[Ray Argall]

Hi Terence,
In theory the method described here for recreating timeline to retain grades and other post work could work, however it will probably effect the pitch and you’d need to trial and error adjusting in Resolve. I’ve found using the “change speed” in Edit mode can cause issues when you check the “adjust pitch to match” box – I’ve had phasing occur esp in stereo mode. Alternatively there are some good plugins to adjust pitch that don’t cause these issues. SoundShifter by WAVES works well in Resolve.
That said, I don’t have experience going from 29.67 NTSC to 25PAL and there will be skipped frames or some shift in the picture when you make the transfer. You may also find it’s better to do the picture xfer to 25 through Deliver in Resolve, then bring it into a 25fps timeline and do the sound shift/pitch change then.
Good luck!!
Ray

Piccolo Films
Sydney Australia

[Ray Argall]

Thanks to Hasan and Michal,

This solution worked for me in 15.3 – I’ve been looking for a work around for incorrect timeline frame rates and this is by far the least painful! Not sure why Gary thinks it’s an unacceptable solution – perhaps because it’s something BM could address, but this solution keeps the grades and edits intact.

Thanks again!

Piccolo Films
Sydney Australia

[Ray Argall]

Hi All,

Further update, I took Marc’s advise and contacted Justin at Conformalizer. He responded quickly but unfortunately did not have good news and said a roundtrip workflow between PT and Resolve was a fantasy, and that getting a decent sound export from any platform other than MC was really difficult – and even that had it’s own problems. He echoed others in this thread that say the editors level and pan info is not much use and they’d rather start from scratch with pan, level and FX.

Fair enough, and on projects with decent budgets and resources that makes sense, but I’m a bit stunned that in 2017 there is not an effective NLE roundtrip between Editors and Sound editors work. Gee, sprockets was slow and hard work but we spoke the same language…

The challenge I’m facing here is that it’s best to link to a dupe copy of the source audio, rather than a new set of audio files in .mxf that contain only the cut audio and don’t link back to the source audio. Handles are a help but I would rather be able to link back through the original audio file. In this project there are quite a lot of speed changes in audio and when they don’t read through to PT it becomes very messy, effectively meaning you have to manually re-synch and restore speed, pan and volume settings to all those audio clips in the timeline again. If you can only link to newly created audio files you lose all reference to not only the pan and volume info but also the speed adjustments that were made. It’s almost tempting to sound edit in FCP 7, as that appears to be the only workable roundtrip to keep track of all those adjustments that were made!

I look forward to hearing someone else has cracked it! Otherwise will report back here when we have…

Ray

Piccolo Films
Sydney Australia

[Ray Argall]

Thanks Marc, I’ll definitely get in touch with them and report back. The sound editor I’m working with has been using Conformalizer to reconform edit changes from EDLs but it sounds like the software will do a lot more.
Cheers,
Ray

Piccolo Films
Sydney Australia

[Ray Argall]

Hi all,

Interesting topic, thought I’d add some experiences with this workflow and throw some more queries at it.

I have just upgraded to 12.5.5 so this is the most current version of Resolve. I’ve been working with the sound editor for a couple of days on this and have not been able to export an .aav or .xml that will read properly in Pro Tools 12 (or 10 for that matter). Using the Pro Tools export on the deliver page of Resolve will read in PT, but shows the clips as “Untitled”. Using this path also means recreating all the audio files in .mxf rather than PT linking to the original source audio (preferred path).

We have found the best option is to export from the deliver page of Resolve using the AVID AAF option (rather than PT option), which reads all the audio files with their correct names in PT and links to the new .mxf audio files. It does add a prefix or suffix however so would have to go through force enable if we were to try and relink to source clips (we haven’t tried this yet). However the PT session has random errors throughout with many clips not matching up on the timeline and being anywhere from frames to many seconds out of position.

One bit of good news is that we have handles on the audio clips – there is no handle selection in the AUDIO tab but by selecting say 50 frames in the VIDEO tab it appears to work for audio as well. It even works when the video export is disabled. Thanks Michael (Tassie Devil) for that tip!

We have disabled the video export as we already have a video file from the same timeline; and have exported all rendered audio into a unique folder, using the .aaf created from that session to import into PT.

None of the volume levels, pan, speed or FX components of any audio clip are reading in PT. Conversely if I export an .xml, FCP brings all those components across (except for some FX). I would like this info to be there for the sound editor as there are a lot of keypoints we’ve added and even if used as a guide these will save considerable time (rather than me going through every single one or referring back to the edit all the time).

As Michael mentions it will take a while (took 3.5 hours to export/render 90 min doco with 15 tracks of audio)

I should add that the audio tracks come from a range of sources, codecs and some have speed changes added (2 – 4% to address synch issues with digitised 1/4 inch audio), but FCP can read all those changes, whereas PT can’t, or it’s baked into the newly rendered files.

So has anyone else found that PT can read an AAF or XML that will link to source audio files and retain keyframe/levels/pan/speed info?

We tried Marc’s workflow with XML and using Conformalizer but haven’t been able to get that to work. We have a complete set of the source files copied, but PT is not reading the XML. Perhaps there are some options in export we’re not getting right? We exported the XML from the Edit page not the Deliver page.

Many thanks for any other thoughts! It would be good if BM could get a seamless workflow/roundtrip between Resolve and PT.

Ray

Piccolo Films
Sydney Australia

[Ray Argall]

Hi Chris,

Yes it’s a bit underwhelming to have no response to this querie, but one just moves on! (The Cow is still a brilliant resource for info)

I find often with the FCS programmes it’s hard to get definitive confirmation that you have actually created the best quality files you’re after – even in FCP there are little traps in the sequence settings that can downgrade high res files through not checking the right setts (progressive vs interlaced; best for motion files etc). I certainly found that FCP 7.0.3 works better than 6.0.6 (and possibly better for round tripping); however I’ve stuck with Motion 4 as it appears to be more compatible with FCP 7 (Motion 5 works better with FCP X). So some of your issues could be the update to Motion 5? (And not working well with FCP 6.0.6).

Gamma shift issues are frustrating for sure, I had some success with files (not exactly as you’ve created) by going to the clip in FCP, right click to bring up item properties, and changing the Alpha setts to None/Ignore or Straight. Might be worth seeing if that makes any difference. You can also open the file in QT 7 PRO (rather than QT X) which gives a better rendition of what the actual file should look like when mastered out.

I’ve resorted to exporting QT files from Motion, I’ve found the round tripping problematic. Which doesn’t help your problem much, I’m afraid!

Ray

Piccolo Films
Sydney Australia