[Aaron Wiesen]

Not at all. The fact that your expression was easy to understand and left me having to move a single Null instead of a multitude of other layers made it well worth it. I am curious as to why I have to move the Null to the lower-right corner (as opposed to the upper-left which feels more in line with what After Effects would normally do), but this is more idle curiosity than anything else.

The fact remains that your solution took care of the problem far faster than I would have managed otherwise. As far as I’m concerned, my question is solved. Thank you again for your assistance!

[Aaron Wiesen]

Hi Cassius,

I did a test using your expression to see what would happen and it was as you predicted: the moment I copied in the expression, all of my layers snapped out of position – but both the positional animation and staggered timing based on in point worked perfectly.

I’m afraid I don’t understand the reason behind it (absolute lack of action script knowledge…I wasn’t moving layers or the null around beforehand; so I’m not sure why having things set for the comp’s center did not work), but moving the “master” null’s starting position to the lower-right corner of my composition realigned all of my elements on the comp.

Thank you again!

[Aaron Wiesen]

Thank you for the response! This definitely sounds like it could be a workable solution in my case, so I’ll give it a try and see how things go. (I had hoped that someone might have an expressions trick for this sort of thing, but wouldn’t have known where to begin myself.)

Working or no, I’ll update the post once I’ve had a chance to give this a shot. Either way, I appreciate the advice!

Thanks again,
Aaron

[Aaron Wiesen]

Kevin,

This is exactly the kind of solution I was looking for. Quick and easy to replicate. Between the Offset effect and expression, you’ve saved me a considerable amount of repetitive work. Truly, much appreciated!

Quick notes for anyone else who needs this:
— Possibly obvious, but the ends really must be seamless beforehand. If not (say you made a few adjustments using a pre-comp to blend the edges together), make sure that your pre-comp length is long enough to accommodate your final comp.
— The first time I applied the expression to the Offset effect, it worked while positive (going left); but threw a fit negative (right) – looping and stitching the image together at the wrong point every second rotation. Definitely a bug here, as deleting the effect and reapplying it made this issue go away. (Not sure if anyone else will experience that, but I figured it’s good to know just in case.)

Thanks again. As always, it’s very reassuring to know that a resource like the Cow exists for problems like this.

[Aaron Wiesen]

Okay, the results are in and everything is working. Much of our issue was actually caused due to proximity – or the lack thereof.

What we had initially created in Media Composer was an AAF using the options to Consolidate media. As far as Resolve is concerned, this technique worked correctly. My confusion originated from the fact that certain titles and transitions generated in Avid did not carry over – and had the appearance of missing media clips when I started looking in Resolve. The Media Composer timeline I received had been set up with all video assets on V1, and titles on V2 (titles were after effects comps, and showed up as “media offline”). The audio was all over the place and resided across A1-A6.

These audio clips did get jumbled all over the place (bizarre mixes, placement, horrendously out of sync and jumbled, etc) when the AAF was brought into Resolve, but – as we are only interested in the video here – I could care less. (It is important to note that a distinctly different AAF file was created for the person handling the audio mix, and that this worked just fine on their system – implying that the “anything goes” jumble is Resolve’s fault, not Avid.)

The confusing element wound up being two things: a few uses of “empty” text generators in the V1 timeline for fades to white – these showed up as “media offline” for me, and I assumed I was missing footage assets. And the unusual garbled a/v media at the end of the timeline which I had assumed got “popped” out and shoved down to the end for some strange reason. Turns out these were the result of some montage version selects that had been so far down the timeline. The editor had cleaned these out of the version I was receiving, but at some point in the hand-off I received the non-cleaned up version.

Once we were sitting in the same room with one another – he with Avid open and I with the same sequence in Resolve – we were able to verify through clips and timecode that all was well with the video. I then received an audio reference file (.wav) to replace my garbled audio mix and all was well. (I also subsequently removed the offline titles from V2 and replaced the empty text generators with white solids for my own personal reference.)

The end. All is well. But, for the sake of being definitive and thorough: I then set up the workflow per Glenn’s instructions on the second post of this thread (verbatim) and verified that this yields the exact same (working!) results – with the added bonus of being a little faster and easier to QC.

So I suppose the lesson is: our way worked, it’s better to use Glenn’s method (2nd post), and if all else fails use the “brute force” technique outlined by Marc (6th post) to make sure you have something usable. Big thanks to both Glenn and Marc for the assistance, and hopefully this answer helps out someone else who gets similarly stuck. I think we’ve got the trip back to Avid well in hand (already tested delivery to Avid options in Resolve with no issues), so hopefully you won’t be hearing from me again too soon.

Thanks again!

[Aaron Wiesen]

I couldn’t find a means of editing this last post (probably there and I’m just missing it), so my previous message was in response to Marc.

[Aaron Wiesen]

Glenn: Awesome info that I didn’t know about Avid (and I suspect the editor didn’t either). While not frightened per-se of the “relink” button, any possibility of risk that we’d have to individually relink clips at this stage is daunting. Great to learn about the database info as both this and discerning between the original and newly transcoded media was a concern. Thanks for the clear-up.

Also very valuable to learn the info about timewarp/ramp. To clarify for anyone who reads this thread: in our case – any footage that did not inherently match the timeline settings was conformed (whether through Media Composer, or before it even got there), so we were not battling mixed framerate footage.

[Aaron Wiesen]

Excellent technique of “last resort”. And yes, I’ve worked with enough DSLR shooters that I’ve had to lay on the timecode/media management speech a little thick more than a time or two. (Thankfully, that is not the case in this instance.)

Doesn’t look like it’s going to be necessary this time around, but I’ll follow-up in another post to this thread.

[Aaron Wiesen]

Thank you for the links, however links one and three (avidblogs and wolfcrow) were ones that did show up in my initial search. In fact, these are the two that we tried unsuccessfully before I posted here (clips missing or in the wrong places…I can’t recall which, but one of the links only matches an older version of Avid as well). That neither of these step-by-step links has worked is what had me initially concerned that we may have had a bug. The metadata link is one I’ve not seen yet, so I’ll be sure to read it over.

We were careful with video tracks (only 2) and we have no baked-in looks, compound clips, or multicam. I did forget to check with the editor about speed changes, so I’ll be sure to do that. Thanks! (And yes, the reference video is an absolute must in this case – never a question about it.)

I’ll be meeting with the editor tomorrow to try and hash this out, so I’ll have an update either later tomorrow or the next day.

He expressed some concerns regarding the unlink/relink nature of moving the Avid folders around (since it’s still probably a day or two away from locked-pic, and this is serving as a proof-of-concept). I’m not really an Avid editor, so I couldn’t give him a 100% guarantee that everything will relink smoothly – we may have to meddle with Glenn’s formula ever so slightly to try and preserve the current folder structure.

Info on what we do and how it turns out when I get back. Here’s hoping.

[Aaron Wiesen]

Hi Glenn. Thank you for the quick response.

You’re absolutely right, I’m not really concerned with the audio aside from having a reference track. But it was the jumbled and/or missing audio clips that first clued me in to the fact that there was a problem – only reason why I was initially interested in them. Having a single, stereo-mix wave file was always the final intent.

As for your proposed “duplicate/transcode/move original” to “AAF link only” workflow – thank you. This is the first answer I’ve found that makes sense to me and seems like it allows for some degree of QC from within Media Composer before we go through the trouble of transferring everything to the Resolve system.

I’ll send this information on to the editor so we can give it a shot – but it sounds good so far. If we run into any other hangups I’ll post them here, and if not I can mark this down as a definitive solution.

Thanks again!