Mavic 2 pro postproduction

[Andrea1976]

Hi everyone
New owner of a Mtp... it's a remarkable machine. I'm a profane and I fly every time my wife is at work (like having an affair!). I'm doing footage at the maximum quality (Dlog, 4K ecc) but it's very hard to process the clips even with an year old iMac.. It's very annoying, I guess I should give up the D-log and use the normal profile instead..

Have you any advise?

Cheers
Andrea

 

[paulatkin73]

it is your choice of that to do... indeed, to process this video takes quite a bit of resources and mac is not the best platform for it, at all. you do not really 'need' dlog-m under adequate lightning conditions. it helps a lot if you go over areas with extreme contrast, in the dusk and in all other scenarios where you benefit from 10 bit color capture, same as you benefit from using DNG raw files for photos.

best advice here, sadly, would be to ditch mac and get better PC with 2080 nvidia card, or a similar AMD alternative, preferably on new AMD cpus that are coming out this July. imac is not a good platform for pro video processing.

 

[Andrea1976]

it is your choice of that to do... indeed, to process this video takes quite a bit of resources and mac is not the best platform for it, at all. you do not really 'need' dlog-m under adequate lightning conditions. it helps a lot if you go over areas with extreme contrast, in the dusk and in all other scenarios where you benefit from 10 bit color capture, same as you benefit from using DNG raw files for photos.

best advice here, sadly, would be to ditch mac and get better PC with 2080 nvidia card, or a similar AMD alternative, preferably on new AMD cpus that are coming out this July. imac is not a good platform for pro video processing.

You're very kind. Thanks

 

[Paul2660]

Unless you are trying to sell it commercially, look into LumaFusion on iPad Pro. You will be surprised at the number of folks using it now. Not all the power of a finalcut, but you can create a perfect video, d-log luts etc and the user interface just makes sense.

20.00

Paul C

 

[Mavic Ray]

I dont know anything about Mac video editing software but with Adobe products you can use Media Encoder and Premiere Pro to proxy edit. This means that can take all the raw 4k video footage and down sample them to as low as 720p so that it is less intensive on your computer. Once you are done with all your editing it will bring it back to 4k for the final product. It does require extra steps and Adobe Media Encoder.

 

[johnmeyer]

I agree: proxy editing is the only way to deal with really difficult-to-edit (i.e., slow timeline response) formats. Lots of editors can edit with proxies. If you haven't done it before, it requires first taking your footage and creating low-res versions. You edit with these and then, just before you render, you tell your NLE to replace the proxies with the real thing. The render can still take a horrendous amount of time, but you just let that crank for a few hours (or days) while you do something else. By contrast, if the timeline performance is only a few fps, you can't really get anything done.

 

[jagraphics]

New owner of a Mtp... it's a remarkable machine. I'm a profane and I fly every time my wife is at work (like having an affair!). I'm doing footage at the maximum quality (Dlog, 4K ecc) but it's very hard to process the clips even with an year old iMac.. It's very annoying, I guess I should give up the D-log and use the normal profile instead..
Have you any advise?

Hi, I use MAC Pro's (the silver tower) and FCPX but my advice would be:
1 shoot 1080p Unless you are shooting for Netflix or projecting on to a large cinema screen you won't need 4K
2 Use iMovie on the iMac (assuming you are doing 1080p HD)
3 Custom build a PC and edit on that.

4 Look at Davinci Resolve because it is free and runs on Mac, PC and Linux. So you can try it out for free on the iMac and if you can get on with it then look at building a custom PC and moving to that as time/finances permit. The Good Thing(tm) about doing this is as long as you start with a decent motherboard and CPU you can easily upgrade graphics card, memory, HDD/SSD etc as money permits. Something you can't do with an iMac.

I think over the last few years both Apple and Adobe have lost the plot* a bit which has meant a lot of video/phot/graphics people have moved to PC's and there is a lot more available on that platform

*Apple with the appaling Mac pro trashcan and Adobe with the CC subscriptions. The new Mac Pro is 5 years too late and very over priced. A pity. Which is why I am taking my own advice in point 4

 

[paulatkin73]

This is absolutely the year for a PC upgrade, time to get to 5ghz. Probably by end of August when initial rage over 39xx amd cpus will subdue. Will see. No mac is even remotely close to that performance price wise, they made mac pro on xeons - effective, but, astronomically expensive. Amd 3900 ryzen is the way, 16 or 12 cores.

 

[jagraphics]

This is absolutely the year for a PC upgrade, time to get to 5ghz. Probably by end of August when initial rage over 39xx amd cpus will subdue.

You read my mind.

Will see. No mac is even remotely close to that performance price wise, they made mac pro on xeons - effective, but, astronomically expensive. Amd 3900 ryzen is the way, 16 or 12 cores.

BTW Black Magic do a build/configuration guide for Resolve of you want to do your own PC for Windows/Linux or MAC configs..

For PC's it talks of 299 rather thean the 39** but I assme they wil update it. If covers things like how to mix and match the CPU and GPU also how to use the slots and memory.

https://documents.blackmagicdesign....07/DaVinci_Resolve_15_Configuration_Guide.pdf

That said I still have to get into resolve. I normally use FCPX

 

[paulatkin73]

You read my mind.



BTW Black Magic do a build/configuration guide for Resolve of you want to do your own PC for Windows/Linux or MAC configs..

For PC's it talks of 299 rather thean the 39** but I assme they wil update it. If covers things like how to mix and match the CPU and GPU also how to use the slots and memory.

https://documents.blackmagicdesign....07/DaVinci_Resolve_15_Configuration_Guide.pdf

That said I still have to get into resolve. I normally use FCPX

I dunno which video to go with. Some materials suggest benefits pairing amd cpu with amd gpu, but i was on Nvidia now for a decade. Will see, by Aug-sep some reviews should be out with comparisons.

 

[johnmeyer]

The video card/GPU decision should be driven by one thing only: what does your NLE support, and what type of support is provided (e.g., CUDA)?

 

[Ted Maul]

I'm using Final Cut Pro 10.6 on a 2017 MacBook Pro, 16gb DRAM 128gb SSD. No issues whatsoever, except that I have to save the project to an external USBC 2tb hard drive, as 10bit 4k from the Mavic2 Pro absolutely devours hard drive space on the MacBook.

 

[Corthan]

Have you tried transcoding? H265 is an efficient codec in that it stores a lot of info in a small package. However, that means that your computer has to work way harder to play it back compared to other codecs. Transcoding takes a little time but has been the only way I can work on projects longer than about 3 minutes with the Mavics H265 footage. I'm on a newer high-end PC by the way. Just changing to a PC won't magically make these issues go away. For me, the real issue is that my NLE doesn't like the Mavics H265 footage and that causes crashes. In many other ways it's great though so I stick with it. For transcoding you might try Kyno. It's reasonably priced and, while it's largely useless in it's Windows flavour, it's apparently pretty good for Mac, which it was originally written for. Try the trial version first. Finally, make sure that you're recording MOV and not MP4 files. MOV is apparently more Mac friendly.

 

[jagraphics]

I dunno which video to go with. Some materials suggest benefits pairing amd cpu with amd gpu, but i was on Nvidia now for a decade. Will see, by Aug-sep some reviews should be out with comparisons.

As noted by @johnmeyer you need to see what support your NLE has for GPU's. The Black magic config document noted that they use CUDA on NAvidia but OpenCL on AMD But notes you can't run both NAVIDIA and AMD on the same machine. Also some motherboards are designed for AMD and others Intel depending on the chipsets used.

I would expect all the main NLE's top support either CUDA or OpenCL but check. You still need to be very carful puttng to gether motherboard, CPU and GPU combination. Then the order in which you have cards in the slots. It isn't like it used to be inthe days of 486's where you cpould throw almost anything together!

Though it still works out a LOT less expensive than the MAC's. The advantage the mac has its that Apple design and build all the HW and SW to optimally work together. IT seems to me that the iMacs are going the way of the laptops and are less and less user configureable and there is less scope for 3 party repair shops.

After a couple of decades using MAC we are looking at going all PC. Hence suggesting the free version of Resolve on their iMac and if the OP finds they get on with it then to build a custom PC for it.

 

[charlas]

If using Premiere just use proxies, makes life a lot easier. With the x265 files you need a gpu with offload capability (10/20 series nVidia or very recent ish AMD cards) and fast IO (ssd minimum! My Samsung 860 struggles at times) lots of ram, and fast processor....

I've got an i9-9950k nVidia P4200 and 32gb of ram.. And to be honest with any sort of effects on the time line I still get dropped frames! If looking to invest I can recommend the HP ZBooks and my z840 workstation has been a real workhorse (what red used to ship with their cameras when you leased them!)

Here's some stuff I did last weekend at a festival I goto every year.

 

[Andrea1976]

Thanks everybody for the reply.
You all make footage in 4k D-log? someone suggest to record in 1080p,it could be an option.. 1080p but in D-log could have sense? in the mean time I''m making some experiment in my garden (VERY BORING!). There're obviously a lot of difference in details between 4k and 1080p..

 

[jagraphics]

@Andrea1976 I shoot a lot of ground based video for news, corporate and documentaries. It is all 1080p. The only time you need 4K is when you are shooting for Netflix or for something that is going to go on a BIG screen (and I don't mean domestic TV's). Actually a lot of TV is SD and the "HD" is 720 not even 1080!
NOTE most 4K domestic TV's are designed to upscale SD, 720 and 1080 to 4K and do so very well.

Besides a lot of streaming services will auto-select and stream much lower than4k (or 1080) even if they say it is available at 4K There was a lot of discussion about this re Vimeo and Youtube. The upshot was that 99.9% of nonprofessional viewers would not notice the difference.

4K has MUCH larger files and requires a hell of a lot more processing power.
Therefore unless you are shooting professionally and the spec requires 4k shoot in 1080p
It will save you a fortune in storage and processing power.
If you must use 4K go and buy one of the new MAC Pros or custom build a decent PC.

 

[Andrea1976]

Thanks, you are very convincing! So I could shoot at 1080p D-log h265. Should be a good compromise between quality and post processing performance, right?

Andrea

 

[charlas]

The D-LOG x265 is all about Dynamic Range, the 'normal' modes are 8bit x264, the D-Log is 10bit x265 (4:2:0), so highlights and shadows won't get 'crushed' so easily, and less banding in gradients, but like everything, it's all about what you want things to look like, you may never need to shoot 10bit footage (if putting on youtube, for example, their compression is on top of whatever you render out at, although you will still see quality improvements even if you render to an 8bit file from your workflow)

So it's really upto you, shoot stuff in all the formats, see what works for you and your equipment/use case.

 

[kilomikebravo]

It's very annoying, I guess I should give up the D-log and use the normal profile instead..

Andrea: As you've read, you are not alone. The M2P created a situation where it can give you unbelievably good footage BUT, your computer didn't get the memo. <smile>

In your situation, proxies are undoubtedly the answer and it's a reasonably simple job with any of the standard editors...Premiere, FCP, and Resolve. The downside is it's time-consuming to create them when you import your native H.265 files. But that is the only negative and using proxies will make your machine feel like it's twice as powerful as it actually is and you will have no problems editing.

If you opt for the iPad/Lumafusion option, just be aware that Luma strips off 2 bits from your H.265 footage so you're really only editing 8-bit, not 10-bit files. That decision is up to you.

I started with an Intel i7 Windoze machine and an older nVidia GPU. It wasn't enough and I used proxies for a number of months. But, I got tired of waiting on Media Encoder to create the proxy files so I upgraded my machine. Now, with an i9 CPU, an nVidia 1080TI, M.2 system drive, and 64gb of RAM (yes, it's overkill and 32gb is plenty,) I no longer need proxies and am able to edit 10-bit DLog like it was 1080 H.264.

So, give proxy creation a try and see if you can live with it. If not, either start shooting in Normal 4k (or 1080) or, upgrade your hardware.