matthoefler wrote:Every tutorial I see on resolve shows the primary wheels with circles in the center that make the position of them easy to discern. I have teeny tiny dots where even the slightest movements of them make HUGE changes although the tiny dots appear to have barely moved.
What resolution is your GUI display? At some resolutions, the on-screen controls (particularly on the Color page) get very small. At worst, go to Workspace -> Reset GUI, and see if that makes anything different.
My opinion (not Blackmagic's) is you need at least a 1920x1080 screen in order to get useful information out of the GUI. I've been using 2560x1440 for a long time, and that's even better: the GUI expands to take advantage of that space and you get a little bit more information on Soft Clips and some other functions.
I think it's fine to use the Color Wheels when you're learning Resolve or just doing very casual work. For anything even halfway serious, you're going to need a control surface. Even an inexpensive controller like the Tangent Ripple (about $350) will give you useful trackballs and controls that work a lot better than a mouse. The key is having the ability to adjust two knobs at the same time, which is a huge time-saver.
When using a control surface, you'll see the value of the "Bars" display, which shows a more-precise indication of the relative balance of YRGB for lift/gamma/gain, and this is incredibly useful. It really helps when you have a whacked-out situation where the image has a problem and is crushed or clipped in one or more nodes, and you need to backtrack and figure out how to make the picture look normal. The wheels won't do that (not easily, anyway), but the Bars will. This war between "Color Wheels" and "Bars" mode has gone on for a long time, at least back to 1998 with the daVinci 2K (an early hardware ancestor of Resolve).