Resolve 9 R3D Grading Workflow

Markus Wellguny shares his dailies, editorial and final conform workflow in his guest post on Ninofilm.net. If you’re about to begin work on a R3D project and want to be able to grade from you RAW files then this workflow will take you through it all step by step.

I move from dailies selection and first light in RedCine to ProRes editing, export the edit as an XML, reconform and trim the R3D files in Resolve, where I start to grade from the existing RMD first light.

Grading Through Digital Bipacks

Oliver Peters has a great little post on grading through ‘digital bipacks’ – which is essentially combining two layers of the same image to create a distinctive look. Be sure to click on the images to reveal these quad images of each layer. Also make sure you rummage through all of Oliver’s excellent site including his other color grading posts.

Apple Color vs DaVinci Resolve

Tristan Kneschke from ExitEditorial posted this colorist’s comparison of Apple Color 1.5 and DaVinci Resolve 9. Its interesting to see how the different feature sets line up but given that Color has long been left for dead and the Blackmagic Design guys keep churning out free updates to an already free program, going forward there really is no contest.

Working with Canon RAW

Ablecine has an excellent technical description of Canon’s Raw Media Format (RMF) and how to work with it. Cameras like Canon’s C500 can output ”HD & 2K in 4:2:2 up to 120p, or 4:4:4 up to 60p, and uncompressed 4K Raw data up to 60p and 120p at half vertical resolution” to a RAW recorder. But unlike other RAW formats Canon bakes in the Iso and white balance data which means you cannot alter it in post like you can with R3D data. Read the whole article for the full details, but know that you can already work with Canon RMF files in the 9.0.3 release of DaVinci Resolve.