Hello friends. After quite a bit of work on my current projects, I'm back to report on the
color settings that have been working well for me with footage from my Nikon Z6II / Ninja V combo. As a result of this discussion I finally arrived at a configuration that's allowed me to get much better color grades with fewer nodes and much less pain. So thank you all for your tips and advice!
In hindsight it now seems pretty simple, but here it goes anyway in case it's helpful to others.
This is all applicable to video recorded by outputting Nikon N-Log 10-bit footage via HDMI from the Z6II to a Ninja V set to record in ProRes HQ.
1- In Project Settings / Color Management:
Color Science: DaVinci YRGB Color Managed
Color Processing Mode: SDR
Output Color Space: SDR Rec.709
Everything else, leave as default.
2- In Media Tab: select all clips, Right-click and choose Clip Attributes. On the Video Tab choose Data Levels: Full.
3- Again in Media Tab: select all clips, Right-click and choose Input Color Space: Nikon N-Log.
(Steps 2 and 3 can also be done on a clip by clip basis if needed).
4- In Render Settings, in the Advanced Settings tab, I'm choosing:
Data Levels: Video
Color Space Tag: Rec.709
Gamma Tag: Gamma 2.4
After achieving a grade that looks better to my eye than anything I'd done so far, I went back to a previous project, duplicated that timeline and started color grading it again from scratch using the settings above. Results were much improved!. Doing that also gave me a useful comparison between this current workflow and whatever I was doing previously. I'm now achieving better looking images with fewer nodes, often using just a Levels Node, a White Balance Node, and sometimes a Saturation Node (plus a Noise Reduction node added to the beginning of the tree as needed). Tools like the Color Warper are now only coming into play for very specific "problem" cases. I often had the feeling before of being in a fight with the material, adding nodes to pull color and luminance in different ways, one correction sometimes messing up the image somewhere else, weird casts often creeping into the image, weird node trees growing as a sign of my bewilderment... Now the process feels much more natural, simple and precise.
None of this is to say that I'm anywhere near being knowledgeable in DaVinci color science. But man, I'm so very happy to have finally arrived at Color Management settings that work well for me with the gear I have.
So again, thanks to everyone for chipping in, happy grading to you all!