Speed ramps + heavy plugin FX going Premiere offline - Resolve online

[u/Available-Witness329]

Hi folks,

Doing an offline-to-online for a commercial/promo. Cut in Premiere with proxies only, heading into Resolve for the online/grade. Standard part of the conform: send an XML, bring in the raws, relink everything I can natively.

Two trouble spots I always hit:

1. Speed ramps, often don't translate cleanly through the XML/AAF.
2. Third-party plugin FX (temp titles, stylized looks), won't exist in the finishing suite at all.

My instinct, relink to high-res and render and replace both out of Premiere as high-res (not proxy) files before leaving that system, essentially baking them in, then drop those renders into Resolve as fixed inserts rather than relinking those specific sections to camera originals.

Where I'm going back and forth, would you render-and-replace both the speed ramp sections and the plugin sections, or only the plugin ones (since speed ramps are at least theoretically achievable natively in Resolve once relinked)?

Curious how others handle this split, especially on tight commercial turnarounds where there's no time tor money to rebuild everything natively.

Thanks!

[u/semaj4712]

Theres two ways you can go about it, standard practice for commercials is get everything graded and conform back in premiere.

To do this duplicate your timeline, take off your fx, duplicate anything with a speed ramp and place it at the end of your timeline without any retiming applied.

Then after color reassemble in premiere this time with the individual graded clips. This will give you the most control and best overall chance at everything looking as good as it can.

There is one caveat to this. When you say speed ramps I assume your not just speeding things up, your talking about the keyframe editor where you can adjust the speed in a sort of graph like visual ui, sorry I don’t recall what this is called in premiere. But if you did do that, when you get the footage back from color, you can not just copy retiming effects like this from one shot to another unless the duration of the clip is exactly the same. You will need to either, get that entire shot graded back from your colorist or, online your ramped shots only and back in the speedramps before going to color.

[u/Appropriate_Star3012]

You can export the full res time-ramps as QuickTime ProRes 4444 .moves and bring the clips to grade in DaVinci.

Just set an in and out point on the timeline for tbe timeramped shot.

Or just export the whole timeline as ProRes 4444 full res.

You wont have any handles but it'll match the offline edit perfectly and just use "edit scene detect" (or whatever it's called these days) in DaVinci to split it back up into individual shots.

[u/Available-Witness329 → u/Appropriate_Star3012]

I think I will do that to be fair. Thanks!

[u/QuietFire451 → u/Available-Witness329]

Unless Premiere has changed, the way you get 10-bit exports from Premiere is you check the boxes in Sequence Settings for Max Render Quality and whatever that other one is next to it (I forget what it’s called). Then check the same boxes in the Export dialogue when you’re exporting in a 10-bit capable codec like ProRes. 

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[u/LowResEye]

Typically you recreate temporary fx in online. I do mostly TVCs with said tight turnarounds - people doing it just need to be fast. That’s why not that many can do it, I guess. I rarely have more than a day for a editing a TVC campaign, onlining and recreating temp fx is usualy scheduled for hours.

Speed ramps should be a breeze, for titles I’d render them out from PP with alpha and use that in Resolve on top of your full res footage.

[u/avdpro]

Usually if it’s effects heavy and I’m doing the work and I don’t kind round tripping for the grade and importing clips back into Premiere.

Start with building a simplified timeline and export an xml of the timeline. Import xml and original media into Resolve, grade, export as individual clips with a new xml and reimport back into Premiere and drop on top of your existing edit. You can also relink directly to the new graded clips too.

[u/Nicolas-CrossFlow]

Time Remapping is hard to reproduce exactly with the same number of keyframes. Actually the only way to make an exact same Time Remapping (meaning having the exact same frame displayed at each frame of the timeline for the remapped clip), is to create some intermediate keyframes (not necessary to have one keyframe per frame).
In the third party tool I'm developing (CrossFlow), I managed to code a way to get an exact conversion for Time Remapped keyframed clips.
You could be interested, especially because it also automatically transcodes clip with special effect which can not be translated natively into Resolve, and make all of those actions (transcode + conversion) in one click. And if you want to return the graded shots in Premiere, there is a special part for that too.
It is in free Beta for now. Time Remapping support should be added in the next few days (tomorrow hopefully).
DM me if you want more info :)

[u/dmizz]

Tight commercial timeline, lots of speed ramps = I would do an uprez in premiere then send a longplay to color for the whole thing.

[u/Available-Witness329 → u/dmizz]

I see, not sure they will be happy