[Marc Wielage]

Yes, if you have Resolve Studio, you can use Motion Blur in the Motion tab.

It may or may not help your specific situation — my experience with motion blur is hit and miss.

[Marc Wielage]

I think everybody works differently. My tactic is to use all the defaults that BMD provides, but I add a whole bunch of additional keys and modes that I need for my own way of working. For example, I like the idea of hitting one button to rename nodes in the Node tree. I generally use unusual key combinations like control-shift or control-option as modifiers so that I don’t overlap or eliminate the standard keyboard shortcut set.

There are advantages to using 3rd party control surfaces like the Tangent Elements or the BMD Resolve Mini if you do a lot of color correction. And there are some terrific macro keyboards out there like the ones made by XKeys and the Elgato Streamdeck. There have been some good discussions on this over on MixingLight and the LiftGammaGain discussion group.

[Marc Wielage]

[Declan Smith] “Interesting that I had a similar export issue but with Audio, i.e. short Pop at the beginning of an audio fade. When listening on the timeline, absolutely no problem, when rendered out to H.264, a glitch at the same place every time, even after clearing render caches etc. When I reviewed the ProRes master I created, no glitch. Maybe there is some issue with H.264 encoding in Resolve. “
My workaround for now would be to use the ProRes master you created (which is a good idea, BTW) and use another program like QuickTime or Adobe Media Encoder to make the H.264. If it’s going to YouTube note that they re-encode a lot of stuff anyway, so you could just try uploading the QuickTime and let YouTube re-encode it for you.

I routinely upload ProRes LT to Vimeo Pro and Frame.io, and it looks fine to me. On Frame.io, they’ll keep it in that native form without re-encoding for anybody who wants to download it (password-protected).

[Marc Wielage]

You can use a free utility called Macs Fan Control to kick the fan up to 1800RPM, which will cool off the overheating GPUs.

In general, the steps are:

1) shut down and let the machine cool off for at least 30 minutes
2) reboot it and go directly into Resolve without launching any other programs
3) turn the fans off with Macs Fan Control
4) get the temperature no more than about 100-105° F
5) render at a slow speed (10fps or 4fps)

And this will sometimes work. Worst case, render out the material in segments to an intermediate format, then stitch those together for final delivery.

I had terrible problems with a 6-core a few years ago, but a second 12-core Trashcan has been very, very good at not overheating and causing glitches.

[Marc Wielage]

I know very well what HLG is and have been following it for at least 5 years. What display are you using for it, and how was it calibrated?

[Marc Wielage]

[Eric Jaminet] “I suppose it is not the right or best thing to do but it seems to work well with my footage for now, as I need results fast, and the colors seem a little better than if I put Rec.709 2.4 in both Input and Output. I could be totally wrong.”
Why do you think you need HLG at all? If your resources are limited, you could just color correct in normal Rec709 space and call it a day? There are affordable Rec709 monitors out there that can work, provided they’re calibrated. Beyond that, whatever you do will wind up as guesswork.

[Marc Wielage]

If you don’t have an HDR monitor, it’s not possible to grade HDR. You’ll drive right off the cliff.

If I were you, I would check the entire signal path in Rec709, make sure that what you see is what you get, and then work on what it will take to actually grade HDR. Just getting past the monitor (and calibration) is a huge hurdle.

MixingLight.com has a good 5-part series on what it takes to work with HDR (including Dolby Vision), and I would recommend them highly. Note that this is a pay site, but I believe you can try it out free for a week or two and explore their tutorials.

[Marc Wielage]

That’s a very complex workflow problem.

My suggestion would be to convert all the source media to 29.97 NDF, and then recut it from scratch and do a manual ColorTrace to bring over all the corrections. It’s possible you could export whole segments from the finished 23.976 project, so it might not be that arduous if you did it in chunks and rebuilt it that way, creating 29.97 timelines that have a mixture of color-corrected material and new material.

I’ve paid close attention to how CNN produces their weekly cable shows (particularly their excellent “Decades” specials), and my theory is that this is how they do the finish. New interview segments are shot at 23.98 and then transcoded to 29.97, old stock footage is de-interlaced and used in 29.97, and then they standards-convert other framerates as needed using whatever they need to get the job done. I have occasionally seen 2:3 artifacts in some old standard-def film material, but I think they try to cut around that as much as they can. The shows look great and are the highest-rated programs on CNN, which is a testament to how well-done they are.

I would also look very carefully at the delivery document, because I would bet they want a standard 29.97 1080i file, most likely in dropframe, for the final air master. It’s no problem to change the timecode, but the trick will be formatting the commercial blacks and compensating for the 3-second difference between drop and non (which is not that big a deal).

[Marc Wielage]

Yeah, I have seen flakiness with either USB or ethernet, but generally one will work a little more reliably than the other. My suspicion is that sometimes this might be a system fault and not Resolve per se, because I’ve had occasional USB connectivity issues on the last few Mac OSX updates. But usually it’s the kind of thing that happens a couple of times a month, not several times a day.

[Marc Wielage]

Are you connected via ethernet or USB 2?

If it’s USB, you might try avoiding a USB hub and connect directly to the computer. It’s possible one USB port might work better than another. There are also different varieties of firmware for the Mini Panels — I think 1.12 was the last one I know of, but there may be a more current version.

There were reports of USB2 being flakey on some systems, so you might get more consistent results with ethernet.