Color Management in DaVinci Resolve

so in this episode we're going to be revisiting color management and I'm going to look at not only resolve color management but also Aces so we're going to look at what it is when to use it when would I use it what's the difference between resolve color management and Aces I'm going to show you all this in this episode now this is going to start off very beginner level so if you're a bit more advanced you might want to look at the time stamps below and maybe skip out the first few minutes and for those of you who are beginners I hope this sort of enlightens you a little bit about resolve color management and Asis so let's go and take a look so own a project here I've got a few different sequences in here so I'm going to go through these in order and explain through Aces and resolve color management and how it all works so the first one I've got here is called display versus scene so this is great if you are an absolute beginner and you're wondering what those terms mean display referred grading and scene referred grading what's the difference so let me show you I've got some shots down here these are shot with ar and they are in prores so they've got a nice log profile and we need to make them look better so display referred grading is when you are literally looking at your grading display or your monitor or whatever you've got and you just start grading yourself to get the image looking better so obviously it's log so we need to get a bit of contrast in there to do that I could bring down my lift here let's increase my gain let me put my Scopes onto waveform so I can see what I'm doing bring bar offset a little bit let's put a bit more work in the shadow something like that let's add a little bit of saturation and we've got ourselves a really nice looking image that could go to the web now that could go for broadcast that's perfectly acceptable it's perfectly legal I'm now going to show you the difference between doing that and doing it using scene referred grading now scene referred grading means we're going to use camera manufacturers technical specs to get us to a more technical starting point ready to do our grade so this is perfectly fine to use however we can get better results using technology so I'm going to add another version and I let I did that on the panel let me just show you how to do that if you want to do it on the software you just right click on the icon here say local version and create new version and what I'm going to do is reset that now and very easiest way to actually get this going is I can right hand click on here I can go to my lot and I can just say ar ar Alexa logy to rec 709 and what this is doing is putting me in a technically better starting point as intended by the camera manufacturer so this is the AR Lut and that is taking me to Rick 709 so this this is exactly how it should have kind of looked on set so let's compare that to my version so there's my one and there's the one off the AR lot okay so that is the difference between display and scene referred grading so what we're doing here is using a lot to take us from the a log space into our display space which is Rec 709 gamma 2.4 in my instance now when we use a lot you are fixed on that output I can't output to P3 for Cinema for example I can't output to HD are unless I've got specific Lux that is doing that so a better way of doing that is to use D Vinci resolve and we're going to do it in a little bit more intuitive way so I'm going to reset that and what we're going to do is go to our effects and we go down here and we say color space transform I'm going to drag and drop that on and all we got to do now in here I'm just going get rid of these CU I'm going to keep this at basic level so all we're going to do now is tell resolve what this image is so its input color space is AR wide gamma 3 and I'll input gamma is log C3 I know that because I know that from the shoots and our output color space wants to be Rex 79 and that is a regular broadcast output and Gamma 2.4 if you're for broadcast and Gamma 2.2 if you're going to the web so let's put that on and we've got a very similar look so again let's compare that to my one when I did my display referred grading pretty similar but not technically correct and that is the one with the with the color space trans form so that is a beginner's basic guide as to why to use color management and not just work in display referred grading now what you can do now is take this and copy across all the shots so I'm just going to highlight them all I'm going to middle Mouse click on this one and these are all now in a really good starting point and now we're going to put our look on it and add our we want to cool off the Shadows a bit uh increase the highlights that sort of thing but we've got ourselves a really good technical starting point so how does this help us moving forward well let's move on to the next sequence so if I go to here and going look at our color manage sequence what I've got here is four different camera manufacturers and what I've done is create color space transforms I've pre-built these using the correct input color space for each individual camera so this one here is uh shot with red so it's using the red log 3G 10 uh profile this one you've just seen me do it's the AR log C and this one here was shot on Canon camera so it's Canon Lo 2 and the final one here is Blackmagic raw so this is shot filmed Gen 5 and you can see that by using color space transforms or Luts if we wanted to or indeed using Color management we're getting these shots into a really good starting point and we're matching those cameras admittedly these are all completely different scenes but if this was four different cameras on the same scene the the color management would get all those cameras to the right starting point so let's have a look at the different color management options in D Vinci resolve and just before I do that think about subscribing to the channel I don't ask very often but by subscribing means I know that I'm delivering the right content that you want and if you hit the notification Bell you're not going to miss any of my future videos as well so I'm going to change on to Tel number three and we're going to look at aces all right so let's bring up our color management options we're currently in Da Vinci yrgb which means we're not color managed unless we use a color space transform or a lot and we've got a D Vinci ygb color manag I'm going to come to that in a moment but we've got these two here AC CC and Aces CCT so what's the difference between the two Aces CC was the original Aces it has a slightly lower Shadow Point than Aces CCT so AC CCT has a slightly lifted toe which means it's a little bit easier to control with I prefer using CCT I think most people work AC CCT but the two options are there so if we select CCT we then have our ases version so you've got all these different versions if you need to be backwards compatible we're going to use the latest one acis 1.3 and you then have this option ases input transform so this is basically saying what is the source material so uh whether it's AR or Canon or whatever it is and if we'd leave that onto no input transform we can specify it on a clip by clip basis or multiple clips at a time our output transform is Rec 709 so we want to deliver to rec 709 okay and we don't worry about all the other stuff at the moment okay so what we're going to do is we're going to say save and because these clips are raw they're automatically recognized in Aces and Aces knows what they are so knows that this one's black magic it knows that this one's Ary and it knows that this one's red so they're already in a fantastic starting point so what is aces actually doing it's a single color space that's basically standardizing across the industry so if I'm working on Aces on resolve and I send this to a flame artist and they're working in Aces we're in exactly the same color space d Vinci wide gamma is very exclusive to uh D Vinci resolve Aces is a standard across all platforms Okay so has a very large color space it has a Ultra wide gamut it has huge dynamic range it's something like 25 to 30 stops of dynamic range so it's absolutely huge let me show it you on a scope if I go to our cie graph and uh let me just pop that out there so you can see here ap0 so so when you go to Aces it's called ap0 okay this is this huge color space here so let me just switch that off for a moment and I can show you so this is is visible light this is Rec 79 so it's our small little display that we're that we're trying to get down to and let me just show you so Aces is ap0 and that is this huge beautiful large color space that we're going to work in all right so it contains everything D Vinci wide gamut very similar but it's not a standard so the main idea behind Aces is that everything gets sent into this ap0 color space it's the large Aces color space and that means that it's unified across everything so if you're working with ar if you're working with Canon if you're working with Sony if you're working with Rex 79 footage it all goes into this large Aces pot so this is all well and good but because these clips are raw Aces knows what they were originated from and what to set them to for our display to re 7 and9 so it knows this was shot on black magic it knows this is ay what happens when you record to something like prores you're not capturing raw so let's have a look at our next sequence so move down here so we've got an AR shot we've got a red shot and we've got Cannon here and they look really strange and the reason for that is because they've not got an input device transform yet Asus doesn't know what it is so what we're looking at is these shots in this huge ap0 color space which is Aces and that color space is actually linear so these shots behave really strangely if I start adjusting lift and gain I'm not going to be able to get a really decent looking image and that's because ap0 is very hard to work with so how Aces addresses this is it puts it from this linear space into a more usable space that we call AP1 so it's a little bit smaller more logarithmic behaves a little bit more like we're used to in our log color space and the only way we can get it into AP1 let me just show you what AP1 looks like and this all happens automatically okay ases does this automatically so every single thing you've got goes to ap0 then before you start using your controls once you've applied an input device transform to it which I'm going to do in a moment it then Works in AP1 once you finished with that it goes back to ap0 and then it goes to your display with your display color space so in our case that' be Rec 79 gamma 2.4 this is all happening under the hood really smoothly so let me show you what AP1 looks like so you can see it's much smaller it's a much more usable color space and it works a lot better so let me show you how we get these correct so we're not working in this linear cover space so right hand click on it you go Aces input transform this has now appeared because we're working in Aces and you say AR ly3 and there we go so now it's gone from AR to ap0 automatically down to AP1 to ap0 again everything gets M back to ap0 and then it goes down to our display space which is Rec 79 gamma 2.4 same with this one let's right and click Aces input transform and we go on here and we say red and it's log 3 G10 and I just know that because I know what these clips are and this one here let's go our Aces and if I go into our cutor space conversion we can go Canon log to into ases so that's how we work so it's called IDT now if we went to our settings here you can set an ases input transform because we had it set to no input transform that means AP zero and this is actually a preferred working method when you're working with visual effects artists they often want it in linear space so no input transform equals linear space AP Z if I set this to be ar log C3 anything that's not raw would have a log C3 applied to it and obviously you can override that on a shop byshop basis so I could override that with our red and our Canon so I leave it set to no input transform you can do this at media pool levels so you could do multiple clips at a time you'd have to do every single shot if you've got 600 shots you can do it at media pool level so this is our starting point this has got all our cameras matched we can grade on top of this very easily now and the beauty obviously working in Aces is that that we can change our output transform at any point so if you want to do a delivery for re 7 and9 and then you want to do delivery for uh P3 or for HDR it's really easy to do you just switch it here okay everything is then transposed at the end so it goes Source in ap0 down to AP1 as a so it's more manageable to grade and the tools work a lot better and then it goes back to ap0 and back out to your display okay that is how Aces works so before we look at the pros and cons working in Aces let's take a further look at resolve color management so I'm going to switch over to this timeline here and we are going to go to our color management settings and we're going to come off acct and we're going to go to this one D Vinci ygb color managed all right now the nice thing this let me just press save so it updates so this image has straight away gone into looking log and that's because D Vinci resolve does not know what the camera Source was for this shot it knows what this one is because it's raw and it knows what this one is because it's raw again red and this one is also raw so it's ay so similar to Aces D Vinci resolve color management knows what it is because raw is telling it what the camera Source was whereas this clip here was shot with prores or recorded prores even though it's Canon so we would need to tell D Vinci resolve what this is so if I right hand click on here we've got our input color space here and it's currently set to the project and if we go down here we can go Canon and Canon log 2 and there we go so that's Now set so it's a very similar thing so that's the uh input color transform so if we click on here we are just in this really simple mode this is uh by default automatic color management it's really great if you're an absolute beginner and you want to work at color managed but you don't really want to delve that deep you can just switch it onto this you can go SDR or HDR let's go a little bit deeper I'm going to take the automatic color measurement off I'm going to click on here and I'm going to scroll down to custom here and we get a very similar menu to what we had when we were in Aces you've got your input col space this is the same as the IDT which stands for input device transform on Aces so basically saying what is the source by default we're just saying if we don't know what it is it's Rec 709 that's why this shot looks very log and flat because it's defaulted to rec 709 when actually it should be Canon log C2 the timeline color space is currently set to rec 79 I'm going to come to that in a moment the output color space Rex 79 scene so let's change that to be Rex 79 gamma 2.4 or gamma 2.2 if you're working for the web but we're going to set that to gamma 2.4 okay and there's lots of other options here we're not going to go into these in this particular episode we're going to get deep but not quite that deep okay the timeline color space what is that now the timeline color space is the working color space that determines how each clip's contrast and color are mapped for adjustment so it basically affects the sensitivity of all these controls okay so depending what timeline color space space we work in currently set re 709 will depend how these tools behave okay some of them are what's called color space aware so they can behave very differently now in Aces they're working in AP1 they're working in AP1 color space okay that is fixed in resolve color management we can set whatever we want so we could set our timeline color space to actually be Aces if we want to but we generally and as you've seen on all my episodes before we go for Da Vinci wide gamut intermediate so that is a nice large timeline working color space that keeps us all our controls working really nicely and we're done so with some simple color management we've got these different camera formats all in a very good starting point ready to start our actual grade if we want to change our output color space that's easily done here we just go to our output color space we can change that from gamma 2.4 to gamma 2.2 to HDR to P3 to whatever deliverable we want so what's the difference between Aces and resolve color management then these clips look pretty much the same to me I can't really tell the difference with my naked eye to that one in Aces versus it in resolve color management so what is the difference let's start with Aces it's an industry standard so it has better interoperability between different platforms if you're working on a bas light in Aces going to flame in Aces and coming back to D Vinci resolve in Aces it's a unified color space so it's exactly the same on all of those different platforms uh it's open source so it's very open to developers to use and incorporate into their systems uh if you're working for broadcas like Netflix you are highly recommended uh if not forced to work in AC's color space anyway and it's a little bit easier to manage there's less options than you find in resolve color management resolve color management can be basic as we saw earlier but it can go much much deeper so you don't have things like tone mapping to really worry about so looking at resolve color management it's much more scalable so you can start at beginner and you can go very Advan you can really start fine-tuning your tone mapping and the settings that you've got in there and you can save those as presets you can also work with color space transform so you can really get pretty nerdy with where your color spaces are are going uh you can choose your work in color space so we can choose to work in D Vinci wide gamut this is the timeline uh color space we can work in D Vinci wide gamut we can work in Rex 79 you can work in AR you can work in Aces we have a choice remember with Aces you're working in that ap0 to AP1 color space uh the controls can feel a little bit more familiar in the VIN resolve especially if you if that's how you've been working moving to Aces it does feel feel slightly quirky to start with and they also has a different starting point so I want to show you that when I take a footage and put it into Aces color space without doing any grade on it it actually has a different starting point than D Vinci resolve so let me show you that let's take this shot here so we're currently in D Vinci resolve ygb color managed we're in D Vinci wide gamut timeline color space output is gamma 2.4 so let's take that so I'm going to grab this as a still this is a great starting point it looks fantastic we ready to start grading so I'm going to right and click on that I'm going to grab a still of it and I'm going to label this one resolve color management all right let's switch to Aces so I'm going to go to here I'm going to switch into Aces CCT 1.3 I'm not worried about an input transform because this is raw so it's going to do it for me my output is going to be Rec 709 and we're good to go so let's press save on that and straight away I could see a difference in this when you're working in Aces it has a much more contrasty starting point so let's compare the two so that is aces as you can see a much more contrasty starting point it is different basically so you're going to have to choose which one you like as a starting point and this is resolve color management starting point so it's a little bit more lifted it's less contrasty and I personally prefer to work like this I prefer the way that the resolve color management gives me a starting point than Aces so personally if I'm not forced to working Aces cuz I'm not working on a Netflix show I'm going to work with resolve color management and have this slightly less contrasty starting point so my big problem is I might want to work in Aces color space but I don't want to work in the aces color management mode I like my sort of CST style I like the way that I can control the workflow so what I'm going to do is show you a good trick I'm going to come out of acct I'm going to come to non-color managed regular here I'm going to go to D Vinci wide gamut in here as I always do on all my episodes I'm going to go to R 79 gamma 2.4 cuz that's going to be my output I'm going to say save all right so this shot now doesn't know what it is because we're not color managed so it's raw but we're not in Aces and we're not in Da Vinci automatic color management so what I'm going to do is work in a non automatic color managed environment and I'm going to build up my own Aces workflow so what we do we take a node here and I'm going to drag this thing here not a cover space transform which is what I normally do so we need to take this from uh Blackmagic film up to normally to D Vinci wide gamut but I'm not going to do that I'm going to send it to Aces so I'm going to use this thing called Aces transform instead of a color space transform I'm going drag and drop it on so now I've got a mini version of the AC's color space that we were looking at earlier so I'm going to go to 1.3 my input transform on here is basically my source which is in this case it is black magic design film Gen 5 that looks a little bit weird because my output transform is currently not set so what I'm going to do is set that not to re 7 and9 but I'm going to set it to be Aces CCT and what I'm going to do now is add another cereal and this seral number two is going to be what I do my grading on so you might have three four five six however many of these that you need and we're going to do another one at the end and this is going to be another Asus transform so we're currently going from Blackmagic film Gen 5 or this could be Red AR whatever it is color grading is going to happen here and this one we're going to go from Aces CCT and this is going to be our output transform now so we come all the way down here ACC and our output transform so rex9 there we go that is now an Aces workflow inside Da Vinci ygb and just to check that is truly working in Aces now what we can do is double click our still that we grabbed it was our resolved color management one I double click that you can see that we do indeed have that slightly more contrasty stting one so that's if it was just regular resolved color management and this is our new ases pipeline that we've built outside of the ases color space color management settings so we know that we're getting a very accurate starting point and the beauty of this now is I could click on here we could start grading so let's have a look at something like I know the uh film look creator for example now what we want to do is go to our color space overrides here and our input color space is actually AC's AP1 that's what's being fed into this and our input gamma ACC and our out outut cutter space is AC's AP1 and our output cutter space here is aces CCT so now we've got the correct starting point on there we can now go in and let's have a look at this Rochester one which I did an episode on a few weeks ago it's kind of Rochester is where the Kodak headquarters is so we're presuming this is a kind of not a Kodak but that is a really nice starting point there we can change a few more things in here let's go to let's just have a bleach bypass I had a little bit bleach bypass in there something like that and once we developed this look we could export this as a lot and confidently know it's in a true Aces pipeline so it's going to work on set it's going to work with VFX artist working on flame and you know you're in true Aces color space so one question I get asked a lot is what do you do if you don't know what the source is of the material you're working in so you don't know what to set it to to start with you don't know whether it's AR Cannon whether it's Rex 79 it might be stock footage what do you do so let's have a quick look in our media pool I've got a few more Clips here so we've got some these are quite clearly red and and one here is shot with my drone let's presume we don't actually know what this is so what I'm going to do is just edit it into my timeline I'm just going to drag it in like so go to my color page and there's the shot appearing now so the first thing to do is phone the production company or speak to the DP and find out what it was actually shot on if you can't get that information the next thing to do is look at the file name itself often that can be a clue so Sony writes in a certain format uh Canon writes in a certain format and that will at least get you the right manufact to start with you can then just play around with It's s log2 or S log 3 a little bit of experimenting this one for example let's presume that we don't know what it is so what we're going to do let's come out of here and let's go to uh resolve color management so I'm going to go to my color management here let's just go to regular D Vinci color management and say okay so what we're going to do now is have a look at our input transform so this you can do this as a CST or use the input color space here so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to go and try a few out I mean there's no harm in just trying AR for example and often I've worked with Canon footage knowing that it's Canon and I've actually used an AR profile on it and a color space and it works really nicely so just try a few out see what happens this is clearly far too concentrated to be a so what I'm going to do is presume that none of these are going to look that good and I'm going to change it to be re 79 Rec 79 scene means obviously shots Rec 79 it's not a display so a display has a gamma 2.2 or 2.4 for example this is Rec 79 scene that means we're just going to grade it as we did at the beginning of this episode where we did our display referred grading so there's no reason to worry about that at all we're telling the color management that it's Rec 7 and9 and we're just going to grade it so we can actually start I've actually done an episode on grading this as Drone footage but there's nothing wrong with just doing something simple like that and we're good to go so if you really don't know what it is set the input color space to be re 79 scene this is what you would do with stock footage that's already graded as well but the idea is we want to send it to either Aces if you're working Aces or we want to send it to D Vinci wide gamut so at least it's in a color management pipeline if you don't know what it is set it to rec79 there's nothing wrong with that so I hope this episode has enlightened you about color management whether you're a beginner or an intermediate user we've looked at Lots csts um Aces we've looked at resolve color management the differences between the two when you use one over the other which ones I like using this episode took me quite a long time to develop so I would love it if you subscribed if you like this sort of stuff if you don't then don't subscribe obviously hit the notification Bell look after yourselves and I'll see you in the next episode

so in this episode we&#39;re going to be revisiting color management and I&#39;m going to look at not only resolve color management but also Aces so we&#39;re going to look at what it is when to use it when would I use it what&#39;s the difference between resolve color management and Aces I&#39;m going to show you all this in this episode now this is going to start off very beginner level so if you&#39;re a bit more advanced you might want to look at the time stamps below and maybe skip out the first few minutes and for those of you who are beginners I hope this sort of enlightens you a little bit about resolve color management and Asis so let&#39;s go and take a look so own a project here I&#39;ve got a few different sequences in here so I&#39;m going to go through these in order and explain through Aces and resolve color management and how it all works so the first one I&#39;ve got here is called display versus scene so this is great if you are an absolute beginner and you&#39;re wondering what those terms mean display referred grading and scene referred grading what&#39;s the difference so let me show you I&#39;ve got some shots down here these are shot with ar and they are in prores so they&#39;ve got a nice log profile and we need to make them look better so display referred grading is when you are literally looking at your grading display or your monitor or whatever you&#39;ve got and you just start grading yourself to get the image looking better so obviously it&#39;s log so we need to get a bit of contrast in there to do that I could bring down my lift here let&#39;s increase my gain let me put my Scopes onto waveform so I can see what I&#39;m doing bring bar offset a little bit let&#39;s put a bit more work in the shadow something like that let&#39;s add a little bit of saturation and we&#39;ve got ourselves a really nice looking image that could go to the web now that could go for broadcast that&#39;s perfectly acceptable it&#39;s perfectly legal I&#39;m now going to show you the difference between doing that and doing it using scene referred grading now scene referred grading means we&#39;re going to use camera manufacturers technical specs to get us to a more technical starting point ready to do our grade so this is perfectly fine to use however we can get better results using technology so I&#39;m going to add another version and I let I did that on the panel let me just show you how to do that if you want to do it on the software you just right click on the icon here say local version and create new version and what I&#39;m going to do is reset that now and very easiest way to actually get this going is I can right hand click on here I can go to my lot and I can just say ar ar Alexa logy to rec 709 and what this is doing is putting me in a technically better starting point as intended by the camera manufacturer so this is the AR Lut and that is taking me to Rick 709 so this this is exactly how it should have kind of looked on set so let&#39;s compare that to my version so there&#39;s my one and there&#39;s the one off the AR lot okay so that is the difference between display and scene referred grading so what we&#39;re doing here is using a lot to take us from the a log space into our display space which is Rec 709 gamma 2.4 in my instance now when we use a lot you are fixed on that output I can&#39;t output to P3 for Cinema for example I can&#39;t output to HD are unless I&#39;ve got specific Lux that is doing that so a better way of doing that is to use D Vinci resolve and we&#39;re going to do it in a little bit more intuitive way so I&#39;m going to reset that and what we&#39;re going to do is go to our effects and we go down here and we say color space transform I&#39;m going to drag and drop that on and all we got to do now in here I&#39;m just going get rid of these CU I&#39;m going to keep this at basic level so all we&#39;re going to do now is tell resolve what this image is so its input color space is AR wide gamma 3 and I&#39;ll input gamma is log C3 I know that because I know that from the shoots and our output color space wants to be Rex 79 and that is a regular broadcast output and Gamma 2.4 if you&#39;re for broadcast and Gamma 2.2 if you&#39;re going to the web so let&#39;s put that on and we&#39;ve got a very similar look so again let&#39;s compare that to my one when I did my display referred grading pretty similar but not technically correct and that is the one with the with the color space trans form so that is a beginner&#39;s basic guide as to why to use color management and not just work in display referred grading now what you can do now is take this and copy across all the shots so I&#39;m just going to highlight them all I&#39;m going to middle Mouse click on this one and these are all now in a really good starting point and now we&#39;re going to put our look on it and add our we want to cool off the Shadows a bit uh increase the highlights that sort of thing but we&#39;ve got ourselves a really good technical starting point so how does this help us moving forward well let&#39;s move on to the next sequence so if I go to here and going look at our color manage sequence what I&#39;ve got here is four different camera manufacturers and what I&#39;ve done is create color space transforms I&#39;ve pre-built these using the correct input color space for each individual camera so this one here is uh shot with red so it&#39;s using the red log 3G 10 uh profile this one you&#39;ve just seen me do it&#39;s the AR log C and this one here was shot on Canon camera so it&#39;s Canon Lo 2 and the final one here is Blackmagic raw so this is shot filmed Gen 5 and you can see that by using color space transforms or Luts if we wanted to or indeed using Color management we&#39;re getting these shots into a really good starting point and we&#39;re matching those cameras admittedly these are all completely different scenes but if this was four different cameras on the same scene the the color management would get all those cameras to the right starting point so let&#39;s have a look at the different color management options in D Vinci resolve and just before I do that think about subscribing to the channel I don&#39;t ask very often but by subscribing means I know that I&#39;m delivering the right content that you want and if you hit the notification Bell you&#39;re not going to miss any of my future videos as well so I&#39;m going to change on to Tel number three and we&#39;re going to look at aces all right so let&#39;s bring up our color management options we&#39;re currently in Da Vinci yrgb which means we&#39;re not color managed unless we use a color space transform or a lot and we&#39;ve got a D Vinci ygb color manag I&#39;m going to come to that in a moment but we&#39;ve got these two here AC CC and Aces CCT so what&#39;s the difference between the two Aces CC was the original Aces it has a slightly lower Shadow Point than Aces CCT so AC CCT has a slightly lifted toe which means it&#39;s a little bit easier to control with I prefer using CCT I think most people work AC CCT but the two options are there so if we select CCT we then have our ases version so you&#39;ve got all these different versions if you need to be backwards compatible we&#39;re going to use the latest one acis 1.3 and you then have this option ases input transform so this is basically saying what is the source material so uh whether it&#39;s AR or Canon or whatever it is and if we&#39;d leave that onto no input transform we can specify it on a clip by clip basis or multiple clips at a time our output transform is Rec 709 so we want to deliver to rec 709 okay and we don&#39;t worry about all the other stuff at the moment okay so what we&#39;re going to do is we&#39;re going to say save and because these clips are raw they&#39;re automatically recognized in Aces and Aces knows what they are so knows that this one&#39;s black magic it knows that this one&#39;s Ary and it knows that this one&#39;s red so they&#39;re already in a fantastic starting point so what is aces actually doing it&#39;s a single color space that&#39;s basically standardizing across the industry so if I&#39;m working on Aces on resolve and I send this to a flame artist and they&#39;re working in Aces we&#39;re in exactly the same color space d Vinci wide gamma is very exclusive to uh D Vinci resolve Aces is a standard across all platforms Okay so has a very large color space it has a Ultra wide gamut it has huge dynamic range it&#39;s something like 25 to 30 stops of dynamic range so it&#39;s absolutely huge let me show it you on a scope if I go to our cie graph and uh let me just pop that out there so you can see here ap0 so so when you go to Aces it&#39;s called ap0 okay this is this huge color space here so let me just switch that off for a moment and I can show you so this is is visible light this is Rec 79 so it&#39;s our small little display that we&#39;re that we&#39;re trying to get down to and let me just show you so Aces is ap0 and that is this huge beautiful large color space that we&#39;re going to work in all right so it contains everything D Vinci wide gamut very similar but it&#39;s not a standard so the main idea behind Aces is that everything gets sent into this ap0 color space it&#39;s the large Aces color space and that means that it&#39;s unified across everything so if you&#39;re working with ar if you&#39;re working with Canon if you&#39;re working with Sony if you&#39;re working with Rex 79 footage it all goes into this large Aces pot so this is all well and good but because these clips are raw Aces knows what they were originated from and what to set them to for our display to re 7 and9 so it knows this was shot on black magic it knows this is ay what happens when you record to something like prores you&#39;re not capturing raw so let&#39;s have a look at our next sequence so move down here so we&#39;ve got an AR shot we&#39;ve got a red shot and we&#39;ve got Cannon here and they look really strange and the reason for that is because they&#39;ve not got an input device transform yet Asus doesn&#39;t know what it is so what we&#39;re looking at is these shots in this huge ap0 color space which is Aces and that color space is actually linear so these shots behave really strangely if I start adjusting lift and gain I&#39;m not going to be able to get a really decent looking image and that&#39;s because ap0 is very hard to work with so how Aces addresses this is it puts it from this linear space into a more usable space that we call AP1 so it&#39;s a little bit smaller more logarithmic behaves a little bit more like we&#39;re used to in our log color space and the only way we can get it into AP1 let me just show you what AP1 looks like and this all happens automatically okay ases does this automatically so every single thing you&#39;ve got goes to ap0 then before you start using your controls once you&#39;ve applied an input device transform to it which I&#39;m going to do in a moment it then Works in AP1 once you finished with that it goes back to ap0 and then it goes to your display with your display color space so in our case that&#39; be Rec 79 gamma 2.4 this is all happening under the hood really smoothly so let me show you what AP1 looks like so you can see it&#39;s much smaller it&#39;s a much more usable color space and it works a lot better so let me show you how we get these correct so we&#39;re not working in this linear cover space so right hand click on it you go Aces input transform this has now appeared because we&#39;re working in Aces and you say AR ly3 and there we go so now it&#39;s gone from AR to ap0 automatically down to AP1 to ap0 again everything gets M back to ap0 and then it goes down to our display space which is Rec 79 gamma 2.4 same with this one let&#39;s right and click Aces input transform and we go on here and we say red and it&#39;s log 3 G10 and I just know that because I know what these clips are and this one here let&#39;s go our Aces and if I go into our cutor space conversion we can go Canon log to into ases so that&#39;s how we work so it&#39;s called IDT now if we went to our settings here you can set an ases input transform because we had it set to no input transform that means AP zero and this is actually a preferred working method when you&#39;re working with visual effects artists they often want it in linear space so no input transform equals linear space AP Z if I set this to be ar log C3 anything that&#39;s not raw would have a log C3 applied to it and obviously you can override that on a shop byshop basis so I could override that with our red and our Canon so I leave it set to no input transform you can do this at media pool levels so you could do multiple clips at a time you&#39;d have to do every single shot if you&#39;ve got 600 shots you can do it at media pool level so this is our starting point this has got all our cameras matched we can grade on top of this very easily now and the beauty obviously working in Aces is that that we can change our output transform at any point so if you want to do a delivery for re 7 and9 and then you want to do delivery for uh P3 or for HDR it&#39;s really easy to do you just switch it here okay everything is then transposed at the end so it goes Source in ap0 down to AP1 as a so it&#39;s more manageable to grade and the tools work a lot better and then it goes back to ap0 and back out to your display okay that is how Aces works so before we look at the pros and cons working in Aces let&#39;s take a further look at resolve color management so I&#39;m going to switch over to this timeline here and we are going to go to our color management settings and we&#39;re going to come off acct and we&#39;re going to go to this one D Vinci ygb color managed all right now the nice thing this let me just press save so it updates so this image has straight away gone into looking log and that&#39;s because D Vinci resolve does not know what the camera Source was for this shot it knows what this one is because it&#39;s raw and it knows what this one is because it&#39;s raw again red and this one is also raw so it&#39;s ay so similar to Aces D Vinci resolve color management knows what it is because raw is telling it what the camera Source was whereas this clip here was shot with prores or recorded prores even though it&#39;s Canon so we would need to tell D Vinci resolve what this is so if I right hand click on here we&#39;ve got our input color space here and it&#39;s currently set to the project and if we go down here we can go Canon and Canon log 2 and there we go so that&#39;s Now set so it&#39;s a very similar thing so that&#39;s the uh input color transform so if we click on here we are just in this really simple mode this is uh by default automatic color management it&#39;s really great if you&#39;re an absolute beginner and you want to work at color managed but you don&#39;t really want to delve that deep you can just switch it onto this you can go SDR or HDR let&#39;s go a little bit deeper I&#39;m going to take the automatic color measurement off I&#39;m going to click on here and I&#39;m going to scroll down to custom here and we get a very similar menu to what we had when we were in Aces you&#39;ve got your input col space this is the same as the IDT which stands for input device transform on Aces so basically saying what is the source by default we&#39;re just saying if we don&#39;t know what it is it&#39;s Rec 709 that&#39;s why this shot looks very log and flat because it&#39;s defaulted to rec 709 when actually it should be Canon log C2 the timeline color space is currently set to rec 79 I&#39;m going to come to that in a moment the output color space Rex 79 scene so let&#39;s change that to be Rex 79 gamma 2.4 or gamma 2.2 if you&#39;re working for the web but we&#39;re going to set that to gamma 2.4 okay and there&#39;s lots of other options here we&#39;re not going to go into these in this particular episode we&#39;re going to get deep but not quite that deep okay the timeline color space what is that now the timeline color space is the working color space that determines how each clip&#39;s contrast and color are mapped for adjustment so it basically affects the sensitivity of all these controls okay so depending what timeline color space space we work in currently set re 709 will depend how these tools behave okay some of them are what&#39;s called color space aware so they can behave very differently now in Aces they&#39;re working in AP1 they&#39;re working in AP1 color space okay that is fixed in resolve color management we can set whatever we want so we could set our timeline color space to actually be Aces if we want to but we generally and as you&#39;ve seen on all my episodes before we go for Da Vinci wide gamut intermediate so that is a nice large timeline working color space that keeps us all our controls working really nicely and we&#39;re done so with some simple color management we&#39;ve got these different camera formats all in a very good starting point ready to start our actual grade if we want to change our output color space that&#39;s easily done here we just go to our output color space we can change that from gamma 2.4 to gamma 2.2 to HDR to P3 to whatever deliverable we want so what&#39;s the difference between Aces and resolve color management then these clips look pretty much the same to me I can&#39;t really tell the difference with my naked eye to that one in Aces versus it in resolve color management so what is the difference let&#39;s start with Aces it&#39;s an industry standard so it has better interoperability between different platforms if you&#39;re working on a bas light in Aces going to flame in Aces and coming back to D Vinci resolve in Aces it&#39;s a unified color space so it&#39;s exactly the same on all of those different platforms uh it&#39;s open source so it&#39;s very open to developers to use and incorporate into their systems uh if you&#39;re working for broadcas like Netflix you are highly recommended uh if not forced to work in AC&#39;s color space anyway and it&#39;s a little bit easier to manage there&#39;s less options than you find in resolve color management resolve color management can be basic as we saw earlier but it can go much much deeper so you don&#39;t have things like tone mapping to really worry about so looking at resolve color management it&#39;s much more scalable so you can start at beginner and you can go very Advan you can really start fine-tuning your tone mapping and the settings that you&#39;ve got in there and you can save those as presets you can also work with color space transform so you can really get pretty nerdy with where your color spaces are are going uh you can choose your work in color space so we can choose to work in D Vinci wide gamut this is the timeline uh color space we can work in D Vinci wide gamut we can work in Rex 79 you can work in AR you can work in Aces we have a choice remember with Aces you&#39;re working in that ap0 to AP1 color space uh the controls can feel a little bit more familiar in the VIN resolve especially if you if that&#39;s how you&#39;ve been working moving to Aces it does feel feel slightly quirky to start with and they also has a different starting point so I want to show you that when I take a footage and put it into Aces color space without doing any grade on it it actually has a different starting point than D Vinci resolve so let me show you that let&#39;s take this shot here so we&#39;re currently in D Vinci resolve ygb color managed we&#39;re in D Vinci wide gamut timeline color space output is gamma 2.4 so let&#39;s take that so I&#39;m going to grab this as a still this is a great starting point it looks fantastic we ready to start grading so I&#39;m going to right and click on that I&#39;m going to grab a still of it and I&#39;m going to label this one resolve color management all right let&#39;s switch to Aces so I&#39;m going to go to here I&#39;m going to switch into Aces CCT 1.3 I&#39;m not worried about an input transform because this is raw so it&#39;s going to do it for me my output is going to be Rec 709 and we&#39;re good to go so let&#39;s press save on that and straight away I could see a difference in this when you&#39;re working in Aces it has a much more contrasty starting point so let&#39;s compare the two so that is aces as you can see a much more contrasty starting point it is different basically so you&#39;re going to have to choose which one you like as a starting point and this is resolve color management starting point so it&#39;s a little bit more lifted it&#39;s less contrasty and I personally prefer to work like this I prefer the way that the resolve color management gives me a starting point than Aces so personally if I&#39;m not forced to working Aces cuz I&#39;m not working on a Netflix show I&#39;m going to work with resolve color management and have this slightly less contrasty starting point so my big problem is I might want to work in Aces color space but I don&#39;t want to work in the aces color management mode I like my sort of CST style I like the way that I can control the workflow so what I&#39;m going to do is show you a good trick I&#39;m going to come out of acct I&#39;m going to come to non-color managed regular here I&#39;m going to go to D Vinci wide gamut in here as I always do on all my episodes I&#39;m going to go to R 79 gamma 2.4 cuz that&#39;s going to be my output I&#39;m going to say save all right so this shot now doesn&#39;t know what it is because we&#39;re not color managed so it&#39;s raw but we&#39;re not in Aces and we&#39;re not in Da Vinci automatic color management so what I&#39;m going to do is work in a non automatic color managed environment and I&#39;m going to build up my own Aces workflow so what we do we take a node here and I&#39;m going to drag this thing here not a cover space transform which is what I normally do so we need to take this from uh Blackmagic film up to normally to D Vinci wide gamut but I&#39;m not going to do that I&#39;m going to send it to Aces so I&#39;m going to use this thing called Aces transform instead of a color space transform I&#39;m going drag and drop it on so now I&#39;ve got a mini version of the AC&#39;s color space that we were looking at earlier so I&#39;m going to go to 1.3 my input transform on here is basically my source which is in this case it is black magic design film Gen 5 that looks a little bit weird because my output transform is currently not set so what I&#39;m going to do is set that not to re 7 and9 but I&#39;m going to set it to be Aces CCT and what I&#39;m going to do now is add another cereal and this seral number two is going to be what I do my grading on so you might have three four five six however many of these that you need and we&#39;re going to do another one at the end and this is going to be another Asus transform so we&#39;re currently going from Blackmagic film Gen 5 or this could be Red AR whatever it is color grading is going to happen here and this one we&#39;re going to go from Aces CCT and this is going to be our output transform now so we come all the way down here ACC and our output transform so rex9 there we go that is now an Aces workflow inside Da Vinci ygb and just to check that is truly working in Aces now what we can do is double click our still that we grabbed it was our resolved color management one I double click that you can see that we do indeed have that slightly more contrasty stting one so that&#39;s if it was just regular resolved color management and this is our new ases pipeline that we&#39;ve built outside of the ases color space color management settings so we know that we&#39;re getting a very accurate starting point and the beauty of this now is I could click on here we could start grading so let&#39;s have a look at something like I know the uh film look creator for example now what we want to do is go to our color space overrides here and our input color space is actually AC&#39;s AP1 that&#39;s what&#39;s being fed into this and our input gamma ACC and our out outut cutter space is AC&#39;s AP1 and our output cutter space here is aces CCT so now we&#39;ve got the correct starting point on there we can now go in and let&#39;s have a look at this Rochester one which I did an episode on a few weeks ago it&#39;s kind of Rochester is where the Kodak headquarters is so we&#39;re presuming this is a kind of not a Kodak but that is a really nice starting point there we can change a few more things in here let&#39;s go to let&#39;s just have a bleach bypass I had a little bit bleach bypass in there something like that and once we developed this look we could export this as a lot and confidently know it&#39;s in a true Aces pipeline so it&#39;s going to work on set it&#39;s going to work with VFX artist working on flame and you know you&#39;re in true Aces color space so one question I get asked a lot is what do you do if you don&#39;t know what the source is of the material you&#39;re working in so you don&#39;t know what to set it to to start with you don&#39;t know whether it&#39;s AR Cannon whether it&#39;s Rex 79 it might be stock footage what do you do so let&#39;s have a quick look in our media pool I&#39;ve got a few more Clips here so we&#39;ve got some these are quite clearly red and and one here is shot with my drone let&#39;s presume we don&#39;t actually know what this is so what I&#39;m going to do is just edit it into my timeline I&#39;m just going to drag it in like so go to my color page and there&#39;s the shot appearing now so the first thing to do is phone the production company or speak to the DP and find out what it was actually shot on if you can&#39;t get that information the next thing to do is look at the file name itself often that can be a clue so Sony writes in a certain format uh Canon writes in a certain format and that will at least get you the right manufact to start with you can then just play around with It&#39;s s log2 or S log 3 a little bit of experimenting this one for example let&#39;s presume that we don&#39;t know what it is so what we&#39;re going to do let&#39;s come out of here and let&#39;s go to uh resolve color management so I&#39;m going to go to my color management here let&#39;s just go to regular D Vinci color management and say okay so what we&#39;re going to do now is have a look at our input transform so this you can do this as a CST or use the input color space here so the first thing I&#39;m going to do is I&#39;m just going to go and try a few out I mean there&#39;s no harm in just trying AR for example and often I&#39;ve worked with Canon footage knowing that it&#39;s Canon and I&#39;ve actually used an AR profile on it and a color space and it works really nicely so just try a few out see what happens this is clearly far too concentrated to be a so what I&#39;m going to do is presume that none of these are going to look that good and I&#39;m going to change it to be re 79 Rec 79 scene means obviously shots Rec 79 it&#39;s not a display so a display has a gamma 2.2 or 2.4 for example this is Rec 79 scene that means we&#39;re just going to grade it as we did at the beginning of this episode where we did our display referred grading so there&#39;s no reason to worry about that at all we&#39;re telling the color management that it&#39;s Rec 7 and9 and we&#39;re just going to grade it so we can actually start I&#39;ve actually done an episode on grading this as Drone footage but there&#39;s nothing wrong with just doing something simple like that and we&#39;re good to go so if you really don&#39;t know what it is set the input color space to be re 79 scene this is what you would do with stock footage that&#39;s already graded as well but the idea is we want to send it to either Aces if you&#39;re working Aces or we want to send it to D Vinci wide gamut so at least it&#39;s in a color management pipeline if you don&#39;t know what it is set it to rec79 there&#39;s nothing wrong with that so I hope this episode has enlightened you about color management whether you&#39;re a beginner or an intermediate user we&#39;ve looked at Lots csts um Aces we&#39;ve looked at resolve color management the differences between the two when you use one over the other which ones I like using this episode took me quite a long time to develop so I would love it if you subscribed if you like this sort of stuff if you don&#39;t then don&#39;t subscribe obviously hit the notification Bell look after yourselves and I&#39;ll see you in the next episode

Transcript for:Color Management in DaVinci Resolve

Transcript for:
Color Management in DaVinci Resolve