Thursday, November 22, 2012

Adobe CS6 and DaVinci Resolve - Update #3

Okay, so since my last post, I've found out a few more things:

  • A guy named John Schultz has created an RGB Curves preset for Premiere Pro that acts as a LUT for the Technicolor Cinestyle picture profile. It looks great, doesn't hog resources, is GPU accelerated for realtime playback and fast rendering.
  • When I tried importing a timeline from Premiere Pro into Davinci Resolve Lite (as an exported .XML) and doing a rough color grade, Resolve added a few random black frames to the footage. I didn't notice them until I rendered out the graded footage. I went back in to Resolve and confirmed the problem appears on the timeline... but not consistently. It could be a framerate mismatch at some point in the importing process, but I haven't been able to figure it out yet.
  • Resolve Lite doesn't like anything other than cuts and dissolves in an XML import of an edit. In my limited testing, any error or missing clip will cause the offending clip to be replaced by another clip - usually the same clip for all errors.
  • The whole color grading process has turned out to be a lot more work than I expected. The grading itself is fun, but the process of getting a project into either SpeedGrade or Resolve is counter-intuitive pain in the butt. I can see why Adobe encourages you to render out a project to .DPX before importing it into SpeedGrade.
  • Resolve Lite has some quirks, like needing to load config presets twice to get the settings to load properly.
  • My massive Premiere Pro project file for the reality show pilot I'm working on freezes After Effects if I try to import it into the latter. I'll probably need to use a trimmed-down version for the final conform.
  • If you need a file that will play back on a lower-end PC, a DV-Widescreen .WMV file appears to work quite well. It's especially good for dailies. If you know a good Mac equivalent, feel free to leave a comment. 
  • Adobe Media Encoder is friggin' awesome. You can queue up multiple jobs, different settings, and don't need to leave Premiere Pro open once a project is queued up to render.
  • Adobe Prelude is pretty good for ingesting DSLR footage, although there are a lot of features I wish it had, such as:
    • Renaming files before/as they're being ingested with custom auto-increment options (e.g.: "MVI00001.mov" could be automatically changed to something like "SGP Test Shoot - 10-23-2012 - Camera A - Shot 1.mov".)
    • Being able to ingest audio files without kicking up an error message.
    • Automatic syncing of dual-system/multi-cam footage (maybe via a Pluraleyes plugin, just like Premiere Pro?)

Which deinterlacing algorithm is the best? Part 1 - HD interlaced footage

Before I began, I'd like to give a special thanks to Aleksander Kozak for his help in testing and providing the HD footage used in this ...