At the Big Picture level, commercial NLE companies' raison d'etre is to make money. As such, they are obliged to protect their own intellectual property, and distinguish themselves from their competitors. While a certain level of interoperability is required to appease their customers, they will never co-operate well enough with each other to provide each other with perfect, seamless project exchange file formats. This is nothing new or surprising to video, not to mention computers, or capitalism in general.
However, DaVinci Resolve happens to be better than its competitors at the process of interpreting an edit created by a different NLE. This process, by the way, is known as "conform" (that'll be a helpful search term).
Before you conform an edit from PP to DR (or anywhere), the following steps are best practice:
- Export a Master Version of your sequence for reference in DR.
- Create a backup of the sequence in the PP project.
- "Flatten" the edit in Premiere; delete any hidden, disabled, or otherwise unused media, AND overwrite lower-level video tracks with higher-level ones, as much as possible. Ideally, everything should fit onto V1, but realistically, 2-4 tracks of video is OK.
- Remove any unsupported effects, transitions, and plugins from the remaining clips. This step is a matter of personal preference, because Resolve actually imports and exports unsupported effects, passing them through the pipeline unchanged, at least theoretically, YMMV. A list of supported operations is in the Resolve manual (pp. 873, Oct 2019 edition). The "Translation issue: Effect on Clip..." error is telling you exactly which clip contains an unsupported effect.
- Finally, export the .XML
The conform process begins once these steps are complete. Some colorists will do this for you as long as you pay their day rate, others will flat out reject your project. Patrick Inhofer encourages colorists to include conform time in their budgets on MixingLight.com (which is an excellent resource on this subject.)
Conform isn't a difficult process to comprehend, or even execute. It is a little bit labor-intensive, and it involves checking the entire program, frame-for-frame, against the Master you export in the first step above (and manually re-creating anything which doesn't match). Like I said before, Resolve's tools for doing this are unparalleled, but they're also too extensive to explain here. So, you'll want to cozy up with Part 6 of the Resolve User Manual, "Import and Conform Projects" (pp.867-940 of the Oct 2019 revision). But basically, the steps are like this:
- Import your .XML from Premiere
- Re-Link your footage in Resolve
- Set up the Master Export you generated in Premiere as an "Offline Reference" in Resolve.
- Watch the Offline Reference, side-by-side against the interpreted XML, and mark discrepancies.
- Fix the discrepancies.
- Do whatever it is you came into Resolve to do -- presumably, color grade.
- Optionally, "round-trip" back to Premiere.
Historically, Resolve was designed as a "finishing" program. It was meant to add the final touches. But because the real world is messy, and edits never really get locked, BMD fully supports round-trip workflows. They've also built some very nice NLE, DAW, and VFX/MG software into their first-class color suite. So, if the whole round-trip thing gets tiresome, you can always just... not.
