[Marc Wielage]

[Bob Cole] “Okay, here’s a bonus stupid question: How does “Smooth Cut” work? How does it differ from a dissolve?”
Smooth Cut morphs the last few frames of a shot to move the pixels to match the first few frames of the next shot. If you’re doing an interview that has a jump-cut, this sometimes will create the “inbetween” frames needed to completely obscure the jump-cut. This is also covered in the manual.

[Marc Wielage]

[Russ Johnson] “Err… yeah. Case of progressive male refrigerator blindness now extended to software. I was right clicking but not going into the Timeline submenu.”
There are no stupid questions!

They moved this function a couple of versions ago, and I curse it every time I have to fumble around for the Timeline options. There’s a bunch of stuff I wish they would remove from a right-click timeline function per se, but I get this is just a philosophical difference, not a deal-killer.

[Marc Wielage]

I find you have to change opacity AND the window shape in order to really make this work effectively. A lot depends on the specific situation: I had a case not long ago where I had to light an actor’s face as they were peering out from an opening door. In that case, the window moved from being very narrow to being “face-shaped” as the door opened. It was amazing how well that worked, truly getting a keylight in a place where no keylight was really possible.

Tricks like this don’t always work, but when they do, it’s fantastic.

If I had to start or stop tracking mid-clip, I think the advice to manually cut it in half is a good strategy. You can always “undo” the split but retain the tracking afterwards, if you want to be a stickler on preserving the edit timeline.

[Marc Wielage]

[Nick Dantonio] “Thanks! Once they’re synced in Resolve, can they be exported or sent to Premiere Pro?”
Well, I’m guessing it would work if you export an XML per each timeline. Do a test and see what happens.

I’m not sure I get why you sync in Resolve and edit entirely in Premiere. Why not sync and edit in Premiere, if that’s you’re preferred program?

[Marc Wielage]

Well, the procedure for Batch Syncing dailies in Resolve starts on page 220 of the Resolve 14 manual, along with several good manual techniques.

[Marc Wielage]

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

[Marc Wielage]

Why not just edit completely in Premiere if that’s what you’re comfortable doing? I don’t think Resolve is better or worse at syncing per se. I believe Plural Eyes can batch sync within Premiere (at least it did 2 years ago, the last time I tried it).

If it’s just syncing up 150 files, that’s not that big a deal. It wouldn’t take 1 minute to do this manually in almost any program (Resolve included), and that would be under 3 hours. Renaming the files would be more complicated, and that would most likely involve a lot of user intervention. If all the files were from a single shoot, my advice would be to not change the file names radically. You could add a prefix for (say) shoot day. followed by the original file name, like “032018_C001” for the first file, “032018_C002” for the second, and so on. There are numerous file-renaming utilities that can do this within the operating system.

[Marc Wielage]

[Michael Gissing] “To be fair Tero, has anyone (apart from your good self) read the whole manual?”
Yes. I’ve read the entire manual 2 or 3 times, and I know a few other colorists in LA who’ve gone through the whole thing. It’s not that hard to do.

The plot is a little dull, and the characters are predictable, but there’s a few surprises along the way. And the ending comes from out of nowhere and really makes the whole book work.

[Marc Wielage]

I would try deleting all the Media Storage paths from Preferences, then re-select the drives and make sure they’re listed in the window in the correct order, with the top-most drive for Gallery stills and Cache files. I would also make sure you repair permissions on this drive within the OS and make sure it’s got sufficient space to do what you need to do.

I run into this sometimes when I have to move a project from my system to a client’s system at another facility, but I get around that by bringing along the Cache drive. As long as that path is visible, it can work pretty seamlessly.

[Marc Wielage]

A lot of small cameras are flawed in that they don’t have jammable timecode. As a result, all the files start at 00:00:00:00 and will not automatically sync up with external audio or other cameras.

My advice would be what we did for 80 years prior to timecode, which was to watch the picture and listen to the sound and get it in sync manually. A clap stick is very useful to determine sync — and they’re still used even in all-digital productions just in case the timecode goes bad.