Tuesday, 1 April 2014

DaVinci Resolve + Colour grading in 'The Maxtrix'



Today Danny Hollingsworth taught us the basics of DaVinci Resolve 9 Lite. DaVinci Resolve is Hollywood's most powerful and creative colour correction software and has been around since 1984.


"DaVinci Resolve 11 combines the world’s most advanced color corrector with professional multi track editing, so now you can edit, color correct, finish and deliver all from one system! Davinci Resolve is completely scalable and resolution independent so it can be used on set, in a small studio or integrated into the largest Hollywood production pipeline!" Date accessed 1st April 2014.

The primary colour corrector can change the lift, gamma and gain with the controls of Davinci's unique YRGB colour space; creating perfect coloured images. The primary controls include; shadows, mid tones and highlight log controls. 

If you want to get a certain colour you can use the secondary precision colour corrector on Davinci. Precise HSL, RGB colour and LUM qualification lets you get the specific colour of the photograph.

Firstly you will have to create a node, which is kind of like another layer so that once you edit, you can click between them showing the before and after pictures. A node is a more powerful version of a layer as you can connect each node together, sequently or parallel. Each of the nodes can have its own colour correction as well.

Before starting to colour grade anything you will have to fix the contrast, so the image is not over or under exposed. 
You can crush blacks but certain broadcasters have a limit. Waveform scope tells us how bright the colours are.
Most directors like high contrast 90% of the time but sometimes they might like low contrast depending on the choice and style of film.

Gamma show us the mid tones of the image where as Gain show us the high lights of the image.

Using colour wheels to change the contrast only enhances the low lights where as if you use the primary setting you can enhance shadows and brighter areas.


Vectorscope is the colour information with an imaginary colour wheel. 
Parade shows us the red, green and blue colours of the image and if one of those colours are too cool or too warm.

Some directors like to use some artistic decisions whilst creating a film, setting the tone and the mood of the film by drastically or just a minor change to the colour of the film. This can effect the audiences emotional response as if the film was dark containing mainly blacks, greys and reds the audience would feel scared and frightened where as if the film was yellow they would feel much more happier.



Throught the film 'The Matrix' the director choose to have a slight green tint to the movie but they also had to make sure that they got the correct skin tone colour and not making the actors look like they are going to throw up. 

In order to do this they would have to lower the saturation to about 30%, make the shadows and the mid tones a but towards the green and then a tiny bit of yellow in the highlights, this helps with keying back in the correct skin tone colours. 

Once they got the correct type of green that they wanted, they would have to change the skin tone back by using the secondary colour corrector and then put a key onto the skin tone, adjusting it slightly. 

(2014). Davinci Resolve 11. Available: http://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve. Last accessed 1st April 2014.

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