Blackmagic Forum

I've been working in Resolve for about 2-3 years now. I'm coming from stills where I have a consistent routine that I mostly follow in processing RAW files. That's the order that I do things and how the file might look towards it becoming a finished grade, always trying to stay nondestructive whenever possible.

I'm not as consistent in motion and as a result think about it a great deal. Which has made me curious. What are other more experienced people doing? How do they set up their node trees? Do they have a kind of formula in the order they do things?

I've been asking this question to the support folks at Blackmagic who suggest I reach out to some of the experienced colorists on the forums.

Will appreciate any responses, thanks.

Here's one of the most detailed explanations of a workflow I've seen here:

viewtopic.php?f=21&t=34285&p=202689#p202689

It's specifically about doing feature-length projects, but a lot of it is applicable to short form, too, and it's a great view into the organized mind of a very experienced colorist on these forums.

Good one Mark. Appreciate it. A good read that I'll save.

I've been using the search and that post never came up.

Walter has patiently answered a few questions for me over the last year or so. I really appreciate his articulate approach to color and his willingness to share his knowledge.

Alexis Van Hurkman has had some interesting things to say about "Order of Operations" and Node Structure in his books and tutorials. For years I did it one way, but once v11 gave us Groups, I started dropping in a "Normalizing" node in the Pre-Clip Grade, then levels adjusted in the regular Clip for Node 1, color in Node 2, windows in 3-4-5-6 (or whatever), style after that, sharpening if necessary, and NR at the end if necessary. I also will branch back to Node 1 if I need to pull a key, on the good chance you'll get a stronger signal earlier on. In some cases, I'll do a vignette or some other kind of "overall" look as a Post-Clip node. Alexis made a good point that some colorists are very OCD about maintaining a strict node order. I see his point, but I don't think it's as necessary to do that nowadays as it used to be.

I absolutely agree that it's very important not to use destructive nodes or LUTs, particularly if you wind up trying to undo them later on in the node tree. In client supervised sessions, I tend to use more nodes for the simple reason that clients need to see before/after looks more often, and I want to be able to turn off each individual step if they decide they hate it or want to go in a different direction. And I very often use multiple versions, particularly on later trim passes. At least this way, if they say, "god, that looks horrible!", you can say, "well, here's how it looked yesterday."

Marc, I was hoping that both you and Walter would answer. You've both been so helpful not only answering my questions but all the others that I read here and over at LGG.

I'm suffering from the disease of not knowing when to say when in regards to how an image looks. I can just keep going and going. Sometimes it seems like forever and I know I don't have the time or the money for that. So I'm focusing to get more organized.

Good suggestion to revisit the Color Correction Handbook. Every time I learn something new I look it up in the manual (which I believe Van Hurkman wrote as well) and print those pages and mark them up.

The point of my post is to learn how other people work. What are their organizational setups. Do they have a set of nodes they use every time on every shot as a starting point? Where else can I learn this stuff?

Marshall Harrington wrote:The point of my post is to learn how other people work. What are their organizational setups. Do they have a set of nodes they use every time on every shot as a starting point? Where else can I learn this stuff?

Sit with a working colorist for a week.

Actually, if you took any 10 working colorists, I bet each of them would know something the others don't know (and vice versa). I've seen some pretty big colorists who just fumble through sessions, but they make their clients happy and they know how to work the politics and business side very well. And I also know people who are technical geniuses at color who don't work a lot because their people skills are not so great.

Warren Eagles with the ICA does some pretty good in-person classes on Resolve that go over the basics very well. One can make a good case on whether a base correction could be used as a LUT in the setup menu, vs. as Pre-Clip nodes, vs. the first couple of Clip Nodes. All three could work -- it's a question of where and how you're using the signal flow. To me, the key is not to stomp on the image too early. Even with 32-bit processing, some of these corrections can get very destructive as you move down the line.

Yes, most of the time is not what you do that matters, but what the client perceive that you are doing. ..

waltervolpatto wrote:Yes, most of the time is not what you do that matters, but what the client perceive that you are doing. ..

Very true. Particularly in the entertainment industry, perception is everything.