[Marc Wielage]

Patrick is a sharp guy and they have good people at MixingLight. I think he’s putting together all-new training for v12, so watch for that.

I think the best of all (but far more expensive) is to hire a pro trainer for one-on-one classes, which is what the International Colorist Association does. The guys over there like Warren Eagles are first class, really sharp. In some cases, you can learn more in a single day from an experienced colorist than you could learn in years on your own.

In truth, I think a large part of the job is just learning to placate the client, solving their problems, and coming up with a fast solution. The color correction itself might only be 50% of the job.

I find Alexis Van Hurkman’s stuff (including his Color Correction Handbook), the 900-page Resolve 11 manual, and his Ripple Training videos to be very helpful. Warren Eagles’ FXPHD training is also good though it has a completely different approach. There are many, many ways to cover this material, but knowing the basics is critical.

I have trained a lot of colorists in my time and the first step is to understand what a good picture is. The second is knowing the shortest route to get there. Unfortunately, it’s not easy when you’re handed substandard material — inconsistent lighting, overexposure, underexposure, focus problems, and so on. It’s sobering to consider that the world-class movies you see in theaters often look fantastic right out of the box, because the DPs get everything right in front of the lens first. Everything that comes after that is relatively easy.

[Marc Wielage]

If you’re color-grading indie films, you’re going to need all the horsepower you can get. One GPU won’t handle 4K in real-time, and that’s tough to overcome. The real problem is monitoring, and having a calibrated, color-critical monitor is really a must. I would get that before the MC Color panel, but in truth you need both a surface controller and a monitor you can believe in.

You can color-correct short films (like 10 minutes), but again, 4K and 5K will be tough, and debayering raw files on the fly is not easy for inexpensive computers.

[Marc Wielage]

[Ricky Milling] “Now this is where the problem comes in, it seems the director has found a company but they are currently grading simply using a mac Pro (new model) hooked up to standard monitor (via HDMI).”
That ain’t gonna work. You really have to have a color-managed output on a calibrated monitor, or you have no idea what you’re looking at. You need to hire a post supervisor who knows what he or she is doing to insist on a real facility with real monitors and experienced people.

[Marc Wielage]

[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.

[Marc Wielage]

And to echo what Joe says: if it’s just an operating system monitor, the problem is that it may obscure some problems while exaggerating others, leading you down a perilous road. It had to be a calibrated color managed display or else you simply can’t believe what you see. This is the danger of trying to judge color on iPads, iPhones, computer displays, YouTube, Vimeo, and all that other crap. It’s also 8-bit, which is yet another problem. And it’s not “broadcast quality,” though that term has come to mean many different things in the last decade.

Alexis Van Hurkman (who also wrote the Resolve v10/11 manuals) has an excellent book out, Color Correction Handbook, and there’s a lengthy section on why calibrated monitors are necessary. Steve Shaw of Light Illusion has a good essay “Why Calibrate” that explains the process and theory behind it very well:

https://www.lightillusion.com/why_calibrate.html

[Marc Wielage]

I have had Resolve crash when adjusting a specific knob in a specific mode, particularly Window Opacity. Happened two or three times in a row on me the other day. Haven’t yet upgraded to 11.3, and for all I know that might fix the problem.

Optical Flow is very demanding from a GPU point of view, particularly in 4K-5K. I’d submit a bug report and make sure it’s on the record.

[Marc Wielage]

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.

[Marc Wielage]

Try Image Scaling Preset: Center Crop with No Resizing, and uncheck “Match Timeline Setting” in Output Scaling Preset. All covered in the manual settings on Image Scaling.

The client can’t deliver in multiple resolutions, so you could just deliver 1920×1080 to them and do the reframing during color, provided you know what to do (blow-up vs. matte). I believe you’ll get better-quality repos in Resolve than you will in FCP.

[Marc Wielage]

It won’t work with an iMac. You need more GPU power. Read the BMD Config documents.

5K is doable provided you’re monitoring in 1080 HD. But Temporal NR will not work. If you’re delivering HD, you could always render HD as a first pass, then do a secondary pass with ProRes 444 files and do the NR there as a workaround. But only on a full-size desktop Mac with the right graphics cards.

[Marc Wielage]

Not only is it an honest question, it’s from 6 months ago. The answer in the manual is the same, all covered in the extensive Gallery section. It’s not that hard to maneuver around and bring in stills from another project, even those under different users.

I have worked on a few projects where the Gallery totally saved me. Without that, I’d still be working on those projects right now!