User Manual

Table Of Contents
Legacy Auto Color
The previous methods for doing Auto Color and Shot Match are available from the
Color panel of the User Preferences, via two checkboxes named “Use Legacy Auto
Color/Shot Match.” With these enabled, DaVinci Resolve looks for the darkest levels in
the image to neutralize the RGB color balance in the blacks, and the brightest levels to
neutralize the RGB color balance in the highlights. Furthermore, Master Lift and Master
Gain are adjusted to maximize image contrast at the outer boundaries of 0 and 100
percent. Using this control with the Primaries Bars mode open makes it easier to see
what’s been changed after these automatic adjustments are made.
Shot Match Guidelines
Keep in mind that Shot Match isn’t supposed to make your clips look good, it’s supposed to
make them look the same as the clip you choose to match to, or to at least get as close as
possible without creating a color correction that will do harm to the image. The purpose of Shot
Match is to make it easier for you to match a scene’s worth of clips together so you have a
starting point for building the rest of the look you want for that scene, on top of this initial match.
The clip you choose to match to may have a correction applied to it, but for the best results, you
should limit yourself to simple Lift/Gamma/Gain primary adjustments. If you make Custom curve
or secondary adjustments to the image, it will be much more difficult for Shot Match to give you
a good result.
Shot Match works best with normalized clips. If you’ve got a timeline edited with log-encoded
clips, you may want to use DaVinci Color Management to normalize all the clips in the Timeline
before you use Shot Match, to get the most accurate results. It’s certainly possible to use Shot
Match with log-encoded media, but the flat color signal of log-encoded media may make it
harder to get good results, depending on the scene.
Furthermore, Shot Match is not the right tool to use to try and match un-normalized log-
encoded clips that use different types of log encoding, such as LogC and RedLogCine, or to try
and match normalized and un-normalized clips. Because log-encoding is similar to a set of red,
green, and blue curve operations, Shot Match is not equipped to achieve a successful result in
this situation.
Shot Match is not designed to apply corrections to clips that already have node adjustments.
The results will be unpredictable, and probably won’t match. While the clip you’re matching to
may have simple primary adjustments applied to it, the other selected clips that are being
matched should be completely ungraded.
Lastly, Shot Match has been designed to do no harm to the image. This means if you use Shot
Match to try and match an underexposed interior shot to an exterior shot exposed at high noon
on a sunlit day, the Shot Match algorithm will do its best to “split the difference” in order to make
the difference between these two clips less jarring, while at the same time taking care not to
stretch the color and contrast adjustments being made to the underexposed clips to the point
where the image falls apart.
How to Use Shot Match
There’s no way to easily describe what Shot Match does. It’s a complex algorithm designed to
try and deal with an impossibly varied number of different situations. As a result, Shot Match
doesn’t apply adjustments to any of the user-editable controls in the Color page. Instead, the
image adjustment created by Shot Match is applied invisibly, as the very last adjustment to the
node that was selected when Shot Match was used, similar to a LUT.
Chapter – 116 Automated Grading Commands and Imported Grades 2638