Hi there, I'm finishing up a feature that seems to have hit one final snag.

My colorist instructed me to not include dissolves or handles when exporting the film from FCP7 so they could color it (in DaVinci Resolve), and my assumption was I would just add the dissolves back in, but now I see that that must have been a mistake, because when I try to add a cross dissolve it says "insufficient content for edit," which must refer to the fact that each shot is now only the frames that appear in the film.

I'm assuming that my only option is to re-export those raw shots from FCP7 with handles (and the original FCP dissolves?), import them into DaVinci, paste the coloring job back on them, and then re-export them? I don't know how to use DaVinci (and my colorist probably will give me a hard time about him doing anything about it now that I signed off on his work already, so I will probably have to figure this out myself), so I don't quite know how to go about doing this. If anyone could help, or if there's another solution I haven't thought of, that would be insanely appreciated. There are only 2 dissolves in the film but they're at key moments so it's something I need to figure out one way or another.

Thanks a lot

that was bad advice from the colourist.
i mean, how is that supposed to work?
remove the dissolves, but include no handles.
they probably should have asked you to put copies of the relevant shots at the end of the timeline with extensions to cover the dissolves.
but seeing as how resolve can deal with dissolves, i don't understand their request.

you should first talk to them about the issue.

however, my approach to make it as simple as possible would be to go through a COPY of your original FCP timelines,
option+shift drag the relevant shots up to a new track,
delete everything else.

now you have to specific shots isolated, and in place.
media mange, with handles.
make an XML of the new Media Managed sequence,
and you give the media managed files and XML to the colorist.

or as mentioned above maybe they will want to relevant shots place at the end of a timeline, WITH the handles,
then they can copy / paste the grades.

it wouldn't be a big job for someone who knows what they are doing.


nick

What was your workflow that you used to turnover the files from from FCP7 to the colorist?
Because it sounds like the Colorist doesn't know what he's talking about.

First, dissolves WILL transfer from FCP7 to Resolve and would not inhibit the colorist from doing his job in any way.

Second, what is he talking about with handles? When you export an xml from FCP7, there's no option for handles. The xml will reference the entire file, so in Resolve, you could actually adjust the edit points if you desired. (This is assuming you didn't media manage it in FCP7 without handles before you exported the xml).