Different in Log wheels and Primary? Other noob save questions?

[Glenn Sakatch]

That’s a lot of questions for 1 post 🙂

Log and Primary are two different tools at your disposal. They essentially work independent of each other. You can tweak the primarys, and then switch over to log and do a different type of adjustment, as Log allows you to narrow your range for the adjustment. If you were to reset one of these tabs, the other would be un-affected. Take a look at the manual, it is in there.

I would guess most people stick to primaries. I personally jump to log when I’m trying to work on that highlight that is still too hot.

As for you adjustment layer, yes you can add a color adjustment to an entire track. (again, you need to go through the manual), but they way you are describing your color workflow, you are making it sound like one color correction will work for your entire sequence of shots. That isn’t really how most of us would work. Each shot gets its own adjustment. If you are not happy with the adjustment, I see no reason for you to have to reset the project and start again.

Either reset the node, or adjust the node, or make a new version and color it a different way.

If at the end of your session, you play down your show, and decide you would like to bring the blacks down a tad across the board, then maybe a track adjustment would be the way to go.

Personally I don’t like them, as I usually forget that I put one there, and then I can’t figure out why the picture isn’t reacting the way I think it should.

If you wanted to add grain as a final pass, that might be another good use of a track adjustment.

You simply need to spend some time with some of the beginner tutorials. There are plenty out there, some free, some for small amount of cash, but all very useful, and as I said earlier, look though the manual. It might not be fun to read a manual, but the information is there.

Glenn

[Tommy David]

No, not in anyway did I mean one color correction would work for the entire video. What I meant is, for example sharpening. If I’m shooting with the same camera, generally, I will use the same sharpening settings on all of the shots, it’d be nice to not have to copy and paste it to each one.

Also, sometimes it’s multi cam stuff, where I have choped it up in multi cam in Premiere or Final Cut and the scene from that specific angle will be graded the same and It’d be nice if I could somehow tell it to grade all the shots from that camera on that take the same way. I know I could grade the clips before I cut them up in an NLE, but then I have to grade, edit, and then grade again.

As much as I love Premiere, using FCPX as JUST an NLE to edit the clips together or do multi cam, it’s amazing with Resolve and I wish i would have started it sooner. Take away resolve, and FCPX just doesn’t hack it.

I tried multi cam in resolve NLE as well, FCPX was still by far the best. You literally just flip a switch and it changes to the proxys and and then you switch it and it changes back to the originals. With premiere you have to manually go in and replace the files with the proxy which you have to make yourself, it doesn’t do it for you like FCPX, when you’re done you then have to replace all of those clips, which might be 20 different camera angles on a music video with the original footage. Even though it’s one camera, it might have 7 angles of the band playing and a story going on that has a ton of angles in it as well. FCPX is king of the multi cam, IMO it’s worth the money just for that alone.

I figured out the Log wheels pretty well today, I see what’s going on there.

My main question I’m left with now is how do I save my projects to external hard drives? It seems to give me no option to start a new project on an external hard drive. I run a 512 SSD with 300GB free, it will go out quick if I can’t it to an external drive!

I’m still battling in my mind which program to use. SpeedGrade has the adjustment layers, some features that Resolve doesn’t have, and the SpeedGrade settings are saved in the Premiere Project, it has quite a few advantages.

However, I’ve always loved the new Final Cut Pro X… Not when it first came out, but the 10.2 version and how it does multi cam better than Premiere and I like editing and splicing clips up with it. I just hated it because there are no great color options, there are just amateur looking effects with very basic color correction, no curves, etc.

This work flow will allow me to use FCPX again and grade it in Resolve. Resolve loaded the XML file well.

However, there are some complex things that shouldn’t be complex… Such as starting a project on an external drive. That should be a very basic thing and I can’t find anywhere online how to do it.

[Glenn Sakatch]

[Tommy David] “My main question I’m left with now is how do I save my projects to external hard drives? It seems to give me no option to start a new project on an external hard drive. I run a 512 SSD with 300GB free, it will go out quick if I can’t it to an external drive!”

Not sure what your issue is here. Your actual project on Resolve is not very large at all.(I currently have 32 on my laptop that are taking up 2 gigs of space total) The media you are reading from will stay on the drive it originates with. (like an external drive)

If you want to have your projects saved to an external drive instead, I would assume you can set your database to be on an external drive, but I’ve never done that…you may need to set that up when you install resolve. It is possible the local database has to be on the same drive as the program. The manual can probably help here.

If you want to take a project with you, you can simply export it and take it to an external drive.

If your caches are what is killing your storage, then set them up to be on an external drive. As it says on the media storage page the first drive listed in your media list is also used for cache function and stills.

If you want to add a sharpen filter to your entire timeline you would add it as a track node, not a clip node.

If you want all clips from the same take to color with the same settings, you can set that up your project to link your clips together. This used to be the default for Resolve, but most found it more of a pain, as an adjustment to one clip, resulted in adjustments to all clips…whether you wanted that or not. Blackmagic has since made it “off” by default, rather than on. In the preferences window under color, you should see a check box next to “use local version for new clips in the timeline” Turn this off before you import a timeline, and you should get linked clips. You still have an option to unlink any particular clip after the fact, to take it out of this option.

I am not commenting much on using Resolve as an editor as well, as I don’t think it is any where near that stage…despite what the marketing will try to tell you.

I cut in Avid and color in Resolve. The round trip function works extremely well. I would assume/hope it does the same from FCPX and Premiere, but I have no experience in that path. If you find an editing program that you love, I say use it, which is what I do with Avid. but don’t abandon a program because it won’t do absolutely everything perfectly…non of them do.

I think people worry too much about a program that doesn’t do it all. Resolve can be free, and is a very good color program, so why not use it. You own FCPX and love it, so why not use it. Struggling with a programs edit functions, because you love it’s color functions (or vice versa) makes no sense at all to me.
All these programs have become so inexpensive in comparison to 5 years ago, that it isn’t worth the hassle.

Yes Resolve does project management differently than a lot of (if not most) other programs, but it works very well. Exporting a project takes all of 5 secs when you are done, and really in the end, the location of your project (unless you are jumping between suites) shouldn’t really matter, as long as the program knows where it is. If you are jumping between suites, then you may want to look into the other database options, that allow you to access projects in a shared environment.

Glenn

[Tommy David]

Thanks for the response, that does help me as I am having a hard time figuring out how it saves projects, Cache, etc. I was able to export a project from the Database last night, but I don’t know if I did it right. I did it in multiple different ways by just clicking a bunch of different things.

I do wish it saved projects like most programs though. I just want the projects on the external drives when I’m done for archiving and backup purposes.

And yes, I think Final Cut Pro X is a superior editor to Premiere. I only switched to Premiere because Premiere is far superior when it comes to color correcting and the features it has. But, once resolve is introduced into the work flow, I don’t need any of those features, and then Final Cut becomes much better to use. Especially because I do so much multi cam and FCPX is the best with that.

I did try to use the multi cam in Resolve and it worked well it’s just FCPX makes everything so easy to do. I like to be able to flip a switch and go from proxy back to original media.

Final Cut Pro X could easily be as good as resolve if they would put a color grading system like that in there. The NLE in resolve is very similar to FCPX, it’s just like a dumbed down version of FCPX. But it seems Apple is doing nothing as far as putting color features in FCPX, not so much as even curves are in there.

[Glenn Sakatch]

to export a project, you just right click on it in the home page and select export. Nothing to it. (you can also do it from the file page inside the project)

The projects themselves are simply saved on your hard drive, but I’m honestly not sure if you can just move it around to another version of the program and have it open…but again, exporting is too simple to not use.

As for the optimized media, you don’t even need to flip a switch. Work with the optimized media, and when you are ready, go to the delivery page and output. Resolve will use the original media, unless you specifically ask it to “use optimized media” on export.

Glenn