Editing, Grading & Exporting iPhone 12/13 Dolby Vision footage in Resolve 17.4.1 - It finally works!

hi there i'm guessing you're here because you've suffered through the same frustration that i have trying to edit iphone 12 and 13 dolby vision footage in davinci resolve like me you probably love the gorgeous colors and contrast that you see in dolby vision footage and now that all of the newer apple devices come with xdr displays that support dolby vision you'd like to be able to edit that footage without losing any of the image quality well i have good news for you in davinci resolve 17.4.1 editing that footage in hdr finally works the way it always should have done it's really simple and straightforward and in this video i'm going to show you how to edit that footage in both hdr and sdr workflows i'll also show you how to export your footage in dolby vision using apple's compressor so that it plays back in the highest quality on apple devices as an important note some of the settings that i'm going to show you in davinci resolve only work on macs so if you own a pc unfortunately this video is not for you for more advanced users you might find it useful to understand some of the terminology used when describing hdr and dolby vision so i have included a section in the description below that covers that terminology and explains it first let's talk about what kind of display you'll need to edit hdr footage you're going to need one of the latest apple devices that comes with an xdr display that includes the new 14 and 16 inch m1 pro and m1 max macbooks that we just recently announced and also anybody who has an apple pro display xdr can edit on any of the older machines as well for those that don't have one of those displays don't worry because i'll also show you how to edit hdr video on a non-hdr display using a lut to convert it while not perfect it is at least a feasible way to get this done and i'm also going to show you how to do an sdr workflow where you edit these dolby vision clips in a standard sdr timeline which is rec7 and ion timeline now let's dive right in and show you how to get resolve correctly configured okay so here we are in davinci resolve and the very first thing to for us to do is to check what version we are using it's very important that we're on version 17.4.1 or later because that's the first time that this actually worked and that was released last week so now we've seen that we're in the correct place let's go to resolve preferences and we should be on the general pane here we must have checked use 10-bit precision and viewers if available use mac display color profiles for viewers and that will make our system work correctly so let's save that now i already have a blank project here but the next thing we want to do is go down to the project settings with a gear in the bottom right hand corner now we're in the project settings tab we want to switch to the color management pane and the first step we're going to do is change the color science from davinci yrgb to davinci rgb color managed this is where davinci does all of the hard work of converting your clips from their color space to the color space of the whole project now it's important that we have this automatic color management checkbox checked and then davinci starts with us in standard dynamic range we want to change to high dynamic range and we want our output space to be hdr hlg hybrid log gamma it's also important that we check this display hdr and views if available and also set this hdr mastering for 1000 nits now you'll see down here there is an opportunity to check dolby vision we're not going to check that because we will be doing dolby vision in a post processing step which is what dolby labs recommends for how to get apple footage correctly processed so now we've done that we can hit save and we're back in the edit page i'd like you to make sure you're on the edit page to follow along next step i'm going to do is to bring in some media these are iphone files that i've exported from my photos app and i'm simply going to drag these across into the the panel change the frame rate to 30 frames per second and now we have a series of clips that we can use in our project and these are hdr dolby vision clips filmed on the iphone 13. so let's select all of these and add to timeline create a new timeline using selected clips we'll just leave it as timeline one and immediately i can see that we are seeing a fabulous high contrast high dynamic range image now unfortunately since none of the screen recording software out there allows me to record hdr footage you're seeing something that doesn't look very good and is very washed out by using my sony camera i can show you what the screen looks like that i'm looking at with the high dynamic range image on the xdr display and notice what happens when i slide the whole window that has davinci resolve across onto my imac 2020 which doesn't have a high dynamic range display every time i moved the davinci resolve window to a non-hdr monitor that case it was my imac 2020 monitor i could not see the hdr display correctly and i would get the washed out whites there is an interesting solution for this if you don't happen to own one of these really good xdr displays from apple and you still want to work on an hdr project what we can do is use a lut and so let's click down here on the project settings gear and in the color tab color management tab here we can go to video monitor lookup table and it currently says no lut selected and what we're going to do is we're going to tell it to convert what we're seeing in that viewer from hlg to gamma 2.4 so click on this particular lut and save it and now you can see that what i see now is that that high dynamic range is no longer showing up in high dynamic range but at least you can see it and as i play through the material here you'll get a sense for what's happening on the screen here so with that done let's do a couple of simple shortening things here just to give ourselves a nice simple project that is not too long that we can work with by the way all of the clips that i'm editing here are all available to you in a dropbox folder that i link to below so if you feel like playing with these clips you're very welcome to do so so we have those now in a timeline that we can export before i do that i want to show you something on the media page which gives you some sense our dissolve color managed workspaces work so let's shift to the media page and instead of showing these as icons here i'm going to switch to the list view and you'll see something i don't have the ability to look at the color space the input color space so what i'm going to do here is right mouse button click on any of these headings and i'm going to check input color space and now i have input color space showing up and something very important happened which is resolve was clever enough to associate the correct color space rec 2100 hrg with each one of those clips at the time we imported them and that's very important because now resolve is doing all the hard work of remapping that rec 2100 clip to the right color space for us and that saves us a ton of work that used to have to be done with color space transforms or luts or things like that but here it's done automatically and while we're on the subject of resolve color management let me show you what happens if i bring in some clips from my sony alpha one so i have in that same dropbox folder loaded here three clips one is in s cinetone one is in s log three and one is in sony hlg2 i'm going to drag these clips into our media folder here and let's click on the s cinetone clip and you can see that it displays fine and resolve has recognized it as being a rec 709 scene gamma setting when we go to the hlg file it's also been recognized as rec 2100 hlg and it displays fine it's a little dark because i filmed it a bit dark but when i go to the s-log 3 file we see that it looks very washed out because resolve was not able to determine the input color space so what i need to do here is right click on that file and go up to input color space and tell resolve that this is a sony s gamut 3 dot cine slash s log 3 file and as soon as i did that it immediately became correctly exposed so that just shows you how easily resolve handles different media formats for you when you're in this resolve color manage space and you start off instantaneously with very nice base grade on your files so let's go back to the edit page and here we can see that we have our timeline and let's say we're happy with the edits that we have on this and we now want to export that as a dolby vision file so here i went to the dolby labs website to find out what they recommend the how to do this and even though there's a lot of dolby vision functionality inside of resolve their recommendation was very very simple and straightforward and so easy to follow and i think that's what we will do and their recommendation is that we create an intermediate file and then run that through compressor and turn that into a dolby vision file through through compressor so let's go to the deliver page and we need to select a format for how we're going to export this we could export this as an h.265 file but in our case we're going to actually go to a apple prores file and select prores 42hq now i'm going to save you some time making a mistake because one of the things that i've discovered is that if you export it simply as shown you're going to get clipped highlights and so it's quite important to change the data levels from full to video before you do the export in prores 42 hq and now let's call this a hdr file open brackets hlg and add that to our render queue and let's hit the render button and see that all rendering very quickly i'm going to speed this up so you don't have to watch while this is happening and now that's complete i can go to where i saved that file to and here's the file that i just saved and if i open that up inside of quicktime i can see you will not be able to see this but i have a beautiful high dynamic range image in front of me it's still not dolby vision encoded but it's still in a pretty impressive beautiful contrast image that i'm looking at here that plays perfectly so we need to do one more step to this image and that step is to run it through compressor and so let's go and open up compressor and when compressor opens up we will add this file by doing add over here and here's hdr file with hlg and brackets let's add that in here and it now says select one or more settings and what we're going to do is we're going to select the apple devices tab and here we can see there is a specific setting hebc hlg dolby vision and that's the one that we're going to choose now when we do that if we run this at this point in time it would work fine but it would be very slow so if you wanted to run faster the simple thing to do is go to the video tab on the job here that we can select by selecting this setting go over to video and here you can see encoder type slower higher quality that will take a long time if we want to use the hardware for this encoding we can just simply select faster standard color you can see include dolby vision 8.4 metadata so this is now ready to go and we can say start batch and that will run for us and again i'm going to speed this up and show you right at the end what we have okay that's completed and let's go back to our thing here this is now the file the dolby vision file that was created so i'm going to say open that with quicktime player and now we have something that is really gorgeous it's uh substantially more contrast and better range of contrast and imagery than we got from our straight hdr file and it's properly dolby vision encoded and will play back beautifully on any of the apple screens that support dolby vision so here we are looking at the hlg file before dolby vision processing and now we're looking at the uh file after post processing it's subtle as i switch between the two of them you'll notice that the whites are brighter and some of the darks are darker so better contrast it's just a better image overall after going through the dolby vision processing step so that's it in terms of how we get a dolby vision file exported but i do want to cover something else which is some of you might be interested in creating a rec 709 version of this that you could use to upload to something like youtube for people who don't have hdr displays so let's just go back to resolve here let's go back to our edit tab so we have our our imagery here what i want to do is go back to the project settings and we will first go back to the color management place let's get rid of this video monitor lookup table that we had set first of all let's reset that back to no lut selected and here for the color processing mode we're going to choose sdr and output color space as being sdrc709 and as soon as we do that we now get to see our apple footage and it looks reasonable but it's a little bit of a poor contrast curve so let's go over to the color page and show you what will typically work for how to fix this and if we take this particular clip we can see that the levels are very highly concentrated in the upper range so what we're going to do is put on a curve and simply drag down the upper part of it and this now starts to give us a great looking image and if i go to the second image and simply hit the equals key to copy that same grade i get a very good looking thing there again same thing with all of these images i'm just simply hitting the equals key to copy the grade from the previous clip and all of a sudden my images start to look great so again i can adjust these slightly for each of these two to get it perfect but we now have a conversion that's taken place and all the work's been done for us in davinci resolve to convert those hlg files out of your iphone 12 or iphone 13 into rec 709 for you so hopefully that gives you everything you need to know how to edit and grade apple dolby vision footage in either high dynamic range or in standard dynamic range now that you know how to edit and grade in hdr let's talk about what i've experienced with uploading to vimeo and youtube starting with youtube youtube doesn't yet support dolby vision so it will convert a dolby vision file to sdr and the results are not great so to get hdr on youtube we'll need to export a 10-bit hdr file that youtube understands since that intermediate prores file that we generated earlier is so huge it's not ideal for uploading to youtube and i recommend creating a 10-bit h.265 file there is a trick to this as when you select h.265 on the deliver page in resolve it will default to exporting an 8-bit file which youtube won't recognize as hdr so we need to change one setting the encoding profile needs to be changed from main to main 10 as i'm showing you here now with regards to viewing that hdr on youtube you should be aware that youtube doesn't currently support hdr in the chrome browser and you'll get a very washed out look so if you're a mac user i suggest using safari which works great hdr viewing is also supported in the youtube app on hdr tvs and recent apple devices such as apple tv iphones and ipads next let's talk about vimeo as of september 2021 great news vimeo supports dolby vision so you can take the dolby vision file that we created earlier on and just upload it directly to vimeo however i did experience a problem with vimeo it wouldn't play back the hdr file that i uploaded it would only play it back at 360p and hdr and as soon as i try to increase the resolution it dropped back to sdr i've got a dialogue going with mio's tech support to try to uncover what's going wrong and as soon as i find out a solution i'll post it in the description below similar to youtube playback is not supported in chrome so you need to use the safari browser or the vimeo app on hdr tvs or more recent apple devices like the apple tv or things like iphones or ipads work fine so hopefully that gives you everything you were looking for if you liked this video and found it useful please like and subscribe as that will help other users find it thank you very much for watching and i look forward to seeing you in the next video

Channel: David Skok

Views: 926

Keywords: Dolby Vision, Davinci Resolve, HDR

Id: 0X1FRWdEvJA

Length: 16min 32sec (992 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 10 2021