[Marc Wielage]

[Kevin Camin] “So for people who are using the program on a normal computer monitor are not getting accurate results? You absolutely need to run it through one of their video cards and onto a broadcast monitor?”
Yes. 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.

[Marc Wielage]

[Richard Krall] “The problem: no image on the LG. Input selection correct, couple of different HDMI cables tried but, no image. LG screen message “No Signal Detected”. “
I think the answer is: the HDMI connector is inherently kind of fragile — both physically and electronically — and sometimes the HDCP copy protection flag kicks in and shuts off the picture.

One solution is to get a powered HDMI splitter, one that actually strips out the HDCP copy protection, and I bet the problem will go away. Do a search on eBay or Amazon and you’ll find different HDMI signal splitters that are actually advertised as being capable of doing this.

I have not had this problem with the HDMI output of a 4K UltraStudio or the Mini-Teranex. I don’t think this is BMD’s fault — this is just a problem with HDMI in general, because it’s a flawed connector. You won’t have this problem with the HD-SDI connection portion of a Mini-Monitor.

[Marc Wielage]

[Duke Sweden] “I’m just joking. Other than Tero, who collects old Davinci Resolve manuals?”
They make good late-night reading when I’m having trouble sleeping. Especially like Resolve 8 or 9…

BTW, I hope they hurry up and finish the Resolve 15 manual… which is still not out yet.

[Marc Wielage]

[Duke Sweden] “Oh, good. I was missing v. 11 from my collection”
The Version 8 manual is good for a lot of laughs. It’s pretty shocking how far Resolve has come over the last 10 years.

[Marc Wielage]

Alexis will no doubt have some new Resolve 15 training tutorials available through Ripple Training in a few months.

[Marc Wielage]

[david fielding] “Perhaps there was a better method in post, but the PluralEyes>Premiere proxy was the best idea I could come up with at the time (this morning after sleeping on it).”
You know, we never had timecode on the film in the days of syncing sound with motion picture film, and somehow we got by with just a sync clap. But you do need a slate and a clap. Once you have that, each take need not take more than :30 seconds, maybe 1 minute at the most. If you have 200 takes, it’s just 200 minutes, which is only 3.5 hours. And if you’re fast, you can do it in less than half of this time. It’s not that hard, and it’s been done for more than 90 years.

[Marc Wielage]

Basic workflow questions like this are tough, because there’s a lot of “it depends” situations involved.

If it were me, I’d go with ProRes 422HQ, and I’d also rename the files when necessary to reflect the shoot date and give them a unique identifier that would help prevent conform confusion later on. For example, a shot made today, called “C0001” by the camera, would instead be renamed “042818_C0001”. In a perfect world, you could also provide non-overlapping timecode for these shots to avoid the issue of every file restarting with 00:00:00:00 timecode (for cameras that don’t use time-of-day timecode). I would then treat all the 422HQ files as if they were the actual masters, then put the original camera files away as a backup just in the case of absolute emergency. True 444 10-bit cameras I would consider transcoding to ProRes 444 in original resolution, and I’d stay right on top of the debayer/decoding settings to make sure the key settings — color temp, ISO, and exposure — were all set correctly.

I would also come up with a system so that each day’s shoots were rigidly organized in a way that the editor and assistant editor (and colorist and assistant colorist) would all be able to find everything needed to put each episode together. One method is shown below:

screenshot2018-04-28at11.34.22pm.png

The book Modern Post: Workflows & Techniques for Digital Filmmakers goes into a variety of options.

https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Post-Workflows-Techniques-Filmmakers/dp/0415747023/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1524983818&sr=1-1

[Marc Wielage]

[Ron German] “I read some manual parts, but there are 1346 pages!!! I`ll read page 858 and forwards.”
You would be well-served to read ALL of it. I think I’ve read the manual three times (over a period of years) and I learn something new every time. There’s some pretty big nuggets of wisdom in there.

[Marc Wielage]

I’m a big fan of Boris BCC and Sapphire, each of which have far more options than what you get in Resolve FX. I think the Red Giant OFX plug-ins are hit-and-miss, and the interface is dodgy; I’m not that much of a fan of HitFilm Ignite, but they do have some interesting features you can’t find anywhere else. And I sometimes will grab the DFT plug ins when I need to do an unusual Tiffen-esque filtered look.

For audio plug-ins, the full line of Waves plugs (like the Platinum or Diamond packages) are very useful, and I like the Nugen plugs for metering and stereo/surround soundstage tweaking. iZotope RX is unmatched for noise reduction, but I tend to use that in standalone mode and not as part of the mix, because I treat each source track separately before bringing it into the mix.

The new array of FX in Resolve 15 is pretty phenomenal.

[Marc Wielage]

Which version of Resolve? What OS? What hardware (CPU, GPU, RAM, I/O)? What type of camera source files? What kind of audio files?