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Post mortem on a real world RED job
Just finished grading and abandoning a 2 day color grade in Davinci from a RED timeline.
Had to start over in Color to make the deadline. Here are some post mortem thoughts.
Tech Problems…
Speed ramp’d clips make rendering out individual clips with original media names impossible.
see my previous email on FCP conform snags for details on that.
Graded whole picture on an EDL timeline.
- a range of exposures meant many clips needed individual RED decode settings, which btw is painfully slow to do
- But you can’t save that RED clip data as part of a grade, which means there’s no way to apply that grade to similar shots.
- Also many clips shared same media and thus were linked.
- I created new local versions of those clips, or batch unlinked them
- The “unlinked” clips were still locked to the same per clip red settings. Changing one changed them all.
- Just opening the settings box for any of them would reset all of them to base settings
Created a dupe of the EDL with handles for render
- almost all of the keyframe data, and most of the tracking data was lost.
- the RED “per clip” settings were all completely wrong
- any “local versions” or “batch unlinked” clips were lost
- Tried to render from the master timeline instead, same problems.
Thoughts from a former COLOR colorist
Just starstruck with the tracking, I’ve been throwing and tracking mattes on EVERYTHING. I had to abandon the Dacinci project after 2 days of work, and start fresh in color. I found my work in color actually looked SIGNIFICANTLY better. Partly because I could really tweak the R3d, and mostly because I wasn’t relying on complicated mattes get the work done. Didn’t realize how much I was overusing them.
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6 Replies
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When you unlink the clips, all your grades are stored with that session only. So if you load a new EDL, it won’t get the grades.
For your current project, you could have saved a copy of the project, and used colortrace to copy all the grades from your EDL session onto the session with handles. It would have used source timecode to match and copy over all the grades automatically (including marks and tracking data).
Here’s a possible variation to the workflow:
1. Create project
2. “Split and Add” into media pool, choose all your EDLs, and choose the amount of handles you want. This will break up the R3D file into separate files so you can apply different Red metadata on each clip.
3. Load the EDL, and grade in context with speed changes, audio, etc.
4. When you are ready to render, you can render from the master timeline in source mode -
Thanks Rohit.
A note for future jobs… thought not sure it will work..
I think I will have to work RedCine X into the workflow for any future Davinci jobs.
As the “per clip” red settings are currently a bit cumbersome to adjust one at a time, my next workflow will have Resolve set to clip metadata as default, and I’ll keep redcine-X running at the same time.
That way I can quickly pre-grade the clips to the .RMD file through redcine and switch back to resolve.
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I think you make a good point in that ideally, the red decode settings should be a little quicker to access and have the option to be copy/pasted with the rest of the grade. I think we would all benefit from such a feature.
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I second this request, actually third
It would be great to copy and paste red settings -
In an email, Rohit mentioned the Redicne x workflow won’t work because the rmd file is loaded when the clip is loaded into the media pool.
However he did say that you can select multiple/all clips and changes made in the RED dialogue box will apply to all of those clips.
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You might look at Foundry’s Storm app – looks like a good tool at the top of the chain for .r3d trimming, metadata managing, and decent 1-light grading before exporting to your editor.
– Allan White, Video Producer, Luis Palau Assoc.
Quad 3Ghz Mac Pro, 10GB RAM, X1900 GPU, XSAN, CatDV Server
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