Review – Controlling The HDR Palette With The Resolve Mini Panel

Great info. Looking forward to v17.1 non-beta so I can upgrade.

This is a bit of a bummer. I love the mini panel because I really never have to hit too many buttons to get where I need to go for whatever control I’m reaching for. But this looks like you really have to do a lot of digging so I foresee myself using the HDR palette less because of it. Time will tell. Not sure if I have any better ideas on how it could be mapped to such a small panel, but seeing it in use gave me a new perspective.

Seems like muscle memory would be easier if there was 2 options for controlling each 6 tonal ranges. 1 tab covered the 3 lower ranges, then with the press of a button, instead of going to next zone, it switches to the next 3 zones (I hope that makes sense).

Maybe the reason they don’t have it set up that way is because you may not have 6 different ranges enabled. Could be more or less.

Once I developed the rhythm, it didn’t feel like digging. But when you’re learning how the HDR Palette works – plus learning how the panel works – it takes a while for all the pieces to start to gel and I did feel like I was always bashing buttons. My biggest problem on the HDR Palette is knowing what result I’m going to get BEFORE I make the change… and this makes learning the panel extra overhead.

But if you stick with it, and I suggest you do stick with it, the confusion washes away and you can get pretty fast in the HDR Palette. It just takes some stick-time.

It’s challenging figuring out how this interaction should work, given the potential fluidity of the number of active zones you need to manipulate. My guess: We’re looking at an initial release of the panel integration and I’m hoping we’ll see an update to remove some of the kinks.

Don’t you also miss a control in the panel to highlight the zone you are working in in the image?

Pat, thx for the insight. Have you informed BMD of your wishlist for the Mini Panel?

Thanks Patrick!

One thing that seems to be missing from the new HDR zone tool in Resolve 17 is the ability to constrain the printer lights to the a specific zone..? It’s one of my favorite things in Baselight: you can easily add a half point of blue in the dark zone, or a full point of cyan in the light zone, etc. Is there really no way to do that in the new HDR tool?

Rodrigo – As you make adjustments, if you have the Zone graph expanded you can see the Zones you’re adjusting as they highlight in the graph. Yes, that’s a good visual cue to make sure you’re manipulating what you think you’re manipulating.

MTO, hello. Not yet. This was my first time sitting down and thinking through my thoughts and suggestions. But I’ll follow up with them.

That would be fantastic. I love the idea of having the Printer Points functionality automatically work on the Global control if you have the HDR Palette open but it would adjust the Offset control if you’re in the Primaries palette. Great idea!

Applying Printer Points to a zone is also a terrific suggestion. I’m not sure how they’d implement that using shortcuts… but definitely worth their effort, I think.

I think Rodrigo means the little buttons in the UI that highlight the corresponding zone’s area in the viewer. I missed these on the panel as well, until I realized that turning on the regular Highlight button on the panel shows the affected areas for whichever ring you touch in the HDR tool.

Yes. That’s what I meant, Robert 🙂

Thanks Patrick! One thing I can’t find on my Mini Panel is the temp & tint for each tonal zone (like 7:45 in the video). Instead, I have EXPOSURE & ZONE PIVOT or ANGLE & STRENGTH for these two knobs. I have temp & tint only for the Global zone. I wonder is there something I can do about it?

Can verify this as well. Maybe they updated the firmware but now those areas say Angle & Strength as opposed to Temp & Tint