[Tig] FC color 1.0

[timothy norman huber]

Jeff Kreines wrote:

>
> Good to have a FT user to ask questions of here, as you've gotten a
> preview of the pain we're all about to endure!
>
> Re power -- is CPU or GPU power what one needs here?  That is, will a
> 4 processor 2.66 Mac Pro do, or is a 4 processor 3.0 or 8-processor
> machine mandatory?  Does the fast ATI card do well, or is the new
> Quadro FX 5600 (with 1.5 GB onboard RAM) the way to go?  How much RAM
> in the Mac?
>
> So many questions!



I'm a FT user as well, and have graded three HD features and a few HD  
projects for the BBC motion gallery using various builds.    FT had  
no manual, so thank you Alexis for creating one for Color.

CPU isn't as important as GPU and fast storage, as all the rendering  
is done by the GPU.  We've got a dual G5 2.5 PCI-x box with an ati  
Radeon 9800XT connected to a 3TB xRaid and 2.5GB DDR SDRAM.   I'm  
going to try it on our intel box next week.   Not all GPU's are  
capable of 10 bit display, nor are all capable of supporting 16 bit  
or floating point formats.

FT was a nightmare from an ingesting and outputting standpoint.   
Apple seems to have fixed most of this with Color 1.0.  FT required  
that all speed changes, dissolves, etc, be baked.  Furthermore, there  
can be no illegal characters in the clip names.  It takes only one to  
keep a project from loading.

One particularly nasty bug in FT was project file corruption.  When  
there are too many events in a project, the project file refuses to  
load, and sometimes you can recover, sometimes not.  The tar archives  
can get corrupted too.    I made a habit of saving all primary and  
secondary grades with the clip numbers, so if I did crash a project  
file, I could rebuild.  Takes extra time, as the interface is clunky,  
but it only takes one project crash to ruin a relationship.   Apple  
should modify the save grade dialogue to save the clip name or number  
rather than a time stamp.    Don't know if this bug is still in  
there.  I'll create a huge timeline of old stuff to test this.

Apple seems to have worked out most of the nastiness, with the  
exception of still-broken broadcast safe.  I brought in a multi- 
layered project filled with unbaked speed changes, dissolves, illegal  
characters, etc, into and out of Color on the first try.     They  
fixed the custom user shapes in the geometry room.  Copy and paste  
grades doesn't work every time with keystrokes (plus its the most  
convoluted keystroke - Control-Option-Shift+1.  Takes two  
hands...needs to be fixed please.    I like the new curves, but the  
interface precision is lame.



T







timothy norman huber
Colorist
Switch Studios
venice

310 795.6599
switch-studios.com
timothyhuber at mac.com