[Marc Wielage]

Sometimes, all I do is read Joe’s messages and nod, “yes — this guy gets it.”

[Marc Wielage]

How are you bringing the color-corrected files back into Avid from Resolve?

Note that you have to actually render a color-corrected file, effectively “baking in” the color for the final edit. There are a lot of resources on the web for Avid -> Resolve -> Avid roundtrip workflows; one is here on the Cow:

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

[Marc Wielage]

My answer to the GoPro problem is generally NOT to use a GoPro, but instead use a real camera like the Blackmagic Pocket Camera. At least then, you have interchangeable lenses, true 23.98fps recording, no auto gain, and reliable operation, plus it’ll shoot ProRes 422HQ. Very simple workflow, no conversion, no nothing. It’s more money than the GoPro, but to me, you get what you pay for.

If you’re absolutely stuck with GoPro, then I would convert to timecoded ProRes early on and consider those as the masters for the entire workflow.

[Marc Wielage]

I’m not convinced DPX will buy you anything. Do a test on 1 minute of material as DPX and 1 minute of material as ProRes 444HQ. I bet the latter will be a lot easier to handle. Having single files should theoretically be easier to relink.

I’m also not convinced it’s a wise idea to noise reduce first and THEN color-correct later. My thinking is, the color-correction process is going to change the gain shot by shot, which means the amount of grain and noise in the shot is likewise going to change shot-by-shot. To me, it makes more sense to do the de-graining as a final operation.

The other philosophy you might use: hey, it’s film. Grain is part of that look. People know it’s film. Embrace the grain and just consider it a creative texture for the show.

[Marc Wielage]

In Mac, you can generally hit ⌘D in an open file dialog box and get to the desktop. But I believe Resolve uses a lot of custom routines and programming outside the Apple toolbox, so these shortcuts may not work.

[Marc Wielage]

The glitches are coming from the D700 GPUs, and (my opinion) are the results of the chips being unable to cope with a lot of stress, resulting in excessive heat that puts momentary glitches in the picture.

In some cases, you can get rid of the glitches by having Apple or an authorized service company replace the D700s. Be warned that I’m on my third set of GPUs and the problem still comes up from time to time. My opinion is that it’s a design flaw caused by the chips not getting enough ventilation in the confined space of the new MacPro round cabinet. The problem is serious enough that it’s driving people to other platforms, like Windows and Linux.

[Marc Wielage]

No, unfortunately if the Media Management process fails, it has to completely start over. I agree with you — this is a bug that should be fixed. One really bad one is if it misses just one file, no matter how small (even 5 seconds), the whole backup/management copy routine comes to a halt. I would like them to just pop up an error message that says, “file not found — continue? (Yes/No).”

[Marc Wielage]

[Dustin Stelly] “What is my work flow for this in DaVinci? Should I edit the full film, then somehow duplicate the entire project and basically have two separate project files, one for the trailer and one for the long film?”
Yes, if you’re going to have two radically different aspect ratios (which I don’t recommend), I would just do it as two completely separate projects. You can use Dynamic Project Switching if you needed to go back and forth between different projects to compare them, and you can always import stills from the other project in order to match color and so on.

Changing aspect ratios is a very standard part of deliverables that’s been around for 35-40 years that I know of. As long as there are different viewing experiences, plus theatrical vs. home video, home video vs. TV syndication, TV syndication vs. streaming, things will always be different. Three aspect ratios are very typical for big studio features: 2.39 for theatrical (and letterbox home video), 1.78 full-frame pan/scan, and sometimes 4×3 pan scan for the few remaining SD countries. The trailers I’ve worked on almost always reflect the feature aspect ratio. I have worked on many hundreds of trailers that had scenes later cut from the feature, and the studios just accept that “things change.”

[Marc Wielage]

How is your monitor calibrated? How does the image look like on scopes?

Do you have Gallery stills that might show how the image originally looked when color-corrected?

There’s a lot of potential issues here. I would not trust anything you see on the GUI screen, because that’s under control of the operating system and not color managed.

[Marc Wielage]

The only workaround I can think of is to export the entire project as ProRes 444 or DNxHD 444, then start a new drop-frame project, import the material back in to the media page, create a drop-frame timeline, and render it out again with the new embedded timecode.