P3 and Rec 709 material in same timeline

Hi all,

I want to preface this by saying I do not professionally work in color correction, so if you are kind enough to respond I please ask you to use the simplest, most idiot-level language you can to help me understand the issue. Thank you very much!

I am working on a project that will have ProRes deliverables for both DCP and streaming. There is a mix of ProRes 4444 footage and still tif images in the timeline; the PR clips are Rec 709, while the tifs were exported from Lightroom as P3.

Assuming that the streaming deliverable ProRes will be Rec 709, and the DCP deliverable will be P3, how should the different timeline material affect our export settings?

Additionally, would it be better to re-export the tifs as sRGB and then convert the timeline to P3 after editing and grading are done?

For context, the original tif exports were sRGB at 32bits and they looked horrible in the timeline (so dark you could hardly see anything in the image), which is what led us to the P3 solution, knowing we'd make a DCP anyway. (Re-exporting the ProRes files we have in the timeline is not a option)

Work is being done on a Macbook M1 in Resolve 19.1.

I have found nearly everything I've read online way over my head and am hoping for a more direct answer on the best practices for this situation. Thank you for your patience, and thank you for reading.

DCP uses P3-DCI. "DCI" is the white point that's somewhat close to 63K Kelvin.

Did you export P3-DCI or P3-D65 from Lightroom? Changing the colorspace of your stills should not have changed the percieved brightness in the Resolve much. It sounds like you're dealing with mismatched gamma.

In a non-color managed project Resolve is expecting your stills to have 2.4 gamma. If the images are mismatched they could appear darker or brighter. Make sure the images from Lightroom are set to 2.4 gamma if you're not using color management in Resolve.

However, since you also changed the colorspace from sRGB to P3. You kind of need to use color management in Resolve which is the easiest way of handling sources with multiple colorspaces and gammas.

If you enable the color management Resolve will read metadata tags in the source files as long as those exist. If they don't you can right click on the media and select desired colorspace and gamma. The output colorspace whould be Rec.709 while you're working on your timeline. For delivery you can set this to P3-DCI, but check with whoever is making the DCP becasue they may be perfectly happy using Rec.709 2.4 render as a DCP source.

keep it simple
1) conform all your sources to Rec709 -> this will be your streaming/internet master
2) go straight from rec709 to DCP (DCI XYX/DCI) and it will look fabulous.

2) go straight from rec709 to DCP (DCI XYX/DCI) and it will look fabulous.

Oh, will it for sure ?

2) go straight from rec709 to DCP (DCI XYX/DCI) and it will look fabulous.

Oh, will it for sure ?

yes.