Resolve for DIT work

well welcome back it's been crazy to say the least as we've all noticed and it's really good to get a new video up here on the channel now this is going to be a direct answer to a question we get quite often and it focuses around davinci resolve can a dit use davinci resolve essentially a free piece of software to do dit work and the answer is sure and oh hell no [Music] now in this segment i want to take a few minutes to delve deeply into the key functions that a dit may use for davinci using davinci resolve to be on set and do dit work now there's two areas that da vinci can't do for you as a dit one is backing up files using a checksum and the other one is creating dailies or assets for post now you can do obviously do a lot more than that but that's what we're really interested in as a dit the problem comes in with what productions you're working on if you're working on a commercial production that has production completion insurance and asset protection insurance then you cannot use this and we're going to show you why secondarily as we've mentioned before and i really harp on it in the book and then and in the in the online courses metadata is the new king of the realm and davinci resolve internally handles metadata very well it's very flexible and very powerful but as far as post is concerned this is a no go and we're going to show you why and what the problems are so let's jump into da vinci and let's step you through the workflow that we're going to talk about take you through and show you the various parts of davinci and how they work and where they might fail now workflow is everything for our production now let's look at an industry standard where post is going to be based around the avid media composer software the camera files will be handled on set through davinci davinci can export avid compliant files which makes it easy for post to handle the key things the data manager or dit needs to be absolutely sure happens is that the metadata from the camera and any additional information you add makes it into the avid software but the first step is backing up the camera mags this must be done using checksum based software and it must create a full backup report with specific information that is considered absolute documentation the backups were done so let's jump into davinci and the clone tool the clone tool is found in the media page in the upper left corner you'll find the clone tab and that opens up a new window to the right of the media tool to get it set up click on the add job button the first backup in the queue wants to know where the source files are simply drag the camera mag to this spot it's important to note that the clone tool only handles folders or drives it cannot clone or copy individual files you will drag the destination folder to the destination field these three dots in the upper right of the clone tool are the settings the checksum type is important and it defaults to an md5 which is industry standard now if you have more camera mags loaded or want to make multiple backups of the same mag just add another job to the queue and you can use the same camera mag as the source and then drag it over to a different destination which creates your second or third backup of the same footage when you start the clone tool it will step through each job and sequence now unlike other backup software davinci can only do one file at a time to one destination now if you are working on a busy multi-camera shoot this bottleneck will quickly put you behind now the clone tool does create a report when done and here's the major flaw it only shows the master checksum number and the file it copied no date time sourced location destination location file size etc all this missing information is required by production insurance companies the cloned files are exact copies of the originals which is ultimately what you need now let's move on to the next part of this the metadata i've imported a red r3d file here into davinci and let's look at the metadata created by the epic camera we see the date the file was recorded camera settings and lots more information but let's say the production wants you to add the mag or roll number and flag it if it was a circle take and add the scene and take information now this is easy to do in davinci simply check on the field and enter the data now this new metadata is part of that file okay production is going to edit in avid so we need to export mxf files and aaf files easy to do in the deliver page with a handy preset for avid to save time i'm reopening these files in davinci to look at the metadata notice all the empty fields including what we added i confirm this reflects what you will get an avid this is not good so da vinci can move this metadata around but it does it in a sidecar file if you go to the file menu you'll see export csv metadata now this metadata and this this is a spreadsheet file that we're using here is understandable by a lot of pieces of software when you open it up in avid and attempt to repopulate the metadata most of it makes it over but not all in fact all that important metadata that you added for example the scene and roll and take and good take and camera and this sort of stuff that won't make it over now what is the impact on this with post well in today's digital post world it is not a nice to have feature to be able to have searchable metadata it's required all right so now what happens if you're working with another piece of software post is using premiere or final cut pro they like to have probably prores files to do their rough edit with let's see what the metadata looks like when we export to prores here's the same red camera files exported to prores the metadata is gone just like the avid mxf files so there you have it it's not too encouraging is it again i i think the point to note here is if you're working on a friends project a youtube video uh where you're going to go start to finish inside of davinci you're okay if you need to go outside of da vinci say if you decide to use davinci for part of the process and then go into final cut or premiere or avid as we've seen then it's probably not a good choice if metadata is going to be important to you if you're on as we said before an insured production then you can't use the clone tool inside of davinci resolve it simply does not generate the reports necessary for insurance companies to feel secure that you backed up files and when you backed up those files and what they were backed up to and how many times they were backed up all this data comes out of other pieces of software just not out of da vinci now i will have to say here that i have spoken with when i was doing my certification in da vinci i spoke with one of the head developers and project managers at blackmagic about adding some of these features specifically in the clone tool and they did not feel that it was important or in that pathway for what they want to do with the software this is fine this is absolutely fine they have to make decisions on what that software is going to be and how big of an audience uh they want to have there are far more colorists and editors and uh and and special effects people and audio mixers out there than there are dits so to fix that little niche inside of and problem inside of the backup software the clone tool isn't worth their time i can fully understand that but that metadata issue that's a big one and the way they handle it is a way of handling it but it's not a universal way of handling it there are other tools out there that are much better for doing this scratch is one of them color front is another there's several others when you add metadata inside of scratch adding metadata inside of scratch and also receiving all the metadata from the camera that is passed along in the outputs with those files that you create out of scratch it's not a sidecar file it needs nothing more than to be ingested into avid or into another program and you'll be able to read that metadata now not to say there's not some glitches and workarounds that you have to do but they're very minor and it's not just a total blowout uh where most of metadata is erased so again can you use it yeah you can and i have and lots of people have but i don't use it on anything that is professional that needs to be done right and it's going to a post house there you have it all right good news and bad news for davinci resolve we'll see you in the next episode

Channel: LearnDIT

Views: 2,456

Keywords: DIT, Digital Imaging Technician, Data Manager, Davinci Resolve, Davinci clone tool, Davinci metadata, Davinci to avid, resolve to avid

Id: PF2yw1oX-Rs

Length: 10min 56sec (656 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 18 2020