Conforming Red for Resolve with Offline Effects

[Chris Kenny]

[Scott Smith] “A project shot in Red, was off-lined in ProRes with composites and effects in FCP. Client wants a 2K output. What is the best way of handling a Red conform with effects that won’t translate to Resolve? “

There isn’t really a magic bullet here. You probably want to grade off of the raw files, which means, of course, you can’t just flatten out the effects from FCP and drop them in. If they really want to keep the effects from FCP, graded footage is going to have to travel back through FCP at some point. You can either round trip the entire sequence back through FCP at the end and re-apply the effects there (FCP will work just fine with e.g. 2K ProRes 4444), or if you want to finish directly out of Resolve you’ll have to render out graded versions of the plates used by the VFX shots, take those back into FCP, recreate the composites with them, and then render those out to bring back into Resolve.

FCP isn’t exactly a serious VFX/compositing environment, though. Some filters/transitions will silently drop you down to 8-bit color depth, for instance. Ideally you’d want to export DPX or EXR plates of graded shots from Resolve and recreate the VFX in AfterEffects, Nuke, or similar. Not that we’ve never round-tripped this kind of stuff though FCP due to budget or time constraints, but we generally advise clients not to consider any VFX they do in their offline edit to be anything more than previz.

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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

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[Scott Smith]

Thank you Kenny. One suggestion was to conform in Smoke and publish out a DPX sequence to Resolve, but that gets away from working natively in Resolve with the Red files. Smoke or not, your advice is sound.

Thank you.

[Scott Smith]

Thanks for the info. If returning back thru FCP for FX with graded elements gets too messy, what about going to AE with the Red files for the FX, and output DPX which I could edit into the sequence in Resolve, grading the DPX composite?

Thanks, Scott