Blackmagic Forum

...I am reading, searching... no helpful answer... hmm...

I have a lot of footage that is to dark and too much saturated - terrible to work with it in the cutting room. Now I like to do some basic color grading BEFORE I start the edit process. Is there an easy way in DaVinci Resolve to do so? I don't want to export or import the footage again.

After the cutting process I would like to delete the quick and dirty correction to do the final one.

What camera was it shot on? A color space transform should be able to bring most footage close it if was shot decently well.

Of course if everything was shot non-raw 3 stops under, it is probably a lost cause and needs re-shot.

it appears to be 12 year old DV material. It's pretty underexposed. For the first rough cut it would be enough for me if it were lighter. The fine work would only come afterwards. I know that something like that works. But at the moment I can't figure out how it went. You can somehow save corrected clips as source material (without importing and exporting). The correction can then be reversed. At least I think so ...

it's probably very simple - I'm just missing something

You color correct and edit (in Resolve it's just jumping between tabs to do 1 process or another) and then export final masters. Source stays untouched- it's all just 'project metadata' which is applied to your source when you do export. You can't just change files "in-place".
Your needs are trivial and can be done in so many apps- simple to complex. Your editing app also has simple grading abilities, so use it. You are making it all confusing.

If you need a temporary custom grade for everything as opposed to an input LUT for a specific camera you can do the following:

On the Color page you can switch the correction nodes panel from Clip to Timeline. Add a correction node and grade to taste. Now everything you put on this timeline in the Edit page will use this grade. When you're ready to grade properly just remove or disable the timeline correction node.

Note that this doesn't apply to media that isn't on the timeline. To make that work you could export a LUT with your grade and then apply it to the media in the media pool.

I think you might want to use Remote grades instead of local grades. Do some search on this function as I think it might help you do what you want.

@ kitsunekuma and roger.magnusson:

Thank you very much for your help - I knew there was a simple solution...