Is The Mini Control Surface ‘Breaking’ HDR Palette Operations?

Quick Tip: How HDR palette temp and tint controls mess with our muscle memory

One of my most satisfying aspects of being a professional colorist is using a colorist control surface to bring my client’s work to life. The control surface is a direct line from my brain to the software. By my definition, a good control surface:

This Insight is about point #3: How the Blackmagic Mini (and I assume, the Micro) panel is NOT predictable under a very specific, very common (for me) circumstance.

This Quick Tip, showing how the Mini panel breaks my habits and gives me incorrect results when using the HDR palette, runs about 3:30. But if you don’t use the HDR palette very much, I spend the last 3 minutes of the Insight showing why this matters.

I suspect that most professionals who are members have figured this problem out for themselves by now. But for everyone else, it’s critical you understand the logical fallacy I’m pointing out if you hope to the get the results you’re trying to achieve by working within the HDR palette’s color science.

This is especially true if you purposely work in ACES or Resolve Color Management to enable the ‘color space aware’ functionality of DaVinci Resolve.

Question or tips?

Definitely use the comments to share your experience using the HDR palette with control surfaces. I’m also keen to hear from Micro panel users if they see the same thing with their panel?

– patrick