Bruno Mansi

There's been the odd rumour going around for a few years that Blackmagic would be interested in buying Avid. I never gave it much credence, but seeing how quickly they acquired Fairlight and managed to fully integrate it into the Resolve toolset, I'm wondering how well they could integrate Media Composer. With all the interest this new version has generated, I think it's the pure Colourist who might feel there's been less attention given to their wish list. There's a couple of things that will please (the increased performance and new plugins), but there's no doubt that there's more waves (excuse the pun) going around the audio community about this release than in the grading community. It does seem as if there's a perceptual shift in the way Blackmagic wants us to regard Resolve. Rather than it being primarily a grading tool, it's now a fully featured post production suite that included advanced colour grading. Even on their web site, the Resolve page is titled as 'Editing and Colour Correction'.

Just in case anyone wants a rundown of the new features, The Blackmagic web pages now have a 'What's New' video on the Resolve pages - and have slashed their prices on the Studio version!

Just had a sudden flashback to when the price of FCPX was announced!

Looks like some great features. Who thought the lens-flare wipes were a good idea? What with Resolve 14 being announced, it looks like a good week for Colourists at NAB! Are all the paint/tracking features going to appear in Baselight Editions? One of the selling points for users of the Editions was that you got the full Baselight toolset, which meant that anything you did on a full Baselight was available on your Avid/FCP timeline.

Nice to hear this track again. I remember the original version which was written and performed by Warren Zevon in the late 1970s.

It's certainly a confusing time for Mac users. At the beginning of the year, it definitely looked as if many had decided to switch to PC for their high-end workstations. Then Apple announce their intention to produce a new Mac Pro (sometime in the future), and now Baselight tease them with their student version, but only on the Mac OS! Seems like a slightly curious decision on Filmlight's part - I wonder if they intend to release a PC version in the future? I'm guessing there's a few more people taking another look at the possibilities of a Hackintosh.

I would be wary about using a brand new version of software on a paid project before testing it out fully! I would also recommend backing up your databases and/or projects before installing V14. I usually wait for at least a one point revision before trying out a new version of software, unless there's some 'must-have' feature I need immediately.

Which makes this quite bizarre. I think we have to assume the ASA and the pubic in general, are aware that a certain amount of 'photoshopping' is done on all commercials. I can only assume that it's fine for you to use anything in your 'bag of trickery' to give a person perfect skin if you're selling perfume or shoes, but not if you're selling face cream.

Just seen this... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-39639704 Rather surprising they picked on this ad, considering the amount of post 'beauty' work that is regularly carried out.

Don't know much about modern film stocks, but I remember back in the days of film photography Kodak generally produced warmer results, with similar Fuji stock tending a little towards greener tones. You could try going over to the Filmconvert web site, as they've produced plugins to emulate the look of various film stocks and have a number of tutorials/examples of their interpretation of different film emulsions.

If you look at the Quickspecs.... http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/getpdf.aspx/c04111526.pdf?ver=5 ...You'll see mention of the two versions of PSU available. On page 4 you'll see the HP requirements that... 'Intel® Xeon® processors E5-2643, E5-2665, E5-2667, E5-2670, E5-2680, E5-2687W, and E5-2690 REQUIRE the 1125W Power Supply Option' In fact, the higher wattage PSU can supply up to 1275 watts if used in regions with 230v supplies. (UK and parts of Europe). Page 5 states... 'The 1125W power supply can also supply 1275W of output power when the input voltage is greater than 105V. If the input voltage is less than 105V, but greater than 90V for any reason, the maximum power that can be drawn is 1125W. An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) is highly recommended if 1275W output power is desired.'

Hi Nicolas, If this was purely a software crash you'd expect to see a message or the BSOD (blue screen of death). I had this on an HP Z series workstation and it turned out to be a failing power supply unit. The PSU is designed to shut down if it goes out of spec on its power rails and this was happening on this particular machine every time I tried to render out of After Effects - I'm guessing the extra demands on the Nvidia graphics card was causing the shut-down. This problem quickly got worse, until the machine would shut down during boot-up. This is not a rare fault, as I soon discovered when I googled the problem, and the only answer is to swap out the PSU, which is thankfully an easy task on the Z820s. Being of proprietary design, you have to go for an HP replacement, which will set you back around £150. If you have another machine handy, you could try swapping the PSU to see if this cures the problem. Be aware that there's two versions of this PSU, an 850 watt and an 1110 watt. The higher wattage version was recommended for those filling their machines with power hungry graphics cards/RAID arrays and was fitted as standard on dual processor models.

Hi Orash, I think 'the industry' doesn't really have a united voice when it comes to addressing training on new technology. The simple fact is that big facilities and post houses will be the ones who can afford to invest in the HDR equipment and address all of the potential issues in meeting the broadcaster specs. They will no doubt charge a premium for this service to make it profitable for them to invest in the technology, and they won't really want to make it easier for smaller boutiques or freelancers to be able to offer similar services, as that will drive down prices (and profit margins). A similar thing happening when HD first arrived. I remember the post house I was working at replacing it's Meridian Symphony for a Nitris, adding a Sony HD monitor and charging an extra £60/hour for the hire of the suite. Of course, eventually someone like Blackmagic will produce a HDR monitor at an amazingly good price, and the floodgates will open. Remember when broadcast cameras, Avid edit workstations and grading equipment cost many tens of thousands of dollars? For a freelancer like myself, I don't see how I will be able to gain the necessary experience in the near future. My options would be to work for a post house with the necessary equipment or hope that one of the independent training houses produces a course at a reasonable price. I still face the problem of buying a professional 4K HDR reference monitor, which will simply be out of my price range for the next few years.

I think the whole HDR grading issue is a constantly moving target, and whatever experience one gains with present monitor technology, will need modifying in the future. The holy grail of HDR seems to be displays achieving UHD with Rec 2020 colour space and 10,000 nit brightness, but there's no current monitor that can achieve this. For those of us lucky enough to be able to work with one of the monitors previously listed, we can experiment with working in DCI P3 at somewhere between 1000 - 4000 nits, but as monitor technology improves, we will no doubt need to modify/adapt our techniques. There's many other issues that come to mind that will need addressing, such as... How will HDR effect us in terms of eye fatigue or metameric failure? Will we need to think about adjusting room illumination/monitor backlighting with these new displays? HDR monitors are only designed to display a small percentage of the available pixels at their peak brightness due to problems with power consumption and overheating panels. All HDR monitors thus have protection circuitry built in to clamp pixel brightness should you exceed the safe limits. The current thinking on grading HDR seems to be that the majority of the frame will still sit somewhere in the 0 to 120 nit range, but that speculars are allowed to exploit the full range of brightness available. Of course, we all know that if you have the potential of pushing (say) large portions of sky to 3000 nits, someone will insist you do it, even if you tell them that the protection circuitry is kicking in. Although it might be artistically valid on your monitor, it's likely to look worse on domestic monitors that can't achieve the same results. It seems that there will be a need to create a SDR version along with our HDR master, to cope with the viewers who will be watching with older monitor technology. How easily are we able to 're-adjust' to doing a grading pass in SDR, after a long session in a HDR suite? An hour... a day? It would be interesting to hear the experiences of anyone on this forum who has had the chance of working with HDR, on the problems they've encountered.

They've renamed it to 'Link to..' but it's still using the AMA plugins to provide support for the codec. The browser is another way of looking at your media and provides drag and drop linking/importing to your bins. Have a look at this YouTube video for details on how to use it.

You'll need the Red AMA plugin. See the following article from Avid... http://avid.force.com/pkb/articles/en_US/Download/en394823

To be honest, I've never understood why people are so partisan over their preferred OS. From my perspective, they're all pretty similar in function and it's the actual software that I run which makes the biggest difference to me. Whether its Resolve, Media Composer or After Effects, they all look (and behave) pretty much identically under the Mac or Windows OS. When I first started working in our industry, it was IBM computers running DOS, but I spent many years on Mac systems because that's the hardware and OS that worked with the editing software I was using. It was only when only when we went to an Avid Symphony system that we jumped to Windows and IBM hardware simply because (at that time) Apple didn't have workstations that allowed for all the extra hardware required. Apple somewhat rectified the situation when they adopted Intel CPUs and their 'cheese-grater' workstations, but by then, many of us had spent a lot of money on Windows software. If Apple had allowed us to run Windows natively on their systems without emulation software, we might have gone with one of their workstations, as they were a nice machines. I think this was an era when companies like Apple prided themselves on producing the best systems they could, and we were happy to pay lots of money for them - and charge our customers accordingly! Now everything's been driven by profit margins and there's no room for the idea that "if we build the best we can, the customers will come". Apple and their shareholders know this, and no matter how large the company is, they aren't going to invest the time and resources on projects that account for 1% of their business. Apple will stick with what they know the majority of their customers want, and that's the world of iphones, ipads and imacs. For media professionals like us, we have to accept that the future is likely to be Windows (or even Linux) based hardware. It might seem like a hard thing to accept, but put in perspective, the change is much easier than the one we (here in the UK) had when we changed our currency from one based on 240 pence in the pound to one base on 100 pence!

It may be with this sort of situation, that the only way to get the control you need is with a matte that completely cuts away the subject from the background. This type of articulated matte is probably beyond what you can realistically achieve with the software you're currently grading on (Resolve, Baselight?) so you'll need to use other software for your rotoscoping work. In my opinion, the best at doing this sort of work is Mocha Pro, but other software like After Effects and Silhouette should suffice.

There's more info about it on the Blackmagic website. Priced at about £800 in the UK, which was more than I expected, given how aggressively they tend to price their products. There's no display panels on the micro - if you want displays then you need the Mini Panel, which will set you back £2400, which is about the price you'd pay for a Tangent Element bundle. The Avid Artist Color is starting to look like good value!

There's been lots of discussion about this on the 'Lift Gamma Gain' forums. Some of he real Apple diehards are choosing to be brave and go the Hackintosh route. The rest seem split between an HP/Dell workstation or building a custom PC system. The general tone of the discussions is that there's little hope that Apple are going to come out with a new Mac Pro that's going to fulfill their needs.

That's basically it, in a nutshell. To expand on what Anthony said... Having the full Baselight Editions plugin installed in Avid also allows you to see how all the layers of the grade were applied and lets you change a grade if required. You don't need the full (paid) version of the Avid plugin if you just want to apply (and render) the Baselight grade. Filmlight provide a free version of the plugin which you can install on as many Avid workstations as required. Of course, you can't alter the grade in any way with this version. If there's a change to an individual shot that the colourist needs to send to the Avid timeline, rather than generating a new AAF, you can generate a BLG file - essentially an Open EXR file with all the metadata required to recreate the grade in Avid. There's also something called a 'lens' you can send to Avid. This is created from a range of BLG files which once applied to a new (top-most) layer in the Avid timeline, will dynamically link the correct grade to the shots on the layers below. All-in-all, it's a very cool set of workflows that completely eliminates the hassle of rendering out grades from Baselight and bringing them into Avid. To see this in action, have a look at this Filmight tutorial.

And their second-hand value has now increased!

Something like this? http://www.brizsoft.com/lut-converter/

Those of us who use, or have some interaction with Avid software will probably have heard the recent announcement that with version 8.8, Phrasefind and Scriptsync have made a welcome return. What was less well publicised was the fact that you can now get your expired Avid software licence (or dongle) back to an active subscription. It was always the case that once your subscription had expired, you couldn't have access to any future updates on that licence. It seems that Avid have now had a change of heart, and will allow you to reactivate your licence for $399 for the first year, which is $100 more than the usual cost of a yearly subscription.

Don't know much about surround sound in Resolve, but there are a number of different channel orders, such as SMPTE and Film. Protools (for example) has settings in its I/O menus for setting track order, as shown below Are there not similar settings in Resolve?