Rotating anamorphic footage

I've encountered a truly confounding bug in Resolve that I can't even figure out a good workaround for.

I'm working on an anamorphic project, and when I'm in the edit workspace, if I rotate my footage, the footage stretches as if the anamorphic desqueeze is for some reason being applied *after* the rotation is applied. This of course makes no sense and I can't think why anybody would ever want that. The result is that footage distorts badly as it rotates.

I've tried changing the project Input Scaling and Output Scaling to all different combinations (including Center crop with no resizing). I've tried changing the Timeline resolution to be anamorphic instead of square pixels. Nothing affects the problem at all.

The only way to apply an undistorted rotation appears to be using Input sizing in the Color workspace, which is not terribly helpful, as I have many, many rotations that have been imported in an XML timeline, and those are all automatically applied as Edit rotations (as they should be).

I've just installed the new 15.3 update, and the problem has not been fixed.

Anybody have intel on this? (Especially whether the developers are aware of the problem and working on it?)

Thanks!

This is something I have also stumbled upon and I also can't think of any use for anyone with how it behaves at the moment.

The workaround is the following. Make sure to apply rotations as the very last step after you got your picture lock. Otherwise it will get fiddely and can ruin your precise edit timings here and there giving you major headaches.

As mentioned, if you edit is final, create a new compound clip for every clip in the timeline you need to adjust. After that Resolve thinks the compounded clip has 1:1 square pixel ratio.

I also really believe this is a bug and since the scaling and other parameters within the clip work as intended. Not many people are shooting anamorphic so it prolly didn't got to the attention of the Devs.

The longer the edit the more complicated the matter becomes since the amount of compound clips will just rise as high as many clips you have to correct.

Bump!

One can use the 'node sizing' settings to rotate the clip after it has been unsqueezed to a timeline with square pixels. But I haven't spotted a way to automatically move all edit sizing to node sizing so that clips don't distort.

Blackmagic Davinci Resolve developers - it's hard for me to imagine a situation in which anyone would ever want rotation to happen before pixel-aspect-ratio unsqueezing. It doesn't work this way in any NLE (Media Composer, Premiere Pro, etc), and the fact that rotation happens before unsqueezing means that every transformed anamorphic clip that is imported in an AAF from a NLE will show up distorted if it has been rotated.

If there's any reason to have 'edit sizing' rotation happen before unsqueezing, can transformations included in AAFs please be imported as node sizing rather than edit sizing so that they do the right thing?

How to reproduce:
1. Import a piece of 2:1 anamorphic footage.
2. In the 'editing' room, rotate the footage 45º.
result: oops, it's distorted.

Yes, unfortunately I also can't quite understand this is the case how anamorphic footage is being handled at the moment.

Some might say do that kind of adjustments in Fusion but to be honest I don't open up AfterEffects when resizing or applying slight rotations to the final shots. And since I have the inspector in the editing panel for this exact reason it's kind of frustrating to work this way.

I think it has something to do with the pixel aspect ratio declared in the media pool not having priority to the inspector in the timeline. As soon as the rotation slider is getting near 0°, 180° and 360° the aspect ratio is at the declared ratio in the media pool (in my case 2x "cinemascope") but prior and past those degrees it returns to the footages original aspect ratio of 1:1.

Anamorphic editing is unfortunately really uncomfortable in Resolve at the moment.

In case anyone is curious this is still a problem and also works in reverse ie. placing square pixel footage in an anamorphic timeline. If you try and rotate it you can watch it flatten in towards the middle.

I'd for this to be fixed and to have the last 3 hours of my life back.

Edit: As someone sort of pointed out above a work around is to switch to the Fusion page, do your rotation there and then go back to Edit. This is a fairly stupid workflow but seems to be all i've got.