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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 :)

DaVinci Resolve Lite 8.1.1 released with unlimited nodes and DNxHD included

It's an interesting read, except, that it wasn't my question. This is my question:
"So, please give me one example of a truly free, innovative product marketed by a company, that doesn't sell other products in order to subsidize that "free" product:-)"
If you read my question, you'll see, that your examples do not cut it. And please remember. We're talking about a very small industry, more a cottage industry- color grading, that is by any measure tiny. There are altruists, but relying on altruists for innovation is not a sound business plan . People need to get paid for their work. That is unless they live in Communist society. And from personal experience, that ain't as great as some let you believe:-)

LMAO ... not to butt in ... but redcine-x is free ... and i think is perty cool.
 
LMAO ... not to butt in ... but redcine-x is free ... and i think is perty cool.
Dude, please read the question:
"So, please give me one example of a truly free, innovative product marketed by a company, that doesn't sell other products in order to subsidize that "free" product:-)"
 
Okay, let's change things up. Whether we like that it's free or not, it's here and I'd love to see what people are able to achieve with it. I'm still waiting for some hardware to run it, but if anyone has taken a crack at it and wants to post some examples of their work, with some insight to how they got there that would be a lot of fun, way more fun than talking about the philosophical or business side of Black-Magic. Anyone willing to post something?

How about we stop derailing this discussion, as it is impossible to come to a consensus on the subject and listen to Steve...
 
IMHO if you work on your own, it's a great tool to refine your trade, get your skill up and maybe make some money on it. In the end you still need to invest in SOME hardware, none of it is truly free, but at least the software end of it can mostly be just that. the 1k for the full software was a nothing investment considering i made that money back on the first job i did in resolve. I was hired for me, not just cause I had the toys. The toys just let me get what I could do, done in a efficient more elegant manor. That said, limited processing and GPU power is still a big hindrance in my opinion. If you work on your own, probably not as big of a deal, but in client sessions it's practically unbearable to the client watch everything stutter and not be able to see the grades and corrections in at least something close to real time. Not to mention if you don't have a beefy video card even in a single gpu setup, it's gonna run out of memory really fast causing some serious glitches. I ripped out my quadro 4000 yesterday to get a rocket in for a job on set, and I spun up Da Vinci to check on something and all i had was my gt 120 in there, and everything went to hell.

Point being, more options that are free are cool, but there are a lot of variables that keep a person working at their trade. #1 is being awesome at what you do. The rest is adaptive business model, and however you can earn an extra buck...
 
It's an interesting read, except, that it wasn't my question. This is my question:
"So, please give me one example of a truly free, innovative product marketed by a company, that doesn't sell other products in order to subsidize that "free" product:-)"
If you read my question, you'll see, that your examples do not cut it. And please remember. We're talking about a very small industry, more a cottage industry- color grading, that is by any measure tiny. There are altruists, but relying on altruists for innovation is not a sound business plan . People need to get paid for their work.

Jake ... perhaps I wrote too much, but I did in fact answer you with SEVERAL examples.

I'll go through some of them again.

Linux was developed by Linus Torvalds to satisfy intellectual curiosity.

Linus had a job ... but his job wasn't anything to do with Linux.

I think it was nearly a decade after he "invented" Linux, including extending it with some cutting edge features, before anybody started selling anything in connection with it.

Linux is still given away aggressively, as are the various BSD UNIX systems and HURD. In fact ... if you want to piss that crowd off, try selling Linux as a closed source product.

The Fisher Space Pen

Fisher knew that traditional ball point pens depended on gravity, and that pencils were unsafe in space.

They submitted a proposal to NACA/NASA to develop the space pen, and it was rejected.

Fisher thought it was a big enough issue, they developed it anyway and gave the pens to NASA for free. It wasn't until sometime later that people started asking Fisher for the "Space Pen" for other uses - or just as a novelty, and only then did Fisher make a commercial product.

Yahoo!

Yahoo! started out as "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web." It was just two, slightly OCD grad students organizing and sharing links.

For free. It was only after "Yahoo! celebrated its first million-hit day in the fall of 1994, translating to almost 100 thousand unique visitors." that these guys figured out that they might have a big business opportunity on their hands.

The Beowulf project was an open source hobbyist project. The guy I worked with, Don Becker, was just tooling around satisfying his own curiosity and writing piles of device drivers so he could get a working cluster with the systems he had. At the time Beowulf was the only way an individual could get their hands on anything like a supercomputer ... and being typical NASA folks ... we had a legitimate need for that sort of thing for our hobbies.

I can say that the device drivers I contributed to have never earned me a penny, and I never thought they might. My only reward was enjoying primitive pictures of virtual "galaxies" (if you can call a few hundred "stars" a galaxy) smashing together.

Dan turned Beowulf into a serious project, and had a NASA contract to use it for real supercomputing.

Those are the direct answers to your questions. You asked for one example, there are three.

Now, after that I got off topic a bit.

I wanted to talk about your other, I think unstated, assumption: Its tough to compete with free.

People usually misinterpret that. They think it means "Its impossible to compete with free," but that's not the case.

You can compete with free successfully. Bottled water and Mac OS X are examples.

Then I got excited and talked about decreasing marginal costs, and the translation of these virtual concepts into physical reality.

Those sidetracks became the bulk of my word count. I apologize for leading you so far astray.
 
I think I misunderstood Alexander. Thanks for clearing that up.

Yeah you did misunderstand, but its my fault.

You can render 4K files ... but I said you could not, when I meant you could. See ... perfectly unclear.

Its actually a sentence fragment I meant to edit out ... an "edito" (sic) you could say.

You can not output to a 4K display, or a 4K "deck." You also can't monitor your work in 4K. Resolve is a very incomplete solution for 4K.

I think they aim to fix that, probably very quickly. First off I expect to see Decklink 4K on the supported hardware list sometime soon.
 
You can compete with free successfully. Bottled water and Mac OS X are examples.

The essence of Jake's position is in almost all cases money is coming from "somewhere" that compliments the free product. I'm sure we can dig for further examples of the rich kid genius that made something and gave it away. It's rare.

The more interesting questions are:
1) Was Black Magic smart to do this? What are they really up to?
2) What will it take to compete with them?

It's a bit of weird bet. They are betting TONS of people want to take on a big time color correction. Free or not, it's a learning curve. Does BM have other prosumer oriented hardware up its sleeve? I'm guessing that's what this is really about.

Does it impact colorists? Maybe. But I think that trend was already in progress via Apple Color and the economy in general. Right now anyone with a Scarlet/EPIC is probably going to get a handle on color correction if they are a shooter/editor. A lot of indies are.

Remember all the ugly footage when RED came out? Get ready for a bunch of ugly Scarlet footage if these people don't learn to color correct.

So how do you compete with FREE? Adobe can integrate and innovate. Their suite brings in the money. But everyone else?

It's not like "water" where you can position yourself as better than tap water. It might be a bit like Apple vs. Linux. If someone truly made an EASIER and BETTER app they could charge for it. But man how friggin' easy and good will it have to be??? Easier would be integrated into the editor. That leaves AVID and Adobe.

But better? That's Big Iron. They compete on outrageous speed and support. On tight deadlines with big dollars on the line money becomes less relevant. Could Davinci be upgraded to compete with those guys? That's more likely than the other way around. So I'd be nervous if I was them a bit. BlackMagic does have a $30K control panel they want to sell.

What's BlackMagic REALLY got up their sleeve? The did this for a reason and I doubt the reason was to get Free Users to bump to $1k Resolve.

BTW - anyone who wants to buy my Full version of Resolve feel free to make an offer. I'm not planning on doing 3D or 4K output anytime soon.
 
But better? That's Big Iron. They compete on outrageous speed and support. On tight deadlines with big dollars on the line money becomes less relevant. Could Davinci be upgraded to compete with those guys? That's more likely than the other way around. So I'd be nervous if I was them a bit. BlackMagic does have a $30K control panel they want to sell.

An upgraded Resolve has been available since Resolve was first released. That's what the Linux version is all about. The fact that Company 3 (and Technicolor, for that matter, although they use Lustre as well) uses Linux Resolves for all of their DI work - including many of the most successful pictures ever released - should tell you that it "competes" very, very well in the "big iron" world.
 
Last night, my grading room was occupied for an editing session but I had to do the conforming prior to the grading session today. I had the R3D footage in the Accusys Exasan already, and received the XML, so I used the Resolve Lite on the sub machine (MacPro with GTX480 and 120) to conform the XML for the grading job today. Exported the project after conforming on the Exasan and started the session on the Main Grading room this morning with no issue. Thank you Blackmagic to provide the Lite version for free and help me conduct my post production work so much efficient!
 
Great stuff!

The only thing limiting me (I don't need realtime playback right now) is the fact, that noise reduction does not work on OpenCL (greyed out)...
Seems like I have to look out for a CUDA-Card (the Mac Pro was not put together for Resolve in first place so I'm on a Radeon 4870 now [Mac Pro 4.1]).
 
DaVinci Resolve Lite includes all the same high quality processing of the full DaVinci Resolve, however limits projects to SD and HD resolutions, unlimited nodes using a single processing GPU and a single RED Rocket card. Stereoscopic 3D features, noise reduction, power mastering, remote grading and sharing projects with an external database server are features only offered in the full DaVinci Resolve so are not included in this free DaVinci Resolve Lite edition. Customers who want these features can simply upgrade to the full DaVinci Resolve Software for only US$995

so no stereo 3D, no noise reduction, no power mastering, no remote grading, and no database sharing.

Also, no serial or paralellele nodes
 
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