Setting the render for the Handles workflow

- If you remember earlier in this series, I talked about the three parts of a handles work flow. There's the editor's delivery, there's conforming the timeline, and then there's delivering back to the editor. We're going to jump back into the handles work flow right now and talk about how we render out of Resolve to hand back to our editor. So I'm going to go ahead, open up my project manager, and switch us back into trust me conform. Which was our handles work flow, save the work I've done here.

And now at this point, we're going to assume that I've done a full-blown color correct on this entire timeline, the color correction has been approved, and we're ready to deliver. In a handles work flow, we're going individual clips. Now there are bunch of presets for us, and I highly recommend when you actually render for delivery, use one of these presets. Why? Because depending on whether you're delivering to Final Cut, to Premiere, or to Avid some of these apps expect some of the meta data in slightly different formats and flavors.

They might have the real number named one way for Avid, which is different than Premiere and Final Cut. Which is true, it is different. And so when you select one of these easy set ups, you're setting yourself up for success when it gets imported as an aaf into Avid, or xmls into Final Cut or Premiere. All the meta data is going to be in all the right places. So definitely start with that easy set up. In this case, we're going to Premiere Pro, so I'm going to enable that. Notice the moment I click on Premiere Pro, I can no longer change from individual clips into single clip.

This work flow is by definition individual clips, and Resolve knows it. I'll jump into the videos submenu here, I'll come down, and again, what is the appropriate codec? Well when we're working in this handles work flow, we're working from camera originals, I usually set my render codec to match that of the highest quality footage in my timeline. In this case, it's the red R3Ds.

For red R3D, I'll go pro res 444. For a really high end client, you can even go higher than that. Typically for most of my clients who tend to be indie filmmakers, indie documentarians, pro res 444 is about as heavy a codec I can give them before they can't play back on their machines anymore. And because of where they're distributing, it doesn't make sense to go any bigger than pro res 444. So that's what we're going to assume here, it's a music video, probably going to Vimeo. Pro res 444 is fantastic, so that's what I'm going to select.

I'll scroll on down. There's another option here. What size are we going to render to? Whenever I'm doing this handles work flow and I'm handing it back to an editor, I like to render at source resolution. If I don't render it, every single clip in here is going to be rendered at 1920 by 1080. But if I click render at source resolution, remember, back in the media pool here, if I pull up my clips, and we take a look at these frame sizes, if we look at the red footage, it's 3840 by 2160.

The pocket camera footage is 1920 by 1080. We have multiple source resolutions. So that's what I want. I want it to render at source resolution, which means HD size material is rendered at HD size, the red material is rendered at it's size, and any resizes that were being done in Premiere that we had to bypass here will flow back into Premiere, and these shots will resize accurately.

Which is the way I like to send it to my clients. As I take a look at the rest of these options, make sure you've got the handles. Whatever you've agreed with your client is what you should set there. For me, right now, it's 24 frames of handles. Next set is to check, make sure you're including audio. And even though we're not working with source audio here, I like to edit in the mix-down when I'm working, I don't want Resolve to have to try to recreate the actual audio mix. I still include the audio in case they need it as a reference, something goes wrong, they need to sync using sound.

They'll have that sound reference on these clips. And then under file, some of these choices we can change. It gets dimmed down because we were working in this Premiere Pro xml work flow, but one thing I would definitely make sure is turned on is unique file names. Do not turn this off. Remember this shot right here is undoubtedly used five, 10, 15 times in the three minute music video. And it may only be two long takes from which these 15 individual shots are taken.

If I don't use unique file names, every one of these shots will render with the exact same name, which means they just keep overwriting themselves until there's only one clip, even though it shows up 15 times. So you need to use unique file names to keep that from happening. The rest of these, I tend to leave at default. And then I'll go ahead, set my in and out, or the entire timeline, add to render queue, and do my render.