[Marc Wielage]

[Bryce Moose] “I edit all my media in Premiere at ProRes 422. My last film exported from premiere (which I didn’t use resolve for) was a total of 7GB. I do all the FX work myself as I am a one man show. “
Well, ProRes 422 is not terrible, but it’s not ideal for VFX work because it’s not 10-bit. However, if you’re getting acceptable keys with your software, then keep doing what you’re doing.

If you wanted to keep it very simple, you could export a “reasonable” correction in Resolve with the background/foreground plates, do your composite, then bring the finished shot back into Resolve and tweak slightly (if necessary) for the final. Lots and lots of TV series are done this way all the time.

[Marc Wielage]

It depends on all the answers to the questions I asked above: type of source material, how you need to deliver it, what the budget is, and so on.

Questions about VFX workflow generally can’t get just a simple one-sentence answer, because there’s too many variables. Whole books have been written on the subject.

[Marc Wielage]

I dunno about that. I would not try to run Resolve 12.5 next to an existing non-Beta Resolve 12. The project database structure is going to get affected no matter what, unless you have two boot drives and two separate locations for project databases (or are using a SQL database instead of a disk database).

[Marc Wielage]

I would do it all by eye and use the camera audio as a guide when available.

I worked on a team with two other people that synced up 22 cameras and 300 hours of concert material for the ROLLING STONES: SHINE A LIGHT concert, so believe me, it can be done. If the cameras stopped and started — which, in hindsight, is a very bad idea — then this will complicate syncing because you’ll have to make educated guesses as to when and where they stopped and started. It does help if all cameras are using common timecode, but I’m guessing this did not happen on this project. Ideally, the cameras and sound timecode should all be identical. When this doesn’t happen, then you have to do it by eye and just know the material. If it’s just a half hour show, that’s a piece of cake.

[Marc Wielage]

Determining a VFX workflow is a pretty major decision. A lot depends on your available budget and the actual number of shots involved. I could see different approaches being used if you had $100 and 10 shots, vs. a $5 million budget and 500 shots.

Another key issue is the type of source material. You could very well aim for a different workflow when dealing with (say) Red R3D files or BMD CinemaDNG files. You can go with a simple workflow if the entire show uses — as one example — ProRes, and you exported color-corrected shots for the VFX artist and all they did was do their composites without changing the color of the material at all, then you just dropped the shot back into the show, replacing the original shot. There are also workflows using exported LUTs, where the VFX artist would apply the LUT to preview the look in your final show.

[Marc Wielage]

[Seth Thy] “But this is my first time working with Alexa and I read in some thread here that because of the way that Arri LUTs are created, saturation curve is going to be much better than if you doing it manually in Resolve. “
Says who? It works fine.

You could ask the editor to send you a compressed reference file (say, ProRes LT) and then use that as a visual reference. Assuming they’re using standard Arri LUTs, you can get very close to the normal saturation and gamma levels just with curves and primaries. It’s not that hard to do.

You need to determine how to come up with a decent starting point, and using the Temp controls and Offset controls, you should be able to get a reasonable balance to start off with.

[Marc Wielage]

Hmmm, you could rip them from Blu-rays with Leawo Blu-ray Ripper.

[Marc Wielage]

I used a Boland 40″ monitor at a facility a couple of years ago, and I felt like the blacks were not as deep as I wanted (or expected). I was told by the engineer that the monitor was calibrated, but I wasn’t too impressed.

It’s very possible the displays have improved in the last couple of years, or we got a defective one. But I haven’t seen these problems with Flanders or Sony or Panasonic pro displays. I would get one on the condition you can exchange it if it isn’t right.

[Marc Wielage]

Just a workaround: Sony’s Catalyst Browse will allow you to take the XAVC files and convert them to ProRes, at least on a Mac…

https://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/webhelp/catalystbrowse/20/enu/index.htm#Supported_video_formats.htm

[Marc Wielage]

I’ve used Pro Tools and iZotope since changing over to OSX 10.11.4, and no issues yet — sound plays.

I think in the case of Gallery stills, they warn you that there’s all kinds of little stuff in the background that makes the Resolve session work. This is why it’s not easy to just transplant entire directories, and they’d rather you actually backup the user database and then restore the user database. I think the idea is to make all this background stuff invisible and effortless to the user.

It took me years to realize that the key to Resolve is that people think it’s a color-correction program, but it’s really a database that does color correction. If the database structure becomes corrupted, it all starts crumbling very quickly. It’s generally pretty solid, but god help you once that happens. This is a key for the backups.

When I’m really worried about backups or moving over sessions, I’ll export sessions with all the stills intact. In one (memorable) situation, I had to restore one session purely with stills and then fix all the keyframes by hand, because the session got clobbered with a bad drive. (This was not BMD’s fault — we’re all victims when the drive fails.) You figure the embedded exported stills are kind of the double-secret backup just in case.