Resolve 9b3 Pixel Aspect ratios and some noob questions

Hi

Maybe I'm stupid... But running resolve 9b3 here on win and mac and can't help to think that the PIxel Aspect Ratio settings are a bit "non-clear". I don't want to select from a list of names, I want numbers! How on earth do i know that what's hiding behind the names are correct? And how do I even know from the top of my head what the PAR is for an item in the list. I know what PAR I want in hard numbers and that's what I expect to see in a list.

I miss the lack of control and visual feedback of what I'm actually working with. Right now I'm just thinking "Mmmkay, this might be correct, or hey... is it really correct, looks a bit stretched...". There's nothing in the viewer telling me the boundaries of my footage and if I'm lucky i MIGHT see the difference of the black filler behind the footage and the gray GUI background. From Nuke I'm used to have various overlay modes I can toggle between so I clearly see the frame boundary and also toggle aspect ratio correction on and off easily.

PAR settings for the timelines seems a tad limited too? And also it doesn't seem to work as expected. I expected to not change PAR for my footage but just to set up the timeline with the resolution of my footage and set the PAR for the timeline and scale the footage to it, doesn't work with ARRIRAW 4:3 here.

Sorry for saying this, but it all feels very apple-fied. Control removed because "the user shouldn't have to care about this". It might very well be lack of knowledge from my side so please enlighten me.

[Peter Chamberlain]

Hi Henrick, the pixel aspect ratio (PAR) items and their names have not changed for many few years and they are well accepted in this form for grading. I imagine from a VFX perspective you have seen it displayed differently but ultimately Resolve is designed to deliver finished material for film, TV or other deliverables that have quite standard image aspect ratios and standards for PAR.

The source clips however may come from a mix of PARs so we offer the ability to convert those in real time to the deliverable format. HD video has a square pixel for example but if you shoot 'scope' for some shots you may want to convert those to the HD standard.

There are also safe area and title area markers and you can using project settings set the viewer to show a more obvious transition on the final image boundary to you can make sure the image covers the whole area.

There are also some additional PAR settings which are used for managing film scans to help them fit into a HD aspect ratio for interchange delivery on HDCAM SR. These can be reversed with a Resolve at the other end without notable quality loss and its a commonly used workflow for facilities that scan for other post houses to edit and grade.
Peter

Hi Henrick, the pixel aspect ratio (PAR) items and their names have not changed for many few years and they are well accepted in this form for grading. I imagine from a VFX perspective you have seen it displayed differently but ultimately Resolve is designed to deliver finished material for film, TV or other deliverables that have quite standard image aspect ratios and standards for PAR.

Honestly I've never seen that approach in any other finishing/grading suite either. For instance in our Quantel iQ and Pablo PA we can see and set the PAR with numbers and it's clearly displayed to the user throughout the grading process. I understand that I'm coming at this as an outsider but just because something always have been done in a certain way in a certain app doesn't mean that it's right or the best way. It's more likely that the current userbase have adopted to it and not given it much more thought since they don't know of something else... If there were a CUSTOM box at the bottom of all PAR settings I would be a happy alien.

The source clips however may come from a mix of PARs so we offer the ability to convert those in real time to the deliverable format. HD video has a square pixel for example but if you shoot 'scope' for some shots you may want to convert those to the HD standard.

I totally get this but when I approached this and saw the Master Project Settings and Image Scale setting for the timeline it to me felt that this is where you should control this. You set a certain resolution and PAR to the timeline and you tell it to scale all mismatched clips to this. But I'm starting to see how this is meant to work, it's just the other way around and my head needs some time adopting.

There are also safe area and title area markers and you can using project settings set the viewer to show a more obvious transition on the final image boundary to you can make sure the image covers the whole area.

Thanks for pointing me to that one! =) really neat in combo with saving presets.

Will dig into it more over the weekend and I hope I have a better understanding of it by Monday. The next big major issue would be the GUI on windows I guess. It more or less takes over the system and you can't move the GUI to your second screen or float it or so. =/

Cheers and thanks! =)