Testing Resolve at Harmon Brothers, Part 1: Some Context
By: Nick Ritter
Tags: Sharebetterstories, Advertising, Postproduction, Resolve, Pipeline

I’ve been an Editor and Post-Production Supervisor at Harmon Brothers for almost 3 years, working on everything from Squatty Potty Dragon to Lume Deodorant. And for all of it, Harmon Brothers has been an Adobe company through and through. Most of our workflow dances between Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, and Illustrator. We’ve been pushing 8K workflows through the Adobe pipeline for most of our projects with a dozen layers of audio, VFX, and graphics.

Our process keeps the creative nimble, but the computers tend to struggle. Crashes, corrupt backups, and glitchy renders are commonplace on our projects. Sometimes pushing technical limits just brings about more bugs than usual, but in the last few years, Premiere Pro seems to have gains more and more of these bugs and some even on smaller projects. Now, I’ll often ignore new features and updates because despite their evocative lure, in my heart of hearts, I know they’ll likely never be production-ready and our workflow works fine as is. But hey, we get by.

Always to cover our butts and sometimes to combat software setbacks, we’ve put into practice strict naming, backup, and update practices. We also plan on whole days to simply render 1–2 deliverables to account for kernel panics and other seemingly novel glitches. A few times, I used a stopwatch to record downtime during our final finishing process and was surprised to see that we literally lost days out of a typical 4 week post-production pipeline just to software-related mishaps. Much of which had to do with coloring, sending to sound, playback, and exporting. But hey, we get by.

And thus, you can imagine my intrigue a couple years ago when I saw reports that Resolve 15 was getting some useful and rich editing features. And the integration with sound, color, encoding, and now VFX was a game-changer. And with Resolve 16 came a plethora of stability and optimization improvements. And of course collaboration mode, which allows a colorist, editor, vfx artist, and sound designer to all be working on the same timeline at once while seeing updates of each others’ work. And for our workflow, I could see that feature actually being used to its extent. Not all the time, but often enough.

So with the user experience decline of Premiere Pro and the rise of Resolve 16 in the community around us, when we were asked at our company retreat how we could streamline creative production, Resolve seemed the obvious choice. Not to adopt whole cloth at first, but to try out on a single smaller-scale video. I’ve had limited professional use in Resolve and before that was just a few student films when I was younger and thinner. But if it works as well as it does on paper, Resolve 16 could save substantial time and money. Plus it just looks more fun to use.

Luckily we got many votes of confidence from the team and here I am typing this after my third full day using Resolve 16 on a Harmon Brothers Sprint Ad. I was assigned to manage post, edit, animate graphics, do the vfx, and finishing editing. I’ll be delegating sound and color to team members in-house through collaboration mode on our Jellyfish network. All to make a high quality, 3-ish minute ad in about 3 weeks.

I’ve got lots to say about Resolve 16 already. Some good, some bad, but I think I’ll leave that for the next post.

Stay tuned.