Marc Wielage

On 1/4/2017 at 1:53 AM, Tom Evans said:

Marc, would you prefer the client to shot for B/W in color because of the monochrome mixer benefits?

If they're shooting on a digital camera, yes, I would rather they shoot in color so I could manipulate the RGB channels in monochrome mode. I did several B&W music videos from film in the 1980s, and in one major case, they wish they had shot in color because they wanted to do a color "effect" at one point. But back then, we didn't have the power of the RGB mixer. 

Anybody who wins an award and has an audience has the right to express an opinion -- whether or not you agree with it. If the person has a public forum, more power to them. If you don't like it or don't agree with it, don't watch. 

On 9/10/2016 at 4:00 AM, Bruno Mansi said:

I recently had the chance to talk to a representative from Blackmagic about all things Resolve, and came away with the feeling that you had to do things 'their way or the highway'.

The glass is half-empty, but it's also half-full.

If you pick up a copy of the Resolve 8 user manual (which is out there on the web), you'll go into shock at how simplistic and awful the user interface was back then. Be aware that the software was also about $250,000+ and required another $100K in hardware and the control surface. And it was about 1/10th the speed of what we have today. 

I think a lot of user complaints boil down to, "I'm uncomfortable that this thing is over there, and that thing is over here." At some point, you have to get with the program and stop wailing at the four winds and just buckle down and learn to use what you have. A lot hinges on changing your working philosophy to taking advantage of how Resolve works, rather than complaining how it doesn't do something in a certain way done in another program. 

It helps to have a control surface, to memorize (and customize) keyboard shortcuts, to use a 3rd-party macro panel (like the XKeys), and to know the manual pretty well. Do that, and you can be very productive and work very, very fast. 

I've used 12 different color correction programs over the last 30 years (Topsy, Amigo, Dubner, the Image system, Arcas, daVinci Renaissance, daVinci 888, daVinci 2K, Pandora Pogle Platinum, Lustre, Baselight, and Resolve). All of them have pros and cons. All of them had flaws. Each of them could do fast, billable, reliable work. Coming from my perspective, Resolve is far more practical and productive than any of them, save possibly for Baselight (which is also an excellent system with some brilliant features). Given the cost difference between Resolve and Baselight, I'll gladly take Resolve's limitations for 1/10th the cost. 

As for editing, there are highly-personal choices in terms of user interface and features. I can think of a hundred pros and cons with Avid vs. Premiere vs. FCP7 vs. FCPX vs. Resolve (and also dark horses like Lightworks). I think given enough macros and a macro keyboard, you could do damned nearly anything with Resolve, assuming very fast hardware and fast drives. I wouldn't necessarily want to edit a 20-camera concert with Resolve, nor would I want to edit a feature-length documentary with 1000 hours of source material. But for certain things, I think it's fine. It's certainly good for finishing and conforming, and I have done some light duty editing projects that work well. 

Read Paul Saccone's recent book on editing on Resolve:

https://www.amazon.com/Definitive-Editing-DaVinci-Blackmagic-Learning/dp/0996152830/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1483522353&sr=1-1

Alexis Van Hurkman also has some good tutorials just on editing on Resolve, and I think he has some good things to say (plus warnings on certain traps and also revealing some tricks along the way):

http://www.rippletraining.com/products/davinci-resolve/editing-effects-in-davinci-resolve-12-5/

I'm not convinced that YouTube can handle normal HD, let alone HDR. Unless and until we have high-bandwidth, low-compression 10-bit images, this is all bogus. And it will happen someday.

Yes, the RGB mixer can do some very interesting things. I have had situations where the camera clipped one color channel but the others were OK, so I was able to "steal" some detail from the two other channels and get the channel a little more detail. This is a huge help for faces when those are clipped red. 

I have worked on a few features where camera clipping made us nuts, and this was in the days prior to Resolve (very early 2000s). I would love the chance to redo some of those shots, because I think now we could salvage them in a way that wasn't possible 10-12 years ago. 

It's also dynamite for B&W correction for projects shot in color, because it allows you vary the grayscale response so dramatically. It's a huge, huge help in cases like that. 

I hate the curve because it affects the "flatness" of horizontal lines in the interface. I have done exactly two features in a 21x9 display and my neck was broken at the end of the day because I was getting whiplash having to turn off to the right to see the keyframe display (which I use heavily in Resolve). I don't think it's worth it -- I think a nice big 27" 2550x1440 display is huge and shows me everything I need to see, and then a smaller 19" display off to the right for scopes. I may go wild and get a 16x9 display for scopes at some point, but at the moment, I'm using a crap 4x3 display because that's what we used for about 20 years (actually, 17 years in HD). 

The third display for me is a 40" plasma, probably to be updated with a 4K OLED or something later on in the year when things settle down. I honestly think this works fine. If I was in a big room, I'd go for two 27" displays, split the GUI, and then drop the scopes down and in front of the console, with a projector head on in front. 

I wouldn't try to push it back into log. I would start with what the filmmakers shot with and take it from there, and make sure they understand they shot themselves in the foot by shooting in Rec709 in the first place. It limits the available choices and they just have to live with that. Be aware that hundreds, maybe thousands, of some of the most memorable videotape videos of all time were shot in Rec601 (standard def) or Rec709 (HD). It's not rocket science, it just takes time and effort to make it work. 

I would also tell the client to expect less. Larry David's philosophy is good: "Curb Your Enthusiasm." 

Walter Volpatto from Fotokem has a good method that I think makes sense: when you start a new project, create a new folder just for the Gallery stills and scratch disk, with the name of that project. Later on, when you move on to a new project, you can choose to delete that folder or archive it or do whatever you need to do. 

It would be very interesting to compare the total price of equivalent systems from Baselight, daVinci Resolve, Lustre, Mistika, Nucoda, and Pablo Rio, and see how they compare. There was a time when they were vastly different. I honestly think today, an experienced colorist can achieve virtually-identical results, but there's always certain operations that are faster or simpler in one system than another. 

Resolve 12 is not a perfect system, but it does what I need it to do. Compare it to what was available even 6-7 years ago, it's lightyears better than anything. I think the competition between all the various systems ultimately benefits the users, but Blackmagic has been a formidable competitor and changed a lot of aspects of the business.

I won't comment on the HDR question, but I will say that if your profession depends on your eyesight, get a good ophthalmologist and get your eyes checked at least once a year or two. I also find using preservative-free eyedrops helps avoid me drying out my eyes, and I do that about 2-3 times a day. I just had a 45-minute exam a couple of weeks ago, and I asked the doctor how my eyes were, and he said, "just about perfect... but you need to blink more." Which I thought was funny, because basically, I don't blink much when I work because I'm always looking for that glitch I missed or that shot element that's way in the background.