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Scopes and legal values vs. Pushing grades question!
Ok this has been bugging me since I swapped over from color. In Color I felt I was able to keep my grades all in the 0 to 100 ire. Now resolve’s equiv. mv. the values would be the following I think:
8bit
16-23510bit
64-940 legal values tv
96-700 legal cine valuesNow in my normal workflow I start off with one node and generally stretch out and balance a shot. Bring the whites up and blacks down and pull out a bit of the mids. Then when I start pushing a pulling and grading you can easily go out of those ranges.
I was experimenting with the soft clip options which do ok. But I feel like I am missing something stupid. I am having to crank those suckers up to keep things under 940/700. I feel like i’m artificially hemmed in as to how far I can go. Do you guys let things clip at all? Top or bottom? It seems that some of the looks I see out there would have to have a clip. I was under the impression that you never try and clip things. Is that a silly assumption and a wrong piece of info a while back? When doing a very stylized grade will this happen by the nature of what the direction would like? Or am I right to get it close let it clip if it must, then reign it back in with the soft clip settings?
CJ
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2 Replies
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Hi Christopher,
You need to look at the shot and decide where it’s important to have detail and where crushing blacks or clipping whites is preferred.
Two simple examples.
1. Clouds on a blue sky. Normally you will want to see some detail in the clouds and as you mention, soft clips can help a lot.
2. Something shot against a white cyclorama. You want this to clip to create the illusion of infinite white space. If it doesn’t clip you’ll end up seeing graduations and defects, which ruin the effect. Same for any sort of specular highlight. You will want these to clip. There’s not going to be any detail within these areas and if you don’t clip them off, the rest of the scene will suffer from lack of brightness.
Of course it’s the same for shadow detail. Does lifting the blacks reveal more detail or I am just seeing noise/grain? And even if there is more detail, ask yourself if the shot benefits from seeing it, or is it better with the blacks crushed.
If you’re monitoring is setup correctly, I would suggest you forget about numeric values and just concentrate on what level of shadow and highlight detail is desired for each shot.
Hope this helps,
Tim
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I agree with all that you are saying. That it is a look judgement call. Im referring to after that stage when you are going to finally master out. What do you do for the legal values? Do you use the settings in the clip to legal values in resolve? Do you bring it back into final cut and pop on a legalize filter? or do like I was trying to do crank up the soft clip sliders till it reads under 960?
Cj Adams
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