To color manage or not

Hi everyone,

I am watching all the great seminars by Daria Fissoun on color management.
In about a week I am going to start colorgrading a documentary which shall be released theatrically. The film contains a wide variety of footage that was shot over several years: There is some Sony Slog footage shot by the main cinematographer, as well as Sony Alpha 8bit footage shot by the director and also family archives which are either scanned VHS tapes or scanned still photos.

Do you guys think that a color-managed process makes actually sense with such a 'messy' project or does it just make things more complicated and I should leave things up to Resolve?

Happy to discuss, happy weekend everyone!

I believe the Opaqueness of the V17 automatic color management system and it incompatibility with fusion are reason enough not to use it.

CST's product identical results, are more flexible and have no compatibility problems. So I use them

I see the automatic system as really no faster as you can bulk apply CST power grades with the same number of clicks setting color space.


If you do need to routinely export to multiple color spaces, you need to build your final CST node accordingly. This is probably one simplicity to the V17 system. And the HDR wheels histogram should 'just work'.

Hey, thanks for the advice!
Gonna dive into this a little bit. I have actually a little confusion going on, that I think many might have:

I usually pre-grade (just regular contrast and basic balancing) on my Macbook before porting the whole project to a grading theater for finalization. I have watched all the videos and read all the tutorials but I am still terribly confused with this Apple color space on the Macbook and how I might be able to transport the entire project into the theater.

I was hoping to use color management for my output color space to migrate the project from the Macbook screen to the grading theater screen.

still terribly confused with this Apple color space on the Macbook and how I might be able to transport the entire project into the theater.
.

I would say get a deck link and cut Mac OS out of it so it can't screw you over.

Is that a MacBook M1 or an older one?

I have watched all the videos

Including this one?

I usually pre-grade (just regular contrast and basic balancing) on my Macbook before porting the whole project to a grading theater for finalization.

I think a MacBook Pro screen is dodgy at best. I'm looking at one right this moment (on a 16" MacBook Pro M1 Max), and it's not good enough for color-correction. If you're going to the trouble of going into a grading theater, my suggestion is that you get a "reasonable" external display that can be calibrated, like one of the LG OLED's, and monitor it through a color-managed box (like a BMD UltraStudio). That will give you fairly consistent color that you can actually believe.