[Jason Brown]

Follow up — I was able to get the Blu Ray disc properly burned. Here were my steps:

– Export IMG file from Compressor
– Manually changed file extension from IMG to ISO (this actually worked!)
– Burn Blu Ray from OSX Finder
– Successful playback from consumer Blu Ray player and Sony PS4

Compressor 4.4 still is missing the “Chapter Menu tab” as previously stated. The small preview window also does not update to reflect changes made while setting up the project.

[Jason Brown]

I was hoping here was a way for fcp to automatically unsqueeze it while capturing. Is processing required? (Render and Export from a sequence?). Adventures with old equipment!

[Jason Brown]

Is it possible to capture anamorphic 16×9 DV footage with letterbox, rather than squeezed?

[Jason Brown]

Thank you for the reply. Most noticeable on all of the footage is a lighter contrast. On dark, graded scenes I do notice a magenta/purple shift in shots on the consumer HDTV that appear desaturated blue on the broadcast monitor.

I’ve run various export tests – 422, DNxhd, etc. to see if it improved the image. However exporting “Same As Source” still looks best at ProRes4444. I thought that perhaps the “Same As Source” function in Avid was exporting the final file in 10Bit as the source footage is, but this does not seem to be the case.

[Jason Brown]

Thanks for the reply. After further investigation, I’ve found that all of my rendered exports from Resolve are showing up listed as “YCbCr 601” in Avid MC, rather than “YCbCr 709” as it should be. I’m wondering if this is behind the degraded quality in blacks when viewing on my consumer HD monitor. I thought it was compression artifacting due to a 2nd generation ProRes 444 export, but perhaps it is from this color space issue?

The images look great in Resolve on my 10 Bit broadcast monitor, but running into lack of contrast and what looks like compression artifacts in darker graded scenes.

[Jason Brown]

I may need to try an MXF export. On particularly dark shots, I see additional noise added to the Resolve exported Pro Res 4444 files. This must be due to the “double” encoding of Pro Res?

[Jason Brown]

Yes it has been frustrating, but I’m happy that at least now I have a cleanly rendered film! We did contemplate installing the older Quadro driver, which does work properly in certain circumstances, however the older Quadro driver is not built to work with the particular NVIDIA 600 series graphics card in the Mac Book Pro. Support did a test of this on their system and was unable to reinstall the current driver and experienced compatibility issues in several applications. So with the Mac Book Pro, do not attempt to instal previous NVIDIA drivers as you may run into serious system issues.

[Jason Brown]

I spent another round of time on the phone with Black Magic Design support. After much investigation, we determined that the black frames are due to a known issue related to the graphics card driver for NVIDIA 600 series. The use of particular LUT’s on nodes can cause random black frames to occur when using the current driver. I used an Arri Log C to Rec 709 LUT as a starting point on many the shots in my project. Apparently, I am the first to bring this particular issue to light in regards to the Mac Book Pro, rather than the tower & 3rd party graphics cards.

My work around was to pinpoint all shots that had black frames in the exported video file. Then, I re-rendered each trouble shot individually. Because the black frame issue is random, I was easily able to get clean shots. In a 110 minute timeline, there were approximately 20 black frames to eliminate. It took about 4 hours to manually correct the exported file in Avid Media Composer 6.5. All seems well now, but this work around may not appeal to those not wanting to re-encode 2 or 3 times.

Support was very helpful and seemed genuinely concerned about the issue. I hope that they will update Resolve to be compatible with all widely used graphics card drivers soon. I’m sure there will be a larger group of people getting this issue as they move into a broader market.

[Jason Brown]

A correction: These are not dropped frames, but single black frames being inserted.

[Jason Brown]

I should also clarify that the frame drops are burned into the render — the frame drops are not occurring due to playback of the exported file.