[Joseph Owens]

[stig olsen] “Its like there are recorded data far beyond the 255 as can be pulled back. Im used to Red and Alexa where everything over 255 is clipped.”

What’s this “255?” There cannot be any values over 255 in 8-bit. This is likely a re-scaling issue.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

In essence, that’s a yes in both cases. AMA linking being what it is, it may be faster to simply re-import the FX shot (because that’s what they are) directly, instead of messing around with multiple timelines being created under AAF. The only other fly in that ointment is that AAFs do NOT respond well to editing in the Resolve timeline and if you are sending the graded timeline back to AVID, 99 times out of 100 it will have corrupted in some way, forcing an export of a “new” AAF, which will not have any of the original filters, etc., that might have been in the original from Media Composer.

A potential work-around is to export a new XML from Resolve — reopen that back into a new Resolve project and then immediately re-export an AAF, which will generally be useable. This is an option if you start getting “crash to the desktop” behaviour when trying to export any AAF, whether the timeline has been modified or not.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Catalin Brylla] “2. If using the roundtrip above, what happens if in the offline a) I need to produce time-shifting effects that do not translate to Resolve (e.g. spline-based speed changes) and b) I bring in non-camera generated material, such as archive stills? If I make these changes/additions in the offline stage, it won’t conform to Resolve, and if I do them after the roundtrip in Avid, it will affect the marriage with audio. Any ideas??”

These are “baby/bathwater” conflicts.

There are some editorial processes that are one-way trips, and fundamentally altering sync relationships between sound and picture is one of the biggies. Spline-based speed remaps are an open invitation to disaster — it is supposed to be a feature, but the vastly different strategies for remapping frames along the timeline, whether its FCP, Avid, Premiere, a plugin like Twixtor… and so on, makes it virtually impossible to repeat or emulate across different platforms. Search the topic among all the discussion forums and you will find hundreds of threads complaining about media failing to link, being out of sync, not imported because of “timecode extents”… its a long litany. In the olden days, a speed change fell into the category of optical effect and meant that you had to be serious about it (intermediate print) or shoot it with an appropriate frame rate so that the film, when it ran at 24 fps, like all the rest of the source footage, created the speed effect. We are somewhat back in that category, since the only iron-clad strategy for guaranteeing that a blind re-conform will be correct is to make all the source media consistent. In other words, “baking out” an optical, speed-inherent clip that matches the project frame rate as its fundamental property.

Archive stills are supported, such as TIFF, PNG, and the like, but — the implementation is still iffy. Often the media will be treated as a single-frame sequential file with an assigned speed of 0 fps. Because of that, any PTRZ “Ken Burns” screen motion will be lost.

There are still a ton of small gaps in the overall “on-line” mode of the Resolve timeline that means that it is still first and foremost a color grade application with some simple tasks within its means. Otherwise the master NLE “offline” is still the “master” master.

Another search will also reveal that confusion still reigns supreme about how to do track assignments once you have re-acquired final-mix audio for a layback.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

Is there a difference in bus data transfer rates between the PCIe slots?

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

Not in the manual… what you are probably hoping for is by holding down some combination of keys, you only affect movement of the control point in either X or Y direction. Not implemented as far as I can tell.

The custom curves are already “constrained” in a manner. The X axis is a representation of the distribution of values “incoming”… and the output “Y” axis is a proportionality multiplier. There really is no absolute control of input –> output value, the custom curve is really only a shape that influences the rest of the black/gamma/gain behaviour. It is not analogous to curve adjustment in Photoshop at all.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

first inclination is to import them into the Resolve project just like any other media – create a “Client Reference” folder and a timeline from that, then grab internal Resolve “reference” stills so that you don’t have to go about creating wipes or crops or whatever on multiple layers.

Important thing to check is that the stills themselves are interpreted and scaled correctly, by default to video levels, I imagine — if you were going to be scientifically rigorous, it might also not be a terrible idea to see how they looked in whatever creation software was used to generate the stills — if another Resolve project, probably no worries, but if there is a platform-centric user color profile associated with the file, then beware. Not all files are created equally or for the same colorspace.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Vincenzo Onorato] “If you can buy a Flanders, do it. Don’t worry about calibration and probes, Flanders offers a FREE calibration service,”

Concur — it is a very cost effective solution for getting into a grade level solution without adding another zero to the price. Flanders has also started offering a package deal on some approved probes and calibration software, so that is worth looking into IF for some reason, you start gravitating into the situation of trying to match other monitors into the signal flow, and as a confidence backup…. but that would be like an insurance policy against a worst case scenario.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

[Dave Pickett] “that would be a startling coincidence”

I agree. I do also note that occasionally I see epidemics of things, whether they are related to point updates or simply the time of year if there is a seasonal production swing and/or some production companies start favouring a camera style, codec, or other post-workflow that somehow tips a balance somewhere.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

Sometimes I wonder if its a cacheing issue. Have seen it occasionally, people can get casual about where the temp files are kept but of course everything about this application is critical.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Joseph Owens]

So… couple of observations…

Either not a lot of people are using Encore.
Or… not a lot of traffic in this forum…
or nobody has any ideas…
or…?

But just in case some wandering soul finds this thread (probably by mistake), a couple of days of feverish net-mining started yielding some clues — none of which directly solved the problem.

Worthwhile advice was found in “flush the media cache”… which changed the behaviour of the Encore preview player. It started crashing at the end of the “Main Menu” first loop and coughed up a “General Error.” Maybe some tiny lightbulbs for some people, but frankly this kind of error dialogue is just an insult to the world.

None of the usual suspects, cited over and over as the problem, for example, a bad End Action, or a lingering or poorly threaded “Override” were to blame. Mis-matched audio and video backgrounds weren’t it, either. But when I hit the “General Error,” finally, those with long experience with Final Cut might start thinking…. hmmmm… what was the issue the software developers were concealing and couldn’t figure out how to cope with…

I re-routed the navigation at one point to one of the other menus in the subsidiary trees, and maybe not surprisingly, the looping functioned properly with that… but not really the path we wanted our viewers to take.

With that, I started re-examining all the elements in that menu. Interestingly enough, for someone who is easily amused, I started wondering about the combinations of 720×480, 853×480 (which would ordinarily be what you wanted for a graphic 16×9 element) and anamorphousness, if that’s a word.

So I went back to the background video element, which was a down-rez from an HD 1920×1080 23.98P original, and popped it into a Final Cut timeline to see what the Sequence-matcher dialog would say. Even though it was nominally ProRes422(HQ), FCP identified it as DVCPro. Probably something to do with the fact that it had been supplied to me as 853×480. Those in the know will start nodding sagely and say, hmmm… yesssss… ProRes doesn’t like being asked to accommodate non-orthodox resolutions.

That wasn’t it, either. Well, not completely.

Completely deleted everything in the project related to that menu. Shut down.

Opened up the supplied elements and duplicated them, recompressing all, including the .psd overlay.

Opened Encore, built the menu from scratch, left everything in default, routed the buttons, created a clickable area for each of the buttons so users didn’t have to play mumbly-peg with the tiny text icons, Preview…

And it worked. Why? I have no idea.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.