- Posts: 53
- Joined: Sun Apr 10, 2022 11:13 am
- Real Name: Thomas Wasserab
Mon Dec 30, 2024 3:04 pm
Hi everyone,
I would love to exchange knowledge and experiences about how to optimize workflows when working with remote cutters and colorists when data is exchanged online and therefore should be reduced to the minimum. I will also share how we do it, but being curious if this could be further optimized. For us, it is essential that after cutting and color grading is done, we still have the DRP with the original footage, so if the customer wants further changes or new edits down the road, we can go from there.
I also want to give some context about our business situation, but if you only want to see how our workflow is, scroll down to "#####".
We run a small video production company, focussed on small-scale productions like imagefilms, recruiting films etc. The company is basically only my wife (who does everything from preproduction, directing at the shooting and postproduction), a DOP & an assistant on shootings, and me, fulltime-employed elsewhere, who sometimes comes to shootings as 2nd DOP, assistant, and drone pilot, but is mostly handling all the technical stuff (equipment preparation and maintainance, IT infrastructure, ...) and financial accounting, so my wife can focus on the core business.
This year, we have had so many gigs that we are now in the lucky position that we're not able to handle everything ourselves, which is why we try to outsource post production, finding the right people. That's a big challenge in itself, but we're slowly getting there.
For the last two months, we tried to send around SSDs with all the data to cutter and colorist, which is doable, but we have already lost one SSD and in general, international shipping takes a bit of time (or cost), increasing turnaround time. So we thought of how we could do it online only in order to speed up the postproduction process and came up with the following:
After the shooting, we load the footage (4K XAVC-I, 500-800GB usually) onto 2 SSDs parallel for redundancy, and when getting home, I create FHD H.265 proxies with Blackmagic Proxy Generator. This footage, including the proxies, is also copied to our Synology NAS where we keep all the raw data of our shootings for at least 12 months. This NAS is back-upped daily to another Synology NAS. So as long as or house doesn't burn down, we're pretty safe here. The memory cards of the cameras don't get formatted until the day before the next shooting, so we have one more level of redundancy.
#####
Before we hand everything over to our cutter, I create a project within Resolve where I already set all the project settings accordingly, and import all the media, and proxies are automatically recognized because they are in the corresponding "Proxy" subfolder. Then I export this DRP file and upload it, together with the proxy files, to Google Drive. This is usually around 10-20 GB.
Relinking for the cutter is easy, Resolve recognizes the proxies even when the original files are missing and the cutter can work with that.
When the cutter is finished (after the revision round with the customer), he sends us back the DRP file, together with all extra footage/assets he used (like stock footage, music, SFX etc.).
I open this DRP, relink with our original footage, and then, I duplicate the project, open the duplicate project and delete all timelines that are not intended to get color graded.
Thereafter, I open Resolve's Media Management to reduce the amount of footage for the colorist (who needs the originals) to the smallest amount possible:
Media Management
Entire Project
Copy
Used media and trim keeping 0 frame handles
Use project name subfolder
Preserve hierarchy after 2 folder levels (the amount of folder levels is dependent on your file structure)
Relink to new files
This creates a new DRP with the essential timelines only, already relinked to the copied and trimmed video files. I zip everything up, and upload it to Google Drive for our colorist. This is usually around 30-60GB of data, depending on the project.
Then the colorist does his magic, and when he's finished, he returns the DRP file.
Usually, when I open this DRP file and try to relink to our original files, this works only so-so. Because we trimmed those files down to only the parts used in the timelines, when there are several segments of one larger file (e.g. 035_4328.MXF), Resolve Media Management creates several files with the same base file name, but adds a unique suffix: 035_4328_S001.MXF, 035_4328_S002.MXF etc.
Therefore, relinking with the original footage does not work and this is where I always had the biggest problems, but I found a solution that seems to be working fine so far:
I open the DRP I get from the colorist, and then, I export each timeline, so I end up with one or several DRT files. Then, I open our original project (the one we received from the cutter) and import the DRT timelines into this project - I don't even need to relink anything; instantly, everything works flawlessly.
It took me some time to figure it out, and Resolve's Media Management has its own quirks, but if someone ever struggles with relinking those trimmed split-files _S001 _S002 etc., I hope this provides a feasible solution.
-----
But now I'm also curious about how you do it. Maybe there are quicker and easier ways than mine?
Let me know - looking forward to your contributions!
Thomas
I would love to exchange knowledge and experiences about how to optimize workflows when working with remote cutters and colorists when data is exchanged online and therefore should be reduced to the minimum. I will also share how we do it, but being curious if this could be further optimized. For us, it is essential that after cutting and color grading is done, we still have the DRP with the original footage, so if the customer wants further changes or new edits down the road, we can go from there.
I also want to give some context about our business situation, but if you only want to see how our workflow is, scroll down to "#####".
We run a small video production company, focussed on small-scale productions like imagefilms, recruiting films etc. The company is basically only my wife (who does everything from preproduction, directing at the shooting and postproduction), a DOP & an assistant on shootings, and me, fulltime-employed elsewhere, who sometimes comes to shootings as 2nd DOP, assistant, and drone pilot, but is mostly handling all the technical stuff (equipment preparation and maintainance, IT infrastructure, ...) and financial accounting, so my wife can focus on the core business.
This year, we have had so many gigs that we are now in the lucky position that we're not able to handle everything ourselves, which is why we try to outsource post production, finding the right people. That's a big challenge in itself, but we're slowly getting there.
For the last two months, we tried to send around SSDs with all the data to cutter and colorist, which is doable, but we have already lost one SSD and in general, international shipping takes a bit of time (or cost), increasing turnaround time. So we thought of how we could do it online only in order to speed up the postproduction process and came up with the following:
After the shooting, we load the footage (4K XAVC-I, 500-800GB usually) onto 2 SSDs parallel for redundancy, and when getting home, I create FHD H.265 proxies with Blackmagic Proxy Generator. This footage, including the proxies, is also copied to our Synology NAS where we keep all the raw data of our shootings for at least 12 months. This NAS is back-upped daily to another Synology NAS. So as long as or house doesn't burn down, we're pretty safe here. The memory cards of the cameras don't get formatted until the day before the next shooting, so we have one more level of redundancy.
#####
Before we hand everything over to our cutter, I create a project within Resolve where I already set all the project settings accordingly, and import all the media, and proxies are automatically recognized because they are in the corresponding "Proxy" subfolder. Then I export this DRP file and upload it, together with the proxy files, to Google Drive. This is usually around 10-20 GB.
Relinking for the cutter is easy, Resolve recognizes the proxies even when the original files are missing and the cutter can work with that.
When the cutter is finished (after the revision round with the customer), he sends us back the DRP file, together with all extra footage/assets he used (like stock footage, music, SFX etc.).
I open this DRP, relink with our original footage, and then, I duplicate the project, open the duplicate project and delete all timelines that are not intended to get color graded.
Thereafter, I open Resolve's Media Management to reduce the amount of footage for the colorist (who needs the originals) to the smallest amount possible:
Media Management
Entire Project
Copy
Used media and trim keeping 0 frame handles
Use project name subfolder
Preserve hierarchy after 2 folder levels (the amount of folder levels is dependent on your file structure)
Relink to new files
This creates a new DRP with the essential timelines only, already relinked to the copied and trimmed video files. I zip everything up, and upload it to Google Drive for our colorist. This is usually around 30-60GB of data, depending on the project.
Then the colorist does his magic, and when he's finished, he returns the DRP file.
Usually, when I open this DRP file and try to relink to our original files, this works only so-so. Because we trimmed those files down to only the parts used in the timelines, when there are several segments of one larger file (e.g. 035_4328.MXF), Resolve Media Management creates several files with the same base file name, but adds a unique suffix: 035_4328_S001.MXF, 035_4328_S002.MXF etc.
Therefore, relinking with the original footage does not work and this is where I always had the biggest problems, but I found a solution that seems to be working fine so far:
I open the DRP I get from the colorist, and then, I export each timeline, so I end up with one or several DRT files. Then, I open our original project (the one we received from the cutter) and import the DRT timelines into this project - I don't even need to relink anything; instantly, everything works flawlessly.
It took me some time to figure it out, and Resolve's Media Management has its own quirks, but if someone ever struggles with relinking those trimmed split-files _S001 _S002 etc., I hope this provides a feasible solution.
-----
But now I'm also curious about how you do it. Maybe there are quicker and easier ways than mine?
Let me know - looking forward to your contributions!
Thomas
