u/Optimistbott

Hi all, I’m working in da Vinci resolve.

When working with black or dark hair, it does not seem super prudent to have it anywhere in the middle. While lighting more flat and cranking the ISO can be good for dark scenes, there’s frequently an amount of it that I’ve run into as difficult to recover as not a black mass.

Even if the hair isn’t super noisy or clipping back in the log footage, you can still bring it up with lift dark hdr and custom curves and compensate for lifted middle, and that can be fine, but frequently running into spots where I’m like “this cannot be made any less black without ruining the contrast”

I’m pretty clear that you can film something flat and exposed and day-to-night it, just desaturate, low contrast, pull everything down and it makes it feel dark with everything visible.

But it’s just in situations where you want both contrast and highlights that it feels like a challenge.

Do you have any tips and tricks to deal with this?

That being said, plenty of horror movies as of late have had intentionally underexposed silhouettes relative to the backlight or the key side. So many movies I’ve seen it’s like yeah dark side texture is gone, or black hair is only realizable as hair due a sliver of a highlight and maybe a tiny bit of contour. Sinners and obsession are the examples I’m thinking of. Really tender parts with dim faces and eye-light that looks really cool, but I feel like on this site, people would say “you’re crushing the low end and losing information”. I also feel like sacrificing contrast or any semblance of milky is bad, right? It also feels like it’s not just horror/noir night scenes, feels like common practice to just let a lot of dark things remain black. And say you have a silhouette sort of scene, you have to extend those exposure levels to other shots in that scene as well.

So where do you draw the line and how do you decide just to go for clipped low end?

I don’t see a lot of movies today using this narrative device. It seems like it was really common in the 90s. It works for a lot of movies that are based on first person narration books like fight club, American psycho, and fear and loathing in Las Vegas. But you also see it used in movies like forest gump and goodfellas.

I loved these movies when I was in high school but at the same time it’s like people criticize clunky exposition and they resoundingly demand “show not tell”. But there seem to be ways to make it really engaging, play against the visual, add insight into inner thoughts that otherwise would have been impossible, and add that beat prose flair.

Are these movies still getting made and I just haven’t seen them bc they’re just not good or popular? Or was it a 90s style that’s pretty much an anathema to sophisticated filmmaking that just gets avoided bc it feels like saying “that was Jimmy and he ate grass for a living before the plague hit” or “and that was that, my ambition dissolved with that single word ‘Parmesan’, I slumped into my proverbial chair into a pit of self loathing but I nonetheless obsequiously in a sycophantic tone ‘good for you!’”

Do people hate stuff like that?

Hi, I’m a novice. I’ve been working on a MacBook Max on da Vinci resolve. I ran into a problem with gamma shift when bouncing to quick time that I’ve since resolved by changing last timeline node to rec709a and output to rec709a to watch quick time bounces. It does not look different in da Vinci on my screen regardless if I use output and final conversion to gamma 2.4 but it does shift when I send that to QuickTime. So my answer is to bounce to gamma2.4 when checking exports on different hardware.

Yesterday I went to a friends house to check on their Roku TV. Gamma was set to 2.4. When screen mirroring just the output from da Vinci, there was an extreme gamma shift. But playing web content did not look different.

I changed the display profile on the tv from my MacBook, I changed the display profile on my MacBook, I changed it all back to gamma2.4 in da Vinci, but it didn’t really make a difference.

In order to match something similar to what I saw on my laptop to what I was seeing on the screen mirrored, I had to take contrast past 1.3 in the lift gamma gain offset windows and it still wasn’t quite there. Meanwhile, obviously the display on my laptop was completely crushed. Having watched videos of various colorists, i do get the sense that taking contrast past 1.1 is going to borderline crush things.

I know because I’m using a laptop to do this stuff it’s not going to be perfect, but I didn’t think it was going to be so far off from what I’m seeing on my laptop, no? So what’s going on here.

I’m just looking for a little more specific thoughts on technique about how people go through the whole process.

I’m sure it could be somewhat different for everyone, but the pro workflow im imagining is

A) hero shot

1. Find a wide shot that has all the elements of a scene.
2. Set exposure, contrast, and black point to a target using eyes and waveform
3. Set white balance such that desaturated things are pretty neutral.
4. Make sure skin tones arent super rosy
5. Desaturate or saturate to get to a good place

B) matching

1. Match exposure target of each shot using a wipe with the hero shot still using waveform in wipe or split mode
2. Do the white balance for each shot in the same way using the vectorscope as well as the parade in wipe or split
3. Adjust saturation for desired liveliness per shot
4. Adjust skin tones on a shot by shot basis to reduce rosiness if necessary leveraging vectorscope.
5. Repeat process with eyes until everything looks good.
6. Go to first node for each and apply temporal noise reduction if necessary.

C) look

1. Go to timeline nodes for a specific scene.
2. Create a look for the scene utilizing vs curves, split-toning with hdr wheels/custom curves/dctl/plugin, halation, artistic contrast decisions, grain, vignette, printer lights DCTL, etc.

D) another pass with timeline grade on

1. Are some shots off? Go back to the primaries and exposure and saturation nodes or skin tone vs curves to change that.
2. Is anything blowing up? Do tracking, keying, masking etc to hone in on a particular element that’s singularly blowing up in a given shot. If easier or desirable, modify timeline nodes to split the difference.
3. Anything else that you need to do to any individual shot to make it work.

If that doesn’t work, there must be an unresolvable problem with on-set lighting.

There’s so much you can do to an individual shot to make it look cooler but if you do any selective processing on your hero shot prior to anything else, you’re going to be masking/tracking/keying/creating mattes/protecting for every single shot, right?

I have a mac max laptop with a good cpu/gpu. Im running da vinci resolve 20.

I'm doing a fairly dark scene, and I don't want to crush the low end too much with contrast, and I don't want it to be too blown out with saturation because it's supposed to be pretty dark.

I have my timeline color space set to DVWG/DVI and output to rec709/gamma2.4 which I understand is correct. my gamma and color space tags are set to rec709 and gamma2.4

In da Vinci, it looks fine. But when I export it, it noticeably looks washed out.

I'm not sure what to do here. If my export looks different than what I've done in da Vinci, it's like I'm flying blind here. It should look the same. If i've got some final timeline contrast node to just increase the contrast on the whole thing after the fact, it's kind of like Ill have to bounce several times to check while it looks crushed in da vinci.

This is the gamma shift, right? What do I do here? It should look the same in quicktime or vlc.

I’ve seen people say to do as little as possible to make it work. So like, addressing problems isn’t a granular thing where you’re keying and changing the hue and levels on every element and correcting for lighting and whatnot, when you see a thing that’s off from your hero shot, you just do the broad stroke move and then go to the other shot and then it’s whack-a-mole and you end up with weird skin tones and weird black point. Is going back and forth part of the job of matching something correctly? Or is it like in your mind that all the elements are just going to fall in line if you’re doing broad strokes bc they were shot in the same space and there’s no good reason why the camera science shouldn’t make every element just line up with the right broad stroke moves if the out of camera reality did not change (and I mean, this doesn’t really seem true, if you’re using a different lens, aperture might have to be different which means that matching with light levels might also need to be different which means the color temp of the non-natural light may add subtly different hues in different amounts so surely this isn’t the case) Eg if a wall is a desaturated bluish gray in one shot, and it’s a brighter and greenish thing in another shot, but everything else looks like it matches, are you using the qualifier and windows or are you just slightly changing gamma and then doing something else to compensate? Seeing a specific problem that I can fix independent of other things is an attractive thing. But I also know that I have a tendency to fixate and over-complicate. That being said, being in VFX and animation it would seem that the job is demanding that you micromanage details.

I know the answer is “do as much as necessary as little as possible bc you only have one life” but do you spend your time keying stuff on like maybe 50% of shots? Is there like a strategy where you kinda can go through really quick and know exactly that you’re going to need to key an element?

Do you feel like you need to key more when you’re trying to shape light?

Do you feel like you’re only predisposed to key stuff when you’re making an artistic choice to make something larger than life?

The broad strokes solution always seems like the best idea and people want to be elegant, they want it to be quick and good. However, do you think that a lot of colorists understate the granularity of their process?

What exactly takes up the majority of your time in the full time week of work that it takes you to color grade a short film that has say 90 shots, and 9 scenes to match 8-10 shots within with a few straggler shots in a singular setting? Anything you spend more than an hour working through? Some stuff is done in a minute and I get that. But just back of the napkin math, you’d be spending an hour on a few shots if it takes you 4 days 8 hours a day, no?

I’m calling it. I don’t think we get a better female performance this year. Facial acting and musicality in intonation, timing was amazing. Larger than life. Some might call this overacting, but it got the job done.

No one’s going to agree with this for the wrong reasons but anyways, if she doesn’t win, I’m excited to see whoever does win.

But I’m expecting she gets actress for non-drama GG

Or do you just delete them on set when they happen.

With digital you can just delete the file from the camera.

Ideally, you don’t have outtakes, but such is life and they happen.

As an editor, I wouldn’t want to go through outtake after outtake. If there was truly some moment where I needed to find 2 seconds of a reaction or whatever, it’d be nice to still be able to go through that stuff and mine it for the right look like you would do for b roll footage.

Or is the answer more just like “that’s what the editors job is. give them all the footage, they will edit it.”

This is the Keystone concept. There is always one thing that makes the whole building crash down if you remove it. Like Jenga. You can fortify your artwork so that if one thing fails and you need to remove it because it’s detracting and you still have another keystone.

A sentence can completely lose all meaning if you remove one word or even a single punctuation mark.

For food, if there’s no salt, yeah it’ll be bad. A single ingredient could make or break the uniqueness of a dish. Even a garnish or the plate that added color or picturesque form could make or break the experience of a dining guest. You can also add one extra ingredient that destroys the whole thing.

I think that’s the clearest example because everyone eats.

With music, a melody could be completely destroyed if you remove one note. Or if you changed the rhythm of that one note. It could be an effect on the guitar or some sort of thing in the mix.

With a film, there could be one poorly delivered line or one bit of audio or one extraneous shot thar destroys the film in addition to one thing that you could add that could possibly make it better.

In addition, you can change literally every parameter in ship of Theseus style. And you can start from any point and continue to add and subtract things. The decision of when to stop adding is because you just added a keystone.

This is in contrast to the phrase “you can’t put lipstick on a pig” or “you can’t polish a turd” which posits that there are original concepts that simply cant be made better and that its better to start from square 1.

Edit: I’d like to note that there are things that are actually dangerous in regard to cooking and architecture as starting points that you cannot make better no matter how you shift things around. Arsenic is poisonous (and I think tasteless) and you should not try to make a soup out of it. Nor should you build a house made on a foundation of dynamite.

I’ve got da Vinci resolve 20, im working on a MacBook max with maxed out specs and whatnot.

Halation threshold can be set top down just from the highs of highs to the mids to everything. It’s a cool effect to apply sparingly and subtle-ly, it makes things a little brighter and you can increase the spread and then bring the highlights down again.

but how about the opposite? I know it’s mimicking a film thing that actually happens and the opposite wouldn’t happen, but is there any way to try this out? Like to make the low-end more diffuse?

I’m looking to hone down lists of things that are not worth submitting to for a super low budget bottle feature that I’ve been working on for a while. There are a bunch that I’m going to go ahead and do anyways and hope for the best, but things that are going to be a lot that I know are deceptively difficult to get into (it’s indie but by indie they mean aesthetically indie 300k features), selective with the programming (“dont apply to this one mid tier if your film isn’t ___), sci-fi/horror fests that are just like super genre focused that aren’t going to be into like mixed genres ie adding comedy/drama and just want jump scares and/or really techy world-building, experimental/psychedelic/arthouse film fests that are allergic to narrative and only want like very impressionistic stuff (nothing wrong with that, it’s just not what we’ve done), in general stuff that you know as a filmmaker that the audience likes ___ because you’ve crafted that sort of style and you got in and a ton of movies were just like yours when you went both in terms of aesthetic and content. I just don’t want to waste on stuff that’s not even that big that won’t be selected just because of a bad fit.

I definitely know what our film isn’t. Some have said it’s sort of in the realm of black mirror, but it’s not like hard sci-fi narrative-wise.

resources about that kind of stuff would be cool to hear but just any tidbit of advice is also welcome.