Davinci Protools workflow

[François Dumoulin]

Thank you Michael for you answer! Our reality are similar ! 🙂

Francois Dumoulin
Editor & colorist | FDCOM
Administrator | Montreal Creative Front

[Peter Lee]

Hi Michael, I am currently editing a drama series in Resolve 12.5 Studio and I can’t export with handles. I added 50 frames of handles in the video tab but the audio files are unchanged. The Sound engineer says there are no handles and the file size is the same as when no handles are selected. What am I missing? Thanks for any assistance.

[Michael Gissing]

Hi Peter. I had the same problem recently. I think the ProTools export from Resolve is not doing handles as expected. I haven’t wanted to go to 12.5.2 as I am mid job but if you can you might want to test if the bug has been fixed.

[Peter Lee]

Thanks Michael, unfortunately I am on Resolve 12.5.2 so no luck there but I have had some success exporting via the ‘audio only’ tab with handles and exporting an AAF from the timeline menu. I have no idea why this has worked and not via the protools tab.

Windows 10
Davinci Resolve 12.5 Studio

[Randy Larcombe]

Hi Laura, Did you ever get resolution to this problem of exporting to pro tools? I’ve just had a job that was on deadline and I couldn’t export to my audio guy so had to do it myself. He said when he opened in protools he kept getting 4 layers of audio but nothing was in it. Just wondered if you found a solution. Randy

[Laura Nasmyth]

hi randy,

no, never found a sollution – i ended up handing it to an editor, who then exported all the sound clips seperately and rebuilt it in fcp/protools…not sure. i think it took him 2 days and there were still many mistakes.

so unfortunately i did not get any wiser on this topic and shocked that davinci does not stand to this,
this is something you should know before editing in resolve!

did you ever find a sollution?

L

[Randy Larcombe]

Not that for project no. However, when I did my next project everything exported fine. I have no idea why there was a problem so I am none the wiser. I am sure it was something simple but I couldn’t get help from anywhere. It was very frustrating. I was on deadline so I had to do my own audio. Less than ideal so I don’t have any confidence in it yet.

[Giannis g. Georgiou]

Hi Peter,

I’ve been having quite a trouble with exporting from Resolve. How exactly did you do the AAF & Audio Only combo you describe here?

“I have had some success exporting via the ‘audio only’ tab with handles and exporting an AAF from the timeline menu.”

I can do the Audio Only export and it gets me a list of .wav files. Then, when I go back and export an AAF from the timeline menu, there is no option to connect the AAF with these file, is there?

Thanks,
Giannis

[Marc Wielage]

The way that the sound mixers I’ve worked with have worked around this problem is to do the following:

1) export an XML from Resolve

2) create a small ProRes LT file with visible timecode at the top of the frame (so they can see footsteps at the bottom), with a rough mix to follow

3) make a complete set of all the sound source files and copy them to a drive

4) give the XML and drive to the Pro Tools editor/mixer, and have them use Conformalizer to reconform the entire cut within Pro Tools from the original source files:

https://www.thecargocult.nz/conformalizer.shtml

I find this is a more reliable method for quite a few editing programs. There is a more direct connection for Avid -> Pro Tools, but they’re owned by the same company.

[Ray Argall]

Hi all,

Interesting topic, thought I’d add some experiences with this workflow and throw some more queries at it.

I have just upgraded to 12.5.5 so this is the most current version of Resolve. I’ve been working with the sound editor for a couple of days on this and have not been able to export an .aav or .xml that will read properly in Pro Tools 12 (or 10 for that matter). Using the Pro Tools export on the deliver page of Resolve will read in PT, but shows the clips as “Untitled”. Using this path also means recreating all the audio files in .mxf rather than PT linking to the original source audio (preferred path).

We have found the best option is to export from the deliver page of Resolve using the AVID AAF option (rather than PT option), which reads all the audio files with their correct names in PT and links to the new .mxf audio files. It does add a prefix or suffix however so would have to go through force enable if we were to try and relink to source clips (we haven’t tried this yet). However the PT session has random errors throughout with many clips not matching up on the timeline and being anywhere from frames to many seconds out of position.

One bit of good news is that we have handles on the audio clips – there is no handle selection in the AUDIO tab but by selecting say 50 frames in the VIDEO tab it appears to work for audio as well. It even works when the video export is disabled. Thanks Michael (Tassie Devil) for that tip!

We have disabled the video export as we already have a video file from the same timeline; and have exported all rendered audio into a unique folder, using the .aaf created from that session to import into PT.

None of the volume levels, pan, speed or FX components of any audio clip are reading in PT. Conversely if I export an .xml, FCP brings all those components across (except for some FX). I would like this info to be there for the sound editor as there are a lot of keypoints we’ve added and even if used as a guide these will save considerable time (rather than me going through every single one or referring back to the edit all the time).

As Michael mentions it will take a while (took 3.5 hours to export/render 90 min doco with 15 tracks of audio)

I should add that the audio tracks come from a range of sources, codecs and some have speed changes added (2 – 4% to address synch issues with digitised 1/4 inch audio), but FCP can read all those changes, whereas PT can’t, or it’s baked into the newly rendered files.

So has anyone else found that PT can read an AAF or XML that will link to source audio files and retain keyframe/levels/pan/speed info?

We tried Marc’s workflow with XML and using Conformalizer but haven’t been able to get that to work. We have a complete set of the source files copied, but PT is not reading the XML. Perhaps there are some options in export we’re not getting right? We exported the XML from the Edit page not the Deliver page.

Many thanks for any other thoughts! It would be good if BM could get a seamless workflow/roundtrip between Resolve and PT.

Ray

Piccolo Films
Sydney Australia