RAW to After Effects to Resolve Workflow?

[John_Harrison]

I am in the final stages of working on a project I directed, and I was wondering if you could help me get my workflow straight. I had to rush through post in order to get everything done by my deadline (It was my thesis project), and now I'm going back and fixing things. Because of the projects VFX heavy nature (almost every freaking shot had VFX of some kind!) I imported the RAW files into After Effects and did all of my color correction there. However, now that I have time I want to be able to do a proper color correction pass in Resolve. My question for you all is how do I get my files from After Effects to Resolve while losing as little data as possible?

One problem I've been having is I noticed that a lot of highlight and shadow information is being lost by After Effects in the imported footage, I didn't mess around at all with ACR on import, but is there a way to change the import settings after the fact? I would rather not do this if possible, because messing with those settings would mess up all of the my keys, but if it's the only way to get back that data, then I'll just have to backtrack a little. 

 

 

 

 

[Mattias Burling]

Yes, you can reopen acr in AE, forgotten which button though... I think its right click and open basic settings or something like that.

When you have figured that out you can export as prores or dnxhd and still have a robust enough video for more grading in Resolve.

But why dont you just import the raw directly in Resolve?

 

[hyalinejim]

What did you shoot on? Can't speak for other cameras, but for Magic Lantern Canon footage ACR has the edge on Resolve in terms of colour, noise reduction and highlight reconstruction.

I've found Cinelog to be a great solution for an ACR to AE workflow, retaining all tonal information in a log format. It's available for a range of cameras. 

To get back in to ACR in AE, select clip in project panel > Interpret Footage (ctrl alt G) > More Options

[John_Harrison]

Oooh, good to know, thanks! I shot on the FS700 + Odyssey 7Q. 

 

And Mattais, I can't import the Raw directly into Resolve because I need to do greenscreen / motion tracking / rotoscoping / on most of my footage. I realize that I could do most of this stuff in Resolve as well, but I am much more comfortable with After Effects for stuff like this (I've also done the bulk of that work already).