[James Jay]

Hi Hector, many thanks for the reply!

I tried Auto and it resulted in the really washed out colour look so I googled it and most solutions pointed towards changing it to Full, which is what I did. I didn’t connect a colour calibrated monitor as these are just for the edit so I didn’t think it was necessary, but I did try them on a couple of different regular displays and they all showed them with the washed out look.

I could try exporting a few at DNxHR SQ but the “damage” has been done as I’ve already gone through all 76Tb of our rushes and made all the selects. As I said it’s not the end of the world as they all work in AVID, but its annoying having the mix of bitrates as it will surely affect the quality slightly, as well as drastically change the filesizes of the selects!

To bring them into AVID I’m exporting them from DaVinci into folders that are named only with numbers (I have spreadsheets to tell me which number corresponds to which reel of footage), and then putting them in the Avid MediaFiles–>MXF folder structure. Then once AVID spots the folders, it generates the .mdb file which I drag into the bins in AVID to populate them with the footage. Is it possible that AVID is misreading the bitrates?? I just can’t figure out why it’s done that.

Thanks!

[James Jay]

Hi Glenn, sorry for the slow reply, I didn’t get a notification for some reason.

The reason we can’t convert everything right now is 1: Storage. We’d have to have the original rushes kept as well as the 4K/6K/8K transcoded new copies. 2: We’d have to bake in a grade to the footage when we convert it to 25p, as it is currently RAW footage, and we don’t know what the final grade is at this stage.

I fully understand the significance of Timecodes in this kind of workflow, which is why its proving to be so frustrating trying to work out how to conform raw MXF rushes to 25p from 2997p. Our RED Epic W can have a 25 timebase which is fine, the a7s’s shoot at 2997, as do the Varicam 35, and the GH4’s, so it’s a big mix of footage!

Where I’m at currently is trying to export DNxHD Dailies from Davinci Resolve at 2997, import them into Avid and then highlight them in a bin, choose source settings, the choose play at timeline framerate (25). This allows the 2997 footage to be played back/edited at 25p, with their timecodes remaining intact. The only struggle i’m having now is actually getting these DNxHD files to appear properly in AVID.

I’m exporting from Davinci as MXF OP-atom, which I believe is the correct type, but AVID is still having a problem importing it which is annoying. If you or anyone could shed some light on that that’d be great. Cheers buddy

[James Jay]

Hi Shane, thanks for the reply! Yes the footage plays back slightly slower but we are filming ants so it’s fine for us (audio is all replaced too so it doesn’t matter if it sounds slowed)

We don’t want to cut in 2997 and then just render it at 25 as that will yield dropped frames (I think?) But instead we want to conform before/at the stage of the edit, so that the 2997 footage plays back slightly slowed in a 25p timeline with no dropped frames. As I said, on PP this was easy as we had the program interpret the footage as 25p so it played slightly slower, but I need to find a workflow to do the same thing but with AVID.

I just can’t think how its possible to cut/edit in 25 and still link back to the 2997 rushes without doing the method i described in my first post, as as you said in your reply “Proxies need to match the frame rate if you are to link back”

Any other imput from you or anyone else would be much appreciated. Thanks!