[Mel Matsuoka]

[Marc Wielage] ” I also put an identifying “bug” in the lower left showing the name of the project and the DP and/or director to make it clear it’s just a clip, and I keep each clip to under :30 seconds. I’d say that pretty much defines the nature of Fair Use, but it is open to interpretation.
“

Sorry to be so pedantic, but this legally incorrect.

At least in the US, Fair Use (with a capital F and a capital U) is not a general, interpretive, moral or ethical concept. It has an actual legal definition in US Copyright Law. Just because the usage seems “fair” on logical and ethical grounds does not make it “Fair Use”, and the idea that excerpting :30 or less of the original work constitutes non-infringing use is a myth. There is absolutely no such exemption for “excerpts” in US Copyright Law. In other words, using even 3 seconds of a copyrighted work (even with attribution) is technically illegal if the usage does not fall within the “four-factor” considerations of the Fair Use doctrine.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that you’re morally in the clear by doing what Danny is asking to do. It’s the post-production equivalent of jaywalking. But it’s still technically not legal, and we shouldn’t pretend that it’s “fair use” just because it seems like it is.

[Mel Matsuoka]

IANAL, so I’d advise talking to an actual “L” if you’re genuinely concerned about this…

That said, the legality of ripping a commercial, CSS-encrypted DVD is not really a “Fair Use” issue, but a DMCA issue. I suppose you can make a case that your particular usage of the DVDs in question constitutes legitimate “Fair Use” (although “Fair Use” has an actual, legal definition that generally excludes use cases like yours, where direct or indirect commercial gain applies), but any Fair Use arguments are rendered moot by the DMCA, which actually makes it illegal to circumvent the encryption on a commercial DVD.

In other words, in the United States, you cannot exercise your “Fair Use” rights with a commercial DVD without violating Title I of the DMCA. A stupid, silly paradox, to be sure!

That said, you’re probably more likely to win the MegaMillions Powerball lottery than you are actually having the Feds knock down your door and send you to Guantanamo, just because you ripped scenes from a DVD for your own demo reel…For whatever it’s worth.

[Mel Matsuoka]

God I wish there were.

The best you can really do is use AppleScript UI Scripting and things like Keyboard Maestro to automate things in Resolve.

Unfortunately, the highly customized UI that Resolve has makes it really difficult to access UI items, even with UI Scripting, but it can be done. I’ve built a lot of crazy Keyboard Maestro macros that use image-detection rules (that in turn calls internal AppleScript scripts) that allow me to build shortcut mappings for things that currently don’t exist in Resolve.

To call such measures a “hack” is a gigantic understatement. I have a lot of fun trying to outsmart Resolve with all these hacks, but I’d rather they be implemented natively, so I can waste my time on more important things 😛

[Mel Matsuoka]

[Marc Wielage] “After more than 20 years of using various daVinci-branded projects, I continue to be amazed that the default for the program isn’t “auto-save every 30 minutes.” Makes me crazy.”

Well in all fairness, the reason why I was less than diligent in forcing my own saves is because of the interminably slow save times when you’re working in a large project. Using disk-based projects instead of database projects is faster, but it’s still way too slow to be kicking in as an autosave task every 5-10 minutes. It would drive me absolutely crazy if my grading sessions were being constantly interrupted by that damn modal autosave progress meter.

It would be nice if Resolve could keep track of every change to every grade that you make, and asynchronously save them in the background (or at least schedule them in smaller “batches” for performance reasons, like maybe every 5-10 parameter changes). This is one of the features I miss most about the old Discreet edit* NLE. That thing was rock solid, but on the rare occasions when it would crash, you wouldn’t lose a single moment of work, because every action you made was automatically being journaled in the background to the edit* database (which was a FoxPro based backend, amazingly enough). As anyone who worked with edit* can attest, performance was *never* an issue, even on late 90’s/early 2000’s Pentium Pro hardware, so it’s probably not a farfetched notion to see a similar feature integrated into Resolve in the future.

[Mel Matsuoka]

[Andy Winter] “then try node sizing! you can grab a still
and append the node to varilous clips
at once. “

Node Sizing was actually one of the first things I thought to try.

The only problem with Node Sizing (or any of the sizing options in the Sizing tab, for that matter), is that for some inexplicable reason, Resolve limits the bottom end of all the image-scaling parameters to 0.25…I needed a 0.16 scale.

In any case, even if it did allow for a smaller scale, Node Sizing doesn’t help in my particular instance, as I need to physically crop the edges in a nonuniform manner, not scale them.

[Mel Matsuoka]

[Andy Winter] “why dont you just grab a still of the cropped clip, turn the cropping off in the edit page and apply the changes
where they should have been applied in the first place, in the input-sizing of the clip. if you wanna have the all
your clips cropped the same way, do it in the track tab and you’re done!”

Input Sizing is not what I’m looking for…I actually need to *crop* the clips in a non-uniform way (e.g., showing only the middle 16% of a 1080 frame).

It does work, however to use the Output Sizing Blanking parameters, which didn’t occur to me until you reminded me of using the Sizing tab instead of the Edit Page parameters. The only drawback is that it only works in Track mode, so I can’t selectively apply the blanking on a clip-by-clip basis. But this is good enough for my purposes right now.

Thanks for the guidance!

[Mel Matsuoka]

I posted about this a year ago:

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/277/22580

Unless things have changed since then, adding more comprehensive & customizable 3rd-party control surface support is low on BMDs priority list.

As much as I hate the de-valuation of the craft that has come with the commoditization and zero-cost accessibility of Resolve, it still seems odd to me that BMD is still tied to the notion that Resolve software is a loss-leader gateway drug towards selling more $30k BMD Resolve panels. It seems out of character with BMDs overall operating philosophy of “let’s-make-everything-that-used-to-be-expensive-unsustainably-cheap!”.

I would gladly pay $3000-$6000 for a version of Resolve that had a fully customizable shortcut-mapping & 3rd-party control surface interface. But this really makes no sense from a business and engineering standpoint, if you think about it. Maintaining separate branches of a software product as complex as Resolve would be a management, marketing and engineering nightmare. Adobe doesn’t even do this anymore (anyone remember when you used to have to pay an extra $1000 for the “Production Bundle” version of After Effects just to get motion tracking functionality?), and their engineering resources are undoubtedly way larger than BMD.

BMD would probably make a crap-ton more money–with almost zero additional engineering overhead–if they simply lowered the cost of the BMD Control Surface. Doing this would cause people like me, who are picky enough to be complaining about the lack of 3rd party control surface mappings, to just shut up and buy “the big panel”. This would free BMD’s Resolve team from wasting their time considering and implementing 3rd party panels, and they could spend more time concentrating on core software features.

Of course, if I were even half the brilliant businessman and marketing genius that Grant Petty is, I’d probably be spending more of my free time relaxing on a beach in the Bahamas, sipping Cristal from the shoes of my Caribbean handmaidens, instead of spending time offering unsolicited marketing and business advice to highly-successful corporations on internet messageboards.

I’m sure there are many good reasons why we haven’t seen any of these scenarios happen, as of yet. The people at BMD are certainly not stupid, and if they could deliver the full Resolve Panel for under $10,000, I’m sure they would. I would like to think that one of the main reasons why we have yet to see better 3rd-party panel support in Resolve is because they are working hard to eliminate the need to purchase 3rd-party panels in the first place. So why would they bother spending the time developing 3rd party support in Resolve 10, when they know that they will be eventually shipping a sub-$10000 panel that’s heads and tails better than every other currently available “cheap” 3rd-party panel?

I can at least dream that this is true. But BMD has an established track record in making dreams like this come true, so I’m definitely keeping my fingers crossed, and will continue to “tolerate” the existing state of control surface mappings until this happens!

[Mel Matsuoka]

I’ve never understood the appeal of color-coded, or application-specific editing keyboards. They may look cool to your clients, but it seems a lot more quicker to keep a searchable “cheat sheet” text-file of commonly used shortcuts, that you can call up instantly when you need to recall a shortcut (personally, I prefer using individual textfiles for each shortcut that I keep in a synced Dropbox folder, and using NVAlt and Launchbar to search and view them instantly).

The whole point of keyboard shortcuts is to speed up your work via muscle memory, and once youve committed a shortcut to muscle memory, the need for the color-coded keycaps disappears. And as Toby correctly mentioned, what happens when the app vendor decides to completely change their shortcut mappings in a future release?

Call me a snob, but I’ve always felt that the main market for color-coded editing keyboards are people who want *other* people to think that they are “professional”‘ editors, even though they probably aren’t 😛

[Mel Matsuoka]

[Tero Ahlfors] “What is your paused resolution?”

Ahh, that was it! I totally forgot about that option! Thanks for the tip.

[Mel Matsuoka]

So it’s a year later, and this 720p monitoring issue is still not resolved?!?

Does Blackmagic Design simply not care?

I’m not crazy about 720p as a working format, but the reality is that many of my clients need me to work in 720p, because of their vast archives of DVCPro/P2 footage. I don’t know how to explain to my clients that I can’t play their 720p projects out to my 58″ display, even though it’s 2014 and my 7-year old AJA Kona3 boards can do this effortlessly.