[Marc Wielage]

Gee, what was the solution? Locked timeline?

[Marc Wielage]

[David Roth Weiss] “Looking for a good and not too expensive Thunderbolt dock… any recommendations?”
I’m a big fan of the Other World Computing Thunderbolt 3 docks.

[Marc Wielage]

[Joseph Owens] “Timed a cut/print A/B project a number of years back, where the hope was that the *checkerboard* assembly wold fit back together. What the producer did not count on was the 2/3 field cadence which destroyed the frame-to-frame correspondence and online 29.907 edit couldn’t cope with — that is matching a C- or D-frame cut on Field 2. Even if you ignore 4-field colour framing, which we could sort of do because we were not working in baseband composite; it was a DCT conform.”
We were usually able to get it to work, at least with 35mm A/B roll dissolves. I did a couple of TV series that way, including LANCER for Fox, and because we did all those in telecine, we had to literally reach over and do the dissolve ourselves: playing back the color-corrected A-side on a tape machine while dissolving to the Rank (or Spirit) playing back the film. We sometimes had to stop and make an edit again, but it worked more often than not.

Many years ago, I did the home video transfer on EL MARIACHI for Robert Rodriguez, and that was A/B roll 16mm, but in that case I just color corrected the two sections and then sent them down the hall to an editor and let them put the pieces together. I think they had 2-frame handles on the ends to facilitate the cut, so it actually worked OK.

I do vividly remember the horror of 2:3 pulldown and do not miss it. I was doing early HD projects from 1999-2002, before 24p came out, and it was an absolute nightmare. I was very happy when 24p came in and we no longer had to deal with 1080i… for the most part.

[Marc Wielage]

[Geoff Johnston] “What should I do about existing fades and dissolves? This film had quite a few of them and my grades don’t do them any justice.”
I work on film restoration projects all the time, and there the dissolves and fades are all baked-in… because that’s how film worked for about 100 years. A/B rolls are pretty rare, at least in terms of video post with film.

I just do lots of manual keyframes and time them to match the length of the image on screen. If I have a window up, I dissolve it out using window opacity or key output gain going to 0. I do tend to use a fixed node structure and have just one type of correction in each node, so it’s not that hard to do. I frequently have different nodes using individual keyframes for different functions, and it’s rare I add a start/stop keyframe to every single node in the node tree at the same time.

Worst case scenario, have your friend export the A-side and the B-side of the dissolve (or fade) separately and then recreate the dissolve manually in Resolve. Problem solved.

[Marc Wielage]

Generally I don’t recommend free Resolve tutorials (because they’re generally worth what you pay for them), but Daria Fissoun — now a full-time trainer with Blackmagic — did this one some years ago which covered the Key Mixer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQht1vTv3O0

Not a lot of people grasp the importance and usefulness of the key mixer, but she covers this very well.

In your specific case, there might be a way of doing this with multiple masks, using one as a window and the other as a mask (subtracting from it), but I’d have to see it to know if it would work. I constantly run into Occlusion problems with certain kinds of windows or keys, and generally tracking masks can help avoid or minimize the problem. The beauty of Resolve is often there are multiple methods to solve the problem.

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[Marc Wielage]

Is this free Resolve or Resolve Studio? The latter supports more formats than the former.

Generally, all the DSLRs out there shoot H.264 files, which is not a great format for post. My general advice for DSLR workflows is:

1) organize all the files by shoot date and camera card number, so each file folder would be A1_03112019 [and so on]

2) add a unique prefix to the heads of every file to create easy-to-understand file names (like “A1_03112019_C0001,” “A1_03112019_C0002,” etc.)..

3) transcode all of these Long-GOP H.264/H.265 files to a high-quality codec like ProRes 422HQ or DNxHR, and keep the file names and folder structure exactly the same

4) archive the original files somewhere safe, just in case

5) do the entire edit with the transcoded files and consider them “the new masters”

6) now, when you do the conform in Resolve, every file will have a unique file name and even though the camera timecodes will still start at 00:00:00:00, there will be no conflicts because of the file names.

7) it helps greatly to have the editor create a reference file that has visible timecode and filenames for source files, as well as record timecode for the project itself.

Variable speed changes are a problem for all edit systems and cameras, because there is no simple provision for variable framerates in XML (plus different playback methods like frame-blending or optical flow produce different results). One way around this would be to just export the variable frame-rate clips and consider them a self-contained VFX shot. The alternative (which I have done) is just to manually varispeed the clip within Resolve and eyematch it to the reference video created by the editor.

This is a proven workflow that can work. I’m not a fan at all of productions using cheap cameras that have no internal jam-sync timecode, because inevitably there’s also other problems like exposure issues, sound problems, and other things that basically come with the territory. But I get that not everybody can use an Alexa or a Red camera, and sometimes you have to deal with what’s there.

There is more to it, but I I would point to the following books as fairly thorough references on the subject:

“Modern Post: Workflow & Techniques for Digital Filmmakers”
by Scott Arundale
https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Post-Workflows-Techniques-Filmmakers/dp/0415747023

“The Guide to Managing Postproduction for Film, TV, and Digital Distribution”
by Susan Spohr & Barbara Clark
https://www.amazon.com/Guide-Managing-Postproduction-Digital-Distribution/dp/1138482811

[Marc Wielage]

[Ole Kristiansen] “Nobe Display is a virtual display plugin that works with DaVinci Resolve™. The main purpose of the application is to mirror the preview and allow to place it anywhere in your desktop. It enables you to have a picture preview in the external monitor without using extra hardware.”
Two major problems with this:

1) there’s generally a delay in playback between the GUI and the secondary screen
2) it’s not color managed, so the picture will very likely will be inaccurate
3) it doesn’t work with Caching enabled (admitted by the developer)
4) it doesn’t work in Fusion page (ditto).

For a lot of reasons, it’s a lot cheaper and a wiser idea to just buy a Mini Monitor or similar BMD device and use that with an external display. That will definitely work.

[Marc Wielage]

My opinion is that Long-GOP H.264 files are intended for final delivery, not for post. For post, I think you’re better off converting them to a less-compressed file format like DNxHD or DNxHR. Pick a codec that will preserve everything in the camera format; if it’s 8-bit HD, go with that.

[Marc Wielage]

There are new laptops with RTX 2080 GPUs that are fast as hell, assuming you get a fast CPU and lots of RAM:

https://www.techwalls.com/nvidia-geforce-rtx-2080-laptops/

A top-of-the-line current MacBook Pro with TB3 connections and an eGPU can be very fast as well. I’m hoping there will be a forthcoming 16″ MacBook Pro, which could be good for Resolve dailies.

[Marc Wielage]

[Shamil Erfanian] “It’s not a naive question, it’s a dbase design that makes little sense for the average users (and this this is not clear when Davnici saves projects…”
Actually, it’s all explained in Chapter 2 of the manual starting on p. 97: Managing Projects and Databases. That’s an important chapter to read. In fact, reading the whole manual is a great idea for new users… all 3000 pages of it. Tutorials are good, too. So are the free books available on Blackmagic’s Training site.