Posted by Spex on 01/20/08 21:36

nappy wrote:
> "Spex" <No.spam@ta.com> wrote in message
> news:13p62e9asvcob0a@corp.supernews.com...
>> nappy wrote:
>>> "Spex" <No.spam@ta.com> wrote in message
>>> news:13p39vka9k7hp7c@corp.supernews.com...
>>>> You should consider baking groups. If you have groups that are causing
>>>> a tremendous slow down like particles or blurs and blooms then select
>>>> the group, hit Export and in the export dialog set the After Export
>>>> option to Import into project. Turn off the original group and carry on
>>>> working in realtime. Come final render time delete all the baked groups
>>>> and turn on all the original layers.
>>>>
>>> Yes. I do this a lot in Combustion. "Commit to Disk" You can switch
>>> between the workspace and the disk files. It didn't do much in Motion ..
>>> for us anyway.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> This is such a "well known" workflow so I'd expect in future versions of
>>>> Motion that this becomes more automatic i.e selecting a group then
>>>> hitting "Bake."
>>>>
>>>> Which GPU do you have?
>>> 7300
>> That's one of your problems right there! Apple's nVidia drivers are shit.
>> The recommended card is the ATI 1900XT. The nVidia drivers are said to be
>> 3 times less efficient on similar hardware. But the 7300 is not a very
>> good card anyway. It is a night and day difference between the 1900XT and
>> the 7300. Again Color requires the 1900XT too.
>>
>
> Spex. The 7300 is running the standard nVidia drivers I believe. And Color
> does run on the 7300. Although we started with 3 monitors on the main
> workstation we had to go down to 2 becuse Color did NOT run on three. It
> wouldn't even start !

Yep, that would be right. Color does not like more than 2 monitors or
more than one Video Card. It wasn't too long ago it was selling for
$25k and utterly useless! :)

I was speaking to a colourist about it and he reckoned it could do some
serious damage in the grading community if, and I mean if, Apple takes
this by the horns and develops it. It's only a couple of revisions
behind Lustre.

>
>>>> You can import cameras into Motion BTW. I'm told Motion can also deal
>>>> with 3D objects but as of now requires an importer to be written. There
>>>> is certainly a lot of potential in this app.
>>> From which sources? What format. We could not find that info..
>> PFtrack, PFHoe. Admittedly not a huge number of 3rd parties have
>> supported Motion cameras but it is possible. I use PFTrack and have
>> imported the Camera into Motion.
>
> Hmm. I will have to see if Boujou cameras work.. Sometime when I have a
> weekend to mess with it. Again it performed so poorly even with the simplest
> comps that we haven't messed with it since.
>

That'll be the 7300. The 1900XT is _the_ card for all the FCS suite.

>
>
>
>>>>> I wish you lived closer. I could use your help on this TV series.
>>>>>
>>>>> Nobody uses rich pixel formats? I find them very useful for carrying
>>>>> velocity, Z and material / object data form 3D apps.. Waddya mean
>>>>> nobody uses them? Am I alone here? :)
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> Of course you are not the only one who uses z, id and vector passes etc
>>>> but I've yet to see rpf files used. They were never taken up because
>>>> Autodesk were never that forthcoming about them so wide support by other
>>>> apps was patchy at best. It is usual for a compositor to receive the
>>>> buffer passes as .iffs or pngs etc.
>>>
>>> Hmm.. interesting. We work with many who do use rpf files a lot .
>>> Especially between 3dsmax and Combustion. It is a common workflow.
>>> Due a lot to the rpf motion blur feature which can be a good sub for 3d
>>> motion blur.
>>>
>> 3dMax-->Combustion was one of the few workflows that actually fully works.
>> I can understand why you use it in your case but not in a Maya-->Shake
>> workflow which is _the_ most common pipeline I've worked in. OpenEXR is
>> the multi-channel HDR file format of choice now. Motion is supporting
>> that rather than rpf.
>
> We're not using OpenEXR here at this point. I haven't had much time to
> actually contemplate our workflow. I am so busy trying to turn out shots
> that it hasn't been a big issue which file format we use.
>
> That said.. I am always interested in your expertise Spex. Thanks for the
> input.
>
No worries. Hope some of this will prove useful. Good luck with the
series.

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