Davinci Resolve: Ditch The "Video" Look

as we discussed in secrets to cinematic color grading most of us are after a more cinematic aesthetic in our grades and one of the keys to achieving this look is to gain a more detailed understanding of its fundamental visual characteristics but simply knowing what we're after isn't always enough if we're going to successfully navigate the full breadth of color grading's creative landscape we also need to be able to recognize what we're not after for most of us this is the dreaded video look and while it's easy to spot in its extreme expressions it can often sneak into our grades in little ways subtly compromising our creative vision so today we're going to talk about some of the core ingredients of the video look and what we can do when we encounter them so let's talk about some of the concepts and visual characteristics that tend to accompany the video look and some ideas for how we can improve on these things now before i dive in i want to point out to you guys that as i always do i am working in a color managed environment today which means that i am using color space transformation to accurately map myself from what the camera saw into what my display can reproduce rather than grading things by hand from their log state if you want to know more about color management i encourage you to check out my aces explained series which is a great primer on the subject or you can watch any episode of grade school where we tend to discuss color management quite a bit but for today let's get right into these concepts and visual characteristics that we want to upgrade the first one of these is this idea of contrast as a sort of single dimensional variable so thinking of contrast solely in terms of being high or medium or low let me show you what it might look like to tackle a grade in that way and the results that we might get out of it let's say here on this image that i want to go for a high contrast look here really want to get those hot highlights and deep shadows and really make the image pop so one way to go about this would be to go to my lift wheel here and stretch things out toward the floor like so and then to go over to my gain wheel and move things in the opposite direction so that i'm getting really deep shadows and really hot highlights like so now i have indeed created a higher contrast look by making this adjustment but i'm really not thinking of contrast in a very dimensional way i'm sort of thinking of it along a single axis and we can actually do better than this one thing that i want you guys to see right off the bat here is if i look at my scopes where before i had a signal that was fully contained in between 0 and 1023 here i'm now spilling through the bottom and through the top on at least some of my channels and that kind of violates a rule of thumb that you guys have probably heard me mention before which is that i want to fill my dynamic range but i don't want to spill outside of my dynamic range with any adjustment that i make while grading and this comes back to thinking about contrast in a bit more of a dimensional way and thinking really not just about contrast but about the overall contour of my image as it moves from pure black to pure white so let's grab a still of this image and reset our grade and see if we can't get a similar sort of feeling of contrast but without losing so much information in the bottom and top and paying a bit more attention to the overall contour of everything in between so i could do this with a number of tools but today we're going to do it with our custom curves so i want to go over here and let's wipe to that prior version of our grade and we're going to try to get a visual match to that sort of overall contrast level to that overall weight but with paying a bit more attention to the tones in between those two extremes of deepest shadow and brightest highlight so i'm going to do that first by creating a toe here in the bottom and kind of match that level that i'm seeing in this image something like that and then we're going to create a shoulder up here so instead of clipping things out in both places we are preserving and compressing our tonal details something like this and obviously i don't need to perfectly match this but i'm going to try and get a reasonably good match just so it's easier for us to compare our two versions of this image and that's starting to feel pretty darn close to me let's move this wipe so that it's fully covering the original image and go full screen and compare this first version to our second version here so you guys can see while i have a similar contrast level here in this version i'm clipping out almost nothing i'm really preserving my tonal detail and here in this version there's quite a bit more that is gone and completely devoid of detail and let's take this concept even a little bit further let's say cool well we've preserved some tonal detail but i actually would like to get even closer to like the weight that i'm feeling here in this version of the image i'm going to do a new node now with a circular power window and we're going to do a vignette kind of around the edges to get even more weight without it having to come at the expense of detail so i'm going to stretch this out nice and soft kind of onto my edges i'm going to invert this circular power window now i'm going to go back to my primaries and drop my offset down quite a bit and then i'm just and now i'm going to go here and turn my power window off so that it's out of our way and if i go full screen now and go off and then on you can see i've got even more weight in this image than i did before and again i'm not clipping anything out and if we wipe to our prior version once again we've got that same feeling of contrast but we're not overly crushing our shadows or overly stretching our highlights so that's kind of one example of thinking of contrast in a bit more of a dimensional way and thinking not only about contrast but about the overall contour of our image reverse if i go over here to shot number two and let's say in this case i want to do a low contrast thing so i'm going to pick my lift up and drop my gain down whoops that's not what i wanted and drop my gain down and i'm going to grab a still of this now and i'm once again going to try to go for a similar feeling using my curves so let's start things off by picking up the bottom which is quite literally a lift operation and then dropping the top which is a gain operation so thus far i'm just matching what i did over there in the primaries tabs but i'm now once again going to add a little toe and a little shoulder so that within this reduced range of black to highlights i still have decent separation and tonal variance and things feel finished and there's enough contrast here to catch my eye because that's something you guys are often gonna find with low contrast looks is when we don't implement them properly they don't catch the eye enough and they can feel a bit unfinished which i would argue is absolutely the case in this first version that we did yeah it's low contrast but it really doesn't engage my eye and it doesn't really feel finished either whereas in this version where we just added that little bit of a toe a little bit of a shoulder it's still low contrast but it's engaging my eye and it feels more polished and more finished so that's another example of this same idea of starting to think of contrast in more than one dimension and something that can really help us when we're grading and help us avoid that more one-dimensional video type of contrast and the last thing i want to look at with you guys today is here on shot number three this is another concept that almost always comes with this video look and that is one of thinking too much about saturation and not enough about separation i'm going to show you what i mean so let's go back over to my primaries tab and i'm going to pump my saturation to say 70. try to make it a nice and strong kind of like eye-popping level of color and that's something that we often want to do when we're grading is we say hey i really want those colors to pop and i've indeed done that with this adjustment of my saturation i'm definitely getting more color out of the image but let's grab a still here and see if we can't get as good or better of a result without ever reaching for our saturation knob at all i'm going to try in this case rather than just creating pure saturation i'm going to try to increase my separation and in doing so create more of a sense of colorfulness in this frame so we're going to do that with a technique you guys have seen me use before which is split toning once again going to go to the custom curves ungang my channels start with my blue channel i'm going to option click along the graph here so that i can get a control point that stays pinned to the line then i'm going to make a little rainbow here in the bottom now i'm going to go to my green option click make a similar rainbow that's just not quite as strong as that blue now we'll go to our red option click make that rainbow here and then go back to my green option click and make another rainbow underneath it that doesn't extend quite as far like so and then i'm immediately going to back everything off so that it's not quite as aggressive i'm going to take my red to about 75 take my green to about 80 and i'll take my blue to about 90 like so and if i go full screen now and turn this off and then on it's much more subtle but you can absolutely see how we have created more colorfulness with this frame without ever reaching for our saturation knob and it's a much more organic much less video aesthetic than if we refer back to our original grade here where we just cranked up our saturation knob so here is the second version and here is the first version of that same image so that's a couple of concepts for you guys to think about when you're grading if you are concerned about falling into more of a video type of aesthetic in your grades these are things that you can be mindful of and that you now have some solutions in your back pocket for to rethink and tackle in a different way when you see them pop up you can say hey am i thinking too much of my contrast simply in terms of high medium or low do i need to pay more attention to the nuances of the journey from wherever i set my black to wherever i'm setting my white point or hey am i thinking too much about just saturation and not paying enough attention to how i might separate out the colors that are already present in my frame both of those are great questions to ask that are almost always going to lead to more polished more organic and more filmic results in your grades now that we've explored both the cinematic and the video look you should be starting to cultivate a sort of creative road map for these different types of imagery the better your map the more skillfully and intuitively you can travel across it and as you continue to explore this world you're going to find that there's a lot more to it than a simple film versus video dichotomy and that the areas between and beyond are where the real treasure lies happy hunting

Channel: Cullen Kelly

Views: 8,993

Keywords:

Id: FGk2VOnTCl0

Length: 11min 7sec (667 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 03 2021