Does anyone have success with Resolve to Avid?!

I have worked on a few Avid originated projects and they're always a pain. With much effort I'm able to get my projects from Avid into Resolve but I have yet to find a reliable method of sending graded material back to Avid for post grade conform.

(1) My exported AAFs don't represent the graded sequence correctly. In an extreme example, I deleted all but a few clips from my session, rendered those clips and exported an AAF of the session. When I imported that AAF into Avid it recreated the entire original sequence.

(2) The only way I've ever gotten media to relink back in Avid is to render the master session. Using this method, there's an "identical" graded piece of media for each ungraded piece of media. However this workflow doesn't allow you to grade clips from the same master clip differently. If a shot is reused 5 times in a sequence it must have the same grade throughout.

If anyone has a real workflow I'm all ears.

roman hankewycz
harbor film company // colorist

I do round trips between Avid and Resolve all the time with no problems.

To relink footage in Avid, the footage (both ungraded and graded) must belong to the same Tape. Are you doing that?

Here's a video showing the steps:
http://vimeo.com/40560865

John,
What if you run into this problem. The pre-graded media had tape names in Avid but when I bring the graded media back into Avid it has different tape names like "msmMMOB.03" I don't understand why the tape names changed. More importantly, I don't know how to proceed given the discrepancy.

Also, do you have any insight into the issue I described which is what do you do when you have multiple instances of a shot in the sequence that you need to grade differently?

And what do you do about AAF exports? I usually need to do a lot of manual adjustments to the edit in Resolve so how do you get those adjustments to translate back to Avid?

Any info would be appreciated.
Thank you,

roman hankewycz
harbor film company // colorist

I've spoken to many people about Avid/Resolve workflow and when I ask the questions I'm interested in I keep getting the same blank faces.

The tutorial that was listed earlier in the thread is nice but it isn't applicable to real-world situations. When do you ever find yourself in a situation where all the media is from one source, each clip is used only once, and you can freely change tape names? The stuff I work on is never as neat as the situation proposed in the tutorial or any workflow description I've come across. Projects have various source media; some with tape names, some without. Sometimes the edit changes during grade, and you need those changes to be sent back to Avid. The same clips are used multiple times throughout the sequence and they need different grades.

I still haven't found a good way of getting graded material to travel back to Avid as cleanly as in the FCP/Resolve workflow. If anyone has any real insight I'd love to hear it.

roman hankewycz
harbor picture company // colorist

Juan,
Lets start with a simple scenario.
I have a shot that is used multiple times in the sequence. When grading in resolve I use versions to give each instance of the shot a different grade.

If I were round-tripping to FCP, I would render the session and export an XML. That XML references the newly created, graded media. Resolve is free to name the multiple graded files with a unique identifier and the XML knows where each file needs to go in the sequence. In FCP I import the XML and the job's done. No manual relinking.

In the case of the Avid round-trip this is not possible, because there's no way for Resolve to tell Avid "Hey, I know you sent me one master clip for these 5 shots, but I'm sending you back 5 individual shots in return. Here's where each of them should go." From what I know about the Avid round-trip process the media you render out has to match the media you send in otherwise it doesn't work. In addition, you have to manually change tape names in Avid so that your original media and graded media share tape names. The tape renaming thing is ridiculous when you're dealing with hundreds of clips, not to mention that changing tape names is not something to be taken lightly.

So to get back to the original question. I'm interested in how you deal with multiple shots in a session that have the same master clip.

roman hankewycz
harbor picture company // colorist

I don't understand why the Resolve generated AAF back to Avid can't cope with the same clip used multiple times?
It's irrelevant that the incoming AAF to Resolve only had reference to one clip. The outgoing AAF maybe based on that but it could hold references to the newly created graded shots. In the same way Avid could and would send differences if the sources hadn't been the same.

Clearly it's still complex and evolving and at best it's important not to imagine A Resolve round trip is like working in Avid and doing you color correction. This is no different to the early days of FCP and color. You had loads of flexibility if you used the FCP CC but if you wanted the scope of the color round trip it suddenly got a whole lot more complex and limiting (especially early on)

So it's important to work within the limitations of the workflow and balance what you need from it against what you lose by going that route.

We have a DS and use that for final grading sometimes and even with the greater integration that gives it still has to be managed and the expectations of the client and editor managed.

We are looking at resolve as a final grading tool and folks will need to have picture lock (maybe the odd VFX replacement at most)
This isn't going to be the same as the up to the wire offline edit/grade some clients seem to work to.

Pat Horridge
Technical Director, Trainer, Avid Certified Instructor
VET
Production Editing Digital Media Design DVD
T +44 (0)20 7505 4701 | F +44 (0)20 7505 4800 | E pat@vet.co.uk |
http://www.vet.co.uk | Lux Building 2-4 Hoxton Square London N1 6US