No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition...

The best thing about Resolve is the tracker… the tracker and the nodes. The two best things about Resolve are the tracker, the nodes and its EDL support. The three best things about Resolve are…

OK – apologies to Monty Python, and apologies, too, for not blogging for a while. My attentions have been drawn back to my real job as our picture lock, of course, unlocked – so I’ve been editing, constructing and sending plates for VFX, incorporating pick-up shots and doing a host of other, small changes from the ‘notes’ fed back from our L.A. execs.

We are now on Picture Lock #2, so I’m back Resolving.

Just for fun (?) last week I tried out some of the more conventional workflows for getting footage from FCP to Resolve. Rendering out a single QuickTime (per reel) and breaking it apart again using DaVinci’s Preconform (from a CMX 3600 EDL) worked pretty flawlessly. If you change your edit, you can use ColorTrace to copy your grading decisions to the new cut, though (for some reason) ColorTrace only copies between projects, not between grade versions within a project, so you need to consider that when you set up the Config page.

If there are the same number of edits in the old and new cuts, then ColorTrace will automatically copy the grades from one to the other – there is a manual option if your edit has changed more than that. It all works well, and I would definitely use this simple workflow if I was confident that there would be no (or few) changes after picture lock.

I also tried to make individual QuickTimes from the FCP timeline – each with the FCP filters burnt in. This involves making the sequence clips independent, then dragging them to a new bin in the Browser and then Batch Exporting them. It should work, but often doesn’t. The problem is that making the clips independent is a bit flakey. Let’s say you place a clip (A) into the timeline, then into the middle of this clip you overwrite another clip (B). Making the clips independent should generate three clips – the original head of clip A, clip B and the tail of clip A (which we’ll now call clip C). This is what you would get if you had assembled the clips in this order in the first place, rather than doing your overwrite edit. Sadly, FCP doesn’t generate clip C – it has two clips from clip A (i.e. not independent) so your Batch Export has duplicate clips and fails. Grr! At least it’s FCP’s fault and not Resolve’s. My chosen workflow (detailed previously in this blog) has some problems of its own – also FCP related. Basically, Final Cut does odd things with merged clips, which can break re-linking the project with the graded files.

I suppose some of these workflow issues might tempt you to stick with Color, which has an easier, if not foolproof, interface with Final Cut. Personally, I would put up with a little hassle for the power, flexibility and ease-of-use of Resolve. I find the node paradigm very intuitive and it’s incredibly flexible. One of the first scenes in Dimensions is a garden party, shot in the British summer. We struggled a bit in the edit as the pressures of low-budget filming, coupled with the British climate, left us with less coverage than we would like. Inevitably, I’m grading footage that has sunlight coming and going, actor’s faces falling into shadow and so on. I’ll give an example of grading a particular clip in the next blog, but grading this scene in Color would have driven me nuts. There is something about grading with Resolve, coupled with Tangent’s excellent Wave control surface, that makes colour correction almost telepathic. Everything is so easy – you keep your concentration on the reference monitor, each node controlling one aspect of your grade, hardly ever needing to look at the computer monitor. If it sounds like I’ve become a fan, I have. Nothing could make me go back to using Color – not even the Spanish Inquisition.

Round Trippin’

Feature film FCP Flow chartIf there is one thing you can guarantee about Picture Lock, it’s that the picture will not be locked. The worst culprit is, of course, the test screening. Producers who think that the opinion of the general public is valuable should take a look at the comments posted on YouTube. Nevertheless, there will always be a few last changes to the edit even though the film is now half way through the grade.

It makes sense, therefore, to come up with a workflow to get from your NLE to Resolve that will allow for those last-minute changes. It’s increasingly common for some effects to be done in the edit suite – for instance, the feature film that we’re following with this blog (www.dimensionsthemovie.com) was shot 16:9 and is masked down to 2.35:1. Several shots are racked within this 2.35:1 frame (for various reasons) which could have been done in finishing, but was easier to implement (and show to the Director) in the edit. 

The obvious option is to ‘bake in’ all the NLE (in this case Final Cut) effects by outputting a single movie file (perhaps per scene or per reel). DaVinci Resolve can import this movie file and slice it back into clips with an EDL exported from Final Cut, allowing you to grade clip by clip as you would expect. Resolve even features clip detection, which looks through the movie file and cuts it into clips even without the EDL. This workflow is very straightforward – there is no need to go back to the NLE.

Unfortunately, if there are changes required to the edit, Resolve can’t tell that your new movie file and EDL are related to the old one, so you lose all the grading you’ve already done (though there is a rather complex work-around using Color Trace).

A better option is to output an EDL or AAF from Final Cut, importing it into Resolve which then builds its timeline from the same files that you used in the edit. As these files have individual file and reel names, Resolve can, er, resolve any changes made in Final Cut, keeping the existing grade and leaving you with only new clips ungraded. The down-side is that Resolve can’t apply Final Cut’s effects to the clips, so you need to go back to Final Cut with the graded and rendered film files and re-apply the effects.

Managing this process isn’t quite a straightforward as you would hope, of course. When you take the project back into Final Cut, you can’t just re-connect the media with the graded files, as another trip ‘around the loop’ will apply the Resolve grade to the already graded clips, which is unlikely to be the effect you want. Fortunately, FCP provides you with all the tools you need.

The forward path through the loop is easy. Finish the edit, export an EDL (in our case we use AAF – both Boris and Automatic Duck provide suitable plug-ins), point Resolve’s Media Pool at the media files and import the AAF. One caveat, you’ll need to do a bit of preparation of the FCP timeline. Resolve only imports one track of picture, so you’ll need to render out any composites that use other tracks, and FCP generators, like text or Motion inserts will also need to be rendered to movie files and replaced (if you want to grade them!).

Here’s where the sneaky bit comes in. Use Final Cut’s Media Manager to create an offline project (basically, a version of your project with all the media offline). Once you have graded the film you can open up this project in FCP and re-connect the media with the graded footage (make sure you set up Resolve’s rendering to use the same file names as your original footage). You use this project to output the finished movie. If there are last minute changes, make them in the original, editor’s version of the project, re-export the EDL/AAF and Media Manager’s offline project copy and repeat – each time you’ll only need to re-grade newly added clips.

Of course, there are as many workflows as there are movies, but this is the one that seems to be working for us with this film. It’s not perfect, but there isn’t too much faffing, we don’t have to repeat work we have already done (which drives me nuts!) and it keeps the Producers happy. Fortunately, we aren’t having a test screening...

Grading With Tangent

Before we get to the main event – grading a feature film with DaVinci Resolve – I would like to take some time to look at hardware controllers. 

Resolve, even more so than Apple’s Color, really needs a hardware controller. There are no on-screen lows, mids and highs colour wheels, as with Color – Resolve’s Lift, Gamma and Gain user interface controls are LRGB (Luminance, Red, Green, Blue) sliders. Pulling out a bit of magenta or even warming up a clip – simple with a trackball – is possible but infuriating when you have to juggle individual primary colours. Blakckmagic have retained the DaVinci hardware controller product line, but they are fiendishly expensive.

Fortunately, UK company Tangent make a great colour correction control surface called Wave. It has a street (i.e. Internet!) price of about £1100 including VAT and the Mac release of Resolve communicates with it natively – no need to install drivers.

The panel connects to your Mac through USB and is bus powered. The unit itself is very light and surprisingly big – which makes it nice to work with but takes up quite a lot of desk real-estate if you aren’t making a permanent installation. Three trackball and jog wheel sections correspond to Resolve’s Lift, Gamma and Gain, and three very clear, blue displays – each with three rotary encoders and three button – allow you to control most of the other grading features of Resolve, including adding nodes, Power Windows, Qualifiers and so on.

To the right of the panel is a transport control section and nine function keys. The panel is supplied with an overlay for these keys so you can write what each of them does – a cheap and cheerful solution but it works.

In use, the trackballs feel smooth and responsive – Resolve’s Config screen allows you to adjust the sensitivity of the controls if the default isn’t to your taste. As you would expect, it transforms the use of the primary colour controls from barely useable to a complete joy. If I’m being picky, the buttons feel a bit cheap, and having to move from the trackball to the jog wheel is easier on other control surfaces, where the jog wheel surrounds the ball. These are minor gripes, however, and totally understandable given the price point of the panel – more importantly the Wave works, and works reliably. It’s also much easier to set up that its JL Cooper and Euphonix competitors, as well as being cheaper, though, with its slightly flimsier controls, you may want to look elsewhere if you are expecting heavy, 24/7 grading work.

Tangent also have a software support package that runs on the Mac and allows you to use a Wave with Color. It’s also compatible with Assimilate Scratch, and a whole host of other applications (check out www.tangentdevices.co.uk for further information).

A few words on Acceleration

NVIDIA Quadro 4000 Blackmagic/DaVinci recommend installing a second graphics card into your Mac – Resolve will then use the Graphics Processing Unit on the card (basically a very fast computer dedicated to image processing) to accelerate the rendering of your timeline. The latest version (7.1) even lets you install multiple GPU cards using a Cubix PCI Express expansion chassis, for real horsepower. The GPU cards must support CUDA (NVIDIA’s technology which allows third parties to access the GPU’s power) though the choice of cards available for the Mac is limited.

We set up our system with a couple of NVIDIA Quadro 4000 for Mac cards, one for the GUI (replacing a GeForce 8800 GT) and one for Resolve processing. If you use two GUI monitors, you should note that the 4000 has one DVI-D Dual Link connector and one DisplayPort. There is a DisplayPort to DVI-D adapter included with the card, but it’s the passive type that only emits single link DVI, so you’ll be limited to 1920x1200 unless you buy an active converter (about £80), or have a secondary monitor with a DisplayPort input.

The first thing you notice is the effect on the Final Cut timeline. Some plug-ins, like Magic Bullet Colorista II from Red Giant use OpenGL for rendering, so the faster the card the better they work. A load of effects that absolutely, positively had to be rendered with the old 8800 GT card will play in real time with the 4000 – bonus! Note that these benefits are from replacing the user interface card (the one connected to the computer’s monitor) – OpenGL plug-ins won’t benefit from the second card. On the down-side, Apple’s implementation of OpenGL is rather old (hopefully it will improve with OS X 10.7 later this year) so the Quadro 4000 doesn’t bring as much speed improvement as its specification suggests – certainly if you have a newer Mac Pro with the ATI Radeon 5770 or 5870, it wouldn’t be worth upgrading.

Fire up Adobe Premiere Pro and it’s a different story. The Mercury Playback Engine in CS5 is written to use CUDA for pretty much everything, and it flies – most of the standard effects use the NVIDIA card, allowing you to run everything in real time, including the decode of 4k RED footage. Annoyingly, though some third party plug-ins support CUDA, After Effects and Photoshop don’t seem to benefit (yet?) – though they get the same OpenGL boost that FCP has.

Obviously, Resolve benefits greatly from the addition of the second Quadro 4000, though the highest performance available would come from using NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 285 (fastest) or Quadro 4800 (next best). Sadly, the GTX 285 has been discontinued. On the plus side, the Quadro 4000 is half the price of the older 4800, though the GTX 285 was very cheap. Further towards the plus side, if you use the PCIe extension chassis, you can fit as many Quadro 4000s as you have slots, as each 4000 is a single PCI card width. The GTX285 and Quadro 4800 are both double width, so you always have an unusable slot between cards. For more information, see the Resolve configuration guide at http://www.blackmagic-design.com/downloads/davinci/pdf/DaVinciResolveMacConfigGuide.pdf.

The Quadro 4000 has cooling fans fitted, and they do make a lot of noise, irritating to be in your ear in an edit suite, but in a grading suite, where silence is less important, you’ll probably get away with it. It has a street (i.e. www) price of about £640 plus VAT.