Masterclass | Blackmagic Davinci Resolve in a Disney+ feature film w/ Daria Fissoun

so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] so hello to everyone hello daria hello tenacious hi everyone thank you all for being here with us today this was blackmagic designs davinci resolve story i am athanasius camarezzos acting head of sae art and streaming department and we have the honor to have with us today daria fassoon colorist compositor master trainer and author of blackmagic designs official curriculum welcome daria very glad to have you with us today yes and uh thank you so much for having me athanasios so let me come over did you mention i'm also an sa alumna yes i'm sorry daria was also an essay student now alumni and today we will be talking about using davinci resolve's collaborative mode on a disney plus project okay on a film and daria was kind enough to share her experience on the subject and will be here at the end of the presentation to try and answer to any of our questions so feel free to ask anything because it may be a little bit technical and whatever question you have we will be trying to answer it so daria after you yeah over to me all right uh thanks so much for that uh introduction uh so uh as has just been said i'll be presenting a recent workflow that has been developed uh well it would help a lot of a lot of people but primarily with uh blackmagic design uh to use davinci resolve on feature films so uh this is something i've had personal experience with for the past three years now we've been using it on feature films and i will show you the process of one of those films in today's presentation and hopefully you can ask me some questions i really want to avoid this coming off as like a sales pitch like i'm trying to convert you to resolve that's honestly not what i'm trying to do but um that is what we used in the workflow so that's kind of i'm talking from that perspective not to mention that i do develop the training materials for them so that's pretty much my area of expertise my knowledge um and i will also be talking about more general film workflows so even if you're not interested in resolve that's absolutely fine because there's a lot of stuff there that is applicable across application so what i'm going to do is bring up a slideshow because that's always a little bit more interesting than watching a person talking so let me find out where i placed it hopefully there we go i hope everyone can see that yes are we good yeah so this was a project that started in we started filming in 2019 it's a disney plus project uh and um it's called safety it's based on a true story it's a sports film um about a young man who got a scholarship at clemson university in atlanta uh but because of problems at home his little brother had to come live with him secretly on campus so it's a story about that what happened it's quite a feel-good story you know it's a bit of a tear-jerker there's like a love interest a bit of everything um and especially if you're into sports you might find it interesting um so for the first time the producers were interested in changing uh the workflow quite a bit and incorporating davinci resolve for everything so in case you have used the software you might be familiar that it encompasses multiple pages there's about six or seven pages at this point that allow you to jump between different stages of the post-production workflow so they were really interested in being able to stay within one software not to you know waste time with turnarounds and jumping between different applications um and they were also intrigued by the idea of working with raw media directly so not transcoding it into a lower quality video first which is the current standard so uh yeah we we pretty much went into this blind we didn't know what to expect and we um experimented uh as we went along we learned a lot of things so that is the title of the presentation uh using the vintage resolves collaborative mode which is a feature in dimension resolve on this feature film project so here was our challenge was how to use uh davinci resolve for this entire pipeline um if we start in the top left corner uh we have the dam cart which is also known as the dit card digital image technician uh dam stands for uh digital asset management so it's a very similar job it's just a little bit more encompassing uh that then uh leads to us processing the dailies at the end of every shoot today and then that separates into the various stages of the post-production workflow so we have editing audio vfx and color grading which ordinarily uh do not happen at the same time especially color grading you know that usually happens after picture lock but in this case because of the collaborative workflow the idea was to do it at the same time as everything else was happening and then finally in the end to produce the final deliverables for disney plus so let's take a look uh at why they were motivated to do this so i'll do like a quick recap one of the primary reasons was the speed so when you're working on a feature film and you're receiving you know terabytes of data every day you're transcoding it into a smaller dailies file and that turnaround could take up to one or two days by working directly in raw you start editing within minutes of receiving the dailies or yeah receiving the rushes so that was very attractive to them as a prospect it also means that we didn't have to you know export anything in order to apply visual effects to it or to create titles that could also be done all within one application the cost of having dailies generated by another company which is usually how it's how it happens um is actually quite expensive so i did the math for it one day and it was anywhere between a hundred thousand and three hundred thousand dollars per film right that's a tremendous amount of money so that by working directly in raw we were directly saving that much money there's also the added benefit of better team communication because again instead of everything being kind of strong around and just jump forward and you know uh having to like call people or email people you instead have everyone working in the project at the same time in collaborative mode so that means we could actively talk and in fact even without talking we could actually see what everyone is doing what page they were on and what timeline they were working on so that was really beneficial and then finally there was also like this benefit of knowing exactly what the film was going to look like on television pretty much right away one of the downsides of working with transcoded media as i mentioned earlier that's the first thing that happens with dailies um is that it doesn't quite look like the final film i don't know if anyone's you know seen russia's before or dailies it tends to look a bit rough uh so the colors are not quite there you might even be looking at it like login coded which is a very flat look um so you only have like an approximate idea of what the final film will look like whereas in this case you are working with the wrong media that is actively being graded and vfx are being applied so you have a pretty good idea what the film's going to look like on the day that you deliver not to mention that resolve amongst its many export presets features standards uh for disney plus and for netflix it's an imf standard for these types of streaming service deliverables so it is you know industry standard it's not just something that's you would expect from a free software which it is so what is what was the film workflow for us uh step by step i mentioned earlier the the dam cart digital asset management um so this is the cart that was on set uh every day of the shoot and just like a dit cart uh it's primarily there to uh monitor the footage as it's being captured and to provide video assist which is when the director or most commonly the producer comes over you know to the dit person and says what did that last take look like you know and then they play it back and then they discuss you know if it was a good take or if they should do another one so that's one of their jobs but as you can tell from all the equipment piled on the card it's got a bunch of other jobs as well so for example uh the dam operator so asset manager is there also applying a first pull sorry preliminary grade um so making the footage look as nice as possible so that the producers are satisfied you know when they see the image and they're like oh yes that looks beautiful you know so print it and then they're generating a lot which is you can think of it as a color preset right so that's something that will be ready for uh the editor to use as soon as the dailies are received um in their down time between takes which uh there happens to be a lot of so a lot of sitting around and waiting on set they will be doing metadata entry which is just um inputting information about all the media that's been captured scene number take number um camera angle etcetera etcetera uh they might even put in uh the notes that the script supervisor would have written down you know so the director's own notes as they were recording you know on set and then finally they're also syncing the audio to the external um audio device and then finally they'll continuously be backing up the media so splitting it across multiplying it on multiple drives to make sure that if something was to happen to one of those drives there's always backups that's extremely important so oh yes we understand something that there's there's an operator there that makes a primary caller a lot just for seeing the material yes and also synchronizes so the audio and passes metadata to the the to the material to the whole material at the same time yes absolutely uh so oh sorry oh i say wow yeah yeah it says one person uh but when you take into account again you know once they yell cut uh if it's if they're gonna do another take from the same angle then they'll reset within five minutes but if they're moving to a different angle then it could be 40 minutes you know so plenty of time to do all of this yeah um and then at the time uh our onset uh dam operator was a guy called mike mike smallin he was doing all of this inside of a resolve project so when he was done all he had to do was share the project file with us and we were able to restore everything you know that he had created for us and that then takes us to dailies which is where i was involved so i wasn't on set so much i visited them every now and then but primarily i was situated in editorial which is uh the building where you're processing all the rushes as they're coming in so even though the edit was being performed on the raw media that was coming directly from the cameras we were still creating dailies right so we were still transcoding and making proxies not so much for us but for the producers the director executive producers anybody any interested party who wanted to see the rushes on a day-to-day basis which of course happens because they need to know how the project is going so for us that meant again making sure that the sound sync was accurate checking that to making sure the clapper was on point uh making sure that mike's uh luts which are look up tables his color grades were applied so that the footage looked you know not perfect but at least like as close to reality as possible so fairly attractive uh so transcoding it into a format that was uh acceptable for viewing usually like on an online like streaming service that's like private to people watching rushes so it's usually like h.264 like the lightest file it's like youtube um and then sometimes we also made proxies for our own use and that would be on more heavier elements so for example there was a lot of multi-cam shoots throughout the whole film i mean virtually every scene was multicam even basic conversations would be captured by at least two or three cameras uh but with the action sequences in particular uh they had loads of cameras capturing it from all directions so i think like the most intensive one had at least 12 angles it wasn't just the cameras on set so this was like the big game at the end of the film but they even got in touch with espn which is a channel in america that shows sports and they got their cameras as well their footage so it's quite um it was very low resolution it was about 720p which for us you know we're capturing in like 8k that was quite low but it was really good in the film to be able to cut to actual tv footage of the thing that we were showing or talking about now after we've generated these dailies we then perform additional backups and we do these onto ltos um if you've not heard of ltos this is what they look like these are linear tape open or tapes and you might be thinking like wow you're backing up digital film in 2021 on magnetic tape and yes absolutely we do and that is because they have a very long shelf life right so they actually uh preserve the digital information far longer than any other medium that we have access to at the moment so if you have something like a hard drive for example it's pretty good for storage for a certain amount of years but with active use you have maybe about five years on something like this five to ten um with solid state drives um it's actually kind of funny because i did research recently and i got this figure 10 years but i used to hear the exact opposite i used to hear that solid state drives actually had more like one year so i don't know where that falls but regardless it's um in both of these cases you have devices that have electric uh currents running through them with a hard disk drive you have a spindle so you have a moving component which means that there's a lot of wear and tear but with magnetic tape it is just there once you write the information on it it doesn't really do anything it doesn't require electricity so you can file it away and as long as you maintain it relatively well you don't overheat it you don't freeze it then it's going to last you a long time so up to 30 years at the moment it also has an extremely large storage capacity the tapes are maybe about like a big i don't have one in front of me but it's like about two palms um it's 12 terabytes it's also got extremely fast uh transfer speed you do need a dedicated uh tape deck for ltos uh but you know once you have that then it's very quick to transfer all your media onto them and what's also quite fascinating is that they're generational so every few years the company that creates these will release a new version so right now we're on lto8 and that's the um that's the specs for that it's 12 terabytes at 360 megabytes but i think at the end of this year we're all anticipating a new lt09 i'm sorry lto9 which should be i think 18 terabytes storage capacity so it's quite cool when you buy these they come in like a crate or a large box and they also come with like these sheets of cereal stickers so you take those off these labels and you put them on the side of the tape uh once you write uh your data to it um so they're all unique they're all serialized then you kind of flip the little lock on the side you can see there's a little red box on the set on the side of the tape so make sure you don't overwrite it and then you send that off to the storage facility in this case disney's storage facility and they will file it away in a specialized warehouse that they make for these types of long-term storage uh devices and it's really interesting as well because that's all automated so they have like little robot arms you know if you decide to recall something that you shot seven years ago then it will very quickly find it on the right shelf and the right row you know it'll go up and it'll pull out this one tape that you need um and that's in case you ever need to restore the film or maybe 10 years from now one of the actors is going to become incredibly famous and they will want to do some sort of show reel showing their old work so it's nice to have like access to all of this media um what is the cost uh estimating of lto recorder oh that's a it's a really really good question because i think like maybe five years ago they cost as much as a hard drive each tape uh so i think they're probably down to about 60 pounds right now maybe the tape and the recorder oh that's like a few thousand yeah it's it's not something you would just casually own it's not like a vhs so yeah this is an investment um but yeah that i was very precious with the tapes because i in my mind i'm like each one of these costs as much as a hard drive i don't want to just lose these you know like a vhs tape like you can fail that you know you break it and you're like whatever it's cheap um not these um and so in the dailies uh column as i was talking through these it also mentions that when we were backing up to lto tapes we were cloning them and i also wanted to specify what cloning is because it's a little bit different from copying on a computer so copying is when you know you can right click with your mouse and choose copy and then paste somewhere um or you can use shortcuts right ctrl c ctrl v or on a mac it's command c command p um the problem with copying is that it's not a hundred percent exact uh there will be some very mild variation of metadata as you do this so a very obvious example is date created will change for example when you copy and paste and that's not really good enough when you're backing up dailies because it's you know it costs thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce this media you know on a day-to-day basis so you want to make sure that there is absolutely no corruption or modification of any kind so that's why you perform cloning which is a copy but it is a bit by bit replica it's completely faithful down to the ones and zeroes and on top of that when you clone media uh media you also generate what's known as a checksum report so it's not a word we use very common like i think checks in this i only use with cloning but what that is it's a really basic text file like you can see in the bottom left corner um that will verify that yes this file has been percent uh reproduced you know in fact like most checks and reports are even simpler than what you see here it's just one line saying that you know whatever number of bits there were have been replicated completely um usually if you're signing like if you work in a post-production facility part of the contract might actually mention the checksum report so they will they will stipulate that the media has to be backed up within 12 hours of capture that it has to include a certain type of checksum report so the most common type is the md5 um and that's something that resolved does for you as well um in the media page you have a clone tool panel which you can see on the right hand side and it's very easy to just drag and drop your source in your destination so it's just like creating a copy of something and then you click the clone button and those get generated so that's something we had to do every day as well for twice for all the media and then the final thing that we did as part of dailies so these are all things that we had to do before the editor would even look at the footage was to generate multi-cam clips right to sync any different angles that may have been captured so the editor would never be looking at the footage one angle at a time they would be watching the multi-cam clip that would display all angles simultaneously so if i show you the interface it looks like this this of course is not from safety but you know i'm using what i'm allowed to show but that's the edit page in davinci resolve and you've got the source monitor on the left record on the right and in the source you can see there's a nine angle uh shot of the same performance and it's actually quite easy to work with uh on the edit page you just lay down the clip on the timeline and then as you're watching it back you start to hit the numbers on your keypad you know one two three four to jump between the different angles you know so it's pretty much like a like a live presentation like on television they switch between camera angles and you start editing that way all right so when it came to the collaborative elements everything i've shown you so far you could do as an individual user but we also set up our project so that it was running off the same server physically so we had a server room and uh we had um off the top of my head like i don't know how how many terabytes of storage i think like 800 terabytes or something whereabouts uh and we had all of our computers linking to a single project that was stored on that server so we were accessing the same media and actively watching each other in the program so in the bottom left corner is just a screenshot of how it's set up in the project manager i'm not going to take you through that but um that's it's just a fairly simple setup like the project manager remains more or less the same after you set it up there's just a little extra icon of people next to the project name and that's how you know it's now a collaborative project and then on the right hand side you can see that there's now little icons present in the program that show you where other people are so i could always see the editor if they were in one of the bins there's even a little chat interface in collaborative mode so you can tell people what you're doing or ask them to do something for you which i think is quite fun all right so now that we've prepared everything uh the editor was good to start actually putting the film together uh the very first thing uh we would have ready for him is scene stills uh which are quite delightful to set up every scene in the film would have a representative image so let me show you an example what that looks like so scene number three for example is young ray meeting his baby brother we would add some titles in the top left to show the scene number whether it was interior exterior whether it was day or night and at the bottom we would have a very brief description of what's happening in the scene we would then print out all of these scene stills and the editor would uh compile them all together into these reels i say the editor this was the assistant and me we would just stick them onto the wall um so every reel represents about 20 minutes of footage which is what you know the classic film stock was able to contain and uh all of these like shots that you see these are not individual you know takes or video clips these are actual scenes you know some of these would range from two minutes to ten minutes in duration um so this would give the editor a good visual of how the film looked you know like actually stand there physically see the edit uh but also when it came down to start trimming the length of the film because our first cut was about three hours and 40 minutes it was way way like it was almost double the length that it had to be um that meant that they could go into this room and actually start taking out scenes or rearranging their order um and cutting them down so we ended up with i think five reels at the end but yeah that was a very neat part of the workflow you know it's a little bit more hands-on um beyond that uh we've got your standard editing techniques so we would build a bin structure or hierarchy there is not like a rule there's not a correct way to build your bins whatever makes sense to you as the editor is the correct way as long as it's tidy and as long as other people understand what it serves you know like what it's meant to do uh you don't want to have a messy project that is a big no-no like there always has to be organization um you can use color coding in davinci resolve but in this like sample screenshot i don't have don't have it active you can also use like smart bins which is a kind of a search feature in resolve to help you find specific clips um and then we also built templates for the editor that had things like uh like liters so you know the countdown five four three two one for every real and we have like the little blip sounds you know so that we could sync the audio and play back um and then the editor could begin the assembly of the rough edit um so that would be the entire scenes based on those real timelines uh they would start design designing preliminary sound design so i say um they because it was more the editor and the assistant editor i was there as a post-tech engineer so i was just monitoring everyone and making sure that you know things are going well and yeah even at this stage we started to assemble temporary visual effects some of which i was doing for uh audio there was never any intention to like complete that in you know in this workflow and davinci resolve because usually you have a dedicated audio engineer and they will use whatever software they have a preference for um but i believe firelight is yes there is absolutely yes there's a dedicated fairlight page uh but ultimately if you're uh collaborating with you know a professional audio engineer you will use like pretty much whatever they need but we did use fairlight for assembling the temp audio um and the reason why you have to do this is to give the audio engineer and the composer ideas of how the film should sound and feel so for example the first cut of the film used a lot of um like actual music tracks you know that you would find on the radio so like popular tracks that you would have to pay millions of dollars to use but it didn't matter because that version of the film never saw you know like a live audience it was just so that we could communicate to the audio composer this is the feel you know this is the tempo that we want this is the energy is it positive or negative so you kind of lay it down enough for them to have a reference this way we also built foley so you know every time there's there's a lot of like physical altercations in the film there's people bumping into each other and all that and shoving so we put those in and then dialogue sweetening is cleaning up the audio uh recording of dialogue so making sure everybody sounds really nice and smooth there's no background buzzing or noises air conditioning or anything like that so just get it nice and clear so that when you have you know test audiences watching this or you have the director they're not going to be distracted by how bad the sound is you know you want to make it sound as good as possible right and this is a screenshot of the fairlight page so you can see this prioritizes the audio tracks over video so everything you see here is an audio track and there's also color coordination to help you differentiate between things like dialogue there's a couple of i can see foley tracks and things like that and then finally with temp visual effects we were doing absolutely everything that was needed uh from us so any type of graphic that needed to pop up any titles we often have to fix production errors so it's likely that you're using something like after effects for doing this if you are going in that direction into compositing um and that's a great software for that kind of 2d compositing work so if there was visible visible booms visible equipment you know we would be there to clean it up you pretty much want the film to look as clean as possible um even before an external visual effects company gets involved and in fact i think about two-thirds of the visual effects in this film was completed in davinci resolve's fusion right so they didn't have to refer to anyone else um we had to watch every reflective surface in the film and every scene to make sure there were no crew members or equipment reflected very often you get lights and things like that visible in mirrors and things so we always have to paint those out um that's actually one of my favorite things to do i find it quite fun um to see like your work after it's done you know and you show it to someone and they're like oh i don't get it what'd you do you know that for me that's a compliment it's like yes i hit it i hit our shame um we also had uh some actual compositing so there would be signs that were not present on the day sometimes it's just impractical to put up a sign and maybe like on top of a building so we would put those in but a lot of the stuff in the film was done practically like the set design was very very good so thankfully our job is made simpler there were a few instances of green screen when the character is like traveling by bus um so again we had to do the preliminary composite for that because uh otherwise you know you you don't want the test screening to feature like actual green screen um it also gives the visual effects department a good idea of how to line up the back plate to the green screen so they know exactly what the timing should be and then fusion even allows you to do uh quite a lot of 3d work as well so 3d tracking 3d graphics you could do you can use particle systems to make things like smoke or steam or fire or water so if we needed those we could put them in i don't know if we actually used too much 3d tracking on this film i think most of it was done in 2d so this is a sample of a project i actually did for a completely different client but again i can't show you too much from safety i don't think i did any screenshots on that project i think i was very like careful about not sharing too much i'm loving because i'm seeing the the street forest yes yeah yeah yeah are the many of the the mini map on the bottom right yeah this is a ridiculous uh note structure it's quite intense uh but this was for uh like an ad that i did maybe like four years ago and everything like the only real thing is the man sitting at the desk um but all the screens in front of him they're all composited and the big screen in the back and i pretty much had to design all of the graphics so i made the animations they're all like kind of coming up he's getting alert messages so in at the bottom of the screen you can see that's the fusion interface um whereas after effects uses a layer base layer-based compositing system uh fusion is node-based so that's that's the alternative to layers um and it looks more like yeah athanasius called it a tree which is exactly what we call like a tree or with branches and the nodes look like leaves um so all of these represent some sort of action something that is modifying the video signal in a way if you've not used nodes before but you are interested in compositing or you know visual effects i will say that the the learning curve for it is a little bit steeper so it's not as intuitive as layers but once you start working with it you realize that it is incredibly efficient especially in terms of processing power with layers there's quite a lot of duplication um you know like i i mean i'm saying this from experience i spent professionally probably the first seven or eight years uh professionally using after effects um and then i was sort of like almost forced to switch into node based um not because i didn't want to but because you know up until that point i just never had time to learn something new but in this case i kind of like learned it and i'm like oh my gosh um it just runs so much faster because once you do something once you can reuse it as many times as you want by reusing the node signal and also there i believe that a good entry trick to do in to enter into the node 3 compositing mode is using the color page of the mixer absolutely absolutely yeah i agree uh so that yeah the color page has its own little node editor and that's how you build grades and i agree i think that's like everyone's first entry into those nowadays is uh seeing that construction speaking of which uh so color grading is something that we were actively doing uh during a project um mostly i kind of broke it up into very simple steps i mean there's more to it than this but yeah we did uh primary color correction and then also secondary grading if we needed to and we had to make sure that the grades ran on both sdr displays and hdr so sdr is standard dynamic range and that is most regular television screens and computer monitors whereas hdr is high dynamic range and those are still a little bit specialized so not everybody has them but you have to generate two different passes because they have vastly different transmission technologies they have completely different ways of displaying light and shadow now let me ask you something about this i was reading one time about this and they say that the correct workflow i believe it is in the direct manual is to start by working on the hdr and then lowering down to the sdr yeah absolutely yeah so you always start with the the highest possible gamut and then down exactly it's the same thing as like if you if you're working on an image and you know you're going to be delivering different versions of the image for like a poster and a postcard you start with a poster size first and then you scale it down you would never do the opposite because then you're just distorting the data so yeah we did uh the hdr pass so you could i i i have a question like if there are two colors on a project and you couldn't split the one doing the sdr and the other and the other the hdr so i believe that the workload would be someone or two person so whatever finished the hdr and on and then work on the sdr version of the same project because it could it could lead to another color process another color result yes yes so ideally what you should do is automatically remap the hdr2 sdr but whenever it comes to automation of any kind with software is you're kind of trusting the software to do a lot of work that could ultimately be creative or human so the hdr pass was done first but after remapping we did still do another pass you know where we we looked at the resulting footage and we were like well all right we could see you know why it was remapped this way but maybe this highlight is still a little bit too hot so we'll we'll bring it down manually you know so you did still have we had to do like um like a quality check pass a qc pass um and then on top of that like we uh mike smolin was the primary colorist on this project uh but i did the secondary passes you know so after he would go through every clip and he would balance everything and apply a creative look i would then go over everything a second time and make sure that anything uh you know any overexposed windows for example were brought down you know i used power windows for that even though nowadays in the current version of resolve uh there's a dedicated um palette for that the hdr uh grading palette so that would have saved us a lot of time back then uh but we did it the long way around this here is uh the color page and as athanasio said the note editor in the top right corner that's a lot of people's introduction uh two uh two notes this is also very intensive by the way um i mean i could probably do most grades with like two or three notes but this one had so many like different elements that i had to break it up and then you have your grading tools at the bottom of the page this was my workstation um so this is where i was monitoring what the editors were doing i was communicating with them using the monitor in the center so you can see that's the project open on the left hand side i'm monitoring uh the footage uh so i could see that i'm in the media page in this instance so there's you can't really see much in terms of the edits or the colors but that's kind of like the default layout and then the monitor on the right hand side is a color monitor so it's only job is to show you a full frame of the footage and it's extremely accurate um so the colors you know are true to what they will look like once they're delivered um in fact i just realized i am looking at more or less the same setup right now in front of me i also have like my primary monitor in front of me and then i have my grading monitor flanders scientific on the right hand side and then this was mike smolin's setup he did the hdr pass so his is a little bit more intense he had the advanced color panel which you could see in front of him with the three um the three um what do i call them uh color color balls um so he would use those to modify the colors of the different tonal ranges he had the rings around them that he would use to modify shadows and highlights and also in front of him this big monitor that's the sony tricaster 4k so it's one of the few monitors that you can use for color grading hdr it's one of the few color monitors for that standard i just looked up the price it's like it's like 28 000 or something like that it's it's intense it's also really blocky so you can see in the back it just goes on and on it's not like a flat screen tv um so grading monitors are always very bulky uh because they use a slightly different setup in the way that they display the image um the grading monitor i have in my suite here honestly looks like the cheapest monitor out of all the ones i have and it is about five times more expensive you know so it's a funny thing about them all right so that takes us to the very end uh once we were ready to start turning around the project we would first of all address certain individual scene needs by sending them to departments like the vfx department like the audio engineer and we would have to make sure that they were there were data burn-ins on the footage right so this is information about a particular scene or clip so this is kind of what they look like you've probably seen these in the past as you're watching the video clip you have all of this data at the top and the bottom constantly telling you what the clip is in the bottom left corner uh which camera roll it came from in the top right corner the sound rolls that's like the batch of audio clips shoot date scene take um and of course the time code in the bottom right and then we'd also have an overlay you know to make sure that it didn't get shared around um all of this information is extremely helpful for the people watching back the footage because if they need to refer to a very specific uh clip or even a frame in the video they can pause it and they can see exactly the data that they need to you know either send you or ask about um we don't just say stuff like oh about 10 seconds in you know there's a mistake like 10 seconds could refer to like a batch of footage did you mean 10 seconds or 10 and a half or nine and a half so you use the time code fully all right um we would then also start delivering for test screenings so again these were very light files um like youtube style you know h.264 quicktimes but then we would also do the final deliverables in this much more intense uh format called imf the interoperable master format um and we would have pretty much two versions one for sdr and hdr if you've not heard of this uh format before um the only thing we need to know at the stage is that this is a package format so it's more like a folder than it is a file and it is capable of containing multiple media streams you know so with most video files you just have the one video stream and one audio stream maybe you can append like multiple subtitle tracks but that's kind of the limit for most formats with imfs you can actually incorporate multiple video um streams or elements as well as audio and subtitle and that's really the important thing whenever you you know watch videos on a streaming service whether it's amazon prime whether it's disney plus whether it's netflix you know that you have the option to switch between languages and subtitles and this is why it's because when it's uploaded to their servers it's in an imf format and whatever you've included in that will be accessible by the consumer this also allows us to include like clean versions of the video which don't include any recognizable text or titles um so there's a pro process known as localization in which you take a video that has you know no writing on it so i have i don't really have anything with writing on it in my on my desk but like i do have some writing here on this drive um you in some films nowadays what they would do is just completely paint this out or not even put a label to begin with and then in post we would then give this a name we would track it to the drive and then we can deliver the clean version to all the different regions that we're delivering the film to and they would translate it and write it in their own language you could see compilations on youtube of films that have done this and it's actually quite like incredible there's a lot of like um different approaches they do different levels of difficulty pixar definitely does this they have a great localization showreels where not only do they change the text but they actually like render entire scenes differently to make sure that references make sense to local viewers so that's all things that you can incorporate in this imf format which is really really cool and then finally after the film was sent out we would do final backups of the project as either davinci resolve project files drp's uh davinci resolve archives or database backups um we did all of these so i think in the end the final final backup of the film and all of its assets was i think about 36 lto tapes um so it's absolutely massive i mean we doubled everything but it was still you know it's like 18 tapes for just the one oh actually a couple of small notes this was all happening about halfway through covet happened so we were halfway through editorial when suddenly we were locked down we were asked not to come back to the editorial suites and we had to very quickly uh reshuffle our layout so they took all of the editors and assistant editors workstations down to the ground floor of our suite so which is why it looks a little bit cramped here and it became a bit of a ghost town like it was there was absolutely no one in their day-to-day except me alright so i would haunt the place i would watch people linking to these computers remotely and i could see their mouse moving around and them doing their work um and i was just there to monitor things make sure that if something broke i was there to fix it if there was a power surge power outlet then you know somebody could fix it physically um so we continued to work off the server that we had been doing but the editors were now connecting via virtual machines um we used a system called jump but there's a lot of these available online these services that allow you to access a much more powerful machine than the one that you might have that allow you to work on really powerful projects in terms of like media you know in terms of capacity so you could technically work on a small laptop and still edit raw for example we had the editor sending me periodic backups the producers and directors stopped coming over to editorial but they were still watching the movie in virtual screening rooms and then in the end we also had uh the film watched by test audiences remotely as well so this was a live event you could only you know log in and watch it with everyone else but regardless they were doing it at home which is a shame because that meant we never got a premiere date um like it just sort of came out directly to disney plus even though there was a plan to like you know go and watch it in cinema um oh we have a trailer i'm also very conscious of the time uh athanasius i just realized i've gone on no problem no problem all right very good very good we did start a couple of minutes late so you know uh let's watch a trailer i think we talked about the film for a while what does sacrifice mean to you means being selfless committed now our tradition here [Applause] is unlike any other we're family now ray these scholarships are yearly you perform on the field you perform in the classroom and if you don't they take that all away yes coach there's no guaranteed spot on my team it's my brother again baymar he's come ray earlier this morning i got her into a 30-day inpatient program we'll be placing feymar in foster care can i just have a family member watch me it's cool you should be getting back to school anyway i'll be good something in me is awakening [Music] uh-huh wait i'll take them all then they say it stay praying that i wouldn't make it i had to bring my little brother to live with me on campus i should look inside find a motivation may we build bridges and break limits mom's going it's just doing me trying to make a better way when the day's finished you don't have to do this on your own for the future we winning the day and this is our story i just want to leave a page in it why are you helping me uh-huh everyone's family here this is where you guys are this is where you shine my brother and i had it kind of tough growing up [Music] clemson has given me the opportunity to change my life my coaches my teammates these men are my brothers too history in the making been waiting for this your whole life perfect thank you thank you very much talia yeah absolutely it was awesome and we have a first question which is a nice one can we do a great color without the tools that black magic says absolutely first of all i have to say that black magic is for free also you can collaborate and learn about i believe 95 of the program [Music] for free yeah you're exactly right so you do get the only things that you get with the um like the paid version of resolve is pretty much like industry level tools like having access to 8k and hdr deliverables uh there's maybe like a few effects like open effects missing but you know noise reduction is like what made me buy it in the end i was like oh this is great um but maybe uh there they might also be referring to the tools as in the hardware uh like the color panel um and the answer is still okay you're right you're right i'm guessing you know because the tools you know it could be software it could be hardware and you absolutely can do a great color grade without the tools i promise you because i color graded two feature films before i got my first panel i did and i did this in final cut 7 and then i did one in premiere and eventually like i did i got a panel when i realized that it was my primary mode of income and then it justified it and i thought well you know like this i need this the only thing the tool gives you access to that you know that you can't do without is speed right it's your output it is tremendously faster in terms of having access to you know certain behaviors being able to um impact the image in a certain way or do something special with the colors or the shadows no everything that you do on the panel is the same as what you do in the software right there's nothing extra but when i talk about like speed i'm talking you know five times faster seven times faster if i'm working with just my keyboard and mouse you know what what could take me a week to grade i can do in a day on a panel because you're doing multiple things at once you know you're adjusting shadow and highlight at the same time you're building contrast on the fly you're jumping between clips um something you do with your mouse a lot is traveling right you go from one end of the page to the other you go from the note editor to the primaries panels that that that takes so much time with the panel everything is right under your fingers so that's like the only reason uh to have one if you're still learning i would say don't don't worry too much don't stress about getting one same thing with the color monitor which you know without as being like specific uh sorry uh tata's being professional you know for deliveries but unless you're delivering to broadcast or for cinema projection it's not really going to give you um that much advantage like a lot of the thing if you're delivering to youtube and vimeo it's perfectly fine to use your computer monitor i find um especially if it's like a good quality monitor i'm using a benq um i love that brand so i'd say go for it you know don't make anyone feel insufficient um and also asking is the free version sufficient absolutely like i said noise reduction is the only thing i would miss and i believe one other thing is that it can use only one graphic card while the beta can use multiple graphic cards but this has to do with major productions and the five percent of the missing tools of the paid version is tools that 95 of the time you won't use in any production yeah i believe there are some plugins that they it's not that you you don't find them inside they they work you can learn from them but there's a watermark while using them the only difference is that it's just a couple of effects yeah that do that you could still use fusion you could do compositing free yeah you don't need anything extra uh kyle is asking which free version of resolve is the best to use i know there's a studio version not sure how many different versions have been released so that's why i found it a bit confused when i was reading it because i'm like there's just the one free version if you go on the website you will see yeah and a paid version period yeah i think that officially the names are davinci resolve which is the free version and then davinci resolve studio which is like the 300 one um and that's it so free version get to everything also one one other thing that was worth mentioning is that there are several davinci there are several black magic products that are sold having other gifts the the full version of the videos for example the speed editor which is a great tool for editing in the new cut page of davinci is what i i believe is the same as what the the for the colonies the speed editor is for the editor this thing exactly we got one yes with this along with these comes a master davinci resolve master uh studios sorry version yeah yeah you get studio and it costs the same i believe to 280 dollars something like that yeah 299 and what's great is that you don't have to pay for upgrades so you bite the one time i've had the same dongle since version 12. yes that's another major thing because every other program all you need to play to pay a monthly or a yearly subscription or every time you need to pay something uh with the black magic you buy once and so on every other update is for free yeah all right is it fine to transfer does it find to transfer premiere project and resolve to color grade or is it better to edit everything on the same software so uh because i'm a colorist i'm usually on the receiving end of a project after it's been edited most people are editing yeah either in premiere uh maybe and maybe uh final cut uh and that's absolutely fine that is the industry workflows knowing how to do a round-trip workflow you know send it to resolve and then send it back you just need to generate an xml timeline and send all the raw materials you know together with it uh however the benefit of doing everything in the same software is is just the the convenience of not having to export everything and send it across you know it's just like you send them the project file a dra and they open it up and they can start working right away also there are some prerequisites that the editor has to do prior to delivering to the colorist to deliver a correct xml there are some minor things that you need to pay attention to of course but so this is totally fine you can continue following blackmagic of course yeah are log profiles really inferior to raw footage in your experience i wouldn't use the word inferior um they're just different uh but it's you wouldn't really even compare the two because uh raw is not a color profile um like raw is just a completely different type of file format you know whereas log is still capturing pixel data and it is applying like a curve to how the highlights are captured so that you have like a much smoother roll-off and you can preserve a lot more data in the highlights raw does not apply a gamma curve it doesn't try to like cheat the colors it is capturing a radiometric signal right so it's literally capturing light and instead of capturing like one stop or two or three are trying to bend several stops of light it is just capturing you know depending on the manufacturer anywhere between 8 12 to 14 stops of light which is why when you open up this radiometric signal you have to first debayer it which is the process of the software interpreting the light data and actually outputting it into a format that human eyes can understand so that's the point that where the pixels are created for raw footage not during capture um so then you can actually change your iso you can change your exposure your temperature after the fact you know whereas normally in most other formats you have to do this in camera so it's not really about inferior like i still work with a lot of log profiles because some people still shoot it log like fewer and fewer nowadays i think like raw cameras have become so affordable that you know even small productions use them uh but also sometimes if uh like right at this moment actually um i finished work yesterday at 2 am because i was color grading like a fast turnaround and everything they sent me wasn't a log profile because they're in the states and it would have taken us days to transfer that amount of raw data so instead they transcoded all their media into a log profile prores 4x4 file which is not raw it is scaled down to an extent but it's still extremely high quality right it is deliverable standard you can easily send this stuff to broadcast and pass you know every quality test um but it lightens the file size you know so they send it to you and you can color grade off that so that's kind of the benefit of still working with log uh dania let me ask you a question was this the first movie that it was completely done using blackmagic the davinci resolve it was the first experiment let us see so that's a really good question because unbeknownst to me at the time i think there were about two or three other productions using the same workflow i don't know if we kicked it off earlier than everyone else but after like the film was completed i started hearing about like oh did you know that also here and there you know they were doing it too um and this was the first in terms of using a collaborative workflow in terms of just using elements of resolve that's been around for a long time like even before blackmagic acquired them the vintage resolve is used for color correction since about uh late 80s early 90s so that the sort of showreel that you saw at the very beginning of the session that's like all the projects that they were involved in some of them in a color capacity editing or you know fusion etc um so yeah the bits um and oh also i don't know if we mentioned this in at the start of the class but very recently got used on a film in athens so it doesn't have a title yet but i was there as well a few months ago supervising oh and this time we also used all black magic cameras which is quite exciting what was another question i wanted to do what types of cameras were used in the movie so for safety it was mostly red except for like there were some gopros and things like on the live action shots uh where they're like running into each other uh but yeah for this most recent project uh what's exciting about that one is that they did a blind test they did a test footage on about four different cameras they had like alexis they had red and blackmagic just one on the basis of the resulting footage so yeah okay and also the material i believe that the bro material the raw material magic is very easy to be worked with in any timeline it's very soft and regarding the the hardware use it's not very heavy regarding the hardware usage of any machine oh yeah you can you can play bro material in a laptop while trying to do redraw material the same laptop it wouldn't it would freeze in the first training so yeah it's funny you mentioned yeah uh they used the black magic raw format in particular which is partially debated so it's a much much lighter file to play back and to share yeah that's what we were using any other questions no so far so good okay okay let me ask you something else um which is i i believe a great debate and it's something irrelevant but having you here is a great opportunity to hear your opinion on this yeah the the swiss knife versus the overlord uh scenario and what i mean by this is there's a great debate on the market motion driven driven by the the old guard the old professionals that says you could pick a role for example a colorist or an editor and stay on it as you will get a tremendous experience on the subject while being a swiss knife the one that works in two or three or four programs and have solutions and everything will divide your knowledge and experience either diminishing your image to the market as one that knows a bit of everything and not too much of something yeah what would you [Music] think about this what comes to your mind what is the best role of those two yeah so this was a question uh that you shared with me earlier and yeah i thought it was a really interesting one like i saw it i was like ah this is a yeah it's a it's a good one so is it is it better to be a master of all trades or is it better to be a master of one um and i think you do sometimes hear that from people saying like oh you should focus on one thing and i think the distinction is that you hear it from an older generation of filmmakers and i think because they had a different entryway into the film world um i think before digital media you know pretty much the only way in was to be an assistant you know in a production on set or in post you know or uh in the carpentry department or costumes so you you were kind of already on route to becoming a master you know if you were assisting on a particular subject um and that like that is good in terms of like building up your expertise uh very efficiently and very quickly but of course the downside is that you don't really get a good sense of what other departments are doing which is what i like about the the what do you call it the the jack of all trades approach is that even if you don't end up pursuing something you can at least appreciate what the other departments are doing and how long it takes so i think like younger producers are more likely to have like a realistic expectation of how long something will take whereas you know producers without that experience might think like oh they can do it in a day and i'll be like no no that'll take two weeks you know what are you talking about um but it in particular with sae actually i'll say like with modern uh digital schools so like uh i mostly do post-production nowadays but i used to teach in in post-production schools as well and what i find extraordinary is that students graduate with such a range of skills that you could not imagine you know even 20 years ago the fact that you can talk you could tell someone i need you to edit this film and i also want you to do the titles for it and i want you to like do a cover up in one of the shots where you can see the boom and then also design the poster for the film after you release it and do some light marketing put it on facebook that's like crazy you know because back you know 20 years ago people would have just the one job and they would do that so that's kind of like my take on it is it's not necessarily a bad thing to be a jack of all trades but over time whether you like it or not you will probably become a master of one thing you'll find one thing that you prefer doing and probably one thing that people hire you to do which is what happened with me i started with compositing and grading and then eventually i just became a colorist okay we have another question i'm a sound engineer what video editing software would you advise me to learn you know what you're probably thinking like wow she's been talking about resolve for like the last hour like what is she gonna say um all those skills are transferable right so you can learn any software and you probably can't take it anywhere else you know and use it just like that uh like i've used every editing software that's currently on the market pretty much like the big four i'd say like yeah avid premiere final cut and resolve and it's so easy to jump between them i would say premiere and uh davinci resolve in particular have a lot in common i think final cut has taken like a slightly different route for for the interface and avid has got like a slightly steeper learning curve because they're maintaining a lot of the same practices they had since like pretty much yeah i i call it the cave program yeah but yeah there's certain industries where that's still the only thing they use it kind of helps to know it i would say yeah premiere or resolve or probably the most like accessible yes but for sound uh for sound i i believe with protools also is another true industry standard let us say and any other question guys but christopher resolve is free though so i'll throw that out there let's see this happen for life i get it i get it no i get it it teaches you discipline you know it's not a bad thing oh yeah i i always use davinci super and i believe a great thing that black magic did with davinci and i believe they used it as a marketing term they they democratized software to the people that was now we see it and we say okay it's a free version and another program starting doing this thing but at the time before blackmagic yet to wnc as a programmer i believe it cost 30 or 40 000 prior to black magic it was three hundred thousand dollars to buy okay and it was bought like on a production basis you know we specified hardware and everything to work with and now having this opportunity leads people to start opening the minds and saying get out of the logic that i'm have i have to to stand by another person and learn and learn for years and then be dedicated is asking when shooting with multiple cameras is that what you saw so when shooting with multiple cameras but some of them are different brands effect color correction in post the answer is absolutely yes and that is a big part of my job is color matching and color correction you can do two cameras set at the same settings and having a different lens could alter everything in the color so of course this is the truth it's really hard for me to get into color grading even correction when it comes to davinci is there any short courses i could take or seminar that can help me out so uh yes uh i use this by their concern 24 but i still find it difficult to match my camera profile oh i see i see so you've actually got like a monitor uh calibrator uh oh so this is more of a calibration question than just general color grading uh because i was gonna say like there's um like a fair amount of resources online so even searching on youtube you will find like hour-long videos doing like an intro course also if you go to davinci resolve's training page select the official url uh there is at the top of the page there's a series of videos in case you want like a quick uh like overview of every page in the program but then underneath that there's also training manuals um so these are all very like practical books you download the book and then you also download video materials that come with it and project files and you can launch those and as you read the book you can follow along with the exercises and learn pretty much every feature of the software when it comes to color uh color calibration now that's like uh oh thank you it's not just he's posted the training uh link the good about yes is they they they have the materials very very crucial you work on materials yeah i'm trying to i mean it's like trying to think of like who i could direct uh youtube for color management oh by the way that reminds me uh blackmagic actually offers a whole series of free workshops um so they do this both in like u.s time zones euro time zones and like sort of asia and australia and everyone can attend you just sign up and it will be people like me and all the other people who wrote the training manuals if you email learning at blackmagicdesign.com you can ask to be put on the mailing list for these workshops and like once every four months or so you'll receive an email with a list of like when they're coming up so you can sign up they're all free um and you can either do it just for fun for learning you can also sign up for to get accreditation to become like an official accredited end user let me type this in long url hopefully that's correct uh so yeah i've posted that so just send an email say hi add me to the mailing list and you'll be on there perfect any other questions guys okay so daria let me thank you for this wonderful presentation for your time i gotta leave you guys next time okay thank you very much okay silly send your questions to learning about magic design and uh we'll get to that we'll we'll get to you perfect perfect it was great having you with us today really appreciate it thank you for your time absolutely and uh hope we meet again yeah next time i'm down in greece perfect okay thank you guys for having the time for us today bye yeah thank you everyone thank you all right bye-bye bye-bye [Music] hey [Music] um [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: SAEathens

Views: 1,986

Keywords: sae, sae institute, sae athens, sae education, creative media, study film, film, Digital Video, sae open class, σχολή κινηματογράφου, σχολή σκηνοθεσίας, σπουδές κινηματογράφου, Film Class, open class, μάθημα κινηματογράφου, σχολή video, σχολή μοντάζ, σκηνοθεσία αθήνα, Blackmagic, Davinci Resolve, Daria Fissoun, Meet the Pros, Disney+, Masterclass, Αθανάσιος Καμαρέτσος, post production

Id: c1xMcDnj6eo

Length: 76min 0sec (4560 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/The-Bloke]

Daria is awesome. Love her videos. I wish she had time to update her own channel for more recent versions of Resolve. She has a whole series of videos on Resolve 12 and 12.5, and planned to do videos for Resolve 16+, but I guess she got too busy now she works with BMD.

[u/1711198430497251]

I found this on youtube. New interesting masterclass from Daria Fissoun, that have just a little number of views, but it is full of really interesting informations about working in DR.