Emily Haine March 23, 2018 Share March 23, 2018 We are on HP z840 machines and that works well, but I wonder if any of you run Davinci Resolve and Avid on iMacs? Can it handle it? Link to comment Share on other sites
Bruno Mansi March 24, 2018 Share March 24, 2018 The film school that I lecture at has iMacs running Avid and they seem to work pretty well. MC really doesn't demand too much from the hardware if you're working with DNxHD media, but they do struggle with linked UHD or imported full rez DNxHR. They've got a new iMac Pro arriving soon for their mastering room, which is replacing an ageing cheese-grater Mac, so I'll let you know how that works when I get my hands on it. I'm sure it'll be comparable in performance to a modern i7 or i9 PC workstation. The big question is one of suitability in a professional environment. I don't like the idea of hanging everything off of Thunderbolt, and despite all the hype about how fast Thunderbolt 3 is, I firmly believe that having hardware on dedicated PCIE slots is going to give the best performance - and performance is what Resolve really needs. Many professional colourists have turned to custom-built PC workstations to get the amount of RAM, drive performance and multiple GPUs they need, which you simply can't do with iMacs. I know there's those who will mention about all those eGPU boxes you can buy to enable you to have two GTX1080s on an iMac, but the laws of physics still apply. Sending high frequency signals up-and-down flimsy cables is not good design. Motherboard manufacturers go to great lengths to keep high frequency PCIE lanes short and isolated on their PCBs to minimise things like cross-talk and signal loss. There's also the question of turnaround time for technical issues. If a workstation goes bad, with a stock of spares I reckon I can have most breakdowns fixed within an hour - many swap-outs only take a couple of minutes.. The HP Z series is completely tool-less for most replacements, whereas if an iMac goes down, you either have to prize off the (glued) front screen to gain access to the innards (not a job for the faint-hearted) or send the whole thing off to an Apple dealer. This is why so many of the people who make their living relying on Apple hardware are desperate for a proper Mac Pro box. My advice? If it's simply for Avid, then an iMac will probably be fine - you can even repurpose your older iMacs as a second screen. If you want to run Resolve then get a good PC workstation from HP or Dell, or even a built system from specialists such as Puget. If you simply can't get on with the Windows OS, then there's always a Hackintosh build. This takes more work in setting up, but there's people on this forum (and on LiftGammaGain) have got really powerful and stable PC systems running Mac OS. Link to comment Share on other sites
Emily Haine March 24, 2018 Author Share March 24, 2018 Thank you for all the details, very useful information! We will not work with UHD+ in Avid, we usually transcode all media to DNx36 for offline. Do you have any experience with working directly on the camera proxy files from RED and Alexa within Avid? Would save a great load of transcoding time. Link to comment Share on other sites
Bruno Mansi March 24, 2018 Share March 24, 2018 The students do shoot on an Alexa, but it's all HD Prores 422HQ which they bring in to Avid at full quality, so no proxies. Given that you're not working at UHD resolutions, I'm assuming your reasons for transcoding to DNxHD36 is to do with disk space? Link to comment Share on other sites
Emily Haine March 24, 2018 Author Share March 24, 2018 In production, it's always 4K+, Raw etc. We transcode to make Avid handle it, not disk space as we have Nexis. Link to comment Share on other sites
Bruno Mansi March 25, 2018 Share March 25, 2018 14 hours ago, Emily Haine said: We transcode to make Avid handle it, not disk space as we have Nexis Have you tried linking to the 4K media directly and then working in timeline proxy mode in Avid? There are one-quarter and one-sixteenth modes to improve responsiveness. Might not work too well with RAW, but I've seen reasonable performance on z840s with certain 4K codecs. Link to comment Share on other sites
Emily Haine March 25, 2018 Author Share March 25, 2018 I have not tried that, but I will give it a go. Any ABC guide on how to set this up? How about working on the camera proxies that are generated in camera?Is that possible? Link to comment Share on other sites
Bruno Mansi March 25, 2018 Share March 25, 2018 38 minutes ago, Emily Haine said: I have not tried that, but I will give it a go. Any ABC guide on how to set this up Assuming you've set up your UHD project and linked to your rushes, you simply go to the Format tab (next to the Effects tab) and select the Proxy drop-down. Here you'll see the options for 1920x1080 (1/4) and 960x540 (1/16). 46 minutes ago, Emily Haine said: How about working on the camera proxies that are generated in camera?Is that possible? No reason why it shouldn't. You'll just need to be sure you can link back to the original rushes when you've finished. Re-linking in Avid can sometimes be a bit of trial-and-error with the various settings, but if the proxy clips have the same name as the high rez clips, you shouldn't have any problem. Avid have quite a few options to deal with possible problems, such as ignoring file extensions and linking back to specific resolutions. I'd give it a quick trial run just to be safe - unless you're going to something like Resolve for your grade, and then it'll be the job of the colourist to do the re-linking to the camera originals. Link to comment Share on other sites
Emily Haine March 26, 2018 Author Share March 26, 2018 I'm very thankful for your answers Bruno, I will run a few proxy tests and think about if we will invest in a few iMacs for individual projects. Link to comment Share on other sites
