[Marc Wielage]

[Duke Sweden] “Outside of qualifying my skin (which is a bitch with my beard and all) is there a tool in Resolve for raising or lowering strictly the red, blue or green levels without affecting to much of the rest of the image?”
What happens if you use a Red Hue vs. Sat curve? That’s generally what I do, and it’s a lot more gentle than a key per se. If necessary, you can use a tracking window on the person and only affect reds within the window.

Sometimes, a targeted Custom Curve can do it, as with choosing the Red-only curve and making an adjustment there. There’s a lot of “it depends” to this.

[Marc Wielage]

No, you can only use one Blackmagic card at a time. But you can use splitters and/or distribution amps to feed multiple monitors. And as Michael notes above, several Blackmagic video cards provide both HDMI and HD-SDI outputs, and you can always use an adapter to change HD-SDI to HDMI (or vice-versa). When using HD-SDI, it’s generally possible to loop the output of the monitor to a second monitor (or even multiple monitors).

[Marc Wielage]

What kind of camera? What specific type of MXF? MXF is just a container, and there can be damned near anything in there.

You are doing the right thing: testing the workflow thoroughly before a big shoot or a big editing project destined for final color. Believe me, Resolve is generally flawless dealing with Avid AAF files. Speed ramps and varispeed are still a bit of an issue, but I’ve even seen dynamic repositions come in flawlessly.

[Marc Wielage]

[Chris Simeone] “Instead of copying a looping clip then pasting it 60 times (four different clips for four different videos translates to 240 pastes), I’m wondering if I can use the transport’s loop function to render the looping clip to a video of a specified length?”
Even if you could do that, there would be a momentary pause while it jumped back to the head of the file.

Just cut and paste it 60 times. Hire an affordable assistant editor to come in for a couple of hours and do it for cheap if you have to. 60 “paste-paste-pastes” is not really that hard.

[Marc Wielage]

Note this is due to decisions made by Apple, so it has nothing to do with Blackmagic or Resolve users per se. One solution is just to buy an affordable Mac (like an iMac Pro) and let that be a ProRes render station. Even some used Macs could do it to a point. The Advanced Linux version can do it ($30K).

[Marc Wielage]

Yes, Michael is 100% right. I think the key is in an ideal world, every clip will have a unique file name and non-overlapping timecode,

There are timecode jam boxes you can buy or rent, at least for cameras that can accept external timecode, and that can take care of part of the problem.

For the other part of the problem, my suggestion for workflow would be to rename dozens of files that are like “C0001.MXF”, “C0002.MXF”, “”C0003.MXF” in folder Cam Roll 01, and instead rename them with a prefix like “061318A_C0001.MXF” for today’s date plus “A” for A camera, “B” for B camera, and so on. (Michael’s suggestion of “H01” for day 1, “H02” for day 2, and so on can also work fine.) There are dozens of utilities for Mac and Windows that will do this. Rename the files the day of the shoot and before the files are backed up. And then insert all the metadata in the editing program of choice or whatever you use for dailies and transcodes.

From here on, you now have files that will sort in order by date and by camera letter and shoot name. If you have a case where the file folder starts naming the files “C0001” again, then I would use a utility to manually go in and sequentially rename them to the next logical number.

There are a lot of reasons why cameras like this are bad and I don’t recommend them. File organization is just a tip of the iceberg.

[Marc Wielage]

The HDCP-removing splitters are all over eBay:

https://www.ebay.com/gds/understanding-hdmi-and-hdcp/10000000177911445/g.html

[Marc Wielage]

[seb demeffe] “Hello I’m experiencing the same kind of problem with a brand new machine: crash when touching a media in the media pool. “
What specific type of media is in the media pool? This should work.

Back up your sessions and your database and try updating to Resolve 14.3 and see if this solves the problem.

[Marc Wielage]

[Philip Hendel] “I am wondering if there is still a possible way to get a DaVinci Lite version that was designed to run on OSX 10.6.8”
Man, I wouldn’t even try. It’s just too old at this point. Find a way to get a newer machine — they exist, and some are fairly affordable.

Look at it this way: 10 years ago, it cost more than $100K to run a fairly minimal version of Resolve.

[Marc Wielage]

[Andrea Franchini] “What’s the purpose of a blackmagic decklink card? Does it bypass the internal processing of the OS and the GPU by simply taking the raw image from davinci and display it on another monitor? This make everything more complicated and expensive since, as you suggested, I should avoid using my main display, which is connected to my gpu, and use an external one connected to the decklink.”
Read pp. 667-668 of the Resolve 14.3 manual: “Limitations When Grading With the Viewer on a Computer Display.” This goes into some detail why you cannot accurately monitor directly from the computer and operating system. You have to have a color-managed output, like one from a Blackmagic display card, preferably on a calibrated external Rec709 display.

You could make a joke that the Blackmagic display device is effectively a “dongle” for the program, since (to me at least) it only works properly with a card. But the truth is that you need a color-managed output where the video is unaffected by anything that happens within the operating system, so that you can reliably see the same picture day after day. Given how affordable the cards are, I think it’s a small price to pay.