mattfezz wrote:Some additional icons for when working with remote grades:
Hi Matt!
I've been asking for this for a long time now. I even mocked up some icons.
So I'm pretty sure every modern colourist faces the same problems working on commercials as I do. Long takes, short shots, multiple overlapping timelines (that are allegedly cutdown, but often not), lots of reframes, speed changes, wanting to grade in context, but also wanting to deliver back full plate source res individual clips.
Using Remote grades is really powerful but when you have lots of timelines things can get confused (forgetting to manually update versions in every timeline, different overlapping sections of the source footage used in different timeline etc etc). The Master timeline is a great idea, but in the modern long take era, you can often have a master timeline that is 40 minutes long for a 60 second commercial - too long to be useful, too much hunting around for the bit of the shot you are interested in. The master timeline would have been fantastic in the film era, where takes were much shorter, and your Resolve source footage would only really be the part of the shot you need plus handles, not all the way from "Rolling" to "Cut"! Using a "split and add" workflow can get you close but it's pretty inflexible if things change, or new timelines get added (as they often do in the commercials world, no such thing as a locked edit any more).
My biggest feature request is for the Master timeline to be made useful again, by allowing a preference to limit it to footage used in other timelines plus handles. On commercials jobs you could do all your tracking in here and know you were covering all footage used. At the end of the job you could render this timeline and have all the footage needed for the online.
Or if I'm being greedy, I hope for the master timeline to morph into a customisable smart timelines feature that would allow you to define a timeline with variables (ie Create a new timeline that live updates, sourced from three "normal" timeline, lets say your 60, your 30, and your 15, sort in reel name then timecode order, a split threshold in frames, clips with grade versions stacked on tracks, etc etc).
I've always thought A/C timeline sort and show clip with handles are two very powerful tools that show the way forward - they allow you to temporarily engage with a timeline or a shot in a different, useful way, that you can quickly toggle in and out of.
In that spirit I would also love show clip with handles to have two sub options that can be turned off and on, that apply when you view a clip with handles: remove speed changes and show each clip at 100% speed, and to remove input and edit sizing, fitting the full image to the screen. Or perhaps there could be a master scaling override on the colour page, that functions similarly to highlight mode
I think any colourist who works on commercials would really appreciate all of these features.