Marc Wielage
Forum Replies Created
-
Alexis Van Hurkman’s Color Correction Look Book: Creative Grading Techniques for Film and Video has some good tips:
In truth, I think a lot of looks boil down to much more than just color correction. You need the cooperation of the DP, the art department, the costume department, and the makeup department for everything to come together as a unified look.
I think you can get some inspiration by lots of successful contemporary films and commercials, and study their use of grad filters (in production or post), colored washes, desaturation, the orange/teal thing, the desaturated-cyan thing, and to reverse engineer them. In some cases, the looks are very, very complicated and require a dozen or more nodes and very specific shot-to-shot adjustments; in others, it might just be a preset from a few nodes that the colorist just pops in as required. It’s interesting to note that many American TV shows are color-timed in about 2 days, so there’s no way they’re taking 15 minutes per shot to do very involved, complex looks — but they do sit down and come up with maybe a dozen presets early in the season, to the extent that a producer can say, “hey, give me that cold, blue, depressed look for this scene,” and the colorist takes that and works from there.
I don’t believe the so-called “Look LUTs” out there on the web are the answer, but you could try some of those out and see if they get you close. In general, I think it’s possible to recreate those with the essential tools we already have in Resolve. Once you have this as a Powergrade, you can use it from then on whenever a similar situation pops up.
-
Subtitling from text files is pretty sophisticated and complicated, and I think you’re better off using a dedicated 3rd party program like Screen Systems Wincaps:
https://www.screensystems.tv/products/wincaps-subtitling-software/
There’s a whole bunch of different subtitling software programs out there, and it kind of goes beyond what NLE editing software does. There are also lots of companies out there that will do the subtitling for you (either closed-captioning or foreign-language insertion), and you may find it’s far less trouble to just hand it off to them and let them handle it.
-
I’m using Desktop Video 10.1.2 under Mac OSX 10.9.2. Had some issues with 10.9.4, trying to troubleshoot issues with MC Color, Eucon, OSX, and Resolve, and had to roll back to 10.9.2 for now. But this is all on a nMP.
BMD does maintain the old drivers somewhere on their website, but I gotta say, the new website overhaul has made it harder to find stuff like this.
-
[Ronen Pestes] “It will be nice to have Black Magic and Avid communicate with each other about this and release a working driver that support all latest OS (10.8.5 , 10.9.2-4) and resolve version 10 & 11 on Mac Pro from 3.1 to 6.1”
I can tell you that Eucontrol 3.1.2 and Resolve 10 will work under OSX 10.9.2. Beyond that, it’s a crapshoot.One key, BTW: watch out for the Mac Firewall settings under System Prefs -> Security & Privacy. You have to be very careful that both MC Color and Resolve can get through the firewall to talk to each other. The panel has to be up and Eucon has to be running, then you have to make sure Eucon is talking to both the panel and can find the Mac before you launch Resolve. You can “lock” MC Color to Resolve once everything is set, and it’ll stay there even if you momentarily switch to another application.
I personally think a lot of the MC Color bugginess lies with Avid’s reliance on Ethernet, but that’s me. I previously had trouble with Avid/Digidesign Pro Tools and ethernet connections for various audio controllers, so this kind of thing has been flakey before. It’s very telling to me that the Tangent Wave, Tangent Elements, and BMD daVinci panels all use USB, which I think is a simpler, more reliable connection.
Once MC Color is up, it’ll stay going for days and days. But don’t sleep the computer. I think that goes for any mission-critical application anyway.
-
True, the entire stills procedure within Resolve is screwy because it’s based on timeline number and scene (if memory serves). I wish they could save stills based on the user-added name. This wreaks havoc when you have multiple timelines and needed to export lots of stills from the same session, all of which technically have the same “Still Name” (like 1.3.11 or something like that).
But you can grab a DPX still of a powergrade and then use that still and the associated DRX correction file, then just rename it. You only have to do it once, assuming you don’t have hundreds of powergrades.
Blackmagic should probably re-examine the methodology behind importing stills, corrections, and powergrades and have a mode that will automatically retain the names and put them in the right place. This is doable — it’s more a question of what they prioritize for features and fixes.
-
Wise words from Juan. People forget that many of us color-corrected from film to video for decades, and we had no LUT. We just did it by gut instinct. My joke was, “I just turn the knobs until I like the picture I see.”
-
I was gonna suggest exporting a DPX still of the Powergrade correction, then import the DPX still (and associated correction) together to the still page and then to the Powergrade section. But open the old session should work, too.
-
If you’re on a Mac, I bet you could use QuickKeys to create a macro that would accomplish this — maybe control-C (for right-click / get Clip Info)?
-
ACES is covered on pages 270-272 of the November 2013 manual. What it says, though, is:
————————————————————————-
“When you choose the ACES color science, two additional settings become available in the Look Up Tables panel:… Red/Alexa/Canon 1F/5D/7D/Sony F65: Each listed camera has its own transform in this list that is specific to that camera’s sensor.”
————————————————————————-My interpretation of that is that you have to use the IDT’s provided by Blackmagic, and I assume they’re standardized. No doubt Peter C can add more.
-
Ask him to make .cube LUTs instead, and those should work:
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/277/8946