User Manual

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Step 3Do Whatever Grading is Necessary
Many productions that decide not to record camera raw media instead elect to record a
log-encoded or “flat” image to ProRes or DNxHD media files in order to preserve the most
image data for grading without clipping highlights or shadows. This can be accomplished using
in-camera settings that record log-encoded QuickTime or MXF media, or via external video
recorders such as the Blackmagic Video Assist. Depending on the camera you’re shooting with,
the recorded media will use one of a variety of log-encoded gamma curves such as Log-C,
S-Log, S-Log2, S-Log3, BMD Film, CanonLog, Panasonic VLog, or REDlog Film, among others.
In other workflows, raw video formats are recorded and later debayered as log-encoded clips
in order to preserve the maximum amount of debayered data for grading, or in preparation for
transcoding.
If you’re outputting high-quality media files meant to be used themselves for later finishing, then
you may want to simply pass the source image data through unaltered. However, if you’re
creating offline media for editors, directors, and producers to watch for the next three months,
you can grade this data in a variety of ways to provide more pleasing output that’s been
“normalized” in order to look closer to what was monitored on-set during the shoot.
There are many ways of normalizing log-encoded media in DaVinci Resolve. If you’re working
with one or more raw formats, you can choose to debayer all clips straight to Rec.709 in the
Camera Raw panel of the Project Settings. However, if you’re working with log-encoded ProRes
or DNxHD media, you need to normalize these clips using other methods.
An easy and powerful way to do so is to use DaVinci Resolve Color Management. To do so, set
the “Color science” setting within the Color Management panel of the Project Settings to
“DaVinci YRGB Color Managed.” Then, right-click each clip or group of clips in the Media Pool,
and choose the appropriate setting for each type of media from the Input Color Space submenu
(you can define the Input Color Space of multiple selected clips at once). For more information
on using DaVinci color management, see Chapter 7, “Data Levels, Color Management,
and ACES.”
Enabling DaVinci Resolve color management
If you don’t want to use DaVinci color management, you can also use one or more LUTs (Lookup
Tables) to normalize log-encoded media. You can apply a LUT to the entire project to normalize
the particular log characteristics of the media you’re processing. Project-wide LUTs can be
applied in the Color Management panel of the Project Settings. For more information, see
Chapter 3, “System and User Preferences.
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