[Marc Wielage]

What is the source material? What kind of resolution and frame rate are you working with?

I’d be curious to know what kind of GPU is in this laptop as well. There are some extremely powerful laptops out there nowadays, but the unfortunate truth is that not many of them work well with Resolve, particularly at higher resolutions and with demanding camera Raw files.

[Marc Wielage]

The BMD MiniMonitor has both HDMI and HD-SDI outputs, and you can use them both at the same time. You cannot monitor a hero signal for color correction directly out of a Mac or PC without a Blackmagic card.

[Marc Wielage]

Nearly half of the 1200-page manual (which is free) is devoted to Editing and Conforming in Resolve 12.5.

I would also recommend Patrick Inhofer’s MixingLight training as being very good:

https://mixinglight.com/color-correction-tutorials/davinci-resolve-12-tutorials/

I believe Patrick has some 12.5.1 updates coming out soon.

[Marc Wielage]

iMacs are not great for 4K video. A more powerful computer with better CPUs and faster GPUs (with more RAM) will help a great deal.

[Marc Wielage]

Normally in dailies for Avid, the edit process uses ALE (Avid Log Exchange) files that contain the scene & take information, picture timecode, sound timecode, picture roll number/file name, sound file name, production date, and so on:

https://documentation.apple.com/en/cinematools/usermanual/index.html#chapter=12%26section=2%26tasks=true

One potential problem with your workflow is that ideally, camera timecode should be time-of-day, so that each shot for a given shoot day has unique sequential timecode that won’t overlap any other shot, along with unique shot names. If the camera resets to 00:00:00:00 with each shot (or each roll), this will be a potential challenge, but not impossible to deal with.

The other complex workflow issue lies with multitrack audio and setting that up so that, at the end of your edit, you can export an edit list that a Pro Tools editor/mixer can use to re-assemble the project for a final mix. For that, again you need timecoded files and separate file names and so on.

It’s maddening that more edit software companies don’t consider the transfer of metadata as part of their feature list. This can become a huge problem, particularly for large projects that have hundreds of hours of material spread out over dozens (or hundreds) of terabytes of drives.

[Marc Wielage]

The brute force technique is to bring all the clips in manually to the Media Page and then bring in the XML (or AAF) and it should automatically find the files that way. If you’re forced to bring in all the files shot for the project — including those unused in the timeline — you can Media Manage the session and save a subset of the files in a different location.

In general, if the Reel Names are correct and the timecodes have no conflicts, this is generally a piece of cake. Where it goes south very quickly is when people shoot on toy cameras without timecode (where all the clips begin with “00:00:00:00”), or when somebody changed the file names at some point. There are workarounds for all of this, but a lot hinges on your specific situation.

[Marc Wielage]

No, you get what you see in the Tangent Wave.

You can buy a 3rd-party panel and program it with any button-pushes or mouse clicks or menu selections that you want. X-Keys is a good company for that:

https://xkeys.com/XkeysKeyboards/index.php

I literally could not work as fast as I do without an XKeys keypad. I’d say it saves me more than an hour a day, sometimes 2. The combination of Tangent Elements and Xkeys works very well for me. The Wave is kind of old and clunky, but it’s serviceable and you can produce good work with it.

[Marc Wielage]

Three handy links:

https://www.avidblogs.com/how-to-roundtrip-davinci-resolve-to-avid-media-composer-tutorial/

https://library.creativecow.net/freeman_scott/AVID-Framerate-Metadata/1

https://wolfcrow.com/blog/the-avid-to-resolve-workflow/

It can work, but it needs to start with a simplified timeline, a minimum number of video tracks (I don’t like more than 2), no speed changes, no baked-in looks, no compound clips, and no multicam clips. You’ll also need a reference video (low-res with visible TC) to check the conform in Resolve once it’s done.

[Marc Wielage]

Those have been available for some time for Elements users (and for those who have the full-size daVinci Control Surface).

[Marc Wielage]

I just finished a Premiere-edited project this week and had no problem getting all the media to be imported in Resolve. One thing you can do is do NOT automatically import the media when the XML is imported. Instead, a dialogue box will come up that asks you to specify where the source media files are located. Then, you open the folder for the specific camera(s), and the files will be loaded and conformed correctly.

I did have an issue where sizing changes did not work correctly, so those had to be manually recreated by eye. Sizing changes, speed changed, and (especially) speed ramps are notoriously unreliable between editing programs, and that includes FCP7, FCPX, Premiere, Avid, and Resolve. I have also seen this work to some extent before.