birkir wrote:What is the benefit of using ACES rather than DaVinci YRGB? I know that with ACES, you can select the Input Transform and get your image to look colorful and contrasty rather than a flat V-Log, but why is that better or maybe not better?
Some good resources are already suggested for the "quick fix" getting started in Resolve. But if you really want to understand what managing color means for digital film post production there is this great talk.
It will make you understand the journey from scene capture all the way to display and give a much clearer insight on why we shoot camera native gamut/log or raw and preferably work color managed in post. Be it via LUTs, RCM, RCM via nodes, ACES, IPP2 or many other pipelines.
Personally I think the best way to manage in Resolve is with Color Space Transforms (CST) because if you shoot in log it is much better to also grade scene-referred because it gives much more control, similar to grading directly on camera-log underneath a LUT. Working with RCM in log/'scene-referred' has problems when you want to use Fusion elements for display referred data like text. You don't suffer from this if you manually set things up.
The way I set it up is:- Set project to DaVinci YRGB (Not Managed)
- Set timeline color space to preferred working colorspace.
Usually I pick ARRI LogC3 or ACEScct, you can also choose DaVinci Intermediate. The key is to pick something reasonably consistent across your projects that is not your camera's log space, so you can get familiar grading in it but also transfer saved grades much easier and having lots of projects each with different working color spaces depending on camera used can get unreliable and messy. ACEScct and DaVinci Intermediate are by design intermediate working spaces so a solid choice for color grading workflows.- Set output color space to Rec.709 Gamma 2.4
To get the tags on export correct.- Group all clips on the Color Page.
- Apply the input colorspace transform on 'group-pre-clip' node tree.
Here you use a Color Space Transform node to go from your camera to chosen timeline working color space.- Grade on the clip node tree
- Apply output color space transform on 'group-post-clip'
Here you go from the timeline color space to display, i.e. Rec.709 Gamma 2.4This practically mimics what happens with RCM 'under the hood' if setup there.