Hopefully processing of a non-beta 1.0 version can start in around a week or so. It will still take considerable time even once that is going as each reel is like 20,000 frames and it will take my PC ages to process 20,000 DNG to intermediate stills (especially since Photoshop seems to crash out overnight after only doing like 2000 frames or so, hopefully that issue can get resolved so a much longer time each night can be spent having it render frames out.
Davinci Resolve will recognize a series of DNGs as a video file as long as the DNGs are named correctly (in series). No need for Photoshop.
Resolve doesn’t have the sorts of tools I’m using for the scanning calibration. None of it’s color tools seem to be able to fix up the colors to match since the metadata has the wrong color primary locations and such. I’m not too fond of Resolve in general either. Anyway, I need to use Adobe ACR for the calibration stuff I’ve done. It is true that After Effects can load the DNGs in directly now through ACR though and handles color-management better than my old version (which didn’t do much at all). The sharpening and rescaling in it don’t seem to be as high quality though (although better than the horrible results in my old version). For JP I also need a special thin spot healing action to get rid of the green emulsion scratch that is continuous on some parts of some reels.
Using After Effects takes ages to load in the DNGs and to render out to a video file compared to loading in say TIFFs into PremierePro and rendering out to a video file. Then again making intermediate TIFFs takes ages and ages and takes up lots of space. But then again the TIFFs then render out to video files so much faster and if I plan to make both UHD, UHD+wide gamut colors and HD versions each in both open matte type 1 and open matte type 2 and fixed 1.85:1 theatrical I feel like in the end while producing one single version might be much faster just using After Effects and DNGs directly, when making like 9 versions of the same thing it might end up faster in the end using the intermediate TIFFs and Premiere Pro. But I still need to test a few more things. PremierePro was having issues recognizing ProphotoRGB metadata in intermediate TIFFs and seeming to only like TIFFs in sRGB format (even REC709 was messing with levels, it seems like maybe PP just assumes TIFFs are sRGB and doesn’t look at TIFF metadata?; on my old version of PP it seemed to only want REC709 input files of a certain type), which would be problematic. AfterEffects was using ProphotoRGB and interpreting images stored as that properly (although for some odd reason even though I set display to wide gamut and working space to something wide, it seemed to be clipping down to REC709 secretly internally for some reason even though I don’t see why it should be, so still not working out for wide gamut production). I like the video editing timeline system of PP better than AE. Anyway, I’ll see.