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...