Resolve Grade: 10 mins of life gone...

[Patrick O'Sullivan]

Hi gang

I got an email from a DP friend of mine asking me if I could explain how he could get any benefits out of the film LUTs floating around here from Bjorn. I started typing and realized how incredibly boring that was going to be so I had a change of heart. I'd make another installment in my ongoing series entitled, "This is what happens when software prices drop and amateurs with wifi in their spare bedroom can pretend to know what they are talking about" aka my resolve walk throughs.

Please don't take any of this as fact. I started with a pretty clear idea that I wanted to explain and then ended up babbling on for about 9 minutes too long.
Enjoy

 

[Vico Martin]

Really nice grade, thanks for share!

Vico.

 

[Thomas Koch]

Fantastic video. thanks for posting this.

 

[Robert Horwell]

where are these film luts?

 

[jimhare]

"This is what happens when software prices drop and amateurs with wifi in their spare bedroom can pretend to know what they are talking about" aka my resolve walk throughs.

LOL, very true indeed. Well done, this was very informative and added a very important point to the discussion, which is how to ground a look in reality while pushing the rest.

 

[Björn Benckert]

Very nice tutorial.

But I think you put the lut on the import/start node. To get the most out of these luts it it's better that you do all your corrections under/before the lut. In other words keep the lut in the end of your tree. Then it will make your adjustments behave more like proper color timing of film.

To see the difference you can take an image and bring up/down the exposure heavily before the lut and then do the same after the lut. As it works the lut will flare your highlights when they go up in a very filmic way, same thing when you bring the picture down.

I do not know much about resolve, so I might be mistaken about the order of your nodes.

 

[Tehben Dean]

Thanks, very informative. Where do we find the LUT's?

 

[BRANDON JAMESON]

Hi gang

I got an email from a DP friend of mine asking me if I could explain how he could get any benefits out of the film LUTs floating around here from Bjorn. I started typing and realized how incredibly boring that was going to be so I had a change of heart. I'd make another installment in my ongoing series entitled, "This is what happens when software prices drop and amateurs with wifi in their spare bedroom can pretend to know what they are talking about" aka my resolve walk throughs.

Please don't take any of this as fact. I started with a pretty clear idea that I wanted to explain and then ended up babbling on for about 9 minutes too long.
Enjoy

This is SO generous of you, Patrick!!!

THANK YOU

 

[Adam Eden]

Very nice tutorial.

But I think you put the lut on the import/start node. To get the most out of these luts it it's better that you do all your corrections under/before the lut. In other words keep the lut in the end of your tree. Then it will make your adjustments behave more like proper color timing of film.

To see the difference you can take an image and bring up/down the exposure heavily before the lut and then do the same after the lut. As it works the lut will flare your highlights when they go up in a very filmic way, same thing when you bring the picture down.

I do not know much about resolve, so I might be mistaken about the order of your nodes.

Yes Bjorn you Are right. The luts work better at the end of the node chain and this is the same for resolve.

 

[Carlos Reyes]

Yes Bjorn you Are right. The luts work better at the end of the node chain and this is the same for resolve.

Question, how exactly would you go about grading if a lot of what he is doing is compensating for some of the effects of the LUT? Things you can only see after the LUT is applied, does that make sense?

 

[Yannik Markworth]

Thanks a lot for the tutorial.
For learning purposes, could you save the look you created as a preset that we could load on our own systems to get a better understanding of how the individual nodes work?

thanks a lot man!
all the best =)

 

[Carlos Reyes]

Thanks a lot for the tutorial.
For learning purposes, could you save the look you created as a preset that we could load on our own systems to get a better understanding of how the individual nodes work?

thanks a lot man!
all the best =)

Only problem with that is that this grade is very specific to this shot.

 

[Yannik Markworth]

sure, i understand that! i wouldn't slap it to other images but have a look at it to see how the individual steps were created

 

[Adam Eden]

Question, how exactly would you go about grading if a lot of what he is doing is compensating for some of the effects of the LUT? Things you can only see after the LUT is applied, does that make sense?

a lut is always placed the end of the chain so you can see what the end result will be ie. film stock effects once printed so you can have. Negative lut and a positive lut.

if you Are going to back to film you render out dpx files without the lut as what you are grading should already have been compensated for the film lut that you had At the end of the chain. Normally you would work with a lab to get your screens calibrated to their chemical process (emoltion lut).
l
i am probably confusing everyone more as I am typing on an iPhone so I am try to condense the process as much as possible

 

[Steve Sherrick]

Yes Bjorn you Are right. The luts work better at the end of the node chain and this is the same for resolve.

I agree. I've had much better luck on the output.

By the way, thanks for the LUTs Bjorn. I am finally getting a chance to play with them now that I have my Resolve system up and running again.

Patrick, nice tutorial. Always great to see how others work.

 

[Jake Wilganowski]

Question, how exactly would you go about grading if a lot of what he is doing is compensating for some of the effects of the LUT? Things you can only see after the LUT is applied, does that make sense?

You are viewing the lut as you are making changes, it's just that the lut is last in the graphical node chain, and your corrections are in nodes before that one, but your always viewing the final output, which is all nodes combined together

 

[Carlos Reyes]

You are viewing the lut as you are making changes, it's just that the lut is last in the graphical node chain, and your corrections are in nodes before that one, but your always viewing the final output, which is all nodes combined together

Makes sense, this is good to know. I'm gonna try this now see how different my results are.

I sat down with a colorist from technicolor new york for a few hours and he had worked on a lot of awesome work, big movies. He was showing me how he works on Resolve for these few hours and he was using Alexa in log and adding the Alexa to rec709 LUT on his first node and take it from there. For this reason I've been putting LUTs on my first node. Is this any different than what he was doing due to the nature of these LUTs? I'd be surprised if he were doing it "wrong" I'm sure he knows his stuff obviously, so I'm just curious. Any insight would be much appreciated!

 

[M Most]

Using a print emulation LUT as an output LUT and removing it for final rendering of Cineon type files for film recording was the standard approach for a number of years when essentially all Dis were being film targeted. This is no longer the case, as digital distribution is now dominant and many DIs are now digital cinema targeted, with the film print being regarded as the secondary deliverable. If you target digital cinema, you can work in that space natively, in which case you wouldn't use an output LUT other than for projector or monitor calibration.

 

[Brian Merlen]

he probably wanted to first make the image look like what the average consumer will see, which is a flat rec 709 image. from there if one is using a color accurate monitor then the colors one changes are both true, and apply in theory to all rec709 monitors, which is all consumer monitoring systems, if this is not a good starting point i don't know what would be. the consumers simply do not have the range of the professional tools, so you need to smash that range into something the average viewers screen can actually see in order to begin perhaps? i am not nearly as experienced in grading as him but i imagine thats where he was going with it...

luts can be applied anywhere in the process depending what they are and what your trying to do. perhaps some colorists even use the DIT's luts to begin an edit? though probably not i hear a lot lol

 

[Marc Wielage]

luts can be applied anywhere in the process depending what they are and what your trying to do. perhaps some colorists even use the DIT's luts to begin an edit? though probably not i hear a lot lol

That often will not work because the on-set monitor has nothing to do with the calibrated monitor in a color-timing room. In cases where there is close collaboration between the D.I.T. and the post facility, yes, it is possible to match looks and even use identical timing decisions, provided the D.I.T. and facility are using compatible software and are extremely critical about calibration and specific monitors. Generally, they isn't the case.

What I have seen done for more than ten years is that we use the "temp" color-timed version (best-light dailies) used for editing, then run this version in sync with the final version being color-timed in the room. In the past, this was done on two monitors; nowadays, the other version is loaded up as a preview version used for A/B comparison. Many times, I've had DPs say, "OK, we know what we did before; let's throw that out and go in a different direction." It never hurts to be able to pull up the old version every so often just to know what direction you're going in.

I agree that dropping in a LUT as the first node is usually the initial step. Sometimes, this is done in a setup menu (as with Baselight for display LUTs), and sometimes, it can be done as the first layer or node. I'd like to see an image that's already about 70% of the way there as the first step, and then everything that follows is just fine-tuning the look.