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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

wow, that sucks considering almost a quarter million dollars just got put on the level of 1 thousand, and they get a free "upgrade" ahaha.

as for pro res support, there might be some decent ways around that right now if there isn't direct support on release. Final conform to dpx ---- dpx via glue tools to FCP MAYBE?---- finish PRORESS 4X4
 
Our clientele traditionally has been Advertising/Med Ed agencies. As the clients became more comfortable and Final Cut saavy, the client trend was bring some of the work in-house. So I guess as the process of color grading continues to get demystified, there will be bit of loss revenue there also.

I'm surprised at the enthusiasm and longevityof this tread. Apple provided a decently robust grading tool that was even cheaper and less hardware expensive than DaVinci, albeit not perfect but capable enough.

I curious to see, what will make DaVinci (mac) a more magical tool than the next.
 
Can somebody tell if DaVinci will ever work in Windows?
 
MichaelHalsell said:
Our clientele traditionally has been Advertising/Med Ed agencies. As the clients became more comfortable and Final Cut saavy, the client trend was bring some of the work in-house. So I guess as the process of color grading continues to get demystified, there will be bit of loss revenue there also.

I'm surprised at the enthusiasm and longevityof this tread. Apple provided a decently robust grading tool that was even cheaper and less hardware expensive than DaVinci, albeit not perfect but capable enough.

I curious to see, what will make DaVinci (mac) a more magical tool than the next.
Click to expand...

There is a big difference between Davinci on the Mac and Apple color. Pure power!! The Davinci on the mac is a pure color grading tool. The feature set is light years ahead of color. whatever you can do in color, you can do twice as much and even more precisely. Its not merely a program or application its a whole system built for color grading only. Apple color is crippled when it comes to real time performance. The $995 Davinci out of the box with Nvidia GTX285 will give you Red R3D 2k real time debayered playback and color correction. I have seen it done in Resolve 6.2 on a $400,000 system, color graded a 2 music videos back to back in 10 hours at $450 an hour, saving us close to $8000.

I remember the colorist saying the software was everything, the whole system was merely overpriced hardware, if he had the option he would buy the software even if it was $50,000 plus a quadro card. Oh yes he'd been color correcting on the Davinci for 14 yrs, so his obvious choice. He swore by scratch and Lustre he felt they were much better and easier systems to use. But it was cheaper for his company to upgrade their resolve than buy new systems.

I have used Apple Color its very straight forward and simple. From what I've seen in the past few days the resolves 7.0 user interface has been upgraded a little for the mac.
If you are shooting with the Red which I assume most users on here are, you should be excited, very excited, i mean very very excited. Although i haven't seen any of the new NAB announced products, for $15000 you can have a fully functioning post house in your bedroom.
1. Adode CS5 64 bit, 32 bit float, accelerated native R3D editing $$1500 or Media composer $2500
2. DAvinci Resolve $1000
3. Nvidia quadro fx $1600 0r GTx $285 500
4. decent 400MB/s raid $1200
5. HP dream color $1900
6. tangent wave $1500 (option)
7.ipad $599 for watching netflix when you feel lazy
8. Red base Station module with SSDs, $1500
9. Red rocket- $5000
10. Panasonic pro 42' monitor $5000
11. decklink card $250 - $3000
12, Aja Kona $3000
13. Aja ki pro $....
etc etc etc

as you see you can mix and match as you wish
 
A Changing Media Ecosystem for DI

A Changing Media Ecosystem for DI

I discuss this in a more macro way on this thread:
http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?p=586638#post586638
But I wanted to contribute to the discussion here as well.

Since a large amount of my business at Light Iron is focused on digital intermediate, this particular thread addresses a lot of the excitement about how the ecosystem is changing for digital intermediate. I was pleasantly surprised to see what Black Magic did with their newly acquired Resolve system. To break this down, let's look at the facts.

1. Da Vinci is the most widely known and accepted color grading system on earth. Da Vinci's can be found just about everywhere and they allow for modifications to enable them to work with film, tape, and file based sources. No other DI tool can work with that myriad of formats as smoothly as Da Vinci.
2. The Resolve is an amazing grading tool. The abilities one can learn with this program raise the bar tremendously over similarly priced systems. This means it will allow people who want to learn more about DI the ability to go as deep and as wide as someone who has made a lot bigger of an investment.
3. No one really knows exactly how these systems will perform in the various configurations that Black Magic is building. Until units are in the hands of users, we are going to have to guess.
4. I am confident that even though the Resolve is 500% cheaper than it was 1 year ago, it will not be 500% worse. If you know me, you'll know I am a fan of RED because I am a fan of scalability. My professional career has been all about managing the scaleability of systems integration (be it DI or otherwise) so that investments can change in accordance with experience, demand, and finances. Resolve is a perfect example of a new level of scaleability, to which I am happy to see.
5. Experienced colorists who use Resolve should not be instantly threatened. Talent is paramount, and that takes a lot of time to develop of the years. Unless you stop learning today (which is unlikely to happen) you're current skills will only improve at a similar rate as those who jump on the system and start to learn it.
6. Un-experienced colorists who only have access to systems like Apple Color should be ecstatic! Being able to explore the depth of the Resolve tool and learn more about the width of color correction will not only improve your personal stock, but prepare you for adaptation to other DI systems, which are important to know as well.
7. Don't get too wrapped up in the numbers. Getting a Black Magic Mac Resolve to perform the same way as it did with Da Vinci will not be achieved with a thousand dollars. But it will count as absolutely bona fide experience on the Resolve system.

It was only 5 years ago that my partner Ian Vertovec and our team started color correction on Final Cut Pro and Final Touch. As our skills and clients improved, so did our DI systems. What Resolve on the MAC does better than anything in the past is close the gap between where you START in DI and where you can END UP. That's total empowerment and that type of opportunity would be foolish to ignore. Final Touch did this is the early 2000's, now Resolve has done it again. My advice is to take full advantage of this system and learn it through-and-through so you can graduate from it to other systems or upgrade the Resolve when we learn what more horsepower will offer the machine. But most importantly, I wanted to point out one more element for discussion:

As the demand for systems like Resolve to become more available at affordable prices, so does the demand for harder work. We call systems like FCP, Color, RED Rocket™ cards, and now Resolve LIGHT WORK. These are systems that are inexpensive, readily available, fairly easy to adopt and extremely powerful. But the demand for harder, heavier work we call IRON WORK. This is the demand for 3D, 4K DI, and 4K restoration. Consider that just as the bar is raised in the LIGHT areas of the industry, so does the bar raise in the HEAVY areas of the industry. I surmise that this relationship will likely never cease. -Top end artists always pushing the boundaries of VFX, image capture, fidelity, and resolution, etc. So while Resolve offers an elevated starting point for DI in terms of LIGHT WORK, the industry is no doubt going to continue to organically demand more in terms of IRON WORK. This is why we named our company LIGHT IRON. It's often pointed out that I have 2 Pablo systems at my shop. But what's more important is that I now have Resolve alongside my RED Rocket™s, a dozen Mac computers, iPad dailies, and a slew of LIGHT WORK software solutions. So the name LIGHT IRON was chosen in recognition that there are many jobs that can be perfectly executed without the need of a Pablo. Likewise, as the demand for more "K's" and more "D's" are requested, the need for HEAVY IRON will never completely go away.

I, for one, am as excited about this as anyone else. It will allow each of us to diversify and develop and enable the talent, which is paramount, to do what they do best. And there is nothing wrong with that. ever.
m
 
Kujtim Ereqi said:
Can somebody tell if DaVinci will ever work in Windows?
Click to expand...

I actually asked the Black Magic folks this question and they said it was definitely their goal to release it for Windows. They said they have only owned DaVinci a few months and so hadn't had enough time to give any sort of timeline on the Windows version.
 
Michael Cioni said:
What Resolve on the MAC does better than anything in the past is close the gap between where you START in DI and where you can END UP. That's total empowerment and that type of opportunity would be foolish to ignore. Final Touch did this is the early 2000's, now Resolve has done it again. ...
As the demand for systems like Resolve to become more available at affordable prices, so does the demand for harder work.
Click to expand...

We don't always agree, but I really like what you said here. I would advise people to look at the words "systems like Resolve," because I for one don't think that this will be the only tool to offer a scalable version. It might be the cheapest, but it likely won't be the last. One needs only to think about the fact that Filmlight has had a version of Baselight on the Mac for at least 1 1/2 years to realize that if they chose to do so, it wouldn't take a particularly long development period to put in a robust playback engine and some other features and complete the package. It's more a question of financial viability than it is technical practicality. And financial viability is probably based more on how small or large the market for these things turns out to be. And I said "small" first for a reason. "Mass market" is always a relative term, but it determines appropriate price points based on cost vs. return, and it determines the necessary sales volume for a product with a fixed development cost to achieve in order to be profitable. That is yet to be determined. There are at least two companies trying different approaches in an attempt to find the "sweet spot" for these types of tools: Autodesk (with the Mac based Smoke for about $16K) and now Blackmagic. The ironic thing is that in my view, there's probably a larger potential market for a multipurpose, deep, very useful toolset like Smoke than there is for essentially a single purpose program like Resolve, yet Blackmagic apparently found it either necessary, useful, or attractive to go the very low end route with their product. Then again, Autodesk doesn't also manufacture and market the I/O and video cards necessary to make it work :idea:

It will be interesting to see where it all ends up.
 
Stephen Lovett said:
The software requires two separate graphics cards, one for gui, one for the software. Surprisingly they only support up to the 285, no Quadro 4800 fx support. I don't get that at all, but they said that more options will become available in the future.

But with two graphics cards, the required decklink card, and your raid, you're done. So Rocket support looks doubtful to me unless Apple gets off its ass, and gives us more and faster PCIe slots.
Click to expand...

This seems worrying to me. If you need 2 graphics cards, then presumably you'd have to stick them both in the x16 lanes.

Where does this leave raid cards (ive got a RocketRaid 4322 in my second X16) SAS HBA card (for LTO-4) nevermind a REDRocket or video IO?

Also I recall seeing someone say over the past few days that Nvidia have now taken on responsibility for writing their own Mac drivers. Can anyone confirm this? Apple has done such a shitty job up till now that I would say that the usability of Resolve on the Mac depends on this being sorted out.

Hopefully it will also open up the GPU options on the Mac as well. They've been woefully lacking for far too long.. Mac'PRO' indeed! pppppfffffff!!!!!!!:rant:
 
Michael Cioni said:
It's often pointed out that I have 2 Pablo systems at my shop. But what's more important is that I now have Resolve alongside my RED Rocket™™™™™s, a dozen Mac computers, iPad dailies, and a slew of LIGHT WORK software solutions. So the name LIGHT IRON was chosen in recognition that there are many jobs that can be perfectly executed without the need of a Pablo. Likewise, as the demand for more "K's" and more "D's" are requested, the need for HEAVY IRON will never completely go away.
Click to expand...

_MG_4601-Bending-Bam.jpg


the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind

Cheers to you Michael for being a wise man... heck I woud love to have two pablos or baselights amongst my resolves too :-) LOL... I noticed that you didn't mention a Scratch system though. :-)
 
Wow... this whole thing sure brings out the poets in people, so it seems.

So why would you imply that Assimilate will easily crack? You don't know what their response will be and neither do I. Thus far they've been very flexible and quick to respond to new formats etc.

If price was everything everyone would be using Gimp instead of Photoshop, and Motion instead of After Effects. But it seems that even Premiere Pro is now making its way back into the OSX editing crowd which is at least an example of a development that most people didn't see coming.

Anyway, shouldn't we continue the conversation when the system is released? And in the mean time hope for Apple to release Mac Pros with more PCI slots?
 
M Most said:
We don't always agree, but I really like what you said here. I would advise people to look at the words "systems like Resolve," because I for one don't think that this will be the only tool to offer a scalable version. It might be the cheapest, but it likely won't be the last. One needs only to think about the fact that Filmlight has had a version of Baselight on the Mac for at least 1 1/2 years to realize that if they chose to do so, it wouldn't take a particularly long development period to put in a robust playback engine and some other features and complete the package. It's more a question of financial viability than it is technical practicality. And financial viability is probably based more on how small or large the market for these things turns out to be. And I said "small" first for a reason. "Mass market" is always a relative term, but it determines appropriate price points based on cost vs. return, and it determines the necessary sales volume for a product with a fixed development cost to achieve in order to be profitable. That is yet to be determined. There are at least two companies trying different approaches in an attempt to find the "sweet spot" for these types of tools: Autodesk (with the Mac based Smoke for about $16K) and now Blackmagic. The ironic thing is that in my view, there's probably a larger potential market for a multipurpose, deep, very useful toolset like Smoke than there is for essentially a single purpose program like Resolve, yet Blackmagic apparently found it either necessary, useful, or attractive to go the very low end route with their product. Then again, Autodesk doesn't also manufacture and market the I/O and video cards necessary to make it work :idea:

It will be interesting to see where it all ends up.
Click to expand...

There is nothing mass market about $995. Mass market is $99. Its a simple issue of demand and supply.
$995 smoke vs $995 CS5, CS5 will win hands down. there just not that many users interested in the power of Smoke period. Shake was $495 how many people bought it?. combustion was $4995, combustion, toxik, shake, etc etc etc where are they now? There was never any demand for those tools in that market segment.
Davinci Resolve fills a color grading demand void. At $995 + ultra-scope $895 it will last for a very long time with an exponential international user base depending on ease of use, user group support, tutorials etc etc.
Color correction and grading tools, just like motion graphics are of higher demand in film and video work across the board than special or visual efx.
Give people a free copy of smoke they will toss it away after a few days. Its just difficult to use period, it may be powerful, but there are easier alternatives and plugins for doing what it does.

I personally think smoke should be $25,000 and flame $75,000. the is a solid user base that needs those tools the cheaper it gets the more this user base is priced out. its the same for Audio, everyone owns a $995 audio Daw, but we all want to mix down on a $300k SSL, neve or Euphonix, Protools system
 
shashbugu said:
There is nothing mass market about $995. Mass market is $99. Its a simple issue of demand and supply.
Click to expand...

What I said is mass market is a relative term. But I would also say it's a matter of perception. In the world of capable, professional, high end tools, $1000 or less is a low end price intended for a much wider audience. Would you consider Final Cut Pro to be mass market? I think I would, and it's essentially the same price.

$995 smoke vs $995 CS5, CS5 will win hands down. there just not that many users interested in the power of Smoke period.
Click to expand...

I don't see a lot of similarity between Smoke (a finishing system for film and video formats that has one of the deepest visual effects toolsets currently available, as well as the ability to handle file sequences very elegantly and very efficiently) and CS5 (a desktop suite that is intended primarily for offline editing and graphics, although it is capable of more than that for those that have more time available). I don't see these two programs competing with each other. But perhaps others do.

Shake was $495 how many people bought it?. combustion was $4995, combustion, toxik, shake, etc etc etc where are they now? There was never any demand for those tools in that market segment.
Click to expand...

Shake was killed by Apple. Toxic now ships as Maya Composite with both Maya and 3D Studio Max. But the fact is that when these products were sold standalone, there was also no Red, and thus no ready and waiting audience of either do-it-yourself filmmakers with quality aspirations, or professionals wanting to take on more tasks that have traditionally been done by facilities. Red essentially created the audience that those tools ultimately needed.

Davinci Resolve fills a color grading demand void. At $995 + ultra-scope $895 it will last for a very long time with an exponential international user base depending on ease of use, user group support, tutorials etc etc.
Color correction and grading tools, just like motion graphics are of higher demand in film and video work across the board than special or visual efx.
Click to expand...

I would say that the jury is very much out as to whether there really is the demand you claim. Time will tell just how many people are either capable of or want to take on the task of color correction. As for motion graphics, I would point out that while it is true that there are literally no motion picture or television projects without at least a title crawl, there are also practically no professionally done motion picture or television projects with no visual effects. Even comedies have significant numbers of visual effects shots. It's not a matter of demand, and it's not a this vs. that. All of these things are necessary. The question is how to best get them done on any particular project, and whether that means doing it yourself or employing specialists to do it for you, and hopefully better than you can if it's not your particular area of expertise.

Give people a free copy of smoke they will toss it away after a few days. Its just difficult to use period, it may be powerful, but there are easier alternatives and plugins for doing what it does.
Click to expand...

And the difference between this description and Resolve is...???
 
M Most said:
That doesn't mean he doesn't have them.
Click to expand...

O it's not a question if he has them... I know at Plastercity they had a few. The question is will he keep investing into Scratch or will he now invest into Resolve. If he continues to invest in Scratch (say two-six months from now)... I would really value his reasoning on what feature sets compels that decision.
 
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