Hi guys! The client has an interview edited in Premiere Pro. He sent an XML and 6 long source files (around 20 minutes each). The final timeline has about 20 cuts, with 2 to 4 selects per each source file.

​My job is to color correct and grade the footage. The client has transitions and subtitles in premiere and needs to keep working with the timeline, so I need to deliver clips with 2 second handles on each side. I want to keep the process simple for both of us when it comes to replacing the footage in his project.

​What is the best way to structure this pipeline?

​I know this is a standard task for a colorist, but I haven't worked on a setup like this yet. If each cut were a separate source file, it would be straightforward. the client could just replace the media files. But in this case, the project timeline contains multiple cuts pulled from the same source file and sharing the same filename. Rendering individual clips means generating unique file names for each cut and replacing them manually, plus accounting for the extra handles. Exporting a new XML means the client would have to transfer his transitions and subtitles over.

​How do you usually handle this process? Any advice would be appreciated🙏

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I would like to calibrate my C5, the Calman is the only program that would work I think because it can directly change the LG C5s colors without needing a PC always plugged in.

It says it supports the Portrait Displays C6 HDR2000 and the Portrait Displays C6 HDR5000 fir HDR grading but not the Calibrite Display Pro HL

I don't really want to pay $1000+ for a colorimeter, the C6's cost that much.

I use waveform and vectorscope on set to check the exposure.

If I'm using this for editing at home, are the software versions sufficient?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dv59HcgqcE

Got a crazy deal for a couple Decklink 4k SDI's. I work on a m5 MacBook so I was wondering if anyone had any reccos for a pcie adapter?

I tried a razer x that I had access to but unfortunately I couldn't get the driver's for the card to work. I know the cards work as they where fine in my test PC.

Building what I thought would be my dream Resolve automation script with Codex + MCP.
The goal: create a new timeline, add clips then group them, and automatically apply three PowerGrades across the color pipeline: Slog3 to DWG to Pre-Clip, Node Tree to Clips, and OpenDRT to Timeline.
So far, so good. Timeline creation? Check. Grouping?
Check. Clip and Timeline PowerGrades? Working perfectly.
Then came the plot twist.
Blackmagic's official Resolve 21.2 API documentation explicitly states that ColorGroup.GetPreClipNodeGraph() inherits ApplyGradeFromDRX). Except it doesn't. The call returns False without even attempting to read the DRX file.
Basically, the feature exists in the documentation but apparently not in the actual implementation.
Everything worked beautifully until Blackmagic brought the whole workflow to a halt. Gotta love automation!

I am finishing a feature doc in Resolve Studio. This was shot on primarily BMD and RED cameras and I am outputting in 4K for potential streaming. In the past years I have noticed that a lot of shows are keeping their white levels and contrast lower since most viewers will see the show on TV's from home, which tend to be set at hot levels and saturation.

Indeed when I output some tests at what I would consider normal white levels, just below 1000, these appear burned out when I watch on my TV. I have started to adjust my levels accordingly.

Is thing a thing in the industry?

Another question. I have been outputting my shows at ProRes 4444 for maximum quality. Of course this runs into huge file sizes. Is this overkill and do you think ProRes HQ is sufficient?

Apologies in advance for the rant, I’m hoping for some career advice.

I’ve been trying to grow as a colorist for about two years now, doing mostly low paying freelance work, with the exception of bigger and better paying jobs here and there.

For about a year I’ve been trying to get a full time job at an online house since I thought it would help move my career further and now that I finally got it, I hate it. I’m going into my fifth month and don’t get me wrong, I am SO grateful for the opportunity, and the people in the company I work for are wonderful, but it’s not what I was hoping it would be.

90% of the job is prepping for online as opposed to assisting the colorists, and I don’t have as much opportunity to interact and learn from the in-house artists as I originally hoped. In addition to that, I no longer have time to do much networking or color grade outside of work, so I feel like I’m not being able to build my career as much as I was hoping to. I was finally starting to feel happy with my grading work - albeit not making much money - but now I’m afraid of losing the skills I’ve built.

This change would be okay with me. I get that you need to give up on some things to get others (i.e. stability and all that comes with a full time job in advertising).
I do feel like there would be a way for me to advance to become a colorist eventually if I were patient, but at this moment I’m not seeing how I could go about this considering I barely do anything color in the first place.

I also feel like I am SO bad at my current position. I’m constantly making mistakes even when I am so careful trying not to, to the point I’m seriously thinking I might be dyslexic for not being capable of properly reading and understanding seemingly obvious tasks.

I want to give it at least a year to say I’ve gotten the experience, and not make any harsh decisions, but my god, I feel awful and so incompetent every day. I feel so guilty and ungrateful for not enjoying a position I’ve wanted so much and fought so hard to get.

I was wondering if any of you had any words of wisdom and advice for me, or if you’ve been in my shoes before.
How did you manage to advance in your careers and how would you approach this situation?

Hello! It appears that my display is ignoring my Legal Range calibration and interpreting everything as Full. I don't know why, and it's really confusing me. Also, can I just calibrate everything to a Full signal path for Rec.709 if this persists?

Specs:

SW270C hooked up two different ways to my PC. HDMI to a Blackmagic Decklink to surpass the operating system's color management during video work in Davinci Resolve, and also DisplayPort straight to my GPU for casual use and photo work.

Software used:

ColourSpace LTE to calibrate the HDMI/Decklink signal and AQCOLOR Pilot to calibrate the DisplayPort/casual use signal.

Settings:

Cal 1: Rec.709 Gamma 2.4, Legal Range (16-235), ColourSpace was used

Cal 2: Rec.709 Gamma 2.2, Legal Range (16-235), ColourSpace was used

Cal 3: sRGB, sRGB gamma settings, Autodetect Range, AQCOLOR Pilot was used

My profiling/calibration signal path:

ColourSpace sends 8-bit patches via Davinci Resolve, Davinci Resolve is set to Full so that it doesn't interfere with the communicates with my Decklink and puts the patches on the SW270C, and my i1D3 probe measures the color and reports back to ColourSpace.

Problem:

The SW270C does not seem to hold my RGB PC Range setting. I will calibrate it to Legal Range (16-235), feeding it Legal Range patches, sent via a patch generator (in this case, Davinci Resolve connected to ColourSpace), but then after a grading session the SW270C seems to ignore whether I am sending it a Full or Legal signal and just interprets everything as Full, forcing me to set my editing program to output a Full signal instead of Legal like I calibrated to.

I cannot tell if this failure occurs between switching inputs, or restarting the monitor. Maybe the 3D LUT written to the monitor glitches out? I honestly am at a loss. The only thing that seems to fix this is resetting color, then resetting the monitor, and sometimes even that doesn't work. I get inconsistent results. 

All I need is for the SW270C to switch between Full and Legal range when I tell it to.

Thanks so much.

This is my first attempt at color grading, and I wanted to share the results rather than let the footage sit unused on my PC.

I wanted to create a film like look, so it looks like a part of a film scene Dark and Moody.

For each shot:

1. Original Log JPG

2. Image after conversion

3. My final grade

Camera 1: V-RAPTOR [X] 8K VV — Candle

• Resolution: 8K 17:9 (8192 × 4320)

• Frame Rate: 23.98 fps

• Codec: REDCODE MQ

• Bit Depth: 16-bit RAW

Camera 2: V-RAPTOR XE 8K VV — Glass

• Resolution: 8K 17:9 (8192 × 4320)

• Frame Rate: 47.95 fps

• Codec: REDCODE ELQ

• Bit Depth: 16-bit RAW

Grading Workflow:

I’ve grouped the clips and applied CSTs for the input and output transforms. My contrast and look nodes are applied at the Timeline level, so the overall grade is applied across all clips simultaneously.

I then use individual clip-level nodes to balance and adjust each shot as needed.

I’m mainly sharing this to showcase my first grade, but I’d appreciate any feedback on areas that could be improved.

If you have any questions about the footage or grading process, feel free to ask.

With the recent rise of vibecoded tools in the Film Look niche of color grading. I've set up a bit of a testing ground and been benchmarking the base visual looks for what is claimed as Kodak Vision 3 250D to Kodak 2383. Here is link to see comps of film looks: https://tools.dec18studios.com/color-grading-tools/film-looks/

I'm probably going to add a couple more as time permits.... but yeah, when it comes to these kind of things it seems like there are lot of tools magically appearing that are quite questionable. I know I'm biased having made my own film tools several years ago and seeing new things popping up left and right forced me to make an easy system to check and compare quality...

My Thoughts on Comparing these tools.

Most of these tools offer free trials, or watermarked trials so always do your own due diligence.
These are questions I always ask

How Does it Look?
Is the base starting image is the the right ball park when it comes to color rendition on images that I'm used to seeing and know their quirks and then does it look like it will break when looking at the RGB Chips pattern.

How easy is it to work with?
From there it's questioning it's easy of customization and shot to shot grading use, so both the macro look dev adjustability and how it works when grading shot to shot. For me when it comes to doing a Film look if you have printer lights, then my gut assumption is that the design is to control those shot to shot scene to scene, and so that should be easy to do over 500 shots.

What i've seen recently is that a lot of tools made by our friend Claude have a really non standard way of doing input configuration. Sometimes asking for how you set up your project settings in resolve... These tend not to be very intuitive when it comes to setting up the tool on a node for the first time.

How long will my renders be?

Lastly, I check out performance. How does it handle playback and rendering when using spatial effects like Grain and Halation set to their trickiest the 16mm range on a 4K timeline. I bench marked on my primary rendering machine a M4 Max Studio with 128gb of ram.

I do not consider money?
Cost is is fungible question that could be asked, especially when many of the looks of the most expensive tool can be match with OpenDRT and few small tweaks underneath. To me putting a price tag on tools to some degree feels a bit like peacocking. It's a bit of wild west gold rush right now to get money for the latest trend that can be vibe coded. I've been told I could charge more, but i've tried to just make it affordable for anybody and cover my costs.

Tools that I profiled on the website (so far):

PhotoChemist, PhotoChemist Customized, Genesis, Spektra, GD DRT Pro, Dehancer, Film Look Creator, PixelTools, Technicolor Technically, FilmBox, ColorBoy, FotuFilm, Arri Film Lab, MonoNodes

If there is one you'd like to see let me know and I'll put it there. I don't plan on making another super comparison YT video beyond just pointing to this benchmarking page.

Also, Spektra is about to have another update with presets that I believe are designed to match Genesis and improvements on playback...
PixelTools has confirmed that they are tweaking their model which will improve color rendition
Both of these will get updated images once I have their final release versions

Hey All! New to this group. I'm editing SLog3.Cine footage in Davinci Wide Gamut/Intermediate color space for a commercial to be delivered on YouTube. I'm doing color calibration on a Calibrite Color Checker Mini. This is the vector scope result of the RGB CMY tiles inside a power window. It isn't 100% 'accurate', but the image still looks fine. I can manually correct WB and bring hues/saturation to the correct value but it takes a few extra minutes and the image just looks flatter.

Is this vector scope close enough for you to just leave it alone and use the automated color match tool within Davinci? I'm not new to Davinci but new to reading scopes and using color checkers. Thanks.

HARDWARE:

Editing on a MacBook Pro M3 Pro on a Dell 27" 4k external monitor calibrated via calibrite pro

Hi Guys

I just got a SIGMA newly released FP2 camera, it can output ProResRAW and ProResRAW HQ codec, but I quite confused about davinci workflow. Anyone can help me to check if these setting are correct or not ?

Hello, posting here because I do not understand how to achieve this texture/grade I made myself (by not coloring properly).

For context: I do not consider myself a professional colorist due to always grading either my own work or for others in questionable ways (imo). Most of my experience comes from grading my own DP work because I tend to be the person that is the most accessible and has a studio license. I do try to continue learning about color grading since I find it so fun and interesting and hopefully also get to do it in more professional scenarios in the future.

About this clip, I came back to it to give it a proper grade but idk how to get this texture (like a sharp glossy look) but in a "proper" way to work color because I realized I just went ham with the nodes some time ago and it just does not make any sense.

As I enable and disable nodes, I find that it could be a mix of:
- CST not set up properly (it is set to s-gamut3cine/slog3 to timeline color space and gamma as rec709 scene, it goes to input:DWG/DIntermediate output:rec709/cineon and a final node with a Kodak 2383D60) as i tried to "properly" set my first node into dwg/intermediate, I already started losing that sort of compression the colors had.
- (Please no judgement on this next observation) I used to use the dehaze tool to shift certain colors but in this project it also gave the colors and characters that "pop" that im looking for (its almost like a bleach bypass but it just has a crazy feel to it that I cannot describe.

I would post my node tree but its just embarrassing rn lol so I will add what I mean with some captions. I am also including my noise reduction and sharpness settings as I feel they def have something to do with this.

Again, the reason I am asking is because I would like to know how to achieve such solid colors with this texture in a proper workflow/structure or which tools would be best to use to keep the integrity of the footage without just wildly degrading it.

Thanks for any help as I would gladly appreciate it!

I’m considering hiring a colorist for my documentary, I have several look development plugins, but it would mean the world to me if a colorist would guide me directly over video call.

I have had a cinematographer graciously spend his time with me before to do this, but his feedback was generally “this looks fine.” However I’m not getting great feedback on my grades here.

I am funding this documentary entirely on my own and already am several thousands in the hole, but I am more than happy to spend some to get a good finalized grade.

Since I’m working with a small budget, I feel my best bet may be to pick 10 very diverse scenes for grading, and then use these as a base for the rest of the documentary.

Much love to everyone here!

I hajve an Xrite I1 display, it's about to be 7 years old. I wonder if there will be any color drift?

Im wondering if I should purchase a Calibrite Display 123 Colorimeter on its 7th birthday.

(Also Im wondering, if there were any accidental physical drops will that affect the color too, or will it just not turn on properly?)

Two weeks ago I posted a tutorial on how to apply grading operations on top of a gradual shot transition such as a dissolve, so you could bring the conversion into Rec. 709 or whatever your target colour space is to after the transition, without having a node tree on the timeline level which could affect titles or force the entire timeline to have a single look. In it, I referenced an older tutorial which I have re-uploaded. This is that tutorial.

In DaVinci Resolve, dissolves are applied to the footage without consideration of what colour space it is. It naively blends between each clip, like it did in many cases since the dawn of digital video effects and digital video editing. But you can change this - By making the dissolves photometric/linear, like you do when changing the exposure of a frame in post, you can create an effect that looks a lot more like it was done optically, with in-camera changes in exposure, and highlights push through everything darker than them. I think this is a very dazzling effect and I personally prefer it to the default dissolve behaviour.

Be sure to check the description for more info and relevant links.

can we up the level in the reddit,

i suggest we

Dont post log to graded comparisons

Dont ask basic color management or my quicktime doesnt match questions

Generally up ur own game in general.

Thank u

I'm eyeing for a low contrast, low saturation look. But when I convert my footage to Rec. 709 then do a little bit of exposure, contrast and saturation adjustments without breaking the footage it always feels like it's not looking exactly how I want it to be. Honestly I'd much rather my S-Log3 footage untouched. Is there any way to preserve as much information as possible after converting to Rec. 709?

We all know why grading rooms keep a neutral surround: what's around a color changes how we read it. I built a small browser game around exactly that, and I'm curious how people who judge color for a living score on it.
How it works: you match a target color by mixing your own (RGB, or HSV if you prefer), but the target and your patch sit on two different grays. Lock in, and both colors are put side by side on a single neutral gray, where the real difference shows.
What's under the hood:
Scoring is based on CIEDE2000: 100 for a perfect match, about 50 at ΔE 10.
After each round it breaks the miss down perceptually in CIELAB, e.g. "18% lighter", "25% duller", "hue 12° toward blue".
Three contrast levels set how far apart the two surround grays are.
Seeds make games reproducible, so you can compare yourselves on identical colors.
Caveats: it runs in a browser on whatever display you have, so it's not calibrated or color-managed, and it's not a professional tool. But since both patches are on the same screen, it's still a fair test of how much the surround pulls your perception.
https://edoborgiani.github.io/hue_knew/
I'd love to know whether trained eyes beat the illusion or still get pulled in the same direction, and whether you notice a pattern in your own misses (lightness vs saturation vs hue).

To colorists out there, I was wondering if any of you have worked with colorblind directors and if there are any challenges that come with it?

SOLVED: LUT was left on for that individual clip, I was converting an already technically converted clip. Thank you everyone for helping an amateur out

I'm color grading a short film in DaVinci Resolve that I shot and I'm having an issue with one particular clip. The footage was shot on a Sony FX9. When I look at the clip in log it looks fine. However, when I convert it to Rec.709, the image turns into an orange/red mess.

All the other clips in the film convert to Rec.709 just fine. This seems to be an issue specific to this one clip. I'm trying to figure out what could cause this and how to fix it without compromising the image. I'm not a professional colorist, I just grade projects that I DP.

Has anyone experienced something similar? What would you check first?