[Marc Wielage]

So many of these cameras are 8-bit and/or 422, I don’t think going beyond ProRes 422 will buy you anything. The Red footage would definitely benefit from ProRes 444, but going from the original R3Ds might yield more range.

Coming up with an overall strategy for file formats in a workflow is one of the major decisions you have to make when you start a large post project. One can make good arguments as to mixed formats or getting most of them converted to something that works well with your conform/color-correction platform. A lot depends on your available budget and schedule.

A Google search reveals that many, many people have run into the ProRes 422 limitation for XDCam. BTW, I assume you mean QT LT in your offline format, which I agree is not good enough to use for color-correction and final release.

[Marc Wielage]

Yes, in the Media page of Resolve, you can group select as many clips as you want, bring up the Metadata editor, and then change a field and have it apply to all the clips. I just tried it and it works fine for Reel Number, Clip Number, whatever you want. I assume Avid can read and sort the same group of fields. I believe there are also 3rd-party utilities that will allow you to rewrite metadata for most major camera formats.

[Marc Wielage]

Doh, I just ran into a doozy of a bug between Resolve 10 and 11: the Y positioning of a title was about 1000 lines off. I have no idea why, since this was the exact same project moved over to Resolve 11 at the same resolution, zero changes to the timeline or project settings. Definitely a bug.

[Marc Wielage]

I would argue that there isn’t enough precision within a tablet interface to make the sorts of subtle adjustments we do every day. It might be enough for broad strokes (like dailies), but not for little tiny 1ire adjustments here and there. Only trackballs and rings will work with that.

Although… there are some major A-list colorists out there that survive very well by using just a mouse. But I don’t think they’re using Resolve with a mouse, last I checked.

[Marc Wielage]

[Sascha Haber] “What I always wanted to see is a render manager which could just spilt projects and render them on the available machines. So you can buy a couple of macMinis for example and stack em and let them to the number crunching while you are working with the client on new material.”

That works for me. Love to see that kind of feature added.

[Marc Wielage]

Not gonna happen. But it would be interesting to see if somebody could figure out how to use a render farm from Resolve. You figure we’re almost there, having the ability to have three people work on one project at the same time.

Using multiple processors and GPUs already works fine in Linux, but that costs real money.

[Marc Wielage]

Canon 5D .MVI footage is problematic under the best of circumstances. I try to only use ProRes conversions of Canon 5D material when I can, because the timecode is much more reliable and the format is less buggy.

[Marc Wielage]

[Joseph Owens] “Not a bug per se, because that would infer there was some process that would allow for it, were it simply an option. It is a workflow issue — scene detect is part of the “import” process, so the application simulates the creation of independent clips, which… cannot be “joined.”
“
That is an annoying problem. You’d think if both clips came from the same source file, and the timecode is identical on each side of the cut, there’d be no problem joining them again.

I seem to recall with daVinci 2K there was a way to set a minimum scene length. If you made it (say) 48 frames, that way you wouldn’t run into 119 cuts on flashes and explosions. Animation was often a nightmare with auto-scene detect.

My cheap workaround for this process is to lighten the threshold so it misses more shots, and then I just reinsert the cuts when I play through the shot and see it needs a cut added, which I can do from the Color window.

[Marc Wielage]

Amen to everything Jake says.

[Marc Wielage]

I think David has a good suggestion above. The default in install is for App Nap to be turned on, so watch out for that. Even with current Macs, we occasionally run into fragmented memory and similar problems, so it might also be best to start a new session each day with a reboot, at least if you plan to render. And don’t have anything running in the background if possible. The few times I’ve had render issues, I was blithely web surfing and screwing around in the background, which is risky when the GPU cards are being driven hard, flat out.

It’s not generally a problem when color-correcting, but I think rendering is a stress on the system from any program and you have to lighten the load as much as possible on the hardware.