The latest version of Slugline 2.0 from Act Focused is available now for download from the App Store. I’m working on a more comprehensive review of the app but for now, here are the details from the website:

Start Writing for Free

Slugline 2 is a free download, and works without watermarks or limitations until you pass page six, at which point you can upgrade to Unlimited Writing. Kick the tires at no cost — or, if all you write is short films, never pay a dime!

The Darkest Timeline

Slugline 2 has dark mode. And a completely new design that maintains Slugline’s beloved no-buttons simplicity, while providing quick access to formatting options, the Outline Navigator, and the new Timeline, which gives you a bird’s-eye view of your structure and pacing.

Live Compare for Tracking Changes

Slugline tracks your changes by actively comparing the current screenplay document to another. Asterisks appear next to the modified text — and you can click on those asterisks to inspect the differences. It’s the exact right amount of revisions-tracking power, without sacrificing simplicity.

Final Draft Import/ Export

Slugline uses Fountain, the free and open text-based screenplay format that’s compatible with everything. And now it can open and export perfect Final Draft files, including dual dialogue and even notes.

Download today and give it a spin.

“performance and workflow advances including UV unwrapping and editing tools, improved selection and modeling tools, organizational licensing for volume customers and updated viewport technology with support for Metal on macOS. Maxon has also boosted Cinema4D’s pipeline compatibility with GLTF export, GoZ integration for Z-Brush, and support for node-based materials in FBX and Cineware.”

What it all means…

Cinema 4D S22 will be subscription only (that’s what the “S” is for) today. The new features will roll out to subscribers first. You can download it now and start having fun. For perpetual license holders of Cinema 4D, a release is scheduled later this year that will incorporate the features of S22, as well as additional enhancements.

In an exchange with Paul Babb, Maxon’s Global Head of Community and Customer Experience, I asked about why the staggered releases, he responded with:

“The advantage of having a subscription product is the ability to release features and significant upgrades to subscribers whenever they are ready. The plan is to have another release later this year that encompasses the S22 features as well as other significant features later this year… However, it makes sense that features for subscribers will be released when they are ready. And perpetual upgrades will come less frequently, but would encompasses everything that has been released to subscribers up to that point.”

Here’s a 10 minute video that goes over all the new features found in the release.

One of the big updates are the Automatic UV unwrapping and Editing tools. You may recognize this workflow if you’re familiar with the tech from “Ministry of Flat”  from Quel Solaar because the new UV tools are licensed from them. Take a look at this video that shows how automatic UV unwrapping works.

And another video that shows other UV workflow enhancements.

I am a very casual Cinema 4D user, to be honest. I’m not building assets from scratch. I’m much more likely to head to Renderhub and spend 20 bucks on a model. That said, the improvements to the modeling tools look like really useful ways to improve pre-built geometry. In particular the Untriangulate Command that let’s users clean up triangulated meshes coming out of CAD and other apps.

Maxon has also improved its pipeline for creating assets for realtime viewing of models and animation in a 3D friendly browser for VR creation apps like Adobe Aero via GLTF export.

There’s a bunch of other great stuff in here like an Enhanced Viewport

A new Nodal Material Editor

And improvement integration with ZBrush

While I haven’t been spending much time in C4D these days, I have been working on a couple projects in Unreal Engine. It seems like everyone has moved into UE and Unity these days, and Maxon was already there with plug-ins for both packages (UE in 2019, and Unity in 2020). I asked Maxon about creating assets and animations for gaming platforms, and Paul succinctly summed up this new world of content creation apps and the role of digital artists:

“Unreal/Unity are not just gaming platforms anymore – they are being used for AR, motion graphics, virtual filmmaking, etc. Our emphasis has ALWAYS been to make sure our community of artists can be competitive and deliver assets for ANY platform or use. We don’t focus on markets, we focus on workflow – making sure our customers can be competitive in ALL types of pipelines. Artists don’t just create motion graphics, or VFX, or medical animation, or AR, etc. – artists do it ALL”.

Maxon Cinema 4D S22 available now, prices starting at USD 59.99 per month for a single user license.

There’s a market for the Blackmagic Design eGPU Pro, but it’s very specific. Blackmagic Design has updated its external GPU device, replacing the Radeon Pro 580 with a Radeon RX Vega 56. This upgraded model carries the Pro moniker and a US$1199 sticker price, compared to the less expensive US$699 of the base model.

The Short Version

If you have a TB3 capable, entry level Mac (iMac, MBP, Mini), and you need a simple, quick solution for some real GPU power for editing and coloring in Resolve, Premiere or FCPX, then this is worth taking a look at. If you have an LG UltraFine 5K display and a desire to have the least number of cables and a beautiful, whisper-quiet hub on your desk, then even more reason. The Blackmagic eGPU Pro looks and sounds great in a client-facing environment.

If you are not in this situation or you’re trying to spend the least amount of money on an eGPU enclosure, then this is not the machine for you. Like I said, this is for a specific market.

An External GPU and a Hub of Many Ports

The eGPU Pro is, at its core, a graphics card shoved into a hub. It adds much needed speed and performance to an existing computer system. These units have been popular for the last few years because they can breathe performance life back into older machines, or ones that can’t swap out their graphics cards.

Until the last year or so, using one has required some hacking and fiddling to get it to play well in the OSX ecosystem. All that changed with the release of High Sierra. You still had to restart your machine to get it to detect an external GPU, but it was closer to plug and play.

With Mojave, this process is hot-swappable. You can plug-and-play at will, without losing the 45 seconds it take you to reboot. The other big innovation that makes an eGPU a reasonable piece of accelerant hardware is Thunderbolt 3. And this is the giant caveat: you need a Thunderbolt 3 capable machine. Really. While there are TB3 to TB2 adapters that will allow you to connect and use an eGPU, you’re cutting your bandwidth in half, which pretty much defeats the purpose of adding an external GPU.

The Blackmagic Design eGPU Pro is for machines that have Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) and a GPU that’s underpowered and can’t be upgraded. So we’re talking about Apple products. Specifically the entire starting line-up of MacBook Pros in 2016, iMacs starting in 2017, and Minis in 2018. If you have one of these machines with an Intel Graphics GPU, you’re the person who will benefit the most from an eGPU Pro. Especially if you are using that machine to edit and color grade compressed 4K video in Davinci Resolve, FCPX or Premiere.

The eGPU Pro fits so nicely into the Apple OSX ecosystem that it is the only external GPU you can buy directly from Apple. Plugging your entry level iMac, MBP or Mini into the eGPU Pro will mean playback will leap from 3-4 fps up to realtime while you stack on nodes. It’s the difference between ripping your hair out and getting work done. And it’s also a nice, attractive and quiet hub that will connect to a the very popular 5K UltraFine LG display at full resolution with a single USB-C cable. It’s the only eGPU that has Intel’s Titan Ridge Thunderbolt 3 controller which brings DisplayPort 1.4 support to all the TB3 ports.

And that’s also who this is for — the person that owns that 5K LG display and a Mini or MBP and wants to work smoothly in Resolve, FCPX or Premiere for serious creative work. It’s for the person that has a pretty great iMac from 2017 that they don’t want to replace yet but need some GPU heavy lifting. If you already have a machine that already has a discrete, higher-end GPU cruising along inside, the performance differences are much less noticeable.

What About Performance on a Pro Machine?

I tested the loaner unit from Blackmagic Design for about two weeks on my entry-level iMac Pro with a Radeon Pro Vega 56, and it provided a nice boost, but I really only noticed the difference when I was stacking a lot of nodes on to h.264 4K footage. My iMac Pro was suddenly a dual GPU set up. Which was cool, but in terms of actual performance, I saw about a 10-15% increase in render speeds and play, back but only on clips that had a multiple nodes and/or a lot of Noise Reduction applied.

This is a significant boost. But if you’re someone buying an iMacPro, you could just spend another 700 dollars for the Pro Vega 64X GPU,  or more RAM and processors.

Why Can’t I Upgrade the Card Inside?

Here is the big complaint that is leveled at the BMD eGPU Pro: unlike every other eGPU unit on the market, the Blackmagic Design eGPU Pro takes a very Apple-like design take — you can’t swap out the card inside. This renders the unit semi-disposable since GPU’s are a volatile commodity in the economy of computer system building. Today’s top-of-the-line “pro” GPU will become a slow-moving tugboat compared to the options available 18 months from now.

I think that this is largely true in fields like 3D animation and Machine Learning. And if you’re looking to build a system with lots of raw GPU processing power this is really the wrong thing to invest your limited resources in to. But that power user is not who this unit is aimed at. This is for accelerating Resolve on Mac hardware with USB C ports. I know, that’s a very specific market. I have no idea how many people that may be, but Blackmagic does a great job at creating relatively affordable, highly specific pieces of hardware for what I imagine are very niche markets. How many people need thousand dollar colorociter control surfaces?

But Why Is It 1200 dollars?

You can buy another eGPU enclosure and Radeon RX Vega 56 Pro for about half the cost of the BMD eGPU Pro. So why the premium price?

Because the person that is willing to pay that kind of money doesn’t have the time to fiddle around with shoving a GPU into a controller in a box, and troubleshooting anything that might go sideways. Blackmagic Design profiled, who I think, the perfect user for the eGPU: the team that did dailies for ROCKETMAN.

They already had a iMac 5K and needed some extra power to iterate looks, create different LUTs and knock out h264 dailies. A note, this article is about the base model, not the Pro, but the market is the same.

If you have already own a 2018 Mac mini that you want to set up as a dailies station. Or you have a newer MBP  and want a more powerful home system. For an additional 2500 bucks, you could add the eGPU Pro and an LG Ultrafine 5K display and be in business with a couple of USB-C cables and a visit to the Apple Store.

Are there less expensive options for external GPUs? Absolutely. But the eGPU Pro offers up a beautiful piece of hardware, quiet and cool, with the ease of plug-and-play without the hassle of wondering which piece of your puzzle isn’t working. 

This article took a long time to put together. There were many forces conspiring against me: from the great “GPU Shortage of ’18” to OS-update-a-phobia. Even with these obstacles, I was still able to experience the future of high performance eGPU graphics on a MacBook Pro using the Akitio Node Pro.

The Short Version

Plugging an Akitio Node Pro and Radeon RX580, into the Thunderbolt 3 port on a mid-range 2016 MacBook Pro makes a moderately complex 4K DaVinci Resolve project jump from 3fps to 23.976fps.

The Longer Version

A MBP from last year running a 4K video project in Resolve is an anxiety inducing exercise in system overload. If you plug in the Akitio box with a GTX1080 or RX580 GPU, you’ll sail in realtime as you stack nodes and OFX filters. This is a simple, singular solution to the plague of underperforming graphics in portable Macs. You need the latest build of High Sierra and be plugged into one of the two Thunderbolt 3 ports. The ones on the left side of the machine.

Right now, you can pick up a used 13” MBP for about a thousand dollars (non-touch bar, base model). The Akitio Node Pro lists for 350 dollars. If you can find one, the RX580 lists for around 500 bucks. Put those pieces together and you’ll have a system that will deliver the kind of performance found on more expensive system. You’ll need a proper display and a control surface if you’re actually doing daily color work.

The big difference here is that next year, you’ll be able to pull out the RX580 and replace it with the RX680 or the nVidia GTX2080. Or whatever new hotness shows up. Unlike the impossible-to-upgrade path of the iMac. And if you have to work in HDR 8K you can just add a new display. Suddenly every part is replaceable again.

Some Background

An external GPU (eGPU) is nothing new. Solutions have been floating around for the last few years, but almost exclusively on Windows. Thus far, OSX solutions involved the pain of having to launch Terminal and type in commands (the Mac readers *shudder*), along with the existential dread of “unsupported hardware” dead ends when you ran into a problem. Until now, an official, Apple-blessed eGPU solution was a fantasy.

With the release of High Sierra, something has changed in Cupertino, a signal change in the direction of opening up to third party hardware. In the last round of OS beta builds, Apple offered eGPU enclosures with the RX580 installed for developers to work with. A recognition that the future of high-end computing is in the highly volatile world of GPUs that double in performance every year, rather than CPU’s which have hit the wall in terms of rapid performance increase.

Used MacBook Pro’s become sort of semi-disposable boxes for running OSX and whatever graphics app you happen to be using to make a living.

The Akitio Hardware

The Node Pro is an elegantly designed unit that makes hardware nerds happy. There’s a ton of attention to detail in what is essentially a metal box that holds a GPU socket, power supply and fan. Here’s what I really liked:

1) Pop up handle that sits flush when depressed so that nothing will snag on it when tossed in the back of your car. When deployed, it is high enough that you can carry it wearing gloves.

2) The spring loaded screws on the top panel so you’ll never lose the screws because they don’t come out, and you can always tell when they are locked in place.

3) The extra tall GPU slot screws. My friend Clint Torres who was helping with the test noted that he has permanent scars on his wrist and forearms from reaching into computer cases to remove the tiny screws that hold cards in place. Why didn’t anyone think of this sooner?

What Went Wrong

For my experiment, Akitio sent me a Thunderbolt Node Pro and an AMD RX 580 Compute Engine GPU. I took the unit into the wild by walking into the everyday work world of a busy post facility. I thought I could plug the box into a producer’s MBP or an iMac used for After Effects work.

As it turns out, few in the professional world of post production have machines newer than 2015, and no one, I mean NO ONE is running High Sierra. One studio I checked in with was running Yosemite still, paralyzed by the technical issues of what happens when the delicately balanced, finely tuned networks of Macs suddenly stop working.

How Stu Saved the Day

I am fortunate that for the last fifteen years, I’ve been friends and filmmaking comrades with Stu Maschwitz (@prolost). Every film I’ve ever made has relied on a piece of software or expertise from Stu. When I hit the wall on this, I pinged Stu and he came through, again. At his ultimate tech nerd BatCave, aka “Prolostlandia” in Emeryville, Stu set me up with a 2016 13” MBP running the latest High Sierra build, Resolve 14 and a clip of 4K footage from a Sony A7S II (3840 x 2160/ XAVC S /100M).

Resolve struggled to play this clip back at 12-13 fps without any color correction applied. The native decoding and playback of the codec was a chore for the Iris Graphics 550 in the MBP. After some fiddling with order of operations we landed on the following, kind of obvious ways to make this work, and for Resolve to run off the Radeon 580.

1: Power on Akitio Node Pro
2: Plug in Thunderbolt 3 cable into Thunderbolt 3 port on MPB and Node Pro
3: Reboot MBP

Reportedly, this will change in later builds of High Sierra, where switching GPUs will be possible without having to reboot the system.

Once the machine was up and running, we checked the System Info and we could see the card recognized alongside the native Iris Graphics GPU.

After launching Resolve, it took some fiddling and I am still not entirely sure the order of operations. But using the manual graphics card selection function in the apps preferences, I was able to make Resolve select the RX580. After relaunching the app, it all suddenly worked like it should.

The 4K clip played back smoothly at 23.976 fps. So then we started stacking nodes. First a levels pass, then a bunch of parallel nodes, some qualifiers and curves. And finally a node with a Gaussian blur dragged up to bleary levels. Every new node added and still, 23.976 fps.

When I unplugged the box and played the clip with all the nodes enabled, not surprisingly performance dropped to 3 fps.

I got realtime performance of a multi-node grade on 4K Sony footage on a computer that would grind to a halt. What makes all this possible?

Two things — an OS that natively supports eGPU configurations like High Sierra; and Thunderbolt 3, a protocol that pushes data around at 40Gbps, double Thunderbolt 2’s bandwidth of 20Gbps. Bottlenecks are removed, allowing this kind of set up to work in realtime speed.

Where I am Biased

I really wanted this to work because I love inexpensive modular solutions to building post production hardware. This is how I have built editing and color suites over the last twenty-five years. A series of complimentary, integrated components easily swapped out when newer, faster pieces became available.

The lack of customization options has left me, and many other longtime users, frustrated with our beloved platform. Apple’s direction of building all-in-one boxes (iMac Pro, the MacPro “trashcan”, MBP) thwarts our modding instincts. Thunderbolt 3’s speed and High Sierra’s native support of eGPU’s breathes new life into the modular computing paradigm.

Where’s it Headed?

I expect to see more and more eGPU boxes showing up in post houses connected to MacBook Pro’s and iMacs. As TB3 becomes a more established connection-protocol this will be less of an esoteric solution. High Sierra adoption will take longer, so many users have been burned by updating too soon. The Akitio Node Pro makes a great reward for those will to move to a bleeding edge OS.

Ten years ago if you were “indie”, you kludged together some fast still prime lenses for your cinema camera package. You’d stick them on your DSLR with the detail dialed way down and shoot away. If you were a “pro”, you’d spend your camera budget renting an F950 and a set of Arri Master Primes. Trusting that your rental insurance would work if you dropped anything.

Enter Sigma

Sigma, makers of fine still camera lenses, has entered into this arena in the last year with both Cine Zooms and a remarkable set of very fast Cine Prime lenses. They are called FF High Speed Primes and they cost $3500 to $5000 each. They range in focal length from 14mm at the widest and 135mm at the longest. The 14mm and 135mm are T2, while the lenses in between (20, 24, 35, 50 and 85) are T1.5. You can get them in PL, Sony E, and Canon EF mounts. The Sony E and Canon EF mounts can be swapped with one another by an authorized service center. The PL mount is not switchable.

Comparison with Zeiss CP3’s

Why compare to the CP3s? 

The short answer is that they are the lenses we have at Studio B, and they are in the same budget range as the Sigmas. Odds are, when you’re shopping for a rental kit or looking to invest in glass, and you don’t have Cooke or Arri Master Prime money, you’re going to be looking at Sigma FF’s and Zeiss CP3’s.

What’s Special About the Sigmas?

What I Didn’t Test, But Wanted To

The test I didn’t do but would like to at some point is see how low-light I can go. I’d like to take a set of FF High Speed Primes with the Sony E mount and an A7Sii into the forest and shoot at night by available moonlight. My guess is that there aren’t any cine lenses in this price range that would be able to touch the performance of the Sigmas. An added bonus is that the lens markings on the housings glow in the dark.

Conclusion

If, however, you are grading in Resolve all week long. Or if you’re engaged in gnarly workflows with masking and maze-like node chains, then, in the immortal words of Roy Scheider from “Jaws”, “you’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

Blackmagic Design provided me with a review unit of the DaVinci Resolve Mini Panel, which I held on to for two glorious weeks last month. In that window of time, I graded a few spots and a thirty minute documentary in DaVinci Resolve Studio 12.5. I was working on a 12-core “cheese grater” Mac Pro 5 1 and monitoring a 1080p video signal via a DeckLink Mini Monitor on a color calibrated Eizo CG2730 display. Final output was for web and broadcast, and the documentary was screened via DCP at the Rafael Theater in San Rafael, California. 

I add these details only to note that the DaVinci Resolve Mini Panel fits as a key component of a larger collection of post tools. Tools that until now, have been prohibitively expensive for smaller shops and freelancers. The Mac Pro has long since paid for itself; the Eizo display is about 2 grand; the DeckLink Mini Monitor is 145 bucks and the DaVinci Resolve Mini Panel is just under three thousand dollars ($2,995). All in, you can upgrade your existing editing suite for mobile, broadcast and theatrical color mastering for the cost of a single iMac Pro. If all you’re just coloring for internet and mobile (which a lot of shops indeed are doing), then you don’t need the monitor or output card, just throw all your budget at the control surface. 

So what does shelling out the $2995 for the DaVinci Resolve Mini Panel get you?

The clearest answer I can give you after my two weeks is simple — you will color projects faster than you will with the DaVinci Resolve Micro Panel. If you need to be turning around a large volume of spots, or spend your days coloring long form content, get the DaVinci Resolve Mini Panel. If you’re looking to save money, get the DaVinci Resolve Micro Panel.

Seconds Add Up to Hours

Think of the DaVinci Resolve Micro Panel as a smaller chunk of the Mini Panel. Because it literally is. The trackballs, rings and control knobs on the DaVinci Resolve Micro Panel are in the exact same spot on the Mini Panel. So if you can grade on one, you can grade on the other — your muscle memory transfers just fine. The difference in the two boards and the one that justifies the 2000 dollar price increase are the two LCD screens and extra controllers. 

With the DaVinci Resolve Micro Panel, you have a physical controller (knob, ring, button, ball) for every tool in the Color Wheel Panel along with some shot, frame, and node navigation buttons. With the Mini Panel you have access to everything else in DaVinci Resolve. Things like generating, editing, and placing Power Windows; adjusting curves; selecting qualifiers; and tracking and sizing, can all be done without ever touching the mouse and keyboard. 

A Control Surface for Health and Safety

Again, you can do all of this without either control surfaces. I have graded entire feature films with a keyboard and a Kensington Trackball Mouse. It takes a long time, and after a few hours, there’s pain. Color grading with a mouse and keyboard requires a lot of repetitive motion. Lots of accessing panels, menus and value boxes. A physical control surface offers up instant access to these functions without the repetition of mouse clicks and dragging. Granted, I only had two weeks and a handful of projects to build muscle memory. When I built my last shots, I was twice as fast as I was with the Micro and keyboard.  I was also much less fatigued by the end of the day.

This is the real value in spending money on the DaVinci Resolve Mini Panel. You’ll grade faster, so even under a deadline, you’ll be able to try out new ideas. The luxury of time to be bold and know that you don’t just “have to get it done”. If you’re like me, someone with RSI, then the Mini Panel saves you from pain and numbness.

Please Call Them Something Different

After my time with both panels, I really only have one critique: the names.

This is a simple plea to the folks at Blackmagic Design. Calling one product “Mini” and one product “Micro”, is a little like saying “nano” and “pico”. There’s a difference (nano is 1000x bigger) but no one really cares because they both mean “really, really small”. Same in “micro” and “mini”.  I know it’s late, and the product has shipped, but for the next round, please consider changing the names.

Blackmagic is drawing a distinction between these boards and their Audi-priced Advanced Panel, but it’s too drastic. The market for Advanced Panels is tiny, while the opportunities for boutique all-in-one editing finishing shops is exploding. The product literature says the DaVinci Resolve Micro and Mini Panels are, “… ideal for editors and colorists that need to regularly switch between editing and color grading, or for freelance colorists that need to take their panel with them.” A Mini Panel lets you fly through any kind of project with the speed of a professional, full featured control surface.

You can call it “Mini” if you want, that doesn’t make it small.

A Drive For All Reasons

Writing about hard drives like writing about tires.

You need tires, good ones. The kind that will handle the performance of whatever kind of driving you’re planning on doing. You want them to last thousands and thousands of miles with no problems. But once you buy and install them, you don’t want to have to think about them. You certainly don’t want to have to worry about them. But we’re not talking about tires, we’re talking about solid state drives (SSD) for production and post.

SSDs are great, offering speed and performance far surpassing the spinning platters of conventional hard drives. A single SSD can offer the kind of read/write performance of four HDDs in a RAID configuration. This is why SSDs have largely replaced the system drives in every laptop and desktop on the market.

In situations like recording 4K video on-set, an SSD is your only option. So why not just make everything out of SSDs then?

They are, for the most part, very expensive on a gig-per-dollar basis. Secondly, SSDs have a well-known short lifespan. Add these two factors up and your average digital media facility is going to stick with the old reliable twentieth-century technology of HDDs in a RAID 5 configuration where you get large storage and fast speed at a cheap price. If a single HDD fails, you can replace it for next-to-nothing without losing data.

While you certainly can replace an HDD RAID with a single SSD, you are kind of flying without a net. If an SSD fails, you pretty much just lose everything that was on it.

On the production side, SSDs slip right into the popular monitor/ recorders like the Atomos Shogun. Here, SSDs are kind of like expendables — you know you’re going to go through them and in a few years they’ll fail. By then you’ll just go and purchase a new one for less gig-per-dollar.

This is the tire analogy. But in production, you kind of expect a blowout and it’s going to happen while you’re driving. So you keep an extra SSD or two handy just in case.

Sony’s new line of SSDs, the G Series offers up the 960GB model SV-GS96 for $539, and the smaller 480GB model, the SV-GS48 for $287. Both claim the speed of an SSD with unprecedented reliability. Sony backs it up with a ten-year warranty with free data recovery.

Sony says the 960GB drive has a 2400 Terabytes Written lifespan. That is based on an assumption that you will write the drive fully five-times-a-week. This works out to a ten-year lifespan for the drive. The Sony G Drive 480 has a life span of 1200 Terabytes Written.

Use Cases

I had the 480 to play with for a couple of weeks so I can’t say much about the longevity. I had new tires and they felt great. What I can say, is that the drive performed flawlessly for me. I used it on three different projects in three different configurations.

First, I tossed it in a sled and did a bunch of data transfer via USB3. Using it as an everyday office drive to sneaker net a bunch of clips between machines.

Second, I installed it in an ancient Mac Pro tower, a “cheese-grater” that had two 7200rpm Seagate 500GB HDDs striped together in RAID 0. Needless to say, the Sony G Drive 480 blew the doors off the old RAID.

I graded three different projects in the tower using the Sony drive and got real-time playback of 4K footage in DaVinci Resolve. Something impossible to do with the two-drive HDD RAID.

Arri Alexa with Atomos Shogun and Sony SV GS48

Lastly, I used the drive in an Atomos Shogun for a day of camera tests with an Arri Alexa. I recorded Prores 422 HQ 4K footage for a bunch of b-roll shots. Every shot was recorded with no issues, playback was solid. Like I said, new tires, all day.

It is impossible to test the claims of Sony’s reliability without using one day in and day out for a couple of years. It is remarkable that they are backing up each purchase with a ten year, 100,000-mile warranty*. No one’s ever done that with something as volatile as SSD memory.

Conclusion

Here’s my takeaway, use this as intended as your set it and forget it, non-expendable SSD in your 4K external recorder. Also, consider the possibility that the Sony G series may be the desktop multi-HDD RAID replacement you’ve been looking for. 4K performance in a reliable long-lasting SSD means you could stick a one inside an iMac or Mac Mini to use as a second drive dedicated for media. Of course, you should be backing up data to an external drive or the cloud, but having the option of installing a drive into a machine and not worrying about pulling it right back out in a few years makes for a compelling reason to ditch the external RAID enclosure.

*By 100,000 mile, I mean 2400 TBW and 1200 TBW.

FiLMiC Pro (US$14.99) has been the de facto video camera app for mobile filmmaking for awhile. Mostly because of its robust feature set which includes manual control of iris, white balance and focus, as well as a 50 megabit and 100 megabit codec to reduce the amount image compression in video files.

Today, FiLMiC Pro 6 hits the app store and it’s a fairly big revamp. The bombshell news is that with v6 and an iPhone 7 /7+ (sorry only A10 processors) you can buy the “Cinematographer’s Kit” (in-app optional purchase for US$9.99) which gives you an incredible new Color/ Tone/ Color Behavior tool called the “Imaging Panel”. This is something every iPhone Filmmaker will want, and not just for shooting log.

There may or may not be an update in the near future where A9 devices will also get the Imaging Panel.  I have been using the beta for the last couple of months on an A9 processor (iPhone 6S+) but the developers were finding too many lockouts for certain combinations of parameters on anything slower than the A10. So today it’s the iPhone 7/7+ only, but who knows what the next update will bring?

Welcome to Your Iron Man H.U.D. Future

When you launch Filmic, you’ll see a very spare interface. One that allows you to hit record and start filming immediately. The app remembers whatever the last settings were. The first new feature is the very cool on-screen Iron Man-esque “heads-up display” style arc-sliding UI that controls exposure, iso/shutter speed, focus and zoom. In my experience these were really touchy with some noticeable lag, but I was on a beta running on an A9 processor. You have to practice to to nail a focus-pull or a subtle exposure correction while shooting. Or use the “Pull-to-point” function that let’s you set two marks and execute an automated focus or zoom pull.

And of course, the point/ set and tap/ lock function for exposure and focus are still there for doing it the way you’ve always done it. Bottom line, the slider controls are new and cool and will certainly get a lot of fans.

New in this version are some more ways to set and lock ISO and shutter speed.

There’s a toggle that lets you assign an ISO range: 23-46, 46-92, 92-184, 184-368 and 368-736. Select an ISO range and then tap the ISO and Filmic locks it in. Change exposure and you’ll change the shutter speed. It works the other way to: lock in a shutter speed, say 1/48th, and ISO will ramp up and down when you change exposure. If you lock neither shutter or ISO, then it will remain in a “reciprocal” mode and change shutter and iso dynamically as exposure values change.

This was one of the more confusing tools for me to use, since there’s no actual ISO, shutter or iris to adjust. My preference is to shoot 1/48th when shooting 24 frame and I would prefer to see the shutter speed tied to frame rate. But that’s me.

On the right side of the UI are controls for focus and zoom. The slider control works for changing values in both, you just have to toggle between “Zoom” and “Focus”. Unlike the exposure controls, there are no numbers for zoom or focus values. And of course the zoom is just a digital scaling of the image.

What would be cool to see is a simple double-tap on “zoom” while in focus mode to have the image pop to maximum zoom, so users could set focus, call it a “focus-assist” mode.

Analytics Tools

There are really great on-screen help tools to make sure you are hitting the sweet spot in terms of exposure and focus.

First up are Zebras for shadows and highlights, which you can just tap right up top to enable. Blue tells you when you’re too dark and red tells you when, and where, you’re too hot.

If the Zebras aren’t enough, there’s a Clipping Mode. It paints the under exposed values blue and hot spots red.

For a very clear exposure map of your image, there’s a full-on false color tool here that takes filming in a psychedelic new direction. Just remember that “green is good”.

Of course these are on-screen tools, they don’t show up in what you record, just in case you weren’t clear. The FP button on the top gives you Focus Peaking. Which is way more handy than I would have imagined. Focus on the iPhone is hard considering that it’s a wide angle lens, so you assume that everything is in focus, but it’s not. It’s easy to blow your focus, especially if you are trying something daring like a rack mid-shot. This focus peaking tool is pretty brilliant and one of those things that you can’t really shoot without once you’ve used it.

And a Mini WFM

Even with all the great image analytics, sometimes you just want a Waveform Monitor. Tap the TC counter to cycle through histogram, RGB histogram and a Waveform monitor. This is new and very cool.

Resolution/ Frame Rate/ Compression

Resolution and frame rates are user defined, you can shoot from 540 to 4K, and 1 frame to 240. There are limits of course, 4k maxes out at 30, 1080 maxes out at 120, and 720 maxes out at 240. Compression varies from “Economy” to 100 m/bit. But 100 mbit only available for UHD formats. HD maxes out at Filmic Extreme which is 50 mbit.

Log and the Color Panel

When you click the little RGB Venn diagram on the bottom left of the UI, you get a whole crazy new world of color manipulation. This is the jewel of the update — a color engine Filmic calls the “Imaging Panel”.

Yes, there is a log setting that let’s you shoot in the ever popular “desaturated gray” of log encoded video (more about that later) but there are also tools to dynamically set color temperature and tint, along with sliders for vibrance, saturation, noise reduction, black point, gamma and white point. The kind of tools that a DIT would use to create a custom color profile on a high-end camera.

There are four built-in preset gamma profiles to work with: Natural, Vibrant, Flat and Log.

Natural is the default Rec. 709 profile that does what a standard display-centric profile should do: make a pleasing image with about 7-8 stops of latitude.

Dynamic is another Rec. 709 flavor aimed at pumping saturation and blowing out highlights while preserving shadow detail.

If you’ve ever shot with a DSLR, you probably downloaded and shot with some version of a Flat profile. This is the same thing: a preset aimed at preserving some detail in the highlights and shadows while also limiting saturation to protect color channels from blowing out. The flat profile footage is tweaked back to a more pleasing image in post with some basic color correction. It is a tried and true workflow designed to minimize loss of image detail inherent in shooting Rec. 709 video.

Flat profiles never gave you an additional 2-3 stops like log video, they kept you from losing color detail by preventing you from blowing color channels. With a flat profile, you can sometimes recover some detail in highlights or in shadows, stuff that would have been crushed under the regular Rec. 709 S-curve.

The Question of Log

Log is different. Log comes from the world of film negatives and telecines. It was a strategy to preserve the specific kind of way that celluloid recorded image exposure could translate into the linear world of video. Turns out the strategy works well for digitally captured images too.

Log means taking the raw image data off the sensor and encoding as much exposure and color information into the video. The goal is to postpone most of the image processing until post-production, where a colorist can decide what to throw out and what to leave in, in order to display a pleasing Rec. 709 image in the linear world of video displays.

This is possible because camera manufacturers build the sensors and circuits that convert raw sensor data into video, so the option of providing log is up to Canon, Sony, et al. iPhone camera app-makers don’t have access to the raw sensor data, rather everyone is handed the same Rec 709, 4:2:0, 8-bit video as an h.264 (mpeg4) file. There are tools in the SDK to dial in frame rate, compression and size, so developers can offer up some customization. Thus far, color space and raw sensor data have been off-limits. So how on Earth is Filmic Pro 6 pulling this off?

According to Filmic Inc, they are not simply slapping on an aggressive log-like flat profile, but they are in fact creating a much more robust image format that captures more information than any other video profile. The fact that my phone’s battery is drained with alarming speed, as well as the heat generated while shooting leads me to believe they have figured something out about log on the iPhone. In their White Paper addendum in the v6 Manual, they say:

“What is the purpose of a logarithmic remapper for low-bit-depth video? If there is an intention to correct or modify mobile-originated footage in post production, the raw data must be reorganized protectively before encoding. When footage is exposed properly, Filmic Log can preserve almost the entire tonal range of the raw buffer in the encoded medium.”

Of course the proof is in the gray log pudding.

My non-scientific tests conducted during the beta phase of Filmic Pro 6’s development leads me to the conclusion that whatever process they’ve developed delivers about one extra stop of exposure compared to shooting Natural or Flat. Contrast this with the typical 2-3 additional stops gained when shooting S-Log, Arri Log or C-log. This is an apple (inc) and oranges question, right?

Large sensors capture a greater range of latitude and color to begin with. There is nothing to compare Filmic’s implementation of log with. There are no other camera phone’s shooting this way, is an extra stop is all anyone will ever get?

I don’t know, but it begs the question, “Is an extra stop of exposure worth all the downstream hassle of shooting log in the first place?”

When you commit to shooting log on your phone, you are:

1) Committing to a color grading session somewhere in your post pipeline. Whether you do that while converting to Pro Res for editing, or you wait until picture lock.

2) Shortening the amount of shooting time because of the excessive draw on your battery. You can add a battery pack but I worry that with as much heat as my iPhone generated, going too long will mean a possible thermal shutdown. Not awesome on a shoot.

3) Monitoring your shoot with a flat gray muddy image. Shooting log on bigger cameras usually means somewhere someone is running a monitor with a display LUT so you can see it as Rec. 709, maybe even with a roughed-in grade to give a feel for what the final video will look like. Focus is most likely being pulled by an AC, or there’s at least more than the operator thinking about the image. Bottom line, log needs a crew, most iPhone productions don’t have that.

In the end, shooting and grading Filmic Natural or Filmic Flat video is pretty close to what I get if I shoot and grade Filmic Log. The extra stop is about the only advantage, and then it’s not always obvious how much of an improvement it is. Overall, the final graded picture quality is pretty similar, log or non-log.

Conclusion

The good news is that there’s log on the iPhone, and it’s the real deal. This isn’t just a “log-look” applied to the existing Rec. 709 video coming out of the camera layer in iOS. There are patents filed and a white paper detailing just how Filmic is handling this. And whatever they are doing is a battery sucking camera heating amount of processing. Adam Wilt and I were joking that camera rental houses will start offering an iLog Combo Kit where you rent a stack of fully charged iPhone 7’s to make your short film.

Log video on the iPhone is going to get attention, there will be camps for and against it. And it is really cool, even with it’s limitations, but it is that color engine, the “Imaging Panel” with savable presets that is shockingly new and never-before-seen.

Imagine developing a series of customized, in-camera looks for the different parts of your show, and then simply loading them up as you need them. Media management is still the same so you can tag, select and upload (to the cloud) clips, directly from inside the app. You don’t have to sync your phone to your laptop, you can simply select clips and save to DropBox, Google Drive or iCloud.

For me, this means shooting and uploading to a Media Encoder CC Watch folder in iCloud. My watch folder automatically converts clips from h.264 to ProRes which I prefer to work with in post. So my iPhone with Filmic Pro 6, linked to the cloud, suddenly becomes my camera, my DIT, my card wrangler and my assistant editor all in one.

You can shoot log, or flat, and wait to sit in with a colorist to finish the show. Or, you could lean in to the strengths of mobile-filmmaking: collapsed production to post pipe-line; always-on cloud connection (time to get an unlimited data plan); and an easy path for exhibition on-line. Visit your laptop or desktop for the edit session and sound mix, but build the look in-camera.

The release of Filmic Pro 6 is more than an upgrade, it is a reboot of an already solid camera app. New on-screen slider controls combined with zebras and focus peaking make shooting a lot easier. Add in a fully-realized in-camera color engine with presets and Filmic Pro v6 stays the best app for mobile filmmaking by far.

It has been seven years since Blackmagic Design released the software version of Davinci Resolve for less than the cost of a cheap laptop. A professional color grading system, that once sold for a hundred grand was suddenly running on everyone’s iMacs for $995.

This watershed release was followed by a “lite” version of Resolve that was only slightly less feature rich but still just as powerful and completely free. Overnight, the work being done in the high-end grading suites, those places that charged $1500-an-hour complete with catered lunches and assistants, no longer seemed so distant.

We all learned how to color in Resolve, while we quickly learned the way that Resolve thinks about color. While we had access to an amazing new toolset for color correction, most users were learning how to navigate the UI with a mouse and keyboard.

The problem is, Davinci Resolve was not designed to be driven by these limited input devices. It is, and has always been, software built for a colorociter control surface. Specifically the Davinci Resolve Advanced Panel: an Audi-priced piece of hardware way outside the reach of everyone but the tiny community of professionals grading TV and Hollywood cinema.

Tangent Wave panels soon popped up in every post-house, there to grade corporate work and product launch videos. This was followed by the Tangent Element family of products. These are excellent devices, I learned to grade on a Wave with Apple Color, and continue to use one in Resolve doing short and long form projects. It still works like a champ.

While a control surface isn’t necessary to color your videos, one is necessary to become a “colorist”.

A control surface, any control surface, promises the user the ability to do the work of coloring without ever having to take his/ her eyes off of the image. It’s the difference between playing a piano with both hands, and plinking out a melody one note at a time.

You’ll never get the experience of grading a series of shots using pure muscle memory if you don’t have a control surface. Most importantly, without a control surface, you’ll never develop the speed necessary for running a supervised color session with a director and three producers sitting behind you. Color is emotive, changes and iterations have to be tried and felt before decisions can be made.

Keyboard shortcuts and a Kensington mouse trackball will never let you simultaneously adjust color values in lift, gamma and gain. And that’s the difference between the 99% of folks coloring low-budget, corporate, indie or any other part of the content tsunami that washes over the internet everyday, and the professionals in the expensive seats.

THE MICRO DOES LESS, BUT REALLY FAST

The Davinci Resolve Micro Panel ($995) from Blackmagic Design works better than the Tangent Wave for almost all of my color work. However, the Micro lacks support for adjusting qualifiers and applying windows. I can do that on the Wave, although I have to tab through menus which change the functions of the buttons and knobs on the surface.

Note that this is why The Wave was so popular — the ability to change modes and drive most functions of Resolve from a control surface rather than investing in a giant console of individual dedicated controls like the Advanced Panel or a Tangent Element.

This is also its Achilles Heel. Even with years of using the Wave, I struggle with memorizing each mode and hence I am looking down at the little LED labels to guide me. My eyes are always darting off the screen.

The Micro Panel gives me an immediate physical, tactile control surface of all the controls in the “Color Wheels” Panel in the Color Page of the Resolve UI. I have Primary Wheels (or Bars or Log) Trackball controls with rings.

The build quality is what we’ve all come to expect from Grant Petty and his team at BMD, but it’s worth giving a shout out anyway. The Micro Panel feels like it was chiseled right out of the $30,000 board. There’s nothing delicate or wobbly about it. The unit I worked with was as solid and tight as a submarine. The knobs, rings and trackballs all butter smooth.

RINGS AROUND A TRACKBALL ARE EASIER TO USE

The Micro Panel uses a ring-around-the-trackball. After a day using the Micro, I am a ring-around convert. My hands and fingers have far less travel distance as compared to the knob-above-trackball of the Wave. The experience of grading with the Micro has about the same amount of physical exertion as typing.

Above the iconic level ring and trackball controls are knobs for: Y Lift, Y Gamma, Y Gain, Contrast, Pivot, Mid-Tone Detail, Color Boost, Shadows, Highlights, Saturation, Hue and Luma Mix. These knobs all adjust the parameters found in the bottom of Color Wheel panel accessed in two pages: “1” and “2”.

There are three buttons on the left of the panel: Log, Offset and Viewer. Log knocks the trackballs into Log mode, naturally. Offset makes the Right Ring-Trackball controller the controller for Offset, while making the left ring for Color Temp and the Middle Ring for Tint. Viewer toggles your UI into a Fullscreen Viewer mode. This is super handy and will be the go to button for all the MacBook Pro Colorists.

Beneath the knobs and right above each Ring and Trackball, there are reset buttons: RGB, ALL, and LEVEL. RGB resets the hue trackball, Level resets the ring value and ALL resets both.

Along the right side of the unit there’s 15 buttons for saving, comparing and storing grades you’ve made, as well as navigating between nodes and shots. These are essential for building a grade, as well as doing the really important work of shot-to-shot matching.

Below those buttons are three simple transport buttons: Play, Reverse and Stop.

And that’s it. The knobs and buttons you see on the surface are the controls you have access to. Everything else: qualifiers, keyframes, applying grades from other shots, adjusting curves and the fifty million other things Resolve does, you’ll have to look away from the screen and navigating with a mouse and keyboard.

You can very quickly build base grades, match shots, try out ideas and iterate with the Micro Panel. This is not a small thing, that’s 80 percent of what you need to do. And for less than a thousand dollars, this is a fantastic bargain. It connects to your system and draws power from a single USB-C cable. The unit ships with a USB-C to USB cable so it works with that old iMac you’re still grading with.

SHOULD I BUY THIS?

If the bulk of your color work is grinding out basic grades, fixing white balance and making sure skin tones are legit, then this is all you need. If you need to carry something from shop to set because you’re the editor-colorist-DIT, this is all you need. Maybe think about some of those cool midi-controllers DIY rigs for controlling the things the Micro doesn’t.

The DaVinci Resolve Micro Panel is a worthy investment even if color grading is something you do a few times a week. Your grading will improve because you’ll be working in DaVinci Resolve the way it was intended.

Serious colorists don’t need the Micro Panel, they need the DaVinci Resolve Mini Panel ($2995) and all the things it can do that keeps them away from the keyboard and mouse.

If you already own a Tangent Wave or Element set up, don’t dump it. If your system is working great, and you’ve built all the muscle memory, why learn a new panel? I know saying that will not stop the fire sale on Tangent gear that’s already burning on eBay, but really, don’t panic.

If you are not coloring in Resolve, you do not need this panel. It is called the DaVinci Resolve Micro Panel because that’s the only program it works with. Don’t expect this to work with Premiere Pro CC or FCPX or anything that isn’t DaVinci Resolve.
If you’re not coloring in Resolve, consider what Blackmagic Design is offering in terms of capability and cost: free software plus a $995 color control surface is an incredible bargain.

The ironic tech-prediction-punchlines from five years ago: “Wireless Photoshop”, “4k on your phone”, have all quickly come to pass. Today, I add one more punchline to the dustbin of clickbait titles: “DaVinci on a tablet”.

The unit I tested came loaded with a core i7 processor (i7-6650U @ 2.2GHZ), Intel Iris 540 GPU, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB SSD. This is the second most expensive model in the Surface Pro 4 line up, retailing at $2199 on the Microsoft Store website. This price puts it in the class of high-end laptop rather than iPad-challenger. The Surface Pro is only a tablet in the sense that it has a multi-touch screen and detachable keyboard. In price and performance one should compare it with a MacBook Pro 15” Retina (Iris GPU, 16GB Ram, Core i7 procs and 512GB SSD).

DaVinci Resolve Performance

Working with 1080P, 24 frame, ProRes footage (which works on Windows since Resolve 12.5.2), I can do three nodes without dropping frames: a LUT transformation, a primary pass and a secondary with a single mask. Anything more complicated than that, and I start working in non-realtime. This is pretty common for laptop color grading performance in my experience.

A Perfectly Tiny Screen

The Surface Pro has a 12.3 inch screen that displays 1080. The Resolve UI is not configurable and it’s designed for a much larger display area. When rendered on the screen of the Surface Pro, it’s a perfect miniature and eye-straining to use.

I could easily see using Resolve on the Surface alone, if I could just grab one or two of it’s palettes. A user could customize various set ups for asset management or basic grading tasks if only Blackmagic gave us the chance (hint, hint).

This problem is easily solved by connecting an external display and using the Surface Pro as a secondary screen and input device. Here is where my argument for customization is even more relevant. If Resolve had a customizable UI, then I could make the Surface Pro a touch-based colorociter for no extra money. Boom.

In fact, when connected to an external display, a separate keyboard and mouse, the Surface Pro 4 feels like working on a much bigger machine. Performance of the OS and applications are zippy. Using the Surface screen as an input device (both multitouch and with the stylus) is intuitive and easy. It’s really like having a couple of screens, a keyboard and no computer.

You will definitely want to keep the Surface Pro 4 plugged into AC while you do this GPU intensive work. The Core i7 and Iris GPU will drain all the electrons from the battery when you’re working in Resolve.

The Workflow

As a workflow model for grading, the Surface Pro 4 is almost perfect. I can work in my color suite with a large screen and peripherals like I’m used to. And, at the end of the work day, I can pick up the Surface Pro and walk out the door with the entire project and all my work. Also, I have all my email, Netflix, music, etc, traveling with me.

I say almost perfect because there is one crucial piece missing from this puzzle: video output. The Surface Pro 4 has a miniDisplay port and single USB3 port. As of this moment, there is no way to get a 10bit video signal out of the Surface Pro 4 because it is not certified to work with the one device that will do that, the Blackmagic UltraStudio Pro. Not being able to see what you’re color grading on a color critical display is a crucial part of the grading pipeline, and a deal breaker for colorists.

There’s piles of other work you can do: editing, asset management, LUT application, etc that don’t require this piece of the pipeline. And for those workflows, the Surface Pro 4 works just fine. But it’s not a machine you’re going to build a color grading suite around. On that point, if you’re building a Windows a grading suite, 2200 dollars will buy you serious GPU horsepower if you go with a custom desktop, rather than a portable. However, you can’t unplug that desktop machine and watch Netflix on the train home with it. There’s a trade-off between convenience and power. However, as product line-ups like the Surface gain more power, this seems less and less of a trade off.

Personally, I want all of my computers small. I want SSDs in everything and an end to the era of back-straining color grading monster towers. As GPUs continue to evolve, I can see that in a year or two, there could be a machine like the Surface Pro that will offer lots of power with few compromises. Hopefully by then, the Resolve UI will offer customization options that take into account the new workflow of grading-on-the-go set ups.

Bottomline

Resolve on the Surface Pro 4 is a proof-of-concept, not a workflow I’d recommend to anyone looking for a machine to do serious color grading on.

Think of Resolve as a benchmark for just how far tiny computers have come in terms of capability, and a marker for where they are going. This is a beast of a miniature machine, as powerful as many computers that are in use in existing post production work environments that are just a few years older.

And while you can color grade in Resolve 12.5 on the Surface Pro 4, lack of video output makes it a device best suited for editing, asset management and non color critical tasks.