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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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!

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…