[Tig] St. Diig

[Craig Leffel]

Jeff Olm wrote:
> It's not all Big Iron anymore. Hardware is getting smaller. The rooms 
> become theaters.
> 4 years ago I went to almost every post house in LA working for 
> Discreet with the Lustre.
Jeff, I know you're a working colorist, but I bought my kit 
*specifically* for the Big Iron value and speed of use. I do around 300 
Nartional TV spots a year, and nothing besides a Baselight really came 
close to my needs. Film Master and Pablo were second in speed for my 
tastes and needs, but Pablo was last on my desired UI and panel, and 
Film Master looks and feels good, just didn't float my boat so to speak. 
We had a Lustre floating in this building for 3 years and never did a 
session on it because it is a plagued system, that while promised to 
address the commercial workflow, never did. My mistake, won't happen 
again.....

> Software CC in 4 years has gone from non-existant to now being a 
> standard service in some form in almost every facility in the world.
I would hope this sentence has to do with Color in FCP, or After 
Effects. If not, you need to get out of LA more before you start making 
gross assumptions like this. There are plenty of places left that *only* 
have a telecine(s) for CC work, and at that, older gear. There are many 
markets besides LA and many workflows you may not have any awareness of. 
Pardon me for over-reacting, but I consider that an inflammatory 
statement. It is not a forgone conclusion just yet... though I agree 
with your premise. There are still jobs and projects that DI does not 
address; in my world it's dailies and final CC jobs with more than 
50,000' feet of film. Real time is still real time.

Bob F wrote:

 >>>>>Some "commodity" processors already come with 8 CPU cores.  Legacy 
architectures are rapidly becoming invalidated and it is time for a 
major re-think of approaches.  This means that there will be an "out 
with the old" and an "in with the new".  Existing DI system vendors will 
need to fight to survive during the transition.

This is exactly why I was more interested in buying a system with more 
"off the shelf" hardware, than buying into custom hardware/software 
architectures. It will be far easier to swallow to buy all new CPU's and 
Ram for instance, even all new GPU cards than to buy single use tools 
like Davinci's Colorist Toolbox or Defocus cards which carry hefty 
pricetags. Toolbox listed around 50K. 6 Vectors for a Spirit is 
expensive as well. Even Pablo runs on custom hardware that will outdate 
itself sooner than later. However, the out with the old scenario you 
describe has been going on for years. Take a walk around a number of 
older facilities that offer telecine and CC services. You'll be amazed 
what you'll find, especially what's still billing.... and that, is 
really what this whole story is about. What can you bill the most on, 
and for the longest........ Buying the "best" gear, that does it the 
"right" way, is only good for PR releases and TIG and CML discussions. 
It does not pay your mortgage or for your vacation. If it doesn't make 
solid business sense and you can't keep up a revenue stream, don't buy 
it. Simple economics. As it is, the whole DI process is having an affect 
on facilities that have historically used traditional live TK/CC kits. 
They're (we're) going to have to find a way to bill the same thing for 4 
hours that used to take 8 or more.... otherwise, money is lost for the 
sake of "The New" and you won't find many business owners signing up for 
that scenario..... guess we all need to get our PR hats on and start 
making up names for services. Personally, I like terms like "Session 
Prep" and "Storage transfer"  they sound ambiguous and hard.

As usual, my 2 cents...... I did start this just by saying it's time for 
a new list name. I love the fact that it was an assumption and the 
conversation turned immediately to ; 

>>>>The switched topology means there is no more than 4 hops to any VIMM,  
and provides multiple paths available should a failure occur.    
Several VIMMs can fail without losing data.   There are up to 4 hot- 
standby VIMMs waiting for failures, otherwise known as fail-in-place.


Any colorists out there worrying about actually doing CC???... no matter 
what the gear they put in front of you? I do think there will be more 
Bravado now, like Jeff's current situation of knowing a variety of 
platforms... I used to enjoy bragging a bit about playing a variety of 
guitars ( half assed though I am )  - I guess that conversation now 
becomes all the platforms I can drive.... I did do a T2T session one 
time off a 2" deck and I kicked it's ass....... made it sing like a 
hippie at a Dead concert.


Happy knobtwisting or mouse-clicking (now)

Craig Leffel