5.5/8.5

[aekbrown]

We are poised ready to install these latest versions and I was just wondering if anyone had experienced any problems, either with the installation or the software upgrade itself.

Thanks for your help.

Andy

[netviper]

keep us all posted on the issues please

[imported_johnmont]

One of the big changes is the addition of scan mode (F1/F2/Progressive) which is part of each clip. This allows all clips to play back correctly in the player as well as enables easy HD to SD downconverts.

But it also introduces some changes in workflow.....check out the scan mode tutorial in the flame tips section.

[aekbrown]

I've had a quick look through that, which is another one of those "I didn't know I needed that, but I'm sure we'll cope..." upgrades. I do worry about things like this though, which was the reason for the question. Do you think that the software is starting to feel a bit cumbersome? I just think that there are more and more changes that don't really appear to move things on, but address problems that perhaps shouldn't really be there in the first place. Sometimes these fixes don't really work 100% either. (Asigning aspect ratio to incoming clips always seems to need a deselect/reselect with every I/O, for example) I was hoping to see lots of encouraging things about the Master Keyer and upgrades to garbage masks etc, but only time will tell!

Andy

[paul_round]

We have just upgraded our infernos, backdraft and burn to the .5 release and I would advise NOT TO DO IT, yet. We are finding bugs every day currently (I will post a list of the ones we have so far, soon)
It seems to be a case of release early, fix later at clients expense, a practice which seems to be more and more common.
I for one would rather have a solid version rather than lots of new tools, in fact if it was'nt for the fact that Discreet have (yet again!) changed the library structure we would definately go back to 5.3.2.

Paul Round
Peerless

[Xavier]

We don't have much more problems with 5.5 than we did with 5.3.2.

However, don't expect 5.5 to fix much of the bugs you might have in 5.3.2 ... almost everything that was annoying us is still there in 5.5.

The master keyer IS nice and is a good alternative to "one-click" keyers such as Ultimatte or Primatte.

The "new" GMasks are not new at all. They just enabled "tracer style" GMasks in the "regular" Keyer. But these "new" masks were there already in the GMask node in Batch and MK.

If you use proxies in your workflow, having control over proxy quality in the project setup panel is nice -- although using some environnement variable in 5.3.2 will give you almost the same effect.

We FINALLY have "divide" in the Logic Ops!!! This is an historical moment for Discreet! We now can colour correct properly a pre-multiplied layer without using a 14000$ box of sparks! -- but if you have Sapphire MathOps already, this will only make your Batch files less "spark intensive", but nothing more.

Having to ONCE AGAIN format our framestores, recreate projects, recreate users and re-enter custom hotkeys IS GETTING SUPER TIRESOME! Please discreet realise that not all installs are "fresh" installs! Figure out a way to automatically import projects, users, hotkeys and media from a previous version!!!

--Xavier

[paul_round]

Xavier,
what type of work do you? We work mainly in 2K 12 bit, and have many problems, but the worst is the drop in IO performance, particularly in Backdraft, which is Ironic as it was sold to us an IO station, for example PAL frames are now taking 10s a frame to export, and that, gigabit.

Paul
Peerless

[Xavier]

Paul,

We do a mix of HD, 2K 8bits and 2k 12 bits. Very little video res. stuff.

We don't use Backdraft at all. (BTW, 10s a frame for PAL seems like something is broken in your setups. I know discreet quality control is not super duper all the time, but I would guess such a slowdown would have raised a few red flags!)

WIRE performance from framestore to framestore is slower since 5.3, but not to the extent you mention.

IO performance does suffer a lot because of the proxies... but that isn't specific to 5.5 to us. It was a problem with 5.3.2 as well (we were using the DL_PROXY_QUALITY env. variable to render "medium" quality proxies).

Wire tries to be clever and instead of moving proxies over the network, it re-generates them after the transfer. The problem is, with non-coarse proxies, it's slower to re-generate than to transfer them over the (fast) network!

Another slowdown is acessing the "Network" menu. The machine goes to lunch for about a minute before giving me a list of available framestores. That's a new problem with 5.5. for us.

Now, about abysmal IO. Well, I have been scratching my head to find a way to push frames (i.e. image sequences from the 3D dept.) on discreet framestores faster than 10 MB/s without any success! (And most of my tests were done pre-5.0 -- things only got worse after that). So, yeah, IO degraded from super-slow to abysmal (when taking proxy generation time into account). BTW, we use custom scripts with imcopy as our IO pipeline.

To make things clear:

Do we have problems/issues with 5.5? Yes. Plenty. This release is quite far from perfect.

Do we have *more* problems/issues with 5.5 than with 5.3.2? Not really. Actually, a *few* bugs that were annoying in 5.3.2 got resolved.

Hope this clears up things a bit.

Cheers.

-- Xavier