Resolve 11 What is your plan?

[Charlie Austin]

[Mitch Ives] “there are times where tracks are a superior approach”

I’m honestly not being contentious here but, leaving aside from mixing audio (as it stands right now, kind of a kludge in X) … When?

————————————————————-

~ My FCPX Babbling blog ~
~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Mitch Ives] “And yes, if your being honest with yourself, there are times where tracks are a superior approach. Not always, but sometimes. Resolve seems to have noticed that. In the old days Apple would have done this, not BMD…”

I am totally honest about all of this stuff behind the wall of a few successful, but mostly failed jokes, cheeky humor, and overly conversational writing that I have trouble reading back, even to myself.

What FCPX is missing is refinement of the trackless approach. I watched the editing demo of Resolve 11 on the website, and honestly, I would not want to go back to that full time. IF FCPX had heads up trimming display (which it does, just not when you use the keyboard), and a way to connect secondary clips to each other (or if you could have layered secondary containers), and if there where as easier way to select and manage layers (which seems to have started with the bouncing playhead ball), and a way to slip audio components separately (which seems like it could be entirely possible within the current FCPX UI) then FCPX would be far more track like without having to rely on tracks.

I have never used asymmetric trimming, I have never marked split in and out points before adding it to the timeline. FCP7 had both of those features. Maybe I am a terrible editor because of it, but not having those features is not something that keeps me awake at night.

For now, there may be limitations, but then I could call track targeting and autoselect a limitation while others would call it a feature. It truly is in the eye of the beholder, and nothing well ever be perfect or bug free.

The Resolve 11 inspector is awesome. The interface is great to look at, and of course the grading tools are an industry leader.

I’m not bagging Resolve 11 because I watched a video online. It looks amazing, and I am really excited about it. But X’s import, organization, and rough to fine cut are working extremely well for me. It did take a while for Apple to get there (the tilde key was a big hurdle). I don’t really mind because Resolve embraced FCPXML very early, so hopefully Resolve will be a perfect X companion.

Is there a Resolve collaboration demo video, or is that only a live-and-in-person demo?

Jeremy

[Mitch Ives]

I’m sure there will be lots of opinions on this, but for myself, I do a lot of complicated comps and I do them in FCP, not AE or other places. In FCP7 I once had 70 layers. I’ve been doing this long enough that I don’t knock things out of sync. I don’t need a seat belt to keep me from screwing up, so the magnetic timeline isn’t as valuable to me as it is to others. My students would have loved the ML.

Second, it’s easier to organize and visualize big projects using tracks. I know not everyone does big projects, but it’s easier to bring in someone else in the middle of a project if there’s some structure to the project. FCP X is perfect for single users who do the whole thing themselves.

Lastly, as I watching the advanced trimming in R11, I was trying to imagine how you could do a complicated asymmetric trim in X? Or how you’d trim some combination of video and/or audio, while not trimming others.

Again, if your project is simple, none of this matters. The guys I know that love X the most are single users with pretty straight forward projects. I’m not insulting anyone here… there are no small projects, only small editors (apologies to actors everywhere)…

So on some projects tracks would help, while on others tracks would slow things down. I like options, and I particularly like the hybrid approach of R11. I’ll be interested in hearing your thoughts once you work with it.

Then again, I could be wrong altogether…

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Is there a Resolve collaboration demo video, or is that only a live-and-in-person demo?”

Found this out about collaboration on the website:

“Collaborative Editing and Grading

Now you can have an editor and multiple colorists working on the same timeline simultaneously! DaVinci Resolve 11 lets an editor and multiple colorists on different workstations share the same timeline and work in tandem as they complete shots. A colorist could be pulling a key or tracking windows while another colorist fine tunes grades that are immediately updated as the editor edits. The all new DaVinci Resolve collaborative workflow lets your creative team break down a large job into parts they can each work on separately!”

It seems it’s one editor, multiple graders, which makes perfect sense to me.

By the way, the timeline keyframing in Resolve 11 looks totally badass.

Jeremy

[Oliver Peters]

It will be interesting to see how sharing actually works. This requires an appropriate server set-up. Resolve currently does not use a project data model like Premiere or FCP 7. Projects are hidden within the database unless exported. Presumably the sharing works through some form of shared database.

Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Shawn Larkin]

To all the ado over what to use and when:

For smaller projects, I would just use Resolve. Why go from one EDL to the next?

For larger stuff, I see using X kind of like Adobe Prelude now. More of a setup and rough in tool.

So I guess if you like working in X, then you stay in it as long as possible. And if you like the tool set and paradigm in Resolve, you jump in as soon as you feel things are setup enough in X.

I’m obviously in the latter camp, but do feel comfortable and appreciate X too.

My perfect world scenario would have Resolve add 3D Compositing — which I am sure will happen — and some sort of amazing roundtrip feature for AE and Motion projects so it really was “all in one” but I won’t hold my breath on that last one.

[Shawn Miller]

[Shawn Larkin] “My perfect world scenario would have Resolve add 3D Compositing — which I am sure will happen — and some sort of amazing roundtrip feature for AE and Motion projects so it really was “all in one” but I won’t hold my breath on that last one.”

It seems a lot of people have this desire. That Resolve will be able to act as a 3D compositor, and also round-trip to AE or Motion. I’m curious, how deep do you want the compositing to be… do you want to be able to do simple keying and maybe overlay a few graphics and text elements (which Resolve can sort of already do)? Or do you want to be able to build up complex shots with hundreds of elements and sophisticated effects… like Nuke?

Shawn

[Shawn Larkin]

I want it to do what Smoke does now, but with more ease and better design.

For the round tripping, AE and Motion projects would allow for mgfx guys to use their favorite package and for you to not need locked media in the timeline. But again, I don’t see this actually happening. There was a time when Motion could import AE projects, but they are so much more complex by design now.

[Jeff Markgraf]

Re: people working on the same timeline (@Jeremy & @ Oliver)

In most of these conversations, I’m seeing a certain lack of precision in how this process is described. To be clear, are we talking about multiple editors/colorists/effects people touching the same -actual- timeline? Or are we talking about multiple people starting with the same instance of a timeline pulled from an open (but locked to all except the owner) bin and doing their thing, as is done with Avid on an ISIS? I keep seeing Avid referred to as allowing multiple people on one timeline, and that is most certainly NOT the case.

I think Jeremy called the multiple users on one timeline scenario a nightmare, and I would have to agree. Or am I missing something really big here?

Jeff M.

[Shawn Larkin]

Yes, it’s a nightmare.

Until it’s not.

No one really knows what the deal is with collaboration in R11 until they use it.

I care more about the dit/editor/mgfx/compositor/colorist “one man band” functionality.

But if I can get individuals to work on sections with their specialty, that is even better for some projects.

So I do want Resolve to be all things to all people, but the reality is it is not going to be.

However, it may be the solution for me and all my needs. And I’ll settle for that.