User Manual

Table Of Contents
Shot Match
The previously available automated color correction commands, Auto Color and Color Match,
are both useful for adjusting a selected clip to give it a clean, neutral starting point when you’re
either in a hurry, or if you’re having trouble manually working out a solution. However, this is
only the first step in grading a scene.
After you make a general adjustment to improve the color of a clip in a scene, one of the other
principal tasks of the colorist is to adjust all of the clips in that scene so that they match the clip
you started with, such that they all look like they were shot at the same time and in the same
place. This is called scene-to-scene color correction, scene balancing, or shot matching. While
there are abundant tools in DaVinci Resolve to ease the process of doing this manually,
wouldn’t it be nice if you could just select a series of clips that you want to match, and have the
software do the work?
That’s exactly what Shot Match has been designed to do. Whether you’re a colorist in a hurry,
trying to blast through a low-budget feature with an absurd schedule, a DIT making best light
dailies who just wants to make them match a little more closely before sending media off to
editorial, or an editor who isn’t fast at color correction who needs to give a rough cut a quick
color balance before showing the project to the client for the first time, the Shot Match feature
of DaVinci Resolve has been created to quickly make different clips in a timeline match one
another more closely, with a minimum of steps.
As of DaVinci Resolve 16, the Shot Match command available from the Thumbnail Timeline
contextual menu uses an advanced algorithm, based on the DaVinci Neural Engine, to provide
superior results when automatically adjusting color balance and contrast. This control has been
developed to provide optimal results when working in the Rec.709 color space, and at a gamma
of 2.4, so they work well in conjunction with using Resolve Color Management (RCM) to
normalize media first.
The updated version of Shot Match has been designed to be used after you’ve used the
A button on each clip in the operation, on both the clips you’re matching and the clip you’re
matching to.
(Top) Original scene, (Bottom) After using shot match to match all selected clips to clip 62
Chapter – 116 Automated Grading Commands and Imported Grades 2637