[Marc Wielage]

I find as long as the pictures match and the clients are happy, nothing else matters. Whether you get there with a LUT or some other way doesn’t matter, either. And the advantage of not using a LUT is that you have exact control over every aspect of the image… once you establish the curves, secondaries, and other settings needed for the correction. And that’s basically what color-correction is, at least to my way of thinking.

[Marc Wielage]

[Yiannis Mozinakis] “Well, that is one of the reasons I posted my question here, to see if it is worth it. From most answers up to now it seems it is not worth it.”
You asked for advice on the net. I gave you an honest opinion on what worked for me. Sometimes, the advice you get is not going to be the answer you wanted or expected, but it doesn’t mean it can’t still be true.

[Marc Wielage]

[Yiannis Mozinakis] “My second attempt was to transcode the above clips to 422, as many people vote for a much better quality (I am aware there is a debate about that) The sync was performed great after that, but as soon as I started converting other clips my hard drive was filled with 3-4 times the amount of data and is maxed out.”
One of the challenges of modern life — particularly in post — is the need for more and more data space for larger and larger drives.

So the answer is: buy more drives. Be glad they’re cheap. About three months ago, I bought 8 x 8TB drives to expand my storage by 64TB, and I was ecstatic that the drives were only $150 each. I’m glad they aren’t $2000 for a 2GB (that’s gigabyte) drive, the way they were back in 1994.

[Marc Wielage]

[Caio Simbula] “I’m sure some of you may think this is a ridiculous question, but how inaccurate could a consumer HDR TV be for color grading in Rec 709? I do understand if I wanted to do high-end work I would rent a real reference monitor for the right client, but what about for low-budget to mid-budget jobs?”
I’ve been using an LG OLED C7 for color correction over the last couple of months, calibrated with Calman and using a BMD Teranex-Mini as a LUT box, and I’ve been very happy with it so far. Not all the OLED panels are blemish-free, so be warned that you might have to go through a couple of samples to find one that will past muster in calibration.

[Marc Wielage]

[Darren Martin] “I decided to start from scratch so i think i’l leave things as they are so i don’t stuff it up again!
I’ve managed to get as much as i had done in a few days in around 6 hours so i guess it was a test in efficiency!!”
I have learned from painful experience that it does often take less time to redo than it did to do the job in the first place. One reason is that you don’t have to guess what you did — you can remember the steps without having to do any trial and error.

But it does point to the necessity for backing up projects at the end of each day (or at the end of each session). I did this with all the color correction systems I’ve used over the last 20-30 years, and that included Baselight, Pogle, daVinci 2K, Amigo, Arcas, and a lot more. There were a few times where the backups saved my life (or at least my job). Note that sometimes, it’s not the program’s problem — it could well be an OS problem or a hardware problem. Crap happens.

[Marc Wielage]

MacVidCards has a selection of video cards that will fit the older PCI Mac Pros and are guaranteed to work.

[Marc Wielage]

In virtually all the tracking I do, some degree of manual adjustment is necessary. Sometimes, I have to hand-roto the entire thing from scratch. It’s life. Get used to it.

As it is, I’m amazed that the automatic tracking works as well as it does. Even when it works most of the way, I still wind up digging in and doing minor manual tracking tweaks here and there just to make the mask as perfect and undetectable as possible. To me, it’s a necessary part of the job.

[Marc Wielage]

I try to avoid LUTs completely and just color-correct the image manually in a variety of nodes, using Curves, Offset, LGG, Log, and other controls. The advantage of doing it this way is you can precisely tailor the correction for the specific image and the way it’s shot and exposed. A LUT (particularly an off-shelf LUT) has no way of knowing the characteristics of the specific shot you’re trying to correct.

Having said that: you can take the advice of Patrick Inhofer over on MixingLight.com and use what he calls the “3-node Technique.” The first node adjusts the camera material to a reasonable starting level; the second node contains the LUT itself; the third node corrects after the LUT. That can work and produce a pleasing image.

But… I say you can often get there by throwing the LUT out and doing the exact same thing manually. Over time, you can build up a collection of looks (or even set-up grades), and use them as PowerGrades so you can show your clients a variety of looks. It’s possible to show them quite a few looks at the same time using the Split-Screen feature (described in the manual).

I don’t have a problem with a custom LUT created specifically for a given shot. But that’s not a traditional “look LUT” that people sell on the net for $9.95. Note that LUTs will not work if you make drastic changes in color space or gamma space, like jumping into P3 or HDR. That’s one advantage of doing manual corrections, because those will work and the results are more predictable.

[Marc Wielage]

I suspect you have lost the set up link to your gallery cache file. Set that up again in System Prefs -> Media Storage and make sure the drive location is valid and permissions are OK. I can tell you the wipe does work and just clicking on/off (command-W) does work just as with previous versions of Resolve.

[Marc Wielage]

I don’t have any answers for you. But I have a few guesses: I think Face Refinement will go through some changes and improvements over time.

What I would like is the ability to turn some of the features off and only track those alone, like the eye light and so on. If we could do that, it’s possible it would help the overall tracking somewhat.

And of course, it’d be nice to be able to make individual manual keyframe adjustments to specific parameters as well. The hooks are in there — it’s just a question for BMD to open that up in the GUI and give users control of it. I have no doubt there are good reasons why it hasn’t happened yet.