Hi, my name is Darren Mostyn and in this episode, I'm going to try and attempt the impossible. I'm
going to try and explain results Colour Management in under 10 minutes. There are quite a few videos
out there that explain it but they're all quite long and this is just a real cut down version
of how to use Colour Management if you don't know what to do. So a few of my videos recently I've
kind of started doing some colour grading and the first thing I always have to say is that "if you
don't understand Colour Management, then don't worry about it" and I want to address that in
this episode. So I'm going to show you what colour management is and by the end of it, you should get
a basic understanding of how to use Resolve's colour management because it's really good. So this
is not for advanced users - if you know how to use Resolve Color management you really do not want to be watching
this video. So let's crack on. So basically I've got a project here. I've got several shots in
here I've got some RED raw footage, I've got some Blackmagic raw, I've got a bit of Canon and I've
got an apple prores 4444 here. So they're all got different camera profiles. And
you can see that this shot here for example, is very flat because it's shot in red colour space.
And it's basically log and it needs to be much more contrasty and better looking. Now the
the monitor that we're working with here is a set to REC 709 gamma 2.4 and if you don't understand
that that basically is HD regular standard dynamic range television. When I'm grading for broadcast thats
the spec I'm working to. So the first thing needs to do is go to our project settings and I'm
just gonna work in regular DaVinci YRGB this is non colour managed to start with OK, and I set
my timeline colour space to be REC 709 gamma 2.4 Because that's correct for broadcast. Then press save.
Nothing's going to happen because I haven't done anything to the clip yet. And
all I've got to do now to get that into a much better looking image is probably just adjust offset a bit
Lift and Gain add some saturation, bit of contrast that sort of thing. And that is now looking much
better that is looking like how I expect it to look on my REC709 display.
So this is known as display referred color grading. Okay, I'm using my display to get me into the
a good place. Now, using colour management, you can do that much more accurately
because when the camera was shooting the scene, it has a certain profile that can be used
to get it into REC709 Gamma 2.4 without me guessing where the controls need to go.
So what we'll do is reset that. So we're back to our original image ungraded
and I'm now going to put us into a colour manage workflow. Click that into project settings
and change my colour science to be the DaVinci YRGB colour managed. So it's the same
colour science just colour managed this time. There are two other ones here's where you got
ACEScc and ACEScct. ACES is a colour managed system but it is a different type of system
and that is unified across a lot of different platforms. So you can do ACES in Baselight, ACES
on the flame for example. So it's more of an industry standard. But we're going to look today
at DaVinci YRGB colour managed which has its own colour management system and it works really well - so I'm going to switch
into into DaVinci YRGB colour managed and it then says what you want to process or we want to process an
SDR standard dynamic range. We're not doing HDR just yet. And the output colour space is going to
be SDR REC 709 which is correct for this project. So my display is REC 709. That's what
I want my output to be. And if I save and when I do watch what happens to this page
It's automatically now gone into the correct settings for my REC 709 gamma 2.4 display.
So the Colour Management has transformed it from RED colour space into REC 709 display space so
it's Scene referred is RED. And its display referred is REC 709 Gamma 2.4. Okay,
so I'm just gonna say REC 709 from now on because it's always going to be Gamma 2.4. Alright,
now that looks a lot better than what I did manually because there's some science doing
that. Okay. And the advantage of that is if you're using different camera formats
by using colour management to get to your first step this can be your first step of grading this
is just to get the balance into rec 709 allows me to balance different camera formats, so Sony for example
will shoot a very different scene referred colour if you like than RED will and than Blackmagic will.
So by using colour management, you are automatically using the camera profiles and the camera manufacturers science to get into good REC 709 starting point. So basically
your starting point is great. Alright, I hope that makes sense. Now what you might have noticed is
that it just literally jumped into a nice looking image. It's now looking great in REC 709 and
if we look at our waveform here, you'll see that we've got nice settings in there and we can now
go and add a node and just start making fine tune adjustments so we might want to cool this off a little bit. We
might have put some shapes around it. We basically can peform our grade but we've got a great starting
point. So I'm just going to reset that. How did it get to there - well what it's done is it's recognised
that this is RED. So the clip has metadata attached to it. And if we go to our camera RAW up here,
it sets the project setting to recognise this is shot red wide gamut RGB log3G10 which is
one of the red profiles, so it automatically knows what to take it from it's Scene referred mode into
the correct display referred mode and the display referred mode is coming from our settings.
So that is how it knows what to do - if I look at these next clips, it's already graded. So within one switch,
we've now graded all of these 10 shots. So if I goto Blackmagic it now recognises this is
Blackmagic Design so it goes from the Blackmagic Design scene referred colorspace into rec 709
Okay, it's just transforming. We've now got a good base grade on all of these.
This one's Canon, so it recognises canon cinema gamut. And this one is
ProRes. Now, the Pro Res one hasn't had a profile attached to it. And that's because
Pro Res doesn't contain any camera metadata. So we have to manually tell the Colour Management
System what this was shot with. This was shot with Arri. Okay, so if I just move through that clip
All we are going to do is then right click on the clip. And because we're in a colour managed
workflow, you get a new menu. This isn't on there if you're not in colour managed, I go input
colour space and I can set this I know this was shot on everything you do have to know what it was
shot off. There's no shortcut for that. This is shot Arri LogC and that looks great. Alright,
so it's now in a much better state than it was. But because it's ProRes, I have to tell it,
okay, so if it's raw, it's automatic. In fact, in the Raw Settings, you don't even have input colour space
it's switched. In here I've now got INPUT colour space and I can change it to be Blackmagic Design, REC709
RED whatever whatever it is. So this is quite a simple setup because we've only got 10 shots. So
what if you're working on a long form programme, you've got maybe 700 or 800 shots and you need to
assign the correct colour space for them. What you can do is take your clips obviously the raw ones
are adjusted automatically, but you can take any other clips that you've got and in the media
page, you could group them together. So you might group them by resolution, for example. So
all your Arri clips will be the same resolution - by clip name would even be a good way of doing
it and you can group them all together and then you can globally change the input colour space
and then they're all correctly set in timeline. So the next important thing is to know the order of
operations you need to understand how the Colour Management actually works.
Where it is processed in the order because we're not working with nodes anymore the colour the colour
space transform is just happening. This is by some miracle, converting from red colour space into
rec 709 colour space. All right, and that's happening under the hood in the colour management.
But where does it happen? Does it happen before the edit page before the fusion page after the
colour page? Where does it all happen? Well, there's several things happening - the first thing that is
processed is the RAW. Okay, so if it's if it's a RAW CLIP, this is taken into account first. Okay,
all these settings, your ISO settings, everything here is analysed and processed first. Then the
next mode of operation is what's called the IDT it's the input device transform. Okay,
then you're colour grade grade happens and everything in the edit page can you do with edit effects,
fusion, colour page effects are all THEN processed. And the final stage of it is what's called the ODT
is the output device transform, which in this case is REC 709 Gamma 2.4. Now the
beauty of this is all the processing is being done in a large colour spaces
being done in our huge big RED colour space, or Blackmagic RAW colour space canon colour space
Arri LogC colour space, these are all massive colour spaces and you can see those
on this graph. You've probably seen this before. But there's the DaVinci Wide Gamut for example.
It's much much larger than REC 709. Okay, so where can we adjust our IDT and ODT and if you don't
understand this bit don't worry too much because the beauty of Resolve Color management for
beginners is you can literally go to processing mode, standard dynamic range, Output Color Space REC 709
and it deals with everything for you. So if you just read this SDR grading environment, best
use where the majority of source material is SDR suitable for SDR and HDR deliverables. So you can
switch your Output Color Space into HDR very easily. The advantage of that is you don't have to regrade
everything you can literally just transform into a different output colour space. So the reason we're
not seeing many options is because automatic Colour Management is ON, So I'm going to switch this off.
Now, if we go down here you see we've got lots of different options. Now as we start getting
into HDR world, P3 cinema mode and all this sort of stuff. So effectively DaVinci Resolve
is doing the hard work for us. In this episode. I'm not going to take this much beyond that. But
what I want you to understand is that it's not a node based operation. It's happening
the colour processing the Colour science is being done before
you make any adjustments in the color page. And then this display output is being set
after we've done all the work so we're always working in the largest Color space possible,
which is the best case scenario you want to be working in the largest space that you can.
Now. You might have seen me doing what is called colour space transform on a node and I'm just
gonna show you what that is doing. Okay, so what I'm gonna do is come out of colour management
and take off and go back to DaVinci YRGB and this effectively switches our Colour Management
off. So all I'm doing now saying my timeline colour space is going to be REC 709 Gamma 2.4 and press
save. All the images go flat again, because we're not color managing them and I've now
got to manually put them in the correct colour space. However, what I can do is I'd normally
have a bigger node tree than this, but let's just put let's just put four nodes down for example. I'm
going to take out of my effects - I'm gonna take this thing called colour space transform. And
what this lets me do is exactly the same as what we've just been doing in the colour management,
but on a node based level, so I'm controlling where it is in the pipeline. So let's take this
effect here. This is red footage, alright. So my input colour space is
RED and it's , REDWideGamutRGB. The disadvantage of this is you do need to know what it is because
obviously the raw is now not being automatically applied - the RAW metadata. Input gamma is
Log3G10. Okay, my Output colour space says use timeline which is currently set
to REC 709 Gamma 2.4 but it is quite good practice to just switch this anyway.
Just to really know what you're doing. Gamma 2.4 And you see the tonemapping here is set
to DaVinci - now its a good idea to leave it at that because what it's doing is saying,
I'm going to use DaVinci's wide gamut - that's this huge colour space here. And I'm going to neatly
map everything down. To my my output device transform my output gamma my output colour space,
which is REC709 gamma 2.4. So nothing clips hard and by doing this that is
exactly the same as doing the Colour Management. In fact, I'll show you what Im going to do is grab this as a still
I'm going to delete that node so we've got absolutely nothing going on and it goes straight
back into the DaVinci YRGB colour managed. So I'm going for colour processing SDR output
colour space SDR REC 709, and save. It automatically does the work for me. And if I now
wipe this clip, you'll see that if I click on this one, you'll see that there's no difference
at all. Just to check as to check the waveform is absolutely no different at all, so it's exactly
the same. So if I now go back to my regular DaVinci YRGB. So effectively, I'm colour managing
I'm effectively colour managing but at a node based level and this is better than
me doing this sort of stuff, and then just guessing where the contrast needs to be
where the midpoint needs to be the mid grey point, all that sort of stuff. So Im going to reset that
again. Now you'll also notice I've got nodes sitting underneath that and that's because I
want to grade underneath this node. Okay. On my fixed node tree I have a couple of nodes after
that in case I just want to do anything after but certainly when you're beginning you should
really have that at the end. So if you're just starting out with colour management,
I would recommend that you probably don't go this route - the color space transform route
I would go - let me just reset that. I would go for regular DaVinci YRGB Colour managed.
Set my output REC 709 - if that is what your Output Color Space is. Save that and then you've got
yourself a great starting point. And all your cameras will be nicely balanced. So I hope
that's helped demystify the Resolve Color management. I'm not convinced I did that in under 10 minutes,
but I think it's shorter than a lot of the videos that are out there. Check out if you want to see
more in depth stuff on this. I might do a follow up to this if people want it
and go into a little bit more advanced because obviously we're just touching the surface here,
but you should check out Cullen Kelly have a look at Cullen Kelly's YouTube channel. He is an
absolute wizard at colour space transforms Colour Management, Aces, all that sort of
stuff and that's a fantastic resource. So look after yourselves and I'll see you in the next episode.