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Blackmagic Design Conference & Thoughts On The New iMac Pro

January 7, 2018

Team Mixing Light discusses the first ever Blackmagic Design Conference & Expo as well as our thoughts on Apple's latest - the iMac Pro.


Series
Day 7: 24 Insights in 24 Days 2018 New Year Marathon

A Brand New Blackmagic Themed Conference & Is the New iMac Pro A Good Fit In The Color Suite?

A happy new year from Team Mixing Light! We hope that your year is off to a great start and that you’re enjoying our annual 24 Insights and 24 days Marathon.

We have a little over two weeks to go in the marathon and still have some really exciting Insights coming up from Dan, Patrick and Robbie, but also from many new and returning contributors!  You’ll definitely want to check in each day in January to see what’s new.

Each Sunday during the marathon we’ll have an installment of From The MailBag!

Remember, you can submit your questions via the contact form or by emailing us at team.ml@mixinglight.com. Your questions can be technical, creative, about gear or anything else related to the world of color correction.

We do have an announcement regarding MailBag episodes.  Starting in February, MailBags will be a weekly feature – combined with another new weekly feature we can’t talk about quite yet…

Team Mixing Light will be delivering more member content than ever in 2018!

The Blackmagic Design Conference & Expo

Over the past year, Blackmagic has been making a strong push into education – they’ve launched an official training program (of which Mixing Light is proud to be part), published courseware for Resolve, and have been more active in training events at conferences like NAB, IBC and Editors Retreat.

Last year, Blackmagic and Future Media Concepts (the nation’s largest production/post conference producer) started talking about a Blackmagic Design themed conference.  Flash forward a few months, after they came to an agreement, Robbie was asked to be the program manager for the first ever Blackmagic Design Conference & Expo.

The conference is happening February 11-13th in Los Angeles.  Featuring a day of warm-up sessions, and two full days sessions covering editing in Resolve, advanced color correction techniques, color management and more, the conference is a jam-packed educational opportunity.  The best part?  The price!  At only $475 dollars ($285 student rate) the conference is a great investment.

In Part 1, we talk in more detail about the conference and why we’re so excited about it!

Thoughts On The iMac Pro

For the past couple weeks, forums, Twitter & Facebook groups have been alive with discussion about the new iMac Pro that Apple officially released in December.

Like many things Apple related, the iMac Pro has caused quite a stir; some people have lauded it as the best computer Apple has ever made and proves that Apple is committed to the pro market, while others have slammed the design of the machine due to its lack of upgradability.

One thing is certain – on paper the iMac Pro appears to be a beast – with up to an 18-core Xeon processor, 128 GB DDR4 ECC memory, 4TB NVMe SSD, and a Radeon 64 16GB graphics card. But is this machine a good fit for the typical color suite?

In Part 2, we discuss the pros/cons of the new iMac Pro, lavish praise on it, while scratching our heads about the un-modular nature of it.  This is a fun discussion!


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Comments

Homepage Forums Blackmagic Design Conference & Thoughts On The New iMac Pro

  • Question for Robbie about part 2 and the 10 GbE port. If you were a one-man-team running your facility, would you connect this iMac Pro to classic Thunderbolt 3 devices (like Pegasus), or would you rather try to be ‘future proof’ (maybe an assistant will come in the team later), and take advantage on the 10GbE port? In the latter case, which device would you advise to start with? Thank you.


  • Robbie Carman
    Guest

    hmmm. Can I answer both? 🙂

    Thunderbolt 3 direct attached with SSDs or a large pool is almost certainly going to be faster than the 10GbE connection. I have a 8 bay SSD TB 3 RAID attached to my PC when I need to do UHD DPX or EXR workflows that is almost double the speed of my NAS over 10GbE.

    With that said 10GBe does open you up to shared storage, and more collaborative workflows. That doesn’t mean you can’t do shared storage over thunderbolt (Thunderbolt Networking) but 10GBe is a known quantity that works well. I’m a huge fan of the Lumaforge JellyFish but I’ve also used solutions from Small Tree too.

    If you’re looking for entry level 10GBe take a look at the 10GBe products from Qnap. I had one of these for a while at home and it worked well

    https://www.bhphotovideo.com/

  • I’m super excited for the conference! Thank you Robbie for all the work setting it up. If it’s not too late to comment on the program, as stoked as I am to see all the fantastic looking sessions on Resolve, I was really hoping for more on Fusion. As the program is currently written, besides VR (in which I have zero interest) there is only a single Fusion session. While there’s a ton of great training content out there for Resolve, there is almost none out for Fusion, and what is there is for full time VFX rather than editors and colorists. So I am really glad to see editors and colorists are the focus of the non-VR Fusion session, and it would be even better if there were more Fusion sessions at the conference. Just my 2 cents. See you there!


  • Willian Aleman
    Guest

    Hi Robbie,

    Thanks for the tone of new information.

    Is there any future plan to have the conference in NYC.
    Doing the math to attend to the LA conference from NY resulted in about $1,400, including the fly, hotel and the conference fee.


  • Patrick Inhofer
    Guest

    Check out the Warm Up sessions before the day before the Conference begins. That’s a 3-hour Fusion session designed precisely to start at 0 and move you forward and help start a base of new Fusion users.


  • Robbie Carman
    Guest

    maybe next year. Conference location was picked by BMD and FMC. With a big BMD office in LA that probably played into it.


  • Robbie Carman
    Guest

    thanks for the feedback! I don’t disagree but a few issues were/are at play – only a 2 day conference, lack of qualified people to teach fusion (the biggest one) and polling indicated not a big interest. As Patrick pointed out there is the 3 hour warm up session but as you probably know that’s not part of the 2 day package.

  • Thank you for the replies guys. Yep, I did pay to add the warm up day even though the Fusion session is the only warmup session I’ll be attending. I’ve read the Fusion manual and am at least somewhat familiar with the UI and some of the tools. It’s the jump to actually figuring out how to use the those tools to quickly accomplish even something as simple as a credit roll or a decent lower third motion graphic that has been harder and is what I hope to get out of the conference sessions. Ultimately, I want to be able to replace After Effects with Fusion in my workflow, though I wonder whether that’s even a reasonable goal. In any case, I’m looking forward to it! Thanks again!


  • Willian Aleman
    Guest

    Robbie, thanks for the response.

  • I’ve looked the schedule of the conference and it’s great! I’m quite new in color correction (I try to color grade for one year now) but the real problem is I’m living in Turkey. Well it’s quite far for just 3 days… I’m thinking to try my schedule but if there is going to be some kind of live coverage in web (I really don’t think that since it’s paid conference) that would be too much way to go.

    Is there any other plans for Europe maybe?

    Thank you for your attention…

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