IRIDAS vs. COLOR

[OlaHaldor]

Hi, I've been working with Apple Color since the day it hit the shelves, and I'm pretty much confident with the tools and over time I've refined my workflow and most of the time I can produce something the clients will like in a very short amount of time.

However, one thing that's bugging me is how slow it can be sometimes. Playback from timeline is choppy and stuttering, about 12-20fps. There's nearly no difference if it's Prores SD PAL or RED RAW 4K.

My setup is a early 2008 Mac Pro (2 x 4 core cpu @ 2.66 GHz) 6GB RAM and I've got a RAID1 on eSATA, Decklink HD Extreme -> HD-SDI -> Panasonic LH1700w . As a freelancer, I can't really afford the most high-tech rocket science kind of technology, but I'm very happy with my setup.

So I'm thinking - is the application the bottleneck here?


I've been looking over at IRIDAS, since they're (as far as I know) the only Mac option out there. But which one would I chose?

SpeedGrade OnSet? Fairly cheap, works with RAW, but will it do the job like Color does, and how is the performance compared to Color? Primary in/out, secondaries, shaders alà Color FX room, custom masks?


Then there's SpeedGrade XR, very interesting piece of software, and I've checked the pricing - boy do I gotta get a load of jobs to get that baby even remotely close to home.



Where would you look? Better hardware? New software? Anything would help.

 

[Nook Kim]

I'm very interested on the topic as well since I'm looking at the Speed Grade DI and Onset combo. I think this combo could offer an extremely attractive digital cinema workflow. I haven't looked at the application too much, but I'm going to take a very close look. For a starter, it seems like the Speed Grade is more versatile as it supports most of the RAW formats natively.

I grade in Color, too, and I'm going to give it a bit longer use with the new version 1.5 upgrade. It's not like I don't like the app, and it's very logical when it comes down to "grading". But it's not too logical with other important features such as conforming, re-conforming, rendering, etc.

I hope to hear what people have experienced with the Speed Grade offerings.

 

[Hans von Sonntag]

Hi Ola,

I used Color in the days when it belonged to Silicon Imaging and was called FinalTouch. I dropped 5K for FinalTouch-HD and used it two tedious years on a couple of jobs. FinalTouch aka Color never satisfied my needs and here is why:

1. No RT-playback. RT playback is vital for colour timing because you need to keep the pace. Interupting the session because of rendering or stuttering playback is annoying. Any experienced colourist would agree here.

2. Akward interface. This is uo to ones taste of course but the "room" concept never convinced me - too slow. For a more convenient, fluent work you need a Tangent panel but then no RT-playback....

3. XML roundtripping with FCP caused many crashes. I often had to re-grade a project completely. Maybe Color 1.5 is more mature in this regard.

When I had my hands on Color the firts time and found out that it was just the old FinalTouch with all it flaws and hardly anthing improved. I had to look out for an alternative. Scratch was too expensive by then and needed new hardware because my lab was mac based. I evaluated SpeedGrade HD and found it much, much better than Color. Even with my old G5 and a non-specified Nvidia consumer board I had SD RT and HD ProRes with 20 fps right from the start. Some time later I bought a Nvida quattro 5600fx and HD 1080p was RT. Great.

SpeedGrade is all about color. Here it has its particular strengths. Your never have to render while you grade. Even with 10 or more colour layers 1080p is RT. The primary is very powerfull, so are the secondaries. The interface is easy to understand and even without a dedicated control panel all the sliders you need are on your fingertips. SpeedGrade eats all flavours of RAW, RED, SI2K, Phantom HD, Arri21, Weisscam, etc. in RT.

SpeedGrade's weakest point has been the big strenght of Scratch: Conforming. Since a year SpeedGrade is performing in this area much better. Conforming from a proxy timeline to R3Ds works very well now.

For R3D RT playback your need a modern 7i machine such as a new MacPro plus a professional Nvida graphics board. The new quattro 4800 will do it nicley. Why Apple left out an Nvidia SDI-Out option is beyond my understanding. This is the main reason why all other vendors of grading apps don't support OSX. A "pro" colourist needs a calibrated HD-SDI based monitor system. Additionally many clients want the R3Ds with a first light grade dumped on SR for a convenient, tape based workflow. For such applications you need to run SpeedGrade on windows with the costly Nvidia SDI board.

SpeedGrade XR is 15k if I recall correctly. SpeedGrade DI (renders to DPX, CIN or EXR which XR cannot) is 5K more expensive, I think. Iridas has a long pedigree with it's framecycler application family which is extensivly used world wide in high-end digital cinema postproduction environments for playback and approval tasks. The performance of applications like SpeedGrade or Assimilate Scratch has its price. It is like with RedOne: once you have the jobs it will pay for it self.

BTW: SpeedGrade On Set is great tool for evaluating shots on set or to determine a specific look prior the shoot. It has all the tools which the bigger brothers have. In this regard it transforms a laptop to a telecine suite which RedCine is not. But it renders only stills and exports .look files that can be used later in the final grading session.

I hope that helps,

Hans

 

[OlaHaldor]

So in other words, SpeedGrade XR is the only option if I were to chose IRIDAS. I'm pretty fresh to color grading, all though I've had almost two dozens of jobs ever since Color 1.0 was installed, though most of them are very low budget productions for film school students or ads for use on the big screen. And I can sign your statement about the lack of RT playback.

A new Mac Pro with i7 CPU is not gonna happen anytime soon, thus SpeedGrade XR neither - my wallet says "NO!". But I'll keep IRIDAS in mind for sure.

Thanks for your time, Hans. Very interesting material to read.

 

[Noah Kadner]

IRIDAS is pretty awesome in action- but yeah not inexpensive.

Noah

 

[Peace Villow]

You can go to their website and request a 30 days demo license.

 

[Dane Brehm]

I did a fair amount of the R3D beta testing on Iridas XR and think very highly of it and when I'm consulting Post houses who are want to make the most out of their file-based systems I recommend XR. It is a GPU-oriented system so you'll have to find what is best on your budget.

Like anything else "you get what you pay for". You could in thoery Grade 2D or 3D then Conform on Scratch.

Goodluck,

 

[Lucas Wilson]

Hi all,

One thing to keep in mind with OS-X... there are no NVidia SDI drivers. If you're going to go with Speedgrade, I would recommend the Windows version so you can get SDI output.

If you don't need SDI, then OS-X is fine.

By the way - this has nothing to do with Iridas. Apple writes their own drivers, and does not support the NVidia SDI cards.

(Lin - correct me if I'm wrong...)

Lucas
-----
ASSIMILATE, inc.
LA, CA, USA
(in Seoul)

 

[OlaHaldor]

So with IRIDAS, I cannot use Black Magic Decklink HD Extreme for output?!

 

[Hans von Sonntag]

So with IRIDAS, I cannot use Black Magic Decklink HD Extreme for output?!

You cannot. And it does not make sense if RT grading is your target. There are technical restrictions in this regard. Check Luki's post above. RT grading with SDI out is only possible on Windows.
Hans

 

[Kaku Ito]

I was wondering what if you connect the DVI to Matrox MXO then to SDI. Only provide 8-bit output though. Ouch.

 

[Hans von Sonntag]

I was wondering what if you connect the DVI to Matrox MXO then to SDI. Only provide 8-bit output though. Ouch.

I haven't tested by myself but a colourist I know checked it out and found some obstacles beeing the 8-bit limitationn the biggest one. Not to be recommended when transfer to tape and colour-critical work is the goal.

 

[zeus]

What are the reasons that DVI is inferior to SDI?

 

[Hans von Sonntag]

DVI is 8 bits only. Plus you cannot connect DVI to a HDSDI system such as a HDCAM SR tape machines. A second DVI port for monitoring eats a lot of the power of the graphics card. This is not the case with a Nvidia HDSDI board. Hence you've got much better performance of the grading system. SDI is not going to die in the next decade.

Hans

 

[Richard Bradbury]

Out of interest could you not use a Matrox MXO2 and connect via PCIe or ExpressCard? Would this not give you the option of 10-bit HD-SDI or HDMI monitoring? Would this not be realtime?

 

[mikeburton]

Just to chime in here, I have been working and testing SpeedGradeXR for quite a while and really have nothing but the best things to say about the app. To be fair, I also use Scratch and Color depending on the job. Lucas is correct, if you are going to invest in SpeedGrade get the software for Windows, get a 4800 fx cardw/SDI or higher with new i7 processors and a small or large RAID. Redcode is very CPU intensive.
From a users perspective, I love how SpeedGrade has your Overall, Highlight, Midtone and Shadow rooms seperated with lift, gamma, gain options for each. It is laid out very intuitively and is very powerfull. Some have mentioned how they don't like their conform tools but I must say that they are very easy to work with and can be as simple as drag and drop. There is a bit of a learning curve that comes with it especially if you are used to Color but it is quite a refreshing tool to work with once you get the hang of it. I would highly recommend this tool to any serious colorist.

 

[Gunleik Groven]

Considering testing...

As for Color, is DPXs the format of choice?

 

[zeus]

DVI is 8 bits only. A second DVI port for monitoring eats a lot of the power of the graphics card. This is not the case with a Nvidia HDSDI board. Hence you've got much better performance of the grading system. SDI is not going to die in the next decade.

Hans

Hans,

Thanks for the Info! I have been trying to figure that out for some time now.

 

[Hans von Sonntag]

Considering testing...

As for Color, is DPXs the format of choice?

I'm a longtime SpeedGrade user and like it a lot. It matured in the last year and the conforming tools are now working very well. Conforming from QT- Proxies or ProRes with a FCP/AVID EDL to R3D, DPX, QT-UC ProRes, CineForm is a breeze. It is quite stable and thanks to it's clever architecture I never lost one single grade even after a full system break down. But SpeedGrades particular strengths are it's delicate colour manipulation abilities.

Scratch and SpeedGrade are the two mid-end solution for everyone who is serious about grading. Which one of the two to choose it up to ones personal taste, how the desired applications are and how deep the pocket is. Both are very powerful and can grade off R3Ds in RT half debayer. This means off a Red 4K source you get full resolution 2K/1080p playback up to 30 fps.

You don't get such a performance with a cheap PC. Both applications need a powerful 8 Core Nethalem (HP Z800 for instance) and Nvidia Quadro 5800fx with SDI board. Not to mention an appropriate program monitor and Tangent controller - all together quite an investment. But like with the RedOne it does pay off. All the boutiques I know which invested in one of the two and delivered a decent Red workflow had much work to do (and still have).

Proper grading is for Red vital, which surely does not rule out Color - only if time is a factor, IMHO.

Hans

 

[Luca Immesi]

I was wondering what if you connect the DVI to Matrox MXO then to SDI. Only provide 8-bit output though. Ouch.

I've got a mac pro 8 core Two 2.66GHz Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processors with an ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB and 12 gb of ram connected to an MXO with 2 cinema displays and one SDI Jvc broadcast CRT monitor. Although it's 8 bit I think it works really well especially with the gamma consistency of snow leopard.
I've got a common internal raid 0 of 3 tera and with 2k prores 4 I can have playback from 22 to 25 fps.