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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Building a post production workflow

From what I understand if you want really professional performance you need 8 gigs of RAM on a Mac Pro. I mean, my Mac is two years old and I got 8 gigs of RAM on it, but now my problem is my processor just isn't up to date. I will probably get a new computer around the time my RED ships (that's not going to be cheap, ugg). My friend David is getting a Mac this next week with 8 gigs of RAM, dual 23" monitors (I use dual 20" monitors), etc. About $8,300. But still that's not too bad, and you can get hardware that accelerates the editing process... the rest of the members of my group went to the Final Cut Studio 2 seminars here in Los Angeles and they were explaining a lot of that. I'm not that technical though, so I really can't explain it back suffice to say I understand the basic concept.

I'm surprised anyone is worried what a client thinks of where you edit. I'm basically the opposite, though. If I do a project that I want to have available for my own tinkering later, I will not let it be done on Avid at all. Avid is not something I ever want to use again. Even Premiere would be better, but I do have Avid so I can at least use it if I want I guess. Don't know why I would want to do that, though. To make an Avid system competitive with a $10,000 Mac setup using FCP you'd need to spend about $50,000. No thanks. And in the end... you're still using Avid...
 
flameop said:
Installed here :-)

Problem I'm faced with at the moment is exporting 10bit clips from FCP as TGA sequences.. seem to get runcated as well.. as it seems to use QT. Which isn't reccomeded to go over 8bit with. :-/

And blackmagic codec has errors on import the orig movies into Shake at the moment :(
Click to expand...

Shake can be a bit flaky with Blackmagic clips. I often find the best thing to do is use the Blackmagic Framelink utility. Then Shake sees a 10-bit Blackmagic clip as a sequence of 16 bit DPX files, which it reads fine.
 
Chris Kenny said:
This isn't strictly true. FCP is 8-bit in RGB mode. However, its "High-precision YUV" mode (which is 32-bit) is 4:4:4 (with a 4:4:4 codec, of course). YUV enables chroma sub-sampling, but it doesn't require it.
Click to expand...

Yes indeed, FCP processes internally as 4:4:4, but I was talking about the workflow of RGB 4:4:4 to FCP via Blackmagic. Currently you can capture from HDCam SR to Blackmagic 4:4:4 RGB uncompressed, but you cannot process that in FCP as more than 8 bits.

The only workflow currently to maintain 10 bits is to only perform cuts in FCP. All captions, disolves, grading etc would need to be done in another app, like Shake, After FX or Color. You could then assemble the processed clips in FCP, and lay off 10 bit RGB to HDCam SR.

Perfectly possible, but you need to be very aware of the limitations, and make sure you don't do anything along the way which will truncate your data.

Once Red, and Graeme's clever trickery are available, this will be much less of an issue.
 
I've seen there is an update to AJA & BM drivers. There's a lot of info in the manuals about understanding what is possible, how to capture, etc. but I'm more interested in how to achieve the highest quality, technically sound video master with output to HD SR. I don't understand why material captured via dual link 4:4:4 10 bit would not have the ability for real time playback such as a dissolve? Why would you have to take to another application -this seems weird to me, but perhaps I am not understanding. Certainly grading in Color I get -that you will have to render out the final grading back to FCP...speaking of, has anyone found the manual online yet?
 
It's not a question of real-time playback. Whether real-time or rendered, any processing FCP does on an RGB timeline happens at 8-bit. What FCP calls 'high precision' (32-bit float processing) is only available for YUV timelines.

Graeme has a cheat for REDCODE which will trick FCP into processing it 32-bit. As far as I know, there is no way to do this for Blackmagic RGB media.
 
So working off digibeta in BM 10bit uncompressed (yuv not the RGB) codec I'm safe to do dissolves?

Exporting a greenscreen in fcp to a series of tga's from the above clip looks fine untill you pull a key in Shake and then you can see the loss in the edges..

Would be good if there was a final list of do's n don'ts not just a million threads on problems! lol..

s
 
But Digibeta is 4:2:2 anyway, so you're not gaining anything by converting that to 4:4:4. It is often a good idea to apply some chroma smoothing in Shake before pulling a key from Digi Beta material. There are plenty of Shake macros out there which do it, or you can make your own.

And yes, disolves in BM 10 bit YUV are fine. They get processed in 32-bit float.
 
It looks like I will pull the trigger on a new FCP system with 6 TB storage dual quad core, and 8 GB RAM. The biggest things are the 10 bit 4:4:4 capture via Kona 3, processing and output, and Color. The cost savings are incredible, even with buying Automatic Duck to take my sequence from Avid to FCP.

I can get an entirely new system with monitors and storage and Color for the same price to get Andrenaline hardware with HD only. The fact that Red is actively wortking with Apple & FCP has also been a big consideration, and I've downloaded all the manuals, which are extremely in depth...I won't feel so nervous as a virgin to the software.
 
Anybody care to comment about storage? I'm being told Ciprico Media Vault sustains 600/mbits/sec capable of 4K playback...I've also been quoted Sonnet with 309/mbits/sec. If I'm doing this online with HDSR 4;4;4 10 bit, will I need the greater throughput? Will titles require more than one video stream?
 
I'm a big fan of having lots of fast storage regardless.

A- Your storage will always fill up. But if you have more space, you won't have to spend as much time deleting stuff (because you really need to think about what you're deleting, otherwise bad bad things will happen).

B- You might find yourself stabilizing or doing effects work on shots at 4K res... in which case the extra drive speed may come in handy.

2- You will likely render your titles, so you only need a stream there.

FCP isn't super intelligent though and will not watch out for things like the user putting the render scratch not on the RAID, fragmenting your drives (an issue if your RAID is almost full), etc. A minor thing to watch out for.
 
Torrie: are you sure those numbers are in mbits and not MB's? A modern single drive should be able to do those speeds you mention.
 
Torrie said:
Anybody care to comment about storage? I'm being told Ciprico Media Vault sustains 600/mbits/sec capable of 4K playback...I've also been quoted Sonnet with 309/mbits/sec. If I'm doing this online with HDSR 4;4;4 10 bit, will I need the greater throughput? Will titles require more than one video stream?
Click to expand...

Torrie,
well first be carefull with sustains capacity that the manufacturer is advertising. Independant testing are far more reliable and close to real world.
Second, it depend on what kind of 4k you are talking about: 4k, RGB, 12 bit, even compressed with REDCODE RGB should need around 800Mbits/sec (or around 100MBytes/sec) for one stream (this is a speculation on compress ratio of the REDCODE RGB, as we don't know what it will be).

For HDCAM SR 10 bit, you will need up to 880Mbits/sec for one stream.

The MediaVault 4440 is an interesting product, but it is quite expensive:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produ...HSX1600S_MediaVault_4440_6_4TB_40x160GB_.html

I have been looking to product from G-Tech, ProMax, ATTO, Enhance and recently CalDigit.

The more you connect drive the more it should run fast, that is why if you want someting like the MediaVault 4440 you need at least 24 drives (the MediaVault 4440 has 40 2,5'' drives! and quad 4Gb connection...)

BTW, Rob, are you sure there is single drive that can sunstain 75MBytes/sec (600Mbits/sec)? If so, I would really like to know the brand and model, as I never heard of such speed for a single drive (think, a single drive that can sustain HDCAM SR 440...).

antoine.
 
Hey Red Folks: I see you guys are using G-Speed and endorsing it...do you have info about read/write capability for the G-SPEED FC? This looks like a good solution, and I'd really like to get your opinion.
 
Antoine: I tend to divide mbits by 10 instead of 8 to allow a bit of overhead. SO I was thinking of 30 & 60 MB/s.

Haven't tested this myself, but was thinking of stuff like this:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/04/07/going_the_sas_storage_way/page22.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/04/07/going_the_sas_storage_way/page23.html

Which comes pretty close. Obviously you want to have overhead instead of cutting it close, but I just wanted to indicate that the speeds mentioned aren't that high in my opinion.
 
Rob, I agree on the dividing by ten, and the test you linked are showing the performance you talk about. But still I don't buy it, I don't think a single drive will sunstain this speed, but I might be wrong. Do you have practical experience with those drives? If you tell me you know that these drives sunstains such speed in real world, I will believe you, but graphics out of benchmark test, I don't.

And then those drives are max 150GB, not so much. Raid turnkey manufacturer tend to use SATA drives because it has more capacity, but if you have the budget to build a big TB Raid array out of 150GB U320 discs, you might have a very high speed system.

antoine.
 
No, I don't have real-world experience with those drives. Hence my comment that you'll probably want at least two of those drives in a raid 0 setup. You never want to be on the edge of the sustainable drive speed.

The reason I mentioned all of this is that the raid array brought up earlier didn't sound that fast to me.
 
Rob Lohman said:
No, I don't have real-world experience with those drives. Hence my comment that you'll probably want at least two of those drives in a raid 0 setup. You never want to be on the edge of the sustainable drive speed.

The reason I mentioned all of this is that the raid array brought up earlier didn't sound that fast to me.
Click to expand...

I can say that I have some experience with disk arrays and at the moment I really can recommend Ciprico MediaVault. It's speed is very close to advertised and on my G5 with Atto dual channel FC card it comes to 560MB/s. With that we are able to work with 3-4 streams of uncompressed HD in realtime + several streams of sound. Of course, Aja Kona is also there to make this a bit more comfortable.
Also, I had some experience with SCSI drives and they are as fast as hell but very pricey and you will need a bunch of them to come close to speed of FC solution and a good RAID controller and power supply and that means a lots of money, too.
 
i've gone for 4 16 bay fibre channel raids (proware) and seagate drives Avids,finalcut, after effects seem to be working great 2k files are playing fine plus HD uncompressed. i've done the maths and with the new 8 core mac's this should be a relatively cheap way of working with 4k
 
I've decided to try the Sonnet 4TB solution for this project. I'll let you know how it goes.

BTW, I am running dual Samsung Syncmaster 245BW 24" widescreen monitors (1900x1200) and it is amazing real estate. We've also got a CP-BK200 coming from Tangent to help the grading process in Color.
 
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