The Resolve / Colour Grading resource thread

[kye]

8 hours ago, Anaconda_ said:

I just discovered a hack, that I've been able to repeat a number of times to test and it's saved me hours of work, so thought I'd share for anyone else who's faced/will face this problem.

The problem:

Wrong timeline settings, but you don't notice before you go to export.

I'm new to the software, I loaded my media, made a timeline and edited my video. Great, it's mostly a test to learn how to use it, and I'm done. I go to export and find I can only select 24p or 30p, my media is all 25p, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. I'm trawling through settings and find a greyed out box in the Master Settings that says 24 frames per second (changed to 25 in the screenshot). It turns out, you can't change this once you've loaded media into your project... (why?) 

The solution:

I backed up my project, deleted ALL the media, timelines etc. to make it brand new. I then opened the Master Settings to make a template to avoid this from happening again. After saving and closing the settings box, for some reason, I assume either habit or fate, I pressed cmd+z. The spinning beach ball arrived and my frustration grew, but suddenly all my media and timelines came back, undoing the delete. Out of curiosity I opened the Master Settings again and low and behold, my project was all set to 25p and I can export my edit at the correct frame rate, without having to reedit the whole piece.

TLDR; 

Wrong project FPS when starting the project

Delete all media and timelines - ideally highlight everything and press delete just once

Change project FPS in Master Settings

Undo media and timeline deletion

Export at correct frame rate.

 

Holy crap - THANK YOU for sharing this!

I've also had that problem and wasn't sure why the frame rate was locked as soon as you pull media into a project.  I normally noticed early on in a project when I was still pulling in assets, and had to start again and re-do the media gathering, but this will absolutely save that time and effort (and annoyance!).

[Anaconda_]

I've recently started trying to sharpen things up a touch, but also denoise some frames, and I'm wondering how people do this. My Nodes look like this:

Braw Adjustments - Colour - Sharpen - NR 

Is that the logical order?

also, for sharpening, I've only knocked the Radius down to 0.38, but it seems waaay too sharp. How do you guys sharpen stuff?

[Towd]

1 hour ago, Anaconda_ said:

Braw Adjustments - Colour - Sharpen - NR 

You typically want to put any finishing/sharpening a the very end after of your processing.  Typically just before running it out.  How strong you make the sharpening and the radius you use will just depend on the final look you are going for and how soft your original footage is.  Depending on the sharpening filter you are using there is typically a strength and a radius value. 

As part of your finishing process, you may also want to add grain into the image.  Opinions on whether you add the grain before or after the sharpening can vary, but I find that if I'm dealing with  an image that needs a lot of sharpening, I'll add the grain last so I'm not heavily sharpening my grain.  Conversely if I'm doing a composite and matching grain between elements, the grain will come earlier in the pipeline.  But in that case, any sharpening I'm adding back in is very minimal to just restore any detail loss due to encoding.

If you want to dial in some specific values for minimal sharpening to make up for re-encoding your original source to  whatever your final format is, you can run a "wedge" and try a variety of values then compare the detail you see with various sharpness settings of your output video against your raw source and pick one that matches most closely.  Depending on what your source material is and what your delivery format is, this can vary wildly.  In cases where I'm working from a high res (6k-4k) source and delivering at 2k, I may not even use sharpening.

Finally, opinions also vary about where to put any degraining, but I prefer to put it near or at the very beginning of my color pipeline.  If your degrainer is expecting something in rec 709 though, do your color transform into video space and then run your degrainer.  A little testing with your camera's source footage will go a long way here as well.  But,  I find that especially when I'm working with 8 bit source material, it can add some pseudo bit depth to the images before I begin pulling on the color. 

So, I'd typically do:

1. .Raw adjustments to set color balance and exposure. (if working with raw footage)
2. Degrain/NR
3. Color
4. sharpen/grain

[kye]

 

On 3/22/2019 at 2:08 PM, Anaconda_ said:

I've recently started trying to sharpen things up a touch, but also denoise some frames, and I'm wondering how people do this. My Nodes look like this:

Braw Adjustments - Colour - Sharpen - NR 

Is that the logical order?

also, for sharpening, I've only knocked the Radius down to 0.38, but it seems waaay too sharp. How do you guys sharpen stuff?

As @Towd says, this stuff is personal and I'd suggest experimenting and seeing what you like.

Some random thoughts:

• You can try controlling how strongly the sharpening effect is applied by adjusting the blend opacity or the output key of that node
• Try the different OFX plugins, I particularly like the Soften and Sharpen plugin, as it gives you control over different grain sizes
• You can easily swap the order of nodes around, I don't know the keyboard combination, but if you drag one node on top of another and hold down one of the modifier keys, it will swap the two nodes, so you can easily change the order of operations and see if things get better or worse
• Only sharpening the edges can also be quite different to applying the effect everywhere

[thephoenix]

hi.

need to do some ultra key in post. i am used to premiere and i am looking for a resolve / fusion tutorial.

any good one ?

so far from what i've seen there is no good tutorial on fusion and it seems way more complicated than doing it in premiere

 

[thephoenix]

 

[Anaconda_]

thisbis rally simple, well explained technique that I’m sure will help a lot of people. Especially those in wedding films. 

[kye]

6 hours ago, Anaconda_ said:

thisbis rally simple, well explained technique that I’m sure will help a lot of people. Especially those in wedding films. 

I saw that one.  It's a pretty fragile effect, you'd have to be careful applying it otherwise you're likely to get a hard edge and artefacting.  They apply it pretty non-carefully in the video and it's bordering on breaking the image.

[Anaconda_]

What's the best way to sync audio to multiple clips in Resolve?

I've been manually matching sounds and waveforms clapperboard style, but wonder if there's a Premiere/Pluraleyes type 'Sync' button? I can't seem to find it anywhere and wonder if I'm missing something.

 

[BrunoCH]

9 hours ago, Anaconda_ said:

What's the best way to sync audio to multiple clips in Resolve?

I've been manually matching sounds and waveforms clapperboard style, but wonder if there's a Premiere/Pluraleyes type 'Sync' button? I can't seem to find it anywhere and wonder if I'm missing something.

 

Theoretically it's simple. Selects in the mediapool clips and sound files and right click and Auto Sync Audio (and choose TC ou waveform)
But this function is almost unusable because the result is so bad. I think you need to use Plural Eyes with Resolve for pro workflow. 

[KnightsFan]

9 hours ago, Anaconda_ said:

What's the best way to sync audio to multiple clips in Resolve?

I've been manually matching sounds and waveforms clapperboard style, but wonder if there's a Premiere/Pluraleyes type 'Sync' button? I can't seem to find it anywhere and wonder if I'm missing something.

 

I am currently making an external tool to do just this and I'd love to hear about what kind of process you are looking for. What kind if workflow do you have? Timecode? Is there exactly 1 audio clip for each video clip? What camera and audio recorder do you use and do they have relatively accurate time stamps on the files themselves?

[Anaconda_]

14 hours ago, KnightsFan said:

I am currently making an external tool to do just this and I'd love to hear about what kind of process you are looking for. What kind if workflow do you have? Timecode? Is there exactly 1 audio clip for each video clip? What camera and audio recorder do you use and do they have relatively accurate time stamps on the files themselves?

Wow great! Well my main thing for now is 1 clip and 1 audio source. However I do often have a whole day's worth of stuff that needs syncing so being able to do multiple clips will definitely be handy.

I've not yet tried it with Plural Eyes, but Braw support is a huge thing for me, and I'm sure more and more people as the weeks fly by. 

I can't rely on audio timestamps so much as my main focus now is a 1 take music performance, with the audio recorded and mixed separately. In Premier, the auto sync thing matches my SOC audio and the mixed track pretty well, but I can't open Braw in it (yet?). I'd love it if Resolve or another program did the same with my Braw footage.

[KnightsFan]

6 hours ago, Anaconda_ said:

Wow great! Well my main thing for now is 1 clip and 1 audio source. However I do often have a whole day's worth of stuff that needs syncing so being able to do multiple clips will definitely be handy.

I've not yet tried it with Plural Eyes, but Braw support is a huge thing for me, and I'm sure more and more people as the weeks fly by. 

I can't rely on audio timestamps so much as my main focus now is a 1 take music performance, with the audio recorded and mixed separately. In Premier, the auto sync thing matches my SOC audio and the mixed track pretty well, but I can't open Braw in it (yet?). I'd love it if Resolve or another program did the same with my Braw footage.

I don't know if I'll be able to support BRaw, since right now I'm using ffmpeg for decoding--though hopefully they will add support eventually. I will look into it though, since technically all I need is an audio stream to sync with, perhaps BRaw has just a normal WAV stream and I don't need to actually decode the video at all? I'll look into it.

[thephoenix]

 

[thephoenix]

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/support-software/DaVinci-Resolve-15---Performance-loss-with-NVIDIA-418-419-driver-FIXED-1376/?fbclid=IwAR2n1CWWfxQa71Pxl6luh8c4C0M7qSoPeg5r03ItqPrjLW9x-o-f2e--WHk

i noticed that you have two kinds of nvidia drivers. gamers and creators.

[kye]

Aram K commenting on whether there is a big difference between having an external reference display with BM hardware vs the GUI display.  (TLDR - not really, as long as you have a good quality monitor and calibrate it).

I'm not a huge fan of Aram as his level of technical knowledge isn't the best, but in terms of being able to see colour and comment in it, I think his impressions are probably useful, and considering I've never compared the two it's a useful opinion.

 

[thephoenix]

anyone knows this guy ?

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCty7zz6T5Ge5drWlktYPSlw/videos

is he any good for grading tuts ?

[webrunner5]

Well the guy has 22 videos on grading Resolve. I would Hope he knows what he is doing lol.

[thephoenix]

17 hours ago, webrunner5 said:

Well the guy has 22 videos on grading Resolve. I would Hope he knows what he is doing lol.

problem is there are many ways to do things, the proper way and all the others...

don't want to learn things that seem to work but finally don't when you look at the big picture

[kye]

19 hours ago, webrunner5 said:

Well the guy has 22 videos on grading Resolve. I would Hope he knows what he is doing lol.

If only that was true!

2 hours ago, thephoenix said:

problem is there are many ways to do things, the proper way and all the others...

don't want to learn things that seem to work but finally don't when you look at the big picture

I had a brief look, but didn't have time to go through all of them.  My first impression though, was that his grading didn't seem to look much good.  I know there's taste involved and there's no such thing as 'wrong' but it didn't make me want to listen to what he had to say.

Juan Melara on the other hand......