Pre-rendering! Find (hidden) problems before they happen - DaVinci Resolve Tutorial

- Technically, at this point, we're ready to color correct. Except, there's something I like to do because I got burned once, where I went through this conformed process, everything was great, we color corrected, and then on render, it turned out that there was one corrupt frame within a QuickTime file. And that corrupt frame kept crashing Davinci Resolve. And, the question is, how do you figure out if this is going to happen to you, and think about it. I was on a deadline. I had to deliver. I had done the color grade, and I couldn't get the render out. And so, the very next job, I sat down and thought, "Alright, how can I solve this problem, "what can I do?" My answer to that, is the pre-render. I need to force Resolve to process every single frame, render it out, and make sure there aren't what I call, "hidden problems", stuff that you wouldn't normally find just by hitting play. So, how do we do that? Well, the pre-render is simple. The first thing I'm going to do, is I'm going to turn off the top track of our reference movie, I don't need that reference movie anymore. I'm also going to hide the audio from the reference movie. I don't need that doubling up if I happen to pull up my audio. And what I'm going to do now, is do a render. But what I want to do, is first go into my Timeline track, Option S, and I'm just going to do a ridiculous grade, just so that it's really easy to identify this footage. Something that looks terrible, it's not a color correction, but it will force-resolve. By doing it at the timeline level, I'm forcing Resolve to process every single frame in this timeline, in order for me to see if there are any hidden problems. I'll jump into the deliver page, since we're going to and from Premiere on this particular job, I'm going to select the Premiere XML round trip shortcut. I'm going to set our location for the Desktop. I'll right-click on Desktop, add new folder, I'll just call this PreRender. Click Ok. Select it. Make sure I've got Entire Timeline selected, and what it's done is actually set an in and out point, because it doesn't have this media up front to render, so it's not going to. I'll come down to Advanced settings, I'm just kind of scrolling through, and in fact, when you select your codec, it doesn't have to be at your target codec, although I like to do that. I like to replicate as much as possible what we're going to do on the final render. All the rest of this looks good, oop, I got to add in my handles, 24 frames. And I'll jump in, I'll take a look at file. Use unique file names, that's what we want. Everything is looking good. Add to the render queue, and start rendering. And now, as this is rendering it out, this is what I call the pre-render, resolve is sitting here, it is processing every single frame. If there is going to be any sort of corruption that needs to be dealt with, if I'm going to run into something weird that Resolve just doesn't like, I'm going to find it here in this process. Alright, Resolve has finished. I'm going to jump into the Media Pool. I'm going to select the Master bin, make sure it's the only bin selected. I'll jump back into our Exercise Files, and I'm going to come up to the Desktop here, I've got this PreRender folder, I'm going to add that bin into the Media Pool. Here's all of our footage, I'm going to select Command + shift + i to import the XML that Resolve should have created with those pre-renders. That's what it does when we select that Premiere Pro shortcut in the deliver page. Here's the XML, I'll click Open, I do want it now to pull in the source clips, because I want to see these green files put together properly into the timeline. I'll click Ok. It says two of three clips were not found. I bet you these are these Premiere Pro elements, I'm going to say no, don't hunt for them. I'm going to close. Alright, so the wave file didn't come across, let's take a look at the rest of this, I'm not really concerned about that wave file. And that's looking about right, if I can even turn this back on, and just make sure. Yeah, look at that. Even the little transforms, all of that came across, Yeah. This is perfect. This is exactly what I would want to send back to Premiere Pro, including these bad re-sizes I want to send to Premiere, because remember, Premiere deals with this R3D footage differently than does Resolve. Yeah, this is perfect, this is exactly what I want to see. The pre-render tells me I have no hidden problems, I can safely move on.