Neil Garner

Marc, Thanks for your help... that is just what I needed to know. Your other ideas regarding how to proceed are also interesting ,however, the big issue with this project is that it is being done on a shoestring budget because it is being funded by an overseas charity with very limited means! Resolve is free to use which is why we chose it! Actually the transfers will all be done using a projector and camera.... (not very professional, I know...), but when the nearest telecine or scanner is 'n' thousand miles away, it makes the whole issue all the more taxing. In addition, the government who own this film, do not want it taken from the country! The content is all newsreel so already has the issue of limited or no lighting control and having to deal with very dark skin tones in very bright conditions, creating very deep shadows and high contrast, so even in its' heyday, it would have been far from ideal material. Realistically, we need to train locals to do this work and provide a limited and manageable workflow which costs nothing more than local pay rates.... so the task is a challenging one. However, I believe that even if not perfect, we will be able to achieve a good deal in terms of saving the content and if a small quantity of it is required for broadcast at some future point, it can always be fully restored then. My feeling at this point is that anything which makes it more viewable and therefore allows a wide audience to see it will be as much as we can manage at this point. Once again thanks for your help...

I am a broadcast engineer/trainer working to help with the workflow of an archive restoration project in Africa. Part of this includes the rescue and restoration of a large number of newsreel films from the 50's - 70's. The film has been stored upright for the last 40 years and is suffering from a number of issues because of this, along with the hot climate and moisture/vinegar issues. Even the best preserved film has a cyclic colour grading issue which is related to the orientation of the spool and the damage inflicted during storage. Result the film has a strong alternating yellow/lilac lift cast every 2 or 3 seconds. At this point I need to point out that i am new to Resolve and am not a colourist.... although I have worked with Vision Control and some basic post production grading tools over many years and started my career 30+ years ago in Telecine where I did grade film... However, with Resolve I am very much a novice.... We have been using auto key-framing to gently move from each colour correction state to the next, which works well but this is incredibly laborious as each new grade and auto keyframe needs to be created individually. Does anyone know how to copy an individual keyframes grading attributes to another keyframe in the same shot/node... because this is effectively what we need to deal with across the entirety of each roll? My guess is that this would make an excellent starting point to then follow on with a finer tune. I have found I can copy settings from one shot to another or one node to another, but at present cannot copy from a key-frame to another (next but one) keyframe.