Any longtime member of the Creative Cow forums might recall some…. well how shall I describe them…. let’s say, “difference of opinion” discussions between BlackMagic Design’s Grant Petty and myself. It got to the point where I was politely (well maybe not so politely) asked to refrain from posting in the BMD forum.
To be honest, I wasn’t all that nice and Grant and I got into things a little too personally. It wasn’t professional and fortunately I’ve learned from those lessons. In fact Grant and I get along quite well and I enjoy getting the chance to talk to him in Vegas each year at NAB. This past year my wife and I spent over an hour chatting about BMD, DaVinci, the iPad, iPhone and even what games little kids love to play on the phones. It was fun and as always, he was very gracious with his time.
So during the show Grant asked if I would be interested in poking around DaVinci Resolve when it was ready for some outside testing. Took me of all the blink of an eye to say “Yes.” Of course he knows I’m a big AJA Video Systems guy so I was rather surprised he even asked, but as I said, we’ve grown to respect each other and if there’s one thing we both have in common is a passion for all things Post Production.
So when I got the call a few weeks ago that they were ready to start shipping the software, I reminded the rep that I have all AJA products here which don’t support Resolve. No problem, they’d send me a BMD card. Well, they didn’t just “send me a BMD card,” they sent the BMD HD Extreme 3D card set. So for the first time, I’ll be pulling out an AJA Kona 3 on one of my Mac Pros and installing the BMD HD Extreme 3D. I’ll also be pulling out an ATI 4870 card in lieu of the nVidia 4800 Quadro for Mac. Again, this is for the Resolve which is only supported via the nVidia card. No, I will NOT be installing two graphics cards in the system, I was told by BMD that the 4800 will fully support Resolve by itself, I’ll just be sacrificing some realtime functionality. For testing out and learning the software, that’s no biggie. When it comes time to outfit our full-time system in the new facility, absolutely I’ll be installing dual graphics cards in that system.
So I’ll be installing everything in the next few days and I’ll report back on how it’s going. Yes, BMD is ok with me sharing information even though we’re in Beta. I’m not used to this quite honestly, usually we have to keep our mouths tightly zipped for fear of Big Brother. Fortunately I have some friends here in Atlanta who are HUGE DaVinci users who will be able to help me get up to speed quickly on the software and we’ll be running the Tangent Wave with the thing as well.
So thanks Grant for the opportunity and we’re really looking forward to moving into a whole new realm of DaVinci!
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.