This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series DaVinci Resolve

So today we are talking about customization and navigation of the Color Page. Primary Grade Workflow and CONTRAST!

What we’ll cover today:

Primary Grade

The first node is your primary adjustment. You basically clean your shot before you start your grading.
You correct your Contrast, Offset your color channels or just make basic starting look that’s simply balanced. No colors are mixing in the white or black point. Fixing your White balance by looking through the Parade Scope and making the shot as neutral as possible!

Contrast

Yes, we all know what contrast is 🙂

Unmix

Turning on the Unmix control disables all transitions, effects, composites that combine multiple clips stacked one on each other in the editing timeline. So with Unmix ON you can see the full duration of your clip. It let’s you turn off the text layers and see the shot by itself. When you are done, you can turn the Unmix OFF again When you’re ready to see how your grades work in context with transitions and composites again, turn Unmix off again.

Scopes

DaVinci let’s you use 4 scopes integrated inside – Waveform, Parade (RGB scope), Vectorscope (it let’s you monitor your saturation) and Histogram (RGB Parade histogram). They all reflect 10b full range information. So when you don’t have 10bit External Calibrated monitor – trust your scopes. Also Scope monitor is the only window from DaVinci that can be send to second (dual head setup of monitors) monitor and viewed in Fullscreen.

Node-based System

Node-based compositing represents an entire composite as a tree graph, linking media objects and effects in a procedural map, intuitively laying out the progression from source input to final output, and is in fact the way all compositing applications internally handle composites. This type of compositing interface allows great flexibility, including the ability to modify the parameters of an earlier image processing step “in context” (while viewing the final composite). (Wiki)

Tip: Every clip has a personal UNDO STACK history… so you can go back to specific clip and undo its last actions!

Original Memory

This command lets you undo a clip’s grade to its original state when you first selected that clip. If you select another clip in the edit and then go back to the clip resets the ORIGINAL memory. So be careful!