Grading Greenscreen CinemaDNG

Hey gang,

I'd love to hear some of your workflows when shooting 2.5k CinemaDNG for greenscreen. Mainly, what steps do you take for before keying and then for grading the composite? Do you recommend keying all right in Resolve? I have much more experience keying+compositing with After Effects, so I'm trying to wrap my head around that workflow. Obviously the DNG footage needs some kind of primary grade first, correct? Maybe import those DNG clips straight into AE, primary color, keying + compositing, then render ProResHQ for NLE + final color and conforming in Resolve?

Hey gang,

I'd love to hear some of your workflows when shooting 2.5k CinemaDNG for greenscreen. Mainly, what steps do you take for before keying and then for grading the composite? Do you recommend keying all right in Resolve? I have much more experience keying+compositing with After Effects, so I'm trying to wrap my head around that workflow. Obviously the DNG footage needs some kind of primary grade first, correct? Maybe import those DNG clips straight into AE, primary color, keying + compositing, then render ProResHQ for NLE + final color and conforming in Resolve?

This has been discussed on this forum already. Please use search function. No primary grade is necessary or desirable.

Yeah, yeah.. I did use the search function and sifted through posts for about 20 minutes, but did not find a post relevant to my specific question.

I'm doing a combo live animation project right now and here's my workflow:

1) Ingest RAW camera footage into Resolve and create ProResLT dailies using a good looking one light pass, nothing fancy.

2) Bring dailies into FCPX and create roughcut.

3) Export XML from FCP and convert to FCP7 XML using X-7 from Intelligent Assistance

4) Import XML into new After Effects project using the ProImport module in AE (what used to be Automatic Duck)

5) Import DNG sequences into AE manually. At this point I set a color grade in Adobe Camera Raw, save a preset and apply that preset to all of the greenscreen clips I import for consistency. I don't use Resolve in this case for the final grade because it would have created ProRes and I want RAW DNGs in my AE timelines.

6) Conform the DNG sequences to your ProRes timeline by manually option dragging your DNG footage onto the selected ProRes clip in the timeline. This should give you DNG sequence in your timeline with the correct in/out points. If you have audio on your ProRes clip, make sure to keep a second copy with the picture off and the sound enabled.

7) Make sure you set the layer to fit comp if you're working in a 1080 comp, and make sure your comp is 16 bit or 32 bit float, not 8 bit.

8) At this point I go ahead keying the greenscreen directly off the raw DNGs using Primatte. You can use KeyLight or whatever you're comfortable with.

9) Because I'm continuing to work on animation with my keyed footage in AE, I create a ProRes 4444 with alpha of my keyed footage from the greenscreen and reimport, disabling the DNG clip. You could could also create a TIFF or PNG with alpha sequence if you prefer image sequences to videos. It speeds up animation and timeline rendering a lot. You can leave it as DNGs but it will be very slow to work with. You can also use Proxies in AE if you prefer and switch to DNGs for your final render.


This is the only way I know to work RAW all the way through. If you don't have a complicated edit, you can skip Resolve and Final Cut altogether and start by bringing your DNG footage directly into AE grade with Camera Raw and go from there. Good luck.