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  • A Note About Running DaVinci Resolve on Ubuntu 18.04

    A follow-up to my previous post

    Earlier this week I decided to run DaVinci Resolve on Ubuntu 18.04. This was a terrible idea. I spent the last 3 days banging my head against a wall and scouring countless forums, blogs, articles, and all for nothing. Here’s my situation. I have an AMD Threadripper with a pair of RTX 2080TIs that I was trying to use with Ubutnu and Davinci Resolve.

    Of course, if you plan to run Davinci Resolve on Ubuntu 18.04, the default Ubuntu install pretty much gives you the generic graphics drivers and it’s up to you to install the ones you need. Since I want to run Resolve, I’ll be needing the latest Nvidia drivers for Linux. Downloaded and installed from the website, but it didn’t work. Installed CUDA, but it didn’t work.

    I tried so many different drivers that they started conflicting with each other and it became an even bigger mess than what I started with. I rebooted a ton of times and sometimes the drivers would work, and other times they wouldn’t even switch from the old driver. I tried with and without CUDA and with and without OpenCL, but nothing worked. I couldn’t get anywhere beyond the opening splash page.

    TL;DR

    Guys, just save yourself the trouble. Seriously. If you’re wanting to run Davinci Resolve on Linux, but you don’t want the official CentOS build… Do yourself a huge favor, avoid the headache and just install Manjaro. Seriously. I was up and running in Davinci Resolve cutting 5K RED footage in 15 minutes. It’s the easiest Linux video workstation setup ever. I’m never going back.

    Full disclosure: I’m not being paid to write this. Opinions are my own. This is just my experience. As always, keep your passwords secure, and your sources open. Cheers.

    matt

    December 5, 2019
    DaVinci Resolve, Linux, Ubuntu
    davinci resolve, linux, manjaro, ubuntu, video editing

  • Projects Disappear After Updating Resolve

    Projects Disappear After Updating Resolve

    Projects disappear after updating Resolve. Oh crap.

    So this happened to me this week. I started a project in Resolve 15, got to a good stopping point, was waiting on client reviews before I could move forward, and figured I’d update to Resolve 16 while I wait on feedback. My bad. As soon as I opened up the new version 16, all my projects disappeared after updating Resolve.

    Windows 10

    After doing some serious digging and scouring every online resource I could find, I finally figured it out. In short, Resolve references your project database in a crazy long file path buried under AppData. This is your ACTIVE database directory. Resolve is always referencing this file path for all your projects. In my case, this directory was empty, resulting in my blank projects panel when I launched Resolve. The full file path is:

    C:\Users\[your username]\AppData\Roaming\Blackmagic Design\ DaVinci Resolve\Support\Resolve Disk Database\Resolve Projects\

    The Fix

    To fix this, I found my projects in a similar, but different file path under ProgramData. Inside the following filepath, I found all my projects! Yay! They exist!

    C:\ProgramData\Blackmagic Design\DaVinci Resolve\Support\Resolve Disk Database\Resolve Projects\

    So all I did was copy everything inside the last folder \Resolve Projects\ and pasted inside my empty \AppData\ directory. That fixed it!

    AppData = Active database directory

    ProgramData = Where I found all my old projects

    Hope that helps!

    matt

    October 29, 2019
    DaVinci Resolve, General Computing, Linux

  • How to Fix Write Permissions For DaVinci Resolve

    Here’s how to fix write permissions for DaVinci Resolve.

    Oh snap

    To fix this, just open a terminal and run:

    chmod -R 766 /your/problem/drive/or/directory

    What’s Going On?

    On linux, security is brilliantly built in. By default, files and folders that you create have a set level of permissions (defined by the umask command). Typically, the default is the user (you) have permission to read and write files that you own, as well as search directories you own. All others have read-only access to your files and directories.

    Knowing this, other applications (aka Resolve) do not have permission by default to write to hard drives, folders, or files that you (the user) own. So how do we change this?

    chmod

    To change permissions of a single file or a whole directory, use the chmod command. chmod gives you the ability to change permissions using short, 3-digit number formats. These are known as octal numbers.

    Octal NumberPermissionsFile Listing
    7read, write, and executerwx
    6read and writerw-
    5read and executer-x
    4read onlyr–
    3write and execute-wx
    2write only-w-
    1execute only–x
    0none—

    So in the chmod command, you use the above table to define permissions for the file user/owner, members of the file group, and other people, in that order. The -R flag used in the code above, simply makes the command recursive, applying to every single file and folder inside the directory you apply the command to.

    Examples

    Readable by owner only: chmod 400 examplefile.txt

    Allow the owner and group to read, write, and execute, and anyone else to read and write: chmod 776 examplefile.txt

    Also, there’s an awesome tool for those of you, like me, who can’t keep all those chmod codes straight!

    After this post made it to Twitter, @rohit_bmd made a great point- check Davinci Resolve > Preferences and under the Media Storage tab, you’ll see a list of drives on your system. Make sure you have read/write privileges on the drive at the very top of that list, because that’s where Resolve will be storing all your cache files. Here’s the the tab:

    If you’re new to Resolve on Linux, feel free to check out my other posts.

    matt

    October 4, 2019
    DaVinci Resolve, General Computing, Linux, Ubuntu
    blackmagic design, command line, davinci resolve, file permissions, linux, terminal, video editing

  • Transcode Files for Davinci Resolve 16

    Today I learned that you only have to transcode files to import them into the free version of Resolve. If you’re rocking the full version, then this shouldn’t really apply, unless you have an absolutely crazy file format on your hands.

    Didn’t We Already Cover This?

    So this stems off a previous blog post from a while back, where I was using ffmpeg to transcode some .MTS files (from a Panasonic/Sony camcorders similar to this) for use in Resolve on Linux. The code snippets from that post were okay… But not great. The biggest problem was that after transcoding, the file size often inflated… I mean DEFINITELY inflated. FFMPEG often defaults to the highest tier of quality in a given codec if you don’t take the time to specify exactly what you want.

    ProRes

    I really struggled with this because it’s easily argued that ProRes is the codec that is literally designed to be edited. So it’s great to just cut ProRes from the start, right? And I’ve been involved in a lot of professional workflows where the first step is to convert to ProRes. Sounds like a good idea. Except when you consider file size.

    Recently, I’ve been getting lots of projects involving mass quantities of footage. Often times I’ll get 3-5 hours of footage, climbing up to 60GB for a single project. Keep doing projects like that and I’ll have to start an Amazon subscription to hard drives… So I’m not in a place where I can afford to transcode 60GB of .MTS into 240GB of ProRes.

    MPEG4

    Luckily Resolve takes codecs other than ProRes! So I experimented a bit trying to figure out how to transcode a ton of .MTS files into something that Resolve can read, but without inflating the file size to something that’s nearly unusable. After a bunch of trial and mostly error, I came up with a pretty good preset. I even saved it as a text file so I can reference it later and use it in bash scripts.

    So here it is, mostly for my own reference so I can go back here and copy it again:

    ffmpeg -i "file.MTS" -c:v mpeg4 -b:v 20M -c:a pcm_s24le /output/destination.mov

    I’ve also tested this export setting with .MOV files that came from an iPhone and didn’t play natively with Resolve. I just converted them using the snippet above, and they played back perfectly in Resolve. Plus with the variable bitrate setting, the filesizes are VERY comparable to the original sizes. Often only off by a few megabytes.

    Enjoy, and happy editing on Linux!

    matt

    September 30, 2019
    FFMPEG, Linux, Video Editing
    editing, ffmpeg, linux, resolve, transcoding, video editing

  • Locate Files using Terminal

    Let’s locate files using the terminal! This is just a cool little trick you can use if you’re doing a bunch of stuff in the terminal, and you don’t want to leave, or you’re just interested in cool terminal tricks. Let’s say you’re looking for a file, anywhere on your machine, but you don’t know exactly where it is. You can install a very cool search package called mlocate (or merging locate).

    Install

    On Ubuntu/Debian you can run:

    sudo apt-get install mlocate

    Or if you’re on that Manjaro/Arch life:

    sudo pacman -S mlocate

    Syntax

    To locate files in the terminal by using mlocate, just type:

    locate [name of the file] [directory in which you want to start recursively searching]

    If you’re using mlocate for the first time, it’s not gonna work just yet. mlocate is actually a pair of tool bundled into one. The other half of mlocate is called updatedb. So by running updatedb, you’re essentially creating/updating an index so that you can run your search. So any time you want to run a locate command and it’s not giving you the results you are expecting, there’s a good chance your index is outdated, so you can just run updatedb, then run your locate search again, and you should be good to go.

    Update your junk by running updatedb then run locate [file] to get your mind blown!

    Bonus Tip

    If the results of your locate command are crazy long, like… CRAZY long…. too long to view everything in the terminal because your terminal only has a finite history, here’s a tip: You can print the results of ANY command to a text file and save it anywhere by using >. For example:

    sudo locate myfile.txt / > ~/Desktop/searchresults.txt

    The above command will run a system-wide search for anything matching myfile.txt recursively from the root directory / and print the results to searchresults.txt on the Desktop.

    Good luck and have fun! Now that you’ve found the file you’re looking for, perhaps you want to do something cool with it! If you wanna learn more cool stuff you can do in the terminal, check this out.

    matt

    September 23, 2019
    General Computing, Linux, Ubuntu
    arch, command line, debian, linux, manjaro, search, terminal, ubuntu

  • Batch Process FFMPEG

    Batch Process FFMPEG

    An incredible use case for simple Bash scripting is the ability to batch process ffmpeg tasks. First off, I’ll assume you guys have got a basic understanding of FFMPEG, what it is, how to install and use it, that kinda thing. If not, feel free to check out the basics. FFMPEG is absolutely amazing. It can convert a chicken sandwich to ProRes. So once you’ve got the basic single-file convert down, how do you batch convert?

    Shell Scripts

    This is new for me, and I’m happy to learn new stuff. So upon a basic introduction, shell scripting looks incredibly powerful. I’m easing my way into Python because Blender is written in Python, but apparently Python is something you can integrate into shell scripts as well, so all the better!

    More good news, someone had the same issue as me, and got a pretty rad response on StackOverflow. The 2nd answer below the ‘correct’ one uses something called parameter expansion that I don’t really know a lot about. But from my limited understanding, I gather that it’s a way to take the existing filename and stick it on to the ffmpeg file export. So let’s say you have vacayFootage.avi that you want to convert to .mp4. Parameter expansion grabs the file name and sticks it onto the resulting export so you’ll get vacayFootage.mp4 without the hassle of having to name a thousand files by hand, each time you convert a file. So here’s an example of how you would batch process ffmpeg commands:

    for i in *.avi; do ffmpeg -i "$i" "${i%.*}.mp4"; done

    So like a true professional, I pasted that Stackoverflow answer into a shell script, modified the lines a bit to match my needs, and boom! It worked! I was able to convert about 500 files in just a few minutes with a single line of code… So awesome!

    So Many Possibilities…

    So with that fancy new script… and learning about how read is a cool Python command that can be used to collect user input… I’d love to write a shell script that can work for anyone. Just enter the directory where all your media is, choose your output options, select your output directory, and boom! Batch encodes for all! Gotta get on that… right after I learn Python.

    matt

    September 16, 2019
    FFMPEG, Linux, Video Editing
    bash, code, ffmpeg, file conversion, linux, python, scripting, shell

  • Switching from Windows to Manjaro Linux

    I use Adobe CC on a Windows machine for my video production pipeline at work. I do video side work on the weekends, and have used Windows and Adobe for those projects as well, but I’ve always felt trapped. Like I’m a slave to Adobe or something. I’ve spent most of my professional career learning and using software like Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Photoshop.

    Making the Switch

    I’ve used Ubuntu a TON, as it’s a super popular distro, and it was my introduction to Linux. A few months back, I was checking out https://opendata.blender.org/ and noticed that a good chunk of data was coming from a distro called Manjaro, but I’d never heard of it. Shortly after seeing all that performance data, I decided to give Manjaro a shot. After some basic research, I discovered Manjaro is actually based on Arch (unlike Ubuntu, based on Debian).

    I gotta say, installing Manjaro was a breeze (cursor theme). I will admit however, I have never known the pain of installing Arch. Like actual Arch. But I’m aware of the memes. So I’m sure it’s pretty involved. While I can’t exactly go around trolling like, “btw I use arch”, I was seriously surprised at the installation and how much was up and running right out of the box! Ubuntu is pretty straightforward, but depending on the hardware, you may need to find a few hacks or packages to get everything full up and running. For example, I couldn’t get the wifi working when I put Ubuntu on my 10 year old Macbook until I installed a special package that didn’t come with the default install.

    Everything Works.

    Immediately… Very first boot up. Everything works. Hardline network connection works. Wifi card works. GRAPHICS look great. Manjaro automatically grabs graphics drivers for you upon install! And I was actually impressed with the pre-installed software collection. Most of the time, in Ubuntu, I have to delete a bunch of crap software I’ll never use. But Manjaro… Like, I use Steam all the time. It’s pre-installed. Libre Office pre-installed. Tweaks pre-installed. Gparted pre-installed (this might be normal). But I was really surprised how little I actually had to do post-installation.

    Smooth UI Experience

    It’s a bunch of little things that add up to a massive amount of time saved. One of my pet peeves in Windows is switching apps on the task bar. If your app has multiple windows (like Blender, and a render window), you have to click once to reveal thumbnails, then click the thumbnail of the window you want. If they’re small or detailed windows like terminals, good luck. I love the single hot corner in the upper left to give you an expose-like look of all your running apps. I love the best-of-both worlds option to launch a full-screen app tray from the bottom left, or tap the drop-down xcfe-like ‘start menu’ from the upper left. It’s pretty awesome. Just gotta get used to typing pacman -S instead of apt-get

    Haven’t logged a ton of hours on Manjaro just yet, still very much in the “moving in” phase. Feeling great so far. Looking forward to diving into my brand new postproduction workflow in Manjaro using Blender, Resolve, Gimp, Inkscape, and Ardour. More on that in the coming weeks! Peace

    matt

    September 9, 2019
    Blender, Linux, Video Editing
    Blender, linux, manjaro, open source, pipeline, workflow

  • Using Mono to Run .exe Files on Linux

    Found a great game? Discover a new program? Only available on Windows? No Windows machine? Don’t want to bother dual booting? Running a virtual machine not an option? Me too! Using Mono makes all that a lot easier. Let’s talk about using mono to run .exe files on linux.

    Mono, according to their website, is an open source project sponsored by Microsoft that implements the .NET framework across other platforms like Linux and Mac OS. It’s not a program. It’s a framework. Basically a sort of language used to run files. So how exactly do you go about using mono to run .exe files on linux?

    Installation is pretty straightforward. Just install a few packages, add the PPA to your system, and run the install command. Done! Detailed instructions on how to do this can be found here.

    In my case, I use KeePass to keep track of all my passwords, but that’s a software project that’s only available as an .exe file. Luckily, you can open it and run it on any OS using Mono. Just by dropping this command:

    mono Location/Of/Your/EXE/File.exe

    The only catch here is that Mono only works for certain .exe files. This is where it gets kinda deep, but it’s essentially dependent on how that .exe file was compiled and what elements of .NET it’s using or requires to run. A bit of googling can certainly point you in the right direction, and for more information on Mono compatibility, check this out.

    Something I learned just recently: if you’re just trying to run KeePass, there’s a great chance that the package manager in your distro has some sort of KeePass equivalent, if not KeePass itself. I’ve started using Manjaro lately, and KeePass is just a one click install. Try it out!

    matt

    July 2, 2019
    Linux, Uncategorized
    development, linux, open source, software, windows

  • Turning my Chromebook into an N64

    Chromebook N64

    I hadn’t planned on turning my Chromebook into an N64 over the weekend, but it’s what happened. Turned out working pretty well, so I thought I’d share my victory with everyone!

    Prerequisites:

    1. Chromebook (or any laptop)
    2. a real operating system (not Chrome OS, but preferrably Linux)
    3. a controller of gamepad of some sort. I used my brother’s old PS3 controller.

    I thought I wrote a post on how I hacked my Chromebook to run GalliumOS, but It may have gotten deleted. If you’re interested, just drop a message in my contact for and I’ll get on it!

    Step 1: Find an Emulator

    This is how you’re gonna play your favorite games. There’s a bunch of them out there for all different operating systems. I’m running GalliumOS, so I went with Mupen64Plus. You can either build it yourself, or you can find some precompiled versions out there. Once you’ve got an emulator, you’re nearly there!

    Step 2: Grab a Controller

    Pretty much any controller will work. The only tricky thing will be finding a driver to work with your controller. I dug around and found a driver called QtSixA. After installing it, I realized I didn’t actually need it because GalliumOS just recognized my PS3 controller right out of the box. Awesome!

    Step 3: Get some ROMS

    A quick internet search for “N64 ROMS” should definitely get you pointed in the right direction. Grab whatever ROM you want, but just keep in mind, if you’ve set up a N64 emulator on your laptop, you’re gonna want to use N64 roms with that.

    Yo, that’s pretty much it. It took me about 3 hours to set everything up, but it’s mostly because I started off trying to install Emulation Station and RetroArch with no luck. Those emulator front ends pretty much launched and immediately froze for whatever reason. Eventually I just decided to download just an N64 emulator and a GUI launcher (Mupen64Plus-QT found in synaptic package manager, I think). Once I launched it and pointed it to my ROM library, I was off and running.

    Step 4: Profit

    Happy gaming!

    matt

    June 18, 2019
    General Computing, Lifestyle, Linux

  • Intro to Ranger

    What is Ranger?

    Ranger is an open source Github project that aims to streamline and simplify directory navigation on any computer. If you’re relatively new to the terminal or only use it rarely, this may not be a big deal for you. However, if you use the terminal on a regular or even daily basis, this tool may be invaluable. Unlike a typical GUI layout found on Windows or Linux machines, Ranger gives you 3 columns of folders at once. This allows you to see one directory up, your current working directory, and one directory down.

    Why is this Awesome?

    If you’ve used Apple’s Finder, you’ll know there’s a file view called “Column View” that allows you to navigate in and out of folders with speed, just using the arrow keys. Ranger essentially brings this speed to every platform, inside the terminal.

    Column view in Apple’s Finder window

    If You’re New to Terminal

    If you’re like me and just starting to use the terminal for the first time, there’s a good chance you know the commands “cd” and “ls” (on linux or mac) or “dir” for Windows. Those commands absolutely do work, and you can still use them if you like. However, it’s also nice to know of some nice alternatives! So instead of typing out long directory paths and risking typos, now you can just run “ranger”. In addition to fast file navigation, you can also get ASCII previews of image files, text previews of documents, and even look inside zipped files!

    Just Scratching The Surface

    Finally, this article is meant to be a very shallow, surface-level introduction to what Ranger is and what it does in a very general sense. Be sure to check out the full documentation to discover the VAST amount of control you can get out of Ranger. That’s all I’ve got for now. Thanks for reading!

    matt

    June 11, 2019
    General Computing, Linux, Web Development
    computer, file navigation, open source, organiztion, ranger, terminal
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