User Manual

Table Of Contents
RED
R3D source media, recorded by the various models of RED DIGITAL CINEMA cameras, contains
one of the most elaborate sets of raw parameters of any of the camera formats. These settings
are divided into four different groups.
Master RED Settings
The Master RED settings are the most important, handling decode quality and the control
governing whether the original camera metadata is used, or if you’re overriding the camera
metadata project-wide with custom settings.
These settings also contain the drop-down menus that let you choose the color space and
gamma curve used to transform the raw image data into image data for processing in
DaVinci Resolve when debayering R3D clips. Which Color Space and Gamma Curve settings
you use are solely a matter of preference; there is no absolute requirement to use one or the
other for any given type of workflow. You’re simply looking for settings that provide the best
starting point for the media you have, given the type of grading you’re looking to do.
For example, in many cases combining the REDcolor3 Color Space setting and REDlog Film
gamma curve will offer a starting point that retains the most image detail with the greatest
latitude for adjustment. On the other hand, if you’re working in a hurry, for example to generate
dailies for offline editing, using one of the REDcolor Color Space settings with one of the
REDgamma settings can offer an image that’s more immediately pleasing and that requires
fewer adjustments to achieve an acceptable result. These are not recommendations, they’re
only examples. As always, the ideal settings for your project depend heavily on the quality of
the source media, so you should experiment with media from your own projects to find the most
suitable results to your eye.
Master
These top settings determine the image quality that you’re choosing to extract from the R3D
source media. The tradeoff is that higher quality media at higher resolution will be more
processor-intensive to debayer, depending on your workstation’s capabilities.
Decode Quality: Determines the image quality of the decoded R3D data that’s handed
off to the DaVinci Resolve image processing pipeline. The Decode Quality you select
has a direct impact on real time performance. Decoding performance depends entirely
on the hardware capabilities of your system.
On the most modern systems, R3D files can be decoded using accelerated GPU-based
debayering if you set the Use GPU for R3D drop-down menu to Debayer in the Decode
Options panel of the DaVinci Resolve System Settings. DaVinci Resolve 16.1.2
introduced the latest RED API-enabling 8K-accelerated debayering using Cuda.
Otherwise, R3D files can be decoded with high performance using multi-core CPU
processing if your workstation has fast enough CPUs.
If necessary, you can also choose a lower quality setting that provides better real time
playback on systems with limited performance while you work, and then switch to a
higher quality when rendering the final output. A “Force debayer res to highest quality
checkbox in the Render Settings list of the Deliver page makes it easy to follow
this workflow.
Bit Depth: DaVinci Resolve can decode R3D files with 8-, 10-, or 16-bit image data for
processing. Choosing 16-bit for maximum quality may impact playback performance on
some hardware.
Chapter – 5 Camera Raw Settings 189