[Marc Wielage]

Start with these:

Alex’s Van Hurkman’s Color Correction Handbook:
https://www.amazon.com/Color-Correction-Handbook-Professional-Techniques/dp/0321929667/ref=pd_sim_b_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=1CHXH704NKTQ12DRM6BZ

Steve Hullfish’s The Art & Technique of Digital Color Correction
https://www.amazon.com/Art-Technique-Digital-Color-Correction/dp/024081715X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1403253999&sr=1-1

The free Color Management SIGGRAPH white papers go into detail about how the science of color applies to the real world of digital images:

https://cinematiccolor.com

Patrick Inhofer’s “Tao of Color” newsletter and website are also informative resources:
https://www.taoofcolor.com

[Marc Wielage]

[Marcus Herrick] “The show I’m working on shoots time of day and often until past midnight.”
Tell them Don’t Do That. If they know at the start of the shoot they’re going to go past midnight, then start the timecode 12 hours earlier — in other words, call 1PM “01:00:00:00,” 6PM “6:00:00:00,” and then when they reach midnight, it’ll simply be “12:00:00:00.” No excuse for crossing midnight. Tell them not to use military time.

Which specific kind of Avid DNxHD media are you using? 220? 145? All of it can work, and I haven’t encountered this kind of crashing before (though I have in other rare situations). How are the drives in terms of speed, and how much RAM do you have? There are a lot of variables here that could cause crashes in some situations; I suspect the BMD people will want to see a crash log.

[Marc Wielage]

[Dave Pickett] “I agree Marc that early adoption of OS updates is perilous. This was an auto update that I neglected to disable upon receiving the cylinder a few months ago.”
As careful as I fool myself into thinking I am, the exact same thing happened to me! Luckily, I did have a system backup and was able to painstakingly revert back to 10.9.2. Still took me about 9-10 hours of screaming, yelling, and cursing, plus turning over furniture, screaming at the moon, stuff like that.

The villain is System Prefs -> App Store -> Automatically check for updates / Download newly available updates / install app updates / install system data files and security updates. Very dangerous.

I’m expecting that Resolve 11 will work with 10.9.3 off the bat, but I’ll be carefully reading the Recommended Configuration file first.

[Marc Wielage]

I think this is an Apple problem more than a Blackmagic problem. I would wait and live with 10.9.2 and then see what happens.

It’s been very, very common in the Avid/Digidesign world for people to be stuck on lower-release operating systems because of issues with current software. It rarely hurts to use a 6-month old OS unless you know for a fact that every program you use is compatible with the new OS. Is there some feature in 10.9.3 that is a deal killer?

[Marc Wielage]

If the end result is all 1920×1080 HD, then I’d convert all the clips in advance to a common format like ProRes 422 HQ — I’m not sure 444 will buy you anything for 8-bit material like this — and then bring the ProRes copies into daVinci Resolve. Mixing weird camera formats on the same timeline is theoretically possible, but fraught with problems.

[Marc Wielage]

[Dan Powers] “My Kensington Expert Mouse Pro Trackball doesnt have a middle button, but I did find that pressing down on the scroll wheel and moving the trackball will reposition the zoomed in viewer.”
I love the Expert Mouse and used it for many, many years, but I reverted to a simple 3-button Kensington wired optical mouse especially for Resolve. No muss, no fuss.

[Marc Wielage]

Blackmagic Support told me today “a Public Beta should be out later on this month,” but I wouldn’t consider that the final word.

[Marc Wielage]

How many video tracks are in the edit timeline? I get very crabby if anybody tries to give me more than two. I’m a big fan of having the editor flatten as many timelines as possible and keep things very, very simple when going into Resolve, just in the interest of simplicity and saving time. I prefer all speed changes to be exported as a single contiguous 23.98 file, everything textless, A/B roll dissolves on separate tracks, no composites, very straightforward. If you need composites, give them to the colorist as separate elements to be graded separately (though you can do temporary composites just to check color).

[Marc Wielage]

That’s one!

[Marc Wielage]

Dwaine is the man.