[Marc Wielage]

In the old days of daVinci Systems, there was a yearly support program that I think was somewhere north of $5000 (might have even been more line $10,000+), and you could get 24/7 answers to certain questions. I think for a higher fee, a local engineer in some areas (like LA) would come by to service the system.

Once daVinci Systems went bankrupt, Blackmagic took over the assets and the IP, but they’ve made it clear they don’t want to get into the service business. I’ve said for years it would be an opportunity for somebody to have a paid support line where you could call and get help 24/7, even if it was $5 a minute or something, but it has yet to happen. You can contact BMD at the numbers listed on their webpage and get help from about 6AM-5PM PDT in North America, Britain, Singapore, Japan, and China, among other areas:

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/support/contact/phone

[Marc Wielage]

I have seen this happen before (but not that often). A possible workaround: use Text+ instead, which involves the Fusion engine, and see if it’s any better.

The alternative would be to render out the titles or prep them with another program like Illustrator or Photoshop and bring them back into Resolve as TIFFs or PNGs with an Alpha Channel. We generally request titles as TIFFs for the simple reason that we know that precise line spacing and dropshadows and so on are not ever going to change, no matter what. And we’re religious about comparing them to the client’s reference video to make sure the titles are absolutely perfect in terms of placement, fades, and so on.

[Marc Wielage]

Resolve is most likely set up for 48kHz. My advice would be to sample-rate convert this piece of audio to 16-bit 48kHz with a 3rd party piece of software and see if that does the trick.

In general, all film & TV post is set up for 48kHz audio, sometimes at 20-bit, sometimes at 24-bit. There are rare exceptions, like higher-res formats for Dolby Atmos, but I think not that many theaters are set up for that.

[Marc Wielage]

Well… as long as the degree of softness is constant, you can apply that across all of the shots in the Keyframe Clip mode, you can increase softness with one overall adjustment. Otherwise, there are control surfaces that will let you jump to the next keyframe and manually adjust softness as required. If there’s dozens or hundreds of keyframes, then you have a real problem.

I’m a fan of the “divide and conquer” method of manual keyframing, where I’ll set a start point, an endpoint, then jump to the middle, and then slowly go through the scene in small increments and see where I really need to drop in another keyframe to work effectively. I also find that the Highlight mode will show you very quickly when the edge is peeking out around or over the subject.

Also, multiple shapes is often the best way to mask out people, particular heads, bodies, arms and hands. (And I tip my hat to Dan Moran of MixingLight.com for this idea some years back.)

[Marc Wielage]

It’s maddening that Apple won’t let users drop in a Thunderbolt 2 or Thunderbolt 3 board into a Cheesegrater Mac and have it work with any Mac operating system.

[Marc Wielage]

I think the best answer is to check Blackmagic’s Configuration Guide and see what it says in terms of processors, RAM, and GPUs. The iMac Pros do OK, as do recent iMacs with Thunderbolt 3’s and the ability to use an external eGPU. If you use very, very light-duty files (like ProRes 422LT), it can work on relatively old iMacs, like 4-5 years old.

[Marc Wielage]

Yeah, this is a thing. Under FIle -> Source Name in the Deliver Menu, you have to select “Use Unique Filenames” when you’re rendering out pieces of a source clip that’s been cut up. Otherwise, one clip will overwrite each of them, over and over again.

I wish there was a warning message about this, but there isn’t. It’s basically a workflow thing where you have to render individual clips with unique filenames AND a new XML so that the other platform will be able to reassemble the clips in the order they were in over in the Resolve timeline. This is explained in the manual.

[Marc Wielage]

And I forgot about this shot from NAB 2010 (which is hard to find), which shows how full-flown Resolve went from about $500,000 to $99,995 from 2009-2010:

It’s fair to say there was some “concern” from companies who had invested anywhere from $200,000 to $500,000 in Resolve when it was owned by daVinci Systems in Florida, only to see it go down below $100,000 after Blackmagic took it over in late 2009. But this is how technology has been going lately; I see it as inevitable. Faster, cheaper, better. My hope is that the work of experienced artists, editors, colorists, and sound mixers still has a very real value.

[Marc Wielage]

Yeah, I remember when Joe was an early adopter of Silicon Color. (By the same token, a good buddy of mine invested in Shake, and he was horrified to see the price go from $4950 to $2999 to $499… and then vanish over a period of a few years. So sadly, there’s precedence for this before.

The hope is that everybody got to make their money out of the platform before it collapsed, and I know people who are still actually using Shake (albeit with older OS’s). In the case of Resolve, be glad you only paid $995 for it and not $200,000+, as some users did. As Jason Bowdach noted sometime back:

So I try to see this as a “glass half-full” situation: more good than bad.

[Marc Wielage]

View -> Window Outline -> On.

Make sure you have the Power Window pallet up, and choose the Power Window tool in the lower left corner of the Viewer on the Color page.

There are pros and cons to using the Window Outline vs. Highlight, and in some cases one serves better than the other.