[Marc Wielage]

[Richard Swearinger] “While using the primaries wheels to adjust the scene brightness, how do you decide whether to change YRGB or only adjust the luminance channel?* I was taught that changing only the luminance would help prevent color shifts, but there’s a lot of bad information out there so I wanted to ask actual experts. “
I’ve never heard this in my life, at least in the past few decades. If anything, I think you can get into trouble with Luma-only changes since the scene’s chroma is unaffected, which can lead to odd saturation issues.

The big panels has Luma-only knobs for Lift / Gamma / Gain, but I only use those for “problem” situations. I will say that if you’re serious about color, you should invest in some kind of control surface and get used to the feel of what the knobs do and how to put the levels where you need them to be. As more than one person has observed, just setting up the basic core of the image to start with takes some time and patience to determine.

There’s roughly a dozen ways to change overall brightness or level in Resolve, and deciding which way to do it is something you can only get with experience. Matching is a separate problem and a separate skill.

[Marc Wielage]

What format is the sound, and what format are the video tracks?

Which version of Resolve, what operating system, and what hardware (CPU, GPU, i/o) are you using?

[Marc Wielage]

[William Terrio] “I absolutely love how Sony vegas functions and works, has anyone found a way to make Davinci control similarly to Vegas?”
I think there’s a point with any software where you have to have kind of a “Zen” attitude with it and just accept the way it was designed and go with the flow. They do allow you to choose keyboard assignments to work in a way similar to Premiere, Avid, and FCPX, plus you can customize it as Tero says above. I agree that there are aspects of the Edit page that echo the old FCP7, but I believe this is by design.

If you want something radically different, you can look at Baselight, Lustre, Mistika, Nucoda, Pablo, and Scratch, each of which has a different paradigm for editing and control response. There isn’t necessarily one “best” way to do it; it’s all a compromise in terms of what’s already in your own head. My suggestion is to go through a Resolve tutorial from start to finish and see if it’s possible for you to “unlearn” Vegas and adapt to Resolve. If after a few weeks you decide Resolve isn’t for you, stick with Vegas. At least BMD allows you to try the basic version of the program for free for as long as you want.

[Marc Wielage]

I just tried it, and I don’t get a gray screen. Is it possible you have the HIGHLIGHT mode on?

Another way to selectively bypass a correction is to use a power window, have the window cover the entire image area, and then use OPACITY to dial out the correction. This works with LUTs, keys, sharpening, Log, LGG, anything.

There are pros and cons with using LUTs, but on the rare occasions I use them, I generally drop it in as the very first node, then correct after that. I concede that there are differing opinions on where to use them in the node tree; I try to avoid using them at all, but there are good reasons to use them on some occasions.

[Marc Wielage]

Here’s the most catastrophic-avoidant backup strategy I can think of:

1) export a DRP

2) export a second DRP with embedded stills and LUTs

3) export XMLs (or AAFs) of every timeline

4) grab stills of every shot in the entire project, and export them as DPX/DRX files to individual folders per timeline

5) backup all your source files to LTO and/or separate drives

6) export a DaVinci Resolve Archive (.DRA), to a separate drive.

One or several of these is bound to survive in everything except the possibility of a nuclear attack.

[Marc Wielage]

Converting the MTS files to a simpler format (like ProRes 422HQ) is the best solution I can think of. MTS (MPEG Transport Stream) files are generally intended to be delivery-only formats, but I know that some AVCHD camcorders use it. I’m not a fan of this format at all because of the heavy compression. Some formats like this really tax the limits of the CPU even under the best circumstances.

[Marc Wielage]

Are you using free Resolve or Resolve Studio?

[Marc Wielage]

This is amazing news. The new RTX cards are not cheap, but man, are they powerful. This makes me gnash my teeth even more and want to throw my Trashcan Mac out a window…

[Marc Wielage]

Is it possible you have cache on and you’re seeing a cached clip and not the original?

I’m not convinced what you’re doing is an effective workflow — rendering parts of the show as you go — but if it works for you, no problem. The issue I see is that you’re going to wind up doing quite a bit of the work twice (or more than twice). I’d rather just render it all once at the very end.

[Marc Wielage]

You can see clip duration with the “I” button on the Color page (far right just under the thumbnails).