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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 :)

Color/Final Touch - lots of heavy bugs and issues.

offhollywood said:
LOL! I have been waving that flag for more than a year and half. I gave up last IBC when Jeff Edson told me I was "the ONLY person that requested that".
Click to expand...

The ONLY one, eh? Well, here's my vote and by what I've seen of this thread, that makes at least 3 of us. :)

As for Mac Nvidia SDI support - I am very sure you won't see that prior to Leopard. I do think that Apple is going to FINALLY embrace Nvidia for the MacPros - after all - there is an Nvidia chip driving the display on the iPhone - and if any of the "rumors" and "chatter" I have heard are true - NVIDIA will be trading at $60+ a share this time next year. They are going to own the GPU space.
Click to expand...

nVidia practically owns the GPU market now. ATI still sees the majority of their sales from mobile GPUs with their desktop, gaming offerings in a distant second place. ATI fell out of the pro market some time ago when the high end GeForce and Quadro offerings walked all over the FireGL cards. It wasn't their hardware that did them in, but their inability to produce a quality driver set. nVidia still needs to fix a few things in their Apple drivers though -- like display rotation.

As for price point ... yeah, I wish Scratch was cheaper - I am still paying our license off - but you have to ask yourself - after all that blood, sweat, tears and money ... do you want to finish your project on a Pinto ... or on a Ferrari.
Click to expand...

I wish it were cheaper too... Then maybe I'd consider a license. I guess I could just try to find more work and make some more money and buy it. Heh.
 
I have seen this. Can you explain again what is happening to you?
 
Anyone can suggest a pricepoint for a Scratch suite?
 
Dice said:
I have seen this. Can you explain again what is happening to you?
Click to expand...

I sent you a PM with a description, in case it's too boring for the thread. If you have an answer which is of use to others, feel free to quote from my PM on the thread.
 
Any dude named Nacho has to be either cool or crazy...the coping mechanisms in Miami however are legendary.

I have heard from Assimilate directly that it's 20K? Is that accurate?
 
Why I like Color.
First, it preserves all my luma values. Automatic Duck doesn't help one whit when taking media into AE. AE ignores above 100 IRE values on virgin clips coming off a camera. So does Shake. If you want to use those apps for pristine color work, you have to pre-darken the highlights, export each clip, and then go to work. And that's not a workflow problem for anyone?
Second, the 8-tabbed inside/outside non-symmetrical feathering keyframeable rotos are sweeeeet.
Third, it hooks to FCP nicely for me. I just finished two car spots (Aston and Masareti) which required several exports from the same project and the footage updated in FCP just fine. I think the manual is wrong on that one.
As for IRE values, I would never trust a software clamp to fix legal issues. Color gives plenty of control over doing that manually -- my preferred way, for certain.
Fourth, it was fre*&(&ng free! Apple should be punished for lying about the software they gave away?!
I do hate its tracker. It's broken, I think. So I have to do the tracking manually, but if that's the price for admission, I'm very happy.
 
I'm with you McDiver, In my two or three spots at a time world it is great and it will only get better.
Aloha
-A
 
Torrie said:
Any dude named Nacho has to be either cool or crazy...the coping mechanisms in Miami however are legendary.

I have heard from Assimilate directly that it's 20K? Is that accurate?
Click to expand...

The reason that people have heard different things is that SCRATCH is a modular product that can vary widely on pricing depending on which modules you buy!

Anybody that wants more specific information, please contact me offlist at lucas@assimilateinc.com.

Stay tuned to this space for other interesting news in the near future as well... ;)

Best,

Lucas Wilson
------------
ASSIMILATE, Inc.
LA, CA, USA
 
Elcurado said:
And in the end...
Please someone convince Luki to develop Scratch for OsX!

($.$$$ price point...)
Click to expand...

We have nothing against OSX, or Linux, or Solaris, or any other OS, for that matter. : ) It all boils down to what our customer base calls for, what our prospects want, and what is possible.

But to give a couple of examples:

One of the big big things that a lot of our customers do is video output from HD and 2K log data downrezzed to NTSC and PAL in realtime with linearization and burn-in. We are an almost completely GPU-centric app.

OSX does not support the SDI daughtercard from NVidia.

Another big thing that makes a difference is the ability to upgrade graphics drivers as NVidia spins new drivers. Because we are so heavily GPU-focused, new driver spins can make significant differences in performance in targeted aspects.

OSX does not easily allow for driver updates and rollbacks.

In a perfect world, we would love to support OSX and SUSE, Fedora, and Red Hat. But we are a relatively small company and have to choose carefully what we do and why. And porting complex software like SCRATCH is a big undertaking. Does that mean we will never port and support other OS? Of course not. Does it mean it's not a decision we can take lightly and there have to be really good technical and business justifications for it? Yep...

Also - SCRATCH is a fullscreen OpenGL application. Regardless of what OS it would be on, the GUI would be the same. So... at that point, why does it matter?

Discussion welcome...

Cheers,

Lucas Wilson
------------
ASSIMILATE, Inc.
LA, CA, USA.
 
After all I read about SCRATCH, now I know why Steve Jobs has been acquired Final Touch and introduced as Color in Final Cut Studio 2. He also pushed Apple to be more software oriented company than before. WWDC 2007 showed exactly that. All that means in a year or two Apple is going to develop "Color" as a leader app for a color grading in the industry. Also don't forget upcoming Shake's successor bears the codename "Phenomenon" in 2008.
 
It's intriguing though. On one end RedUser is full of appreciation for the direct, open and upfront attitude of Jim and the other folks at Red. Everyone seems impressed by the 'no bull' type of communication.

And now some of the same people suggest in this thread that Apples release notes shouldn't be taken seriously and that Apple can't be held responsible for the lies they spread because everyone else does it too?

Apparently it's possible to love appreciate one company for the direct openness, and another for the opposite.

Sheesh.
 
offhollywood said:
You can read a lot into rumors. If you ask me ... I'd say MOTION 4 is going to be "Phenomenal" -:wink:
Click to expand...

If they do merge the products, I hope it will be possible to swich it between 'dummy' mode (with a lot of options hidden) and 'pro' mode.

Currently the philosophies of Motion and Shake are very different. Motion makes it very easy for the relatively inexperienced user to put something quite impressive together pretty quickly, but it's not so easy to have full control of things. Shake lets you get right in under the hood of the image processing and adjust everything, but you need to know what you are doing. I wouldn't want to loose the flexibility Shake gives me.
 
Update to the Color issues I mentioned before

Update to the Color issues I mentioned before

The image sizing issues and the field rendering problems appear to be related to the specific sequence I was testing with. The sequence was captured as 10 bit uncompressed on my G5 under FCP 5.1.4, then media managed to ProRes in FCP 6 on my Powerbook. This workflow created oddities in the XML which confused Color, but which I can't replicate any other way. A sequence created from scratch in FCP 6 did not have the field and geometry problems. It did still have the same timecode problem I referred to before.

Although I speculated earlier that the problems might be caused by the graphics card in my Powerbook, this is not the case. Exactly the same thing happened when I ran the tests on a friend's Macbook Pro.
 
Nick, I'm getting a gamma shift from 10 and 8bit uncompressed, media managing to proresHQ.. you get the same?

Also have a load of old work I recaptured from digi beta 10bit uncompressed.. its all frame based not interlaced.
When I set the timeline to none it playing a field in the canvas.. when set to Odd its fine :-/ all clips set to none. I take it transitions will then be field rendered.. hmm..

Have a 24 sony grade one in.. Color was really good hooked up on vid out. Though I did notice as so did the 3d guy that when the 30" ACD had its brightness tuned down to 0 using the keys (not black just lowest brightness) they were actually pretty similar! ACD just a touch warmer. Sony warmer in the shadows slightly I'd say though.

S
 
Hey Lucas

Final Touch was a full screen app as well, I have no idea why Apple decided to change this.

I'd say the biggest issue with Scratch not being on Mac OS X is that having a One System that you can do the Offline, Online, Effects, Grade, DVD blah blah blah... has alot of advantages.

I'm hoping with AMD owning ATI and Nvidia wanting to get closer to Intel things will finally get sorted for Mac Pro graphics... so hopefully Nvidia SDI support is around corner.

Regards
Rory
 
The pc version of the 4500 has sdi out.. I get that.. but whats so special about it?

Being usually thick n tired I take it you could not just hang a dvi>sdi converter off the second monitor output?

S
 
flameop said:
The pc version of the 4500 has sdi out.. I get that.. but whats so special about it?

Being usually thick n tired I take it you could not just hang a dvi>sdi converter off the second monitor output?

S
Click to expand...

You could do that. But I think you might be able to get true judder-free 23.98 playback more easily if you use SDI?

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
flameop said:
When I set the timeline to none it playing a field in the canvas.. when set to Odd its fine :-/ all clips set to none. I take it transitions will then be field rendered.. hmm..
Click to expand...

Are the clips set to 'none' in the canvas as well as the bin? Select a clip in the timeline, press Apple-9 and check.

I'll have a look for gamma shifts when I'm back in the studio tomorrow.
 
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