Bruno Mansi

Unless something has changed in version 5, there's no way of doing this from inside the Baselight UI. Using the F5 & F6 keys to go back/forward only seems to work on Baselight effects on the track you've highlighted, and will 'break' if you try to select more than one video track before entering the effect. I always make a new track above the other layers of video which I designate as the grade track and apply the Baselight plugin. By using the subdivide function in the Pan and Zoom tool, I can create add-edits for each edit on the tracks below, so that each shot will have its own corresponding Baselight effect.

I've heard of this message when your import has more than one sequence contained in it. Haven't a clue what it means, but I've heard this happening with AAFs from Premiere. Can you see more than one timeline? Can you import any of them? I've heard that sometimes you can import one or other of the timelines listed.

That's what I have, although it's an Epiphone copy rather than a Gibson. Sounds like we've got enough players to form a band! - The Loweposts?

The Advanced Media Workflow Association are the people who created AAF. Looking at their website, I can't seem to find much about AAF development but they do list liaison organisations such as SMPTE and The EBU. Interestingly, if you look at the 'Project Owner' for the AAF Edit Protocol, it's Phil Tuder - someone who (by his email address) seems to work for the BBC. Don't know if anyone here knows Phil, but he may be able to shed some light on future AAF development.

I've just been having a play with Resolve 15 on my laptop and on the whole it's been OK. A couple of crashes, but I could never reproduce it a second time around. Fusion works on my setup, albeit very slowly - I'm only getting playback of a few frames a second, and that's before I've added any effects. I'm not expecting much performance on a laptop, but it seems slower than I remembered using Fusion 9 standalone. I don't see the proxy setting icon like there used to be in Fusion 9, so I'm not sure if it's using the proxy setting from Resolve. Nicolas, your problem might be to do with your graphic chip or driver - I've got a mobile Nvidia chip on my laptop (M4000) and it seems to work with this setup. I suggest you try forcing Fusion to work with your CPU only. You can change this by going to the System Configuration settings and ticking the box that says 'Always run Fusion on CPU'

There's always been a bunch of tutorials on YouTube. A lot of these were for very much earlier versions of Fusion - even going back to the days when it was owned by Eyeon, so they may not be terribly useful. See the Vimeo channel... https://vimeo.com/channels/fusion As far as the latest (standalone) version is concerned, there's very basic ones like these... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VrCoB7mbzw&t=534s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNOVvXBPuEM The version that's included in Resolve is laid out slightly differently. There's a Blackmagic video that takes the Fusion node for a spin, but it gets into advanced effects such as 3D and particles pretty quickly... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i-Js1UA1OY Jonny Elwyn has a whole section on Fusion on his website... https://jonnyelwyn.co.uk/film-and-video-editing/getting-started-with-fusion-9/ You can also try sites like Creative Cow and Premiumbeat. Moviola (which has recently become free to everyone) has some stuff on Resolve for those used to working in Nuke.

If I'm remembering correctly, don't you import/export stills & power grades from the gallery? (right-click on grade and select export)

Mac or PC? Off the top of my head... Check the dongle LED is lit. Is the dongle being seen by the OS? Did you get a confirmation 'dong' when you inserted the dongle? USB isn't the most reliable of connectors if you're constantly connecting/disconnecting. I've seen cheese- grater Mac Pros with front panel USB socket problems due to them simply wearing out. Things like dust & corrosion can also cause connection problems, so a visual inspection might be advisable. I've taken to using port-savers on frequently used ports and dongles - that way, it's the port-saver connector that's wearing out.

This is no different to when editors were being asked to take on grading and compositing tasks. The question has always been how much does the colourist/editor take on before accepting that it's better to hand the task over to someone more expert in the relevant field.

Yes, this is one of the limitations of trying to get one piece of software to correctly interpret speed changes created in another. When you consider that you can subtly alter a speed curve using bezier handles, it's hardly surprising. This is not only a problem with AAFs from Avid - I've seen XMLs from FCP which show the same sorts of problems. Your options are to either bake the speed into the clip before export, or use the offline reference movie to tweak the the effect until it matches.

You can see the edits in list form in the Edit tab, but you can't sort these ( by clicking on the column header) as you can if you're using the list view in the media pool. However, if you have an EDL of your exported AAF you can import the batch list from this EDL into Resolve. This will appear in the media pool (in a folder of your choice) which you can sort.

In case any of you haven't seen this on LiftGammaGain, the buzz is that Blackmagic are announcing Resolve 15 at NAB, and it's going to include Fusion effects!

Hi Chris, As promised, just tried this out on the z800 and you're absolutely right! With the client monitor enabled (either through the client monitor enable button or the hardware switch) I can only manage about half speed playback, both on the plugin viewer and the actual monitor. The preview monitor setting seems to make no difference, but as you mentioned playback from the Avid timeline is real-time. Once you switch off the client monitor (or disable the hardware) real-time returns to the plugin viewer. Sorry about the misinformation - I haven't used Baselight on the Avid for quite a while now as I've recently been using Resolve, which IS real-time through the client monitor. Obviously age is scrambling my brain! I know Baselight Editions 5 is still in beta-testing mode - do you have any info on whether they've fixed this in the new release? BTW what guitar is that you're(?) playing? Looks like it could be a Les Paul.

I will check tomorrow when I can get onto the z800 in question - just to make sure I'm not making this up!

Just to confirm, I've just been testing on my laptop. I'm using DnxHD media and I've switched on the 'show playback fps' in the Baselight interface, which opens full screen. Avid timeline quality is at medium (yellow/green) No corrections applied - Real time playback (25fps) in normal screen size and full screen playback (F8) Layer 1 added with Film Grade adjustments - Real time playback as above Layer 2 added with Video Grade adjustments - Real time playback as above Layer 3 added with Hue shift adjustments - Real time playback as above Layer 4 added with glow Added - Real time playback as above Layer 5 added with sharpen added - Real time playback as above Layer 6 added with grain added - Playback now at 14fps So you can see that it's pretty much as I described - i.e. it stays real-time until I add the grain layer, which is pretty much what I expected. Although I don't have a way of connecting my laptop to an external monitor, when I'm doing this on the Z800, I get similar results and the external client monitor (connected either from the Blackmagic card or the Mojo DX) just reflects what I see inside the interface. So if I'm dropping frames in the interface window, I'll be dropping frames on my client monitor

On my laptop it's simply through the Avid right-hand (record monitor). The laptop is equipped with a Nvidia Quadro 4000M chipset and Dreamcolor display. CPU is an i7/2Ghz/4 core processor with 16GB memory. The Z800 is a dual Zeon 6 core with 48GB memory and a Quadro K4200 GPU. Playback is normally on an external monitor using a Blackmagic card or with the Mojo DX hardware. On both machines, I get real-time previews either within the Baselight interface or from the Avid timeline.

There's something not right here as I've had real-time playback on PC systems with no problem. These aren't the latest computer builds either - I have a HP z800 and a HP laptop (8760W) which will do real-time, and they're both well in excess of 7 years old! Can it be something to do with the fact that these both have Nvidia graphics card/chip? The plugin utilises the GPU to accelerate rendering performance but there's not much info on how it does this - maybe it's something to do with CUDA or it's drivers? I'd give Filmlight a call - I'm sure they will be able to help you sort out what's going on with your Mac trashcan.

This isn't my experience on the systems I've worked on. You can get real-time playback within the Baselight interface as long as you don't have too many layers/effects. It also seems to work better when the Avid timeline quality is set to medium (yellow-green).

I've worked with version 4 of Baselight Editions, but unless something about the interface has changed in version 5, this has never been possible. You could place BLE as an effect on a higher layer - covering several shots, but then they would all have the same grade.

Assuming you've set up your UHD project and linked to your rushes, you simply go to the Format tab (next to the Effects tab) and select the Proxy drop-down. Here you'll see the options for 1920x1080 (1/4) and 960x540 (1/16). No reason why it shouldn't. You'll just need to be sure you can link back to the original rushes when you've finished. Re-linking in Avid can sometimes be a bit of trial-and-error with the various settings, but if the proxy clips have the same name as the high rez clips, you shouldn't have any problem. Avid have quite a few options to deal with possible problems, such as ignoring file extensions and linking back to specific resolutions. I'd give it a quick trial run just to be safe - unless you're going to something like Resolve for your grade, and then it'll be the job of the colourist to do the re-linking to the camera originals.

Have you tried linking to the 4K media directly and then working in timeline proxy mode in Avid? There are one-quarter and one-sixteenth modes to improve responsiveness. Might not work too well with RAW, but I've seen reasonable performance on z840s with certain 4K codecs.

The students do shoot on an Alexa, but it's all HD Prores 422HQ which they bring in to Avid at full quality, so no proxies. Given that you're not working at UHD resolutions, I'm assuming your reasons for transcoding to DNxHD36 is to do with disk space?

The film school that I lecture at has iMacs running Avid and they seem to work pretty well. MC really doesn't demand too much from the hardware if you're working with DNxHD media, but they do struggle with linked UHD or imported full rez DNxHR. They've got a new iMac Pro arriving soon for their mastering room, which is replacing an ageing cheese-grater Mac, so I'll let you know how that works when I get my hands on it. I'm sure it'll be comparable in performance to a modern i7 or i9 PC workstation. The big question is one of suitability in a professional environment. I don't like the idea of hanging everything off of Thunderbolt, and despite all the hype about how fast Thunderbolt 3 is, I firmly believe that having hardware on dedicated PCIE slots is going to give the best performance - and performance is what Resolve really needs. Many professional colourists have turned to custom-built PC workstations to get the amount of RAM, drive performance and multiple GPUs they need, which you simply can't do with iMacs. I know there's those who will mention about all those eGPU boxes you can buy to enable you to have two GTX1080s on an iMac, but the laws of physics still apply. Sending high frequency signals up-and-down flimsy cables is not good design. Motherboard manufacturers go to great lengths to keep high frequency PCIE lanes short and isolated on their PCBs to minimise things like cross-talk and signal loss. There's also the question of turnaround time for technical issues. If a workstation goes bad, with a stock of spares I reckon I can have most breakdowns fixed within an hour - many swap-outs only take a couple of minutes.. The HP Z series is completely tool-less for most replacements, whereas if an iMac goes down, you either have to prize off the (glued) front screen to gain access to the innards (not a job for the faint-hearted) or send the whole thing off to an Apple dealer. This is why so many of the people who make their living relying on Apple hardware are desperate for a proper Mac Pro box. My advice? If it's simply for Avid, then an iMac will probably be fine - you can even repurpose your older iMacs as a second screen. If you want to run Resolve then get a good PC workstation from HP or Dell, or even a built system from specialists such as Puget. If you simply can't get on with the Windows OS, then there's always a Hackintosh build. This takes more work in setting up, but there's people on this forum (and on LiftGammaGain) have got really powerful and stable PC systems running Mac OS.

It's one of the odd things about Resolve that when you add layers this way , the 'top' layer is in fact the bottom layer as viewed in the node tree. Have you tried swapping the inputs to the layer mixer?

I've run both these pieces of software on a HP laptop purchased in 2011. It's a HP8760W mobile workstation with an i7 processor and 16GB memory. Top specs for its time, but nothing special these days. When It's worked hard, the CPU fan kicks in and makes a fair bit of noise, but I never really notice any increased fan noise when I'm calibrating a monitor using Lightspace or Calman, so I assume the laptop is not being stressed particularly hard.