CORTEX Dailies 1.5 Beta Feedback

Thanks for your participation in the CORTEX Dailies 1.5 Beta release and the rollout of this forum. Now that you’ve had some time with the new version, we’d like to hear your feedback.

What is your overall impression of v 1.5?

Which of the new features have you used?
New features include:

You can also report bugs in the [Cortex Bugs category] (http://forum.mtifilm.com/category/cortex/cortex-bug)
If you have sensitive or private information you’d like to include in your feedback, you can email [support@mtifilm.com] (mailto:support@mtifilm.com)

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Hey Amy!

So far, my impression is good. Here are my notes:

  • Took me a minute to get used to the reels on the left, but I like it a lot more when I’m doing commercials and they have tons of reels.
  • Tried hooking an old Decklink Studio into the machine to test the video out, didn’t work out so hot, got a “Failed to open Video Board, Value does not fall within the expected range.” error. I’m guessing I need a newer one. I’m using the BM driver included with desktop video 10.1. It does however seem to work with BM Media Express. Is there a supported card list somewhere? Haven’t found one.
  • Render times still seem to be quick! I’ve tested F55 SR footage, cinedeck cineform footage(raw), gopro, alexa (PR) and redepic and dragon(raw). All to prores and dnxhd.
  • Haven’t worked with other teams that have cortex, so I haven’t had the opportunity to use the manifest functions, same for the EDL traceback functions.
  • I love the reports!
  • The scope and waveform controls are great!
  • All of the lut importing is working wonderfully, it seems to take in just about everything!
  • Haven’t tried the region of interest stuff yet, but I think that is a great function!
  • I got a little overwhelmed with footage on the last job so I tried the C&V tool, but it just took too long (anything besides copy would have taken too long unfortunately), but the one time I used it looked pretty cool. Seemed like a little too much human intervention to get things going. If I’m running around doing other things on set, it may not be doable. Shotput seems to be the most automated, quickest easiest thing these days.

Unfortunately on the last job I was on, that Peter, JD, or Dave helped me solve some issues on, there was just so much footage with an unrealistic deadline I din’t have time to play. Should be playing with it more this next week. He and I were trying to figure out why the render speeds were a bit slow, but after assessing everything going on (transfers & renders), pretty sure I maxed my raid out at 900MB/s! So cortex was fighting to get the files, no fault of cortex.

Those are my notes! Any chance on buying a keyboard from you guys??

Have a good weekend.

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Thanks for taking to time to share your feedback! Much appreciated!

The problem may have been the driver version. We have been installing the 9.8 driver. We just updated to the SDK version 10.1 in one of the most recent builds so you may want to try again with the latest when you have a chance and report back.

Would love to get more input here. The speed testing we’ve done shows that the checksum calculation during the copy has almost no impact on the speed. And the verify is always delayed until after the copy, so you are able to keep rotating your cards without having that get in the way.

The other cool thing is that now we automatically pause/resume copies when you are playing back media, so your storage bandwidth is prioritized on the fly.

Play around with it a bit more when you have the chance and aren’t under too much pressure…

I moved 3 posts to an existing topic: Which BlackMagic cards and drivers are supported?

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