Offlining roundtrip

[Joseph Owens]

[Catalin Brylla] “2. If using the roundtrip above, what happens if in the offline a) I need to produce time-shifting effects that do not translate to Resolve (e.g. spline-based speed changes) and b) I bring in non-camera generated material, such as archive stills? If I make these changes/additions in the offline stage, it won’t conform to Resolve, and if I do them after the roundtrip in Avid, it will affect the marriage with audio. Any ideas??”

These are “baby/bathwater” conflicts.

There are some editorial processes that are one-way trips, and fundamentally altering sync relationships between sound and picture is one of the biggies. Spline-based speed remaps are an open invitation to disaster — it is supposed to be a feature, but the vastly different strategies for remapping frames along the timeline, whether its FCP, Avid, Premiere, a plugin like Twixtor… and so on, makes it virtually impossible to repeat or emulate across different platforms. Search the topic among all the discussion forums and you will find hundreds of threads complaining about media failing to link, being out of sync, not imported because of “timecode extents”… its a long litany. In the olden days, a speed change fell into the category of optical effect and meant that you had to be serious about it (intermediate print) or shoot it with an appropriate frame rate so that the film, when it ran at 24 fps, like all the rest of the source footage, created the speed effect. We are somewhat back in that category, since the only iron-clad strategy for guaranteeing that a blind re-conform will be correct is to make all the source media consistent. In other words, “baking out” an optical, speed-inherent clip that matches the project frame rate as its fundamental property.

Archive stills are supported, such as TIFF, PNG, and the like, but — the implementation is still iffy. Often the media will be treated as a single-frame sequential file with an assigned speed of 0 fps. Because of that, any PTRZ “Ken Burns” screen motion will be lost.

There are still a ton of small gaps in the overall “on-line” mode of the Resolve timeline that means that it is still first and foremost a color grade application with some simple tasks within its means. Otherwise the master NLE “offline” is still the “master” master.

Another search will also reveal that confusion still reigns supreme about how to do track assignments once you have re-acquired final-mix audio for a layback.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Catalin Brylla]

Joseph, many thanks for your reply.

With speed effects I don’t mean only preplanned speed changes, but changes to sort out unclean camera tracking shots or extend reaction or POV shots, if they are too short. From what you suggest, the best way (in Avid) is to ama link to the particular shot in the offline stage, transcode it to DNxHD 220, offline edit, send AAF to Resolve, link to original media and replace just that one clip with the DNxHD 220 media. Correct?

Re stills and pan-and-zoom, I would do the same: create in Avid, consolidate just that clip, and then link to the Avid mxf media in Resolve, right?

Catalin Brylla
Filmmaker – Editor – Lecturer
http://www.catalinbrylla.com
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Skype: cbrylla

[Joseph Owens]

In essence, that’s a yes in both cases. AMA linking being what it is, it may be faster to simply re-import the FX shot (because that’s what they are) directly, instead of messing around with multiple timelines being created under AAF. The only other fly in that ointment is that AAFs do NOT respond well to editing in the Resolve timeline and if you are sending the graded timeline back to AVID, 99 times out of 100 it will have corrupted in some way, forcing an export of a “new” AAF, which will not have any of the original filters, etc., that might have been in the original from Media Composer.

A potential work-around is to export a new XML from Resolve — reopen that back into a new Resolve project and then immediately re-export an AAF, which will generally be useable. This is an option if you start getting “crash to the desktop” behaviour when trying to export any AAF, whether the timeline has been modified or not.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Glenn Sakatch]

The frustrating thing about the round trip is the combination of speed effects and changing the timeline.

I find many of the fancy speed effects do come across from Avid (but have had trouble figuring out why some do not). The kicker is that those are represented in the original aaf that comes from Avid. If you change your timeline at all, as Joe says, you need to output a new aaf from Resolve…at which point all those speed effects get destroyed when going back to Avid. (I’m referring to spline tweaked changes, not basic run at 50 percent changes)

Also good luck trying to manipulate an avid created spline effect in Resolve.

About a year ago I decided ANY changes for a proper round trip, needed to be done in Avid, with a new list. It was the only way to get it to work without me having to hunt and peck for shots to relink, or manually recut into Avid.

Change 1 shot? Do it in Avid and send me a new list please.

Glenn