Using Compound Clips For Dolby Vision Revisions & IMF Delivery

Series	Compound Timelines For Delivery

Compound Clips Part 2: Advanced Finishing Workflows For HDR and Dolby Vision

If you deliver to major streaming services, then your workflow involves Dolby Vision and IMF deliverables. The problem is that no edit is ever truly ‘locked’, and changes can come up at any time! The cumbersome render-the-timeline-and-reimport workflows, which are common because of how Dolby Vision trim analysis is performed, are prohibitive in turning around this sort of work fast enough.

Optimizing your Dolby Vision workflow for last-moment revisions

At The Finish Line, we mostly work on long-form documentary films, and series, and Dolby Vision deliverables are a way of life. Through necessity, we’ve learned that working on camera originals and keeping the timeline ‘live’ throughout the delivery process allows us to meet crazy deadlines with minimal mistakes.

Using the workflow in this Insight, you gain maximum flexibility in the Dolby Vision SDR trim process. This approach extends to IMF outputs, which are simple even when creating additional assets like textless supplemental deliverables – again, without ever rendering and re-importing.

If you are experienced in these workflows, you’ll find this Insight easy to follow. If the notion of Doby Vision trims and IMF deliverables is new to you – you may need to watch this a few times to understand what’s happening.

Learning Goals

What are the specifics that you should learn from this Insight?

How to force Resolve to Scene Cut Detect a compound clip
How to prepare a compound HDR timeline for the Dolby Vision SDR trim pass
Once completed, how to make changes to the HDR timeline and have them trickle through and update your SDR trim
How do deal with creating a Textless supplemental and keep all metadata and pictures consistent

Related Insights

Custom ACES SDR to HDR Part 3: Dolby Vision Trims – Learn how to use the original SDR color grade as a reference for a new SDR Dolby Vision trim from an HDR re-master (gulp!)!
Mailbag: What’s up with Supplemental IMFs? -Mixing Light contributor Joey D’Anna who gives us the skinny on supplemental IMF packages for delivery to broadcasters and OTT providers.
Creating Supplemental IMF Packages in DaVinci Resolve – What is an IMF package? How doyou use DaVinci Resolve to create supplemental IMFs for delivering fixes and alternate versions?

– Zeb

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Comments

Creator

Discussion
June 1, 2022 at 1:52 pm #43500

Zeb Chadfield
Participant

This is the discussion thread for the Insight: Using Compound Clips For Dolby Vision Revisions & IMF Delivery
Creator

Discussion

Marty Webb
Member

June 3, 2022 at 4:03 am

Ooo I’ve got another script for ya Zeb! This will help you chop up your compounds really fast and easy.

https://www.martycolour.com/product-page/alternating-clip-colours

This script will colour every other clip on a track. So what you do is duplicate your compound to V2 and place your original V1 above that on v3. Run the Alt colour script on v3 then you can select all the coloured clips and drop down and delete them. Then select all on v2 and drop them down.

Now you have an accurately chopped up compound in seconds.

Just be careful of dissolves. You usually wont want those chopped for the purpose of DV analysis.
- Zeb Chadfield
  Member
  
  June 3, 2022 at 4:09 am
  
  Nice one Marty! I’ll have a play. I did do a little testing around this and actually found the route to have scene cut detection was preferable in this situation having cuts based on large image changes. This allows us to treat parts with flashing and big jumps as separate parts for the trim or you can remove edits if you don’t want to. Also not having edits where there may be cuts but not a lot of change in image is good too. So specifically for this we like some of the unintended consequences of having the edits based on automation rather all the real edit points. This script will be very handy for many other things though!
  - Patrick Inhofer
    Administrator
    
    June 5, 2022 at 10:06 am
    
    Zeb – I was wondering how you handled ‘false positives’ when cut detecting. It’s interesting that you’ve found those ‘fake’ edit points as useful, rather than annoyances. Do you prefer the colorist to decide which add edits to keep/remove or have you trained your assistants to handle that part of the job?
    - Zeb Chadfield
      Member
      
      June 5, 2022 at 12:08 pm
      
      The key thing is just to watch it back in the trim pass and the person doing the trim can add or remove edits anywhere they like. It’s a case of feeling if it’s right or needs a little something, if the grade is in the right place to begin with you will find the trim shouldn’t need loads of work anyway. The scene cut analysis is based on big image changes more often than not this is a benefit, especially in docs where you may have shots you’ve manually chopped duplicate frames out of the archive and other things that could have resulted in clips that are cut or have sporadic edit points from some point of the process, or archive that’s from a mixed reel and not cut up in the timeline. Every shot change will end up with a cut point so the trim is better for it and you will also get them around flashes or gun fire and I’ve found this helpful to manage those elements but you can also just remove the edit points or copy trim data between shots too.
      - Marty Webb
        Member
        
        June 5, 2022 at 3:21 pm
        
        This masks a lot of sense. I guess it all comes down to a judgment call per project. Is better to have all literal edit points or newly generated edit points based on content. There’s just different pros and cons to both.
        
        Zeb Chadfield
        Member
        
        June 6, 2022 at 2:04 am
        
        I’d say in pretty much every other situation real cut points is better 🙂
- Patrick Inhofer
  Administrator
  
  June 5, 2022 at 10:08 am
  
  Marty – Brilliant! Thanks for sharing!
Justin
Member

December 10, 2022 at 3:17 pm

Great guide. Thanks Zeb.

Have you had any QC fails using this workflow?
- Zeb Chadfield
  Member
  
  December 11, 2022 at 12:46 am
  
  Nope, delivered hundreds of programmes using these methods.
  - Justin
    Member
    
    December 13, 2022 at 7:09 am
    
    Great to hear. I’ve got some DV documentaries coming up that I’m going to give this a go on. Thanks again.
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Using Compound Clips For Dolby Vision Revisions & IMF Delivery

Compound Clips Part 2: Advanced Finishing Workflows For HDR and Dolby Vision

Optimizing your Dolby Vision workflow for last-moment revisions

Learning Goals

Related Insights

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Using Compound Clips For Dolby Vision Revisions & IMF Delivery

An Introduction To Versioning Efficiently Using Compound Timelines

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Using Compound Clips For Dolby Vision Revisions & IMF Delivery

Compound Clips Part 2: Advanced Finishing Workflows For HDR and Dolby Vision

Optimizing your Dolby Vision workflow for last-moment revisions

Learning Goals

Related Insights

Member Content

Member Login

Comments

Zeb Chadfield

Using Compound Clips For Dolby Vision Revisions & IMF Delivery

An Introduction To Versioning Efficiently Using Compound Timelines

1,000+ Tutorials to Explore

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