Marc Wielage
Forum Replies Created
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[Sam Coward] “I’m working with ARRI Alexa footage for the first time. Its grey and flat as expected, but the ARRI specific LUTS aren’t working well, even as a base to do different grading. I think the camera settings in the actual shoot were not the best they could have been. The image looks really grungy – the contrast is super strong.”
Arri lets you create custom LogC -> Rec709 LUTs on their own website, and it’s pretty easy to use:https://www.arri.com/camera/alexa/tools/lut_generator/
They also have a dozen different LUTs you can try, each of which affects the toe and shoulder response slightly differently.
It’s always very helpful to have the camera crew shoot a known color reference chart, like one of the DSC’s, so you can get an idea of where to go. Mike Most above is correct that Arri color science is not a linear saturation change, but you can get pretty close to it by hand. I know of quite a few post houses that just use a minor curve or mid adjustment for gamma and then some very slight hue/sat curve adjustments, and you can get very good results out of that.
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Is the drive included as a Scratch Drive (Preferences -> Media Storage)? You may need to highlight the drive in the Resolve Media window and Refresh it in order to see the files. I’m also assuming this is a standard HFS+ Mac-formatted drive.
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Crossing midnight is a disaster for post. Don’t do that.
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Repeat after me: it’ll all be better in version 12.
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The orientation of trackball mode IS controlled in the config menu. The old Rank configuration I believe was about 180-degrees from following the vectorscope (I seem to recall green was at 12:00), but starting with the Rank URSA scanner (and the ARCAS color-correction system), they went with the trackballs moving in the same direction as the Vectorscope. I can recall a time in the mid-1990s when I worked for a company where half the rooms were one way, and half the rooms were the other… kind of like patting your head while rubbing your stomach. After a year or two of confusion, everybody eventually agreed that going in the same direction as the Vectorscope made the most sense.
Check Project Settings -> Control Panel -> Grading Style, and select daVinci. At worst, reboot, power-cycle, and restart and see if it takes.
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MacBook Pros are not ideal for Resolve. My opinion is that they just don’t have enough horsepower to do the job reliably.
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I’m not convinced you can calibrate a Thunderbolt display very well. You’re not going to get consistent results for color correction unless you have a color managed output (outside the operating system) through a BMD card. Eizo and Flanders make decent monitors that can be calibrated reliably.
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Wow, here’s a 4-year-old thread back from the dead.
My observation is where you get in trouble with Rec709 -> P3 conversion is at the extremes: very bright scenes, or extremely colorful (and/or clipped) scenes. I’ve seen issues with both on occasion, but we’re talking less than a minute out of an entire feature.
I always suggest to clients that they QC the entire feature in a DCI-compliant screening room prior to release (even at a festival), just to make sure there are no surprises. If there’s just a few momentary shots that are problematic, we can always take them down or pull back on the correction to reduce any issues. But in a perfect world, you’d always try to actually do the entire color correction in a DCI theater.
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I should mention there is a section on the LiftGammaGain.com website where members can post images and video links from their projects and invite tips and criticism.
To me, it’s hard to provide criticism because you never know how awful the material was that was shot. If somebody takes absolute crap exposures and makes it merely mediocre after days of hard work, that’s actually more difficult than taking brilliant cinematography and making it better.
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I generally use Source Clips Full Extent, because there’s always the possibility that the client will do a few trims here and there later on. I don’t add handles, I just use the entire clip as is. I have enough space that I can grab the entire clip.
Make sure the destination drive is available in the Prefs -> Media Storage -> Scratch Drive setup. It never hurts to repair disk permissions and/or even format the new drive if necessary.
I also find that often, Nikolai Waldman’s Resolve Collect is a better way to go:
https://www.niwa.nu/2013/06/collect-source-files-with-resolve-collect/