Scarlet + Davinci Resolve Colour Grading Breakdowns
Reduser member Philipe Ratton posted some awesome R3Ds from his latest short film currently in production. I couldn’t resist grading these. You can find the original Reduser post with the R3Ds here.
Grading is super easy when you start with quality, well shot source material. That was definitely the case this time! There are so many possibilities with this footage. It truly can be pushed and pulled in any direction.
Resolve node structure and setup
Below is the Resolve node structure used for all these grades. You can see what effect each node has on the image in the video above.
Usually I also have a sharpen node right at the end, which I disable prior to outputting the footage. It’s really only for preview purposes since I prefer the sharpen tools in After Effects.
For some of these grades I’ve also used Resolve’s built in noise reduction. I find it helps clean up secondary qualifications. NR is always applied on the first or second node so that everything downstream benefits from a cleaner image. My settings are usually NR Threshold: 1.200, NR Blend 0.2-0.5, NR Radius: 1 for final output, 4 during grading.
Setup on this is the standard REDcolor3 / REDlog Film but this time its being graded through a film print emulation LUT. More on film print emulation LUTs to come in future posts…
The first grade is the standard teal / orange look that is popular in feature films these days. The second grade has more of a sickly green bias. And the third keeps things looking relatively neutral whilst still retaining some moodiness.
Click images for full size 1080p versions.
7 Comments
Kc says: December 30, 2012 at 3:54 pm //
Love your work. Be great if you released tuts, I payed for some tuts on DR recently from a world famous Ozy film/fx site and found myself more aggravated than impressed, the teacher spoke so slow and his block buster grading results are non-existent compared to yours.
Excited to see what you come up with.
jacenK says: January 12, 2013 at 4:25 pm //
This is why i need a better color gamut camera- awesome
Matias says: January 15, 2013 at 3:30 pm //
Hey man, your grading stuff it’s absolutely brilliant. Did you go to vfx school or something? or just self-tough.
Juan Melara says: January 16, 2013 at 12:59 am //
Kc, thanks for commenting. I’ve seen a few tutorials from experts on achieving the blockbuster look. You’re right, most of the time they don’t really get close. To me it seems that they’re not really analysing what actually makes up the look. Plus they’re missing a few key ingredients which make it difficult to actually nail the look.
I’m currently shooting some footage that I’ll have rights to distribute and I’ll be working on tutorials in the next few weeks. Hopefully I’ll do a better job!
Juan Melara says: January 16, 2013 at 1:05 am //
Hey Matias – I’m completely self taught in colour grading. But I have a background in painting, illustration, photography and graphic design, which have been invaluable when grading.
In some ways it was only the software and processes I needed to learn as I already had a strong foundation in working with colours, composition etc.
Sidmar Holloman says: April 7, 2013 at 5:27 am //
Can we get a detail video tutorial on how to achieve these looks?
Dara says: May 24, 2013 at 6:18 am //
Hi Juan,
Can explain why did you have node 8 link to node 1 and it look like all you parallel node u are linking to node 8. How are u getting clean key with that node to do skin tone HSL keying since ur parallel is pulling from node 8? And also on the Mid/Lo Tint node are you pushing the black and gamma toward cyan and the high tint u pushing it toward green?
thanks
Dara