Davinci Resolve Rocks
27/02/19 08:37 Filed in: Editing | Post Production
I've become a bit of an evangelist about Blackmagic Designs of recent and it's no surprise why. I'm still in the glow of getting a Blackmagic URSA Broadcast, which I will be shooting a test video with in the next week or so, but I am still blown away by Davinci Resolve. It was such the right decision I made a couple of years ago to invest my time into it. It really does rock.
I have now completed many projects entirely using Davinci Resolve, from MERCS Moonsamy which was edited, graded and sound mixed in Resolve. This film was mixed both as a stereo delivery and a 5.1 surround mix which was just simple to do in fairlight (see this article for the setup).
Today I have finished my first Davinci Resolve Multi-Camera project. Really like the interface and workflow and it did exactly what I needed. The one issue I did have however, was the sound sync. The project was a recording of a theatre show which was covered by three cameras and separate sound recording. Each Act was about an hour and one of the cameras was a DSLR which had maximum clip lengths of about 12 mins so each ACT consisted of 5 or 6 segments. The separate sound has three separate two track recordings per act, i.e from different microphones (just the way it records). The sync by wav functionality in Resolve just couldn't deal with this setup, so had to revert to pluraleyes and create FCP XML exports which worked ok, but it did introduce another level of awkwardness to the workflow. I'm sure if synced timecode was used, this would not have been a problem. I don
Once the synced multicam clip was constructed it was put into a timeline to carryout the multicam angle selection. I lifted all the sound from the multicam clip and inserted it at this level. What's nice is that common colour grading operations can be done in the multicam clip itself. This made it easy to match the three cameras in a general sense. Clip level tweets to grading were then done at the timeline level as was all the sound. There is a function to flatten the multicam edits but I don't really understand why you would want to do that. By keeping the multicam timeline intact with the sound at the timeline level means that it's trivial to change angles at a later date or alter edit points if need be.
There is another absolutely beautiful feature in Davinci Resolve when working with multicam clips or compound clips and that is the timeline overlay in the viewer. This shows you the underlying timecode of the clips which means when you open them you can navigate to the correct point quickly and easily. It would be even nicer if when you right click and select "open in timeline" that it opens the multicam clip or the compound clip at the place where the cursor was positioned in the higher timeline, but the overlays are very useful and allow you to audit codes at the timeline level.
Today I have finished my first Davinci Resolve Multi-Camera project. Really like the interface and workflow and it did exactly what I needed. The one issue I did have however, was the sound sync. The project was a recording of a theatre show which was covered by three cameras and separate sound recording. Each Act was about an hour and one of the cameras was a DSLR which had maximum clip lengths of about 12 mins so each ACT consisted of 5 or 6 segments. The separate sound has three separate two track recordings per act, i.e from different microphones (just the way it records). The sync by wav functionality in Resolve just couldn't deal with this setup, so had to revert to pluraleyes and create FCP XML exports which worked ok, but it did introduce another level of awkwardness to the workflow. I'm sure if synced timecode was used, this would not have been a problem. I don
Once the synced multicam clip was constructed it was put into a timeline to carryout the multicam angle selection. I lifted all the sound from the multicam clip and inserted it at this level. What's nice is that common colour grading operations can be done in the multicam clip itself. This made it easy to match the three cameras in a general sense. Clip level tweets to grading were then done at the timeline level as was all the sound. There is a function to flatten the multicam edits but I don't really understand why you would want to do that. By keeping the multicam timeline intact with the sound at the timeline level means that it's trivial to change angles at a later date or alter edit points if need be.
There is another absolutely beautiful feature in Davinci Resolve when working with multicam clips or compound clips and that is the timeline overlay in the viewer. This shows you the underlying timecode of the clips which means when you open them you can navigate to the correct point quickly and easily. It would be even nicer if when you right click and select "open in timeline" that it opens the multicam clip or the compound clip at the place where the cursor was positioned in the higher timeline, but the overlays are very useful and allow you to audit codes at the timeline level.
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