Working Color-Managed In A Flat File Workflow

Nice workflow!

Patrick, that is the slickest Pr/Resolve workflow I’ve seen. Easy to understand the process, and allows for full and easy CM in Resolve.

And yes, as someone who does a ton of Pr/Resolve stuff and handles queries on this sort of thing, I would love to see any follow-ons you could have. This to me is a massively updated *and upgraded* workflow.

It’s much simpler to just enable the “Extract reel names from EDL comments” option 🙂

LOL. Quite true. But then, I’ve worked on plenty of run ‘n gun jobs where reel names were useless for separating out cameras. Although, adding reel names related to the cameras can work if the NLE will honor that metadata change on EDL export.

It’s definitely a workflow variation worth testing when executing this process. Thanks for the idea.

Neil – thanks! If you get any specific queries, definitely let me know. The ‘EDL Comments’ one is a good one worth breaking down – but that’d be a short video, so I need to collect a few more thoughts, questions, or approaches to warrant a full-blown video.

Really excited to give this workflow a shot! Thanks for the ideas, Patrick.

This is a great Insight, exactly what I needed to explore yesterday! I went a different way though… For some reason I can’t get Split and Add to work at all, even though the same EDL works as PreConformed EDL. And it is now possible to have a single master clip but change the Input Color Space for each shot (p988 on the 17 manual). EDL comments and C-mode sort in the Lightroom work nicely and the info panel shows reel names as I step through each clip and group and colour code them. Oddly Data Burn-in Reel Name doesn’t work but %Reel Name does!

You’re welcome. Let us know how it goes?

Jamie, what’s happening to you on Split and Add?

Will do.

Trying this again with another test… It doesn’t work. Either nothing is added or it just adds a couple of clips but not all the shots as I assume it should?

Patrick, Another fine example of a workflow which makes Mixing Light a wonderful source of colour grading intel. 🙂

I think you can actually cut out your whole edl step. You can import the same clip into a bin multiple times, tag each as a different camera source then conform lock each of your timeline tracks to each of those master clips and you’re done.

I do this a lot when I have a single camera source but with a few rec.709 stills or archive. I import the flat file twice, tag onc with the correct IDT and one with a rec.709 IDT and conform lock the timeline clips accordingly as I go along.

The only real difference would be that you have one master clip for each camera instead of a master clip for each shot. But I don’t think that will matter since those master clips all have to share the same IDT anyway.

For longer-form projects this workflow proved messy for me. I found it much simpler to use the track-based approach with the EDL allowing each shot to be tagged independently of all the other shots. It’s not unusual in ‘run-and-gun’ productions where a few shots were recorded differently and need to be treated differently than other shots from the same camera.

It seems like we wouldn’t have to go through this very clever work around if Resolve could keep the reel names from the EDL after you relink the EDL to the flat file.

My work around is to bring in the EDL and keep it offline. Duplicate the sequence and relink the duplicated sequence to my flattened .mov file. Then I cut the relinked sequence into layer 2 of the original sequence with the offline EDL. Layer 2 is what I color and layer 1 (with offline media) is there just so I can see the camera name.