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Any news on Scratch front ?

Alexandre Westphal

Alexandre Westphal

Hi all,

I've been just wondering for a while : any news regarding upgrades for the color grading tools inside Scratch ?
If anyone from Assimilate is passing by with some insight ;)
I guess they've been quite busy on the live FX stuff, but since more than a year I believe there were only updates with some fixes, nothing really new.... or am I wrong ? Shall we expect something in a near futur ? ( am I supposed planning to upgrade soon :) ?)

Cheers,
Alex
 
I tried for several days to reach Assimilate tech support in San Jose, CA via phone but nobody picked up the line each time. Same response in Sales department.

Does anyone have another number to contact Assimilate tech support in the USA?
 
Tony Sal said:
I tried for several days to reach Assimilate tech support in San Jose, CA via phone but nobody picked up the line each time. Same response in Sales department.

Does anyone have another number to contact Assimilate tech support in the USA?
Click to expand...

Did you try to reach the support through their email ? Usually they respond fast ! (From my experience assimilate support is really great).
 
@Jason Myres: Thanks for linking me in!

Tony Sal said:
I tried for several days to reach Assimilate tech support in San Jose, CA via phone but nobody picked up the line each time. Same response in Sales department.

Does anyone have another number to contact Assimilate tech support in the USA?
Click to expand...

Hey Tony, we do not offer phone support, I'm afraid.
But as Alexandre mentioned, you should be helped pretty quickly via email support.
Feel free to shoot an email to support@assimilateinc.com anytime!
 
Alexandre Westphal said:
Hi all,

I've been just wondering for a while : any news regarding upgrades for the color grading tools inside Scratch ?
If anyone from Assimilate is passing by with some insight ;)
I guess they've been quite busy on the live FX stuff, but since more than a year I believe there were only updates with some fixes, nothing really new.... or am I wrong ? Shall we expect something in a near futur ? ( am I supposed planning to upgrade soon :) ?)

Cheers,
Alex
Click to expand...

Hey Alex,

fair question :) .
Your assessment is correct - we'Ve been quite busy with Live FX over the past one and a half years.
It indeed took more resources and time than anticipated.
V9.7 is around the corner and with that we should be in pretty good shape wrt Live FX and virtual produciton workflows.
The other thing that is keeping us busy at the moment is a pretty big under-the-hood update, which is porting everything to metal on macOS.
While SCRATCH runs natively on Apple Silicon (i.e. you do not need Rosetta to run it), a lot of things still have to be ported over to Metal.
That means porting 20 years of OpenGL and OpenCL code ;-) .
It's quite a big ship to turn around, but it doesn't make too much sense to develop new features before that port is done.

Anyhow - we're totally aware that we've been lacking updates on SCRATCH (outside of certin things rippling down from Live FX development) for quite a while. Rest assured - there will be updates for it, although it'll still take a bit until we're there.


Best,
Mazze
 
Tony Sal said:
I tried for several days to reach Assimilate tech support in San Jose, CA via phone but nobody picked up the line each time. Same response in Sales department.

Does anyone have another number to contact Assimilate tech support in the USA?
Click to expand...

Just to confirm that Assimilate Support and the scratch gooogle user group been super responsive for me in the few occasions I needed urgent help.
 
Thank you Mazze, Berend, and Alexandre .

Mazze are you involved with the Play Pro Studio App?

I have been testing it with Pro Res Raw files for transcoding to Cinema DNG for import into Resolve.

I discovered the camera color temp and tint metadata do not match between a XAVC intra (SLOG 3/SGMT3C) file versus the ProRes RAW recording which was simultaneously recorded from a Sony FX3 camera. The transcoded Cinema DNG color temp and tint were offset by over 1000 Kelvin compared to the XAVC Intra file.

In addition in the Resolve color page/ RAW tab the Cinema DNG transcoded clip has limited options for color space and gamma settings.

I concluded the best option when working with the Cinema DNG transcoded clip is to create a CST node as outlined below.

input color space set to either BM design or P3D60
output color space = SGamut3Cine

Input Gamma = Linear
Output Gamma = SLOG 3

Tone mapping = None
Gamut mapping None

Is my CST workflow correct given the limited options available in the Cinema DNG Raw tab?

Are the limited Cinema DNG Raw tab color space and gamma options due to Cinema DNG Blackmagic SDK or another cause?

Why does the clip color temp and tint metadata in the ProRes RAW file as seen in Play Pro Studio as well as the Cinema DNG transcoded file not match the XAVC Intra file?
 
Hi Tony,

I am not entirely certain, but I think there was something about the FX3 baking in the white balance, preventing you from doing technically accurate white balance shifts with the resulting ProRes RAW later on.
Don't quote me on that, I might be wrong.
That being said, it would be good to have some numbers in terms of color temperature (i.e. XAVC vs ProRes vs CinemaDNG).
However, if there is already this difference between the XAVC and the ProRes RAW, I'm afraid it is a question for Sony.
Play Pro Studio reads in the ProRes RAW files through the Apple SDK and gets its numbers from that.
It should look 100% the same as in e.g. Final Cut.

As for Resolve and the debayering options: Correct - this is a limitation in Resolve.
There are hacks around these limitations though:

Whether your CST workflow is correct or not... debatable.
If I'm right wrt white balance being baked in, then all bets are off anyways and whichever workflow yields the best image to work off of is totally valid.
At the end of the day, everything is being debayered in full float, so there is close to no loss in image information whichever way you go.
It is really mostly about what you're most comfortable with as a starting point for grading the pictures.

Maybe send a (short) sample clip package (ProRes RAW and corresponding XAVC) to support@assimilateinc.com and I'll take a look at it to see if I can find anything else.


Cheers!
Mazze
 
Mazze Aderhold said:
Hey Alex,

fair question :) .
Your assessment is correct - we'Ve been quite busy with Live FX over the past one and a half years.
It indeed took more resources and time than anticipated.
V9.7 is around the corner and with that we should be in pretty good shape wrt Live FX and virtual produciton workflows.
The other thing that is keeping us busy at the moment is a pretty big under-the-hood update, which is porting everything to metal on macOS.
While SCRATCH runs natively on Apple Silicon (i.e. you do not need Rosetta to run it), a lot of things still have to be ported over to Metal.
That means porting 20 years of OpenGL and OpenCL code ;-) .
It's quite a big ship to turn around, but it doesn't make too much sense to develop new features before that port is done.

Anyhow - we're totally aware that we've been lacking updates on SCRATCH (outside of certin things rippling down from Live FX development) for quite a while. Rest assured - there will be updates for it, although it'll still take a bit until we're there.


Best,
Mazze
Click to expand...

Thanks a lot Mazze for this answer !

As you can imagine, I can't wait to see new things happening on Scratch for the colorists tribe (Virtual Production is some kind of far away galaxy for me ;)

Best regards,

Alex
 
Hey everyone, Hi Mazze,

about a year later I remembered this old thread. Was wondering if anything was planned in a near future regarding color grading inside Scratch.

For the 9.8 ?

Cheers,
Alex
 
Hey Alex,

good and bad news (I guess) - we have completed the Metal-port, which will be the main thing about v9.8 (to be released in November).
But as I stated above... it was 20 years of OpenGL code that needed to be ported... it was a really massive project, which took us almost a year to complete.
So the bad news is, that 9.8 won't ship with big updates in terms of new grading features - although DITs will appreciate the increased performance.
The good news is, that we will then be in a pretty good place to finally get back to develop new grading features.

I'm sorry it is taking us as long as it does - with a small development team, you can't do too many things at the same time, so it has to be one after another.
But we'll get there :) .


Best,
Mazze
 
Mazze Aderhold said:
Hey Alex,

good and bad news (I guess) - we have completed the Metal-port, which will be the main thing about v9.8 (to be released in November).
But as I stated above... it was 20 years of OpenGL code that needed to be ported... it was a really massive project, which took us almost a year to complete.
So the bad news is, that 9.8 won't ship with big updates in terms of new grading features - although DITs will appreciate the increased performance.
The good news is, that we will then be in a pretty good place to finally get back to develop new grading features.

I'm sorry it is taking us as long as it does - with a small development team, you can't do too many things at the same time, so it has to be one after another.
But we'll get there :) .


Best,
Mazze
Click to expand...
Good Christmas news. Davinci is showing us flames. Would be happy to bring my ideas to the table as a user and programmer..
 
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