[Mike Most]

If you try the same panel with, say, Assimilate Scratch (or in Media Composer, for that matter, at least when using the lift and gain masters as timeline joggers), I think you’ll notice the difference. It’s not so much a latency thing as it is velocity sensitivity. Some operators like that, some don’t. But it’s only present (in my experience) with Resolve, not with other programs.

[Mike Most]

While it’s true that there is a Windows version of Lustre, it only exists due to legacy, Autodesk having purchased the technology years ago from Colorfront. Today, you cannot buy a new standalone license for Lustre on any platform, and you cannot buy a standalone license for Smoke on anything but OS X. I think Autodesk has made it pretty clear that their strategic platforms going forward are Linux and the Mac, at least for the “systems” type products. Clearly, it’s a different situation for things like the 3D animation products and the Autocad line.

[Mike Most]

I would point out that Smoke is technically a Mac-only program, at least in terms of being available as a standalone license. On Linux, you can only get it as part of Flame Premium. Not being available on Windows is both a strength (you can use a lot of common code between Linux and OS X, and on the Mac you can use Apple specific codecs) and a weakness (there are a lot of Windows users out there…..).

[Mike Most]

I wouldn’t hold my breath for this, at least not while Apple refuses to provide a Prores encoder for any OS other than their own. And yes, I’m well aware of the open source codec, but Blackmagic – as well as most other software publishers – has not seen fit to risk legal action from a very trusted hardware partner. One of the downsides of providing completely cross platform software is that you really can’t come up with caching format that only works on one of the three supported platforms.

[Mike Most]

FCPX will likely be fine and an interesting experience — provided you don’t use multicam clips if you’re planning to reconform in a color grading program (Resolve or anything else). If you think you will use multicam, you’ll be much happier in Avid, where you can collapse them and eliminate groups before sending the AAF off for a Resolve conform.

[Mike Most]

While it’s not as convenient as a trackball based control, I would point out that the red, green, and blue offset controls have been mapped to knobs on various third party panels for some time now, as has the master offset.

There was a time when many, if not most, colorists used either sliders or knobs rather than differential controls like joysticks or trackballs, you know……….. 😉

[Mike Most]

You don’t really need a LUT for this purpose if you’re correcting for Rec709 space. The default in Resolve is to interpret the RAW data into Rec709 color space and gamma. It will give you a very good starting point without any additional help. Use master offset and contrast to get the overall range right and you’re off and running.

[Mike Most]

I get the impression from various places that multicam into Resolve was working in earlier versions of FCPX. The fact that it doesn’t seem to work now probably points to a change in FCPX 10.0.8 XML generation that will ultimately be fixed. So perhaps there is hope. That doesn’t help you this week, though….

Of course, it goes without saying that all this would be moot if FCPX could produce simple, standard EDL’s.

[Mike Most]

In further investigating what I did to get a FCPX project to work, you should actually leave the “assist using reel names” unchecked. If Resolve does not find the clips, it will ask you to specify a folder to find them in. That works, because the path names are included in the XML file and are reinterpreted relative to the original. Compound clips should be broken apart, but I did find that it does not find any multicam clips, regardless of what others have said. It leaves those spaces empty in the Resolve timeline. So unless and until Apple and Blackmagic get this resolved (sic), my guess is there’s no good answer to using multicam clips in a project to be graded in Resolve. Perhaps Rohit or Peter have more information on this…

[Mike Most]

One more thing…. Resolve doesn’t like compound clips. You shoud break apart all items in the timeline (errr, sorry, “project”) you’re exporting from FCPX prior to making the XML. And regarding the reel names, Final Cut XML’s contain explicit path name references, so the reel names shouldn’t really be needed or used when conforming in Resolve from an FCPX XML file.