Color Space Transform - PRO COLORIST Explains

color space transforms this must be the most talked about subject on DaVinci Resolve forums that I've seen for a long time so in this episode I'm going to demystify what is a color space transform how does it work is it color management is it better than color management where does it go in your node tree all these sort of questions are going to answer in this episode so this is a really good one for beginners but if you're intermediate it might answer some of the questions that you have as to where it goes in your node tree for example so let's take a look so I've got some footage here this is some Airy footage and I've got some red footage here as well so I'm just going to show you a couple of different color spaces to work with so my color space transform is here it's in my effects and I literally drag and drop it onto my clip and nothing happens because I haven't actually set anything yet and just to show you we are in color management here we are in a non-color managed environment we're in DaVinci y RGB color managed is the next one down Okay so we're in just regular DaVinci ygb I've got my timeline color space set to DaVinci wide gamma intermediate and my output color space is Rec 709 gamma 2.4 because I'm delivering this for broadcast this is for HD regular television if you don't understand that I've done an episode called are you color space aware and it will explain what those settings are doing so you should check that one out I'll put a link to that in the description so here is our color space transform what is a color space transform well a color space transform is a way of working in different color spaces on a node by node basis so I want to take this image which looks very flat from this Ari color space profile into Rick 709 all right and to do that I could use color Management in this case I'm going to use a color space transform so there's two things that you need to tell DaVinci Resolve when you're working in color space transforms and the first one is what's your input and the second one is what's your output so our input is area log C okay I know this came from an area camera and it's Airy log C so I'm going to say I'm going to say here in the color space very wide gamut three and my input gamma here needs to be set to array log C3 and that should put us into a very nice starting position but this looks terrible okay and the reason for that is our output color space is currently set to use timeline and our timeline color space is DaVinci white gamut so it's not rec 709 gamma 2.4 so it's not going to look nice the idea here remember is to color manage your image so you've got a really good starting point for your grade I want to get the image looking as the camera intended it to be so I'm going to change my output color space as well and get that to be Rec 709 and we're going to choose gamma 2.4 which is a broadcast standard and now our image looks great this is ready to grade all right so what I'm going to do is grab a still of that and I'm just very quickly going to prove to you if I reset that node I'm just going to show you that that's exactly the same as going to color manage here saying save and there's the same image so if I do a split wipe on these you'll see they're absolutely identical all right so the color Management in a CST is the same as the color managed however I have control of where it will go in the nodes so the next question is where does it go in my node tree does it go at the beginning do you do this to start with do you do it at the end you've probably seen in my programming and my no trees that I work with my CST at the end but I'm going to show you an extra little tip as well from that so stick with it right let's come out I've color managed and I'm going to put that back to DaVinci wired gamut and I'm going to put my app because it's basically Rec 709 gamma 2.4 and to get that CST back on there I could just drag from here however before I do that I'm going to put three nodes on here okay so what I'm going to do now is show you why I think it should go at the end and not the beginning all right so my color space transform should be at the end so first of all let's put it at the beginning all right so I'm going to drag from here so I've literally just taken that node and dragged it on the first node here so there is our setup ariwide gamut to aridoxy input to Rick 79 camera 2.4 and these two nodes are empty so they're effectively doing nothing so if I go into my second node here even though it's labeled node one it's actually the second node because my path goes from here to here and what I'm going to do if you look at the parade here we've got a really nice clean image here this is pretty good we've in fact we could probably not need to do too much to this but I'm going to go extreme here and just show you I'm going to take my offset wheel and I'm going to push it hard okay and you see when it gets to the top here it Clips so we'll actually start losing data off the image this is because at this point here we've taken a big large Airy color space and we've condensed it down into Rick 709 so let me show you on my cre chart here the there's our that's our color space that's how large our color space is from the camera and this is Rec 709 so it's a much smaller area that we could work it in and what we're doing on the first node is putting us into that smaller area so when I start playing with all these tools here we are hitting the boundaries of Rec 709 very quickly so you can see my parade we've now hit the limit now if I undo that so let's just reset that okay and what we're going to do now is put this CST at the end instead of at the beginning so I'm going to use this trick I'm just going to use command and drag which will literally swap the node order okay so it's command and drag my CST is now on the end so we're still going Aries to rec 709 but I'm going to grade underneath that CST all right so in here so this is why I prefer the CST workflow over the color managed workflow because in the color managed workflow it's determining this order for me right I'm going to do exactly the same step I'm going to take my offset and I'm going to push it hard and what you see this time is we get a nice roll off okay because we're working in a much larger color space first and then that is being brought down to rec 709 not we're going to Rick 709 first and then we're pushing our levels all right so it's a much larger working color space that we're in so that hopefully proves as to why I know this is Extreme but I'm not losing the detail the detail is still there all right I'm going to reset that now the color space transforms allow us to go from any color space to any color space so what we could do is work a little bit smarter than this so what I'm going to do is take a color space transform I'm going to put that in the beginning I'm going to say our input color space is array as we already know input gamma is Ary Lux E3 but my output color space instead of sending it to rec 709 gamma 2.4 what I'm actually going to do is put this into a larger color space so I'm going to put it into DaVinci wide gamut this is actually a bigger color space than the Airy color space but it's a very good intermediate working color space it's very good if you've got mixed camera formats like we have here we've got Airy and red so The DaVinci wide gamut is a good intermediate one to use my Apple gamma needs to also be set to DaVinci intermediate so what we've done here is take our array color space and we've sent it to DaVinci wide gamut color space now what we can do at the end let's put another color space transform so this is going to be our grade this one on the end what we're going to do is take our input color space and it's not going to be array this time because we've set Airy to DaVinci here so it's actually we need to go from DaVinci color space don't you write gamut Da Vinci intermediate and now we're going to send it to rec 709 so I'm going to say apple cut a space for x79 gamma 2.4 okay this still looks exactly the same so if I double click this which was just our array log C to Rick 709 and wipe you see again they're absolutely identical because what we've done is taken Arie to Da Vinci here we're then going to do all our color grading in the middle in DaVinci wide gamut color space and then we're going to go from DaVinci wide gamut again down to rec 709 so with the effects we've just built a new pipeline we've got our start and our end just to show if I push the extreme we still get that nice roll off we don't get any clipping occurring so it's a really good workflow okay so let's take this to the next level what I want to do is get a really efficient workflow going on here we've got our first node here this is taking us from our camera manufacturers color space to our chosen working color space in our case DaVinci wired gamut this could be Aces if you prefer to work in Aces there's absolutely no problem with that as long as your final CST in your program takes you from that same working color space down to rec 709 this is at the final bit that we want to funnel it down to rec 709 color space in the middle of that you've got your grade so this could be one node 20 nodes 30 nodes doesn't really matter what's going on there but we're going to keep that as a blank node for now we're going to make this really efficient so the thing that's unified between all the Clips in our timeline will be our grade so I'm going to keep that as a blank for now and our final CST okay we're always going to go from DaVinci wide gamut to rec 709 so these two things are common the thing that changes is the first one because this depends on your camera manufacturer or indeed if you're working with archive footage or iPhone that might just be Rec 709 doesn't matter it still needs setting because we're going to send it to DaVinci wide gamut so what I'm going to do is I'm going to right and click I'm going to reset that node and I'm going to save this as a node tree okay so this is going to be my very basic fixed notary if you like okay so I've got two nodes and I've got that CST on the end settings from DaVinci right gamut to rec 709 now what I'm going to do is apply that to all the Clips in my timeline so if I select all my clips and just middle Mouse click this one so now you can see that all the Clips in my timeline I've got exactly the same node structure but they're all wrong because they're all starting in DaVinci wide gamut and going to rec 709 whereas these are arry and red so what we can do is use groups and this is really going to help us so I'm going to take our red footage I'm going to highlight it all I'm going to right click and I'm going to add it into a new group let's call this red and now because these clips are in a group what we can do is go to our group pre-clip selection and we can use a color space transform to tell it that these clips are red so I've only got to do this once and it will apply to the whole group so we go red white gamma RGB and we're going to go red log 3G 10 and we're going to tell it's going to go to DaVinci wide gamut because that's our work in color space so I'm just going to set that up here and all these clips are now set correctly because they're in a group so this is done at group level and then all you got to do is go onto your clip level and we can just start grading away however many nodes you've got there ready to grade and your final CST is going to take you from DaVinci wide gamut back to 709 so really efficient so let's just put our Ari Clips in a group and do exactly the same I'm going to say add new group let's call it array so all our Eclipse are now in a group so I'm going to go to group pre-clip make sure you choose pre-click and not post clip because you want to happen this before you start the grade I'm going to put my color space transform on and we're going to tell it it's very wide gamut and it's Airy look C3 again I'm going to send it to DaVinci ride gamut DaVinci intermediate and these clips are all now correctly set up ready to start grading so if we come out of our group into clip and we're good to start grading so you can just fire away here just to show you that's all nice and smooth no clipping occurring and we're good to go if you want to see how to do this in a color managed environment click on this video here look after yourselves and I'll see you in the next episode

Channel: Darren Mostyn

Views: 102,018

Keywords: Colour management CST, CST, Color Space Transform, colour space aware, Timeline Colour Space, Resolve 18, Color Space aware tools, OFX, Colourist, Colorist, Blackmagic Design, 18, v18, DaVinci Resolve v18, Resolve v18, Blackmagic design cloud, Cool titles, editing in resolve, keyframing in resolve, keyframes, resolve keyframes, MotionVFX, Titles in MotionVFX, Darren Mostyn, pro colorist

Id: CtSBVKmHkjU

Length: 11min 46sec (706 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 13 2022