Premiere to DaVinci – Frame Resize

[Ryan Whiting]

Hi John – did you ever figure this out? I have a 3min project edited in PremierePro CS6 – shot on RED with 5K & 4K files. Because I’m outputting to 1080, I have plenty of room to manipulate the framing, and so I did quite a bit of repositioning/ reframing to the clips, while some of them were left with the ‘scale to frame size’ box checked.

In getting footage back from the colorist who graded in Resolve, the repos and frame sizes are all off.

What are the scaling/ position rules that need to be followed in Premiere prior to exporting an XML so that these repo’s/ reframes translate over correctly? And what are the settings in Resolve that allow the colorist to export graded media and xml that will apply said repos/reframes when imported back into Resolve?

Any help you can offer is greatly appreciated!
Thanks!

Ryan W.

[Ryan Whiting]

Hi John ~
I completed editing a project in Premiere CS6 and outputted an XML for Resolve. The footage was 4 & 5K R3D, and my edit was in 1080.

I removed any reposition/ framing CHANGES that happened within a clip before exporting my XML, but left any clips that had such changes at the lowest/ widest scale # they were seen. For example, if I “pushed in” on a shot & keyframed from a scale of 40 to a scale for 48, I left it at 40.

There were, however, some shots in the edit for which I simply selected the “Scale to Frame Size” (1080).

In getting my graded footage back from the Resolve, there are lots of scale and position issues – and information outside the ‘widest’ view of the frame has been cropped/ no longer exists.

Any advice on how to fix this? Does the XML from Premiere need to be consistently of one world – that is, EVERY clip’s scale manually chosen, or every clip is Scaled to Frame Size?

Can the Resolve interpret this scaling and position information at all? Can it be used or ignored for the color grade, but maintained so that it can be outputted back in the XML going back to Premiere?

Any advice/ information is much appreciated!

Ryan W.

[John Tissavary]

If, in a Premiere edit, the source footage is a different size than the edit sequence, one must choose a method of scaling and stick with it. Mixing will cause headaches in Resolve conforms.

Here is why – Resolve has several options for incoming footage:

1) Center crop with no resizing
2) Scale full frame with crop
3) Scale entire image to fit (Default)
4) Stretch frame to all corners.

For Premiere sequences where ‘scale to frame size’ has been chosen, option 3 ‘Scale entire image to fit’ is the equivalent Resolve method of handling source footage resolution input scaling.

For Premiere sequences where ‘scale to frame size’ has NOT been chosen, option 1 ‘Center crop with no resizing’ is the correct equivalent Resolve setting.

However, the Resolve operator must choose one of the four scaling options. At that point, all clips in that project will be handles in one of those four image scaling methods. Combinations are not possible like they are in Premiere, where this is chosen on a clip-by-clip basis.

Once you start mixing the two in premiere, you’re basically making it impossible to follow along in Resolve without manually adjusting any shots that do not conform to the chosen image input scaling methodology.

Hope that clears things up a bit…

John Tissavary
colorist
The Post Collective NYC

[Billy Nicholson]

I just discovered last night that if you do a couple steps, for the most part, everything will translate over.

1 – Drop clip into time and “Scale to Fit” (this will keep the base size at 100% and you can go up/down from there
2 – When repositioning move the clip around with “ANCHOR POINTS” not the position.
3 – Import “Using Size Information”

So far this has worked for me