Home DaVinci Resolve Flagging Autolinked Clips in Resolve

Flagging Autolinked Clips in Resolve

by alexis

Flagged Clip

I know; it’s not the most clever title. However, once I fully understood the implications of how flags and marks work in Resolve 9, I discovered a practical use for flags that hadn’t previously occurred to me.

To clarify, I wrote in the Resolve manual that flags are intended to highlight a whole clip, while markers let you highlight individual frames within a clip. This is true; you can only apply one flag of a particular color to a clip, but you can apply several markers of a color to different frames within that clip.

What I hadn’t thought to emphasize, however, is that when you flag a clip, you’re really flagging the source clip within the media pool (in other words, the clip that appears in the Master Timeline). This means that, if there are several clips in an edited timeline that all connect to a single source clip in the media pool, flagging one of these clips results in you flagging them all.

At first, I thought this was a nuisance, until I realized the following:

(a) While flags exhibit this behavior, markers are specific to a particular timecode, which makes them specific to a particular clip. So, if you want to mark just one clip for future reference, you’re better off using a marker.

(b) Flags follow the same rules as auto-linked clips in timelines using Remote grades.

This latter behavior is what leads to a valuable tip—you can use flags to quickly isolate every other clip in the timeline that’s auto-linked to the current clip. This gives you a way to deal with situations where you’re not sure how many other clips will be affected by a grade you’re about to make when you’re working with automatically linked clips and Remote versions.

The following example shows a timeline using Remote grades, where the currently selected clip is auto-linked to other clips in the timeline. This means that any changes you make to the grade of the current clip will automatically ripple to all other clips that exhibit the little orange arrow (to the right of the timecode above each thumbnail).

A timeline with auto-linked clips

A timeline with auto-linked clips

A frequent criticism of this behavior is that it’s impossible to know, at a glance, just how many other clips to the right and left of the visible area of the timeline are automatically linked. In particular, it’s not uncommon for there to be a handful of auto-linked clips that require a different grade; for example, a section of interview after an exposure adjustment has been made.

Using flags, there’s a simple way of filtering just the auto-linked clips. First, right-click the thumbnail of one of the auto-linked clips, and add a flag using the Flags submenu. In this case, I’m adding a blue flag.

Adding a flag using the contextual menu

Adding a flag using the contextual menu

Now, each auto-linked clip will have a blue flag attached to it. Even auto-linked clips outside of the currently visible area of the timeline.

FlagB2

Flagged thumbnails in the timeline

Now, using the Timeline Filtering pop-up menu, you can filter out everything but the blue-flagged clips.

Filtering only the blue flagged clips on the timeline

Filtering only the blue flagged clips on the timeline

This results in a shortened timeline that shows every single clip that is auto-linked to the current one.

Only the auto-linked clips are filtered, using flags

At this point, you can spot check the other clips to make sure they match, and you’ll know for certain just how many other clips, to the front and to the rear of the current one, will be affected by the operation you’re about to perform.

When you’re finished, choose Show All Clips from the Timeline Filtering pop-up menu.

Showing all clips again

Showing all clips again

If you want to get rid of the flags, you can choose Clear All from the flags submenu of the thumbnail contextual menu.

Clearing all flags

Clearing all flags

Keep in mind that this behavior works when your timeline is using Local grades. In the following example, the timeline is set to local grades, which can be seen by the (L) underneath each thumbnail. However, the procedure is the same.

Filtering clips using Local grades

Filtering clips using Local grades

This means that, even if you’re grading each clip individually, you can still take advantage of Resolve’s built-in auto-linking to sort groups of related clips in the timeline.

So there you go, one more use for flagging and timeline filtering, to help you keep organized when grading long timelines. I’ve been working as 2nd colorist on a History Channel program, and using Remote grades has been a real time-saver since there are so many repeated sequences of clips. This technique has been helpful in letting me keep keep track of auto-linking in situations where I want to check to see how many clips will be affected by a particular adjustment.

Special thanks to producer Neil Gobioff and Director Shawn Paonessa for thumbnails from their short, “The Bedford Devil.”

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7 comments

John Sellars January 26, 2013 - 8:09 pm

I posted this the day before your post:
http://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=4428&sid=4ac7c923983ee6c4735f00a4951a27d9
Just wondering if it inspired your creative solution… Thanks!

– John

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Alexis January 26, 2013 - 8:42 pm

I tried to read your link, but there’s no corresponding topic. (Turns out clicking the link in the WP administrator UI doesn’t work, I clicked the link in the comments and found the thread) To answer your question, I came up with this solution on my own while working through a show at a post house I freelance at here in Minneapolis, though I was keeping in mind complaints I’d heard in the past from colleagues of mine. I hadn’t actually read the Blackmagic forums in a couple of months; your feature request is elegant.

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5 DaVinci Resolve Tutorials | Jonny Elwyn - Film Editor February 8, 2013 - 4:44 am

[…] is frequently posting some great tips, musings and insights on his blog so its well worth reading the full post and then taking some time to rummage […]

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C_skaff February 24, 2013 - 10:23 am

There is a much easier way to do this…
Just click on a/c-mode and you will have all those clips in a row. Since all those will have the same (or similar) source TC.

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Alexis February 25, 2013 - 12:38 pm

You’re absolutely right. I do on occasion feel it’s valuable to isolate just the linked shots in the timeline, despite the extra steps.

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C_skaff February 24, 2013 - 10:26 am

But another useful way is when some clips in you project needs to be renderer in a separate format.
For example, is all your blue screen shots needs to be rendered in DXP while the rest is to be delivered as Prores…
Just flag the clips and in Deliver just show the flag. And render.

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Alexis February 25, 2013 - 12:44 pm

That’s a nice use of flagging that hadn’t occurred to me, especially since flags will guarantee you don’t miss any clips that come from the same source media.

It’s funny, because I initially felt that flagging was getting in my way; I had a project where I was using local grades to make it easier to grade otherwise linked clips differently, and I wanted to identify just a handful of clips that I’d changed for rendering. Flagging the clip I wanted to render ended up flagging a bunch of other linked clips that I didn’t do anything to, which was nettlesome. However, using markers instead of flags worked for what I wanted to do because markers are clip, indeed frame-specific.

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