The BEST Node Tree for ANY Camera! PRO Colorist (BBC, Amazon)

so I get a lot of requests of people wanting me to show them how to grade particular camera profiles and what I want to do in this episode is show you a slightly broken down version of my fixed broadcast notary that I use on every single job that's for BBC Amazon ITV branded content whatever it is I use the same fixed Notre I'm going to show you exactly how to build it and show you how easy it is to grade any camera profile so to show you those examples I've got here this is Canon log 3 I've got Canon with uh not log it's just Canon wide gamuts I've got Sony slog 3 I've got this is red I've got black magic design raw AR and even iPhone footage and if your camera profile is not in this list I promise you that this fix notary will work for any camera profile so it's going to be really great way of moving forward also I'm going to show you good solid techniques that I used on my day-to-day broadcast grading that will give you consistently good color grading results so stick with this one so I've got my first shot here this is is Canon log 3 so what I want to do is go to my color management settings and just have a look at what's going on and these are currently set to the defaults now I'm not going to work in the automatic color management we're going to use color space transforms and I've got quite a few episodes on that I'll put links to those in the description but basically if you follow what I'm doing here and I will put this actual not Tre when it's finished in the description in a link and you'll be able to download it but I'm going to show you how to build it from scratch so our timeline color space as you know wants to be a larger color space that us to take any camera profile and have it comfortably working in a larger color space so the one I use you can use Aces you can use AR you can use whatever you actually prefer but I work in Da Vinci wide gam intermediate this is a really good starting point for me and my output color space as we all know needs to match my display which is currently calibrated to rex7 9 gamma 2.4 that is what my delivery is so that's what my monitor is calibrated to and that's the only output color space that's worth putting in there if you're using a gamma 2.4 monitor all right all right let's press save to that I could actually save that as a profile by the way so you can have it as a default and I'm going to press save the first part of building our fixed no tree is to get our color space transformed because we do want to work color manage but we want to do it manually not automatically and this is the key to being able to switch between these different camera profiles really easily so node number one here we're going to build it from scratch there absolutely nothing going on here so far and I'm just going to go to my effects and I've got these filtered actually by favorites so normally you'd have it on show all you'd see all your effects but I've got my favorite showing these are the ones that I use uh most of the time I'm going to take my color space transform here and what we're trying to build up here is the perfect notary that we can save and apply it to every single job that we use moving forward forever and you'll slowly start adapting it but let's just build that node tree up node number one is going to take our camera color space into a unified color space that all our Clips are going to work in and that will be da Vinci White gamut in this instance so our output color space here D Vinci wide gamut and our output gamut is D Vinci intermediate keep all these as default for now I'm going to show you why in a moment and our input color space is the camera Source itself so the camera color space in this case that is Canon and it is C log 3 I'm going to show you what to do if you don't know what that color space is as well so Canon log 3 there we go so this still looks wrong that's because we've sent it to D Vinci wide gamut my monitor doesn't display D Vinci wide gamma it displays Rick 79 gamma 2.4 so this is still no good for me so what I want to be able to do before I start grading is C in the correct color space I want to see my display color space not the camera color space let's put another CST I'm going to press option s to add a Serial and I'm going to move this over here cuz this is actually going to be right near the very end of our no tree I'm take another color space transform and we've currently sent Canon up to D Vinci wide gamut at the end I want to come from D Vinci wide gamma and D Vinci intermediate and our output color space is Rex 79 gamma 2.4 and this by switching this on now this is going to look correct this will look what that camera was seeing when they film this on that rooftop gamma 2.4 there we go so that looks much better starting point for me now so this node here will always be and will never change I'm just going to label it now it will be da Vinci wide ganet to 709 so I'm going to grade underneath it so I can see correctly what the camera was seeing I want to see in display space not in the camera color space this node number one is the one that will change depending on what flavor we're working with down here and all we're going to change is the input color space so let's build a not Tre first and then I'll apply it to those other shots and show you just how quick and easy it is to get good consistent results with your color grading using this fixed not Tre okay and this is based on my actual broadcast not Tre that I I use daytoday let me just show you something because people ask me what should this ootf what is all this stuff what what are we doing with this basically D Vinci resolve knows what it's doing with these settings so it's going to apply the correct transform function these are transform functions depending on whether it's a camera color space or a display color space or a working larger color space all right so we've got our D Vinci wide gamut we've got our Canon log 3 these are both large color spaces so the correct check boxes have been applied automatically if we look at last one this is going from a large working color space divin wide gamut to a display color space so automatically resolve has ticked the correct boxes if I just temporarily swap these around so we're going to go from a display space to a large color space Watch What Happens the tick boxes move automatically so basically you can trust what D Vinci resolve is doing with those tick boxes all right so just trust it it works what we need to do now is build the node structure which I'm going to build the nodes first first and then I'm going to go in and fill them in and start doing an actual grade for you on these shots so I'm going to press option s which is going to give me a Serial and I'm going to call this balance and exposure okay sometimes I have this on two nodes but just for this I'm going to put it all on one node I'm not going to actually do it yet I'm going to build the no tree first so let's add another one this next one is going to be my contrast and I'm going to build another one and this one is going to be saturation so when I get to this point here I would have got myself in a really good starting point and what I want to do then is build the node structure that's going to be my fine adjustment so things like temperature uh adjusting highlights doing anything with the warper tool curves that kind of thing and what these are going to do is come from parallels and I'll explain why so I'm going to add a cal first and then I'm going to add some parallels I'm pressing option P let's just do four for now you can have this as big as you want but these are basic basically going to be my sort of fine-tuning nodes okay this is fine-tuning the the the look that we've got when we get to this point here remember we're always grading under this CST and you'll always be grading under any film looks that you've got going on which I'm going to do in a moment so let's label up these some examples so this could be for example temperature all right this one here might be HDR it might be highlights in the in the HDR tool for example okay this one here for example might be anything I do with the warper and this one here is curves and you can have as many of these as you like so if you use lots of different curves you might want to split those up into extra parallel nodes but the point of this is that when we've graded up to here we've got a really good solid foundation and we then split off so this one will go and feed our temperature but when I do my highlight work here I want it to come from this here not from what I've done with the temperature when I do my warper I want it to come from this point here to come down here because this is a really good solid grade up to this point here so this one feeds this one feeds this one and then we're feeding off into these various branches and this gives us a really good solid consistent grade this is kind of one of the secrets to my grading being very consistent the next thing I'm going to do is add another cereal after this and I'm going to call this one I'm going to run out of room in a minute but I'm going to call this one trim and what this is is just an extra node on the end that allows me to fine-tune all of these great that are going on here okay this is all working in d Vinci wide gamut remember okay so all these little tweaks I've done here I can then do an overall little tweak in here that might just be an extra little bit of contrast it might be just lifting Shadows it could be anything like that so that's just there and remember you don't have to use the node just cuz it's there the idea of the fixed node tree is this is a reminder for me to grade in a good methodical order to get good consistent results the next thing I'm going to do is add another cereal and then I'm going to make a parallel off that and you might want two or three parallels here but these are basically going to be my power windows so any work that I'm doing where I'm isolating an area are going to happen in this little parallel notary here so I'm going to call this one power window one I'm going to call this one here power window two and I'm going to call this one here power window 3 all right I'm going to run out of room here so let me just close down my gallery for a second and move that over so you can see what's going on that's our end not Tre and then what I want is another probably one maybe two more Cals here and these are going to be things like my grain or textures and things like that so let's just put in here let's call it call it texture the next thing I need to add in here is any particular looks that you might be doing because you what you're going to do is grade underneath those looks so the classic one is the Kodak 2383 three film L that's built into Da Vinci resolve as you know from my episode again I'll put a link to it in the description on how to correctly build these film LS but they need to be working in a different gamma than 709 so let me show you that and again I've done a whole episode on this so check that episode out if you're unsure what I'm doing here but what you need to do is add another cereal here and I'll do another cereal as well and let's just apply the film look so let's take any one of these built in but this one cut of 2383 is a very popular one I'm going to drag and drop that on and as you can see the image goes a little bit too strong okay it's not that good and as explained in that episode is because the input into here needs to be a different color space than what's currently feeding it and what's currently feeding it is this go to our effects here Rec 79 gamma 2.4 that's wrong so what I'm going to do is I'm going to stick onto this node another color space transform now I can't actually see that node to apply it so what you do middle Mouse click I'm using a pen but it's the same thing you just middle click and you can drag this around then so now I can see the node drag a color space transform on it and it only do this if you're going to use this Kodak film lot or any one of these Lots you've got a Fujifilm lot but they're expecting cineon film log not gamma 2.4 so what you need to do is say Rex 79 up here I'll do this as quick as I can and it is the input is gamma 2.4 cuz that's what we fed it and the output color space here is going to be still Rec 709 but in a different gamma which is cineon film log now that Kodak film emulation looks a lot more usable and what's covered in that video is the fact that I highlight these together right click and create what's called a compound node so this is two nodes inside that node and what that allows me to do is adjust the strength using this key button here basically using this key Apple tool I can adjust the strength so at zero that's effectively not applied and at 100 you're at full strength I'm going to call that Kodak uh if you wanted to use a different one of course what you can do is right hand click on here you can say show compound node and then all you got to do is right click here and you can change that L to be any one of the other ones okay you just simply switch and then click on here and you're back out so we've now got the foundation of a good solid notary this is a slightly simplified version of my Advanced one that I covered in my master classes but this is a great notary to be working with to work with any camera color space that you've got going on all right this will give you a good disciplined solid grade workflow so I should probably save this at this point here okay and I'm going to save it with this disabled that way it's not applied unless I switch it on so I'm going to go to my gallery here and I'm going to right click on here and I'm going to say grab still so what we've got basically is a empty uh not Tre but with our csts ready to go and I'm going to show you how I would actually go about grading this now so we've got the correct input color space I'm going to switch my film print emulation on okay so this is if I want to work with a bit of a look and I would grade underneath this look because as you can see my Scopes have already changed what they're doing let's just switch that off so because I've got this going on if I'm going to work underneath it I need it on all the time because it's affecting my overall look and then I'm going to grab underneath this so we're going to grade underneath these two effectively I'm going to dial it back a little bit CU it's a bit strong so let's just do let's say half mix of that something like that and now I'm going to start balancing so we go to our first node which is balance and exposure so to do that I'm going to keep the Scopes open so you can see what's going on but I'd probably go to the HDR tool have a look at our exposure just bring that down a little bit something like that I would be looking at our balance so let's see what's going on it's actually really nicely balanced but let's see what happens in our primaries if I go to my offset tool and you can grade this however you want now obviously but I'm just trying to get a really good starting point there we go something like that all right the next thing I'm going to do is apply contrast there several different ways you can apply contrast I'm going to just do it quickly here just adding the basic contrast tool or you could even go into the HDR wheel and add contrast down here okay many many different ways of doing it so I prefer to work in the primaries with my contrast so I'm just going to increase contrast here a little bit and like there's many many different ways of doing it but I'm not going to cover that in this particular episode let's go to our saturation does it need any saturation it's actually looking pretty saturated to me but let's just add a little bit anyway to our HDR tool for that add a little bit of saturation in and we should have here now a really good starting point which I think we have at this point here if this should look good and if it doesn't look good you shouldn't move forward this is the point at where you want this good because what we're going to do now is Branch off into these different nodes and make our fine adjustments so for example top one here temperature let's just go to our color temperature I like to do this in HDR tool and let's just have a look at what's going on there something like that and then if I go and make change let's say I want to use the warper here okay I might want to make a change to the Hue on her dress I can go to the warper but I don't want it to be affected by what I just did on the temperature I want to take the feed from here from this saturation point so we've got balance exposure contrast saturation is feeding the warer directly so I'm going to get the best possible outcome that I can so I could go in here now maybe do I know you might want to do Hue versus saturation and yeah let's just make sure that's wide and that's wide and there is so just desaturating a little bit her dress there and that is a good example the trim here would be any adjustments I want to make to the overall look that I've done so far so I might want to just lift up maybe I just want to lift up the Shadows a little bit so we can do that here with lift something like that all right so this this is where I'd make shapes and windows if I want to start isolating anyone in there I would do that on these nodes here to create some power windows so let's just have a quick look at that for an example something like that and then we can again increase our maybe increase our gain a little bit in our offset something like that I'm going to switch that on and off just to see if it's looking better which it is and I don't want to do anything on these these are just going to stay there as empty nodes so we've done it we've got a really good look going on there and I've just followed this methodical workflow so let's do this now on another image so I'm going to take this one here this is Canon but Canon wide gamut so it's not log the fact it's not log means we don't use one of the log profiles okay I'm going to go to my gallery I'm going to take our fix no tree I'm going to right click and say apply and this looks wrong and why does it look wrong because it's currently set to Canon C log 3 so we're going to change that the only thing we have to change is this all these nodes are empty there's no balancing going on and our Kodak L is off I'm going to leave that off so we're going to you don't always have to have it on so I'm going to go to my effects with this node active and we're going to put in here the correct color space now because it's not log we actually want to set this to be Rec 79 okay so what it's actually expecting is it to be Rec 79 but slightly wider profile so I'm not going to get to gamma 2.4 I'm going to press Rex of 9 okay and now it looks a lot better but it's a little bit flat and the idea with this profile is that you do add a bit of contrast and saturation to it yourself to taste okay so we're going to go to our balance and exposure I'm doing this all underneath the the 709 node so my display looks correct and we're going to balance exposure let's bring up our graph here and let's see what's going on so I'm going to go to my HDR exposure tool let just boost this up a little bit I think and I'm going to go back to my primaries let's bring our shadows down cuz they've lifted a bit bring our game back up okay I could be doing that as contrast as well okay this is very similar tool bring our contrast up like so and go on to our saturation let's see if it needs any more saturation again I'm going to do that in the HDR tool so Global saturations here soor I'm used to doing this on the panel that's why I'm moving around a little bit and we've got a bit of a cast going on here so I'm going to go back to my balance tool there's no reason why you can't just keep moving between these okay you don't have to move linearly forward because as I make a changes here this affects this one and this one so I'm going to go here I'm going to go to my primaries here and I'm just going to adjust my offset a little bit something like that now I need to add a little bit more saturation so this is kind of how I'm working let's add a bit of HDR saturation and there we go something like that so that's looking good and I didn't use the Kodak fil print emulation on this I wanted this to just be a clean look so I'm just going to leave that Switched Off I can then go in here and do the temperature and all the other adjustments but you can see how I've got a really good start straight away again let's go to this one let's go to the Sony one I'm going to drag and drop my fixed not again it's going to be wrong to start with because we've currently got it set to Canon C log 3 what I'm going to do is if I right hand click in here I can say clean up node graph okay and there we've got now my node graph nice and clean click on here go to my effects and let's change this to be the correct camera color space which is Sony sloc 3 and it's Sony Cinema gamut three there okay so now we've got our really good starting point and now we go ahead balance exposure contrast saturation as we did before by using the fixed notary you're staying disciplined and you can switch between your different camera profiles really easily so let's just have a quick look at these I'm going to go and drop this on all I've got to do on here is say in fact what I'm going to do let's clean this no graph let's do this properly if I take this one and set it to a blank so I'm going to just say use timeline use timeline that way it won't come in in the incorrect camera space it will come in with no camera space so I'm going to right hand click and save that this will be our new fixed notary moving forward this is the one that I'll save as a link in the description and basically when we apply this the first thing you going have to do is apply the camera profile so in this case this is red let's go to Red wide gamut and red lock 3G 10 and now we've got our great starting point because we've got the CST already applied under here all right so we've got the CST bringing us from D Vinci wide gamut back to 709 2.4 now we can just start grading so it's really quick and easy okay same with this one let's use our new default one all we got to do is change what's on node number one I'm going to go in here and just show you how easy is to change all these camera profiles ready to start grading this is uh oh I always forget which one this is pocket 4K film 4 and again pocket 4K film G 4 there's our great starting point ready to start up grading let's go again to this one now another one go through here let's go to AR wide gamut 3 and AR logy 3 there we go brilliant and now what do we do with the iPhone footage I've done H again I've done another episode fully explaining this but if we click on this one let's take our blank tree and all we're going to do on this one is convert it into Rec 79 so our profile our camera profile I can't quite see that let's clean up here yeah there we go is Rec 709 because that's what it was sh in if you would on the new iPhone 15s you might find this is Rec 2020 and you want to be working in HDR but this one was shot on an iPhone 14 Rec 79 and re 79 don't put gamma 2.4 cuz it's not got a gamma it's Rec 709 so the gamma 2.4 is a display gamma okay it's not a source camera Source gamma so we've got the 709 gamma 2.4 identified on this node here and we're ready to start grading so that shows you how quick and easy it is to apply this fixed not Tre this is the only not Tre you're going to need it's absolutely brilliant I'll put a link to it use it and then elaborate on it if you find you need more cereals on the end add those cereals and then save it as your own now if you want to see how I apply that to Drone footage have a look at this video that's appearing here and there's also a tip in there on how to correct Auto exposure which is a real problem sometimes with Drone footage you get that auto exposure so there a really good tip in that video shown you on that look after yourselves and I'll see you in the next episode

Channel: Darren Mostyn

Views: 220,910

Keywords: davinci resolve, node tree, fixed node tree

Id: kdTMRQP_V7E

Length: 22min 23sec (1343 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 02 2023