The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP054: NAB 2026 Recap

Episode Date: May 4, 2026

In this Episode, we're wrapping up NAB 2026 with some first hand experience from Joey - who, as he's done for almost a decade, was the lead Resolve demo artist at the Blackmagic Design booth. In addition to Joey's NAB experience, we'll discuss the state of affairs with trade shows like NAB and then explore some of our favorite things centered around DaVinci Resolve 21.  Specific topics include:The state of NABJoey's experience at the Blackmagic BoothThe new photo page in Resolve 21Other great new Resolve 21 featuresThe new trim pass workflowLayers!Other cool stuff - Luminary, Gaia Autocal Reporting, Adobe Color modeCheck out offsetpodcast.com for our entire library of episodes. You can also follow us on Instagram & Facebook - just search for The Offset Podcast.  Be sure to like and subscribe to the podcast wherever you found it and be sure to check out our growing library of episodes.  If you like the podcast it'd mean the world to us if you'd consider supporting the show by buying us a cup of virtual coffee -https://buymeacoffee.com/theoffsetpodcastSee you in about two weeks for a new episode.

Hey there, and welcome back to another episode of the Offset podcast. And in this show, we're doing a post-NAB-2020 recap. Stay tuned. Support for this episode comes from Flanders Scientific and the XMP 270 and XMP 310, the accessible, lightweight, and versatile monitors, helping to bring HDR monitoring on set while also being very well suited to post-production work. Learn more at Flanderscientific.com. Hey, everybody, welcome back to another episode of The Offset Podcast.

I'm one of your host, Robbie Carmen, and with me as always is my partner in crime. Joey Deanna. Hey, Joey, how are you, man? Good. Hey, everybody. Well, welcome back in for, I think this is episode number 54. Following up from our previous episode where we did sort of an NAB preview, Joey has survived his trip out to the desert, his annual pilgrimage to the land of debauchery.

and trade shows and is back to tell us all about it. First and foremost, we're glad to have you back, Joey. I'm glad that you survived. I know in previous years, and the voice has been shot, the body has been shot, the whole nine yards. So it seems like you made it out with minimal damage this year, which is a good thing, right? Yeah, I mean, it was a good show.

I lost my voice a little earlier than I would have liked because I like, I was great the first day, drank all my water, had all my cough drops. I was ready. I was staying hydrated. But like I woke up in the middle of the night with like, went to bed early like you're supposed to. Woke up in the middle of the night with the hotel air conditioning,

just killing my throat. Yeah. And this cough and that kind of second day, my voice was bad. But then it was like an uphill for the rest of the show. So overall, you know, didn't come home sick, didn't come home with any bubonic plague,

which was nice. That's good. I feel like everybody was pretty, pretty sanitary. There's a lot of hand sanitizing going on as as you do with these things because a lot of handshakes. But yeah, it was great. I came back right back to work, but had a good weekend rest afterwards. So I'm feeling really good. Killer. Killer. Well, we'll jump into all of that. Just real quick, some housekeeping before we dive in. Just as a reminder, you can follow the show on Facebook and Instagram. Just search for the Offset Podcast. You can check out our complete library of shows

over at the offsetpodcast.com. And we'd love it if you consider supporting the show by checking out our page right here to buy us a cup of virtual coffee. Every dollar pledge of the show goes directly to support the show, help us pay our editor, overhead costs, etc. So anything you can do there, we sincerely appreciate it. So yeah, Joey, I'm excited about what you have to say about NAB. I was a little bum not to make it this year, but at the same time,

didn't lose my voice, my feet feel great. I slept pretty well the entire time you were gone. So it's good stuff. But let's talk about a little bit about, I think let's start at kind of like the state of NAB, right? And then we can dive into some of the particulars of obviously new software, new hardware, all that kind of stuff. So I'm just curious, like, you know, from 3,000 miles or 2,000 miles away, whatever I am from Vegas, it seemed like the general vibe was, yeah, this was a good show. people were back enthusiastic but overall like size was maybe down a little bit I heard numbers ranging from like 45,000 to like maybe 55 or 60,000 which is significantly smaller than the heydays of NAB where it regularly broke 100,000. I know they've moved some things around in different halls as the convention center has kind of been rejiggered. Like what was your overall impression of you know the show in that regards like size, the general gist of people are they engaged? engaged or not, the new convention center set up, like, what did you, what did you feel about those things?

Yeah, I mean, I, I felt like it was a bigger show than it was, I think, because yeah, like, like you said, the numbers are kind of down. The, like, like, social response online was like, y'all, if you weren't there, you almost didn't know it was happening, right? Yeah, I was kind of bummed about that. Nobody was really talking about it, but, you know, from the actual show, everyone was super engaged. It did, feel a little bit more, I would say, lower paced because, you know, like you said, they moved around the convention center. So the big, the big hall now is the north hall, which they just fully rebuilt. It's very nice, but it's much more spread out. There's like a hallway and almost two sides of the convention center now.

So it's the actual show was physically more spread out in that hall. And it did feel like maybe the pace of people. coming and going was a little bit less. And, you know, there's advantages and disadvantages that. We had a lot of great conversations with a lot of people that, you know, we could focus on a little bit more instead of like huge crowds and in and out real quick of people trying to rush. But overall, it did feel kind of lower attended.

And I think, you know, NAB is my favorite thing in the year. I love it. I hate to see that. It's a little of a bummer. we're still recovering from all the weirdness around COVID and the show moving dates and changing times and evolving and all of the things. So I hope it grows. I hope they figure out ways to grow it in the next coming years.

I know it's a challenge for vendors that exhibit there. So I hope NAB, the organization themselves recognizes, hey, we're starting to lose some attendance here. We got to maybe look at how we're running the show and figure out how to make it bigger for the next That's all super interesting I mean I feel like you know

Having gone to that show for I don't I think my record was like 21 years straight or something like that right It was like it was definitely something I looked forward to But even in that time frame the 20 years or whatever Like I saw this slow Kind of slide and skid down And like not all of it was directly related to attendance A lot of it was just the

you know, the tricks and the dog and pony show that vendors would bring out. I mean, if you've listened to the show for a while, no doubt everybody's heard my story of being stuck in the Quantel Formula One race car out front of the South Hall. Like, there's no Formula One cars anymore in front of the, you know, in front of the halls. There's no, you know, there's no, you know, $1,000 giveaways. There's no parking lot helicopter rides. Right. Exactly. And like, I think you're onto it that, you know, that the trade shows in general, I think, like, what the pandemic did to a lot of.

of people throughout a lot of industries and a lot of ways of life is people are just like, eh, it's not worth it to me to travel anymore. It's not worth it to go this distance. So like, like the past few years, NAB has definitely felt a little bit of like L.A. West. You know, it's like, it's kind of like a like an extension of like, oh, okay, cool, the L.A. scene, California can get out to, you know, the desert for a weekend, party, look at toys, go home. And I think that's one of the reasons we've also seen like NAB, New York kind of. of on a little bit of an ascendancy the past couple years, like, because people were just not making those, those sort of same treks that they were in years, in years past. But interesting,

I'm, I'm dying to see, I'm going to get back out there next year to see the new convention center, because I know that that was, you know, they even have, what is it, like the west side now, which is like kind of across the street or something. Yeah, all new hall. Yeah. Yeah, and I think a lot of that was in response to the mega shows, like CES, which are, you know, 200,000 plus people and every little nook and cranny is full. But I also think you're right about something. I mean, knowing a little bit about the back end of how the, not all the details,

but some of the details about how the financials of NAB works in terms of getting booth space and whatever, it's like a, you know, for a lot of these companies, it is a significant percentage of their revenue to display at these shows. And I think, you know, I used to make fun of them, but now I'm kind of sort of becoming one of these guys a little bit and other avenues of my life.

Like, those guys in the back of the hall, like the little science fair boards and like the folding card tables, right? Like, even those guys are paying an arm and a leg to get those little setups. So it just goes to show like, you know, the Adobe's, the black magics, you know, the Sonys of the world.

I mean, just the megabucks that they spend to make this happen. And, you know, and part of it too is just like, you know, it's like you wanted to send, like if you wanted to ship something to a vendor out at NAB at the booth, it's got to go through, you know, this group of people and this group of people, and they all mark up and there's handling.

Like, it's a little bit of a racket, you know what I'm saying? And I think it makes it harder for smaller and mid-sized companies to really, I think every year they do the mental math of, okay, this is probably not financially worth it, but is it worth it for us to show off our wares? You know, and they kind of do that calculus every year. Yeah, it's funny. The joke has always been like you go to NAB as a vendor. they'll give you an extension cord for free,

but they'll charge you $5,000 to plug it into the wall. Right, exactly. Exactly, exactly. So, well, that's interesting. So tell us a little bit about, for those of you, I teased at this last time, our last episode, but for those of you who don't know, Joey has, I don't know,

what has it been, maybe eight years, nine years, something like that. Yeah, that you have been on the Black Magic booth through giving demos and the cool thing is we'll put a picture up here on screen so everybody can see it. But Joey is like one of the only people on the show floor in general. Like if you walk to every booth, you're only going to find like one, two, three, four people sitting.

Joey is one of those people. He is held in such high regard over there, I'm teasing, that he gets his own like, you know, lounge chair to give demos, which must, I just have to ask, could you imagine spending the three or four days with the volume and the time that you spend on the booth, what a different experience it would be if you had to stand up the entire time? I've done it. You know, the chairs were a relatively new development about two years ago. So, you know, the first five years or so that I did this, I did the full standing thing. Yeah, and then you came back and it was three weeks of like moaning of like how dead you were. Yeah, and two, I'll say this, just specifically

related to this and in general, when Black Magic has us as contractors out to do demos, they treat us incredibly well. I am very grateful to the team for how much effort they go into to make what is a physically grueling experience just because of the pace and because of everything going on. Yeah, you get lunch and chairs and all yeah, totally. Out of their way to treat us well, including, like we said, everything and may cost money for your booth, Black Magic has the plushest, most comfortable booth carpet that you're allowed to have on the show floor. And if you don't, if you never made it to the show, carpet plushness is a sign that you've

made it in the landscape of NAB. Like the companies, like you can almost, like, there's almost a direct correlation to success and net worth with how thick somebody's carpet is in their booth, you know, to how much money they may make. But that's great. I mean, so you had, you were running this, um, this demo station kind of in the middle of the booth, uh, in your nice plush chair, big resolve advanced panels, uh, just kind of give us, uh, I don't know, the 50,000 foot view of, uh, obviously Resolve 21 was announced. That was what you were kind of showing off. And obviously, uh, your main focus there on, on the booth floor demoing that and showing it to people. Um,

why don't you kind of just walk us through. I don't know, I think just that kind of general experience of just being a demo artist on a big booth with thousands of people around. And then kind of like what the flow was of that. And then kind of, you know, hit us with, you know, in your impressions after spending a week with it. What was that whole experience? Like, what do you think about Resolve 21? What are the major features? Like, you hinted out earlier that it was kind of, you know, quiet outside.

And I, I would, I would emphasize that. Like, I almost heard nothing on social media channels, on news sites. Like, if I hadn't known that the show was going on and you were there and all that kind of stuff, I wouldn't have known anything. Like, so like, you know, all people, like, a week later, I'm like, oh, Adobe introduced something new. Oh, okay, Resolve, like, it was just that level of crickets. So I'm curious. And I'm sure other people in our audience feel the same. Just give us the, give us the lowdown.

Yeah, I mean, clearly, Resolve 21 was the big news of the show, as it usually is, especially for our little corner of the industry. And, you know, one thing that Black Magic has done for the past few years that I think is really, really smart is to put out the public beta and their big announcement video a couple days before the show. That means everybody that shows up that's really interested has some context. They know what they're generally looking for. They know what their focus is, what's kind of new, what they want to see, as opposed to coming in completely. completely blind and being like, show me everything new. You know, that's a harder, harder demo to do because, you know, you can just go back, you can go through the list. We're like, here's all the cool favorite new features kind of one by one, but you don't really have time to focus on anything specifically.

So for people to come with some understanding and like a little bit of homework done in their head, I think we can be as demo artists much more valuable to them because they're coming with better informed questions, a better. of the framework of what they want to see. And we can tailor every single demo to the person we're talking to. You know, do you want to look at these new edit page features? Do you want to look at some of the new AI stuff? What do you do? Have you used Resolve before? You know, what do you do right now with Resolve? What are you looking for in this new release that you're excited for?

That, you know, having that couple days of advance for the general crowd, huge help. Yeah, it's just in the, the repetitive. of some of the stuff we have to, you know, demo over and over again. But in terms of what I think is actual value to the customers and actual value to the users, if they're coming with a little bit of context first, I can give them a lot more value to what their real day-to-day workflow is. Yeah, that's interesting.

I mean, I think that pre-announcement, a couple days a week ahead of it, whatever they've been doing in recent years, I think you're right. I think it also is a big, like, traffic control time-same. at the booth, right? Instead of like that first day, and especially now that they've kind of shifted the schedule a little bit, now the show starts on a Sunday rather than a Monday and all that kind of stuff. You know, it used to be in years past. These big announcement was sort of happened the morning of the, you know, the first day of the show. It would be, you know, impossible to get anywhere near the booth. And then everybody was just scrambling like, what? I heard Grant say this. I heard Grant say

that. And it was like, it was like a traffic nightmare, right? And like, like, when we say that the show might have felt a bit slower. Stuff like that might make it feel slower, but there's so much more value to the users there. So it's kind of a double-edged sword. Yeah, and then the other thing that struck me about what you just said, too, is that like, I'm really, and we can dive into this a little more because obviously you know all parts of the app pretty well,

but it strikes me as resolved, you know, now in version 21. It's a far cry from, you know, the early days where I think most people, people using resolve could tell you, you know, professional users could tell you that they had a pretty full grasp on the app, right? And now it's just sort of like there's so many pages, so many features, so many, you know, right clicks and hidden menus and all that kind of stuff. Like, as a demo artist, right, at these shows, is that a challenge to sort of, I mean, obviously your focus is color. You have obviously quite a bit of fusion and compositing knowledge, maybe tangentially a little like Fairlight knowledge, but like, is that a challenge when people roll up to be like,

hey, show me everything end to end in this app, because now it just seems to me that like, it's really challenging to get like a grasp of the breadth of the full app these days. Yeah, and it's one of those things where I kind of use it as an advantage. I like to explain to people that, hey, one of the amazing things about resolve that is unique among all post-production software available today is that there is zero round-tripping. There is one timeline. There is one set of clips. Yes, there are many different pages, many different tasks, many different mediums you can work in, but it's all presenting the same timeline just in a different user interface for a different creative task. That's not to say you need to know

every single step of every single workflow. Many of us don't, and that's fine. It's the, The advantage there is that when you do need to go from one workflow to another, or maybe you need to bring in somebody with collaboration to do a different workflow like Fairlight or Fusion or, you know, some editorial stuff, whatever, there's no round tripping. There's no XML. You know, we've talked a lot about conforms and back and forth and interoperability recently. You know, if you're staying all in resolve, the big advantage is no matter what page you're on or how many people you have working on it, it's all. the same timeline. I mean, there's no loss in translation. So that alone being able to kind of explain that concept to people because it's really, it really is unique to resolve. I think once they get that, they realize, okay, yeah, you might not be able to tell me every single

thing about Fairlight. There are people here that can. And, you know, I just try to be honest to me, but if we venture into something like deep into audio world that I don't understand, I'm like, hey, I'm a colorist. This is not my primary focus. The Fairlight guys over there would love to tell you those things. Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, it's a blessing and a curse. I mean, I remember, you know, I was involved in the relatively early days of Final Cut Studio, writing books and stuff like that. And I, you know, you know, the dream was always the super app, right? You know, to get rid of these, these, and Black Magic has obviously achieved that. But I can imagine, like, a little bit of a victim of their own success, right? As this, as you get more features and, like,

this app gets bigger and bigger and bigger and more complicated. And I think that's a, a challenge on a lot of levels. It's a development challenge, right? It's a marketing challenge. And it's a user challenge, right? I mean, and we even see this. I mean, I'm a perfect use case of this. I can tell you that I know, you know, the color page and the edit page inside and out.

I could tell you in my sleep, what every right click is, where to click or whatever. But that knowledge falls off in a very, you know, precipitous way when I get into fusion and to fair light and some of these, you know, other work. right? And so it's a challenge. And it's totally fine. I think we need to get rid of this idea that you need to be a full expert of every aspect of this software. We need to embrace the idea that it's a better workflow to have it all integrated, but you don't have to be a master of everything. Oh, no, for sure. I'm just saying the gone are the days where I feel like I could be a master of the whole thing because it's just so big and broad and et cetera. Support for this

episode comes from conform tools. Conform tools. allows you to translate timelines between Premiere and Resolve and other NLEs while automatically solving common issues that normally need to be fixed by hand. Avoid time-consuming trim and transfer issues and securely send large media files to collaborators at a fraction of the size and in minutes instead of hours. With a growing toolbox of features, let conform tools handle the tedious stuff so you can focus on the creative. Built by Post professionals, Conform Tools helps editors, colorists, and conform artists move faster and finish stronger. Learn more at conform.tolls.

And now, Blackmagic is, I don't know, adding to that complication that I just spoke of. One of the highlight features that they came out with this year was the photo page. And now, before you tell us all about the photo page and how it works and all your thoughts about it, I just want to say one thing about it because I have, in preparation of this episode last night, the day before I was, you know, reading reviews and looking at forums and whatever. And I actually think that this is a really welcomed feature, not only because it's, I mean, obviously if you do anything with stills or photos, now you have a unified place with a tool set you already relatively know, in workflows that you already know, color science, you know, same sort of tools. But, you know, I'm thinking about it from like a business perspective. How often, you know, do we do movies or advertising campaigns where there's like still elements, right? Where people are like, oh, well, I guess I got to hire this retouching artist over here or this person who knows Photoshop or Lightroom or whatever.

And now it's just sort of like, no. And I've actually, it's interesting because we've done some projects in D.C. color recently where it has been all sales base. And I've just been like, screw it. I'm just going to do it in resolve. And now I have an added feature set to assist me with that. So why don't you tell us a little bit about kind of where it's out with this? Because I, for one, think this is a really cool thing to have, not just for the photo dabblers out there, you know, but for the people who are integrating still assets, especially raw still assets, into their workflow,

I think this is a huge boon for that productivity and can allow people to go, nope, we can do your video portion and your, sales portion, maintain consistency. Here you go. Yeah, I think the photo page is, it's a little tough to explain, but it's such a huge improvement that it's, and it's so well thought out, and it's so well done. And we're just only, we're still in beta one or two. Yeah, I've had some issue. I've had some issues that I want to ask you about, but go on, explain it. And we'll, we'll get into this. But, you know, I do a lot of photography just myself. So I've been a long time user of other photo organization and editing apps. I have already thrown those away, bought a secondary micro panel for the workstation

that I do photography stuff on, and are moving all of that workflow over to resolve and the photo page. That's how much I absolutely love it. And the biggest thing, the biggest takeaway for the photo page for me that I want everybody to understand is that it's not new color tools for photos, right? it's not a completely new thing. It is, you know, resolve in my view as the best color tools in the world. They are now being applied in a workflow that is more appropriate to photos.

Like you said, we've always been able to do photos and resolve. We bring them in as frames. Maybe we string them out into a timeline. Maybe we render them out as individual clips. You know, do our edits. We might use a camera raw converter to convert them to like a TIF beforehand. You know, it's sometimes hard to get things like sizing and crop. right because it's not a normal video aspect ratio, things like that.

There's a lot of workarounds to getting photos in to resolve before 21 and getting photos out of resolve before 21. What the photo page does is it eliminates every single one of those workflow headaches. You can now bring in camera raw stills directly from their raw files, edit their camera raw settings, change their debayer settings. You can catalog them into photo gallery. You can rate them with stars or flags as you're culling through, you know, whole shoots full of photos. You can edit them and grade them in their native res and aspect ratio while also looking at them on your calibrated reference monitor, which is a huge improvement if you've used any other photo editing apps, right? How annoying is it to sit in front of a $20,000 monitor that's turned off while you're grading photos on a $200 Dell, right?

Like, that's such low-hanging fruit for the photo-editing world to use calibrated monitors on external color-managed output. And now Black Magic is the only one doing it. So the big thing to know about the photo page is input and output and full-res viewing and operating works amazingly now. Dealing with super-high megapixel raw stills is different than dealing with video. So you do have options to scale the viewer resolution, not the actual resolution, but the debayer resolution. So if you want your controls to be more interactive on like a 60 megapixel monster image, it can automatically do that so your controls react quickly. All of the color controls on the photo page, just drive node number one on the color page. So you can start with organization, cropping, culling your photo library, whatever, and then do basic corrections on the photo page.

photo page using your reference monitor and then one button jump over to the color page add as many nodes as you want do whatever color management you want and then jump back to the photo page to go back to organization or anything else now when you deliver you can export right from the photo page or when you have a photo gallery selected the deliver page now gives you photo specific options like metadata for dpi for output color space stuff like that and the the piece day resistance if you will Now you can export H-E-I-F-HDR stills with full metadata as well for social media, Instagram, Facebook. They will show up natively on your phone in HDR using the same H-DR collar management and pipeline that you're already using in Resolve.

So let's do an example here, right? Let's say I've got a film. I've got a show look. I graded the film in ACE's CCTV. I've got a whole custom pipeline developed for this. I want to grade my stills in that same pipeline. in the past, there would have been a lot of workarounds on the way in and the way out. And you might even be kind of leaving some dynamic range of quality on the table by using external camera raw tools.

Right. So now with the photo page, grab all your photos, throw them into an album. Okay. You can jump over to the color page, do a pre node to transform from whatever you're deba bearing to. And this is important because all of the camera raw formats, have different debayer options. That's just the nature of the camera, the different camera manufacturers. But let's say it's a Canon. Debaer to 2020 and Canon Log. Sony. Debaer to S-Log 3 at S-Gamet 3, Cini. Nikon, debaer to Nikon-N-Log. We have color management transforms for all

of these still color spaces that we can debayer to now and then go right into Aces CCT before that node 1 and now throw on maybe on the timeline level or a group level in ODT that matches your show look, you know, with whatever stuff you've done for the film. Now every single still you grade, whether it's on the color page or with the controls on the photo page, it's hitting that node number one that's now perfectly situated in your existing grading pipeline with your existing color management. Using your existing reference monitor, you can be an SDR, you can be an HDR. All of your color management is now going to work exactly how you expect with the

infinite amount of node-based color tools available to you for all your still. I mean, the amount of time that's going to save and quality you're going to get for any time you need to do stills and video together, I am in love with it. And grading still, coming from doing a lot of my own photography and using other apps and their color tools and always wishing it was resolved, just doing it in ACEs like I do everything else on my reference monitor. God, it's, it's liberating. well especially because it doesn't move yeah right tracking's really easy tracking's super easy right no that's a cool overview

I mean I um I sort of I think this writing has been on the wall for a while actually I can't tell you exactly what versions it has been but you know slowly but surely like maybe it was Resolve 18 or 19 there was you know I remember there was a big thing about the announcement like a Sony ARW support which is their raw format, you know, like, and we've seen Canon Raw.

Like, I think we've been building to this. And it's just like one of those things where, you know, I think the narrative is like, oh, this is black magic, like, you know, going after Adobe and attack. Like, I think, you know, there might be somewhere, somebody in an office somewhere in Melbourne or whatever who's thinking like that. But I think that, you know, from a workflow point of view, you know, this just, this just, it naturally fits into the. model and it naturally fits into the flow.

And what I like about it is that all of the new stuff is, how can I say this? All the new stuff is supportive of that workflow, not reinventing that workflow. So it's not like- We're bringing the power of node-based color grading, which, as I will always say, is the superior approach to stills where it's never been. Yeah. And I think that that's, like that supportive aspect of it, I think is good. it's going to give people, you know, projects of all sizes the ability to go, oh, now we can be

much more unified in our approach. We can be, you know, that means even just a single person doing the work, right? And I think that also, I think artists need to think about this as revenue enhancement thing, right, that now we can pitch the idea of like, oh, do you have, oh, you're doing a film. Do you have behind the scenes photos? We can do those too and get them in the flood, like, you know, marketing packages, all of that kind of stuff, I think is going to be a real boon to people to market additional services for. And as you said, use tools that they haven't used before. So it's very cool.

And I am in particular, I've taken a real keen interest in still, HDR stills in particular. So I'm very keen on social. They get you a lot more attention because when you pull up your phone and you see a photo in HDR, it's, I mean, credit to Apple for kind of really pushing this with their iPhones and having them take photos by default in HDR, but now that we can do it right out of resolve. Well, that's the thing, right? It's like for years, we've been in these discussions or, you know, our presentations from Apple or Dolby or whoever, you know, talking about, oh, HDR for still.

And like, I'm like, yeah, but how do I make it? Where do I see it? How do I work it? And it's always been like this little bit of a hack kind of thing to get it to work. And now it's like, okay, now it's just here. It's in the tool I already known and it's like, that's how these things, you know, generally flow, but I'm excited that it's finally here. and give it a shot.

Now, let's move on to some other cool things, because obviously more than just the photo page and the photo workflow. I have some favorites that I wanted to kind of mention to you and see what you thought. Obviously, there was from all accounts, the show was a little less AI heavy in an overt way

than we were anticipating and a lot of people were probably. And more AI workflow, less AI generation, which is exactly what we were asking for. 100%. But I do, I did note when I pull down the, the beta version, which I think is now on beta two or three, something like that, always head over to the Black Magic support page to

pull down the latest. You know, they are very splashy with, hey, AI this, AI that, you know, and so there's a couple tools that I think are kind of cool. Some of them, I'm a little suspect of like AI speech generator seems a little dangerous to me, like in the wrong hands or whatever. but the AI and Telesearch, I think, getting, you know, analyzing media to get at specific pieces of footage, I think, you know, somebody in a face, laughing, smiling, whatever it may be, I think that's really cool. The ones that I was super interested in, and I'm curious about your feelings on this. So doing a lot of, how should we say, marginally shot projects a lot of the time, right?

One of the things I'm doing constantly is obviously noise reduction, but sharpening, right? And I'm curious what your thoughts were about the AI ultra sharpen tool because, you know, just like the AI ultra noise or whatever they call that feature now, I think does a really killer job. And it's for me, the AI noise reduction has been like a good in between point between like my normal noise reduction workflow and then bringing in an OFX tool like neat. It's like it slots right there in the middle for me. I often get chunky results with sharpening, right? Like it's that crunchy, that crunchy edge, that kind of stuff. How do you feel about this ultra sharpened?

I'm really impressed with it. And I'm really not just saying that because we were, I was really trying to break it in a lot of ways. It's very clean. Like, no sharpen tool is going to be a miracle, right? It's not going to take a fully. out of focus shot and make it in focus. That would be an unreasonable expectation. But compared to other shnarpening tools available, the new ultra sharpen is, I would say, exceptional. Yeah. With a couple notes here, because I think it's important to kind of really think about how

best to use it. You know, even the best AI tools in the world, none of them are just click it and it's perfect, right? If you have a noisy image, obviously the ultra sharpen will sharpen the noise. So it, helps to isolate the areas that you want to sharpen, maybe with a power window. It helps to do some noise reduction before it. But what really struck me about the ultra sharpen is when you get into those fine details, eyelashes, hairs, crisp edges, the fall off between what it's sharpening and what it's not is incredibly natural and even more so the impact of it on brightness is really, really soft. And that's important for HDR.

You know, you ever look in HDR and you start oversharpening something and those highlights just start ringing at high knit levels? Yeah, and you get like jutter artifacts and stuff like, yeah, it could be really bad. You know, it can be really challenging. And I would say especially in HDR and especially with fine detail, ultra sharpened does a phenomenal job managing that fine line between we're going to get some sharpness here or we went too far and now we've ruined the image. Yeah, so the other, unlike a lot of AI tools, it's very consistent. You know, shot to shot, it's not like drastically different shot to shot. The controls feel the same in terms of as you're kind of increasing or decreasing it. It feels very consistent, very usable.

It's a very, very good. I'm going to be using it a lot. Yeah. So the other one, again, with doc and marginally shot footage, that really jumped out to me right away was the, the motion. D-Blur tool, the AI motion de-blur, because here's a situation that happens all time, right? And you see this, and part of this is like, you know, the frame that editors often choose, but, you know, you've seen that motion where it's like in full motion, then it's a freeze frame, right? And then, like, there's a narration over it or something like that, or maybe some sort

of graphic pointing at something. And inevitably, when the editor makes that freeze frame, it's, like, right in the middle of motion, right? So, like, somebody's hand is a little blurry, or, like, There's their faces moving. That to me is like, so we've always had motion. I mean, not always, but we've, for a long time, we've had motion blur to put in some of that blurriness. But now the opposite of that is really pretty, I was playing with this last night on a project that I'm working on.

And it really was pretty amazing for a bunch of stills that were pulled, that were freeze frames from video that preceded it, right? And like, it just got it to be like that, just that, like, that, like, that, slight softness, that little bit of motion blur. It really did a good job cleaning that up. And I'm just curious how you felt about that one too. Yeah. Again, just like to sharpen, don't expect impossible miracles. Yeah. But it works really good. And a couple couple kind of tips here that I've found. One, it's important to know this is a media pool operation. So you right click on the clip, tell it to do a motion d blur. It will render it as a new clip. And I think that's a better

way to do it because one of my suggestions is go through the shot. and kind of maybe mix between the two depending on how much motion is happening, right? So you don't have to be 100% all or nothing with this tool. You can blend between it to get more or less motion blur as needed. What's really cool about it though, start thinking about it for stabilization, right? Have you ever stabilized a shot that has motion blur in it? It'll lock down perfectly, but then you just have still shot, still shot, jitter of blur. right if you do a motion de blur on that shot

before you just made your camera you just made your camera do the same thing by the way I got excited you know uh but yeah if you do the motion de blur on the shot before you stabilize it you're stabilizing it without that motion blur so when it removes the motion it doesn't pulse in and out of that blurriness that's a good one like you said docs found footage you know run and gun this is going to be a go-to tool where you're going to take a shot that might have too much motion blur, take some down, maybe blend it with the original clip a little bit to kind of dial it in, or if you're stabilizing something, give you a better base point for your stabilization.

Yeah, now there's two more that jumped out of me with this AI thing. We can move on to other features. And this is going to sound like, oh, Rob, you drank the Kool-Aid, man. This is so cheesy. Like, what is it about you? We actually had a project, maybe last, spring where there was a person that and we actually lost the project because the there was an actor in the film a well-known actor who required how should we say special handling of their skin right and um you know to sort of uh de-age them or maybe maybe you know whatever um and we lost it because they had a go-to retoucher that they had

worked with before that they trusted, right? And I was like, man. And surprisingly, that kind of thing about, like, aging people and, like, sometimes purposely aging them, that comes up in narratives sometimes. Like, we need to, like, this is supposed to be 10 years later. This, like, that was always a really kind of specialized thing. I'm trying to remember there was a thing, a Netflix thing, or maybe, like, Robert De Niro. I can't remember what the movie was where, like, this was made to be, like, a big deal, how they aged people, right? And so I'm curious about. And so I'm curious about, this this age transformer I think is what they're calling it um is it coolade is it can't be or is it something that you think that uh is useful and like and you know like smooth and seamless for

for for using it if you want to have those kind of effects a little bit of both uh and that that kind of range depends entirely on how aggressive you are uh you know when you go really aggressive, just like I keep saying, don't expect miracles. But what I've found, it works really good on. And I want to actually combine two of these things, right? There's the age transformer, but there's also the AI blemish removal tool, which only handles blemishes and skin. Yeah. That one absolutely fantastic. Does a great job. And how does that, as you explain that, just give us an idea of how that differs from, you know, the beauty effect, the face refinement, you know, because it seems like there's Black Magic's getting to this place now

where there seems to be some overlap, or I don't know if it's overlap, or it's like these newer tools are iterations of those older tools. Like it's a little confusing about, you know, some of that too. You know, I've always said in resolve there's a thousand ways to do any particular task, and having options is always good when you're trying to figure out the best approach for a shot. So let's talk about the phase age transformer and the Blimmy. removal together, right? Blimish removal, like basically goes and actually finds blemishes, discoloration, etc. On a slider, you can kind of give it a range and it will, you know, colorize them,

remove them, you know, blend them into the surrounding skin while keeping the skin texture. It does a very good job of it. The face age transform, yes, you can go positive in age and you know, it kind of grays up the hair a little bit, which can be really useful for for some things. Again, if you go too far, it goes too far. That's just how any kind of tool like this is. But if you go back a little bit, for example, to use as a beauty tool, kind of de-age someone, whether you're using the age transformer or the blemish tool,

what I suggest is reach for the detail recovery resolve effects, which is essentially a layer mixer combined with frequency separation. So you can take your. adjustment or you can take your blemish removal and feed it back the prior node right the unaffected node put it in this detail recovery and then you have really intuitive controls of how much to use how much not to use based on the frequency of things like skin and hair texture so it's one of those things where you can kind of combine it in a node-based environment and make what might seem like a kind

of point-and-click tool at first be a really deep customizable tool that's going to be a lot more useful in an actual color session. Support for this episode comes from Flanders Scientific and Gaia Color Direct Connect volumetric autocount. Calibration of reference displays is critical in our industry, and there's no easier way to calibrate than by using Gaia color, which is standard on DM, XMP, and XMPC series monitors. Gaia color calibration allows supported probes to be plugged in directly to the monitor.

for fast, accurate, and automated calibration with no computer or operator expertise required. You can learn more about this powerful system at flanderscientific.com. Tell us your impressions about this, the trim pass architecture and workflow. I think, how should I start on this? I think that there has been some things recently that I have not, that are cool. on the surface, Node-sacks, for example, are one of those things for me.

Some people absolutely adore nodes-sacks. To me, it's just complexity, right? I'm nervous about this workflow with trim pass, because I can see the absolute benefits of it, but I'm a little worried that it's going to be that same sort of

add complexity to the process that, to me, node-sacks were. And I'm curious if I'm wrong about that, maybe there's a little bit of that where you kind of sit with that and where you think it's going to be most beneficial for most people's workforce? I have been saying since

day one of the beta the multi-master trims is my favorite new feature in 21. And I mean that. It is incredibly cool. To summarize it, basically for every timeline, you can add an infinite amount

of what they're calling trims. And what those trims are, are they give you additional node stack layers specific to that trim. But it's not just one for the whole timeline. It's not just one for the clips. It's everything.

So you have, let's say you have trim one, trim two, trim three. You go to trim one, you get a node layer for every clip that's unique, shot to shot, just for that trim. You get one for every group that's unique group to group for that trim. And you get one for the timeline that's unique to that trim. trim. So what does this actually look like? Let's say we have our main grade in ASIS CCTV. Then we make an HDR output transform on the timeline level of trim number one for an HDR version. Great. Okay. Now we can switch to HDR. Do the same thing for an SDR. Now we can have an SDR and an HDR. Okay. The main grade stays the same, but we have a whole node tree to make shot by shot adjustments just for the SDR or

just for the HDR. We have a whole node tree for of our groups, so if like one interview needs a little bit of help on the HDR, we can do that on a group level just for the HDR. And we can trim on the timeline level. The next part of this is each trim can have its own unique output settings. So what I'm really going to be using this for is social versions, right? You do a UHD timeline for your master, then you do a 9x16 timeline on a trim, and since you have a separate node tree for each CLIN, clip just for the 9 by 16 trim, grab node sizing, you could pan and scan your clips all in the same timeline, unique to just the 9 by 16, but then when the client comes and says, oh, we need to add a shot, we need to replace a shot. It's just one master timeline. To be able to bring all those things together in kind of the idea of I have one master edit, I'm going to make all of my versions, whether they be aspect ratios, whether they be color spaces, whether they be different deliverables from this trim manager. it's beautiful.

And then you go to the deliver page, you literally just have a drop down of which one you want to choose. All right, so I have a couple technical questions about this. So I got my, I don't know, what we're going to call that now,

my master grade, my hero grade, my original, like what I mean? Like that starting point grade that I did, right? And then I come in, I enable this feature

and I'm working on, hey, I got the HDR version, I have the social version or whatever, right? That handoff of data from that master grade to these other versions, I'm guessing is also a floating point data flow, right? Like, I'm not like, if I, I could recover something later on

in one of these node stacks that I could, in their original grade, right? Okay, that's good. Two, like, I guess it begs the question, what am I using the original hero grade for? Because it seems like, if that's the base, like that the beginning of the recipe, there's potential to have that original grade kind of be irrelevant

because you're doing all of the specific work in the additional stacks. Do you see what I'm saying? I think it's the exact opposite. You do that hero grade with whatever output transform that you're going to be primarily working in, get it as close as humanly possible. That's the one you get approved by the client. Then you start making other versions and, oh, in this color space or this aspect ratio needs a little tweak.

That's when you reach for that clip level trim only on that version. One of the, also, I think a marquee thing that came out was the Magic Mask improvements, right? So, you know, Magic Mask has made was, you know, an pretty evolutionary or revolutionary jump from version one to two. And I think everybody can agree that version two, you know, last year's announcement of that worked exceedingly well. It does work exceedingly well. But it still has problems with performance occasionally. It still has some problems with the way, you know, losing the mask and having to retract it and regenerate the object mask. One of the things I thought was really interesting is that they now have a Magic Mask-specific render-in-place option that generates a mat and it gets wired up to your node tree very easily.

Tell us a little bit about that because I think that's going to be a big, especially on, you know, projects where you might be hesitant in the past to really dive deep into magic mass. for fear of some of the problems I just mentioned. Do you think that alleviates some of those concerns? Oh, yeah. It's a really cool thing to just be able to... You literally just in a 3.manyo magic mask, say, you know, render magic mask in place, drops it as a high-contrast mat right in your node tree

and connects it up. So anything else you've done on that node already working, it's completely seamless. There's a couple of really cool things about this that I think go a little bit beyond the surface of now I don't have to retrack it. Now I get real-time playback. Now it makes collaboration easier

because we can sync that mat between different sites, things like that. It also allows for a lot more customization of that mat. So now we've got our magic mask written into place. I can slap on as many other nodes

after that as I want. Different blurs, different kind of transforms, different, you know, alpha mat shrink and grow. I can manipulate that with all of my, you know, normal node-based tool.

now, it's going to stay real time, it's going to stay with the project, and I can kind of take Magic Mask its starting point to the next level with the full node-based tool set, whereas before I was limited to just the refined tools in the panel. So not only does it save you on the workflow side, it opens up some interesting possibilities for what you can actually do with Magic Mask. Yeah, and I think it's going to be, I mean, I think, you know, I haven't put it into play a lot other than just testing, but I think for me, where I had a lot of hesitation about overusing magic mask. I think now those concerns, like, so like, you know, in a collaborative project, right,

or whatever, like, you know, or just one that I'm just, don't want to retract 200 clips. That really makes a lot of sense. Related, I simultaneously excited but disappointed for the group, uh, group enhancements that they did now with, uh, grade versions in the group. That's a big improvement being able to quickly, uh, iterate on different looks and feelings. for like interview setups and that kind of stuff. Oh, yeah. I'm still bummed that they didn't fix

some of the underlying problems of groups that I have, but maybe in Resolve 39, that will finally be fixed. Now, the last one I have to ask you about the color page because I'm sure you're very opinionated about this, and I'm sure, I don't know, your node-based side of your brain kind of exploded a little bit. Do we have layers now in Resolve? Is this just a way of abstracting the data to look at it?

Like, how much did that bother you that there was now a layer of view or layer workflow in the node graph and resolve? You may be surprised to hear this. I really like the layer view. Okay. I really do. Because when you have a node tree as complex as mine, everybody's seen it. It's a bajillion nodes. They're all labeled.

they're all organized as a pretty complicated pipeline. I might have, you know, a magic mask over here. I might have a power window over here. I might have a key over here. It gets tough to figure out at a glance what I've done to what node. In the layer view, they're all just stacked up as icons. I can instantly see where everything is. And since I'm using a fixed node structure,

I'm not wiring my nodes up in this layer view. But it's a really screen real estate efficient way of seeing every single thing that's on, every node on the advanced panel, I can still punch up a node by number and just go right to it and I know my node numbers. So like if I'm going day by day, color shot by shot,

I'm probably gonna keep it in that list view because I can easily see every operation on the nodes. I can still jump to my nodes. I know where they are in my head because I designed the node structure. I don't need to see that whole massive tree that I'm never gonna change because I'm using a fixed node structure.

So I like it. I think it's great. I'd love to see some of my feature requests was I'd love to see like some filtering and some sorting and some searching added to it. But like as a view, I think it's helpful. Interesting. I got to say I'm surprised by that point of view from you, knowing that you've been such a staunch, you know, node advocate for the entire time that I've known you. But that's good. Yeah.

I mean, for me, it's just it's less, you know, the data is not changing. The operations are not changing. It's just a way of visualizing it. And as you said earlier, you know, different ways to sort of solve the same problem. I think there are certain people that nodes are, you know, just by the nature of them, there are a lot to look at. There can be complicated, especially the bigger the tree gets. And this is just an alternative way of looking at the same set of data, you know, of you,

if you will. Like, that's cool. Like, I dig it. Like I can, and I do think that there is a certain thing to be said about, just the physical layout of it, like larger icons, easier to spot what operations are going on. Because, you know, you've been there where you have a node and you've got 40 things going on the node and the icons are like... Hover over it to get the...

Yeah, you can't really see it. Like what it... So it solves a lot of those kind of problems, but I mean, I don't think that, you know, the people who are freaking out about like, oh, we're moving to a node base or a layer-based workflow, like, I don't think that's unfounded. I think the nodes are there. It's just a different way of visualizing that data. No, obviously we're Mr. Node, and I love it.

I think it looks great. No, obviously, there's been a lot of other improvements to resolve in terms of Fairlight and Fusion. I'm really, how do you say this? Do you say it Lottie? Is that the way to say it? The Lottie animations? It's like a text-based or HTML-based animation. I knew nothing about this beforehand.

But when we talked about kind of pre-NAB, one of the things that I was really harping on is I want more companies to support more open standards. Totally. This is an open standard. I'm all for it. Yeah, and there's a lot of, you know, a lot of under the hood stuff like that with all of the push towards immersive stuff. I think, you know, with affiated rendering, H265 improvements, you know, we didn't even get to this. We maybe cover this in a later episode, but the Fairlight Live workflow, I think, is pretty interesting that Black Magic is moving into kind of that, you know, market that seems to have been dominated by, you know, the SSLs and the, the Neves and, you know,

the big live events. You know, I'm not sure that they're going to be mixing, you know, the next whatever, you know, cold play concert on this. But, you know, churches, events, theaters, like, that's like, like, they're going to, they're going to own that space just like they have with ATEMs and stuff. So that's pretty exciting. So cool. I mean, this is just, you know, a little bit of a high-level view of Resolve 21 and some of the

NAB experiences, obviously because Joey was there. Now, there's a lot of stuff, other stuff going on in NAB. And if you were marching around the show floor, please let us know. head over to the Offset Podcast and use the submission button. Maybe there's something cool that you saw that you think is worth us exploring for a future episode and talking about it. I mean, we surely didn't get into lots of other cool things that were announced at the show, including, and I'm just going to do this for Joey so he doesn't actually have to say it.

Joey himself was part of the NAB experience. Joey announced this week a new software tool that was announced actually yesterday, I think, at the semi-annual or quarterly Dolby. sort of webinar that they do for Dolby Vision. Doe has a new tool called Luminary that is supporting Dolby Vision workflows. Joey, give us the quick elevator synopsis of Luminary for those who would be interested in and where they might be able to go

and find more about the product. Yeah, it's a timeline-based XML viewer, editor, visualizer for Dolby Vision metadata. It's basically a supercharged GUI front-in to Metafire that gives you a full timeline and can also sync that timeline to DaVinci Resolve. So I've been using it. I started the project specifically because I was doing some compliance editing on existing Dolby Vision IMF episodes.

And I wanted to make absolutely sure when I was rearranging shots and trimming things that I wasn't breaking the colorist original creative metadata. So this is kind of helping me, you know, validate and make sure, hey, I'm looking at exactly where the edit points in the metadata are so I can really go in and QC and analyze and troubleshoot any Dolby Vision related problems. So it is

going into a private beta now and then we're going to be releasing it hopefully very soon, but it's really cool. Yeah, so if you want to learn more about that, you can head over to retrograde tools, which is sort of the landing place for some of the things that Joey's working on, including a whole bunch of

free accessible tools, Python scripts and DCTLs, that kind of stuff worth checking out. So that's exciting, Joey. I think it's about high time that software development is in your quiver of skills and abilities to get out there. So very excited about that.

And I know that based on the webinar from Dolby yesterday, they're excited about it too, which is great and hopefully solve a lot of problems. Lastly, you know, if you were following any of the news from NAB, I think we're going to have a few follow-up episodes about some of the things that are coming out there. One of the things that excited me that we didn't get too early on this show was the new validation workflow

with Flanders Scientific Monitors and their guy a color auto-cowel, I think, is really exciting. The ability to not only do the calibration, but then the validation and reporting of that is really cool. And there were some other things, obviously, that came out of the show. We didn't cover in this episode, but we will in a later episode. Adobe, of course, made a huge announcement with their new color workflow. And we've been trying to get some of our friends over at Adobe maybe on for a future episode to talk a little bit about that. They're obviously all on vacation now after just hitting NAB.

But we'll be working on that and get back to you soon, hopefully with an episode to cover that tool as well. In the meantime, you can always follow us on social media, Facebook, and Instagram. You can head over to the Offset Podcast for our complete library of episodes. You can, of course, find the show on Spotify. Apple Podcasts, and also if you want to see the video version on YouTube. So very exciting, Joey. I'm glad that you had a great NAB.

Lots to share here about that. We've only hit the tip of the iceberg here with some of these new features and workflows, not to mention all the additional hardware that Black Magic and others announced. So there's a lot to look at, a lot to digest. And we'll probably hit on some of this again in future episodes soon. But in the meantime, thanks for joining us for this episode. I'm Robbie Carmen. And I'm Joey Deanna.

And one last thing to everybody that came up to me and said that they enjoy listening to the podcast, there were a lot of you. It was great meeting all of you. If I haven't met you before, thank you. We both really appreciate that, you know, you guys are out there listening to this. It seemed to be making a little bit of a difference. So we were so happy to hear from a lot of our listeners at NAB. Thanks again. And until the next episode, have a good one.