Production Sound & Video

Summer 2021 – LOCAL695.ORG 41 Summer 2021 – LOCAL695.ORG 41 The media landscape has changed. As technological innovation has driven advancement within our industry, a new level of technical literacy has become essential. Though our core duties remain unchanged, the role of the Local 695 Video Engineer continues to evolve with the times. Our diverse responsibilities on the set include media playback, on-set chroma keying, off-camera recording, copying fi les from camera media to external storage devices, backup and redundancy creation, transcoding media with or without previously created LUT's, quality control, and syncing and recording copies for the purpose of dailies creation. With so many tasks to juggle, having all the tools necessary to perform our jobs is of critical importance. But today's user is overwhelmed by choices. Countless hardware and software solutions span the entire spectrum of fi lm and television production, with companies vying to attract customers to their products. Engineers require tools suited to handling a cross section of our various responsibilities and that cultivate effi cient workfl ows for the production. Some might even go so far as to say that we need a little bit of black magic and, to that end, few pieces of software facilitate as many of our jobs on set as DaVinci Resolve by Blackmagic Design. DaVinci Resolve began primarily as one of the fi rst high- end digital color-correcting applications. First unveiled in 2004 by DaVinci Systems, the fi rst Resolve products were turnkey platforms—self-contained hardware units designed for the single purpose of running their prepackaged software with maximum effi ciency—intended to facilitate the earliest digital coloring workfl ows. These units were costly, with a price tag of more than $100,000 USD, pricing out the majority of consumers. When DaVinci Systems sold the platform in 2009, there were only about a hundred Resolve users worldwide. After being acquired by Blackmagic, Resolve was reworked over the course of a decade and now boasts millions of professional users around the globe. A software-only version was made available for $995 USD, representing more than a ninety-nine percent reduction in price, and a range of features meant to broaden the software's usage application were added. Chief among them, Resolve transitioned from an emphasis on color- correction to become an end-to-end nonlinear editing platform. Blackmagic has continued to develop or acquire new modules to incorporate into their software, including the audio platform Fairlight CMI, originally developed by Fairlight. In spite of the fact that fi lm editing and post-production color both fall under the jurisdiction of our brothers and sisters in Local 700, there are a wealth of advantages to be found in Resolve for 695 engineers. As the system was originally designed with the intention of being used as a fi nishing program, Resolve features advanced functionality for communicating with and ingesting media from other nonlinear editing applications, such as Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere Pro, and Apple Final Cut Pro X. Projects originating in these ecosystems can be brought into Resolve, processed, and returned to their point of origin or forwarded to another destination. In short, a project originating in one application can be brought into Resolve before being sent along to an entirely different application, allowing workfl ows to be altered if an unforeseen issue arises. This allows programs with no ability to communicate with one another, such as Media Composer and Final Cut Pro, to share data indirectly with one another, thus closing gaps in software communication. This support for a vast number of video codecs and support fi les also makes it ideal for ingesting and performing quality assurance on media, regardless of the original source or format. Other nonlinear platforms are reliant on proprietary fi le formats or generate proxies for internal use, whereas Resolve works to debayer source media in real time. This makes it one of the best options for viewing an accurate representation of a captured image, especially when partnered with a color-accurate monitoring system. This ability to play back full-quality assets is quickly becoming a more important feature as more productions move toward creating real time digital environments on set. Just as 695 Playback Specialists have been tasked with Nonlinear Editing Platforms DaVinci Resolve by James Delhauer The media landscape has changed. As technological innovation has driven advancement within our industry, a new level of technical literacy has become essential. Though our core duties remain unchanged, the role of the Local 695 Video Engineer continues to evolve with the times. Our diverse responsibilities on the set include media playback, on-set chroma keying, off-camera recording, copying fi les from camera media to external storage devices, backup and redundancy creation, transcoding media with or without previously created LUT's, quality control, and syncing and recording copies for the purpose of dailies creation. With so many tasks to juggle, having all the tools necessary to perform our jobs is of critical importance. But today's user is overwhelmed by choices. Countless hardware and software solutions span the entire spectrum of fi lm and television production, with companies vying to attract customers to their products. Engineers require tools suited to handling a cross section of our various responsibilities

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