My Sucky Teen Romance
Dir. Emily Hagins
Feature, 7D

Grey
Dir. Marko Slavnic
Short Narrative, 7D

Brewed
Dir. Mike Mann
Short Documentary, 7D/HVX

So far the things I miss…

Easy XML round tripping.
Workflow is a big adjustment.. I was definitely spoiled with the FCP to Color to FCP workflow. But i will figure this out as i go i’m sure..

Hue, Saturation, and Luma Curves.
i’m finding ways to get around Resolve’s lack of these, but they were very handy. I definitely relied heavily on the Saturation and Hue curves.. never really used the Luma curve that often, but it has its uses.

Seeing the Color Wheels..
Even though most of the time i wouldn’t ever be looking at them, it was a regular visual reminder of which directions meant which hues… and i know that should be more ingrained in me with the hundreds and hundreds of hours i’d used Color.. but for some reason it was good seeing it.. and also having a visual reference of where you were inside the color wheels when you make an adjustment. The Resolve interface makes perfect sense, but it portrays it more mathematically if that makes sense, but not nearly as visually… like I see that I’ve added more red and green but taken out blue, but in Color it would show me that i’ve been pushing the correction towards yellow or whatever… I’m adjusting.

Dragging a correction from one shot to another..
A lot of times i’d drag my vignette from one shot to the next shot and quickly tweak the shape or position as needed since the amount of darkening i usually kept pretty close.. it seems in Resolve it’s much more convoluted to drag and drop a node from one shot to another. You have to grab a still, show the nodes of that still, and then drag the desired node into a fresh serial node on the target shot.. So what once took under a second, is now a much more involved process.

On the flip side…
No limit to corrections you can make on a shot.
Enough said.

The tracker. Is. Awesome.
It’s incredibly quick and accurate, and it really opens up some new creative opportunities that were too time intensive inside of Color.

Resolve has a hue adjustment knob that can be applied in any node..
Cool. That was only available in Secondaries in Color.. So one way to get around no Hue curve is to qualify a certain hue, then twist the hue knob.. A decent workaround, i’m sure i’ll come up with a better way as time goes on.

The qualifier seems to behave a little differently from Color, but it’s better.
I feel like i get cleaner isolations and have more flexibility.. being able to eye drop, and then using add/subtract selection.. and then all the power window options for inside/outside.. anyways.. i could ramble on endlessly.

Chroma Light/Chroma Dark
Is really cool, and very useful, and being a preset it saves a lot of time.

Plenty of keyboard shortcuts.
I can use a keystroke to add a node with a vignette activated, ready to be adjusted. There are even different keystrokes to add nodes ready to go with each of the 4 types of windows.

RED Raw..
Resolve works beautifully with Red footage. Has access to all of the metadata adjustments.. which Color still does not..

I’m sure there are tons of other things i could think of, but these are some of the highlights..

Disappointments..
Performance
My storage as of now, isn’t up to the challenge. My internal raid (only 3 drive) isn’t quick enough to keep up with the software, but once the Cubix comes in (been waiting a month), i’ll be able to hook up my external raid again and additional quadro card and I think I’ll be in great shape. So I think this will rectify itself.

My dream with Resolve was to not only unlock more creative possibilities for my work, but to also be able to playback sessions with audio inside of the grading environment. It’d be a huge plus for some of my clients.

My speed
As with any new tool, there’s a learning curve. And right now, I’m a lot slower than I’d like to be. I’m still making the adjustment to the Wave. I’ve been using an MC Color/MC Transport for the past year, so I’m retraining my muscle memory and learning the panel. I know as I continue to practice and gain experience with Resolve, i will get faster, but right now, if I had a quick turnaround job come in, I’d probably use Color.. I expect that to change soon.

1 Feature
1 1hr Doc style TV Episode (5th ep of a series)
3 Shorts (2 doc, 1 narrative)
13ish Commercials

And i did the motion graphics for most of those commercials as well.. what a crazy month it was.

3rd search result: How to resolve the brainteaser “Cubix”

NFL Best Fans Ever:

NFL spot Side by Side

The compositing just blows me away. I had no idea they’d composited every single shot. Just amazing.

And of course, the VW Force ad.

Some outtakes:

Unfortunately, it’s crippled by previous versions of BRU PE not maintaining it’s own catalogs. So once you update, you’re potentially unable to actually launch BRU PE. Which not only happened to me, but a colleague, and I’m pretty sure i know another company that will hit the same issue when it comes time to upgrade.

The program hangs on opening while Examining Catalogs. There’s no way for this to be fixed on the user end, in dealing with BRU support, you’re required to upload your catalogs that are then mended by someone over there and returned to you.

If you don’t have a current support contract, which is everyone i know that uses BRU PE, then you wait until they have time to address your particular case.

It’s good they still help, but it seems clear that it’s a known issue that is affecting many customers. The cause is pre 2.2.0 versions of BRU not cleaning up after itself in the catalogs.

During the downtime, they’re kind enough to provide you with a runnable version of 2.1.0, because just reinstalling your old version won’t work.

I’ve got myself into a pickle because i needed to make more backups during this downtime.. which was several days.. so i’m going to have a hope they’re feeling kind enough to fix my catalogs again.. so i can then upgrade to 2.2.0 cleanly..

finger crossed.

New Features for BRU PE 2.2.0 build 403
Updated Final Cut Pro session parsing to include both FCP 8 native and XML session formats.

Even if it’s a mistake, i’ll bet NAB time this year will be interesting.

BRU Release Notes

Michael has some free and very useful tools available on his website. Some of his tools have saved me in the past when a project file corrupted. I think we pushed our luck by reconforming the same sequence one too many times.. Anyways, we were able to batch transfer the project to a new one and still made our deadline.. but it was close.

The only inconvenience is having to upload project files to his server, which takes time. I’d love to have local running versions of his tools. Comparing that to re-doing hours of work, it’s an easy sacrifice to make.