Face Refinement: Analyze multiple clips at once

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bikman

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Face Refinement: Analyze multiple clips at once

PostThu Jul 04, 2019 8:31 pm

Hello,

Is there any way to run analyze process of Face Refinement plugin for multiple clips at once?

I mean when I'm working on a long interview with tons of same talking head clips where same correction is used and copied across all clips, it is needed to push Analyze button of Face Refinement plugin every time for every clip and wait till it finishes to switch to the next clip. This is very painful and time consuming. It would be great if there is a way to select multiple clips for Face Refinement analysis and run it overnight all togather.

Appreciate your advice!
Thanks,
Dmitry
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Michael Tiemann

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Re: Face Refinement: Analyze multiple clips at once

PostFri Jul 05, 2019 3:20 am

I have this question too! And another question: am I screwing myself by making my Face Refinement node a shared node (causing Resolve to lose its mind as to what cache data goes with what color node)?
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Marc Wielage

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Re: Face Refinement: Analyze multiple clips at once

PostSat Jul 06, 2019 4:04 am

This is a similar problem with stabilization: you have to carefully examine each shot, one at a time, and make sure it's doing a good job. Often, there's a degree of experimentation and "tricks" you have to use in order to make the process work. There is no one-size-fits-all setting where either of these will always work.
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Hendrik Proosa

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Re: Face Refinement: Analyze multiple clips at once

PostSat Jul 06, 2019 4:02 pm

I'm interested in what kind of examination and tricks you apply before pressing the analyze button for the first time that would make semiautomatic first analysis pass useless?
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Marc Wielage

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Re: Face Refinement: Analyze multiple clips at once

PostSun Jul 07, 2019 12:26 am

Hendrik Proosa wrote:I'm interested in what kind of examination and tricks you apply before pressing the analyze button for the first time that would make semiautomatic first analysis pass useless?

I sometimes get better results analyzing from back to front, or from the inside out, or by zooming in to the face before analysis, or by putting a black box around the person's face in cases where the analysis engine gets confused. Note that anything Face Refinement can do, you can also do manually... if you have enough time and patience. It pays to have enough PowerGrades that re-create that same facial shape (eyes, mouth, forehead, eyebags, cheeks, and chin); I have an additional one for neck, which I find often needs refinement more than faces in many "beauty" situations.

Minus -midtone, Beauty, Soften/Sharpen, Blur, Mist, SNR... all of these are useful for skin-smoothing, and no one technique works best all the time. Often, very specific key qualification works better than the default in Face Refine. I also sometimes find putting a garbage matte around Face Refinement helps solve problems with other faces in the same area. I should do a video tutorial on this sometime.
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Hendrik Proosa

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Re: Face Refinement: Analyze multiple clips at once

PostSun Jul 07, 2019 6:04 am

And you do those decisions always before running the analysis for a clip for the first time? I'm nor sure you understand the logic OP is wishing. Instead of pressing analyze manually, waiting twisting thumbs and then tinkering one could run analysis automatically for all clips and then work with "tricks" on clips that need that. But sitting idle behind desk crunching one by one through all clips manually when maybe more than half of them work ok with default pass is just waste of time.

Auto analyzis does not mean you run wild with results, it means you let machine crunch while you can have something better to do with your time.
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Marc Wielage

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Re: Face Refinement: Analyze multiple clips at once

PostSun Jul 07, 2019 7:00 am

Hendrik Proosa wrote:Auto analyzis does not mean you run wild with results, it means you let machine crunch while you can have something better to do with your time.

A great deal of color correction boils around making good subjective decisions. I can't let a machine do that, because a lot of it boils down to experience, trial and error. And there are times I throw Face Refinement right out the window and do it completely manually.
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Re: Face Refinement: Analyze multiple clips at once

PostSun Jul 07, 2019 7:33 am

You don't get the point. To throw it out of the window you must first run it, to decide if it works or not, unless shot is obviously not worth trying at all. And doing this one by one is daft. Lets say you have 100 very similar shots that you want to run FR or stalilization on. In which universe is doing it one by one manually better than running automatically and then refining shots that need it?
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Re: Face Refinement: Analyze multiple clips at once

PostTue Jul 30, 2019 4:25 pm

Fully agree on simple cases.

Now I'm working on a project where the shots a pretty much the same (close-ups with very clear face) and I could extrapolate Face Refinement options across most of them. But unfortunately I need to wait for each "analysis" to finish and keep an eye on it to move to the next shot. It's very ineffective. The best workflow would be to select all of the shots and leave machine work all night to make analysis. Create some king of queue for the shots. I can correct it if needed, but clip-by-clip manual analysis is very painful as of today.

One more thing is to allow analysis go in background and not to block any other work. It would be very nice to work on simple cutting while machine is analysing faces on several clips. As far as I can see, Face Refinement isn't utilising too much resources during analysis process.
Thanks,
Dmitry
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Philipp Glaninger

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Re: Face Refinement: Analyze multiple clips at once

PostWed Jul 31, 2019 12:39 pm

+1 I agree that it would be nice to have things like Face Refinement and Stabilize done in a Batch.

I do a lot of theatre and performance and all the shots are pretty much the same trough the whole thing. I hate it that I can do only one clipsegment at a time. There is no need in this case to evaluate what I am doing on a shot basis, since I will choose always the very same settings. Its boring after Clip 10, tedious after Clip 26 and mind numbing after Clip 104.
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Re: Face Refinement: Analyze multiple clips at once

PostThu Sep 26, 2019 1:13 am

I'm doing beauty work on 60+ sequences of a host of a show. Setup is the same. So once I dial in the look I want. I have to manually "Analyze" over 400 shots. Waiting for each one to finish before being able to do the next.

So yes, a batch Analyze feature is a must. Also, "Analyze and Render" on output would be helpful too. As long as it saved the Analysis'sz.
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Marc Wielage

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Re: Face Refinement: Analyze multiple clips at once

PostThu Sep 26, 2019 2:51 am

brediknight wrote:I'm doing beauty work on 60+ sequences of a host of a show. Setup is the same. So once I dial in the look I want. I have to manually "Analyze" over 400 shots. Waiting for each one to finish before being able to do the next.

My suggestion would be to offload these shots to an assistant using a networked computer and have them do all that in the background while you move on to other scenes. Let them make the judgements on when the stabilization works and when it doesn't. It basically takes about 1-2 minutes per shot, depending on the length of the shot, the speed of the scene, and the nature of what the camera is doing.

400 shots will take all day, no matter what -- it's better that somebody else do that for you rather than doing it yourself and tying up the system. If every shot took 1 minute, that's still 400 minutes, roughly 7 hours of processing time. And it still needs human intervention in order to choose which specific stabilizing technique works the best (or not at all). (Note that it is possible to find affordable Resolve assistants out there without much trouble.)

One potential workaround if you don't have a networked/remote Resolve setup: place all the stabilized shots on a different track. Select all those, then create a new project and timeline with just those shots. Hand them off to an assistant and have them stabilize them elsewhere with Resolve or Fusion or After Effects or Mocha Pro or whatever you want. Once they're done, have them render them all and then bring the shots back into Resolve. If the timecodes & filenames are identical, you can relink and drop them back in, basically as if they were VFX shots. This is a very standard part of workflow we deal with all the time.
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Re: Face Refinement: Analyze multiple clips at once

PostThu Sep 26, 2019 2:54 am

Philipp Glaninger wrote:+1 I agree that it would be nice to have things like Face Refinement and Stabilize done in a Batch.

Face Refinement is another situation where sometimes it just plain fails, and there's no controlling where or how it's going to work. The instant you have an occlusion -- that is, when somebody or some thing moves in front of the person's face... it's going to fail. If the person turns sideways or looks straight up... it's going to fail. There are times when manual masks work better. There's a lot about color finishing that involve good judgement and a lot of different techniques, sometimes by trial & error, and I think Beauty work with Face Refinement is high on that list. Do it long enough, and you can do it with less trial & error.

It's not automatic because it's hard, because there's too many "chaos theory" potential points of failure involved, and because there is a level of skill in making these things work. To me, it's no different than getting the mix right, matching radically-different cameras, compensating when there was a sudden weather change, or smoothing over bad stock footage used in a transition between two otherwise-identical scenes. There is no easy way -- it all involves hard work and good judgement.
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Re: Face Refinement: Analyze multiple clips at once

PostFri Nov 15, 2019 9:59 pm

+1 for an automated batch option. Why waiting for a progressbar just to trigger the next one, when you can have it automated? Would be a welcome feature.
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Re: Face Refinement: Analyze multiple clips at once

PostSat Nov 16, 2019 12:29 am

I kind of agree with marc. I would never rely on such an automated process with the current tools. On the other hand, why not just let the users decide if it works for them? I can imagine a scenario where it could work.

still, would you really take the risk? Imagine one clunky artifact which you didn't see because of the rush.. to me, these kind of refinements are still powered by love, and not automation, i think.

But.. isn't this something where python scripting could come in?
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Marc Wielage

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Re: Face Refinement: Analyze multiple clips at once

PostSat Nov 16, 2019 2:09 am

Rick van den Berg wrote:still, would you really take the risk? Imagine one clunky artifact which you didn't see because of the rush.. to me, these kind of refinements are still powered by love, and not automation, i think.

I have to say, I have had cases where Face Refinement worked perfectly 10 times in a row, and then I used it on one more shot, and that one failed a couple of times and I missed it. And then on a review pass, I realized to my horror that the actor's skin and eyes were flickering because the effect was turning off. Luckily, I caught it before it was shipped, but it caused some delays and frustration.

One answer to this problem would be at least some manual control of Face Refinement in terms of tracking, but I'm sure there are reasons why we don't have it. For situations like this, I just build all the masks by hand and create a similar effect (at least to the best of my ability) and do it the hard way. At least in that case, I can roto every mask if necessary without any flaws.

But manual Face Refinement (like with 6-7-8 tracking masks) also can't be done as a batch process, and each one of them has to be tracked individually. You can cut-and-paste the tracking to a point, which will cut a lot of time out of it, but it's something that still has to be finessed. If it were 100% reliable every time, sure, they could make it automatic and do lots of shots at one time. But we're not at that point. When you do this long enough, you'll realize how often things like tracking, stabilization, and Face Refinement can fail and why the colorist has to stay on top of them when they do.
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Re: Face Refinement: Analyze multiple clips at once

PostThu May 28, 2020 8:37 pm

I'd love to see this thread revitalized. I too would like to batch analyze. I understand doing this on a clip-by-clip basis to ensure quality, but that is besides the point. You need an analyzation to fix in the first place, and babysitting a million clips is a major bottleneck in some workflows.

Does anyone know of a way to get this done?
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Re: Face Refinement: Analyze multiple clips at once

PostSat Sep 26, 2020 2:34 pm

I've been using an adjustment layer in the effects toolbox. Usually I edit all my clips and then drag an adjustment layer across all of them. Once in the color tab I run analysis on the adjustment layer and it does a face analysis of all the lips. Any changes happen on all clips.
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Re: Face Refinement: Analyze multiple clips at once

PostTue Feb 23, 2021 5:55 pm

ctyree81 wrote:I've been using an adjustment layer in the effects toolbox. Usually I edit all my clips and then drag an adjustment layer across all of them. Once in the color tab I run analysis on the adjustment layer and it does a face analysis of all the lips. Any changes happen on all clips.


I just need you to know you've given me back hours of time with my family because of this suggestion, and there aren't enough thanks in the world for that ;)
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Re: Face Refinement: Analyze multiple clips at once

PostTue Jun 08, 2021 5:48 am

Wow! Just Wow! For the right kind of project like a zoom recording single person. This adjustment layer solution is absolutely on point. Sometimes you just need the computer to compute without babysitting it for the basic needs of a simple project.
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Re: Face Refinement: Analyze multiple clips at once

PostSat Jul 31, 2021 7:32 pm

+1 Very much please
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Re: Face Refinement: Analyze multiple clips at once

PostSat Mar 12, 2022 12:54 am

Guys... I figured it out quite some time ago, but I completely forgot about sharing that info on the forum :oops: :mrgreen: Although as I can see, no one gave that hint yet, so that's what you need to do:

Drop the "Adjustment Clip" from Effects (Edit Page) just above videos where you want a Face Refinement to be. If it is a mix between people and some other stuff don't bother and put it along with the whole project. Do the settings and start analysing - go to sleep/go for a run or do anything you want. It's gonna take some time for sure, but at least you don't need to do it hundreds of times on one project. Sure. You can adapt this method to your specific needs. If it is a project with 80% people and 20% other clips Adjustment Clip on the entire project will make sense - then just cut it to the places where are actual clips that include people's faces. If it is the opposite ratio, you can take out those clips at the end of the project, put them together one by one, add an Adjustment Clip on top of them, do the analyse, cut the Adjustment Clip and put it all back.

The way how you solve it is totally up to you, but it is more time-efficient than doing it one by one and looking at % progress.
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Re: Face Refinement: Analyze multiple clips at once

PostWed Dec 07, 2022 5:32 am

Hello - I'm trying to understand the adjustment layer option as I've never used that layer type. I'm running it right now across a sequence of 5 clips with a single talking head. The face refinement analysis is going (which is great). But, once it is complete - the face refinement tracking is located just on the adjustment clip or does it exist in the actual video clip below it? In other words do I have to move both layers around to keep the face refinement data or can I just move the underlying video clip and that face data will stay? Just trying to understand this work around because it seems like it could be a great time saver (in that I can let it run overnight) but I don't quite understand it.

Thanks for your help
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Re: Face Refinement: Analyze multiple clips at once

PostWed Dec 07, 2022 10:17 pm

REALLY could use this feature! also have 100-200 clips that all need RE analyzing because stabilization messed it up, i KNOW these shots work with face refinement and spent hours dialing them all in, just needs to be re analyzed and im not looking forward to spending 3 hours clicking that button... also its kinda crazy that the only suggestion here is to "have an assistant do it". like...cmon. suggesting pay an assistant to click "analyze" when there should be a "re analyze all" button
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Marc Wielage

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Re: Face Refinement: Analyze multiple clips at once

PostThu Dec 08, 2022 12:01 am

EchoroomMedia wrote:REALLY could use this feature! also have 100-200 clips that all need RE analyzing because stabilization messed it up, i KNOW these shots work with face refinement and spent hours dialing them all in, just needs to be re analyzed and im not looking forward to spending 3 hours clicking that button... also its kinda crazy that the only suggestion here is to "have an assistant do it". like...cmon. suggesting pay an assistant to click "analyze" when there should be a "re analyze all" button

It's not that simple. I agree that you do have to do stabilization FIRST before any window tracking (and that includes Face Refinement).

If you can't afford an assistant, sit there and track them all yourself. It just takes time. The tracking time would be the same -- the only difference is you have to hit the ANALYZE button yourself.

One tip/workaround: you can paste Face Alignment on multiple clips at one time, even though the tracking wil be wrong. So if the clips are similar, all the settings will be (more or less) correct. Then, you just bounce to the next shot, hit analyze, go to the next shot, hit analyze, and so on. Be warned that this still won't tell you when the Face Refinement fails, and that's the real issue you have to watch out for.

I just did some Face Refinement today on a (fairly) A-list star, and I ran into one case where the only way the analysis would work was if I zoomed all the way into his face and tracked in reverse. Absolutely would not track in forward, and it wouldn't work without zooming in. How could that have been done automatically? The answer is.... you can't. It requires human intervention and judgement, plus constant vigilance to make sure it doesn't flicker from a bad track. (This was a case where I opted to use F.R. instead of using manual windows, all by hand.) If it's a commercial with 6 shots, doing it by hand is not a problem; in this case, I had 56 shots in a behind-the-scenes video, and basically every face needed some eye-related help. It worked out fine, but... it took some thought and effort.
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Hendrik Proosa

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Re: Face Refinement: Analyze multiple clips at once

PostThu Dec 08, 2022 7:49 am

Marc Wielage wrote:If you can't afford an assistant, sit there and track them all yourself. It just takes time. The tracking time would be the same -- the only difference is you have to hit the ANALYZE button yourself.

What’s the qualitative difference between sitting there with dumb face and clicking a button every once in a while vs computer clicking that button for you?
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