DR104 – Fairlight and Sound Mixing

DaVinci Resolve Colour Page Overview

We have a good understanding of how to conform a project, let’s look at the Color tab interface. The first area is the Gallery that stores still frames and grades you want to copy amongst timelines. This is also a shortcut for the actual Gallery Tab. Option and a number key will store the current frame and grade to that corresponding number. If you want to apply that Galley still, you can press ‘Command’ and the number key to apply that Galley image grade to your current selection. Next is the Viewer, which shows the current frame your modifying in the timeline. This area displays the playback frame rate and GPU monitor, along with the timeline name, and timecode. You can right click the viewer to get options such as taking a Still, or applying a wipe. There is also the option to change the viewer zoom, and enable scopes. Scopes are a great way to have an unbiased colour and luminance reference for your image. You can use the Waveform for the brightness levels. Parade to view each channels luminance levels individually. Vectorscope for the chrominance of individual channel, saturation will be displayed as amplitude on the graticule, and hue will be displayed in the phase of position relative to the QAM (Quadrature amplitude modulation) structure.  The Histogram displays the full spectrum of information per channel, this is just another way to determine if you have clipped, or crushed some of that information. The Node Editor displays the structure of your correction nodes, these can be added, removed, or combined to create advanced nodes structures which we will look at in more detail later on. The Timeline helps to navigate clips in your project, and has been broken up into three parts. The ruler at the top allows you to scrub across multiple clips, and zoom out to go through the entire timeline. The mini timeline is a condensed version of the edit page displays clips as durations. At the bottom the Thumbnail timelines is where all the clips are displayed as a single frame. You can modify clips by right clicking these thumbnails, and select from variety of options such as ‘remote grades’ that will share the grade with the same clip throughout the timeline. You can also save or load versions, modify ACES, and LUT setting from this dialog. The Left Palette consists of icons for panels that will enable you to control colour, contrast, and raw media settings. Camera Raw is a shortcut to the raw tab in project settings that lets you control the raw settings on a clip per clip basis. The Color Wheels display graphical colour wheels, and master wheels. The Primary controls for adjusting YRGB Lift/Gamma/Rain, the RGB Mixer for mixing individual colour channels with one another. And the Motion Effects controls for noise reduction and artificial motion blur. The Centre Palette have a wide range of functionality including a Curves Editor, HSL Qualifier, Window Controller, Tracker, Blur and Sharpen, Key, Sizing, Stereoscopic 3d, and Data Burn-In.

The Keyframes Editor

Enables you to animate Colour, Sizing, and Stereo formatting over time. You can modify multiple nodes to animate as a group or independently.

Now that we have are familiar with the interface let’s start grading. I normally start with making sure I have modified my Remote grade settings, then tweak the first clips Raw Settings. It’s best to get the most out of the raw information before we being tweaking the linear information. Just as a reminder, if you are working in an ACES workflow some cameras don’t support RAW setting changes. If you want to copy these setting across multiple selected clips, you can select ‘Apply changes’ to modify only changes settings highlighted in amber, or ‘Apply All’ to apply all parameters to the selected clips. Once you’re set to Clip under the Decode Using dropdown, we can begin to modify the Colour Temperature, Exposure, and a variety of other options depending on the source camera.