Da Vinci Questions

[Vladimir Kucherov]

Especially in the indy world, that’s where a post production supervisor is really needed. Generally on smaller indie projects I play the post soup, colorist, and finisher all at the same time. That way I get to talk to the editor from the start and make sure he sets up his project in a way that won’t be hell for finish.

I’d say it would be nice if all editors would think of the finish and coloring process but there’s no way to guarantee that.

[Thomas Wong]

oh wow, had no clue it would render out that way, got a lot of playing around to do before my first session with it. the issue is the client is 100% done with the film yet. picture is locked but certain vfx plates have to be still put together and inserted in the film. this is gonna prove to be tricky. I think the best course of action to eliminate the most amount of error and give the edit flexibility in making changes are.

grading the sequence without the vfx clips, and leaving transitions (and speed changes if they say applied) and also removing the scaling and movements.

grade that sequence, re-apply the scaling in resolve itself, export that out, hopefully edl method in the conform page can be brought back into fcp, if not relink manually to with render source clip method, in commercial mode.

than grade the vfx separately in it’s own sequence and the vfx team can apply the vfx to it and match to the grade i did, and editor and insert those clips.

I was also thinking of exporting as blackmagic rgb 10 bit out of resolve when fcp onlines, to keep it as lossless as possible. fcp won’t take in DPX so if anybody as any better suggestions (pro ress is arguably still lossy) please chime in.

and if anybody has a better workflow than this, please feel free, I think this is all really important info.

[Vladimir Kucherov]

Hmmm. Is there a reason you can’t export the final straight from Resolve?

I would drop the entire timeline into Resolve, grade as you need to. When you get VFX shots, cut them into your timeline in Resolve, and grade those too. Then you can just render out the entire show in one go and not bother relinking anything.

[Thomas Wong]

the VFX shots haven’t been done yet, and they haven’t even created the fully debayered quicktimes for the work yet. It’s a 3 day session, that’s all they can afford, so I think their intent was grade the shots first, and the vfx guy can match the vfx to my grade, and since I’m running a rocket I can get those clips out to him faster…. I’m in discussions with them right now and trying to do the one big timeline out of Resolve method. It’s gonna save so many headaches.

I’m more worried about speed changes, some b-roll they shot from different sources, and matching their scaling and movements that won’t carry over the EDL. I think I’m gonna ask the editor for the drive with everything on it a few days early just so I can play around with different conform options on my own time.

[Christopher Adams]

As far as speed changes.. why not have the editor bake them in? Or have you do the non speed changed clip then he can re-apply that one change once he or she relinks the clips?

[Thomas Wong]

client wants to work with as much r3d files directly as possible. this grading session will be 98% grading with r3d. with just a few b-roll shots on hvx200 and ex3. so if speed changes are there I’d probably have to remove them if they are gonna conflict with the r3d session. than i’m gonna render out either as dpx or uncompressed quicktime. probably both. trying to avoid pro res ingests and outputs as much as possible as the DP explicitly asked me to have the final delivery in absolute lossless quality.

lot of moving parts to deal with…

[Vladimir Kucherov]

I would suppose you could just render out your timeline as one quicktime with black over where VFX go and they can drop those on top. Again, just to save the relinking headaches.

As far as speed changes, I would ask for them pre-baked. Or if its Red and you have to online, I would make a new timeline with just speed effect shots (and speed effect removed).

The reason is, Resolve just does very simple speed effects (frame duplication and removal) – things tend to look rather not good.

[Thomas Wong]

thanks Vlad, you’ve been a huge help, I think that’s the best course of action. leave the complicated stuff out of the primary sequence and grade the other stuff separately and have them drop it back in when they are ready to. Saves everybody time, headaches, and money.

[Adam Hendershot]

I guess that answers my question. For the work I’ve had a problem with in the past, it would have helped if Resolve had a mode where it would output clips identical to the originals except with the color corrections applied for the correct timecodes in the edl, and of course be smart enough to recognize when a clip is used more than once and act accordingly. It would waste some space but Final Cut would be happy.

[Vladimir Kucherov]

Well heck, if you don’t mind rendering out everything, what I would do is remove all shots not used in your show from the browser so that your master timeline has only shots you need.

Then grade EDL as usual, but instead of rendering the EDL, render the master timeline. If rendered in Source mode, THAT should link perfectly to FCPs original timeline – you’ll just be doing a lot of rendering.