DaVinci

[MichaelHalsell]

Alex I totally agree with you. There is historical precedent. Years ago, systems based largely on hardware muscle had longer lifespans because ofMoore's law. Now that technology gaps have shorten, business models of the 80's, 90's no longer have validity. Anyone on the grunt end of a keyboard or camera has to respect the economic seismic shifts that's happening and plan accordingly.

 

[Andrae Palmer]

That is scary, since there are a ton more people ten times more talented than me thinking the exact same thing. Those are the guys who are going to take the food from your mouth.

Interesting times we are living in... the early fringes of singularity.

 

[Bruce Allen]

Andrae, can you honestly tell me that you would charge a client to do color correction on their film without being PROPERLY calibrated with correct LUT's for a specific destination? Or you think it's acceptable to use an 8 bit monitor over a 10 bit? How could you offer that client any kind of piece of mind?

How about this for a low budget feature: grade to a standard - eg 709 on a calibrated Dreamcolor.

Book a final session at Technicolor, Fotokem, etc. Bring in the whole thing (with an EDL for notching purposes if you have to) and get them to do the conversion from 709 to whatever color space you're delivering in, doing filmout, whatever.

Compensate for any overall color balance / brightness differences there. Get them to do layoffs to HDCAM, HDCAM SR, etc.

This is what we do for movie trailers anyway.

I think people will still pay for service and quality.

The question is: do you need all of the expensive stuff to deliver service and quality?

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[MichaelHalsell]

Signing off on this one. Will let you industry pros hash it out :emote_hippie:

 

[mikeburton]

How about this for a low budget feature: grade to a standard - eg 709 on a calibrated Dreamcolor.

Book a final session at Technicolor, Fotokem, etc. Bring in the whole thing (with an EDL for notching purposes if you have to) and get them to do the conversion from 709 to whatever color space you're delivering in, doing filmout, whatever.

Compensate for any overall color balance / brightness differences there. Get them to do layoffs to HDCAM, HDCAM SR, etc.

This is what we do for movie trailers anyway.



The question is: do you need all of the expensive stuff to deliver service and quality?

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

There are alternative methods as you point out Bruce to finishing a project, no doubt. In my experience most clients I have dealt with don't think about the gear until its not there, then they instantly realize its not there and become questioning. I guess if you are doing things out of your basement (so to speak) you just have to manage your clients expectations.
I personally love the idea of a DaVinci in my home, and got instantly excited about it until the buzz wore off, then I began to realize that I don't invite clients to my home to work out of. The price point is going to be great for many aspiring colorists and small production/post production companies as well in this race to the bottom :smiley:

 

[M Most]

Gradually slowly its been dissolving, and now more and more you see the new model which is artists run shops. They know how to use the gear and how to make pretty pictures, and they don't need an MBA to secure the lease and build a business plan to operate the company.

No business experience and no business plan..... right. OK. Good luck with that.

Anyone sitting on an expensive piece of gear, SMOKE, PABLO, LUSTRE, should be sweating, it doesn’t matter how many clients you have now. Once that pro colorist who was in your shop decides to open his own facility and takes his credit card and walks into a B&H, your in trouble. Being able to buy 10 DaVinci's for the price of one Baselight, that's not a game changer, thats pretty much game changed. Someone in a LUSTRE color session is not going to leave you during a color session after hearing about NAB, but the money game has started, and its all about dollars and cents eventually. Every movie, every TV show, will try to figure out a way to cut costs at some point.

As someone who has spent a lot of time in the post industry, I can tell you that if you really think that shows select facilities solely on the talents of one colorist, you haven't spent much time in the television industry. And you haven't talked to some very experienced working colorists who thought that when they changed facilities, the shows they worked on would follow them - in other words, that they were more important than the facility they worked for. Many of them have gotten a very rude awakening. Facilities working on network level material must be capable of a lot more than simply color correction. In fact, that may actually be only a minor part of what they provide. Dailies services (yes, this is still very much a part of the mix, even when film is not involved - lots of deliverables, double system synching, data management, lots of material that everyone wants to see first thing in the morning, many other things), conforming, color correction, and perhaps most critically, deliverables are all expected to be done and done right under rather brutal deadlines. All studios will try to save money, that's why post moved to electronic systems in the first place. But there is a certain level of power that's required to accommodate the kind of demands that come with this type of work. And it involves a lot more than a colorist. That's why it's very difficult for a facility that has not demonstrated the ability to deliver this level of work under the timeframes required to get studio approval as a vendor, even when the principals involved have experience in the industry. In earlier times there used to be a saying that nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. These days, you might say that nobody gets fired for bringing a show to Ascent or Technicolor. There are, of course, other players (I work for one), but if you really think that individuals can buy a couple of Macs and have the opportunity to do post production on network dramas, I'm here to tell you that's almost never the case.

 

[Sid Idris]

There are alternative methods as you point out Bruce to finishing a project, no doubt. In my experience most clients I have dealt with don't think about the gear until its not there, then they instantly realize its not there and become questioning. I guess if you are doing things out of your basement (so to speak) you just have to manage your clients expectations.
I personally love the idea of a DaVinci in my home, and got instantly excited about it until the buzz wore off, then I began to realize that I don't invite clients to my home to work out of. The price point is going to be great for many aspiring colorists and small production/post production companies as well in this race to the bottom :smiley:

Perhaps instead of characterizing this democratization as a 'race to the bottom' we can look at it as an overdue 'market correction' (much like what RED did with the R1 & RPPs) It seems DaVinci has realized that many DIY filmmakers are grading there own projects on home systems using another $1k system (namely Apple Color).

On another note...I gotta wonder what DaVinci just did to Assimilate... who will want to drop $70k on scratch when you can get a multicore DaVinci lic for 50k (including control surfaces)???

lastly, Bruce speaks the truth: rec709 for DVD, BLURAY, VOD & Web distribution - if by chance a project is slated for a filmout you can send it in for a final bump at a fully equipped studio with proper monitoring.

 

[Barend Onneweer]

Mike I think you are wrong... coloring won't be just for high end clients anymore... Most of the things you mentioned just won't matter... we are entering into another dimension.

These features will go straight to home made DVD's (distribution via Toast one disc at a time) ... or no where at all. Everyone nowadays is talented and a movie director. My guess is that most of these works will be submitted to the new booming industry of local film festivals.

Are we still talking about the media industry here, or are you really just referring to out-of-hand hobbyism?

Maybe the best comparison is the music industry: recording equipment has become commodity long ago. But there's still a good demand for engineers, producers and high-end studios. The market has shifted and gone through some changes, but I still see people building high-end mastering studios.

Anyway - it's the same song again: instead of just being excited about tools becoming available to more people, many seem obsessed with the 'downfall of the establishment'... Not just enjoying the RED camera, but wanting 'film to die'...

Seems like a rather negative view on things to me.

 

[Hans von Sonntag]

Anyway - it's the same song again: instead of just being excited about tools becoming available to more people, many seem obsessed with the 'downfall of the establishment'... Not just enjoying the RED camera, but wanting 'film to die'...

Seems like a rather negative view on things to me.

Good observation, Barend.

Reduser is full of people wanting film to die. Why? Interesting psychology.

Hans

 

[Barend Onneweer]

Hi Hans,

Well, I remember me and my sister eating candy in the back of my dad's car. And instead of enjoying the candy the whole point was making sure you kept some for when the other had none left.

It wasn't so much about having candy, but much more about the other not having any...

I was around 5 at the time and I've since grown past this...

It's a nasty part of human nature not to begrudge others what you can't have. And to enjoy what you have only if others don't have it..

 

[Ben Rojas]

With democratization of tool sets, is the industry moving from specialist to generalist?

Good way to put it. The answer, IMO, yeppers... However, that's not to say "generalist" don't become specialist in multiple areas. I myself started as a cutter 15 years ago. Late 90's I started composting... In 2000, finishing & efx... Late 2K, color correction, which really wasn't much of a stretch considering I'd been doing it all long. Now, my first love will always be cutting, but the continual shifts in technology allowed me to grow my skill set, prosper and eventually specialize in several areas. That being, as a professional, you've got to know your limitations! I'm a pretty good shooter, but that friends is where I'm certainly a generalist :biggrin5:

 

[Hans von Sonntag]

Barend,

Peter Sloterdijk, Philosopher in Karlsruhe University once wrote an interesting article about the German tax system. He distinguishes between envy and jealousy. He postulates that the German tax system is envy driven. According to him is envy the case when I want the Porsche my neighbour has but if I cannot get that Porsche my neighbour shouldn't have it either (cut it in two, breaking it King Salomon and the 2 mothers). Jealousy is when I see the neighbour's Porsche and work hard to get an even faster one.

Envy is a negative force, jealousy is powerful. Sloterdijk developed Hegel's idea that we humans are driven by appreciation a stage further. He proposes the thought that we are driven by jealousy.

What it's worth,

Hans

 

[Ben Rojas]

That is scary, since there are a ton more people ten times more talented than me thinking the exact same thing. Those are the guys who are going to take the food from your mouth.

Nothing new... It happened when Avid Express' started flooding the market, which I believe started the downward spiral of editor wages. LOL, I'm sure Linear Editors thought the same when Avid MC began. Final Cut came along and made it even worse. Hell, the "Live Types" of the world killed the 400-500 p/h Flame & Smoke artist (like myself in mid 2000) made for animated supers and the like. How about you shooters? Lots of DP buddies of mine were scratching their heads when Pani HVX200's flooded the market and everybody was shooter, film maker, etc. LOL, those little cameras didn't help keep rates up :wink5: In the end, we'll have to continue to adapt 'cause technology will continue to make things better, faster, easier, cheaper, etc.

 

[Ben Rojas]

Hmm, when I started doing 3D, Softimage cost something like $10,000 per CPU. We were using very expensive SGI Indigo2Extremes and sometimes would throw renders on the Onyx Flame system. 3D artists were paid pretty well then.

Guess what? Things are much cheaper now - and 3D artists are still paid well. About the same or better, I'd say.

Also, cheap desktop systems meant that my friends could start their own companies and boutiques and in a few years they were driving around in Porsches and vintage restored black Mercedes gothmobiles.



If they SUCKED then yeah their rate probably did have to go down. Most of the editors I know really weren't affected. I was assisting for a $1000/day editor and she got the same rate whether she used Lightworks, Avid or FCP.

This is like saying that the salaries of painters went down when paints became cheaper. Maybe that was true in the Middle Ages when Ultramarine was a precious resource but not now.

Right now, the cost of the system I use (software and hardware, all plugins, etc) at my workplace is less than a month's wages for me. Actually, that is high since we recently upgraded hardware. My best ratio was when I was art directing a high-end stereoscopic title sequence on a $500 Craigslist PC with a $450 monitor - ok, with about $4000 worth of software and $500 worth of drives. We'd take stuff into the fanciest 3D Pablo suite in Fotokem - and the colorist wouldn't touch a thing. I know that for sure because the one time I wanted him to tweak a shot's color it took me about half an hour of cajoling.

If you're someone who has trained your eye and developed relationships with clients who respect you as a creative collaborator, then this is a golden time.

If you're some button-pushing online monkey then yes, you should be very afraid.

Mike, I now you mean this in good faith. But to be honest, every time you try to tell us folks that we aren't talented enough to use the big iron stuff, you just remind me of when I was a kid trying to get my animation laid off to VHS and some moron with an Amiga and a Video Toaster won't let me use their system.

I realized really early on: many of the people hiding behind their expensive systems are not the friend of the artist.

The friend of the artist is the manufacturer who gives the community affordable professional tools.

That's why I'm on REDUSER.

That's why this DaVinci thing is so frikkin' awesome.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

Agreed, but you have to admit overall compensation has gone down. There were a hell of a lot more highly payed salary jobs 10 years ago than today. As the senior editor, I get paid well, but I can't do all the work that comes through our doors. It's on me to fine editors that will work for what budgets allow... Which more often than not makes me cringe! But the reality that young FCP guys will work cheap, many vet editors (old friends & colleagues I've known and worked with for years) take the low paying gigs. Bruce, these guys aren't button pushing monkeys, but rather examples of these truly challenging times.

 

[Andrae Palmer]

Are we still talking about the media industry here, or are you really just referring to out-of-hand hobbyism?

Do you realize that people can make a living from what you refer to as "out of hand hobbyism"? Take a look at the amount of garbage features produced for the local film festivals... someone is making money in this process. Be it either camera manufacturers, rental houses, post houses or the film festivals themselves. The sub 50k features market is booming at this time. I would be happy to be an Heavy Iron elitist if I had the money to be one.. albeit I wouldn't put most of my money in the software. It's not so much begrudging but out and out warfare... these same elitist will use what they have against me. I will use whatever nimbleness I have against them. Nothing personal just business.

Regarding RED users wishing film would die... how many film snobs expressed the same thing about RED? Do you know how many film snobs I meet that hate the RED and recently even DSLR shooters that hate the RED. It's all warfare to win new clients... everyone is defending their ground and highlighting their advantages.

BTW.. personally I've contacted Kodak about their film stocks... so that way I can have control of both terrains.

 

[Ben Rojas]

There's a natural path forward for them. Keep the Linux version around until five years from now or whenever, when Mac Pro towers can do real-time 4K from a single GPU. Then kill the Linux version.

In fact, sometime in the next 10 years, practically all of this stuff becomes trivial, as far as the hardware is concerned. You'll have consumer laptops that can process 4K more easily than they can work with SD today, and no particular need for internal slots for I/O cards because of things like Light Peak -- and because even consumer graphics cards will routinely have 10-bit output, so you can hook 'em straight up to grading monitors. If you even need specialized grading monitors, in a world where consumer OLED displays will have CRT-class blacks and probably color gamuts so wide they can easily emulate P3 or whatever else you like.

A lot of people don't quite seem to have grasped the consequences of the fact that the video/film production industry is now fully governed by Moore's Law. According to Nvidia "GPU compute is likely to increase its current capabilities by 570x" over the next six years. Hell, if that holds up, I think an iPod Touch will have enough GPU power for real-time 4K grading.

I guess my point is, if your business model is built around certain equipment being expensive... have a transition plan ready. Because there are going to be a lot of announcements over the coming decade in the same vein as this one.

Wow, so well said I'm going to follow you on twitter!

 

[Sid Idris]

Are we still talking about the media industry here, or are you really just referring to out-of-hand hobbyism?

Maybe the best comparison is the music industry: recording equipment has become commodity long ago. But there's still a good demand for engineers, producers and high-end studios. The market has shifted and gone through some changes, but I still see people building high-end mastering studios.

Anyway - it's the same song again: instead of just being excited about tools becoming available to more people, many seem obsessed with the 'downfall of the establishment'... Not just enjoying the RED camera, but wanting 'film to die'...

Seems like a rather negative view on things to me.

There's a certain element of digital fanaticism that seems bent on seeing film die...blah blah blah. However I think the bulk of this conversation has been about expanding the horizon for independent productions. Not long ago post houses were quoting 20k for conforming and grading a 200k feature. It's nice to know that the proliferation of these tools expands the options for those lower budgeted projects; In part by putting pressure on those same post houses to lower their quotes...I see this as a positive.

 

[Tom.Wong]

Now that I think about it more, this is really too amazing. I've done a variety of jobs and LOVE color correcting. I self taught myself "Color" and have done several projects with it, and have always wanted to learn and do more. Traditionally to become a DaVinci Colorist, you'd probably have to intern and apprentice for several years before you even come close to getting the chance to do it.

Now with such a affordable solution, I'm really tempted to get it myself and teach myself everything about it. There will always been the need for the 50k systems, and there will always be the need for high quality "at home" solutions, and they are offering both now, and I will get the opportunity to learn a system that I had no chance of learning before. I can't intern for years for no pay and expect to survive.

Now my second order of questions are, how are the decklink extremes these days? My last experience with them wasn't so pleasant, but I'm willing to junk my plans of getting a AJA LHI now and get a decklink, hdp converter combo/dreamcolor, and spend the extra bit of money for a Resolve System...

 

[Barend Onneweer]

Do you realize that people can make a living from what you refer to as "out of hand hobbyism"?

Yes absolutely. But do you realize that even many 200k dollar productions don't want to be grading in a bedroom, and do place value in a calibrated reliable workflow?

And trust me, I'm not a 'heavy iron' guy. I started out as a vfx guy in a spare bedroom and have now converted an apartment to an indie post-studio with a Scratch system. So I wouldn't consider myself very elitist.

 

[Andrae Palmer]

But do you realize that even many 200k dollar productions don't want to be grading in a bedroom, and do place value in a calibrated reliable workflow?

Of course I do.. that's why i'll have the best tools for my Davinci Resolve. You see the entire point is now that I can enter the game comfortable... 50k is no problem for a 4k solution and it's fun to start playing at $995. Before I could have gotten Scratch at 70k but that's mostly software... I didn't think that would be a wise move. It seems too risky to me just for software, now I feel a lot more secure going the Davinci route. 30k in hardware and around 20k in software... I can hack that.