[Marc Wielage]

I think it’s a very bad idea to use an iPhone for anything in a professional production. I get that people who have zero money, particularly students who are learning, have few other options. If you do have options, my advice would be to use something like a Blackmagic Pocket Camera, which at least has manual gain and 10-bit color. You can show an actor *pretend* to hold an iPhone and then cut to the Pocket camera shooting the same image, and that will work for dramatic purposes.

If it’s already shot, convert the H.264 material to ProRes (for Mac) or DNxHD (for Windows), and it’ll work fine in Resolve, within the quality limitations of the original material. I find it often takes more time to color-correct bad cameras than it does good cameras, because a lot of the time you’re trying to come up with bandaids for non-defeatable automatic level issues and lens problems on top of just making reasonable pictures. There is no justification for bad cameras in a world where $995 will buy you something reasonable, and less than that will rent you an extremely good camera for a couple of days.

[Marc Wielage]

There are cases where sometimes manual tracking works best, basically rotoscoping it.

I have also found situations where the Point Tracker works better than the Cloud Tracker. With eyeballs, I think all you can do is do an extreme zoom into the viewer and carefully watch what the tracker is doing, then compensate when it goes off the rails. Sometimes, killing zoom or rotate may help. I generally have not had great luck with the 3D tracker, but there are always exceptions.

[Marc Wielage]

[Geoff Johnston] “I made a backup version three months ago. Most of the work I did has been since then, which is a lot of grading. Sending the project to BMD sounds like a good idea, in fact, it’s probably the only option I have now. …By the way, does anyone have any experience with data recovery software like Photorec and Data Rescue? I’m using them to look for past instances of my Project.xml file, but so far I am only finding the most recently saved version of it.”
ProSoft’s Data Rescue saved my sorry, tired ass about 8-9 years ago and recovered a 2TB drive that had been thoroughly whacked. My sad story was that I had a crash while backing up a drive, and the crash was severe enough that both the source drive and the destination drive were clobbered. Luckily, I had a double-secret emergency backup from the day before, and just lost about 12 hours’ of work (which I was able to redo in about half that time). The recovery took over 24 hours but did work.

I think it’s a good idea to backup your project DRP file(s) on a daily basis, and backup your database on at least a weekly basis, just in case. Some of these problems happen because of OS-related issues totally outside Resolve’s control.

[Marc Wielage]

Workflow often depends on your hardware, operating system, drive speed, and delivery intentions. My opinion is that a lot of the time, converting to ProRes 444 (on Mac OSX) is wise provided the transcodes are done well. You do have to stay right on top of the conversions from Raw -> ProRes, lest you get into a situation where you don’t have sufficient range to get the job done.

An iPhone is not an ideal camera for video use for a lot of reasons, including the fact that it won’t do 23.98 (yet), as far as I know, plus it’s fairly severe H.264 compression.

[Marc Wielage]

I thought of another possible way: go through one entire timeline, then create a new (identical) timeline with the same edit points but different clips, then use ColorTrace to just copy over the same PTZR positioning over to the other timeline. Now you’d have two timelines with identical dynamic position moves.

[Marc Wielage]

You might also look at the “film clutter” and similar files you can overlay as composites from Rampant Design Tools:

rampantdesigntools.com

The speed-jerky thing would be tough to do unless you specifically shot it at 12fps and then played it back at 12fps and then doubled the frames to create that kind of silent-movie look. Hand-painted B&W film from the 1910s and 1920s has a very peculiar look, particularly when you consider this is nitrate film, which has that highlight glow thing going on.

[Marc Wielage]

No, not at the same time. But you could cut-and-paste either the Transform Attributes (in the Edit page) or PTZR keyframes (in the Color page) by having two video tracks and then select just one by using the Unmix control. It’d be a pain in the ass, but it could be done. It’s possible you could assign a macro to it with a 3rd-party hardware/software combo, but it’d require some experimentation.

[Marc Wielage]

Page 385: To unlink audio and video from one another: Select a clip, then right-click it and choose Link from the contextual menu (or press Command-L). Unlinked clips do not appear with a dot before the clip name in the Timeline.

[Marc Wielage]

Mixed frame rates are very bad for Resolve, in my opinion. I generally tell client to render those out and give me those clips separately with the speed change built in. If the clip simply has to play at 23.98, I can handle that. But there will sometimes be a risk of timecodes not matching, because if the timecode rate is different than the frame rate, the timecode is going to be off.

In one scenario, you can render out a Reference Version of the project from Avid with the source timecode, source names, and record timecode as burn-in windows. These references will help manually reconform the image in other kinds of software, like Resolve and any other editing or color-correction program.

[Marc Wielage]

Unfortunately, the HP calibration app is going to lie to you and not give accurate results.

You asked for advice — I gave you advice. You can either believe me or not, but my opinion is still valid. The Dreamcolor was a cheap display made to give digital cartoon artists and VFX people a reasonable display for that application; it doesn’t work well for Rec709 images, for a lot of reasons. It’s great as a computer display; not great for making critical judgements for color.

Read this long, long discussion as to why it’s not a good choice for color correction:

https://liftgammagain.com/forum/index.php?threads/new-hp-dreamcolor-monitors-4k-capable.2694/

I think the Eizo CG-series are about as low-cost as you can get for Rec709 and still get reasonably reliable color, provided it’s calibrated by a 3rd-party system like Light Illusion or Calman.