New Quad Core iMacs - Mac Pro alternative for FCS?

[super_plus]

CONS for iMac 2009:

One Firewire800 slot, that's all? Your only monitoring option would be an AJA IO-HD box.
And even at 1.5TB denominations per harddrive, you will run out of space.

CONS for the MacPro:
Eats a lot of power($$$), makes a lot of noise, takes up lots of space.

You can get FW800 hubs, I don't know how well they work personally but I've heard good things from some. I was actually really surprised that it doesnt have a FW400 port but you can get an adapter to take it down from 800. I wander if this would cause issues with some DV cameras?
I personally am actually giving this new Imac some thought. The Mac Pro is a bit out of my budget and the pros seems to heavily outweigh the cons. I know that it probably isn't best for professional use but for a recent college grad trying to get into the industry, I'll take it.

 

[bikefilms]

Judge by eye or by expensive equipment

Judge by eye or by expensive equipment

You guys may think I'm kidding, but an alternative to buying a broadcast monitor is to train your own eye to "see" beyond what your monitor shows you. Just like you can use your camcorders' LCD screen (with training) to judge accurate colors, you can use a notebook computer screen as a legit monitor.

Anyway, create a test. Calibrate your camcorder as best you can. Shoot some shots under different lighting situations. Bring the shots into your editing environment. Check it out, make notes. Basic first steps are to ask youself if your footage looks darker or lighter than you thought it would. Does it look as Warm or Cool as you thought you shot it? And regarding gamma, does your exposure roll into the shadows as you planned? There's a lot of trial-and-error to do, but at the end you can sit behind your LCD screen and say without a doubt, "OK my exposure will be a bit higher than what I see here, so stop down. The orange color in my LCD kinda pops as compared to the others, so my orange gelled lamp may need a stronger gel to get the desired color. I can't quite see into the shadows on my LCD, but I know there will be some detail that I can't see yet.

This is the 5-minute version. Contact me if you're into it I've been at it for years, and have colored and delivered dozens of projects for broadcast, without a monitor.

Peace,
Andrew Burke

Computer monitors and broadcast monitors are built for different purposes though so even very nice computer monitors will fall short of being good broadcast monitors. ...

-A

 

[adkimery]

W/enough trial and error I don't doubt it's possible to compensate for some of the inherent inaccuracies of a computer monitor and the preview quality image you get in Color and FCP, but it just seems like working harder instead of smarter, IMO.


-A

 

[RyanBellaCine]

Now that we're off topic..

You could learn to read your waveform scopes built right into FCP & Color. Paint by numbers, more or less.

If an element in all three channel waveforms are of equal value, then your getting pure black/grey/white depending on it's luminance value. 0 is black. 100 is white. And the color wheel is the color wheel.

Once you get a feel for how "bright" 50 ire or 40 or even 85 IRE is on a monitor, you know you can always trust the scope when grading

 

[adkimery]

Don't post facilities usually do that anyway, even if they have a couple/multiple output SDI (costs more than a car) monitors, calibrated already. Don't the broadcaster re-check and make legal all that goes on air. Is there not a QC engineer somewhere in this chain also to secure final playout look on consumer television devices, so this being the simplified version of this process.

Broadcast monitors can be had for $2-3k so I guess that's still more than a car, but not a very good car.rogar-BigGrin(DBG)

Making something broadcast legal means adhering to certain technical specifications. A QC engineer will look for things like audio peaking, phase problems, video hits, dropped frames, excessive chroma & luma, etc.,. A b'cast monitor, scopes, and probably some other gear is used to analyze the master tape.

Personally when I grade I don't try and guesstimate what it will look like after it gets compressed for b'cast and viewed on someone's maladjusted, $200 TV from Wal-Mart w/a fat glare on the screen from the window on the other side of the room. There are just too many variables to try and take into consideration. Am I going to make sure things like text and gfx are legible on smaller, lower quality screens? Sure, but I'm not going to make any subjective decisions about aesthetics based on a consumer TV because that's just chasing my tail, IMO (I could visit a 100 different homes and see 100 different TV setups).

I grade to my b'cast monitor so that I know it looks how I want it to look. And people who care enough about image quality to appreciate the grade will look at it on a properly setup TV, in a proper viewing environment and will see what it's supposed to look like too (w/in the technical limitations of their TV set of course).

I don't agree that we should be aiming for the lowest common denominator. Its like the trend towards eliminating dynamic range in music because 'loud' sounds better through factory car speakers and tiny headphones. Screw that.


-A

 

[DrDave]

Having used a quad for some time, I would prefer an octobox for serious rendering days.

 

[Staven]

What about the 21.5 iMac??

It's size fits my desk way better than the 27inch would. I understand that it isn't quad core, but what can't it do that the i5 or i7 can?

 

[yabyum]

What about the 21.5 iMac??

It's size fits my desk way better than the 27inch would. I understand that it isn't quad core, but what can't it do that the i5 or i7 can?

It'll be half as slow when rendering... so there's that.