How to Emulate the Clarity Slider + Color Correcting in VFX Workflows

Thank you guys for taking the time to elaborate on some best practices around the collaboration process between a colorist and the VFX folks. Lots of good tips here. Patrick – I had one followup question from your suggestion of sending the VFX guys a LUT from your first pass grade.

Let’s say you’re working with RED files. Once the VFX guys and lighting bolts or new a sky or whatever based on the image LUT you give them as a guideline for the effects, do they typically give you back a ProRess 422HQ version back to add in the final grade? The problem here is now you no longer have access to the RED raw file adjustments. It’s baked in and that may be fine (or not) as you add in your correction and grade. Would it better to have the VFX send you a file that you composite with the RED clip in Resolve? Not sure this is making sense but I want to ask.

In that particular RED workflow – VFX would render out to ProRes444 (coming from RAW formats I always want to render out at 444 or Uncompressed) using the same RED settings I used when creating the LUT. VFX would use the RED raw controls to make sure the image looks good based on the LUT I gave them… so in theory they should be close enough that I don’t need those RAW controls.

If they messed up so bad I do need those controls – I’d communicate what I need and have them re-execute.

Make sense?

Makes perfect sense.
And … once again, thank you so much for your help. That’s exactly what I wanted to know.

Regarding the “Clarity Slider” style results in Resolve, I remember that Dan had a tutorial awhile back about using the trim LUT to move grades from Lightroom into Resolve. Would that be another (slower, but perhaps more accurate) way to match the results from Lightroom’s clarity slider in Resolve?

Jamie –
Thats a really good question! I’m going to give that a go and let you know what I find!

It’s great that Blackmagic has saved us both the trouble by finally adding a slider for it in version 11 : )