[Jimmy See]

Well, it appears to have worked fine for everybody all this time without my idea implemented so I’m not holding my breath, however right now I can certainly see the value of it, especially as what I am suggesting is essentially already done as it is, albeit much less efficiently, by delivering audio files separately for an auto conform process.

The limitation of my suggested feature being implemented in the way that I suggest is as you describe: that a global toggle doesn’t account for particular and specialised circumstances where for example, the editor has declined to place all the possible tracks that might be available on the timeline, however the mixer would only benefit from the inclusion of some of those unused tracks, but not all. It’s true that my on/off, include/don’t include switch in this circumstance wouldn’t have any way to deal with that, that wouldn’t be messy.

That said, if you think of the current approach of delivering all the recorded audio to the mixer for them to auto conform, they’re faced with the exact same situation anyway. Similarly, the current global switch option that is implemented, either includes, or doesn’t include ALL the angles of a multicam clip including any you might potentially have seen no value in providing and would have excluded were it possible.

I also don’t see the obstacle in the explanation for why this is logical and sensible as a feature for multicam angles, but not for audio tracks. You point out a distinction whereby a multicamera clip, is a special kind of clip where all angles are on the timeline but not, because they are ’embedded’ in to the clip and so they’re ‘there’ even when not visible in UI or in the record monitor output, thus when an AAF is generated it is possible to collect all the media that comprises all the angles of the clip because of all of them are ‘on’ the timeline (in a sense of the word). This opposed to audio tracks from a source clip that are not laid on the timeline which you are saying are ‘absent’ from the timeline in a way that angles of a multicamera clip that aren’t actively selected are not. It seems to me that’s an accurate description of the current situation, more than it is an explanation because that distinction is arbitrary. All of the angles of a multicamera clip placed on the timeline aren’t ‘on’ the timeline, in the sense that the user interface doesn’t show you 4 clip segments, it is just the case that a relationship between the angle that is visible on the timeline and those which are not is understood by Avid and recognised during the process of generating an AAF, it seems to me then that a clip with only one track on the timeline but which has a relationship with 7 other audio track can be just as logically described as having all 7 tracks as “on” the timeline as a multicamera clip can be described as having all angles “on” the timeline, given Avid knows about the relationship between the 1 chosen track and the other 7 available ones. You can, with 1 keystroke from within Avid call up the other 7 tracks of audio available, just like you can with multicamera angles, and the AAF standard appears capable of dealing with this same level of complexity so the inclusion of one example of it and not the other seems just arbitrary.

If the AAF standard was not sophisticated enough to encompass the concept of media with special relationships to other media, and was simply a means of collecting and describing tracks on a timeline, the inability to do what I’m suggesting would make sense, however because you say it’s possible to do this with multicamera clips, it is hard to imagine it’s not equally possible, by means of the same mechanics that allows that to work, collect additional unused but still available source audio tracks. Having the option on by default would probably not be a great idea, but a checkbox exactly like the one that’s already there, would be great. There would be circumstances where you didn’t get exactly what you wanted out of it because the inability to choose which tracks to include or not, but if you wanted to do that, you’d do it the old fashioned way by either including or not including them on the timeline and disabling this theoretical option.

Also, after writing all this I went back and looked at the export dialogue again and I’m now quite thoroughly confused. It’s actually called ‘include inactive audio tracks’ not ‘include inactive tracks’ which suggests it is absolutely audio specific. It also makes me wonder something, if the option does or doesn’t enable the collecting of additional media for the AAF based on whether you do or don’t want additional unused angles collected with the chosen angle of a multicamera clip, what is the ‘commit multicam edits’ function for? Wouldn’t that be the same things as choosing not to enable the include inactive tracks option?

[Jimmy See]

Thanks man, good to know. I have actually had mixers request materials in that way, the auto-conform I think is the part of the process I was missing so that explains a lot.

Is it a limitation of the AAF standard that this isn’t an option, or just no one particularly felt it was necessary or thought about it. I’m thinking it could be a good feature request, after all, it’s useful for much the same reasons that the feature as it currently works for multicam is.

[Jimmy See]

If you need free,

[Jimmy See]

I’m not an authority, but I wondered the same thing while typing a particularly long string of text in to a text generator in Resolve 14 (so it does this even on new text, not just copy and pasted text).

I found your post, and others around the web, a few from this year and there doesn’t appear to be anyone saying Resolve can do it, only asking how to do it, or requesting that Blackmagic include it so I think we can assume that Resolve doesn’t do this as yet. It’s pretty damned annoying, Titling seems to be something that a lot of platforms struggle to get right and weird things you wouldn’t expect to have to deal with like this tend to crop up, I hope there’s some movement in this space.

[Jimmy See]

This is getting embarrassing now as this is the second post in as much as two days where I could have sworn there was nothing obviously wrong before posting asking for help only to discover I’d missed something.

In fact there was a track with only one clip on it, it was a disabled clip on a track below the one I was looking at but ending on exactly the same frame so I thought the one I was looking at was the place the playhead was stopping at. As the clip on the track was the only clip on that track, the playhead moved to the previous closest edit point on that track which was that clip.

It’s still a little mysterious though, I was pretty sure the clip on the timeline that was actively selected affect the up and down arrow behaviour but it seemingly doesn’t and also i’m sure I remember the issue suddenly starting, as in I’d gone way past the clip where the playhead was stopping as I went through the timeline and used the up arrow command thousands of times without issue and it only now was starting so I guess there is still something of a mystery why it would be doing this.

[Jimmy See]

Replying to my own thread because I got some advice that solved it for me. In the project in which I initially did the sequence which I copied to the other projects, I’d set the global project input scaling settings to ‘crop’, meaning all the still images which were almost always significantly larger than HD had to be shrunk down to get the right size.

The project I was copying the timeline to had the input scaling set to ‘scale entire image to fit’ meaning it first resize the image to fit the horizontal or vertical borders of the HD frame and then performed the edit size scaling which reduced it in size again, making everything super shrunk.

I just selected all clips in the timeline (in the copied to project) and changed the scaling settings from the edit page inspector to tab to ‘crop’ allowing me to get the correct sizing for this sequence without affecting anything in the rest of the main sequence for the rest of the project.

[Jimmy See]

Just to add to the weird-assed-ness, the problem is manifesting differently sometimes now and the workaround became simpler, but still irritating.

At one point, on watching back through my timeline I noticed that a black flash frame showed up on one of the layers I’d already replaced the footage for and fixed the flash frame issue for. That was dismaying, what could I do now if my fix doesn’t work? On a whim I switched back to the original, supposedly not working source clip that was on the layer to begin with and suddenly the issue was fixed.

Then as I continued on through my timeline I noticed a flash frame on yet another clip, except this time it wasn’t just blackness. It was one random frame from a different clip in the composition. This time I went through the folder of imported footage and found the source clip and placed (no ‘re-placed’) it on the timeline with the same in and out points, and copied the transform parameters from the layer below on to that layer. Suddenly the flash frame was fixed. This didn’t work if I used the replace command with the same clip selected in the project pane.

This was good because it meant I could fix issues as they arose without digging around on disk to find source clips and manually import them, however it’s not great because the issue seems to manifest at random even in footage that probably didn’t have the issue before, or which already had it fixed.

Somehow it seems to me like some sort of corrupt rendering issue, but the problem persists when you view the footage layer from source and not in the composition. My biggest fear is that any fixes may ultimately be for naught because what if the errors suddenly show up during the export of the composition? Is it a preview only issue, or will it persist in the finished movie file?

[Jimmy See]

I read that somewhere years ago as well and did that as standard practice ever since all the while believing that I was indeed consolidating the full media set (or transcoding), but either that was the case and they changed it, or I was just wrong because as it turns out 0 handles is actually exactly what it says it is. Zero handles is the portion of the media used in the timeline, and no additional handles either side. Frustrating.

The reason I have to do it from the bin menu in Avid and not use a third party application is because I’m trying to do an OMF export. OMF seems to have gotten old hat because it’s difficult to do those these days. The option is hidden unless you set the project to SD and then when you do it throws up all manner of hurdles. It’s extremely picky about what format of sound it likes and after trying to get only the camera rushes sound and sync sound and cleaning the timeline of all other SFX, narration, even consumer cameras sound like GoPro, everything except the bare essentials it STILL didn’t work. I discovered though that it would if you told it to transcode in the OMF export options it would work, it would transcode the media in the timeline to OMF wav which apparently Avid seemed to like because it made an OMF. Problem is, I only saw an option to do this with handles, and I wanted to do all the media. So I thought I’d try transcoding it first before the OMF export and then export an OMF from my now entirely transcoded timeline, and that’s when I discovered how difficult that appears to be.

In the time since writing I did actually figure it out though, sorta. First, I discovered that there actually was a transcode all media option after all within the OMF export menu, I just missed it, but then Avid crashed trying, so instead I did an AAF export and transcoded all media and then attempted to make a ‘link to’ export of the ‘.exported’ timeline but it crashed AGAIN. So as far as my mission of trying to do an all media OMF export is concerned, I’ve failed, but along the way I discovered that the initial question I asked is sorta solvable. Actually another thing occurs to me though. maybe 0 handles means all the media, if you’re not selecting a timeline only reference clips, and if there are no in and out points set. Will have to try some time.

In summary: you can transcode/consolidate all media via AAF export settings and if you don’t need it you can just discard the resulting .aaf file.

[Jimmy See]

Ok, I guess you’re probably right about bulk application of the change using paste attributes.

That’s interesting what you say about it’s ability to always be using the full available resolution of the 4K. It’s good to hear someone sound confident that that is indeed what happens. I’m paranoid you see because Premiere Pro has a serious ‘gotcha’ problem with regard to resolution scaling whereby if you want the image to fit your frame there’s two settings for achieving that aim with really vague names that seemingly do the same thing but one of which has bad consequences if you do any further scaling.

I know we’re talking about Resolve, but there’s a point for digressing in to Premiere. In Premiere, if you have a 4k image in an HD timeline, you’ll find when you put the playhead over the image, that it’s centre cropped, you’re not seeing the full image, only 1920×1080 sized box within the centre of it. Now you can adjust the scale manually using the scale attribute, but if you want it just fill the frame, you can do it in a single click. One way of doing that is to choose an option called ‘scale to frame size’, which when clicked, resizes the image to fill your frame. However, there’s a trick, because if you click that option, the ‘scale’ attribute remains unchanged, it stays at 100, and if you later decide that in fact you wanted to zoom in a little on something, and you scale to 130%, in fact you lose quality because when Premiere ‘scaled to frame size’ it actually resampled the clip and made it the same resolution as the timeline, therefore further scaling in is actually blowing up an HD sized shot, not a 4K one. But if you don’t click scale to frame size and instead click ‘set to frame size’, the image is resized to fit your frame and the scale tab is adjusted accordingly and because the image is bigger than the timeline resolution, the scale parameter is set to a lower value in order to shrink the footage to fit and if you later decide you want to to be a little more zoomed in after all, you adjust the scale to a value that is less low, but not above 100. There’s a similar issue in Avid too where any material that goes through it’s ‘import’ process is resized to fit the project resolution and thus no longer 4k (there’s caveats to this depending on some steps you can take but that’s the standard behaviour).

That rant about Premiere and Avid had a point though because basically, if I’m adjusting the node sizing parameter, it’s set to 1.000 by default and zooming in from there means a value above 1.000, but since scaling is applied as part of the input scaling settings set for the project, you can see why I might wonder whether it was pulling a Premiere on me. The same goes for scale parameter in the inspector, because if you have input scaling applied, and you have the ‘resize filter’ parameter set to project settings, then it too defaults to a zoom of 1.000 which again introduces the ambiguity (at least at a UI level) over what actually happens, this is why I was taking the extra precaution of setting each drone shot to the ‘crop’ resize filter.

How is it that you found out that it definitely doesn’t ‘pull a premiere’ regarding scaling?

[Jimmy See]

GENIUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!