Bruno Mansi

Hi Orash, Found this on the Specracal website... System Requirements Windows 7® or later with latest operating system updates installed (recommended: Windows 7® or later) 2 GHz processor (recommended: 2 GHz Dual Core Processor) 2 GB RAM (recommended: 4 GB RAM) Microsoft® .NET Framework 4.5 CalMAN Studio also supports Windows 7® or later in VMWare Fusion® and Bootcamp® for Mac OS X® users. Haven't looked at the Light Illusion site but I imagine Steve Shaw will no doubt respond in due course.

Without wishing to state the obvious, I would have thought the answer to this question would be to look at the Light Illusions and Spectracal websites.... or is it you want us to do the work for you? I would have thought the requirements would be fairly modest, so you might even consider a good, second-hand laptop.

Isn't this a case of never throwing anything away and just making a copy of the entire timeline? Alternatively, you can make versions of any of your graded shots and just do the necessary changes. Resolve keeps all your versions, so you can always go back to the original/previous grade.

The LG OLED range? For it's price point, one of the better displays for home use. LG are due to bring out their 2018 range in the next couple of months, so you might start to see dealers reducing the price of the 7 series to clear the way for the new stock.

It would have been nice to have seen some examples of the bot's grades and improvements over the learning cycles.

I don't think you can really compare a full Resolve or Baselight system with a plugin on an editing system. If your workflow is such that you're not able to go to a dedicated grading suite, Baselight Editions is a very good substitute. It will certainly give you a good introduction to the power of Baselight, but someone who wants to go in-depth with the software would probably want to try out Baselight Student.

I would also advise anyone using Mocha with After Effects to take a look at MochaImport+. It's essentially a script that you install in AE that adds a lot of extra functionality to the tracking data that gets brought into an After Effects layer. Take a look at this link that describes the features... https://mamoworld.com/mochaimport-mini-tutorials I can particularly recommend the Stabilized Precomp function. It's something I've used on many occasions.

Mocha Pro is now also available as an Avid or OFX plugin, which saves having to export your video every time you want to planar track something. It's also included as part of the tool-set in the latest Boris Continuum suite of plugins, although I think it might be missing the remove module in this case. It's always been my go-to application when I have a difficult track to do. It's particularly good with object removal/replacement where there's perspective changes or obstructions that tend to throw off point trackers

Most modern motherboards now have extensive monitoring abilities in their BIOS setup menus. I would go there and see what your fans are doing in response to the various temperatures reported for your CPU. The CPU fan should basically increase in speed when required by rising temperatures within the CPU. If the fan is just randomly changing speed for no reason it might indicate a problem.

No need to export any media from MC as Resolve will happily read the OP Atom files that exist within the Avid Mediafiles folder. Just export an AAF, linked to the media. If you're on the same workstation Resolve should find the Avid media when it imports the AAF. If you're going somewhere else for your grade, you'll need to copy all your Avid media and take it with you. It's likely that the original AAF links to the media will be different on the Resolve setup, so you may need to tell Resolve where the media lives. I've found in these cases it's best to just bring in all the Avid media to the media pool first, and then import the AAF. If there's a lot of media in the Mediafiles folder (most of which isn't needed) you could consolidate first in MC (with a second or so of handles) and then just bring that media to the grade. If you need to go back to Avid for any reason, you've got the choice of exporting the grade as one long clip, or individual OP Atom files which can go back into a numbered folder within Avid Mediafiles/MXF.

I'm by no means an expert in all this colour science, and I'm sure there's others on this forum who'll give you a more informed break-down of what's going on with log to 709 conversions. Rec709 is a standard in terms of the range of colours that are permissible within the prescribed gamut. It's a standard that was chosen for the reason that it would be achievable by the majority of the display technologies that existed at the time. If you use a standard digital camera that records in Rec709, then you would expect that with grading/editing software that is setup as a Rec709 project, your camera rushes would look roughly the way you'd expect, and that gamma and colours should be roughly within spec. What you do with the image after that is up to you, as long as you stay within the limits defined by the standard, otherwise you'll end up with illegal levels/colours etc. With high-end cameras that record wide colour gamuts and log levels, you'll need some kind of transform (or LUT) to get it to fit into the Rec709 colour space. How that's done is open to some interpretation, but the camera manufacturers provide their own conversion LUTs to best utilise the abilities of the camera and produce the most pleasing image. Sometimes they may tweak these LUTs to (say) push a little more green into flesh tones or play around with highlight/lowlights to give the sort of look that people often associate with Arri or Red cameras. I don't think they would regard these as highly inaccurate, as I'm sure they've put a fair amount of effort into their design, but rather subtle changes to a purely technical LUT in an attempt to give the end user a choice in the starting point for their images before any further grading is done.

Rec709 was set up by the ITU over 25 years ago as a set of standards for HDTV. The part of the Rec709 standard I think you're referring to is the 709 gamut, which defines the colour space of the RGB primaries as well as gamma curves, although these curves were really designed for CRT displays. I think the newer BT.1886 standards have modified the gamma curves somewhat, to suite modern display technologies. As the name implies, cameras which record log images are just applying a logarithmic curve to better retain the low & high level detail. A log to 709 transformation simply applies the necessary corrections to bring the image back to a 'normalised' image as defined by the 709 standard.

Well, they would wouldn't they? I wonder what the people at the Foundry would say, given that Nuke is used on the majority of features for vfx work?

There was a previous discussion on Baselight Editions for Avid on this forum. See.....

How strange! The internet said Dmax is a hair salon in Kings Cross, London UK, with "good prices and excellent services". But I do know that Kodachrome is a Paul Simon song off of his third album.

Is this a quiz, or are you just too lazy to look this up?

I guess to keep the price down. Once you add SDI inputs it's likely to add a few thousand Euros to the price, which brings it close to the cost of Sony's BVM X300

Name any product in Apple's current line-up that will take just one Quadro P6000 How about a product that'll take one GTX 1080Ti? To any TV/film professional who needs a well-specced workstation, that makes a difference. Whether it's a 48 hour or a 48 minute render, it all makes a difference. That's why some have resorted to building 'Hackintoshes', so they can have the Mac workstation that Apple should be making.

Having worked with both PC and Mac operating systems over 35 years, I've never quite understood why some are so partisan towards one OS or the other. They're similar enough for me to not bother which OS I'm on when I'm moving files/collecting mail/etc, and once I'm using an application like Resolve or Avid, everything is pretty much identical. The most problem I have when switching is getting my left -hand fingers to change from Ctrl-Z to Command-Z. For me it's really about the hardware. So for Avid, you can pretty much use either system as Media Composer doesn't put that much of a strain on resources. Most of the Z series workstations will work well and you'll have enough expansion for extra drives/RAID cards/output cards. With Mac, you're probably looking at something like an iMac with Thunderbolt ports for your storage etc. When we talk about Resolve, You really do need a powerful workstation with lots of up-gradability and PCIe slots. Unfortunately this is where Apple's product line-up falls short. The Mac Pro trash-can is the only one that can approach the necessary performance that is required for serious colour work. However, it's high price, old technology, non up-gradability and ongoing problems with heat-related issues make it (in my opinion) a non-starter. Your only real option is going PC, and that means a high-specced Z840 is the minimum you should be looking at. Many people on this forum have spent the extra money on more custom-built solutions which can really extract the best from today's top performing hardware.

Been spreading this around a few forums. Gigabyte have just introduced a new motherboard with onboard Thunderbolt 3. I know a lot of us have been waiting for this to come to PC motherboards, without having to resort to add-on PCIE cards. http://uk.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/X299-DESIGNARE-EX-rev-10#kf

Glad to see you had a happy ending.... and at such a low cost! If you have any time to share any of your further experience/tests using the Bizonbox, I'm sure we'd all like to hear about them.

As far as I'm aware, the HDlink series were similar to Blackmagic's current range of mini converters, in that they only need connecting to a computer to change settings, load LUTS etc. I'm guessing you only need to do this on an occasional basis, so your suggestion about using a laptop with an old OS (Mac or Windows) should be fine. I'm assuming you want to use it to convert SDI to HDMI (or DVI) for monitoring purposes?

If it's a delivery requirement for the broadcaster, then that dictates your project settings. As far as the visible effects of choosing an interlaced format is concerned, rollers look a lot smoother, as do some animated effects. Shooting interlaced gives less motion blur, which might be good for sports programmes, but many people comment that it makes things look more 'video' and less 'filmic', which is why so many dramas are being shot progressive. I'm not totally up to speed with all the issues with NTSC (being in the UK), but if broadcasters were to go over to progressive transmissions, I wonder how they would deal with telecine transfers and 3:2 pulldown, since that relies on having fields. I'm guessing they might adopt a 24 fps transmission system.

The Flanders website are saying this is a 65" monitor. Since it's OLED, I'm wondering who's panel it's using. LG?

Try going back to one 1920x1080 display, so that Windows will set the resolution to match. You can then check the settings to make sure they're correct before connecting the second display.