The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP022: Grade Management

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

You've likely heard the phrase 'work smarter, not harder'. Well, for the professional colorist who has to grade tons of shots day in and day out, working smarter is at the core of what we call grade management. In this installment of The Offset Podcast, we explore a plethora of tools & techniques for grade management. While many of these things are Resolve-specific, grade management approaches can apply to your grading tool of choice. Highlights include: What does grade management mean?The power of fixed node tree (fixed structure)The process of building your own fixed treeLeveraging Node Stack LayersUsing compound nodes Using groups, Lightbox & Smart Filters to work fasterShared nodesUnderstanding sort modesUsing multiple playheads Remote and Local gradesUsing VersionsSplit screens for complex comparisons  Stills and wipesTimeline (Layer) organization and track disabling Burn in options and rendering specific tracksSingle Clip vs Individual Clip render optionsRemember to subscribe and like wherever you find The Offset Podcast. We appreciate you checking out this episode!

Hey everybody and welcome back to another installment of the Offset podcast. And this week we're talking about grade management. Stay tuned. This podcast is sponsored by Flanders Scientific, leaders in color accurate display solutions for professional video. Whether you're a colorist, an editor, a DIT, or a broadcast engineer, Flanders Scientific has a professional display solution to meet your needs. Learn more at flanderscientific.com.

All right, everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Offset Podcast. I am Robbie Carmen and with me as always is my partner in prime Joey Deanna. Hey, Joey, how are you, man? Hey. Well, Joey, this week we are going to talk about something that I think if you talk to most pro-colorists, they're going to say, oh yeah, this is like perhaps more vital than whatever tool I'm using or, you know, any new technique. And that is the concept of grade management. And I want to be clear with a couple things about this. First of all, grade management is kind of like a catch-all term. There's not really a better term for it and we're going to talk about all the various things that go into grade management

from node tree to still organization to all these kind of things and related we could probably do i don't know probably a half a dozen episodes on the various sort of sub items that we have here on our outline we're not going to probably do that for all of the things here but there's definitely a few things like fixed node trees come to mind where we'll probably in the future do some dedicated episodes to some of these specific ones because they're just juicy enough and they're thick enough and complicated enough where we can probably do some episodes. So if you're watching or listening this back and you go, well, I wish they would go into more depth about that. Don't worry, we probably will at a later date because there is a lot to chew on here. Also, just to get

some housekeeping stuff out of the way, if you're on old social media on Instagram or Facebook, you can search for us, the Offset Podcast. You can follow us there. That's where we post things about new episodes and stuff. Also on YouTube, of course. And you can go go over to The Offsetpodcast.com if you have an idea for a new episode or want to ask us some questions. We have a submission button over there on the site where you can, you know, send us a message as well. So, Joey, your feelings about grade management. It's an important thing to be efficient and fast, right? I'm not just, I'm not just making that up in my own head, right? Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, when I think about grade management, I think about all of the

different things you can do kind of from the planning stage, all the way. through the execution and the finishing stage of a project to make it so the process is efficient not just for one shot, but for every shot and not just for your first pass, but for subsequent passes, for tweaks, for changes, for versions, for any need that you have to do multiple different shots or multiple changes, you know, basically being able to roll with the flow and roll with the punches of, you know, a complex color rating session without having to be able to roll. to reinvent the wheel all the time. You know, and that's where, you know, you can really get into some efficiencies or some

inefficiencies if you don't plan for this stuff. Totally. Totally. And I think, you know, to me, it's because one of those things where when I look at a lot of, you know, new color is censoring the field and they're presented with, you know, 1,500 shot timelines or whatever, one of the things that I think it's not their talent, it's not their knowledge of the software, et cetera, but where they really fall down is this kind of general term of grade management, right? You know, you look at one shot and it's got three nodes on it.

Another shot's got 38 nodes on it. They're all called different things. They're all different numbers. They're all different, you know, in different places, doing different things. And like we've discussed in previous episodes how like that kind of thing can just kind of, you know, be bad in general for kind of, you know, you're adding one, subtracting one, kind of getting back to zero kind of thing. But I think, you know, if you talk to most, you know, pro-colors, they'll say, look, you know,

The stylistic concerns of a project vary from place to be, you know, from show to show or whatever, but the techniques about how I go about managing a project are kind of universal. And there's something that you have to have in your back pocket to work quickly. So, yeah, I think we should dive into that. And I want to be clear about one more thing. And that is that this is not a complete list of grade management techniques, right? If you have something to add, again, hit us up on social media or the submission form. And like I said, we can probably add it to a future episode because there is a lot to talk about. Okay, so first thing first, let's talk about in a kind of a general way.

I don't think we need to go into an amazing amount of depth about this. But fixed node trees, Joey, this is something that I know that you're, you know, like you're an evangelist for, right? Everywhere we go, you're talking about the power of fixed node trees. For our audience, what is a fixed node tree and why is it so powerful? Yeah, I mean, anybody that's ever met me knows that I live by the fixed node tree. And I want to be clear, when we say a node tree, you know, we're specifically talking about resolve here because that's where Robbie and I work. But this concept of keeping the same structure from shot to shot really works in any software and any type of color grading.

So when I say a fixed node tree, what we mean by this is we make a template that embodies all of the nodes we're going to possibly need for a project, and we set up the node structure so we can template it out and save it, and every single shot in the project has the exact same node structure. There's a few advantages. One, it's muscle memory. You know exactly where everything is all the time. Two, you can pre-build things that you know you're going to use a lot.

if you use a lot of certain shape of power window, make yourself a couple and just leave them blank. Or noise reduction or something like that. I need a circular power window. I've got one ready. You can use tools like Ripple where you can copy changes on a node from shot to shot, or you can even do without using advanced tools like Ripple,

just regular node copy and paste. Jumping from shot to shot works really well in a fixed node structure. But most importantly, I think it just keeps you organized, keeps you fast, keeps you kind of on the focus of grading, you're looking at the monitor, you're not looking at the UI and your node tree constantly, right? You're not, if you build up a complex tree

for every single shot, that means every time you go to a shot, you need to figure out where you are, where the change needs to be made, you know, you need to navigate each shot individually, whereas with a fixed node structure, you are navigating the same thing shot to shot.

And just again, like I said, we're going to talk specifically about Resolve, but I know Colorists to do the exact same thing in Baselight with a fixed layer stack in New Koda, which is also layer-based. I know Colorists that build out a really advanced layer stack that has basically all of their color management built in and various templates for Windows and keys and stuff, and everything's in the same place on the same layer numbers, whereas in Resolve, we do it with nodes, but this can apply to any grading software just change nodes to whatever the UI theme

is. Yeah, whatever the paradigm for that. Yeah, and actually I was just going to say too, like I know a lot of people, a lot of audio folks who are in Pro Tools have a similar kind of paradigm with their session templates, right? Like they always know this is routed to that. And it's the same concept. I think you hit on a couple quick things that I think are for me the power of the fixed

node tree. One, that muscle memory thing can't be misstated. It is so important that you always know whatever node 14 is your noise reduction you know node number six is where you do curves or whatever and I think that just knowing that serves a couple purposes one it's great as you said for muscle memory it's great for things like rippling which I actually think for me was years ago you know decade ago when I made the move to a fixed node tree rippling was actually the biggest reason I did so and for those of you're not familiar with rippling and resolve it's the idea of making a change

on one node and then rippling that change down to other shots in your project in a sort of an automated way. And there's various ways that you can do that wholesale fraction of or a percentage of, etc. But like the idea is do it once and have it go many. That was the real motivator for me to go to a ripple tree, to a ripple tree, to a fake snow tree because I ripple all the time, right? But the other thing that it really helped me with is really get an organizational concept or construct, I should say, in my head of different parts of the tree doing different things, right? And that helped me really get it around in my head. Okay, like this is my, you know, this is stuff that I do in quote unquote camera space, right? This is stuff that I do

after an initial transform. This is the stuff that I do for output and kind of, it's not really germane to the individual shot, but it's more things like, you know, blanking or grain or whatever, you know, those kind of things. So I think it's really kind of an important thing. And we get a lot of questions about like, hey, can you send me a copy of your tree? And I'm always hesitant about that because it is such a personal thing. And I think part of the thing about a fixed node tree too is that like by going through the process of building one, yes. You kind of figure out, oh, these are the things that are the most important to me and the way that my head works and the way that I work. It's not that I can't take your node tree or vice versa.

We can't figure it out. We do that daily during the week. But it's more just like you get through that process. So I would encourage you guys, if you're thinking about moving to a fixed node tree, to go through that process of building your own. And I would also stress, start simple, start expanding out. You can always resave the node tree.

But if you start with this, you know, a huge monolith of 78 nodes, you're not going to ever use it because you're never going to remember what's doing. I mean, what's each node is soon. I probably started out with a, I don't know, five, six, seven layer node. And now I'm probably up to about 20 nodes in my node tree, 25 nodes in my node tree. But that was over time because they were like, oh, yeah, that's a great idea. Oh, I'm doing that repetitively, that kind of thing. Yeah, I kind of lost track of how many nodes are in my template at this point.

But I can tell you, the process of building and exploring this workflow is critical. Right. You'll start to figure out, you know, if you're going to go down this road and you've never done a fixed node tree before, I would suggest trying it on a short form project, if it all possible. Because, you know, because you're committing to the same node tree across the entire project, you know, you don't want to get a thousand shots into a feature film and realize, oh, man, I really approached this the wrong way. I need to start over. But if you've got a 30 second spot that has 15 shots in it, build a fixed node structure, try it out, figure it out,

okay, find out what worked, what didn't work, and evolve it, and evolve it. Keep it. evolving it as you go and then apply that to your bigger long-form projects. But the short-form projects, your promos, your shorts, those are kind of your workshopping projects where you can really figure out, you know, okay, yeah, if you make a mistake and you have to gut the whole thing and start over, oh no, it was 10 shots. Right, right, right. You know, you have that flexibility. Yeah, and I mean, it does take some practice.

I think what you're getting at is that it does take some practice to figure out, you you know, what's where, you know, the order that you have things in, what's best for you in terms of navigating between nodes, you know, that kind of stuff. Or like, what's best for initial settings, right? Like, you know, you might have, for example, you have a node that has a power window on it. And let's say it's a circular power node. You might over time just kind of update that default state of that power window, right? Like, oh, if you find yourself every time you go to that node, oh, I know I need a little bit more softness.

Well, resave the template with a little bit more softness. Exactly. Or like, I'm always putting it on somebody's face, so I'm going to make a little more oval than square, like whatever, whatever those kind of things are. Because that little, it sounds minor, but that little level of tweaking of like being prepared for the majority of situations saves you, you know, hundreds of clicks over the course of a grading session, right, where you're just not doing those things over and over again, right? You know, a couple more quick tips because, like Robbie said, we're going to do whole episodes

on fixed node structures. We don't want to go too deep into this, but just a couple of examples of things you might want to try building out when you're exploring this idea. Highlight recovery, shadow recovery, right? Nodes for trims and different options where, okay, if a client wants to try something,

have an available node where you can say, okay, I'm going to try this new change, and you can show the client by toggling just that node on and off. And one thing that I love doing, It's my favorite thing to do on a fixed node structure is I always have a dedicated keyframe node. So I save the node tree with one node with auto key turned on. That means if I need to ride an exposure change, I know I always just, you know, online, it's the bottom of the kind of stack of parallel nodes I have.

I know, I just go to that keyframe node and just start making changes. It automatically makes keyframes. and I go back to my primary node and I can change my grade altogether. But that saves me so much time in either making manual keyframes or, oh, I need to keyframe this node. I'm going to go in and click auto keyframe

in the bottom right for that node and find it in my strolling list of 30-some nodes. No, no, no. That's too many clicks. That's too much looking at the screen. If I need to make a keyframe change, I've got a node for it. I just go to my keyframe node.

Do it. I like that one a lot, actually. I hadn't thought about that one before. And I'm just thinking, as you said it, like, I'm so scared of auto key framing because you know, you bump something and next thing you have a million keyframes. But by having it on its own dedicated node kind of out of the way that you have to navigate to, that makes auto key framing a little more attractive. And then you never accidentally turn on auto keyframe for like your primary node and like you said, make it go absolutely batty. Yeah, that's a good one. So a relatively new thing that has come into the lexicon of resolve users.

is this idea of, we now have like node graph stacks, right, where we can kind of to riff on the idea of a fixed node tree. This was introduced in version 19 of DaVinci Resolve. And it's kind of this concept of layered node trees, right? Where we can set up different layers with each layer having its own individual node tree. It's a similar concept in kind of, if you're thinking about kind of how it looks, if you're listening to this on an audio podcast. It's kind of a similar concept of like, you know,

having different states of the clip, like pre-clip group or whatever. But I kind of like this too because as I've gotten down the path of more complicated node tree setups, it's become a lot to look at. And it's become a lot to kind of navigate around a little bit, right? And so I've been, you know, I will be completely transparent here. I'm not really using this grade sacks or note stacks quite yet in my approach, but I'm experimenting with it. But it allows me to kind of take out a huge bigger node tree and fixed node tree and kind of divide it down into smaller fixed chunks. And what's great about that is that all the same rules about rippling and all that kind of stuff work on a, you know, kind of a stack to stack level, right?

So you can have this, you know, maybe the first layer or the first stack is your initial, you know, transform, right? Well, great, that you can have that ripple out. Have you been using that much? Because I think that's something that I'm trying to get my head around in terms of a fixed node tree grade management kind of process. And I think I'm finding some ideas. But I'm curious with you and others out there kind of how you've been approaching that. I've got a lot of different ideas for it. And this kind of goes into what we were talking about with.

doing the exploration on short form projects. I've been playing with it, but it's not in what I consider my production node tree. But to me, it's going to be a really good organizational tool, right? Because you can take things that you might not reach for very often and kind of segregate them out to the other stacks and then have your shot-to-shot grade really focused on one layer.

You could use it for color management. You could use it for different versions. if you have an HDR version and an SDR version, maybe you could keep some of those nodes separately. So there's a lot of different possibilities with it, but I've actually already kind of been doing what that does with compound nodes. I put a compound node at every stage of my node tree so I can jump in there. And if I have to build something kind of dirty and messy, I don't break the fixed node structure for something shot specific that I might not have anticipated. I agree. And just to be clear, compound nodes for,

those of you who aren't using them, they're just basically a way to nest multiple nodes into one a single appearing node in your main node stack. Yeah, I tend to agree. And I'm thinking of, I'm almost thinking of this new feature, you know, these node stack or node layers or whatever we want to call them. I'm almost thinking at it as like, okay, I can have three or four separate go-to trees for different things that I'm now applying to clips. So, like, you said something like we do a lot of shows where we got to do like, you know, Lace and Splate blurs or logo blurs or whatever, that's not every show, right? Well, I could build a node tree that's specific to that part of the workflow and just that's always on this stack, right? Or like I have another part of the

stack that's like, you know, I'm always doing, you know, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, nine, two, three nine, whatever. I can have a whole stack that's, you know, to remain to output stuff, right, in different, different formats. So there's a lot of ways of thinking about that, but I, I think it's something I want to continue to explore and working off what I, my knowledge, our knowledge of how nodes, you know, no, fix, no trees work. I think this is the next frontier with that kind of the next level of complication. But with that said, there's another kind of related thing in terms of organization that I am, God, man, I am always surprised that more people don't use. And I feel like some sort of Luddite for like,

you know, I'm like, you know, I'm sorry. I think I look at those people of some sort of Luddites that they're sort of like, what is that? I never even knew about that. And that's the idea of groups, right? Groups are something to me that are just so native to the way that I like to work. And they're just so vital to the way that I like to work that I can't imagine life without them. But let's just dive into that for a second because I think it's something that might be new to some people. Essentially a group is a way to select a range of shots.

You can manually select them, add them into a group manually. And when you add them into a group, you'd get sort of various states or levels of grades that you can do now on this collection of shots. So we've always had clip level, and that's still germane when you're working in a group. Clip level is stuff that just affects this one instance of the shot. But now in a group, you have free clip, things you can do before the flow of signal hits the clip level. and you can have self-host clip things that you do afterwards. But the reason that I use them is that it makes grading similar shots so significantly faster. So we do a lot of dockwork where interviews are key, right?

Well, part of our prep, just go through the show, group all the interviews, call it, you know, guy with the red tie as a new group or, you know, woman with the, you know, the yellow blouse on, whatever. Make those groups. And now when I do my base grade, I do that. on one of the group levels, and guess what? Bam, everything has been graded, right? And now I can go back to a clip level if I need to make any tweaks on an individual shot-by-shot basis

to that group. And it's one of the things for me that it's like, when you look at shows that are 1,500 shot shows, 2,000 shots or whatever, and you make all these groups and you grade the groups, and then you're like, damn, I am a hero. I just graded 800 shots in an afternoon because you were using groups.

Yep. Yeah, I use groups all the time, but I think I use them slightly differently, but not completely differently. And it depends on the project, right? You know, sometimes we'll do groups for scenes, for narrative projects. Yeah, yeah. A lot of times, yeah, we're doing groups for interviews. We're doing groups for different formats, maybe. Any kind of thing that you need to organize and bulk shots together is the application of a group.

A couple really quick tips to give people that you might not have thought about. When you're grouping, the light box is your best friend. Because you open up the light box, you can just tap on all the shots you want and put them in a group. Let me introduce something there real quick.

One thing, if any of our friends of Black Magic are listening, and I've submitted this about 400 times as an idea, drag and drop in the light box, guys. Dragon drop in the light box would be the best thing ever. Please think about implementing that because I'll just write clicking drives me crazy.

But barring that, right? Once you start to make your groups, there's a bunch of things you can do to make that process easy. One, smart filters. You go in your smart filters and say, okay, everything from this camera or everything starting with this name. That's why you can kind of, especially in the example of a documentary, you can usually get your interviews kind of laid out that way.

But the biggest tip I can give you, if you have a lot of shots to group, the worst thing ever is okay click click click click click and then you scroll down click click click click click click click oh I just missed I just blew my whole selection I know right I know you want to do it in stages so you click like 10 shots add them to your group and then what I do is I always have a smart filter saved and this one is weird people no is it is it the no group uh smart filter yes yes you want a smart filter yes for anything that isn't grouped yeah so once you you start grouping, then you go to that smart filter and it clears out anything you've already assigned.

So you're whittling down the show as you're grouping it. And the way to do this, there is no grouped or ungrouped smart filter. You go, you make a smart filter, you say where group is blank. And you leave it blank. Yep. So if the group is blank, it's in the smart filter. If the group is not blank, it's not in the smart filter. It doesn't show it to you.

So then you can go in and say, okay, I'm going to group these 10 shots. good, they're gone. Refresh the screen with that smart filter. Oh, here's 10 more of that interview. Good, they're gone. Refresh the screen. It saves you from selecting like 200 shots and then missing the scroll bar with your pin a little bit

and then just clicking out of that selection. Yeah, totally. And I think the smart filters in general, we could do a whole episode on that. Smart filters are just a way of basically taking a set of metadata or criteria about your project timeline and or clips and filtering things down. And I do that.

I have so many smart filters that are germane to the types of shows that we work on. So, for example, I have one, like, still images. Like, if you're a JPEG, TIF, whatever, like, automatically show me those. I have the same thing for things that have, like, alpha channels associated with them. Like, the sky is the limit with that.

But it lets you just to get out of view really quickly, and especially helpful in the lightbox. It obviously works in filtering your timeline, which is lightbox just extension of that. but it gets you to be able to group that stuff to real quick. I would also make one other suggestion about groups and that is that

I know you I know you just call it group one, group two, group three, group four or whatever. No, I name them when I can. When you get, I tend to, I tend to name them not because like one of the problems, an embarrassing thing I'm sure people have faced before, right?

You're in a session with a client and they're like, oh, well, let's go to that shot of Bob and you're like, I have no idea who Bob is because I haven't been listening to the show. I've just been grading it, right? So I'll name them things like, you know, guy with, you know, tie on or, you know, whatever, you know, kid with a baseball cap on or something like that, that very quickly, I can just go, oh, that's what the client's talking about.

I'm into that group. The other, the other related suggestion is that if you're going to have, I've found, because I have my control surface and stream decks set up to do this, if you have similar groups, say an A cam, B cam, C cam, search all of those related cameras out at a time. Because that way I think from an OCD point of view, it's just, it's easier for me to get my head around when I have these groups in order in a row. Yeah, that's another feature to request if anybody's listening. I'd love to be able to sort and reorder the groups.

Right now you can't. Right now, exactly. Because that just makes it instead of, oh, here's A camera and all the way down here is B camera, it just makes it a little easier, a little easier to get at. So yeah, groups are an essential thing. I think, you know, again, we probably can do a little more on this at a later date. But generally speaking, once I have things in a group, you know, there's this debate about what you should do in what group level or not. To me, to me, it really is germane to how your brain works and how you want to work.

I tend to, you know, I understand that the math concoctinates from pre-clip to clip to post-clip, right? The way that I generally think about it, and sometimes it has some implications, but I generally forget that there's two levels. And I usually just use that post-clip level as kind of like my main node tree is in that post-clip. And I'm making clip-specific changes on the clip level. But if you wanted to be even more organized, like we were talking about Node-Sacks earlier, you could do like an initial transform in your development of the shot in pre-clip. You have all your shot-specific stuff in clip. and then you have all your output or your trim stuff in postclip. There's no right or wrong there.

There's some math implications. Like you might find it, well, you might say, oh, well, it's easier to do something after this processing or whatever. Like, that's going to be on a case-by-case basis, I think. Yeah, and I'll say this, you know, you don't even have to use pre-clip or post-clip to get usefulness out of group. Because it's a sorting method, absolutely. It's a sorting method. Right, absolutely. More often than not, I don't put anything on the group levels.

What I'll do is I'll use my, because I'm such a zealot for the fixed node structure, I will use the same fixed node structure across all the shots, including the group shots, but I'll use the groups as a organizational tool for ripple, because you can do ripple to group. So if I have all my interviews, I'll pick a, you know, I'll get my interviews graded, and then assign the same tree to all of them, then I'll make shot to shot changes as needed. And then, okay, I need to make all the interviews brighter, make it a little bit brighter,

Ripple Group. Oh, that works with scenes. It works with interviews. You know, to me, it's just a different way of organizing it in my brain where it's a quick shortcut to do a ripple. Well, it's nice because you don't have to, unlike the other option for Rippling, which is Ripple to Selected Clips, you don't have to make that selection first. I mean, that's useful for people. Exactly.

It's ready for you. You can map it to a button. And there's a whole, yeah, that's a really super appetition. And to me, it's about saving clicks, right? I don't have to click on postclip, you know, that's one click times a thousand shots during the day that I might not want to do. However, again, there's no rules here. I will use post clip or preclip as needed.

Yeah. But don't think if you're not using it, that you're doing it wrong. And also groups, you know, they go into other things like filtering. So if you want to filter your timeline by only a group, or you can do a split screen of the groups. You know, so there's a lot of stuff in the software that you can use the group as an organizational tool that, you know, even if you're not putting a grade on one of the group levels, it's still really, really valuable. Yeah. And there's things, there's a couple of things that are kind of tangentially related to groups. I would put them in the general group category.

They operate a little differently. And I think it's important to understand that as any software matures and there's enough people saying, yeah, this is cool, but I'd like it to work this way. there's always going to be multiple similar kind of things to do. And like the next thing I'm about to say is similar in general idea to groups. And that is the idea of shared nodes. Shared nodes came in, I think, resolve 13, 14 somewhere in that range maybe. And they function in a, not exactly the same, but in a similar fashion. So for example, if you had a shared, you added a node and let's just say you put

grain on it. Green is an easy one to think about. You put grain on that, you right click on it, you make it a shared node. And now, anytime that you add that shared node, it could be in your fixed node tree already, for example. But anytime that you make changes on it, it will, it will change all of the clips that have that shared node, whether they're grouped or not, right? So it's kind of like, it's kind of like just an alternate version, grouping light, if you will, something like that. Yeah. And a lot of people have asked for groups of groups, like multi, layered grouping as a feature. Shared nodes is a way to achieve that. Yeah, because you could group and have a shared node within the group. Right, exactly. That's it. That's an interesting.

I've never even thought about that. That's a pretty good way. You can have one shared node across multiple groups. Now you've got a group of groups. It takes a little, especially with shared nodes, like that one is a little, it's a little dangerous to me because there's not really any indication that you've just all of a sudden made this wholesale change that's affecting everything. And there's not really, you don't really have to force it. You don't have to, like groups, you have to say, okay, ripple this to the whole group. You make a change to that shared node. Doesn't matter.

And you think you're changing just one shot. And it's everywhere now, right? So you've got to be totally careful with that. All right. So Joey, groups, shared nodes, all that kind of stuff is related. There's one last kind of thing that I didn't quite know where to put it. And that was, it's because it's group, sort of groupish. It's sort of, I don't know, smart filterish kind of thing.

And that is the idea of sort modes. Now, you already spoke about just a second ago about the idea of smart filters, which basically allow you to sort the timeline in different ways by different metadata parameters, right? But this, the specific thing I'm talking about here is actually a pretty old school thing. And that is the idea between sort modes and we have two different sort modes, right? They're essentially a source sort mode and a record sort mode, right? What your timeline chronology is like versus your clip chronology out. Explain these sort modes and what the different names of them are and how you use them.

Yeah, so the sort modes are basically called A and C. This goes back to the old floppy disk edit decision list, online editing techniques. A mode sort is your normal timeline. It's first shot, second, second, shot, third shot, and so forth. A C-mode sort is reordering all of that to be all of the sources from the same

tape or file one after the other, after the other. So, if you have a conform, or even if you're working from a baked file, but you've brought in an EDL to do a pre-conformed EDL, this is kind of one of the cool things about actually

going through that process of bringing in an EDL versus just doing a scene cut detect, because you get the clip names with the EDL if the editor exported that way and the C mode sort will still work. So even if you're on a baked timeline, you can click over to C mode sort and then all of your interviews will probably be pretty near each other because they all have similar real names. It's funny because I had a conversation recently with a colleague and I was talking about like, I was like, why don't you just use groups?

And he's like, well, we can form every show. I get the same functionality just basically by using C mode sort because all my click or right in a row and I can just go pace, pace, pace, pace, pace, and I'm done. I use C mode sort primarily as a way to get my grouping done quickly. Yeah, no, that's a good one. It's a little old school, but it has some caveats with the EBL and the names and stuff like that, but it's definitely definitely. The one thing is, you know, it can get to a point where if you flip over to C mode sort

and you start going previous and next clip, it's very easy to lose track of where you were in your timeline. Yeah. And then you're out of the realm of saving time and you're making more work for yourself because you go back to A mode sort. You're like, oh, great. Now I'm 50 minutes in the timeline

when I should be 10 minutes of the timeline. You've got to kind of reset and find yourself. And that kind of reminds me of another grade management thing that I love, love, massively love. And that's multiple playheads. I use multiple playheads almost constantly because basically that lets you go, you know, you have four playheads,

You can select A, B, C, or D, and you can leave one at one point in your timeline and then go off anywhere else in another point in your timeline. So I have three shots I need to match. I'll go one, two, three on my playheads and just bounce between them randomly. If I'm using C mode sort and I know I'm about to go on a wild expedition across the timeline looking at these different interview clips, I'll drop a playhead, jump to the B playhead, go wild on my. timeline, then go back to A mode sort, guess what? I just jump back to exactly where I started with that playhead and I never lose track of where I am. So it took me some convincing to get into playheads, but then once, because like they have, there are two parts of them that you kind of have to realize that one, they're a location based, right? So they're, you're kind of like a,

it's more sophisticated marker, right, to be able to go to. And then B, they have the ability as like a navigational tool to be able to quickly jump between them. And so like you're comparing shot to shot. That's one because you can also compare and something we'll talk about later in split screens. But I actually, and this is really dorky, Joey, I actually have one of those El Gato pedals under my desk. And I have a mode for it where it's playheads where I can just quickly left and right

go between different playheads on the timeline to make quick comparisons. Now, I don't do that all the time sometimes. I'll go and use stills, but that is another way of quickly jumping around for comparison purposes. Another related one to kind of the idea of groups and shared nodes is the idea of remote grades. Now, I'm just going to put on a little history lesson for people because this is something that people are going to go, what is he talking about? I have no idea. I've never seen this before.

Now, I can understand why this has been super hidden slash for all intents and purposes removed from the software, but let me just say it this way. It used to be back in the good old days, we had this idea of a master timeline. It was something that you could enable and have a master timeline. And what essentially operated like is that you had one timeline that had a string out of all of your media in the project, right? So think about a situation where you have a 60 second spot, a 30 second spot, a 15 and maybe a 6, right? And they're all just cut downs of that 60. So there's shared media for everything. So what you would do, in that situation for efficiency, so you don't have to copy and paste or anything like that,

or group or any of these other new thing or thing we talked about, is that you would just go through the master timeline, you would grade all the shots. And because you have remote grading enabled, those grades that you did on the master timeline would ripple to all the individual spot timelines with that grade already in place. So grade once and it's done multiple places, right? Okay. The problem with that, or the confusing nature of what people got into that, is that they would go, cool. Well, this grade seemed perfect for me

when I was on the master timeline, not looking at it in context of the shots that were around it in the shot flow. They would make changes on the individual timeline, not still in remote grading, right? They would make changes to that, not realizing how remote grades really worked. And the next thing you know,

the other timelines picked up that change, and now you're doubling up on your problem, right? And the fix to it, by the way, was just that when you had places where you're like, oh, that's going to be a little different for the spot, was to flip over into local grades, local meaning that's affecting only that timeline, and make those changes.

Now, I can understand then, Joey, because of that nature, it's a little confusing, local versus remote. I can understand why that behavior is a little hidden now because I think it was getting a lot of people in trouble, right? But it is still something that you can, remote versus local, the master timeline is still something that you can turn on.

But I'm just going to put that asterisk by there. Turn it on with the warning that this, if you don't realize what's going on with remote and local, you can be literally banging your head against a wall trying to figure out. I just change it here. Why is it changing there and not understanding what that connection is? Yeah. You know, I very rarely use the master timeline or remote grades,

but coincidentally, I did just last week. I had the perfect, perfect project for it, where it was a series of 60 second spots with 30 and 15 cutdowns of each. All of them were relatively the same context. The shots were in pretty much the same order. They were just cut down. And they were all using the same media. So I started the project. If you do want to explore this workflow, you've got to start the project and enable the master timeline and project settings first.

If you have a timeline, you can't go back. back to that setting. So again, if you want to play with this, short form is the great, great time to do it because if you don't like it, you can throw it out and start fresh. But it was actually for this one use case, for this one project, absolutely perfect, because I did my master timeline, graded all the shots, and then I literally just imported the AAFs for a dozen spots, and they were all graded already, and it was all perfect. Yeah, but that one is, is one of those real advanced use cases, they hit it for a reason. Yeah, and spots are like probably the classical example of that, but I've also had that,

you know, like that situation where it's, you know, the edit is still in play, but like, it's really important that we have, you know, the president of the company graded, but we just don't know how we're using them yet, right? So like, you could get a head start and just grade the master clip, the 40 minute long shot do like a base look and then conform an X&L, you know, and as long as you had it turned on to begin with and have that apply. So there's a lot of cool things about remote grades, but I would just again, caution people into really understanding how it works because for a while there, it was, it caused a lot of pain and agony for a lot of people who didn't quite know how it works.

Okay, a related thing to this, and I think, I don't know, I don't know if I'm the only person that uses this feature, but I love it. I absolutely love it. And I get a lot of strain. looks, but for me, from a grade management point of view, it's indispensable. And that is the idea of versions. And let me explain why I love it so much. So versions has been around and resolved forever. It basically allows you to make a duplicate of your current state of your grade, do something different on that version, and then have the ability to toggle between those versions. The argument against versions, I'll start there, is, well, yeah, cool, you can just do that with, you know, an extra node at the end of the tree.

And that's why you have those trim nodes and all kind of stuff, right? I have found that if I start with kind of my principal look or my principal thing, create a version of that, I don't have to keep track of what's different. If I change the node tree or I change multiple things, it literally lets me just go, Robbie's version, DP's version, director's version, and I can toggle back and forth of those without having to disable a lot of individual nodes, toggle those on and off. I just love it. And in fact, there's actually a preference and resolve where you can actually pre-name your versions. And I have names for those things that I do all the time, right? So I have

like first pass version and then I might create a second pass or whatever. Or you might think about it where like you have version one is what you've done before you presented the client. And then you just select the entire timeline, make version two, right click and make version two. And then you're addressing the client notes. So you always have that original grade to go back to to look at. And I just found that when I tried to do that on individual nodes, I just got really confused pretty quickly. Did I have that on originally?

No, okay. You know, it just got a little harder to keep track of where versions for me are kind of just snapshots that I can keep iterating and have a record of, of, and be able to go back, most importantly, if something was better from one and the other. Yeah, I think that is It's one of those things where it might seem like a bit more effort at the start But once you kind of have it mapped to shortcut keys And you actually think about it

You're like, okay, I know I'm about to try some crazy stuff on this shot I don't want to screw this up New version Yeah Buy my crazy stuff Well no, go back Okay I'm going to try some more crazy stuff

New version Okay great I like this one right It allows you to create that snapshot that you can always go back. And again, what we're doing here is we're setting up our grade management for success. We're basically saying, you know, we're going to be organized and we're going to manage our changes in such a way that we don't have to think about it. You don't have to keep track of. I changed node one and two to get this look where I want it. So now I want to, you know, adjust that.

You know, you don't have to remember what you did. You just new version. I'm going to try something. Maybe I like it. Maybe I don't. I'm going to go back to what I had. It saves you from making mistakes. It saves you from breaking your timeline if you do something crazy and accidental. It gives you an extra layer of security. So all of those things together kind of add up to these session efficiencies that we're talking about. All, Joey, as we get towards the end of the show, I have a couple more things I want to talk about. Some of them are related to the general idea of like comparative tools, stills, and that kind of thing. We had mentioned playheads earlier, but one of the things that I love, like you love playheads, I'm in that same passionate man crush on this.

And that is split screens. Split screens to me are just, they're invaluable for the way that my brain works. And split screens essentially have different ways of comparing shots, two shots or multiple shots next to each other with a different set of criteria. So easiest one to bring up a screen is just selected shots. You can just compare those two shots together. But then you can do things like, hey, show me all of the shots in a group just for visual consistency. And the cool thing is that split screens are outputted over the SCI stream. So if you have, you know, monitor, you can like, show me everything in a group.

and very easily you can just go through the group, make sure everything is the same. Versions is another split screen option, right? So I mentioned how much I love versions earlier. Maybe you're working on a heavy-duty commercial session where it's an agency client. They're like, show me this, show me that, show me that. Well, if you did it as versions,

split-screen versions bring those all up on a big, on the client monitor, and literally just have the client point to, oh, I like that one the best. Cool, that's what we're going with, right? So split screens are a way in various criteria of comparing shots next to one another. And I just like them a little bit better than what a lot of people I think use stills and still wipes for. Because it just allows me to look at them on the same screen at the same time. Now, there is one really important thing that you should note about split screens. And that is screen uniformity.

I know people are going to like, what? What are you talking about? I have had the situation before where if I have a bunch of split screens up, maybe the left side of the screen is a little slightly more, more or whatever than the right side of the screen. And they're like, well, your continuity's all screwed here because this is more red over here. You didn't see it when it's just a single shot up, but you see it in that context. So just a little asterisk on split screens to be here.

Yeah, and it's funny because we've talked about using all these different things as kind of ways of, you know, how do you adapt your workflow to be efficient? Yeah. It's going to be different for everybody because I kind of feel the exact opposite. I almost never reach for the split screen. For me, I reach for playheads a thousand times more than split screens because I would rather those things be full screen and I just jump between them because I'm thinking, okay, A, B, C, basically, and I'm kind of comparing in my head quickly.

That's just kind of how I work differently. And you have these options, but, you know, find the things that work best for. for you, for me, it's not split screens. Let me, let me, let me, um, let me, uh, sort of give a little bit of a differentiation thing here too. So like I tend to use split screens for general shot comparisons where I tend to use still and still wiping for detail comparison, right? So like if I'm trying to get this idea of like, do these shots flow in from one

another, right? And I look at them side by side or whatever, you know, four up or five up or whatever. I go, okay, cool. The general tone of these shots is flowing, but oh, his jackets or his face or whatever is a little different in shot to shot. Then I'll flip over to using splits, I'm sorry, to using stills and still wipes where I have a single thing up and I can wipe in it in different ways to then compare on those details. So I kind of use them both, but for different reasons, where a split screen is kind of like the macro feel. And then I dive down a little bit closer on stills to do some more. detail comparison. So related is one thing I think that a lot of people are not aware of when it comes

to stills. Everybody saved a still. There's multiple ways of organizing. We don't have to get into. We got a different bins and power bins and power grid bins and stuff like that. One of the things that I don't think a lot of people realize about stills is that number one is that there's a whole lethora of ways to have default naming for those stills, right? And I think this is really one of those things that's gotten me a lot faster because you're in a big show. You're saving stills, saving stills. Next thing you know, your bin has 400 stills on it and you're trying to find the right one.

There is an up preference and resolve for default naming. I have recently gotten into the idea of using variables in my still naming, right? So now I name by, it always gives you like the shot number, you know, 117 or whatever, but I named by time code. And then I name by like, I think I do time code and version. as my default way of naming stills now so I can very easily go to it and go, oh yeah, that's the still I pulled from.

When it comes to stills, I'm curious about, I don't think we've ever actually talked about this. Are you a wiper, or are you a quick flash between stills? A hundred million percent quick flak. I do the wipe to the very edge, and then I just play still on and off. It's the same thing as how I like to compare

with playheads versus split screen. I think my brain is just like, I like that AB because I can focus on one thing and see where that's changing. Yeah, I have come around a little bit to the flash it up real quick, like to compare a thing. I think what I try to do sometimes is I do this, like if a matching skin tone, for example, I'll bring them up in some sort of wipe, get them there, and then I do the flash thing to see if that works. And if that works, I'll go back up to the split screens thing and select a whole bunch of them and see if that works. Right. And if I got it working on all three of those comparison tools, then I know that it's working.

Also, I don't think a lot of people realize this one, you can wipe to another clip on the timeline, too, which is very handy. You don't have to say. Right click the thumbnail, wipe to timeline clip. Very useful. Which you don't have to make your life complicated by saving a still and then organizing it that way. You know, if you're not, it's not something you're going to keep for later. Why make it? Just compare to a shot on a timeline, which is which is pretty handy. Okay, last two things before, two or three things before we wrap up. And that is the idea of what I'm generically going to call layers,

but that's a little confusing to people because we already talked about layers and stacks earlier. What I mean specifically is how you organize the edit timeline in terms of your overall approach to management of clips, right? And I see this really, you know, we talk about in a wagon or old. old man fingers about editors use 827 layers and nothing's in the same space. But one of the things I think is really useful is organizing your timeline for, hey, this is my base lever, base layer, this is, you know, whatever, inset stuff, this is my text, these are my subtitles, because this is what I'm getting that, is that you might want to be organized on your edit timeline for things like text or whatever, but you might not want all of that stuff to be

visible on your color timeline. And this is a little hidden thing that I think more and more people are hip to, but it's really important to mention is that on the color page timeline at the track headers, where it says V1, V2, V3, and so on, you can actually click on, with some modifiers, click on those track headers to disable entirely or just to disable from view, right? So an option click or an alt click on those headers is going to turn them off. from view in the color page. Because I'm sure you faced this situation before.

You're going along. You're grading, you're grading, grading. And then you're like, why is the control not doing anything? And then you realize that you're actually on a lower third. You're grading the subtitle or something like that rather than on that. Because you don't need that on your timeline. You want it on for context, but you don't want it on on the timeline to grade. So it's a little quick tip about that too is being able to temporarily disable things from

view on your color page. timeline so they're still there and still be able to look at them but they're not they're not going to accidentally grade them right which is yeah and this is something I talk about all the time like ad nauseum which is you know prep prep prep prep the more organized your timeline is on the edit page the more organized you're gonna be on the color page when you're focused on the reference monitor and just trying to grade the images so if you sort that timeline on the edit page really nicely where, yeah, you can toggle on and off the things you don't need to focus on and then

get into the task of grading. It's going to save you so much time. All right. The last thing that we'll talk about and then we'll wrap up for today is I do think it's interesting when we get to the backside of a project that grade management still comes into play, right? And there's a couple things that I want to talk about that. And that is one, when you're viewing in context with a client, I think there are several grade management things that you can do. And the first one is a no-brainer. It's just simply bringing up a time code burning with the data burning options when you're viewing something, right?

Because a lot of clients still have that bitty, you know, burned in time code is what that acronym means, burning time code, bitty. It's just easier for them to look at something like that. Also, just with difference of player, especially if you're in a remote workflow, difference with how counter time code versus sympathy time code or whatever. if you're in the feedback thing, do yourself a favor and just bring up that burning time code that can be there. Another thing with burning options, I don't know how you feel about this. I think you're probably in the negative.

But I have found situations where some of those other burn in options, specifically clip name and things of that nature, can be useful to have on the timeline so clients can go, oh, it's that one. It's that shot. It's that shot I'm talking about. but a lot of variance there, but explore the burning options because I think that they are important. And then lastly, with rendering, okay, I was today years old

when I realized that in Resolve 19, there's a new feature that I'm like, who asks for this? I need to buy them a beer because it's awesome. And that is, we do a lot of rendering with textless rendering and not textless rendering or whatever. New in Resolve 19,

there's actually an option to exclude certain tracks on the render without having to go back to the edit page and turn things off. I love it. I love it. So much. It's great. Because going back to what we were just talking about, if you've done the prep work and your timeline is organized, now your textless version is one click.

Yes, totally. There's other things like that. It all comes together at the end in the deliver page. Everything else is organized. And that is such a killer feature of 19. It's the simplest thing. But I love it because the other thing you can do is I'm going to turn on, I'm going to make a render job for my texted. Then I'm going to make a render job for my text list.

And I'm going to click render both. I don't need to come back to the box. Totally. And that was always the way. And that was always the problem. And add a new render job. That was always the problem with the other way of doing it is that you couldn't, you had to do one render at a time because you had to, it was. was based on what was ever enabled in the edit time.

Or you duplicate your timeline, which has all kinds of other implications for things like render cash or messing up version. You could you could do it that way, but it was messy, right? Now it is beautiful and clean if you were organized at the beginning. Yep. And there's two last things I'll mention on the render page that are important. Then we'll wrap this conversation up. One, you do have the ability to render versions on the render page, which is great. So remember, if you want the directors cut,

all their crappy grade that you hate, right? Sure, you've made that a version, just turn that on, and you're done with that. Similarly, there is a way, like, if you're in a workflow where maybe you have an online editor doing things after the fact, or there's, you know, for a visual effect workflow, this doesn't get talked about very much, but there is this idea of what's called flat pass render,

where you can, if you've ever had the situation where you've done all this work, and then you're having a panic attack that all your renders don't have your grade on it, That's probably because flat pass is turned on. So that is another little minor grade management thing to worry about. And then lastly, in terms of grade management, this is definitely, this part of it is definitely a future episode getting more into the render page. But I don't think a lot of people actually realize the power of switching between single clip and individual clip renders.

And what I mean by that is that individual clip renders actually have a whole lot more grade management possible. than rendering out a single clip of your timeline. Some things that come to mind are render at source resolution rather than the timeline resolution, right? The option to turn on and use timeline effects or not use timeline effects on those individual clips. Things like, you know, naming in sort of a commercial workflow, like alpha channels. Like there's just a plethora of stuff that come into mind, which again, I think we can talk about in a future episode. but grade management is not something in resolve, I think that happens just at the grading stage.

There's a lot of these little buttons everywhere that are kind of workflow grade management kind of techniques. Yeah, and I'll just close on one last thing related to rendering individual clips. It doesn't have to be individual clips. You can kind of think fourth dimensionally here, something that I do all the time. If I have 50 spots in a project, I'll just select them all in the bin,

new timeline from selected clips. I make sure I turn off to use mark in and out so I get the whole timeline. Now I have a string out of nested timelines of all my timelines. And those are individual clips. Render individual clips. I just batch rendered 50 timelines with one click.

Totally. That's a great technique actually. Very cool. All right, guys. So we bounced around with a million different things here. Hopefully you followed some of it. as we said, a lot of these subjects, we can go into more depth.

There's a particular subject that you did think. Yeah, leave us a comment. Let us know which parts of these you want us to dive deeper into. Totally. Because there's a lot to break down here. But hopefully in the hour or so we've been talking, you've gotten some little nuggets out of here

that you can work into your own projects and into your own workflows. So as always, thanks for checking out this episode and hopefully it was helpful. Until our next episode, I am Robbie Carmen. And I'm Joey Deanna. Thanks for listening.