Resolve for Mac feedback from former Apple Color users?

[Jack Tunnicliffe]

WEll I guess old habits die hard. Resolve can import the audio in 20 seconds and you’re good to go. The director for a series I’m working on now arrives from two thousand miles away every two weeks for a couple of episodes of a series. We have final sound by that time so we can sync it up. We can play through in real time, watch final picture with final sound and make any picture tweaks on the fly, no rendering. Some directors are nuts about having their sound, others aren’t. We now have the ability to do it any way we want, sound on or sound off.

I think if I have a spare tire available for my car I’d rather take it on a trip than leave it at home in my garage, if you know what I mean. Resolve offers a lot of great options Color simply cannot.

[Sascha Haber]

Some wise man said once :
” Sound is 60% of the image ”
I totally agree its also important to be able to turn it off and listen to music.
But it really depends what i am listening too.
When i play Trentemoeller the images become dark and washed out.
If i am playing some funky house they look bright and colorful.
Sooo…its a very underrated topic I think, and we will go full THX for out new grading theater just because you also sell the images more easy when the music fits.
Especially when doing final approvals for commercials and other shows my clients demand sound and so do I.
Apple Color is not an option…Never was

[Jack Tunnicliffe]

Robert:

From reading your post and reading about your workflow I’d say Resolve is exactly what you want. My clients are so happy now they only want to be in Resolve where they can view real time, have audio and make changes on the fly, any number of adjustments (nodes) and no rendering. You can make versions of your edit or versions of clips, as many as you want, I believe. Like colour, which ever version is currently set to display will playback or render, but then can you really call Color playback, maybe chugback. Sorry, now I’m a Davinci snob, but really you would never look back.

I’m currently into the 5th episode of a national comedy series all shot on Red. Along the way I’ve timed many commercials, small documentaries almost all without issue. Red in Davinci is such a treat. When was the last time you tried qualifying say green grass in Color if the files are Red? You can’t do it cleanly because Red was built into Color as an afterthought the pipeline is bad. Your colour picker is reading off the raw images which of course are very washed out and flat until they got through the Red tab. I had suggested to Andrew Bryant on occasion that Color needs a downstream qualifier when working with Red files but nothing ever happened. I know that Apple is so busy building mobile devices that they seem to have dropped development on all these editing products.

The one issue with exporting from FCP is that it is now an edl instead of xml. This means you cannot have multiple tracks of video stacked up, but then I rarely worked this way in Color. I usually tried to work with one base layer if possible but if I do get a stacked project in that I have to deal with I can always go back to Color. In almost 4 months of work I have not re-opened Color which is rather telling.

I do miss saturation and hue curves. I loved these in Color but I understand there are ways of working in a similar fashion. I’m going to take some training from another old Davinci colorist in Atlanta the end of December where I’ll get some of these inside secrets.

When I go to Atlanta I’ll be working on the big panel. I’m really curious if it’s overkill or not. I’ll have a chance to find out first hand. Right now I’m on the Wave panel and it’s okay, but lots of navigating up and down. I do find there is more mousing in Davinci than in Color, at least with the way I work. Sometimes this is an advantage because you can be dragging out a window while you’re dialing softness or aspect at the same time on the controller.

That’s all I can type for now. Got a ton of work to do but if you have specific questions, feel free to ask.

[Kim Krause]

thanks for posting this…it is exactly the info i’m looking for. i am always being labelled as anti davinci and its just not true. i would use a cows ear to grade if it did the job well! i am only pointing out that color is a valid tool for alot of people who either dont have the resources or the need to switch to something else…

[Eric Denis]

So, how was the panel Jack? Is it overkill? Your feedbacks on this should be appreciated…

Thanks!

[Jack Tunnicliffe]

I’ll be seeing it on the 28th of December and working with the big controller for two days. One thing I can tell you about the Wave panel after working 7 days a week on projects is that I’m broken. Yesterday I had a massage therapist in to work on my back and try to work out muscle spasms. In all my years of doing this kind of work I’ve never had these problems but they are definitely a result of using the Wave panel. So much of what you do is at the top on the encoder buttons and because there is this hug arm rest at the leading edge it means leaning forward to reach these buttons every time. Add that up at 8 hours or so a day, seven days a week and it breaks you. I have kind of short arms to begin with, which doesn’t help, but these buttons are too far away.

To try and adjust we’ve put my keyboard on a spring loaded slide out try and then we’ve angled the Wave panel up on the front edge about 3 or 4 inches to lean the top edge up and closer to me. I could post some pictures if anyone wanted to see the modification. It helps but I think there is still a reach problem that I never had with the old Cooper controls.

[Michael Cinquin]

[Jack Tunnicliffe] ” I could post some pictures if anyone wanted to see the modification. “

would love to see that !

Michael

[Jack Tunnicliffe]

No problem. I just snapped these off with my iphone. Good enough to demonstrate the set-up.

https://web.me.com/javajack/Wave_Panel_set-up/Wave_Panel.html

The keyboard slides in on a bearing and is very easy to slide in and out as required. My tech did all the rigging, so I have him to thank. I can pull the keyboard way out and stand up if I want to grade while standing for awhile, just for a break, and then of course I would turn off the LED’s as they would shine up. Right now they shine up on the top of the desk and provide illumination on the keyboard when it is only partially pulled out, otherwise it’s hard to see under the desk and leads to typing errors. He padded a couple of 2×4’s with some black cloth and created the riser for the panel to sit on. Seems to all work pretty well.

[Kim Krause]

agree with your comments on the wave…i had been sitting on the fence for months and finally got to see and feel one for myself..(i think theres only 3 in the whole country)…i cant understand why they didnt angle it up from the bottom to the top…and it is quite high so your arms are always floating above the thing…after a few hours i could see that this was not for me. i think the jl cooper eclipse series is better laid out. i prefer the rings around the balls. also glad to know that i’m not the only one who is dying from this job. my back is also shot after too many long days in the chair. i now try and take regular breaks and even try and get to the pool in the afternoon just to loosen things up.

[Jack Tunnicliffe]

I’ve been running Davinci 7.1 for about 2 days now. I see they broke the “-” on the qualifier. I sent in a bug report and this was confirmed. I’m using it on R3D files so it may be fine on other formats but definitely broken on Red media.

The Wave controller is now more responsive but they’ve added a level. I’m finding this puts a level between adding nodes and my Power window controls that I don’t appreciate. Tech support told me to hold down the up and down keys at the same time to display a master menu where a user can make changes. Have tried this but haven’t activated any changes as yet. Thought some of you might find this useful. Also may be able to try my old Cooper controls which are now supported under 7.1.

Installed a Quadro 4000 Cuda card thinking this would be the ultimate GPU for Davinci but it was actually about 10 to 20 percent slower for most functions. I’m told that the GTX 285 is still the fastest card for Resolve. Maybe they haven’t optimized this card yet, but again thought some of you might be interested in these results.

Jack Tunnicliffe
Java Post Production