Winds from Sandy are whipping outside, though nothing like my friends are getting this up the East Coast. For those of us here in Georgia, Sandy brought a major blast of winter in the form of low 30 degree temps. So on this first evening of a lit fireplace, here’s some updates and random thoughts…..
Davinci Resolve Update
So in my last blog I mentioned how we were setting up a new Resolve suite and the plan was to transition our Dell PC Workstation over to Davinci Resolve. Well, that didn’t work out so well because the machine only had one nVidia card and we could not get Resolve to launch on it. I could have sworn it had dual nVidias but it didn’t so we reverted back to the Mac Pro 12 core which DOES have dual nVidia cards.
Anthro Fit Console, Computer Monitors (L & R), Flanders Scientific LM-2461W (Center) and Tangent Element Panels (front) in position. 6500k lights wash the wall.
Now those of you who have followed me for a while may remember that after NAB I got a set of Tangent Element panels that would not work with our system in the original screening room. We use Gefen 5500 Cat5 USB / DVI Extenders in that and most of our suites, and after about 5 minutes, the entire system would slow to a crawl when the Tangent Panels were enabled. So I continued to use the Wave panel in that suite because that worked fine.
In the new suite, we’re using a different set of extenders, with Gefen stand alone Cat5 DVI extenders and a Smart USB Cat5 extender. Yeah, technically this USB Extender is for use with Smart Boards, but we’re just using it to extend USB on our computer. Well now the Tangent panels are working perfectly fine. So the just over $100 USB extender works superior to the $2500 DVI / USB Extender. Who knows why, but I’m glad I can finally start learning utilizing the Tangents.
If you followed my tweets this past week you know that I’ve not been able to get Resolve 9.0 to launch on the Mac Pro. In fact, I’ve been trying for weeks on multiple systems and it kept crashing. I was extremely lucky to have Blackmagic Design’s Rohit Gupta and Peter Chamberlain in town this week visiting David Catt and all three made a quick visit to the office this morning. I did what any business owner would do when they have the product engineers and designers in the facility, I asked them to fix it!
Rohit Gupta (left), Peter Chamberlain (right), David Catt (standing)
Turns out the problem was as simple as the Mac Pro not booting up in 64 bit mode. I honestly had no idea Lion could boot up in 32 bit mode and according to Rohit, since this was a clean install on the 12 core Mac Pro, it should have defaulted to 64 bit when installed. So now I have to go back and look at all the other machines I tried to ensure they’re all in 64 bit.
That took all of 1 minutes for him to figure out. Then I got a nice personal walkthrough of the changes in Resolve 9 including some of the updated 9.0.3 features. I’m beyond excited about getting my feet wet in the new software.
Davinci Resolve 9 running (finally) in my suite. Not sure why the back wall has a green cast in this photo, must be the iPhone
With the guys in Rebecca’s Atomic Café. Somehow I’m always the short one in photos…. Really appreciated their help and compliments of our facility.
iMac Update
The second of our 27″ iMac machines arrived, literally the day before the new ones were announced. So of course we told John that his new machine sucks and threatened to egg it. But I digress….
Actually the machine caused a bit of a headache with the 32GB RAM kit from Other World Computing. For the first time since I’ve been ordering from them, we had major issues with their products. The first 32GB RAM kit (4 sticks, 8GB each) had two bad RAM sticks. iMac would not boot with all four of them in there. So OWC sent a second complete kit. Again, two bad RAM sticks. So I mixed the two good sticks from the first order and the two good sticks from the second order and finally the machine started up with the full 32GB of RAM. OWC of course took the four bad ones back and credited me for the purchase price.
Edit 5’s 27″ iMac, Behringer MON800, AJA IoXT, Flanders Scientific LM-2340W
This time I ordered an AJA T-Tap but because John does more capturing than the projects in Edit 2, we moved the original AJA IoXT into his suite and the T-Tap is installed in Edit 2. But they are literally interchangeable and I’m really growing on the idea of external boxes over internal cards. We also have the Blackmagic UltraStudio 3D so we can swap that in to do Resolve work in any suite as we replace our Mac Pros with the iMacs. Not that easy to do with Kona / Decklink cards inside a machine.
And yes, I plan to continue to replace our Mac Pros with the iMacs because they are working out really well and the price is right. The newly announced iMacs are just an absolutely killer edit workstation that will be augmented by just a few Mac Pro 12 Core machines to do heavy rendering. But for day to day editing with Premiere Pro or Avid, these machines are proving themselves as solid editing workstations in daily work.
Original Programming
If you haven’t seen the website yet, we’re planning to launch our first original series in early 2013. Not something I ever imagined producing, but an idea that I developed and have found a very enthusiastic audience. Concept is “Here to Cheer!” and it’s a new spin on Competitive Cheer. I’m very fortunate to have assembled an amazing, seasoned team to pull this series together and we’re looking forward to getting the venture off the ground. Will definitely update this blog and the Here to Cheer blog as we move forward.
In addition, we have more original concepts forthcoming that span everything from lifestyle to travel to cooking to animals to sports for both broadcast and digital delivery. We had a couple of false steps in the beginning but after re-grouping, changing direction and changing personnel, 2013 is going to be a very fun year. We’re fortunate to be working with some incredible folks to make it all happen.
I Scream You Scream for Ice Cream
Finally, if you are in Atlanta Saturday, Nov. 3rd you must head over to High Road Craft for their 2nd Anniversary party. Happening from 12-4 pm, it will feature some good food, music and of course ice cream.
I’m very fortunate to have gotten to know owners Keith & Nicki Schroeder over this past year and not only are they two of the most incredible folks you’ll ever meet, their company creates simply the most kick-ass ice cream and gelato you’ve ever tasted. You never know what flavors they’ll have but here’s something I found the last time I was there and yes, it was ridiculously good.
If you like ice cream, you owe it to yourself to get to the 2nd Anniversary party. If you can’t make it this Saturday, well they do have Factory Store hours every Saturday from 10am – 4pm. Not from Atlanta? Whole Foods & Fresh Market both carry their pints so you can pick them up there. You’ll be glad you did.
That’s some thoughts on this blustery evening. Stay safe my Northeast friends!
BISCARDI CREATIVE MEDIA is a full service digital media production company near Atlanta, Georgia with services that include Video Production, Sound Production, Sound Mixing, Graphic Design, Animation, Post Production, Video Editing, Color Grading, Finishing, Digital Asset Transfer, Digitizing and Archiving. Quite simply we’re the people who make video and media production easy for you. No technobabble. Just clear, concise and creative content delivered where and how you need it, on time and on budget. Office and production space is also available for short and long term projects. www.biscardicreative.com | 770-271-3427
Hello Walter,
Good to hear the Resolve issue has been… well fixed.
I too am thinking about replacing one of my older Mac Pros with the upcoming iMac. Looking forward to your reviews once they are released to help with my decision. Just wondering if anything became of the ProMax computer you tested a few months back. At a facility I freelance at they purchased a RAIN PC as the main edit system and we are very happy with it.
Congrats on all your opportunities looking into 2013.
Victor
That was a review unit and was, sadly, shipped back after the testing. I’m considering a 16 core machine like this one to augment our iMacs as a render station. But the Windows / Mac thing can be a bit of a challenge when you edit completely in one and then render with the other. We have run into some codec issues that we’re working through.
Hi Walter,
We are just starting up and I’m trying to decide which way to go with my editing/graphics suite.
Started in the PC/Avid world back in the day, switched to all Mac/FCP about 8 years ago. Now starting from scratch as far as hardware/software goes, I am torn. I read through all your great insight and experience, and I currently still prefer the Mac/FCP, but at the same does it really make sense to build a new post house using this combo? It seems like the PC/Avid/Premiere makes more sense now, even though I prefer OSX to Windows. You did a great review of the Promax One Hero system. We are focused on TV series, but also would like to be able to cut a theatrical film as well.
So finally, if you were just starting from scratch and needed to make the most of your budget, which path would you take? Apple or PC?
Considering FCPX is probably not an option and we would still be running FCP7. You seem to favor the iMac approach, which is cool, but also you are already an all Mac house. I’m looking at Quadro 6000 + Tesla. And with the Promax One Hero, I would also opt for more of NAS approach than the internal RAID.
Thank you for your time and wisdom.
Jeff
It’s hard to say with the hardware, but I will say at the moment, we are absolutely loving the new iMac / Premiere Pro combination. We have two of them in the shop now and they are working so well, I plan to replace my other four Mac Pros with iMacs soon.
On the PC side, we ran into an issue with XDCAM Quicktime files not working at first, required a third party plug-in, and then after we bought the plug-in, those files would bring the machine to its knees. 8 core, 48GB RAM, nVidia CUDA card, etc… and those particular files just did not play happy with the PC.
Also, with our SAN, the partitions show up differently on the PC vs. the Mac. SAN 1, SAN 2 on the Mac, and K:, J: on the PC. So we constantly have to reconnect the media when switching OS machines. We’re talking to our SAN provider about this to see if we can come up with a better solution for this.
My current plan is to outfit all of the suites with iMacs and then have one or two 12 – 16 core machines (probably PC) to do the heavy rendering at the end.