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Strategies for grading a 2.5 hour feature film in Resolve?
I’m about to embark on uncharted territory for me, which is grading a 2.5 hour feature film, shot on RED (with some 5D footage here and there), all in Resolve8.
Since my background is mostly commercial grading, managing a 2+ hour feature grading job is a whole new thing for me.
Any tips or workflow suggestions when working with such huge projects in Resolve? Should I split the film into separate sessions, like I would have to do in Apple Color?
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9 Replies
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You should in any case make your material to smaller reels 15 to 20 minutes.
Maybe even smaller.This would make the project more simpler to work with and better for the machine to handle.
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Margus
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That is correct…split the film into 20mins projects (projects, not sessions) or you will run into Out of Memory error as the media pool will be too much to handle.
Once you have finished grading and renderered them out, you can import the final graded files into a new project so that you can watch the entire movie from start to finish.
-chrispy
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So you got the edl/xml for the feature in a single big one file? That’s not common, unless it’s a film of “Long Shots”. Because editing machine will also have the overflow problem when there’s too much shots in one reel.
Usually, editor should splitting for reels, each reel usally less than 20 minutes.
If the final output will go film media, then you should communicate with director/producer, ask them do the reel splitting job on their editing machine. Because there’s issue for music, when you split to reels, you can’t split in the middle as music plays. -
Is there a rule of thumb at what’s too much for the media pool?
I have never run into an out of memory error, including some feature length projects.
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[Nick Anderson] “So you got the edl/xml for the feature in a single big one file? That’s not common, unless it’s a film of “Long Shots”. Because editing machine will also have the overflow problem when there’s too much shots in one reel.
Usually, editor should splitting for reels, each reel usally less than 20 minutes”
Yeah, I did get a single (remarkably clean) timeline from FCP as an XML file. The film wont be going to film-out, and will be digitally projected, so would the 20/22 minute reel thing still apply to my workflow? The delivery spec for the film festival this will be going to asks for either HDCAM tape or a ProRes quicktime file on a hard drive.
Mostly, I was wondering about how to most efficiently navigate through all the scenes in a film of this magnitude. How do you easily jump between related scenes without having to scrub through the timeline? The film is a typical, artsy-fartsy non-linear storyline kind of film, so we constantly jump back to scenes throughout the movie.
Would it be better to grade in C-sort mode, in this case? What has been the traditional method of grading feature films in this respect? Coming from a commercial background, I am experienced with the situation where the DP and/or director prefers to grade in context of the edit, and not C-mode, which makes sense to me from a continuity aspect. But is this method recommended for a feature workflow?
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Has anyone run into this out of memory issue? I just did a 90min feature, I split the sessions into reels but had the whole thing in one project with no issues, perhaps that was an issue of a previous version?
Joseph Mastantuono
Online Editor – Colorist – Post Consultant
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I am working on a 90 minute feature right now shot on red. I am constantly getting that running out of memory error. And I have split the film into 20 minute chunks. But I am still blowing it up at least twice a day. in fact i have found that if i just switch back and forth between browse, conform, and color pages enough times I can run it out of memory without even applying a single grade!!!
D.J.
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Ok, try this :
1. Get yourself a copy of STORM, trial will do.
2. Export an EDl from Resolve of what you are really using (locked edit)
3. Import that into Storm and CUT your RED footage accordingly into a neat pool of wanted media.
3. Reconform your project by either changing parent directory, re-conform and color trace or both.See if that sorts it out.
Request : Consolidate function in Resolve, with or without truncating RED files.
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