@caveport

Sony cameras

Panasonic consumer camcorder manual part

Soft Skin Mode

When this function detects skin tones, it softens the focus in that area. This has a skin beautifying effect, which makes wrinkles and lines appear less noticeable. When turned on, this function makes blemishes and moles look less conspicuous, while preserving resolution in areas of the picture outside of the skin.

In stills skin smoothing is present also in around 90% of cameras, if not more. Sometimes via creative mode that turn it on, sometimes as special menu switch.

I think you will find that there are no face smoothing filters in cameras. Where did you get that idea from?

Compositing

While DR 14 will not replace or integrate Fusion, it’s own compositing features have been extended. A minor improvement is definition of another image source directly inside of the Color page. It’s still called a Matte, but actually can be anything. It became simpler in the Media Pool too, you can now just click Add as Matte for Color Page Clip. Alpha channels will not only pass through from the source, but any key you generate inside of Resolve will be combined and passed through as well. You can hand it over to other programs with ProRes 4444, but unfortunately there is no proper single file format on the PC for this, since DNxHR 444 doesn't work as promised until now. So, for the time being you’ll need image sequences like TIFF or use uncompressed ARGB (but that's 8 bit only). A helpful effect for keying is the new Alpha Matte Shrink and Grow.

Apart from the improved planar tracker, which now can be used as an anchor for many effects, there is the new Match Move tracker. This looks a lot like a conventional point tracker, but it can be used with a minimum of three small tracking areas to define a plane in your scene. In many cases it will recognize automatically if a track is lost due to foreground objects and deactivate that track. When the object is showing up again, it helps you to validate the area if you're just moving the pointer there. It’s also quite easy to combine several trackers for a scene if there are frequent occlusions or tracked areas leave the frame. While Tracking and Positioning already work quite well in the current beta, the image is not yet showing up when I switch to Compositing. Funny detail: if you want to clear one part of a track, it says „Clear Past“ or „Clear Future“ to make it very obvious what you are going to delete. So philosophical ;-)

Together with the rotoscoping option of the older planar tracker you can solve quite a few tasks which you would have done with a full blown compositing software before. For example: you could insert a separate image source to be treated like a plane inside of your scene and add a copy of the scene to a second track. Now you’d mask out foreground objects meant to occlude that inserted image. The result would show your new image integrated with the scene in correct perspective and following camera movements. Foreground objects would cover it for full credibility. The regular tracker has been improved too, but primarily for stabilization, which comes close to Adobe’s Warp Stabilizer now and is even faster (the old Stabilizer is still there if you need the keyframes for copy-n-paste). The only feature still missing in this context is a rolling shutter compensation (always difficult in post). Anyway, DR's was already a good planar tracker for rotoscoping windows before, second only to Mocha from my experience.

BTW, there’s an anti-tripod filter too, called Camera Shake ;-)

The tracker is impressive, sometimes more reliable than Mocha, but the image to be inserted is not yet showing up:

New Features

BM extended the range of FX plug-ins coming with the software and they are sorted and easier to apply now, not only to nodes in the color page, but you can just drag-n-drop them on clips in the timeline. They broke some third-party OFX plug-ins in the beta, though. Some of the most interesting ones from BM come with the studio version only. But, as mentioned before, it’s price went down to 299,- and the final retail version won’t need a dongle any more (studio betas still need it). I won’t write about every single effect right now, just the most interesting ones.

The styling department offers Abstraction and Watercolor for a cartoonish look of your footage. This is not easy to do, since camera video always contains quite a few fluctuations in pixel values and the results could look quite nervous, but BM did not a bad job here when compared to tools like ToonIt. Of course they need a source with strong colors and contrast, clear forms and not too much detail. With the long list of parameters in Abstraction you can easily adjust filling and edges to taste, only the color of edges can’t be changed. Watercolor has fewer parameters to adjust and generally a softer look. The filter for shrinking or growing masks can also be used for stylization of smaller details (much like a min/max filter). Of course you can influence the outcome of all these massively by using a grading node before them.

Color Palette is helpful for graphic artists who need to know the dominant colors in a scene for title design or illustration. It analyzes a clip for it’s dominant colors and shows them in small swatches in the lower area of the frame. Just export a still and make the graphics department happy.

I have the studio version. After a careful reading of the new features, it looks like multi-pass is Mac only.

..also ofx plugins (even one plugin ) slow down frame rate playback by 2-3 times fold (even when no other nodes added )

Any plugins?

It can be very inefficient implementation, like constant copy between GPU-RAM (as it is 32bit values for each of RGB).

@sammy

Sounds like a bug.

@nomad

Yes, FCP-X is really making good use of the available hardware.

Most strange here is that ProRes really does not need much hardware. So, it is interesting what can cause such big difference.

Tried using 14 Beta to edit a music video shot on Atomos Ninja Assasin 4k ProRes..... playback is awful for sync editing. Anything more than a single track needs rendering to play with any kind of smooth motion... Tried every optimization I could find, and eventually gave up and went back to FCP X.... I was never so happy to see my old friend X as I was that day.

You're not ready yet Resolve... I'm not buying a super system just to edit with you.

New Formats

Resolve supports frame rates up to 120 fps now and you can re-conform to other speeds in full frame increments from 1 to 120. Resolutions up to 16,000 by 16,000 pixel are possible, but where will be the hardware for such an „Ultra 8K“ format in 120 fps? New codecs: Canon C200, Nikon RAW, DNxHR, Arri RAW in Open-Gate resolution and MP3 audio on all platforms, even AC-3 audio (both in MTS and Quicktime files) is finally supported on all systems. H.264 with high 10 profile is read on Windows too and became speedier with beta 6. Support of H.265 is still limited, but clips from a Samsung NX1 work (R.I.P.). All codecs where BM needs to pay licenses are only supported in the Studio version, for sure. In general quite a few more metadata are read. DR understands CLF-LUTs too now, which are becoming a kind of universal format as it seems. If you'd like to try it out: BM has added a day for night look and a Kodak 2383 emulation.

For output a few formats have been added which are offering alternatives to ProRes, in particular on PC: DNxHR HQX in 10- and 12-bit versions and the whole list of VP9 Codecs. Googles VP9 is a license-free alternative to HEVC and supports resolutions beyond 4K and the important variants of HDR. It’s not only an internet codec, since there are lossless variants up to YUV 422 in 12 bit. Encoding of H.264 offers multiple passes as an option and ticking „Network Optimization“ allows beginning to play the clip before encoding is completed. Export to ProTools has been improved, e.g. it will keep track names intact.

Unfortunately, no other movie codec than ProRes 4444 is carrying an alpha channel up to now. But they seem to be working on an integration of the alpha channel in DNxHR files, though it's not functional even in beta 6. Should become a viable alternative to ProRes for PC users (well you can always resort to numbered image sequences like TIFF or TGA). This is promising since DR now supports alpha channels quite well, not only from the incoming file, but you can add keys and masks from grading nodes too. Which leads us to the next subject: compositing.

Alpha export is there, but only for individual clips and not yet working in anything but ProRes 4444:

Collaborative Workflow

Until now collaboration was limited to grading, while editors (or clients) could just have a look at somebody else’s timeline. This is going to change completely, all specialists can work in a team now (Studio version only!). You’ll obviously need a fast network for this and a common PostgreSQL server. It doesn’t need to be a dedicated machine, but should be up and running all the time for sure. The old multi-user scheme with individual login has been dropped for this. Of course any system needs some kind of locking mechanism not to create total chaos when working in a team, but DR is doing it in a quite simple manner. For editing you have bin locking, i.e. as soon as someone becomes the owner of a bin, all the included clips and timelines are locked against changes by others. They can look at the stuff and copy it into their own bins, though (copying means making links to the footage, not wasting space).

Now the new owner can make an alternative version of the edit and later both can compare their timelines with a pretty intuitive graphical tool. That tool, BTW, is available to you even if you are one person shop without a server and sit down next to somebody else to compare versions of the edit. Every discrepancy is nicely marked in the a graphical interface and you can accept or deny every single change. This method will apply to the Fairlight audio timelines too. Color grading is locking only the single clip while you are working at it. As soon as you activate another one, all changes become visible to others and can also be changed by them. Of course this needs a lot of discipline and trust in the team and some may ask BM for a bit tighter control of access rights – hey, in capitalism everybody is your competitor ;-)

OTOH there is an integrated chat system for teamwork and forming an organization…

Collaboration has logical consequences for saving: DR is now live-saving every single step to the current project immediately and the former auto-save by timed intervals has been dropped. The new approach allows for an undo history, one shared by Edit and Fairlight, another one for Color. But of course it’s also more risky, any serious hiccup can ruin your file and worst case make it unreadable. So, you should manually save versions frequently, in particular as long as you are testing the beta builds.

This is the graphical interface to compare timelines:

Thanks, Mike, for that tutorial. Apart from the missing levels before recording, I'd like to add two points:

– Would be great to have a visual countdown before the beginning of recording – Looping would be great too, automatically adding another track if you repeat

That's the way proper ADR is done ;-)

BTW, over the next few days I'll add some of my observations and thoughts about DR 14 here. Please forgive me if i touch subjects that have been covered before, this thread is already quite long…

@caveport

No, you really have no idea. No need to tell me about my own experience or what I really want.

I have very good idea.

Look around - lot of robbers, murders, cheats and lot and lot of other stuff. And most of them have economic reasons. Same as your thoughts deep down. How cool it'll be to make this beginner wannabe to pay to reduce competition, sweet :-) But of course you bury such amoral thought deep down. No, of course you want for them to focus on hardcore colorists, of course.

Well that makes no sense at all. None of your statements in this topic are clearly thought out or articulated.

Absolutely. Poor old neurons in your head fight to keep their old connection even if it hurts whole organism, let them do their job. But as you'll eat more and read more, make another attempt, who knows that surprise can happen.