Anyone going start to end with Resolve for large projects

[Will Duncan]

I'm just curious if anyone is doing anything large with edit to color in Resolve. I see a ton of people mentioning how much they love it, but their example projects are small, a few TBs of media or 30 second commercial work with a few cuts and simple audio tracks. Is anyone doing TV shows or anything long-form? Multicam / sports / documentary work with a lot of high-res / slow motion footage thrown in the mix?

I'm extremely intrigued by Resolve 16. If the collaborative editing works anywhere close to as well as advertised, and it won't buckle under a big media load/import, it looks like it would save a lot of time. Adobe teams seems like a mystery / black box and I've yet to meet one person who has actually used it on a big production.

I spent the last few days doing a lot of research and didn't find any real world examples of Resolve as an NLE for anything complex. But it looks as if the last pieces to the puzzle were added in Resolve 16, and 15 wasn't quite really to make that leap into a complex workflow yet.

I've used it for color many times, but I've never really looked at it seriously as a start to end solution until recently.

 

[Joshua O. Miller]

Yea we use it for feature films, 30min tv shows and we have one large collaborative project which is referencing over 60tb of footage in one project from a synology server. It’s the only NLE that does everything we need.

 

[Brian Timmons]

This award winning feature length documentary "The River & The Wall" was cut in Resolve.

To me doc and reality are genres that stress post production the most in terms of data/footage management, organization, and workflow. If Resolve handled this film I imagine it should do well for any type of editing.

I'm still an FCP X guy (metadata and keyword tools are on a different level) but have huge respect for BMD's Resolve.

Brian Timmons
BRITIM/MEDIA

 

[Marc Wielage]

If they figured out a way to cram 400 hours of doco footage into Resolve for The River and the Wall, I am extremely impressed.

If you look back at what Walter Murch did on Cold Mountain and similar editorial experiments, their secret was basically they had five or six systems up and running to augment what the editor was doing. If you can do that with shared storage and have several assistants, it can work very well. And it's pretty much mandatory with a huge documentary like this one.

 

[Michael Tiemann]

I'm just curious if anyone is doing anything large with edit to color in Resolve. I see a ton of people mentioning how much they love it, but their example projects are small, a few TBs of media or 30 second commercial work with a few cuts and simple audio tracks. Is anyone doing TV shows or anything long-form? Multicam / sports / documentary work with a lot of high-res / slow motion footage thrown in the mix?

I'm extremely intrigued by Resolve 16. If the collaborative editing works anywhere close to as well as advertised, and it won't buckle under a big media load/import, it looks like it would save a lot of time. Adobe teams seems like a mystery / black box and I've yet to meet one person who has actually used it on a big production.

I spent the last few days doing a lot of research and didn't find any real world examples of Resolve as an NLE for anything complex. But it looks as if the last pieces to the puzzle were added in Resolve 16, and 15 wasn't quite really to make that leap into a complex workflow yet.

I've used it for color many times, but I've never really looked at it seriously as a start to end solution until recently.

I took the plunge with a project that has 50+ hours of multicam R3D footage plus GH5 and GH4 footage to boot. I think it weighs in at around 37TB. Resolve is not the rate-limiting step. I've been working with 16 since the beta was announced, and I have to say this: the BMD team fix bugs in subsequent beta versions faster than you can say "what's the work-around in Premiere?" There is a lot to learn, and and I know I don't know half of what it can do right now, but with a Red Rocket-X connected to my 10-core iMacPro, it's quite OK for my 8K footage. I can only imagine how much fun it will be when I have hardware that really works--either a new new Mac Pro or a machine with some nVidia GPUs.

Because I do a lot of multi-cam stuff, I'm not sure that the Cut page is ever going to be a thing for me. If I were shooting single-cam projects, it would rock my world.

 

[Travis Edwards]

the BMD team fix bugs in subsequent beta versions faster than you can say "what's the work-around in Premiere?"

This is the reason I've also switched over to Resolve for all my projects, including a feature-length doc. Every new version is a legitimate upgrade, instead of just a new coat of paint like Premiere seems to be.

 

[Will Duncan]

Thanks for the responses! It's encouraging to read others who are doing sizable projects in Resolve.

We do a lot of 30 min to 1 hr sports post-shows that often have very fast turnaround times. Typically we're at 40 to 100TB of mixed media for a project but these days a majority of it is 8K R3D which has been a bit of a logistical nightmare.

I've come across my fair share of Adobe bugs over the years, nothing is perfect and we hit some petty edge case issues that we rarely got a response from Adobe on. With time, it feels like the workflow is holding us back, and we've lost days battling strange issues that we couldn't really ever find a solution for. It's refreshing seeing how active Resolve development is over the last two years. The early betas seem particularly unstable but that's what a beta is typically. At least the forum is active and you can get some sort of response from people who work there. I think the last time I was on support with Adobe they told me it doesn't support shared network volumes that I would have to move the media locally. I actually laughed out loud on the phone and hung up.

I've only been in Resolve heavily for a few weeks and I haven't touched multicam / proxies or any complex audio as of yet. I'm just learning the basics of the editor and testing out shared / collaborative workflow and reporting back to the rest of the team to see if it is really going to shave off time for us and actually be a worthwhile switch. Just being able to do edit and color at the same time is a huge win for us. For the most part it feels pretty natural to work in. If I have any complain it's that a few settings are hidden in some weird places, but eventually that will form in my muscle memory.

Is anyone working with remote editors / proxies heavily? My team is geographically dispersed and for some of the bigger projects it's more effective to fly to the same place when the deadline is tight. I'd love to cook up some sort of sync'd proxy server / volume solution that was trustworthy, especially if low-res proxies are an option.

 

[Marc Wielage]

I'm just curious if anyone is doing anything large with edit to color in Resolve. I see a ton of people mentioning how much they love it, but their example projects are small, a few TBs of media or 30 second commercial work with a few cuts and simple audio tracks. Is anyone doing TV shows or anything long-form? Multicam / sports / documentary work with a lot of high-res / slow motion footage thrown in the mix?

This guy just popped up on the BMD Support Forum and is apparently editing a massive documentary completely in Resolve, and he had some thoughts on the process:

https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=93375

I think the way to do it is to go about it the way Walter Murch did Cold Mountain in FCP some years ago: set up five different workstations running the same editing software, use shared NAS drives. Have one system for dailies/transcodes, one system for importing and setting up bins, one main system for actual cutting, one secondary system for additional scenes (montages, titles, VFX, etc.), and then a final system just for exporting and deliverables. Only the main system need be a big computer; the rest could be iMacs or low-cost modern PCs and laptops that have enough system speed and GPU power to get the job done.

Robbie Carman of MixingLight.com recently posted a video about a documentary project that accessed 400 hours of material, all cut in Resolve. I will hunt around and see where this video is located.

 

[Bob Zelin]

Hi Michael -
you DO know that you can use a Win 10 PC with an RTX-2080ti to run Resolve, and this will render faster than your iMac Pro with your old outdated RedRocket-X.
And you probably already know that the new Mac Pro will NOT run NVidia GPU's - only AMD GPU cards (and I will faint if YOU are that person that purchases one).

Bob Zelin