[Marc Wielage]

I suspect if you were to price a fully-equipped Baselight 8 with panels vs. a full-tilt Resolve Linux system & panels with similar storage, the prices would probably be at least $50K apart, with Resolve being a lot cheaper. To me, the advantage of going with Resolve is that you can buy a couple additional stations and have assistants working in separate rooms simultaneously with the colorist, doing conforms and renders while leaving the lead colorist free to work with the client.

I think in terms of sky replacement, trying to do it in a color-correction room isn’t optimal. I think you’re better off having one room for color and one room for VFX, and let a VFX artist tackle something as sophisticated as AE work and Maya and all that stuff. The compositing tools in Baselight and Resolve are nowhere near as good… but I think the color-correction tools in both are excellent. I like the DaVinci control surface very much, but the (much higher-priced) Blackboard 2 from Baselight is pretty awe-inspiring.

I personally relate to the node structure in Resolve better, but I worked with several Baselights for some time and got used to those, too. I think you can be fast and productive on both. I also think the service from Baselight is top-notch. There’s a ton of people who I think bought low-end Resolve systems and kind of got overwhelmed with how difficult it can be to learn and maintain, and from that perspective, I think Resolve could have better support in North America. I’d like to see Blackmagic follow Adobe and Avid’s lead in providing paid support — maybe by subscription or by incident — so there’s always somebody there on the phone, 12 hours a day. If it cost $50 to get an answer, this could help a lot in solving problems in time-sensitive situations.

[Marc Wielage]

[Steve Edwards] “The Slip command slipped the audio and video together, not the audio independently.”
Is there a way to split the embedded WAV audio away from the BMD files and just treat it as a separate media import?

I assume there was no separate audio recorder used on the set. Sadly, it’s for reasons like this that I always, always tell people to record double-system audio on all these shoots, particularly with unpredictable cameras.

[Marc Wielage]

[Itai Bachar] “Hi Kevin, my node tree is actually similar to what you are describing, I do the LUT (either Arri lut from the 3d lut menu, or my own “lut”), than minor tweaks.”
What happens if you eliminate the LUT entirely and just use the first node to simulate the actions of the LUT? I have encountered Log-C situations before where I just went at it with no LUT and did just fine.

Bear in mind that in The Old Days, we color-corrected for decades without LUTs using film, which is always photographed Raw, essentially in Log space. It can be done, it’s just a question of where you need to go and what you’re trying to do.

BTW, I always find it’s best to use the first node to get the image to something approaching normal, then do all the fine-tuning downstream from there. Whether I use the LUT or not is dictated by the material.

[Marc Wielage]

I hate when that happens. There are a handful of situations where Undo can’t work, because it’s a shot-by-shot Undo related to the Master timeline, not always a session-wide Undo.

It’s true that there are some fatal steps you can do that will result in catastrophe. If you’re lucky, you’ll only make these mistakes once and live another day.

[Marc Wielage]

This kind of question comes up in the world of audio as well. As a general rule, Pro Tools re-recording mixers do NOT hand out their Pro Tools sessions as part of the deal. The goal is to give the client the *work* involved — not the road and building blocks that eventually leads to the work.

Having said that: if this is a regular client, and it was a case of ensuring client loyalty and you trusted them, I’d have no problem with it. If it was a one-shot deal, absolutely not.

[Marc Wielage]

I just did a project last month where we had reference audio come up in a Blackmagic design camera, and it came up fine in Resolve 9. We wound up not using it because all the sound was recorded separately, but it was at least there.

Is it possible to slip the audio in conform and just manually force it to be in sync?

[Marc Wielage]

[Alessio Occhiodoro] “aaaand i’m having this horrible artifact when i bring down the lowlights in my luma curve”
What happens if you try to adjust it without curves, outside the log mode, in the normal liner mode? What about if you eliminate the LUT?

Anything with an ISO of 160 is gonna have to have a lot of light. What do the histograms look like? You’re going to need a good meaty exposure and lots of fill in order to get detail out of the blacks on something like this. I don’t see this as a Resolve problem; this is a question of aesthetics and technical decisions.

I do find you have to be very, very careful doing anything with curves in 8-bit material, and sometimes extra points can give you greater smoothness and less “steppiness.” But in truth, I think you can often get there just with lift, gamma, and gain 90% of the time, unless it’s really a problematic exposure.

[Marc Wielage]

What happens if you change resolution to 1920×1200?

[Marc Wielage]

[Arthur Puig] “But the interesting thing is that the majority of other vendors were saying the same thing, and something I kept hearing since day 1, “Blackmagic is destroying the post industry””

I don’t think it’s quite that bad. This is no different than what’s going on in the audio industry, where you can go out and get the $295 version of Pro Tools and call yourself a mixer. It’s not quite the same as having the $20,000 version of Pro Tools HD3, tons of plug-ins, and a mixing stage.

There will always be bottom-feeders who try to compete with the big facilities, but I like to believe that talent and experience makes the difference. I would trust a guy who’s done a hundred studio feature films on almost any system, vs. a guy who’s got Resolve Lite in his garage.

I have no problem with filmmakers who want to make a stab at color timing their own feature, but my experience is that it’s even harder than mixing. And very few try to mix major projects on a desktop.

[Marc Wielage]

[Rick Turners] “From my understanding, Company 3, Technicolor and EFilm utilize Resolve to grade the highest grossing films in the world. “
Small correction: eFilm is using a customized version of Lustre, and Technicolor uses Resolve, Baselight, and (some) old daVinci 2K’s, depending on which facility.

It is true that Resolve has been used on some major, heavyweight blockbusters of the past couple of years — [I]Avatar[/I] being perhaps the most famous (at Modern Videofilm). But in that case, all the conforming was done on Quantel iQ.

For day to day D.I. or broadcast work, Resolve, Baselight, Pablo, Nucoda, Lustre, and Scratch can all work. It’s more a question of choosing the system that makes the most business sense and can also blend in with your existing workflow.