[Marc Wielage]

Run color bars and a grayscale ramp through the entire process, and see what you get. I bet you could “pre-distort” the signal and get exactly the same thing back.

But in truth, consider the audience and what they’re gonna watch YouTube on — most likely laptops, tablets, and smartphones. It’s going to look like crap anyway. All you can do is make sure it’s not too crappy at the point it’s uploaded, and check it on a few sRGB displays.

I only encode for YouTube using Compressor, and there’s a million tutorials out there showing how to do it. And as others have said, there are better video, higher-res sites out there (like Vimeo) that are a little more faithful to the original in terms of color, gamma, and compression.

Note there are lots of known issues with gamma shifts and ProRes 422. 444 is actually more predictable, but it depends on where you’re going with it.

[Marc Wielage]

[Jake Keller] “Hey Peter, I think we discovered the issue to our problem. They ended up coloring all of the RED footage under the ARRI Alexa settings for Camera Raw.”
Stop what you’re doing and redo the project from scratch. Chances are, it’ll be possible to create a new 1st node that will put the rest of the images in the right place.

It’s for reasons like this that it’s very, very, VERY important to get everything right the moment the project is started. And it never hurts to check a few times as the hours and days go on.

Red and Alexa have vastly different color science, and it’s not a good thing to mix them.

[Marc Wielage]

[Harris Charalambous] “The elements are great Panels but the bottom line is that mapping on resolve is down right terrible. If you see what can be done with element mapping there is no reason to touch the mouse during grading (see nucoda).”
And how much does Nucoda Film Master cost in relation to daVinci Resolve? Mmmm-hmmm…

[Marc Wielage]

Remember you can always tread lightly with Auto Scene Detect, and just add any missed cuts manually with command-shift-J while in the color timeline. I do that on occasion when I realize there’s no cut there within a sequence, and it’s not the end of the world — as long as you catch it. I’d rather have too few cuts than too many cuts, because I can always add more cuts later.

[Marc Wielage]

That’s very goofy! Have you tried a different mouse? I went out a piece-of-crap $12 wired 3-button Kensington optical mouse (which had the very clever model name “Three-Button Mouse”), and it’s been flawless and perfect. And I’ve used every pointing device known to man in the past 30 years, including trackpads, pointing sticks, trackballs, 50 different mice (meeses?), and tablets. Works great under OSX with Resolve. I thought I would go back to my Apple Magic Trackpad for everything else, but I’ve gotten so used to the stupid cheap mouse, I’m still using it, months later.

No issue with middle-button copies or viewer repositions or anything.

[Marc Wielage]

No, honestly no issues here with disconnects on MC Color. This is under OSX 10.9.3, Resolve 10.1.5, and Eucon 3.1.2 (thanks again, Jake!).

[Marc Wielage]

[Andrew Akada] “I then would like to go back into After Effects (which is the program I’d exported the original draft from) fix up a few things – then re-import the fixed footage into Resolve. At that point I wanted to apply the old scene detect info to that same clip. “
I think your workflow is flawed. You should only be going into Resolve at the very end, not going back and forth between Resolve and AfterEffects. I can totally see swapping out a handful of shots, because that always happens.

It drives me crazy when stuff isn’t locked when it should be. This is an enormous problem in the post business that continues to get worse. One of the rare places where it’s sorta/kinda under control is in TV, where rapid schedules due to airdates preclude anybody making too many fixes. I’m reminded of the quote attributed to the French poet Rimbaud: “Poems are never finished… they’re abandoned.” Films are like that. You work and work and work and work… and then you gotta stop because the show’s gotta ship.

Finding the discipline to know when to stop, what to fix, and what to let go is a whole long conversation.

[Marc Wielage]

The key is to get EUControl running first, make sure it recognizes the MC Color panel, then launch Resolve, make sure it’s accepting network connections, and while Resolve is booting up you should see the menu displays loading on the MC Color panel. (In truth, even the daVinci panels do the same thing: you get a screen saver until Resolve is actually running.)

None of this stuff is 100% reliable. I’ve had the daVinci panels go stupid on me many times, even back in the olden days. You just have to figure out a troubleshooting scheme to get everything back up and running.

I think a lot of users are going to change their working philosophy now that we have user-assignable keyboard shortcuts for certain functions. While you can do 95% of the job on the daVinci panels, my experience is that any other 3rd party panel — Tangent, Avid, whatever — is a compromise, and you still wind up using the mouse and keyboard for certain things. It slows you down, but it’s not a deal killer at this price point.

[Marc Wielage]

I think you’ve solved your own problem: don’t use files that have illegal character names. Most OS’s will allow you do search for a specific character directly from the drive’s file menu.

[Marc Wielage]

It can work, but there are some tricks to it. Make sure you’re running v3.1.2 of the Avid Eucontrol app. Double-check all the settings in the app via command-1 (on Mac OSX). In some cases, I’ve had to reboot once or twice to make sure the app comes up and recognizes the MC Color panel via ethernet, and it’s set up to receive network connections. Once the MC Color panel appears in the Eucon app, make sure the proper Layout is loaded, which drops in all the keys and functions for the knobs on the panel. And make sure Resolve’s config is set to MC Color in the config.

I agree, the connection is very flakey, but I blame Avid for going with Ethernet rather than USB. Once the proper handshake occurs, the panel will keep running for days and days, provided you don’t quit Resolve or sleep the computer. Once that happens, the Ethernet connection is broken and you’ll most likely have to jump through hoops again. It’s an annoyance but not a deal-breaker for me.

BTW, if you call Avid Support, there are helpful people there provided you find the 2 or 3 people in the entire organization who have a) heard of MC Color, and b) know the issues with Resolve. I solved my own problems before I could reach them, but Avid has their own issues as an organization.