xml issue from Premiere with stills

I am having trouble with 12.5.5 importing XML's from Premiere. Graphics are coming in at the wrong location in the timeline. Davinci will then overwrite the clips in the timeline that are supposed to be in the same location as the relocated stills. This only has effects stills (graphics.) It also seemed to start a few weeks ago.

It happens on both Linux and MacPros.

my flame operator seems to think that the problem is that premiere is delivering an incorrect framerate for the stills, which is making the math all screwy, as it does seem to get worse and worse as the timeline progresses, and the clips are also a few frames too long.

Just to keep this going here is a grab from my davinci timeline and the premiere timeline. As you can see, the graphics get proportionately more and more off both in length and start point than the premiere timeline.

The xml confirms my suspicions about timecode. <timebase>30</timebase> is placed before all of the graphics in my timeline. Unfortunately, changing that timebase to 24 doesn't help the XML in text edit, as the edit point is still being calculated (I think) at 30fps.

Whenever I get a project that has a lot of still frame graphics, I generally ask their editor to render out the stills sequence as a flattened file, and then bring that flattened file into Resolve for the final. If there's more than one sequence, they make several flattened files.

My guess on why this trainwreck happens is that you need a unique file name and a specific start timecode/end timecode, which you can't get from a still file. I suspect if you brought the same XML into Avid or FCP, similar problems would happen.

The alternative would be to manually drop the stills in as required (or use Force Conform) just to get them in the right position in the timeline. If there's only a dozen or two stills, it wouldn't be that hard; if there's hundreds of stills, that would be back-breaking.

While I agree with Marc about the usual problems with stills in an XML workflow, if the stills are pushing other clips down the line out of sync, that is a new bug - one I've experienced myself just recently. I thought it was a Resolve 14 beta bug, but it happens in 12.5 for me as well. I think it may be related to a change in how Premiere is encoding its XMLs. The only fix I've found is to remove the offending stills, which makes the rest of the XML conform work as expected. I then export the problem stills out of Premiere as QTs and cut them back in in Resolve. Obviously not the best option in a stills-heavy piece!

Robert, it is also seen in Flame, so it is a premiere bug. The XML is treating stills as if they are at 30fps, which is throwing the entire timeline off. Changing the XML tag on the stills doesn't help. I guess we'll have to wait until Premiere fixes their XMLs....It could be a while.

Miraculously, no one seems to be complaining about this on the Adobe forums, so I just made a post:

https://forums.adobe.com/message/9758598#9758598

If anyone want to go over there and click on "I have the same question", it might get more attention.

Thanks.

And Adobe's forum seems to be broken! Fantastic. Here's what I posted:

There seems to be a new bug in the latest updates of Premiere Pro CC2017 that breaks the roundtrip to DaVinci Resolve (via XML) if there are stills on the timeline. The stills end up in the wrong place on the timeline, often truncating or shifting video clips.

This is my Premiere timeline:

timelinePremiere.png (54.83 KiB) Viewed 2744 times

If I export it as XML and them import it into Resolve, it looks like this:

timelineResolve.png (73.32 KiB) Viewed 2744 times

I have confirmed that this is NOT a result of changes in Resolve, as importing into an older version of Resolve does not fix the issue.

In fact, if I just import that original XML (generated by Premiere) back into Premiere, it's broken in the same way!

Screen Shot 2017-08-10 at 10.33.48 AM.png (35.81 KiB) Viewed 2744 times

It is possible that the culprit is in the <timebase> tag on the stills in the XML, as it is set to 30, despite the sequence being 24. I do know that if the stills are removed, the roundtrip is perfect.


This issue is HUGE for colorists like me. I just spent an entire day conforming a project from Premiere to Resolve that formerly would have taken a couple of hours at most. Please fix this!!


Here is an archive with the Premiere project, the XML export from Premiere, the XML re-export from Resolve, and the screenshots above: http://www.lateralfilms.com/adobe/XML_bug.zip