Color correction round trips frames don't match

Question

So this is a strange one. Doing color correction through another vendor (who is using baselight), we found his exported files don’t match our source. But only by one frame. Like if you look at the export from him at the timecode 1:00:00:00, it would match the image of the source file at 00:59:59:22. But that would be the case for every clip. The image would be offset by one frame.

To make matters more strange, it looked like things were even further off on some clips (we figured out something else going on there and solved it), so we had him re-export everything with a few seconds of handles so we could adjust things and make them match. On that batch, only one file was off. Everything else matched perfectly.

But this apparently isn’t isolated to that vendor or baselight. Because we have had the same (or at least very similar) results with another project going through Resolve.

I understand if you don’t have frame rates matching between source media and sequence, or if you’re time remapping, or myriad other combos, that can cause issues with XML communications. But this isn’t drift or total mis-matches. This is the picture in one file being offset by one frame from the source file.

R Neil Haugen · Answer

I work for/with/teach pro colorists. There have been issues of being a frame off that colorists have had to deal with for years. There are apparently slight differnces between PC and Macs in date handling/naming conventions plus slight differences in how the apps work with that data is what the colorists I know have felt was the issue.

I did a job with a guy editing a project on a Mac in Resolve, wanted me to do some work in Premiere that R couldn’t do at the time, and wanted me to grade. Note, I’m all PC. So I did some test stuff, sent it off to see what he thought. He said it was fine, but was ticked that the stuff was now off that frame.

So I had a sequence of stuff I’d shot for another project, and sent it off to him to load into Resolve on his Mac. Asked him to load it into a project in Resolve, and simply export out. When I got it back, yep, it was all that one frame off … though reversed in which direction the time was off. As Resolve gets it one direction, Premiere the other … or something.

Yea, it’s a pain. To make him happy, I jiggered the sequence over a frame prior to export from both Resolve and Premiere, which then would keep the time ‘on’ for his re-import. And this was probably 8 years ago now.

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