[Marc Wielage]

Shot in the dark: what if you launch Resolve, stay in the Project Manager page, then right-click and export the bad project in question. This will create a DRP file you can temporarily keep on the desktop.

Now right-click within the Project Manager screen, choose import, and select that file. It’s possible that the new imported file (which you should give a new name) may be able to work. If it doesn’t, contact BMD Support and send the file to them and see if they can recover it.

I find it’s always a good habit to save a backup of your current project just in case there’s a problem. And keep it on an external drive outside your current project database. That way, even if the drive goes down, the project itself is covered.

[Marc Wielage]

I have seen this problem before. I have sometimes resorted to using A/B rolls, putting the A-side of the dissolve on one track and the B-side of the dissolve on the other, then doing the move earlier so that it happens at the right time.

[Marc Wielage]

My advice would be to fire up the standalone Blackmagic Media Express application, load in a file of known quality, and play it back to the monitor. If it looks bad there, then I would suspect the box or the cable going to the monitor.

[Marc Wielage]

[Bruce Gaber] “I recently returned to some important footage and discovered that it was infested with glitches…color bars & distorted images. The original footage was clean (I managed to find a copy of it), but it was somehow damaged on the system.”
Is it possible to open the original session and see if the material in it is good or bad?

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

The Trashcan Macs are known to introduce glitches in renders on occasion, due to the AMD GPUs overheating. (Google “MacPro Video Glitch.”)

This is one of those cases where unfortunately, it’s important to QC the material before it ships to the client to make sure you catch any issues prior to delivery. Even when I’m sure the system is good, I try to spot check the files in at least a dozen or more places for a few minutes.

[Marc Wielage]

[Russ Johnson] “I can see how to copy and paste video attributes from a clip on a timeline to other clips, but I can’t see how to copy an OpenFX filter (in this case Soften & Sharpen) and its settings applied to a clip and paste those to other clips in the timeline. “
There’s a couple of ways to do it:

1) highlight the clips you want to change. Add the clips into a New Group by right-clicking the thumbnail — you could call the group “Soften-Sharpen.” In either Pre-Clip Grade or Post-Clip Grade, create a node and cut-and-paste the settings you want from the Soften & Sharpen OFX plug-in.

2) Have a node at the very end of the node graph with the Soften & Sharpen OFX grade (only) in it. Now, highlight all the clips you want to change. Under the Color menu, choose “Append Node to Selected Clips.” Now, those shots will have a new node at the end with only the Soften & Sharpen correction added.

What can also be helpful is to have a fixed node tree that has (say) a dozen or two dozen pre-labeled nodes for every single shot, even if most of them are de-activated. This way, if you decide to make a change on a specific node, you just change that one node and ripple it to the entire timeline (or whatever shots you need to change).

[Marc Wielage]

[Andy Winter] “i want to copy a couple of nodes altogether with one operation at the same time! i would love to lasso a couple of nodes, hit copy and select a new clip and hit paste to insert or append them!”
You can’t do this as one operation, but you can save a grade with just those two nodes, make it a PowerGrade (or just a regular still), and then you can quickly append it to any shot. If you need it in the middle of a grade, then you’d have to open up the node graph and drag those two nodes over to the right place in the Node window.

[Marc Wielage]

What OS? What specific hardware (CPU, GPU, RAM, I/O)? What type of camera source files?

It should be no problem using a scene-detected timeline, particularly for something as short as 22 minutes. I’ve done at least 4 features so far this year that were handed to me as a single flattened file (3 on film, 1 digital), and the number of crashes were minimal. These were all ProRes 444 2K on Mac OSX 10.12.6.

[Marc Wielage]

[Bill Russell] “I assume by “separate file” you mean as a movie file. Ugh. Well, thanks for the info. Anyway, I manually force-conformed every image file. It took an annoyingly long time. Cheers – b”
Image file sequences are tough if they don’t have unique file names (at least for the sequence) and no timecode conflicts. If you have endless numbers of sequences that all start with 00000000, it can get a little tedious to deal with. It is possible to embed timecode numbers into certain kinds of file formats (like DPX).

Choosing the right formats for workflow involves a lot of considerations, and for me a good chunk of that boils down to “how well can I reconform this in another editing or color program?” Tests and trial runs can help ferret out which methods work and which do not. TIFF sequences would not be high on my list, but I do use TIFFs all the time for still graphics and titles — usually manually cut in and tweaked for length.

[Marc Wielage]

[Bill Russell] “So, the way I’m “searching” for clips in the timeline is to export and EDL, open that up in a text editor, search for the clip name, then reference its timecode in the timeline. “
My workaround for this is to organize a separate bin in the Media Page for each timeline, and that way I can immediately zero in on a clip that’s gone missing or a situation where I have the wrong version of a specific clip. It takes a little more time and trouble to do so, but once it’s done it works very well.

The USAGE column in the Media Page is also very helpful at pinning down what’s there and what isn’t needed.

[Marc Wielage]

Keep the R3D files and the proxy files on two different drives, and make sure the Premiere XML points to just the drive with the specific files you want. Spanned clips — like A005_C005_051521_001, A005_C005_051521_002, A005_C005_051521_003 and so on — are special cases but are supposed to play as continuous files. The trick is that the transcoded files have to be joined when they’re made, not kept as separate files.

On the Mac, EditReady can help with joining these spanned transcoded files to make them easier to deal with in the edit.