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feedback/wishlist for davinci resolve
dear davinci-resolve-engineers, dear bm, dear fellow colleagues!
i know version 12 is around the corner, and as every year, i am sad not to have managed visit
the nab and could see the progress of the software, or could talk to you people. i am really a
heavy user of your software since version 7 and each time you are announcing an update i am
thrilled and can’t wait to test it, wondering if some things me or others have suggested via
the forums are implemented etc.and every year you come up with exciting new stuff, but still there are a couple of small
innovations i miss, so therefore this list. if you like some suggestions and they are easy
to implement, please integrate them. if other colorists do think alike, please comment!my personal wishlist:
– better audio engine (transparent channel mapping etc.)
as far as i have read, you changed a lot of stuff in the audio section already, so perhaps
this is done already.– decide if i want to import images as sequences or stills, if stills, being able to decide how long the std duration should be.
it is sometimes annoying getting title-graphics from the graphic-department like title01, title02 etc. and resolve automatically
interprets them as one movie. i am using resolve more and more as my mastering-solution, and this would help a lot.– more encoding options (especially h264: bitrate vbr cbr etc)
– better Navigation in delivery room (e.g. jump from edit to edit including audio clips)
– reference still & split screen USE sizing!
at least an option in the preferences for this would make sense. a lot of times i am also doing reframing during my correction.-
sessions, and if i want to compare a size-changed-shot to another one, i can’t because the still frame is always ignoring any
sizing taking place (node and input sizing are currently ignored.– on using the split screen mode in combination with the selected clips the sizing is also ignored. please make an option
available to use also the sizing information here.– another small distracting thing: it would be awesome to decide whether i want or not want to see the white-bright-selection-border
around the selected clip on my sdi-monitor. because if i want a real comparison of the shots, and therefore this feature would be
perfect, i don’t want to have this white rectangle around one clip that makes the comparison next to impossible. and if i want
to have the information which clip is selected, i could always look on my computer-monitor. (on viewing power-windows you let
the user decide whether he wants to see the window via sdi or not.)– tracking more flexible (change track values, dissolve etc, esp stabilisation)
if i could grab certain points in the tracker/stabilisation view after tracking, and could manually adjust them, complicated
tracking or stabilisation could be achieved easy and faster.– make powergrade from selected node
sometimes useful for small changes in a grade you want “to ripple” to other clips. now i have to make a version, delete the
other nodes, grab a still, switch to my original version, delete the other version. or: i could simply copy the node, and paste it,
but then i am limited to only one node.– hit enter to caption your node, another incredibly “feature-request” 🙂
every time i hit enter while sitting on a selected node, i am switching in the change label function. that
way commenting your work would go a lot faster. (right clicking on the node and chose it from the context
menu seems very unpractical to me!)
– on the “vs curves”: a parameter to widen or tighten the selected range plus softness, hsl like.
-a HUE vs CT curve!
this might sound strange, but i would love to have a HUE vs COLOR TEMPERATURE curve!
HUE vs HUE is good in certain situations, but it is limited to just change the hue angle. if i could pick a certain
color-range and make it warmer or colder, a lot of skin-tweaks or look-changes would go a lot easier!
i am sure this would be a great creative new colorist-tool.
-a color temperature slider.
i know i am a colourist and should be able to set this with my balls (no pun intended) correctly (and yes i can!) but
this would not only be a faster and cleaner way, but would also empower me to communicate with my client or the dop
in an easy way we both understand. (eg. can you make the picture 200 kelvins colder?)
– creating a correction layer of distance based on the unsharpness/sharpness relationship of pixels.
i know, this is perhaps science fiction, but still, sometimes i am wondering if it wouldn’t be technically
possible, to compute some layers of common blurriness in a picture and provide this levels for grading.
so the colourist could try to select just the background of shot etc.
– node sizing: twitch!!!!!!
sometimes dops are asking me to twitch 10 pixels on the left side of the shot to the the leftiest 100 pixels, to get rid of some distracting details
in the picture. now i can only zoom it, and reposition it. and zoom it back, and reposition it…
-better scopes
i do like them, but especially the vectorscope seems to be very limited in its viewing options. i do love the base light
version of the vectorscope, where you can see the actual corresponding “colour-clouds” in the scopes, and not just
a weighted green or black and white cloud.
scopebox also has implemented this view, but it would be less of a hassle if i could tweak my davinci-vectorescope
that way.what do you think about my personal wishlist? anything doable? anything others would like to have too?
best regards,
andy winter -
5 Replies
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[Andy Winter] “this might sound strange, but i would love to have a HUE vs COLOR TEMPERATURE curve!
HUE vs HUE is good in certain situations, but it is limited to just change the hue angle. if i could pick a certain
color-range and make it warmer or colder, a lot of skin-tweaks or look-changes would go a lot easier!
i am sure this would be a great creative new colorist-tool.
-a color temperature slider.
i know i am a colourist and should be able to set this with my balls (no pun intended) correctly (and yes i can!) but
this would not only be a faster and cleaner way, but would also empower me to communicate with my client or the dop
in an easy way we both understand. (eg. can you make the picture 200 kelvins colder?)”It is true that a “colour temperature” control is featured in a number of applications that people use for color correction. There is an implementation of it in the RAW adjustment settings section for the appropriate
formats where metadata is available. A heated debate broke out about a control of this type a couple of months ago on the BMD forum.The gist of that went along the lines of… Resolve attempts to be an exhaustively correct instrument that works within the actual color science, rather than provide a bank of Fisher-Price knobs that, while providing the illusion of making the correction that a user is telling their clients they are accomplishing is merely synthesizing a warm-cool balance that has nothing whatsoever in common with a CIE-Planckian locus transformation. This is fine for wedding videos — but is a pretend transformation that is outside of the color science that other frameworks depend on, such as the ACES workspace, or a LUTted predictive display for example if you wish to work in a P3 colorspace using a 709 display. All of which is a bit more involved mathematically — and basically impossible to implement with media that has no innate base-point color temperature framework. In order to make a Planckian transform, you have to know where the media started — what the reference Kelvin point was when the original image was created. This is part of the issue with (no) respect to that bloody dress. What you are really asking for, as I responded early on in the BMD debate, is a mired-shift control.
Maybe my industry experience is a little skimpy, but within the more recent twenty years working exclusively as a colorist, the only “other” language I’ve ever heard a DP use to warm/cool a shot is to ask for a “couple of points” one way or the other. Without a specific stock/colorimetry densitometric relationship (and that would be relative to LAB aim points for a particular stock) the only practical way to respond is by feel, and the target is acquired when the client says “woof.” Two hundred K colder might mean +3 or 4 points of blue… or minus that many red, depending on where you are relative to 25-25-25… still a stab in the dark.
The show build of Resolve 12 featured a number of refinements that look a little bit like some of the things you would like to see, including redefining how some of the nodes are represented — the recombining ones, for example, and you will be able to lasso a complex node tree and essentially “nest” that correction into a single node… stuff like that.
I do agree that (while I am not happy to be essentially re-editing an erstwhile finished project) constantly having to re-position PTRZ up and down a timeline and not really being able to have the exact match immediately available or figuring out which pan/tilt tool is appropriate — between the Edit and Color pages — is irritating.
I think help is on the way though.
jPo
“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.
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What Joe said.
Also: a lot of Andy’s questions are answered in the manual, and there are workarounds for a lot (but not all) of them. For example, to save a node as a Powergrade, just delete the nodes you don’t want, save the result to the Powergrade group of stills, then “Undo” to bring the deleted nodes back. I go a step further and give the node a label as it’s saved; that way, when I append the Powergrade, I can see at a glance, “ah, that’s the node that does that thing.”
Don’t get me STAHted on a color-temp control. I honestly do use them with camera raw files (just finished an R3D project today where it was used), but it’s silly with everything else.
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thanks joseph. i didn’t know that the color temperature slider is a already discussed
point, and, yes, after i read your thread i totally understood why it is not a simple operation,
but still, let’s call it different then, but a hue vs a kind of “color temperature-shift” operation
would be stunning! i must insist, am i the only one? and i also did write why i am thinking
that this would be great, simply because it would make communication easier…and marc, what do you mean with a lot of my questions are answered in the manual?
first of all, what i suggested are feature-requests, that would speed up things, not questions! please
don’t put that standard-phrase in front of your posting, and then chime in the color-
temperature-slider-bashing-thing. let’s all forget the color temperature slider wish, it is not that
important to me, but what about the rest?c’mon, hit enter to caption nodes, that’s a no brainer and everybody who thinks the
same could make some sort of +1 posting, so bm knows it would be appreciated!no one wants to have better scopes and more user-friendly-tracking-adjustments?
andy
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[Andy Winter] “…decide if i want to import images as sequences or stills, if stills, being able to decide how long the std duration should be.”
Project Settings -> Editing -> Standard Still Duration will do this now. I confess, I don’t think this one is in the manual. It should be on p. 75 with the other default durations, but this one is not there. Dwaine Maggart pointed out this one for me some time back.Scopebox ($99) or BMD’s own UltraScopes ($999) are actually more accurate than the internal daVinci scopes, particularly for very tiny details. Most post houses I’ve seen in LA are using external scopes, sometimes legacy hardware scopes like Tektronix or Leader.
I believe better tracking is coming and there will be more control over screen layouts, which is progress. I agree with you on node labeling, still labeling, and Powergrade labeling, but the problem with just double clicking it is that this already has a function. You can click on the area just above the node (if it’s labeled) or just below the still, and that will get you into labeling without having to right click. I would bet this would be an easy feature for them to add.
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Double click clip on Timeline opens Fusion 8 node editor with full Open CL color pipeline …then i’m sold 🙂
Resolve 11.2 – Smoke 2015 EXT1SP2 – Sapphire 8
Colorist / VFX Guru / Aerial footage nerd
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