Remembering the state of Group Pre/Post clip node views

PLEASE fix the "Switching Clips Selects..." option in the Node Viewer so that it honors the last adjusted node in Grouped clips!

It is so painful to have to constantly switch back to the "Group Pre-clip" menu every time I switch away from a grouped clip. I thought the "Switching clips selects Last Adjusted node" option would prevent this, but alas it doesn't.

PLEASE fix the "Switching Clips Selects..." option in the Node Viewer so that it honors the last adjusted node in Grouped clips! It is so painful to have to constantly switch back to the "Group Pre-clip" menu every time I switch away from a grouped clip. I thought the "Switching clips selects Last Adjusted node" option would prevent this, but alas it doesn't.

This is made more easily on the panels that provide a one-button switch to Pre-Clip/Post-Clip view. You could also use a macro panel to provide this functionality.

I see what you're talking about, but this is not a deal-breaker for me. But I would not have a problem for the "Pre-Clip" or "Post-Clip" node view to latch, so that it stayed in that mode even if you went to the next clip. The trick there is, what do you do if you then go to a clip not in a group? So it gets a little tricky.

But I would not have a problem for the "Pre-Clip" or "Post-Clip" node view to latch, so that it stayed in that mode even if you went to the next clip. The trick there is, what do you do if you then go to a clip not in a group? So it gets a little tricky.

This is actually precisely the scenario that brought this issue to my attention. I am grading a program that contains an interview shot on two entirely different cameras. The client liked the in-camera look of one camera, but a large percentage of the interview used in the cut was from the other camera, which looked terrible, and I had to match all those instances to the other camera.

So I grouped those “bad” clips together and did a pre-clip grade. When doing contextual matching like this, I like to toggle quickly between neighboring clips using either the arrow keys or via an Xkeys macro. But of course, when doing this the grouped clip node view reverted to “Clip” mode, which is definitely not the behavior I want it to do when grading like this.

I suppose the obvious workaround to this is to use Shared Nodes instead of Grouped clips, but this is not a workflow that I prefer to use, since I’d have to make EVERY node in the grade a shared node.

Seems to me that Resolve should be honoring the intent of the colorist, in that if the last adjusted node in a Grouped clip happened in the Pre-Clip group, then it should remember and restore that state if they move away from that clip, then return to it later.

In other words, it shouldn’t matter if the clip is grouped or not, Resolve should always display the node graph as it was last displayed, as specifically implied by the “Switching clips selects...Last Adjusted Node” option.

This is still bugging the bejeezus out of me in Resolve 16.2.3.

I did, however, figure out a really dumb workaround for this, which is to make EVERY clip in the timeline a Grouped clip, even if most of those clips don't need to be grouped. Then switch the Group selector in the Node viewer to "Group Pre-clip".

If the clip that was previously selected was A) a grouped clip, and B) had its group pre/post clip enabled, then then next clip you select will have that Group mode enabled by default.

I really wish there was an option to preserve the last displayed mode of Node graph, so I wouldn't have to resort to such zanyness. And before anyone chimes in regarding Shared nodes, I really don't like using Shared nodes for the kinds of things Grouped clips are good for, namely applying multi-node grades to dozens of clips at once, without having to copy and paste any new Shared nodes I may need to add to the grade.

This is actually precisely the scenario that brought this issue to my attention. I am grading a program that contains an interview shot on two entirely different cameras. The client liked the in-camera look of one camera, but a large percentage of the interview used in the cut was from the other camera, which looked terrible, and I had to match all those instances to the other camera.

It's scenarios like this which are why I wish Resolve had Source grades. Then you could match the grades between the source material and those changes would apply to all clips on the timeline that refer to the source clip.

It's scenarios like this which are why I wish Resolve had Source grades. Then you could match the grades between the source material and those changes would apply to all clips on the timeline that refer to the source clip.

Have you looked into remote grades? I believe this is the functionality you are looking for.

I really wish there was an option to preserve the last displayed mode of Node graph, so I wouldn't have to resort to such zanyness. And before anyone chimes in regarding Shared nodes, I really don't like using Shared nodes for the kinds of things Grouped clips are good for, namely applying multi-node grades to dozens of clips at once, without having to copy and paste any new Shared nodes I may need to add to the grade.

While I can see this as a valid request as an option. I personally would not like this if it was the default. I often will place most of my show into a group and do a pass on the groups. Then go back and do a pass that trims each clip at the clip level. In the scenario you are proposing when I went back and did my clip trim pass I would run into the opposite problem where clips would be switching back to group grades as that was their last active state.

I am a huge advocate for groups and think there are some definite improvements to be made but I don't think this would be a good feature unless it had the ability to be disabled or it was a switch that could set such as:

On Next Clip:
Default to Pre-Group
Default to Clip
Default to Post Group
Default to Last Active
Default to Current State (So if you are leaving a Post it will go to a Post, but if you are leaving a clip it will go to a clip)

Have you looked into remote grades? I believe this is the functionality you are looking for.

Remote grades are similar but not quite the same. A source grade would work like a remote grade but they wouldn't be an alternate grade, they would apply before any other grades and would be viewed on the clip even within the Media Pool and the Source Viewer. Ideally they could be created without even having to create a timeline.

The way I see it, groups and clips are timeline relationships that make sense within the context of an edit but there's certain things I would do to footage that has nothing to do with the edit. For example, I graded a film where there was a lot noisy, log footage that was shot with the white balance being entirely too warm and slightly over-exposed. In order to cancel out all the yellow, I had to add multiple corrector nodes with the color temperature set to -4000 before I could begin to recover some of the color. By the time some shots were done, they needed about 15 nodes with a lot of qualifiers. With that many nodes, things got resource intensive especially when noise reduction is involved since I use Neatvideo.

Having source grades would have allowed me to de-couple those technical grades from the actual creative and contextual grades without having to resort to defining groups. I also could have cached those source grades which would have kept playback speed real-time without having to disable grades.

I’m definitely advocating for my request to be a user defined option, as far as default behavior is concerned, because as you correctly pointed out, there are cases to be made for both workflows.

I think the bulk of my request is based on my premise that if the existing "Switching clips selects last adjusted node" option is enabled, then Resolve should do exactly that, regardless of whether that node was in a Pre/Post Clip Group, or in a standard Clip level.

The fact that it doesn't do that, in my opinion, means that this setting is actually incorrect in its labeling. It simply isn't doing what the preference actually claims to do.

I'm just proposing that Grouped clips also be included in this setting. But if you prefer the current default switching behavior, then you can uncheck the "last selected node" option.

Of course this would also mean that you wouldn't be able to have the last selected node available when you switch clips. So unfortunately you'd probably need to add yet another separate preference to limit the "last selected node" option to Clip level grades. It's not great to be overloading the preferences panel with more granular options like that, but maybe there's a better UI solution that would make both sides happy?



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

Just bumping this request after 4 years, just to make sure if I'm really in the minority on this one?

I think the bulk of my request is based on my premise that if the existing "Switching clips selects last adjusted node" option is enabled, then Resolve should do exactly that, regardless of whether that node was in a Pre/Post Clip Group, or in a standard Clip level.

My guess is that the undo and "last done" event stack treats a regular Clip node and a Pre/Post Clip Group node as 2 different things. As a result, it wouldn't be able to do that.

My workaround would be:

1) create a fairly large Fixed Node Tree (say, at least 30-35 nodes)

2) devote the first 4 or 5 nods just to the "source grade" correction that the other commenter mentioned

3) now, when you want to change just those specific clips, ripple the correction for those on the first few nodes.

I suspect the new Node Stack Layer feature in Resolve 19 could help with something like that: Layer 1 could be the "Starting Point" grade, and that could be easily rippled to identical clips. Of course, metadata and custom clip sorting would be necessary to bring up all the similar clips at the same time.

I just checked Node Stack Layers in Resolve 19, and unfortunately it does not remember what Node Stack Layer you were on in each individual clip. At least not yet.

I think the bulk of my request is based on my premise that if the existing "Switching clips selects last adjusted node" option is enabled, then Resolve should do exactly that, regardless of whether that node was in a Pre/Post Clip Group, or in a standard Clip level.

My guess is that the undo and "last done" event stack treats a regular Clip node and a Pre/Post Clip Group node as 2 different things. As a result, it wouldn't be able to do that.

This is a valid nuance that does give me more clarity about how I envision this feature to work.

If you take the name of the preference literally, then the "last adjusted" node could of course either be in a Pre/Post Clip Group, or in a standard Clip level.

But I think what I'm really advocating for is that the criteria should be the "last selected node", regardless of if it was "adjusted" or not.

So if the last selected node was in a Pre/Post Clip group, then it should be able to remember this state, and switch to the Pre/Post group accordingly. There wouldn't be any need to treat Clip nodes vs. Clip Group nodes with nuanced, differing behavior in this regard. All I care is: "just show me the node that was last selected in this node graph the last time I switched away from it".

I'm sure there might be situations in which you might not want this behavior, but I can safely say that in my experience, there's never been an isolated situation in which I said to myself "wow, I'm glad that Resolve works this way, even though I wished it worked the opposite way 98% of the time"

And all that said, I will reiterate that if the criteria is "last adjusted node", then the preference as it's currently labeled still does not perform as advertised, if that node is in a Pe/Post Clip Group!

I know workarounds exist, but I'd prefer for the feature to work as claimed, because If it did, you wouldn't have to do any of said "workarounds".