Dear BMD,
I'm pleading as an aspiring colorist who still makes most of his money doing conform work to please consider the important roles of conformists and media managers. It's getting to a point where I'm just losing faith that it'll ever be 'okay'.
Right now, with 12.5 some really nice preset features were added. Some other things were not exactly improved. Among them, once a render is done and the session is re-opened.. The render list is empty. I'm sorry, but that render list is important. It tracks deliveries and can be used for future deliveries as well. Auto-removing is just ridiculous. I really like some of the new features but I'd rather work in a very old version than have my render list auto-cleared.
The Job list is also very un-satisfying in terms of how much information is given. As for the multi-project ability to render, that's very cool but I never got it to work. One time it actually did render the OTHER project that was queued but it actually neglected to render the active projects queue. It's also very hard and tedious to edit parameters. Even just opening the thing up and looking inside leads to an inevitable save dialog.
On the input side of the program i'm missing one major feature. Something that I would personally kill for, so name your president. I find it hard to accept that creating offline media, especially as it's stored frame by frame (isnt that extra taxing on the filesystem?) has to render in a captive mode instead of background. Also, once the media is generated, there is no icon or indication that it has in fact been done and clicking the generate button again actually makes it render again, even if it's already completed. Something there jut isn't finished.
Scopes in the edit page. Really big please!
And that forced, non-disableable four up display on certain edits that can only be worked around with the wipe needs to go. It has very little purpose and should be something you chose to work with, not something that's stuffed down your throat.
As for the editing interface, too few buttons and too many key combos.
And for file saving operations, there are already some hidden % codes but it would be really great if they were properly integrated in the export window. Especially when working with individual clips, using $REEL $TCIN $TCOUT etc and being able to match that with the media matching panel in prefs would be awesome and massively timesaving when transferring between facilities or archiving.
The media matching panel shouldn't be a preference, but a specific timeline setting. And it should show its results when importing an AAF/EDL because right now it can take a lot of time finding the right settings.
Saving should be faster. I dont know how, but both the disk database and postgres are slow. Snapshotting and saving in the background would be the most amazing thing possible, but that is probably very hard. But it shouldn't take more than a few seconds to save a 10 minute film with only one or two tracked shots and really not that many nodes and keyframes. I get the idea that some of the data is being stored in an entirely incorrect data form creating massive amounts of redundant metadata. As an addition to that, it would be great to allow the image store to be in a database, instead of a very cryptic disk folder.
And as for the color page, a simple button/keypress to switch layers WITHOUT changing timeline timecode. So no more jumping around. Way back when with telecines you wouldn't put this in either so why do it now?
And finally (not the end of my personal wishlist but it's a biggie that a lot of colorists are bugging about).. please for the love of user friendliness, allow users to map their own tangent (or whatever) panels. Why the heck not? It's absolutely wasteful that I can't use the panels in the edit page for conforming and can't adapt the buttons to my own grading style. It would be even more amazing to have that ability on the soft buttons on the big Resolve panels.
That's a lot of wishes, and I hope you know I love Resolve and the opportunities it posts for us wanna be graders. A lot of really awesome things were added in 12.5 that I wasn't expecting but am ecstatic to see but there are some fundamentals that need work to make the program smoother and appealing to both new users and the established colorists who are used to a certain level of performance and flexibility that I do see in other packages.
Highest regards,
Roel Videler
I'm pleading as an aspiring colorist who still makes most of his money doing conform work to please consider the important roles of conformists and media managers. It's getting to a point where I'm just losing faith that it'll ever be 'okay'.
Right now, with 12.5 some really nice preset features were added. Some other things were not exactly improved. Among them, once a render is done and the session is re-opened.. The render list is empty. I'm sorry, but that render list is important. It tracks deliveries and can be used for future deliveries as well. Auto-removing is just ridiculous. I really like some of the new features but I'd rather work in a very old version than have my render list auto-cleared.
The Job list is also very un-satisfying in terms of how much information is given. As for the multi-project ability to render, that's very cool but I never got it to work. One time it actually did render the OTHER project that was queued but it actually neglected to render the active projects queue. It's also very hard and tedious to edit parameters. Even just opening the thing up and looking inside leads to an inevitable save dialog.
On the input side of the program i'm missing one major feature. Something that I would personally kill for, so name your president. I find it hard to accept that creating offline media, especially as it's stored frame by frame (isnt that extra taxing on the filesystem?) has to render in a captive mode instead of background. Also, once the media is generated, there is no icon or indication that it has in fact been done and clicking the generate button again actually makes it render again, even if it's already completed. Something there jut isn't finished.
Scopes in the edit page. Really big please!
And that forced, non-disableable four up display on certain edits that can only be worked around with the wipe needs to go. It has very little purpose and should be something you chose to work with, not something that's stuffed down your throat.
As for the editing interface, too few buttons and too many key combos.
And for file saving operations, there are already some hidden % codes but it would be really great if they were properly integrated in the export window. Especially when working with individual clips, using $REEL $TCIN $TCOUT etc and being able to match that with the media matching panel in prefs would be awesome and massively timesaving when transferring between facilities or archiving.
The media matching panel shouldn't be a preference, but a specific timeline setting. And it should show its results when importing an AAF/EDL because right now it can take a lot of time finding the right settings.
Saving should be faster. I dont know how, but both the disk database and postgres are slow. Snapshotting and saving in the background would be the most amazing thing possible, but that is probably very hard. But it shouldn't take more than a few seconds to save a 10 minute film with only one or two tracked shots and really not that many nodes and keyframes. I get the idea that some of the data is being stored in an entirely incorrect data form creating massive amounts of redundant metadata. As an addition to that, it would be great to allow the image store to be in a database, instead of a very cryptic disk folder.
And as for the color page, a simple button/keypress to switch layers WITHOUT changing timeline timecode. So no more jumping around. Way back when with telecines you wouldn't put this in either so why do it now?
And finally (not the end of my personal wishlist but it's a biggie that a lot of colorists are bugging about).. please for the love of user friendliness, allow users to map their own tangent (or whatever) panels. Why the heck not? It's absolutely wasteful that I can't use the panels in the edit page for conforming and can't adapt the buttons to my own grading style. It would be even more amazing to have that ability on the soft buttons on the big Resolve panels.
That's a lot of wishes, and I hope you know I love Resolve and the opportunities it posts for us wanna be graders. A lot of really awesome things were added in 12.5 that I wasn't expecting but am ecstatic to see but there are some fundamentals that need work to make the program smoother and appealing to both new users and the established colorists who are used to a certain level of performance and flexibility that I do see in other packages.
Highest regards,
Roel Videler
DaVinci Resolve Studio 17
HP Z640, Mini Panel, Windows 10 Pro x64, 2x Intel E5-26something, 64GB, Mini Monitor 4K, GTX1080Ti
HP Z640, Mini Panel, Windows 10 Pro x64, 2x Intel E5-26something, 64GB, Mini Monitor 4K, GTX1080Ti