A few Gotchas with OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

OK, a quickie:

Snow Leopard is speedy according to the reviews I’m reading, but of particular note for us -

(Suspense! More after the jump)

Native Red Render speeds in new Color 1.5

Red .R3D render speeds in Color - sloooowww

Good news/bad news -

Good news - the new Apple Color version 1.5 (part of the new Final Cut Studo) reads R3D files natively - you can even start a new project and pull in a clip! You have controls for directly accessing the 12 bit RAW Redcode controls in the Primary Color room - this is great! It also does a full resolution, high quality debayer, which is the highest quality way to do this - better than the half res solution that Final Cut Pro utilizes. For the money, this is definitely the easiest, highest quality, most control solution for grading your Red footage. All good news.

Bad news - for now, it is SLOOOOOOOOW - on an maximally pimped system*, it was rendering about 1.43 fps - so about 17 times slower than realtime. And this was only with a simple lift/gamma/gain adjustment, no color adjustments, no secondaries, no filters, no rescale, etc., all of which can make the process take even longer. Ouch! Here’s to hoping that Apple will support the Red Rocket card to accelerate debayering and scaling of Red .R3D files directly within Color in a future version.

Read on for details.

Video Tour of Rocketcine-X build 566

Red recently released the Red Rocket board, a PCIe card to accelerate the tediously slow conversion of R3D files to something more immediately useful, like QuickTime files, DPX and TIFF sequences.

As usual, Red has shipped hardware as soon as the hardware was ready, and the software is playing catchup, so at this time, there is only an alpha stage piece of software called Rocketcine-X that can actually utilize the Red Rocket to accelerate R3D conversions. Red says that it will require only relatively minor changes to applications that already support Red’s R3D API in their code, so hopefully vendors will quickly be able to implement support of the Red Rocket card. We’re looking at you, Apple, Avid, Adobe. Ahem!

So what is Rocketcine-X? It is a blend of Redcine (if you’ve used that) and RedRushes (if you’ve used that) that allows you to load a series of R3D shots, grade them individually, tweak the color parameters on a shot by shot basis, and output to QuickTime files or DPX or TIFF sequences, and export batches while you keep working. That is the good news. The bad news is that this is in development, alpha level software with a lot of bugs and features omitted, such as:
-you can’t save a Rocketcine-X project
-you can’t scale with letterboxing - crucial for 2:1 footage to fit properly into a 16:9 movie or image sequence.
-you can’t add windowburned timecode readouts at all.

Oh, and as usual for Red, there is zero documentation at this early stage in the game. (EDIT: To be fair, their approach is of the “If someone can find this useful, lets get it to them ASAP and we’ll follow up with docs/updates ASAP.”)

Fortunately, it is somewhat straightforward, but here’s a video tour of the features and some of the limitations I made. It is long, about 22 minutes, but is only 32MB, and if you watch it, you’ll know the ins and outs of the program pretty well. Video and bug list after the jump.

New ProRes info - Data Rate Chart

Apple posted a handy white paper on the new ProRes codecs, and there’s some good stuff in there.

I went digging through the ProRes white paper that Apple posted with the release of Final Cut Pro 7, and found some useful info (which I’m betting they won’t mind m highlighting here). Read on.

Apple’s much improved laptop repair service

Several years ago, my Mom’s original iBook (the blue toilet lid looking ones) got goofed up - I broke one tiny piece of a keyboard key spring while upgrading a hard drive or something. LIterally, it was a tiny wishbone piece about 6mm long - I just needed a new one of those and I could fix the rest. Could I get that from Apple? Nope - it was $400 to get the entire keyboard replaced - the only option offered - that was my last Apple laptop repair experience.

Fast forward, I was in a car wreck at the very end of last year (talk about going out with a bang) that rolled the car - everything inside went on Tumble Dry for a few seconds.

Ever since then, I’ve had a persnickety problem with the WiFi on my first gen Macbook (2GHz black model) - once it warmed up, the usable WiFi range would drop down to just a few feet - I had to sit in arm’s reach of the Time Capsule to get a signal. No couch surfing, no bed email - bummer.

Read on to see how things have improved.

Caveats of upgrading to Final Cut Server 1.5

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: If you are in a mixed Intel/PPC environment, think very carefully before committing to Final Cut Server 1.5, there are many caveats. I don’t recommend a mixed FCP 6/7 environment with Final Cut Server 1.5, nor do I recommend installing Final Cut Server 1.5 in a primarily FCP 6 environment if you want distributed processing for Final Cut Server 1.5.
EDIT: DO NOT install the Qmaster Node for Final Cut Server 1.5 on a Final Cut Pro 6.x box! I’m still trying to get Compressor to work a day later after uninstalling and then reinstalling. UGH!

Read on after the break for the details, such as the dangers of using the new Qmaster node with older Final Cut Pro 6 installed.

DGA Digital Day 2009 Conference Notes

This will be looooooong - these are my raw notes, as taken, of sitting in on the panels at the DGA Digital Day today. I saw almost everything, but skipped out on some VFX stuff to go see the footage demos, which I found a bit disappointing due to incompleteness - no D21 or Sony camera footage. But it was VERY helpful to see camera demos back to back to back to get a sense of what they could do. Coverage begins after the jump. And since it is my raw, unedited notes as taken, no complaints - you get what I typed without looking, so if I typo’d, yeah. I typo’d.  The best stuff is the one on film distribution - indies, take heart - there IS hope, you just gotta play a different game.

Notes from DGA Digital Day 2009 vendor area & camera footage demos

OK, here’s a two parter - went to the DGA Digital Day (that’s the Directors Guild of America to you) and it was basically in two parts - sit down presentations, and a vendor area to wander. Here’s my notes from the vendor area, after the jump. EDIT - and I put my notes from the camera vendor demo footage in here too - seemed a better place for it.

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