Marc Wielage
Forum Replies Created
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I agree (as usual) with Joe above. But I would add: get the specs in writing. Also be aware that they may need a countdown, slate, or preliminary material before and after the program contents. I usually give them that anyway unless they specifically say not to.
Audio levels are extremely complicated and generally involve being ITU R128/ATSC compliant. There are plug-ins that will help verify where the trouble spots are, but I would check over on sound-specific discussion groups like Gearslutz to find out how to get levels in line.
For picture, I find it never hurts to create a track custom clip curve to kill any overshoots over 100ire or whatever the spec you’re trying to hit. In general, it’s better being too conservative than too loose.
Note that Resolve v11 will have a “legalizing” feature with three different clip-level modes, and this will make it much easier to create broadcast-legal pictures.
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[Mark Longchamps] “Currently I do this by hand. I go to the properly exposed part of the shot and set a KF. I then go to the brightest/darkest part of the shot and set a KF. I toggle between the two and look at the scopes to get it close. “
That’s the way I’ve always done it. Tell the camera operators to stop changing the iris, and that you can fix their exposure problems far better in Resolve.My joke is, this kind of visual problem often requires three sets of keyframe corrections: one when the exposure problem starts; another to compensate for the severe change caused by the operator; and then a third correction to ease the exposure back into normal at the end. If they just left the exposure alone, it’d be a single keyframe event.
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[Stepan Ko] “Would be interesting to know how people deal with such problems on a feature film scale. It’s not so bad on small scale, cause there are only 20-30 clips used. But how do you get that sorted with the heaps of footage used for a feature?”
It helps to have dozens and dozens of people in the background helping. The issue of post deadlines and edit changes have never been worse than they are right now, and I don’t see this problem getting any better. Clients have a bad tendency to have unrealistic expectations, particularly when presenting 100 changes in a single reel that have to be fixed in a few hours. It’s our job to rise to the challenge and fix them as much as humanly possible.I know of a case where a superhero movie from the last 9-10 years had a half-dozen different color-correct versions one week prior to release, because the producer, the director, the DP, and the studio each had different versions they favored. The end result was a compromise between all of them, but in truth the movie was terrible and still bombed. No amount of color correction or re-editing can fix a project that troubled.
As far as your situation goes, you could time all the shots once with handles and then let the VFX people deal with them and do the conform. This same kind of thing happens all the time with feature trailers, which are typically done from the same 30 or 40 shots over and over again, spread out over 40 or 50 different TV trailers for different markets. If you’re fast and good, it doesn’t take that long to find the shots and re-time them in order to make them look consistent.
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[Max Kawczynski] “I’m posting on the behalf of a friend who’s starting to learn color grading with Davinci Resolve. I would like to know if you know some good online/downloadable tutorials that focuses on the math/physics part of color grading. “
Start with these:Warren Eagles’ FXPHD Resolve Tutorials:
https://www.fxphd.com/store/fast-forward-resolve-v10-fundamentals/Alexis Van Hurkman’s Resolve Tutorials:
https://www.rippletraining.com/categories/avid-adobe-davinci-courses/davinci-resolve-products.htmlAlex’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=1CHXH704NKTQ12DRM6BZThe free Color Management SIGGRAPH white papers go into detail about how the science of color applies to the real world of digital images:
Patrick Inhofer’s “Tao of Color” newsletter and website are also informative resources:
https://www.taoofcolor.comA lot about understanding color boils down to having a gut feeling on how to deal with problematic footage, and how to predict where it’s going to go when you make a certain adjustment. That can only come from experience. I’ve encountered enough situations where the math didn’t necessarily work under real-world situations, especially with color-space LUTs. All the math and physics in the world won’t necessarily solve a client’s problems when they’ve underexposed the footage by 2 stops or when you have one day to do three days’ worth of work.
If you’re specifically using Resolve, I think reading the manual a few times — not just skimming the basics, but really reading all 750 pages from start to finish — is also necessary to understand color in the context of how Resolve deals with it. In truth, I think color is only 1/3 of the job; a lot boils down to problem solving, understanding the DPs problems (and finding solutions), dealing with the psychology of clients, having a good grasp of editing and conforming, having a good working knowledge of VFX, and knowing how to deliver the projects and get them back out of the box. Out of all of these, the color may be the easiest part.
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Roll back to OSX 10.9.2 and see what that does.
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H.264 is a pain in the ass no matter what you do.
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[Alex Patsos] “I have some blown out footage that I am having trouble keying out the sky with. A friend told me to isolate the sky in DaVinici with a solid color, export, open in AE and than key it out.”
If you’re talking sky replacement, I think this is much better done with After Effects’ compositing tools. Anything you do to adjust the keyed color (or luminance) within Resolve is only going to get noisy later on, at least in my experience. -
I’m not sure if ColorTrace will copy groups or not, but my memory is that it will not. I think all you can do is recreate the groups and deal with it that way.
I’m suspicious of groups because I think a lot of how the shots play is context, and if a vastly different shot precedes the interview shot, you may have a completely different feel for how it needs to look. Sometimes, matching a shot we haven’t seen for 2 minutes is not as important as making it flow with where the shot is this very moment.
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[Jonathon Lee] “The resolve session has about 2000 clips of BRoll footage that are being rendered to ProRes. Camera source is Canon XF100 MXF mpeg-2. “
2000 clips? Yikes!Is there a way you can chop the project down into separate reels? Do that and keep the reels under 30 minutes, maybe 500-600 clips each, and those will open fine. At the end, you could always cut and paste the timelines and create one master timeline with everything in it for the final output render.
I get very nervous with massive “super session” projects with hours of footage and thousands of cuts. It’s technically supposed to work, but the truth is it stresses out the whole system. And that’s also true for VFX and sound-related software as well.
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Spend the money on the full version. It’s worth it.