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Important Workflow Questions.
Hello Everyone, I have been working with Resolve for about a year now and I love it, MOSTLY, when it runs well and fast, when it is slow, I want to poke my eyes out. The System is a 5,1 MacPro with 24gb Ram and QuadroFX 4800 and a Geforce GUI Card, blackmagic broadcast card and fibre storage..
Here is the breakdown on most all the stuff I grade.
— Problem1, CG Animation with lots and lots of Mattes —-
Step 1. Layer of sRGB 10bit DPX from the compositing or CG department.
Step 2. Many DPX Luma Mattes. min amount of mattes two or three, most amount of mattes 20+When I grade with this system all the DPX files are on a Fibre Raid, and when I have that many Luma mattes, the system can choke, big time, the FPS is not the issue its the lag in refresh when I adjust a grade. Sometimes I will adjust a node and I have to wait 2 to 3 seconds to see the adjustment!! Its really horrible, and when I have a client breathing down my neck, i want to commit seppuki.
Question 1. Where is my bottleneck? Do I need a faster Raid? Faster System bus? The playback is about 2fps to 8fps, but that doesn’t bother me, once the frames cache it plays back in realtime. How can I speed up the 2 to 3 second lag when I adjust any settings?
Question 2. How are the images loaded in DaVinci? Does it have to load every frame into DaVinci to do an adjustment, does that mean it needs to load the DPX frame and all the LUMA mattes?
Question 3. Can changing my workflow from something like DPX to EXR, where I can get the frame smaller help DaVinci not get bogged down when grading?
— Problem 2, Too Many mattes —-
Like I said sometimes my grades have 20 mattes, its because of the complexity of doing grading of CG elements with clients. Everything from the nob of a robot to his teeth need mattes because a client wants to adjust it.
Step1. I bring in each DPX sequence and HAND LINK all the mattes to each clip.
Step 2. If I have a new revision of a shot from CG, See Step 1.
Step 3. Repeat, Repeat, forever…Why is it so hard to relink mattes, everything has to be done by hand, WHY!!! If I am working on 20 revisions of a shot and I have twenty mattes for each shot, thats 400 mouse clicks to get up and running in Resolve.
Question 1. Can I cut and Paste Mattes?
Question 2. Is there anyway to automate this process?
Question 3. Will Blackmagic make it easier to link Mattes?— Problem 3, Building Layers and Rendering —-
Step 1. Build Layers in DaVinci Conform Section, top Layer has Alpha Output enabled, and there is a key from that layer going to the output.
Step 2. Put the Background Layer Underneath that layer with Alpha.So this essentially creates a Decent Comp, my question is.. .HOW THE HECK TO I RENDER THIS???? I mean this is a great tool, but the fact that I can’t figure out a way to render that as one clip is soo pointless.
Question 1. Is there a way to render these layers as 1 comp/file/quicktime?
Question 2. If there is not, WHY???? Blackmagic should have that is a feature 3 versions ago.I know this is a lot of information…
Thanks for any help.
You guys are the best. -
30 Replies
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This is not really an answer to your question (I’ll leave that to much smarter people), but have you tried Smoke? It sounds like it may be a better tool for this kind of project.
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For your problem #3, are you rendering in target mode? Target mode should bake all visible tracks into the output exactly as you see them on screen. You would have to set ins and outs for each quicktime you want to create.
Cheers,
KC
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From the sounds of it Resolve is not the right tool for you. Have you considered nuke? It’s built specifically for this kind of workflow. And has some decent color correction tools. I would consider an approach of adjusting individual elements in nuke, then doing an over-all pass in davinci to get a final look that doesn’t require any or at least as many mattes.
For all it’s compositing abilities Davinci Resolve is absolutely not a compositor.
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Hey Michael, I have used smoke, I worked with a demo for about 8 months. It has some cool features, but a very cumbersome and archaic workflow. It was Smoke for Mac, since we are still reliant on ProRes 444 and 422. Smoke for Mac does not have Batch, the real compositing engine for Flame and Smoke Advanced. I have met and talked with lots of Autodesk Pros, and they try to tell me what action can do, but I hate Action as a final compositor. Its horrible. When you have Batch, you don’t have to use Action for much more than brining in Clips etc, but in Smoke for Mac that is your compositor and Its not up to todays pro level. As for the color warper??? Come on… Color Warper is to DaVinci Resolve as MS PAINT is to Photoshop. So yeah, I have tried Smoke, and if I was doing a lot of Online Editing it might be ok, but for grading its not good enough. Also whats up with the Price?? They always claim you can get 40% more work done?? But its 140x more expensive, so should they say you can get 1400% more work done? Autodesk is a still a costly investment.
This is not really an answer to your question (I’ll leave that to much smarter people), but have you tried Smoke? It sounds like it may be a better tool for this kind of project.
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Hey Kevin, I’ll try that thanks!
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Hey Juan, yes, I am a top end Nuke artist been using it since it was a D2 comp program, before that Shake. Nuke and DaVinci Resolve are like an Apples and Oranges comparison. All of the color sessions are watched by clients, producers and agencies and require realtime feedback.
PROBLEM with NUKE for Grading…
1. Broadcast Monitor Support is buggy and crashes a Lot.
2. Nuke does not support real time caching.
3. Nukes Color Grading Nodes are adequate but no where close to what Resolve can provide.
4. Grading in DaVinci resolve with panel is much faster and more responsive than in Nuke with a mouse.
5. Desktop LCD/LED do not provide the proper feedback required to officially approve broadcast material with our current workflow.We do definitely do a very close color grade in NUKE before we go to resolve, but of course its a client driven industry, and if a client wants to change a color… ad it has to be viewed in a large suite with tons of people standing around, then it always to through resolve..
Ideally, I just want to figure out a way to add more MATTES into my sessions without the system going to a snails pace…
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Could you have multiple objects that don’t over lap in the same matte? Then use a power window and track to isolate just one for adjustment?
That’s the only thing I could think to improve performance. Reduce the number of mattes.
You may want to try a local sas array of 10k or 15k drives for matte cache. Fibre doesn’t always do the best job with random file access. Are you running a san file system? Try copying the files to a non SAN file system.
The other bottle neck might be the system bus. Consider a windows system with more and faster pci2 lanes (pcie 3.0 may help quite a bit), and more gpus. Keep your storage card on at least an x8 lane slot.
Oh and of course RAM. You didn’t specify any of your system config.
But truthfully I’ve never heard of anyone using 20 mattes on a single shot. That’s like drawing up 20 streams of (hd, i’m assuming… again not specified).. so a local SAS storage for mattes and separate storage for image… or various pools for images and mattes would be helpful.
You could try using prores 422 or some lower bandwidth media for your mattes to reduce the toll on your bus.
It sounds like you’re in a tough spot… the perfect tool may not exist for your specific workflow.
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It sounds to me like your hardware choice is severely underpowered for what you’re trying to do. If you really want to drag that many elements in a color correction system, you need a hell of a lot more power than you’re going to get on a Mac based system. If Resolve is a program you want to use for this, I would strongly suggest looking at the Linux systems, which have a lot more expansion capabilities than either a Mac or Windows system can offer (which is one of the main reasons Blackmagic is continuing to make and support them). What you’re talking about doing really requires a lot of horsepower. Other systems that would probably accomplish what you’re talking about are things like Quantel Pablo and Baselight 8. Both of those cost about $300K. If you want to do what you’re talking about on a simple desktop solution, the price you’re going to pay is the price you’re paying, which is very, very slow performance.
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Mike is right. It hadn’t occured to me but a baselight four|eight with a few cluster nodes would be a far better solution for this. Baselight would allow you to bring your mattes right into the sequence. Making them far easier to place.
https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/pdf/datasheets/FL-BL-DS-0481-BLMultiNode.pdf
Not to mention has built in media distribution, so that the mattes and images are automatically on different drive sets.
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first off davinci is not a compositing tool. i would love to know how you can see all those mattes in resolve! usually one layer takes precedent of the other so i can’t even imagine trying to balance all those mattes. you really should be doing that kind of work in flame or if you insist on doing it as a function of grading then you should consider the nucoda or even base light. they can handle the workflow you are trying to do. what you’re doing is trying to race a go cart around a formula one track.
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