Testing Resolve at Harmon Brothers, Part 2: Pros and Cons

Now it’s been a couple weeks in Resolve at Harmon Brothers. There’s some major upsides and some major downsides. Here’s the TL;DR list:

Upsides

• Take Selection
• Collaboration Mode
• Audio Tools Built-In
• The Color Tools, duh
• Stability

Downsides

• Playback Issues will be Render Issues
• Cache and Optimized Media
• Useless Tabs
• Syncing Audio

Upsides with Downsides

• Frame.io integration
• Delivery Tab
• Resource Hog
• Backups

And much of my determining criteria comes down to two things: how well does the software get out of the way of creativity, how reliable is it, and how well can it run on my work computer? For instance, when you have to render out cache in order to playback at a full frame rate, that gets in the way of the creative process. Or if I sit down with a director only to find the audio quit working. Or if you need to do a final export in the next three hours to deliver on time for a national campaign launch and the renders keep coming back with kernel panics and render errors.

So with that out of the way, let’s dive deeper into my list:

Upsides

Imagine you have a couple versions of the same line. Either could work great in the edit, but you want to audition both with the Creative Director. In Premiere, I’d often duplicate the scene and change the copy to reflect both options. Not too bad of an operation, but it does take a little time. Final Cut Pro X addressed this issue to some extent, but Resolve took it a step further with their Take Selection feature. This feature allows you to stack these different takes and gives you the option to automatically adjust the timeline to fit. Watch one version, then just click on the next take to try the next.

In Premiere, when we want to do a color pass, we’ll duplicate the project file (cause backups) and that timeline is now untouchable for the day or so it takes to do color. And that’s assuming Lumetri doesn’t cause frequent crashes. Pft. Ha! Hahahahaha! What actually happens is our colorist just dials in the R3D RAW color settings and calls it a day. Luckily, our colorist is also a world-class cinematographer who knows how to get the color right in camera, so we haven’t necessarily NEEDED more options, but it would be nice. I’ll get to the solutions, but one more problem section:

And for a sound pass, we’ve typically done the usual OMF/AAF export (cause we never know which one will work) to send to our sound person and while they’re mixing and mastering, we leave the timeline alone. And even when we make changes post-STEMs, some of them have to get sent BACK to the sound engineer to copy and paste effects. This can be as simple as trying a different joke. This process has many many issues, especially if your sound engineer is running Pro Tools, and especially when you never truly lock your edits like we do. See? It’s a two way street.

But now in Resolve, there’s such a thing as collaboration mode. I can be working on the edit while the colorist colors. And while I’m here, Resolve has built in, a fully featured, industry-standard coloring program, and a fully featured Digital Audio Workstation complete with bussing, automation, and ADR tools. This means that when we have to change takes to try a different joke, I can simply copy and paste the effects and settings from one audio track to the next. And our color never has to be compromised and can again be copy and pasted between takes.

EDIT: Turns out Resolve 16 doesn’t support editing and mixing at the same time from two computers. Kind of a bummer and I hope this is addressed in future releases. However, the many other benefits to having a built-in DAW is still worthwhile.

The day before I drove down to Texas to get married, I had a big deadline. It was a VFX shot in After Effects involving tracking a meteor into the sky, rotoscoping, etc. I’d spent 60 hours executing dialing in that shot with the directors and it was almost there, but then it crashed. When I re-opened the project, it had reverted back to my progress 40 hours ago. I scrambled to the auto-save files to find them corrupt. And I wished I’d had better backup solutions, realizing that the last 40 hours was completely gone. I ended up having to send them the last review render, which was a low res mp4 file. And yes I did make it to my wedding on time. And since then I’ve lost countless hours in Premiere timelines both personally at at Harmon Brothers. And in the last couple weeks, Resolve has crashed 3–4 times and guess how much time I lost? Zero. Never even had to open a backup.

And there are many many other features I keep stumbling across daily. The updates are fast, furious, and from what I’ve seen: stable. Adobe only gets two of these things right and for much more money. Not naming names, but the one they frequently get wrong rhymes with table. Not to say that Resolve is perfect by any means.

Downsides

Playback issues will be render issues. This means that if you see glitches in your edit or hear stuttering audio, they’ll show up in the final delivery. Kinda sounds like a positive, except it isn’t. While working on a freelance job, I heard some audio stuttering with occassional clicks and pops. When I listened to the original files in Windows Media Player, the clicks and pops were gone. When I listened to the audio even in the Fairlight tab, the clicks and pops were gone. But in the final delivery, there they were again! Most video software will give you a dumbed-down version in the edit with some imperfections for the sake of smoother playback, but will pull out the big guns for the render to ensure the highest quality the settings will allow. Not the case with Resolve. I suspect that the playback and delivery engines are the same thing. Silver-lining though: issues will never catch you by surprise.

Like other editors, Resolve uses optimized media and cache to help with smoother playback, especially when dealing with tough codecs like R3D or h.264 or when putting in lots of Color, Visual, or Audio Effects. And Resolve likes to store Optimized Media and Cache in the same place on our system. Works great when you’ve got a massive SSD. Doesn’t work so great when you’re trying to use the collaboration features on a Jellyfish network. Today the network kicked me out for some reason, which unlinked the optimized media and slowed playback to a halt. All without any warnings. Luckily relinking the optimized media wasn’t an issue. But because we’re on the network, access to cache is bottlenecked by the network speeds, which have been slow for me during most of this project.

The Cut and Fusion tabs are essentially useless. They may work great for many users and workflows, but definitely not ours. For the cut page it comes down to simply not showing markers. Markers are essential to how we organize and log our footage. We typically have really long clips that feature many takes and options and Markers show us where each take or option starts. The Fusion tab gets much more complicated. Let’s just say that the motion graphic tools just aren’t up to the level of After Effects and the standalone version of Fusion 16 is much faster and has more tools. The actual integration features in Resolve are still pretty half-donkeyed.

Syncing audio in Resolve works, but it just feels so convoluted and needlessly complicated. Normally in Premiere, we try syncng audio by timecode first, then if that doesn’t work and there’s scratch audio, we’ll sync by waveform, then by setting markers at the clapper point in the audio and video. In Resolve, there is no marker system. You have to open the video in one panel and the audio in another. Make sure you’ve selected just the right panel, line up the clap points and click a link button. If you need to edit the sync, you have to start the process over again. And if you accidentally have video preview scrubbing on, you find yourself having to reset the playhead way too often, which is more than none times. You should never have to resets things from software mishaps.

Upsides with Downsides

One of the big new features to Resolve 16 was the native Frame.io integration. You could upload and download Frame videos straight from Resolve. No need to run a browser. Additionally, comments from frame or Resolve would sync with each other in delayed realtime. Really great features. But be aware that if you duplicate your timelines like we do, that link with the Frame video follows the duplicated timeline, meaning that the comments will show up on a newer version of the video, throwing off timecodes, etc. Additionally, there’s currently no option to check off the comment. It’s either there or deleted, which means no feedback history. Also you have to export through the special Frame preset in the Delivery page, which means very limited export options and no subtitle support.

The delivery tab itself is a mixed bag. I love the preset system and the amount of delivery options you get to customize your video. You even get the option to deliver your timeline as a series of clips instead of one video. Batch rendering is built in, and even sending a render to another machine on your network. But then they forgot to add the render-in-background option like Final Cut or a separate encoder like Adobe so you can keep working while exporting.

One of the biggest pains of Adobe software is the inability to utilize advanced hardware from the last decade. It seems to max out its performance at 4 cores, 64 GB of RAM and a single GPU in the rare case it actually uses the GPU. Resolve takes much more advantage of your computer’s resources. This means that major machine upgrades shows major performance boosts. Ultimately this allows you to upgrade your computer to save work and processing time. The downside is that if your computer doesn’t have many resources, even a fully specced out iMac, Resolve seems to slow down to the speed your computer can handle. I notice a major performance difference between the iMac at work at my beefed up PC at home. With optimized media and caching, I should be fine to use it on my work iMac, but that’s all it’ll be is fine unless we can convince Benton to buy us something like a Mac Pro. Hey, a boy can dream, can’t he?

So there you have it: the good, the bad, and the mostly good of Resolve. The playback issues are a big setback for me, but the collaboration features are huge too. Too much complexity to really make a call while in the thick of it. Overall, I’d say the experiment is going well. Makes the job more interesting at least.

Many of these issues could be fixed in Resolve 17 rumored to release this year. Many might not go away for a long time. And who knows, maybe Adobe will surprise us with a rewritten-from-the-ground-up, stable release this year….pffff hahahaha!