Shared Project feedback

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postprod-walterfilms

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Shared Project feedback

PostFri Dec 06, 2019 12:25 am

Hi,

I just finished an almost full blackmagic shared project with davinci 16.1.1 and here's my feedback :

Configuration :

7 BMPCC6K cameras shooting BRAW 12:1
7 editors
2 colorists
1 sound mixer
3 assistants

all on macpros 6,1 D700, 64GB of ram, MacOS Mojave up to date.

Shared storage :

Facilis terrablock with FC 8Gb to all clients (read/write on all clients was indicating 360MB/s with BM speed test)
1 partition for storing all the rushes
1 partition for the caches

Database : (thanks to Seth Goldin)

Intel NUC (8x1,9Ghz core i7) 32GB ram
Centos 7 / postgresql 9.5 backed up on the server using cron jobs every 15 min.

posgresql.conf tuned with those settings :

max_connections = 300
shared_buffers = 8GB
effective_cache_size = 24GB
maintenance_work_mem = 2GB
checkpoint_completion_target = 0.9
wal_buffers = 16MB
default_statistics_target = 500
random_page_cost = 1.1
effective_io_concurrency = 200
work_mem = 13981kB
min_wal_size = 4GB
max_wal_size = 8GB
max_worker_processes = 8

For the shooting part, everything was very smooth, all cameras were synced with tentacle and everything worked fine, pictures looks very good. the battery is still a problem as well as the non-tilting screen... but we found some workaround and that's not the subject.

The edit part was quite smooth also if you keep very organized, and talk a lot. also not having to conform, check, reconform, transfer software was very comfortable, but I noticed some very annoying bugs, and i wonder how to overcome them for the next project :

- when an editor or a colorist stays in his bin, and his timeline, that's smooth for him. but for the assistants or as soon as you have to navigate between bins, that's very very very slow. you spend just a lot of time waiting in front of that rainbow wheel, while the other bins get updated.

- bin locking and timeline locking at the same time can be problematic as well. specially if some editors work with timeline stacking. sometimes no one has a specific bin opened and you wonder why it's marked as locked, but it's just a timeline stacked that is blocking the bin.

- we had an "exchange" bin, some sort of sandbox bin so we could drop timelines there to pick them up and put them in someone else bin. but this workaround was really annoying as there was always someone who forgot to leave the bin so it was locked. maybe that could be enhanced with "dropbox" bin or in the chat or a pop up window.. "X wants to send you this timeline. Accept / No"

- We had to deliver some unconventional resolutions for that project, one editor without asking changed the settings for the entire project not just his timeline... so everyone started to have a weird timeline. would be great to have the ability to have one "Super User", that would be the only one to have the ability to change the settings for the entire project.

- activating options like "stacking timelines" or enabling cache or on any of the clients, was enabling it automaticaly in a very random way in every other clients. enabling cache was slowing the access to the database a lot. It took me a while to find out that one colorist enabled it, and it appeared completly randomly on all the editing suites. when shutting in on every clients, it became smoother. We disabled the cache for every users but some bad habits came back and the colorist activated it again without thinking too much (that would be an other great setting for the Super User) We ended up creating a separate project for colorists so they could enable the cache.

- speaking about resolutions, it's great to have the ability to modify them on a per timeline basis, but editing/grading a vertical timeline is really hard when the monitor is not able to display it... maybe blackmagic can do it on the software side, because we ended up using the good old regular HD timeline with an alpha cache.

- it was impossible to disable the automatic backup in the user settings. anytime I wanted to change it and save, when coming back, it was immediatly checked again and was pointing to an other host. As i was backing up the database directly on the server, this setting was useless and anoying.

- When an editor had to move from a client to an other, it was a bit annoying to send his keyboards, and preferences.

- we have had a big crash in the middle of the edit, davinci crashed slowly on all clients, and impossible to reconnect the clients after that. an error saying "The project could not be loaded in collaboration mode as Resolve was unable to establish a connection to communicate with other users" always appeared when we launch the project. I rebooted the database and reindexed it and problem was gone.

- Lastly, I think a very nice "improvement" would be to rollback to when there was Users in davinci. Specially when using shared project now. Users would be stored on the database side, that would allow ACLs on bins/timelines, "super user" or admin user, and also would allow any user to log into any machines with his own settings / preferences / keyboard / cache.

Hope that it will help and I can give more details for those who wants. I would be very happy to get other people feedback on shared project also.

Have a nice day,
Last edited by postprod-walterfilms on Fri Dec 06, 2019 6:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Jim Simon

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Re: Shared Project feedback

PostFri Dec 06, 2019 5:17 pm

postprod-walterfilms wrote:all cameras were synced with tentacle


How long was your shoot? I've read that the Pocket camera may need to be resyned every so often, while the Ursa would hold sync all day.
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postprod-walterfilms

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Re: Shared Project feedback

PostFri Dec 06, 2019 6:07 pm

Hi,

When using tentacle sync, you have a small device always connected to the camera using the jack in audio, so you just sync those devices at the beggining of the day with your phone on bluetooth, you plug them on each camera /sound recorder and then you forget about it.

BMPCC6K recognize it directly as external TC through the jack so you don't even have to record it to any audio channel.
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Jim Simon

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Re: Shared Project feedback

PostFri Dec 06, 2019 9:31 pm

Ah, bummer. I had a misunderstanding on how they worked.
My Biases:

You NEED training.
You NEED a desktop.
You NEED a calibrated (non-computer) display.
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postprod-walterfilms

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Re: Shared Project feedback

PostFri Dec 13, 2019 7:18 am

Some updates as i just finished an other project which went a lot smoother (no crash at all of the database, almost none from the softwares, everybody happy :) ) but found out new bug:

There was less clients working at the same time (4 editors, 1 color grader, 2 assistants) and we were working with HD prores footage.

- I was able to deactivate autosave on each client by creating a dummy project which was not shared, deactivate autosave on each clients, and it seems that it was easier to manage for the clients and database but it might not be related as we had less clients and better organization.

- the weird bug concerns some special fonts used for subtitles. We had to deliver with thaïlandese subtitles and when quitting davinci and reloading that sequence straight, it immediatly crashes the software. If we wait or open different sequences before, than we are able to open that sequence with thaïlandese subtitles.

(I can provide the font or any element to BM in pm if needed)

thanks and have a nice day.
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iddos-l

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Re: Shared Project feedback

PostFri Dec 13, 2019 9:34 am

This is very useful information.

Thanks for sharing.
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postprod-walterfilms

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Re: Shared Project feedback

PostThu Jan 23, 2020 11:37 am

New update after new project :


-------------------------------------------------------------------
Davinci 16.1.2

Configuration :

7 BMPCC6K cameras shooting BRAW 12:1
7 editors
2 colorists
1 sound mixer
3 assistants

all on macpros 6,1 D700, 64GB of ram, MacOS High Sierra.

Shared storage :

3x AVID NEXIS pro striped

Database : (thanks to Seth Goldin)

Intel NUC (8x1,9Ghz core i7) 32GB ram
Centos 7 / postgresql 9.5 backed up on the server using cron jobs every 15 min.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Everything went quite smooth but still the same very annoying problems that won't be solved unless blackmagic brings back "users" fonction:

- shortcuts and UI preferences don't follow if an editor moves to an other edit station.

- if an editor enables "stacking timelines", it becomes a huuuuuuge mess as it activates randomly on every other editing station which is not only annoying, but leads to massive crashes. I had to force editors to not use it unless very necessary.

- If an editor enables caches, it becomes available on all the other editing stations and leads to crashes and/or offline cache.

- On the editor side, i had some complaints about how the timeline reacts. sometimes when you move the playhead inside de timeline and hit play, the playhead goes back to its previous state which is annoying.

- We tried a new workflow to exchange timeline, we created a bin for each editors, and a sandbox bin attached to it to drop timelines and avoid binlock collisions, it worked but it's still not ideal.

Apart from that the database was very stable, we introduced a little more grading during editing the same timeline without bugs.

Davinci is obviously going in the right direction, and i would love to see user management in 17 maybe even with a "blackmagic cloud" to keep it in sync for the editors so wherever they work they can always call their preferences.
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Rohit Gupta

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Re: Shared Project feedback

PostThu Jan 23, 2020 12:07 pm

There are a lot of improvements for collaboration performance in the pipeline. This will make your experience a lot nicer. We hope to get it out in the next major release.

Thanks for your feedback!
Rohit Gupta

DaVinci Resolve Software Development
Blackmagic Design
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postprod-walterfilms

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Re: Shared Project feedback

PostThu Jan 23, 2020 4:42 pm

Thanks Rohit,

if I can help in any way, let me know !

if others have questions i'll try to answer.

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