Brad Hurley
Forum Replies Created
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Okay, Ray, good luck! I hope I didn’t waste your money by steering you to the PFS FCPX Maps plugin; it worked okay for me but I didn’t test it extensively and since it didn’t do exactly what I wanted I ended up deciding to develop my map animation in Fusion (in DaVinci Resolve), which is analogous to Motion.
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Just to provide a new alternative: Ripple Training just released a “flyovers” plugin that looks great and should function very well:
https://www.rippletraining.com/products/plugins-ripplelive/rt-flyers/
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It’s funny, with Resolve 16 I’m actually thinking of switching to Final Cut. It’s partly because BMD rushes to release new versions packed with new features every year at the expense of QC and stability, but also because Resolve gets more demanding of my computer with each new release. Final Cut is performing more reliably on my 2013 Mac Pro; no bugs that I’ve encountered whereas Resolve seems to be full of them.
Resolve and Final Cut are so vastly different from each other until you get past the first assembly and start editing in the timeline. At that point the differences become more stark. I’ve been using Resolve almost exclusively for about 2 years now, and I find that I avoid making some edits simply because I don’t want to have to go through the effort of looking down through all my tracks and figuring out which auto-select buttons to turn off and which ones to leave on based on the kind of insert or replace edit I might be making and its impact on tracks below it. I wonder if I’d be a bolder editor if I were using Final Cut.
On the other hand, all my footage looks better in Resolve, and audio is easier for me to manage in Resolve (e.g., built-in loudness meter, ability to connect directly to external editors like Izotope RX, etc.).
I’m working on two versions of my current project, one in Final Cut and one in Resolve, to see which side of the fence I end up on. I could of course edit in Final Cut and export XML to Resolve to do everything else but I like the convenience of staying within one NLE.
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Note that NeatVideo also has deflicker capabilities now. It’s worth getting for the noise reduction (which is more sophisticated than the NR built into Final Cut) and the deflicker is a bonus.
I change shutter angle from 180 to 178.2 when shooting indoors in 50hz countries (e.g., Europe) to avoid flicker; I never thought I’d need to do that in North America until I shot a concert lit with stage lights set up by the soundman…it all had terrible flicker. Resolve’s deflicker removed it just fine but it’s a very processor-intensive operation and I though my computer was going to launch into outer space during rendering, the fan was running so loud.
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I’m not sure how to re-enable that in the inspector, but there’s another way to add a custom LUT, which is to go to the effects browser > color > Custom LUT, and drag that onto the clip(s).
One big advantage of this approach is that you can position the LUT after an initial color correction; you can even do this with camera LUTs. I rarely use LUTs, even technical/camera LUTs, but when I do I insert them this way.
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“However it seems Atomos could make a ProRes RAW recorder for Blackmagic cameras.”
They could, but they almost certainly won’t. Atomos and Blackmagic Design have an anagonistic relationship. If you look at the list of compatible cameras that Atomos posts for its monitor/recorders, for example, you won’t find any BMD cameras listed even though they’re compatible. There is bad blood between them; I can’t remember the details but they weren’t pretty.
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Okay, if you don’t get any useful tips from anyone here, you could try contacting Fabián Aguirre at https://www.theunderstory.co/contact. He mentioned on the Blackmagic Design forum that he does this round-trip workflow, shooting in BRAW on the Ursa Mini and Pocket 4K, exporting proxies from Resolve and editing in Final Cut, and then he goes back to Resolve for color correction. He said (in his post) that it was difficult, but like you he prefers editing in Final Cut. He might be willing to provide some tips.
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“While BRAW was originally a raw format for Blackmagic cameras, Atomos makes some recorders that record/encode BRAW from a few non-BM cameras, e.g, C300 II. ”
That can’t be true, can it? Blackmagic Design and Atomos have a bad history together; as far as I know Atomos is only making monitor/recorders that record Prores Raw, not BRAW.
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I think the key question is whether you want to round-trip back to Resolve for color correction after editing in FCPX, or if you just want to use Resolve as a BRAW “developer” so you can render Prores HQ files in Rec709 and then work with those files from start to finish in FCPX.
Resolve’s color correction/grading tools are of course much more advanced than those in FCPX, but if you don’t need all that power and flexibility (and built-in tracking ability) the color correction tools in FCPX are quite good and capable. I only work with footage from BMD cameras, shooting log or raw, and everything looks better in Resolve; I can’t achieve the same results in FCPX in part because Resolve offers a color-managed workflow with no need to use technical LUTs to go from log to Rec709. But if you do primary color correction on your BRAW clips in Resolve and then render the individual clips as Prores HQ files in a Rec709 colorspace, you can then import them into Final Cut and do all your editing and remaining color grading in there with no need to go back to Resolve.
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I haven’t done it myself but you can of course render individual BRAW clips in Resolve to ProRes HQ and import them into FCPX, which was a fairly common workflow among people with earlier Blackmagic Design cameras that recorded CDNG raw.
There is some speculation that the next release of FCPX could include BRAW support but who knows. Apple has a vested interest in promoting ProRes RAW so they might not go for it, but Premiere supports it now. Originally there was speculation it might be released at the FCPX summit earlier this month but that didn’t happen, so now the speculation is focused on the release of the new MacPro, which could coincide with the release of new versions of FCPX and Logic. We shall see.