Phantom, and a number of others), the ability of the tool to fit into specific workflows (Baselight has a published API that lets those who can script everything from individual strips to entire projects without ever opening Baselight), the tool's specific toolsets for specific types of work (Baselight has Truelight, arguably the most accurate color management on the market as part of its native toolset), and perhaps as important as anything, the level of support supplied by the manufacturer (Filmlight's support is second to none, and they're usually first on the market among high end systems with support for new formats - Mysterium X, for instance..). If you ask most professional colorists who have run multiple systems which they feel gives them the best color correction toolset and the most control, I would say a fairly large percentage would probably name Baselight as their first choice. Others would probably pick Resolve or Lustre. But all of these products have their strengths and weaknesses, just as cameras do. No one company is going to "own" the color grading business, just as no one company "owns" the camera business, the recording business, or the post business, no matter how much they're willing to give away.

 

[David Battistella]

Just as not everyone shoots with Red even though it's very full featured, higher resolution, and much cheaper than almost anything else, not everyone will go to Resolve. Everyone has reasons why they prefer the tools they prefer. Sometimes it's price, but in real post facilities that do higher end work, it's usually more about user preferences, the tool's ability to handle the file formats that are common to that facility (and, BTW, Baselight probably handles more formats natively than just about anything available, including Red, Arri Raw, Phantom, and a number of others), the ability of the tool to fit into specific workflows (Baselight has a published API that lets those who can script everything from individual strips to entire projects without ever opening Baselight), the tool's specific toolsets for specific types of work (Baselight has Truelight, arguably the most accurate color management on the market as part of its native toolset), and perhaps as important as anything, the level of support supplied by the manufacturer (Filmlight's support is second to none, and they're usually first on the market among high end systems with support for new formats - Mysterium X, for instance..). If you ask most professional colorists who have run multiple systems which they feel gives them the best color correction toolset and the most control, I would say a fairly large percentage would probably name Baselight as their first choice. Others would probably pick Resolve or Lustre. But all of these products have their strengths and weaknesses, just as cameras do. No one company is going to "own" the color grading business, just as no one company "owns" the camera business, the recording business, or the post business, no matter how much they're willing to give away.

Mike,

I agree with most of what you say and there is no doubt about baselights capabilities but the rest of my post talks about whether people will pay all the extras for 20% more features.

Volume.

Volume will matter.

david

 

[John Tissavary]

The other thing about Baselight is since BM bought DaVinci they've changed the mode of support completely. While most of us (including me) can't tolerate the huge the support contract fees big iron companies demand, there is a place for that kind of thing, and Baselight's support is second to none. There will be larger facilities, processing huge amounts of data (which is where Baselight truly excels), for whom any downtime is money lost, and a support contract to a company that can maintain maximum uptime for the gear they support is worth its weight in gold.

That's not to say there aren't ways around that, and I predict a cottage industry of Resolve support contractors will sprout around centers of use, but when you shell out the extra $$ for Baselight you're really getting more than just some extra features.

Same thing with Scratch, though in a very different way. There's no question that Resolve for $995 will be huge competition for Assimilate - it's kind of a no-brainer to give it a shot at that price. But on a facility level I'd be far more likely to invest in Linux licenses as I don't believe it'd be practical to work from only a Mac for a couple of reasons (no reatime SDI output being the biggest - this means you can't get more than 8bits out in realtime!), and then the price structure isn't so wildly different - each package has its own particular strengths & weaknesses that will probably drive decisions more than just price alone.

cheers,

John T.

 

[Arttie Puig]

But even at 50K, you get a way better deal than Scratch or any other, first of all you got an amazing panel, Scratch just uses Tangent or Cooper, runs on Linux, and you can use Infiniband to scale it up. But I think it's unfair to compare Scratch with the Linux version of DaVinci because Scratch is just running short there.

I remember a few months ago, the concept was that Scratch was so much cheaper than high end tools like a Baselight, Lustre or DaVinci, now it's all upside down.

And I can see that what's happening now it's really common, people who bought a Scratch at 75K are going to defend that to death, since there's nothing they can do about it, and people who were thinking in buying it they are just not going to. But Assimilate needs people to buy their software to stay in business, so it's a tough scenario for many.

On another note, NVidia took control of development of drivers for Mac, before Apple had it and they did a lousy job, I wouldn't be surprised of a Quadro SDI for Mac, but you can use a blackmagic or Kona card to get 10 bit output, although it wouldn't as fast.
But now processors are growing exponentially, what's coming next, 8 or 16 cores in one chip?

And to say the least, Blackmagic, they just keep pushing and pushing, the pace at how they develop new products is scary, they obviously surpassed Kona (although I prefer them) on features alone. And they re-hired all the developers that were fired for DaVinci that were pushing for new features, so they got an amazing team working on their side.
I mean, who knows, as RED becomes more and more popular, they may even come with their own Rocket card version at $999, I wouldn't be surprised.

 

[Greg M]

$999 gets you a piece of software, nothing more. Scratch is a system, as is Baselight.

 

[Cüneyt Kaya]

$999 gets you a piece of software, nothing more. Scratch is a system, as is Baselight.

scratch is a piece of software...around 7 MB big.

a scratch station is an average PC with common hardware + CC Tools (panels+rocket+nvidiacard+monitor + raid....though a lil overpriced)...

with scratch software you get fast/stable pro RED software and always the support for the latest RED stuff....that is an advantage and there are a lot of redshooters happiely paying for that.

(but a finishing Tool not beeing able to load other RAW codecs is a disadvantage for assimilate)

----inmho they missed the market where foundries storm falls in.

 

[M Most]

But even at 50K, you get a way better deal than Scratch or any other, first of all you got an amazing panel, Scratch just uses Tangent or Cooper, runs on Linux, and you can use Infiniband to scale it up. But I think it's unfair to compare Scratch with the Linux version of DaVinci because Scratch is just running short there.

You're making the assumption that Scratch and Resolve do the same thing. They do not. Resolve is a color grading system, and that's all it does. Scratch is a data mangement/conform system first, and a color correction system second. Most of the existing Scratch licenses are for systems that rarely if ever do any color work at all. They are used in major facilities like EFilm and others as conform workstations for projects that are then color graded on systems like Lustre, Baselight, and the like, as well as for real time playback and review by visual effects facilities. Most of the recent development on Scratch has revolved around adding compositing features. Only on RedUser do people think of Scratch as basically a color correction system.

I mean, who knows, as RED becomes more and more popular, they may even come with their own Rocket card version at $999, I wouldn't be surprised.

They would need Apple to redesign their machines to have more slots for this to be practical. I don't see that happening any time soon.

I don't disagree that Blackmagic's moves will probably hurt Assimilate to some degree. But people here don't seem to really understand who Assimilate's primary customer base is, and falsely assume that the DI finishing market is its primary and only one. But even if that were the case, the fact is that Scratch is a very efficient and viable conforming tool - a major part of what one must do in the DI world - and Resolve is not.

 

[M Most]

(but a finishing Tool not beeing able to load other RAW codecs is a disadvantage for assimilate)

Scratch was demonstrated at NAB handling Arri RAW footage in real time with no additional hardware assistance beyond the "standard" Nvidia card. I think you can reasonably expect them to be adding support for all viable formats in the near future, although at the moment the only one they really don't handle natively is the Phantom.

 

[Cüneyt Kaya]

Scratch was demonstrated at NAB handling Arri RAW footage in real time with no additional hardware assistance beyond the "standard" Nvidia card. I think you can reasonably expect them to be adding support for all viable formats in the near future, although at the moment the only one they really don't handle natively is the Phantom.

wow cool, i did missed it.