QUO VADIS? Where are we going?

[FredD]

I am afraid you guys have lost the plot with all this reference to 4K !
My OP said I had ordered a BMDCC;and that is :
http://www.blackmagicdesign.com/product ... emacamera/

No, not delivered yet due to production probs at BMD.
However, I have been spending the waiting time productivley, and just completed
the build of a new PC to handle RAW footage and Resolve for grading.

Twin liquid cooled 6 Core Intel processors with 64 Gbs of RAM.
Twin nVidea GTX graphics cards (Total 5 Gb RAM)
Asus MB with Thunderbolt. Etc Etc....
128 Gb System (64bit WIN 7 Pro) SSD
3 x 1Tb 7200rpm HD RAID array.
Hope that will handle the workflow !

Fred D.

[Roy1]

Mike. I mean no dis respect but I have to ask. Why buy HD camcorders and editing facilities if you are not going to use the format. I have been on HD for a couple of years and after comparing the results with my previous SD efforts, I would never go back to SD. I see a distinct improvement in quality of my HD videos and even on YouTube the difference is very much noticable.

[Mike Shaw]

I bought HD because SD alone wasn't available. I had a hard enough time finding miniDV cams (yes ... that too! Am I a luddite or what? Thing is, I have piles of brand new unopened Sony tapes and saw no point in investing in SD Cards as well). Even the squirty little underwater (solid state) cam (ExtremeCam, as reviewed by Tom Hardwick) at under £100 is called 'HD'. So the options for SD alone weren't really available.

As for the editing suite, I was lucky enough to get Avid Media Composer as a cheap upgrade (just £400 instead of c £2k) when Liquid went pear shaped - and Media Composer (especially the latest version) is a top end editor that needs a very high spec machine to run it smoothly.

Another reason for not going the HD route - many of the people I make movies for, although for the most part they now have HD ready TVs, they don't have BluRay DVD players. So I'd be making SD DVDs for them anyway - and its SD as well for (our) club use. Yes, many festivals can now cope with HD projection ... and the films so projected do look crisper. But it doesn't improve the script or the camera work or the editing.

[tom hardwick]

But Mike, l thought you were editing in HD so that you could have Magic Mercalli on your side, regardless of the fact that your films end up on DVD.

[Mike Shaw]

Ahh! But I don't need to use Mercalli any more (not because I've sobered/steadied up, but because MC has excellent stabilisers built in, and motion tracking on most of the effects) ...

and doesn't Mercalli work with SD? Yes, I'm sure it does.

[daveswan]

Our club doesn't even project in HD yet (Though I'm hoping to push that) but we do have a Blu-Ray player (That I bought them to break the Catch 22 situation, no Blu-Ray, so no HD proj), and one of our members still edits SD even though he has a Sony FX1 (Why???).

Mike, I run MC6 on a basic Sandybridge machine, in fact at one point I was running MC 3.0 on a 2006 vintage Dell dual-core laptop with a very underpowered graphics card. I wasn't brilliant, but it worked.

I don't have the luxury of FredD's budget, so I hope my current workstation ( Sandybridge 2600 3.5GHz 16 gig ram Quadro 600 / GTX 570 128 GB SSD boot, 2x 1GB storage) will be ok for editing BMC's DNGs, else it will be DNxHD. A 12 TB Raid 5 box is on the shopping list.

Back OT, I expect the BMC to ve a viable cam for at least the next 5 years, hopefully 10 which will bring me up to reteirement, at which point I'll push the boat out on the proverbial "Camera that will see me out". 4K? 8K? raw? I don't know.

[Mike Shaw]

Well, I use an FX1 (in SD mode) as well!!!...

I too had MC on a 'lesser beast' - but decided to push the boat out (a little) to have it run a bit quicker and smoother (and more importantly, with faster renders! How I miss Liquid's background rendering!). However, reading what others are building themselves PC-wise these days, my little speedboat would seem to be little better than an outboard-powered Ark. Ah well. It's well fast enough and capable enough for what I do...

I think the real reason for my Luddite-ish-ness is that, now at 81, I'm too long in the tooth to keep making changes and investing in new equipment all the time. I'm happy with my workflows, my equipment, miniDV tapes, SD, 2D images, and plain old bog standard stereo ...

Wasn't there a remark in Alice Through The Looking Glass to the effect that "You have to run very fast just to stay in one place" - or words to that effect. That's how I feel about keeping up with modern trends!!

I'd rather have a few more strawberry ice-creams...

[Roy1]

mercalli does work with SD. I have just aquired Mercalli V2 and have used it on HD and SD with fantastic results and its so easy to use. I tried using the stabiliser in Adobe after effects and it was so complicated. Also vegas 10 stabiliser, easier but not effective enough, so as Tom said, Mercalli is magic. Unfortunately Mercalli doesn't work with Windows XP anymore so I had to move up to Win 7 (64 bit). BTW Mike compared with me your still a youngster.

[Mike Shaw]

BTW Mike compared with me you're still a youngster

Now I feel like partying!

[FredD]

BTW Mike compared with me you're still a youngster

Now I feel like partying!

Strawberry ice cream anyone ?

[daveswan]

Just looked again at my last post and can't believe how many typos crept through. Corrected now.

I blame this keyboard which is fine for controling Avid but hopeless for typing.

[FredD]

Just looked again at my last post and can't believe how many typos crept through. Corrected now.

I blame this keyboard which is fine for controling Avid but hopeless for typing.

Well I hope it resolves itself for Resolve Dave

[daveswan]

[col lamb]

I konw waht y0 umean Dvae

2 parafraze a wel knonw saing

"I hit all the rite keeys but note necessarrrilly in th e righht oorder"

[Geoff Addis]

One very useful advantage of 4K is the ability to re-frame and/or stabilise shots into a 1920x 1080 format timeline without loss of 1920 x 1080 resolution providing tthat he original framing extends beyond that of the desire image!

Geoff.