Bruno Mansi

Don't know about renting a probe, but there's been discussions in the past that although you can reasonably calibrate the LG OLEDs for SDR, they're not suitable for serious HDR work. If I remember correctly, they're WOLED displays and start to badly desaturate at higher nit values. I'm sure there are other, more knowledgeable people who will comment further on this.

I think this is a very sensible approach. I guess the desire to try to get workstation-like performance out of a laptop is also fuelled by the fact that we're being forced into working remotely. We want the same experience at home as we get at our office/facility without having to lug all that equipment home and annoy one's partner! I did see that on Barefeats.com, they did some tests on storage speed between M1 and Intel Macs and their conclusion was... 'The M1 MacBook Pro's READ speed was slower than the 2020 MacBook Pro 13" but the WRITE speed was slightly faster.' So, not everything is necessarily faster. If disk throughput is important for your work, the M1s might not be the best option. At the end of the day, this is an ever-changing scenario. I've been reading that due to AMD and Apple's success with their chipsets, Intel are going to be introducing hybrid 12th generation CPUs, which look like being competitive performance-wise with Ryzen and M1.

It's my view that despite the number of external ports you might have, it's the total throughput of the CPU/hardware that's the deciding factor. So, if your Thunderbolt controller has a 40Gbs bandwidth, that's all you can (theoretically) get from all your Thunderbolt ports combined. This is without factoring in the effect that having active HDMI ports might have. You see this all the time when you start looking at CPU/motherboard specs when building PCs. When you delve down into these specs, you'll often see the manufacturers state something like 'when using the second M2 slot, the bandwidth of PCIE slot 2 will reduce from x16 to x8).' As an early adopter of the new M1 Macs, you end up being the guinea pig for testing out these scenarios! The rest of us will no doubt benefit from your results. I suspect there's already people with similar desires testing this out for you. They often pop up on YouTube. Barefeats.com are often quick-out-of-the-gate with testing all things Mac related, I know they recently did a comparison between Intel and M1 chipped Macs.

With this many external devices, are you not going to saturate your Thunderbolt connections? Having monitors connected is really going to eat up the bandwidth. Although Thunderbolt is fast, I believe there are restrictions when you want monitors and fast storage attached in the chain. Also, I did hear that (presently) you can't attach external GPUs to the M1 Macs.

I did hear that you can't attach external GPUs (eg. the Blackmagic eGPU ) to the M1, so this may have implications for professional colourists. Don't know if this applies to any other external PCIE cards you might want to use. I can imagine that for those involved in music production, the M1 may be problematic as they often have a lot of legacy hardware hanging off their machines. There's no doubt that these machines are going to be great for home use and occasional light work, but I can't see them replacing (say) the Mac Pro for professional use. Whether we'll ever see a M-chipped Mac Pro is another matter. And of course, they're still continuing this trend of having nothing replaceable/upgradable, so they really are disposable when something goes seriously wrong with them. Maybe we are reaching a point of the end of actual ownership of domestic computer products. Just as many are switching over to car leasing as a more convenient way of having a motor vehicle (especially for electric cars), there's no reason I can think of why it wouldn't work for home computers. With everything backed up in the cloud, if your laptop breaks or you suddenly want a more powerful model, your leasing agreement should be able to accommodate your wishes.

You've probably been told this because this this is still the most trouble-free method of not having to deal with the colour management within the GUI /OS. The prices of IO boxes like you mention are very cheap these days (thanks to Blackmagic) and every recent Mac has thunderbolt, so there's no reason not to use this method. The issue of having reassurance in your delivery then purely rests with the monitor your using and how well it's calibrated. I would keep the HDMI port for extending your GUI display area, especially if you're working on a laptop.

Prices vary enormously between versions. For an OFX version of Continuum, an annual licence is only $146 (in the Black Friday sale), whereas for Avid it's $371. Seems like good value to get the plugins for Resolve and probably more useful in a finishing system. A new permanent licence seems to be about four times an annual. Even then, I think you have to pay an upgrade cost once your first year of free upgrades is up. With an annual licence, you can always get the latest version. Whatever you decide, their Black Friday sale (up to 50% off) is ending very soon!

The LG OLEDS are going to be more expensive than the 700 Euros you'd budgeted for. OLEDs do give deep blacks that the other monitors can't really match. The size of these monitors is something else to contend with. LG now do a 48 inch version (LG48CX) which is presently more expensive than the 55 inch, and will mean you really need to double your budget. Current wisdom around the forums is that they can be reasonably well calibrated for SDR work, but not for HDR. They also only really have HDMI inputs, unlike computer monitors which often have Display port. Being OLED, you'll also have to contend with auto dimming and the possibility of screen burn-in if static images are left on the screen for too long. Search the forums for more info on this. Whichever monitor you go for, there are going to be compromises in the budget range you're talking about. It just depend which of these compromises you can live with.

I'd like to know why you were told that the 3080 isn't compatible with the Z840. It may be that the power requirements are beyond the PSU if you don't have the 1125W version (which is specced at 1450W if you're on 220 volt mains). These are very new cards, so there's not a lot of info about them regarding the Z840s. Have a look at this discussion on the HP website... https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Desktop-Hardware-and-Upgrade-Questions/New-Nvidia-3080-amp-3090-cards-on-HP-Z840-WS-1125w-220v/td-p/7787780 I suspect the biggest problems is getting hold of one of these cards at a reasonable price since they're going to be in short supply.

Isn't it ripple delete? So, mark area, right click and select Ripple Delete.

I haven't checked the latest version of Resolve, but I found the subtitling options rather limited when I last tried. I was running a lecture on subtitling in Avid, and part of the lecture showed the required steps to get subtitles out of Avid and into a format that Resolve could understand. However, a lot of the things you can do in Avid's subcap tool, you simply can't do in Resolve. I seem to remember you couldn't apply global changes throughout the captions. So (for example) if you changed the caption box opacity, you couldn't ripple it throughout the rest of the captions.

The not-so-polite answer would be... 'don't work on the sofa when your wife's there!' Fan noise is inevitable if you want cooling. Good laptop design will keep the fan speed down until it's needed, but ultimately, you cannot get away from the basic laws of physics. With desktops and workstations, you can install more/larger fans which spin slower and achieve the same cooling, thus reducing noise. Unfortunately, you can't really use this technique and maintain the slim design that most modern laptops aspire to. The tiny fans in modern laptops have a very high-pitched whine which can really annoy! If you look at the gaming laptops (which have full blown 2080 GPUs) you'll see how bulky they are because of the fans and cooling fins inside. I guess the noise doesn't matter so much when you're using a laser blaster to destroy enemy ships! I see most students wearing headphones when they're editing, so they're not bothered about the fans whining, but it's a pain for the rest of us! You may be able to download fan software to further tailor the speeds of your fan, but if you end up not giving it enough cooling, you're going to get thermal throttling. One tip I can give is to take care where you rest your laptop. My wife likes to use her Macbook Pro in bed on occasions, but it was really ramping up the fans even on light duties like reading mail. The problem was, she was resting the Macbook on the duvet, which was covering up the exhaust grills sufficiently to prevent adequate cooling. Using a hard surface helped. Also, consider removing the rear cover and cleaning out the dust occasionally. I changed the battery on my wife's Macbook recently (due to the dreaded expanding battery pack issue) and the amount of dust in the fans and fins was surprising!

Can't really comment on your particular workflow, as in the past I've used a Resolve-to-Avid-to-Resolve workflow. What I did find was that when transcoding in Resolve (Red to DNX) the metadata in the transcoded file didn't carry any shot/scene /take information to Avid. What I was able to do was create an ALE file (Avid Log Exchange) in Resolve, which when brought into Avid and linked to the media, would display the additional metadata. Not much help to you and I can see you tried a similar thing with XML which doesn't seem to have worked. BTW, are the two examples you show from the same clip? I ask because the Redcine X image shows Scene 3 whereas the Resolve Description field shows 1.

You don't mention what software you want to grade with, but assuming Davinci Resolve. According to the configuration guide.... MacBook Pro As all laptop systems are designed for portability and low power, for use with Davinci Resolve we recommend selecting the fastest CPU, 16GB of system memory and the GPU with the most memory that is currently available.

I seem to remember a discussion about this a few months ago. Unfortunately, I can't remember which forum it was on. As far as I remember, there's no option to embed the audio into the AAF, so you just have to export the clips into a separate folder. There doesn't seem to be a 'Handles' option in the Audio settings, however, there is one in the Video settings. There was some suggestion that setting the handles here will also do the same for the audio. Not sure if this means you have to export video as well. There's a video that goes into some of this here...

Hi Nicolas. As I've said previously, I don't personally own an Apple laptop, but we have them in the house (my wife is a long-time user). The schools I teach at have various types of iMac Pros/Macbook Pros (as do many of the students) so I've got to know how they perform over the years. For Media Composer, I think both of the models you've mentioned will work fine. I know there are issues using MC with Catalina (look at the Avid forums for details) which might be a problem if you buy a new 2020 Macbook Pro. A more interesting question is how these models will perform with Resolve. I think the issues will be less about the CPU clock speed and more about the type of graphics chips these models have, as Resolve relies a lot on GPU muscle. If you intend to use an eGPU with your setup, then this will really determine how well Resolve performs. There's also the issue of thermal throttling, which I believe the 2017 models suffered from more than an average laptop. If your Macbook is going to throttle because of inadequate cooling, the max clock/turbo speeds are pretty irrelevant. I believe Apple have improved the cooling situation with the 2020 models - no doubt there are others on Lowepost who have more experience with these issues and can advise. With all new hardware, there are always incremental speed improvements over older models, but is it worth the thousands of dollars you'll need to spend? Could the funds be better spent - eg. eGPU and external RAID storage? If your 2017 model is performing reasonably well, I would definitely consider going for the external graphics and storage solutions as a better option.

ditto

That all makes sense. So I'm guessing if there's an interpolation mode in Avid that isn't available/exactly the same in Resolve, there will be some discrepancies. There must be many instances in finishing work where the original interpolation used in the offline is neither known or able to be influenced.

Is this at the Avid end or Resolve end?

I do find that if you overlay a reference file of the cut from Avid, there's some very slight differences in timewarp effects when translated in Resolve. Nothing that cannot be fixed by adjusting the curves, but it seems to be there when the motion becomes more complicated in nature.

You should take a look at the 'Conforming in Davinci Resolve' course by Kevin MCauliffe (in the Courses section of Lowepost). If I remember correctly, it covered some of the aspects of bringing in Avid speed-ramps into Resolve. If you want to extend your knowledge to creating these effects, I guess you first need to decide if you want to learn how to do this in Resolve or within the Fusion module. If you've already had experience with motion effects in other applications, it's not that different in Resolve, but going to Fusion requires more investment in time to get your head around the nodal structure.

Not owning a Macbbook Pro, I'm probably not the best person to answer this, but you really cannot do any serious colour grading on a laptop screen - regardless of the make or model. Ideally, you'd want a separate grading monitor and a video output device from your Mac that bypasses all the OS colour management. Of course, this costs money and may be beyond your budget. I'd recommend you do some reading to find out the problems and the compromises you'll inevitably have to make if you grade from a laptop screen. As a general primer in colour management, I can recommend Jonny Elwyn's web site. Have a look at... https://jonnyelwyn.co.uk/film-and-video-editing/colour-management-for-video-editors/

If you're talking new, There's only really one model, and that's the 16" Macbook Pro 2020. I guess you probably mean what options should I purchase? The base model starts at $2.8K and rises to a whopping $6K+ if you go for a maxed out system. My personal opinion would be as follow... Don't bother with the 2.4gHz processor over the 2.3 - just a 4% difference. (save $200) Memory is the tough decision here. For many people 64GB would be a sweet-spot - especially if you're dabbling with Fusion. That's going to add $800 to the price. If memory were up-gradable, I'd go for the minimum and buy more myself, but you can't upgrade the memory in these models. I think I'd go with 32GB (+$400) and accept the limitations this might bring. The Radeon upgrade to 8GB seems reasonable (+$100) unless you're considering an eGPU setup, which will overshadow anything the inbuilt graphics can achieve. I would stick with the 1TB of SSD. With Thunderbolt you can attach lots of external SSD storage at half the price Apple will charge you. This would make my pick retail at $3.3K - not cheap but Avid should run pretty smoothly with it. The performance in Resolve is really going to depend on what nodes you throw at it, but you can't expect it to perform like a proper workstation with a high-end graphics card (or cards). Having something like one of Blackmagic's eGPU boxes will really make a difference in Resolve, but you're looking at an extra $700-1200. As far as connections to an external client monitor is concerned, there's dirt-cheap (Ultrastudio mini monitor) or something with more flexibility like the Ultrastudio HD/4K mini

I don't know of any way of doing this. I find the side-by-side method of comparing a reference to the master timeline works OK if you're checking for incorrect shots, but not that useful to check for correct resizing or motion effects. In these instances, I prefer to bring in the offline reference as a normal clip, place it (in sync) on a layer above and then switch its composite mode to Difference. Now as you scroll through, you should see near-to-perfect black if the shots are identical (assuming you've done no preliminary grade or colour transform), but where there are differences in size/position, these will be instantly visible. Forgive me if you already know this technique and I'm teaching you to suck eggs!

Can you not use the OFX grid in a timeline node? It will then just sit over the top of every shot/element. Not as convenient to switch on or off, but there seems to be nothing in the safe area settings that will give you what you want.