Need Scratch Lab?

Need Scratch Lab?

June 6, 2013

At 6000 USD, Lab is not a cheap piece of software. But if the bulk of your work is processing the production's deliverables, it's an essential tool. Assimilate is currently offering a massive discount on Lab for Local 600 members, down from 5999 to 2499. This includes 1 year of support and updates. After that, it's 1000 per year for continued service. 

Here's an interesting discovery though - you don't actually need to be a 600 member to get this discount. When prompted for Local 600 Member ID #, any 4 digit number will work. 

On the next screen, put in the coupon code "LABFOR2499" and voila - you just paid a lot less for Scratch than me and many others! 

Creating production deliverables on the set is often very challenging and complicated work and Scratch Lab gets the job done reliably and efficiently. I'm not sure how long this promotion is going on but it's quite the bargain for all users - union and non-union alike. 

Syncing Audio in Resolve 9 Lite

Syncing Audio in Resolve 9 Lite

Happy Sunday. It's a beautiful one here in NY so can't wait to get on the bike. That said, this will be quick.

Whenever I spend an aggravating amount of time trying to figure something out, I feel that it's a worthy topic for a blog post. I've been checking out the Resolve 9 Lite Beta and couldn't figure out for the the life of me how to sync audio. Couldn't find any decent tutorials or workflow guides online or on the BMD forums. After enough "right clicking" I finally found it. 

From the top -

1 Download Resolve 9 Lite >>>

2 Create your project and set it up according to your camera media specs.

3 In MEDIA, load your camera files along with the corresponding sound files. It helps to make a bin for both in the Media Pool window, like "Picture" and "Sound".

4 In CONFORM, create a new Timeline and call it something like SYNCED or you can use the Camera Roll Number. Whatever works for you really. 

Now select the Bins for Audio and Video in the Media Pool and RIGHT CLICK on the Timeline you just created. Select "Link With Audio From Selected Bins". A prompt will come up confirming your selections. Click OK. 

5 You can confirm that you now have sync sound on your video clips by scrubbing through the timeline.

For now there is no way to sync audio without synchronous timecode and no way to slip in the event of drift. That's a problem but one that I'm sure will be addressed. Another problem is that this only works with truly MOS video clips. If there are audio channels in the ProRes Files (or whatever), even if they don't actually contain any sound, Resolve will not overwrite these channels with new ones.

6 In DELIVER, make sure to select "Render Audio" in Output and select however many channels.

There you have it - Color Corrected, Sync Sound Dailies. For free software, this is a pretty powerful solution for HD deliverables. I'm not going to get into a bunch of software comparisons / pros and cons right this moment but I do think with Lite you get an awful lot of BANG for your "No Buck". Hard to argue with that. 

Lustre Color Management

Lustre Color Management

There's some great info in this document regarding the finer points of digital color management that I've found to be very useful in researching a few articles I'm preparing for this site. Anyone who is doing digital color on the set would be interested in the info regarding 3D cube formats and monitor calibration as it's not necessarily specific to Autodesk software.

Thanks to Brooks Harris @ EdlMax for forwarding.