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My color grader and I are working in parallel. I'm editing in Adobe Premiere, and he is grading in Da Vinci Resolve (version CC 2015.2 and 12, respectively). I gave him an early rough cut of the film to start grading.

A lot has changed in the cutting of the film since I exported him the rough cut XML of the project. The typical round-trip workflow I find online is to export XML projects back and forth between the NLE and Resolve, but that doesn't work for us because the Premiere project has changed so much and will continue to change.

Instead, we're trying to have Resolve render graded replacement video files for all of the source clips used, and tell Premiere to point to a different source clip. The following technique seems to work, but has to be done clip by clip: "Project Pane > Right click > Replace Footage".

Is there an easier way to do this transition in Premiere and Da Vinci Resolve? Or a better workflow in general for a colorist to work in parallel with an editor?

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Method 1 First, with the Premiere project closed, move the original files that you're editing with to a new folder or other location. Open your project and it will warn you of missing files. Click the Relink others automatically checkbox and then hit Locate.

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Navigate to the folder with the new graded footage, find the first clip and press Ok. It will then re-link all the other files to the matching files in new folder.

Note that this will only work if the files have the same name. Different extensions are ok, from my experience it's smart enough to deal with it if your original footage was an MXF and you're replacing it with an AVI for example.

Method 2 In your project window, or in your timeline, select all the files you want to replace, right-click and choose Make Offline. Generally you want to choose "leave the media files on disk" in the dialogue that opens, because it permanently deletes the file if you don't.

Once your clips are offline then you can re-link. With all the files still selected, right-click and choose "Link Media". This will open up the same dialogue as method 1, so as before you choose Relink others automatically and navigate to your graded footage.

Again, this only works if the graded clips are named the same as the originals.

Method 3 With the project closed, move the original clips from where they are on your hard drive, and replace them with the graded clips. When you open the project it will link to the new clips, again, provided that they are named the same. You will need to re-render any rendered clips in your timeline.

Another note is that if your footage contained audio you need the graded footage to contain audio, even if you're not using it. Premiere won't accept them otherwise. So in Resolve, make sure you check the "Render Audio" box.

I use this workflow when I'm working with BlackMagic Cinema Camera footage. DaVinci Resolve gives me much better results than the Adobe grading tools, either in Premiere or Speedgrade. The only thing that does nearly as good a job is using Adobe Camera Raw by opening the footage in After Effects and rendering out intermediates, but that is extremely tedious and dog-slow.

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    I use a similar workflow, also with BM footage and Resolve. I start by using Premiere's "project manager" to copy all the used clips (and only the used clips) to a different directory for grading. Then, in Premiere, right-click on the header row above the bin area, select "Metadata display," and add the "video usage" column. Sort by that, and then you know which files you've corrected (and you can delete the others from your project if you want, since they're not used anywhere).
    – Oscar
    Commented Dec 5, 2016 at 21:31

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