BLEv5 Q's

[dermot.shane]

starting playing with BLE v5 inside Avid, was wondering if anyone has found a way to play a sequence of say 5 - 10 shots...   without exiting the Baselight UI and running it in MC?

 

 

 

 

[Bruno Mansi]

I've worked with version 4 of Baselight Editions, but unless something about the interface has changed in version 5, this has never been possible. You could place BLE as an effect on a higher layer - covering several shots, but then they would all have the same grade.

[Chris DiBerardino]

Unfortunately there is no real time playback in BLE in Avid.  You have to jump out of the interface and play it on the timeline.  

[Bruno Mansi]

4 hours ago, Chris DiBerardino said:

Unfortunately there is no real time playback in BLE in Avid.  You have to jump out of the interface and play it on the timeline.  

This isn't my experience on the systems I've worked on. You can get real-time playback within the Baselight interface as long as you don't have too many layers/effects. It also seems to work better when the Avid timeline quality is set to medium (yellow-green).

[Chris DiBerardino]

6 minutes ago, Bruno Mansi said:

This isn't my experience on the systems I've worked on. You can get real-time playback within the Baselight interface as long as you don't have too many layers/effects. It also seems to work better when the Avid timeline quality is set to medium (yellow-green).

I'm using it on a very robust mac trash can system and I can't get anything close to real time playback even with the Avid timeline set to preview.  This is on 1080p footage with only a base grade.  I've never been able to get real time playback within the plugin itself.  I'd imagine you could get close on a really crazy build.  But it shouldn't take that much juice to get realtime playback when Resolve on the same system with the same footage performs 1000x better.

[Bruno Mansi]

There's something not right here as I've had real-time playback on PC systems with no problem. These aren't the latest computer builds either - I have a HP z800 and a HP laptop (8760W) which will do real-time, and they're both well in excess of 7 years old!

Can it be something to do with the fact that these both have Nvidia graphics card/chip? The plugin utilises the GPU to accelerate rendering performance but there's not much info on how it does this - maybe it's something to do with CUDA or it's drivers?

I'd give Filmlight a call - I'm sure they will be able to help you sort out what's going on with your Mac trashcan.

[Chris DiBerardino]

My company is in close contact with Filmlight on a regular basis.  Even when I was on a z800 with a GTX 780 a few years ago doing 1080p I couldn't get realtime playback inside of the plugin.  As far as the trashcan goes, I'm pretty positive it is probably because it has AMD GPUs and not Nvidia.  

Bruno, for clarity sake, are you able to get realtime playback to an external broadcast monitor?  Or are you strictly talking about the player in the interface itself?  My issue is on an external playback monitor.  I've seen realtime playback inside the interface itself.  My understanding is that it's still not supported to play out of the video output from within the interface.

Edited March 28, 2018 by Chris DiBerardino

[Bruno Mansi]

3 hours ago, Chris DiBerardino said:

re you able to get realtime playback to an external broadcast monitor?  Or are you strictly talking about the player in the interface itself? 

On my laptop it's simply through the Avid right-hand (record monitor). The laptop is equipped with a Nvidia Quadro 4000M chipset and Dreamcolor display. CPU is an i7/2Ghz/4 core processor with 16GB memory.

The Z800 is a dual Zeon 6 core with 48GB memory and a Quadro K4200 GPU. Playback is normally on an external monitor using a Blackmagic card or with the Mojo DX hardware.

On both machines, I get real-time previews either within the Baselight interface or from the Avid timeline.

[Chris DiBerardino]

2 minutes ago, Bruno Mansi said:

On both machines, I get real-time previews either within the Baselight interface or from the Avid timeline.

You get real-time playback on your client monitor while inside the Baselight interface?

My avid timeline always gets real-time playback if in preview quality mode.

[Bruno Mansi]

Just to confirm, I've just been testing on my laptop.

I'm using DnxHD media and I've switched on the 'show playback fps' in the Baselight interface, which opens full screen. Avid timeline quality is at medium (yellow/green)

No corrections applied - Real time playback (25fps) in normal screen size and full screen playback (F8)

Layer 1 added with Film Grade adjustments - Real time playback as above

Layer 2 added with Video Grade adjustments - Real time playback as above

Layer 3 added with Hue shift adjustments - Real time playback as above

Layer 4 added with glow Added - Real time playback as above

Layer 5 added with sharpen added - Real time playback as above

Layer 6 added with grain added - Playback now at 14fps

So you can see that it's pretty much as I described - i.e. it stays real-time until I add the grain layer, which is pretty much what I expected.

Although I don't have a way of connecting my laptop to an external monitor, when I'm doing this on the Z800, I get similar results and the external client monitor (connected either from the Blackmagic card or the Mojo DX) just reflects what I see inside the interface. So if I'm dropping frames in the interface window, I'll be dropping frames on my client monitor

[Chris DiBerardino]

I'm more concerned with the fact that  you are claiming to get real-time playback on your external monitor while you have the baselight interface open.  I've never been able to achieve that even with no color or layers added.  It must come down to individual hardware components of the system.  

You're the only person I've ever heard claim to get real-time playback within the baselight plugin interface while using client monitoring.  So I guess your system just has the right pieces in it to make it work.

One other variable is that on my z820 system I used, the output device was a Nitris DX box.  I doubt that would hinder any playback, but it is a variable.  That and the graphics card being a gtx780, but that was a strong card when the plugin came out and was put in specifically for the plugin.  

[Bruno Mansi]

I will check tomorrow when I can get onto the z800 in question - just to make sure I'm not making this up!

[Chris DiBerardino]

I'm looking forward to hearing about what you see!  

[Bruno Mansi]

Hi Chris,

As promised, just tried this out on the z800 and you're absolutely right!

With the client monitor enabled (either through the client monitor enable button or the hardware switch) I can only manage about half speed playback, both on the plugin viewer and the actual monitor. The preview monitor setting seems to make no difference, but as you mentioned playback from the Avid timeline is real-time. Once you switch off the client monitor (or disable the hardware) real-time returns to the plugin viewer.

Sorry about the misinformation - I haven't used Baselight on the Avid for quite a while now as I've recently been using Resolve, which IS real-time through the client monitor. Obviously age is scrambling my brain!

I know Baselight Editions 5 is still in beta-testing mode - do you have any info on whether they've fixed this in the new release?

BTW what guitar is that you're(?) playing? Looks like it could be a Les Paul.

 

[Chris DiBerardino]

6 hours ago, Bruno Mansi said:

I know Baselight Editions 5 is still in beta-testing mode - do you have any info on whether they've fixed this in the new release?

BTW what guitar is that you're(?) playing? Looks like it could be a Les Paul.

 

Bruno,

Thanks so much for checking that out!  It's nice to hear it confirmed by someone else because I was starting to think I was just really unlucky or you were incredibly lucky!  I'm in the same boat where I haven't been using Baselight in Avid and doing mostly Resolve lately.  

I can confirm that as of right now on the latest beta, the problem is not fixed.  I think it's a pretty deep rooted problem between the code of Avid and the plugin.  I'm not sure on the possibility of it being fixed any time soon.

The guitar is actually a knock off les paul made by Agile.  I got it for like 180 used on ebay and it was the best purchase I've ever made.  Plays better than any les paul I've played in a store!  

Thanks again for checking your setup!

[Mark Mulcaster]

Its partly inherent with a lot of 3rd party plugins that they seem to be much more render intensive or wont allow real-time playback as esily in avid as other NLEs

My online editor told me her avid reported back 69hours of rendering time to render a 8minute uhd sequence on a z840!

After some investigation we found that the issue was 3 fold:

-UHD 50p rendering

-There's an update for the drivers for the avid BM box which helped

-A semi-complicated grade was created by yours truly, ive found anything over a couple of layers and it really affects rendering time.

 

The system played better simply by bypassing the avid box and that's how we found the driver issue, like I said above the driver update helped and it was

Edited March 29, 2018 by Mark

[dermot.shane]

On 3/29/2018 at 8:56 AM, Chris DiBerardino said:

Bruno,

The guitar is actually a knock off les paul made by Agile.  I got it for like 180 used on ebay and it was the best purchase I've ever made.  Plays better than any les paul I've played in a store!  

Thanks again for checking your setup!

not excatly on topic, but speaking of Les Pauls.... here's a piccie of me with my mod'd 59 Lester + 59 Bandmaster, i've owned the Lester since 1971 when it was a "beat up old guitar"... i was student then, studying classical guitar and the Lester took every dime i had at the time,well worth it by 2018...

The Bandmaster is Bryan Adam's, the piccie is taken at his studio, excuse the fake smoke ring, i had nothing to do with the piccie processing... i was just a passanger on that ship, and no one had a clue what my day job is ;-)

Edited April 16, 2018 by dermot.shane

[Nicolas Hanson]

Black beauty?

[Bruno Mansi]

58 minutes ago, Nicolas Hanson said:

Black beauty?

That's what I have, although it's an Epiphone copy rather than a Gibson.

Sounds like we've got enough players to form a band! - The Loweposts?

[dermot.shane]

yea a 59 custom, as best we can tell, could be early 1960, Gibbies sn;'s are a nightmare to sort at the best of times

now another Bl(E) user question....  is there a way to move between BLE effects on diffrent tracks, or exclude working on some tracks without leaveing the BL ui?

if so, i've not found it (yet)

 

 

 

[Bruno Mansi]

1 hour ago, dermot.shane said:

is there a way to move between BLE effects on diffrent tracks, or exclude working on some tracks without leaveing the BL ui

Unless something has changed in version 5, there's no way of doing this from inside the Baselight UI. Using the F5 & F6 keys to go back/forward only seems to work on Baselight effects on the track you've highlighted, and will 'break' if you try to select more than one video track before entering the effect.

I always make a new track above the other layers of video which I designate as the grade track and apply the Baselight plugin. By using the subdivide function in the Pan and Zoom tool, I can create add-edits for each edit on the tracks below, so that each shot will have its own corresponding Baselight effect.

[Chris DiBerardino]

On 4/16/2018 at 2:26 PM, Bruno Mansi said:

Unless something has changed in version 5, there's no way of doing this from inside the Baselight UI. Using the F5 & F6 keys to go back/forward only seems to work on Baselight effects on the track you've highlighted, and will 'break' if you try to select more than one video track before entering the effect.

I always make a new track above the other layers of video which I designate as the grade track and apply the Baselight plugin. By using the subdivide function in the Pan and Zoom tool, I can create add-edits for each edit on the tracks below, so that each shot will have its own corresponding Baselight effect.

I've been on version 5 for a long time.  So long that I don't really remember how previous versions worked.  That being said, I believe in version 5 there are a few enhancements to navigation.  They added a filter where you can skip to a different clip in the timeline based off tape, reel, clip, source names.  I'm not sure if that is in previous versions or not.  Also, you can read nested baselight effects, say if it's underneath an avid effect on the same track.  Also, the built in subdivide functions in the baselight plugin are now rock solid, so no need to use the avid pan and scan to subdivide.