Short Edited in Resolve 11

DaVinci Resolve 11 has some great editing tools available to us already. We just recently finished a short that gave us some good insights on using Resolve as an NLE. We want to share the workflow, and hope the information provided could be of benefit to you.

The footage was recorded on a Canon 5dmkii with Magic Lantern on it; shooting in MLV Raw at 1600x960 at 24fps. The footage was all shot using the Iscorama 54 Anamorphic adapter; which results in a x1.5 squeeze (approximately). On set; we offloaded the 64GB compact flash card to a computer multiple times. After shooting we converted the MLV files to CDNG using Chmee's raw2cdng converter on a Windows computer. At first we tried to convert them using the command line tool provided by the Magic Lantern Team. Having a minor stroke, we discovered that some of the files could not be converted using the command line tool. Then we tried MLVMagic, but that essentially uses the command line utility so the results where the same. Lucky for us, Chmee developed a Windows application that did the job perfectly. The only downside of using his tool is that you loose the Lens metadata from the MLV file. This is not a big problem, but we wanted to preserve the lens data so we are able to find out what lens was used for specific shots later if we wanted to. If you convert the files using the command line utility, it adds the lens data to the CDNG files. I solved this by extracting the metadata to a text file; and placing those text files next to the videos for archiving. For those interested in the way to extract the metadata; since the first half of last year (2014) ffmpeg is able to read the MLV files. So you can use ffmpeg's metadata extractor to write the metadata to text files using this command:

find /path/to/videos/ -name *.MLV -exec bash -c '/path/to/binary/ffmpeg -i "{}" -y -f ffmetadata "{}.txt"' \;

We setup our Resolve project to 2274x960 (square pixel), and set all the clip's anamorphic attribute to PAL 16:9. This allowed us to edit the project and preview in it's (approximately) correct aspect ratio.

Then we started cutting and grading. We used a matte of the free VisionColor film grain pack as an overlay for the entire timeline. This would slow down Resolve to about 4fps playback, while the normal playback speed was realtime, that's why we would bypass the timeline's node chain when editing or grading.

As for the grading, we didn't have any lighting equipment with us, and this problem is obvious in some shots. Still, we wanted to go with a washed out 70s look. Here is an example of the grading we did:

Before grading:

Before grading

Screen Shot 2015-08-17 at 10.48.12.png (141.99 KiB) Viewed 2823 times

After grading:

After grading

Screen Shot 2015-08-17 at 10.47.51.png (157.19 KiB) Viewed 2823 times

The dialog was recorded using a Tascam PCM Recorder at 48khz 24bit, using 2 phantom powered Shure SM81-LC mics inside the car, and 1 phantom powered Rode NTG-2 on a booming pole outside the car. We synced the dialog to the clips by creating a temporary timeline and manually locate the clapperboard. There was no timecode recorded on any of the devices to sync to, so everything had to be done manually. The PCM recorder also kept running most of the time, so we had three or four very big files with multiple takes per file. The recording date/time of the PCM Recorder and the MLV raw files did help to locate the clapperboard position in the audio files. When we required the clip; we would just copy it together with the synced audio track from the temporary timeline, and paste it on our main timeline. Lucky for us, there wasn't a while lot of dialog in there, and it was synced on the same day as the shooting.

Foley was done in Nuendo 6.5; we exported an Avid Roundtrip AAF and imported that in Nuendo. As expected, the video tracks could not be loaded so we did a render pass of the full timeline in Resolve to a low quality Quicktime h264. After the audio postproduction was done, we just rendered the complete Nuendo timeline, and used that render as an audio track in Resolve.
We then made some last minute changes in the cut, and that caused kind of a mess going to Nuendo and back again. The Pro Tools round trip delivery feature might be a good solution in Resolve 12.

After that we delivered to Quicktime h264 High Quality for Youtube, and EXR's for archiving. It's a shame you can't export a wav file out of DaVinci Resolve to put next to the EXR's. We've had several occasions where we already did some modest audio editing in Resolve, and wanted to export a single wav file to go to audio postproduction instead of the AAF.

You can watch the short using the link below. Viewer warning: There is some use of foul language in this content.

I think that's the full technical story behind it; have look at the short, hope you enjoy it! English captions are available for the non-flemish speaking

Very cool. FYI, I highly recommend the excellent RAWMagic app (for OS X) for converting MLV files not only in CDNG, but also Compressed CDNG which definitely helps keep the data manageable. For some reason, the Magic Lantern bosses have gotten into a pissing match with RAWMagic and censor it on their site, but I think it's important for Magic Lantern users to know that they have other options which don't involve command line BS.

The small app ML Raw Viewer can also be useful, although the GUI can be a tad difficult to decipher.

Lastly, yeah lens metadata is cool, although since you're using an Iscorama on top of your regular lens, I suppose the metadata is only so applicable...plus depending on which lenses you use, it might not read at all (like for instance if you're using vintage lenses).

Good job, I like your take on the story, it's unpredictable and original.

Could you talk a bit more about your grading process in more detail? I find your look interesting and would like to know how you went about achieving it beyond a before/after still.

Hi Kays,

Thanks for the tip; We came across MLVMagic, and that would have been an option if raw2cdng did not work out. We where looking for the least expensive solution, and I think the MLVMagic app is only free for the old style RAW files. But looks like an excellent tool indeed. I must also note that for archiving the original project and masters, I used Adobe's (free) DNG converter to compress the CDNGs. It did an excellent job compressing them to about 50% in size. That saves me 50% of cold storage. Do you experience any performances issue when directly editing with compressed DNGs?

Regarding the metadata, even when using the Iscorama adapter, it could still be useful. We only used Canon lenses, even the 70-200 L II for the dialog shots inside the car. For example, we could see at what focal length the canon was in the dialog shots. Of coarse it's a "nice to have", there's no real need to save the metadata.

Thanks for the nice comments; it was my very first short. There are lots of things to improve, or I would have done differently now. But I guess even shorts are not released, they escape

I'll try to put something together regarding the grading process. Though I must warn you I'm not a professional colorist, so much of the work was achieved by experimenting and probably doing things the wrong way!

Also; I took a peek at your website. It looks great!

Kind regards,
Nick

I haven't noticed any particular performance hit when dealing with Compressed CDNG (in Resolve) vs. regular CDNG...and I still feel that Resolve 11 deals with editing CDNG better than even ProRes.

The biggest compromise for converting to to Compressed CDNG is that it becomes necessary to drop the 14bit image down to 12bit which might or might not be an issue at all for most people.