[Marc Wielage]

A lot depends on what kind of performance you expect from Resolve. In my opinion, even the recent MacPro laptops and iMacs are just not fast enough or expandable enough to do much. The iMac Pro can definitely work if you get it fairly souped-up with additional RAM and the best GPUs. My opinion is that you’re better off with a top-flight Mac Pro, preferably one with at least 12 cores and 64GB of RAM, plus a couple of beefy GPUs. (You can make a good argument that a top Windows PC can be put together for less money and a lot more speed.)

Blackmagic’s configuration guide goes into the minimum specs in a lot of detail, and they keep this fairly current.

[Marc Wielage]

Tons of RAM and a super-fast CPU will help.

I divide up my still pages into different groups, so it’s rare I have to wait more than a few seconds for them to load. This is on a (relatively-crappy) 12-core 64GB Trashcan Mac, Resolve 14.3, OSX 10.12.6.

I think their philosophy is they could (in theory) load ALL the stills into memory at one time, but then it would take a long time from the point where the session is opened to the time you can actually start working. Only loading the stills when they’re actually needed is faster from that point of view.

[Marc Wielage]

ProRes 444 and ProRes 444XQ can also both support Alpha channels, but only on Mac OS and on the Linux Advanced Version of Resolve.

[Marc Wielage]

[Chris Clementson] “Can you give an example of this using 8-bit values?”
No, this is strictly going by the (rare) rejections I get from QC people. In some cases, I can BARELY see a bit of chroma hitting the GxB or GxR channel plot (similar to the Tektronix Diamond scope), but it’s so subtle that it’s almost impossible to really see. There are automated QC programs like Tektronix Cerify that do this as a matter of course:

https://www.tek.com/file-based-qc/cerify-video-content-analysis

This kind of thing is beyond the scope of most colorists, but my tactic is just to try to use good judgement and kick in the Resolve Gamut Mapping plug in when I suspect we’re straying within a few percentages of being illegal. Colored neon or very bright car tail-lights are big offenders.

[Marc Wielage]

[Chris Clementson] “Do I have this correct? Is there more to it than that?”
There is more than that to it, because it’s possible to have very slight out-of-gamut issues that are technically correct according to conventional scopes.

One tool that can help is the Gamut Mapping plug-in, which will automatically force any incoming signal to whatever colorspace you set it to, like Rec709 (for Luma and Chroma). I generally will grab this whenever I have a hot chroma signal that needs a little helping hand. High Soft clips can help as well. BorisFX has a new “Broadcast Safe” OFX plug-in that looks promising.

[Marc Wielage]

To import PowerGrades, you have to export both a DPX still and the corresponding DRX grade that goes with it. Once you’re in a new install of Resolve, you then create a new PowerGrades bin, then right click in the Gallery window and choose “Import,” and highlight all the DPX files in the exported stills folder. The DRX corrections will come along with them. As far as I know, it’s not possible to import DRX files without a DPX still.

[Marc Wielage]

What exactly are you trying to adjust? You mean OFX?

[Marc Wielage]

[Bruce Gaber] “Where, exactly, are my project saves going? I’d like to be able to put them in my main project folders along with other media. But when I do a “save as”, unlike virtually every program I’ve ever used on a Mac, there is no opportunity to set a destination folder.”
You can do this if you EXPORT the project as a DRP, and it will give you a traditional OS destination drive/folder window. I try to export a backup project every single day when I finish (or, if it’s a long day, in the middle of a day at a meal break). It’s extremely rare that I ever need the backups, but they’re nice to have for that 1 out of 100 situation where a hard drive goes south or something.

[Marc Wielage]

The key mixer can help refine chromakeys and stuff like that. There’s some tutorials out there on the web.

[Marc Wielage]

[Mauro Moreira] “The only thing that remains is that sometimes when I export Mov or MXF from a h264 source, the render comes out with a lot of Media Offline. Nothing that i tried solved this (slowing down render, etc).”
Is this on Resolve Studio?

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

Make sure you check Prefs -> User -> Media Storage to see that all of the source drives are shown in the display. The top-most drive is the location used for Gallery Stills and Cache Files, and the other drives are for source files. As a safety, you could check the Media Page and make sure all the files have valid source directory paths. Relink them if necessary. Also in Project Settings -> Master Settings -> Working Folders, make sure those drive paths are valid as well. As a final step, you might try deleting your current Optimized Media and Render Cache and regenerate them as needed. I have seen Resolve appear to choke when what was actually happening was that some of the Cache files were bad.