Resolve 12.5 Dans Favorite Features

Resolve 12.5 – Dan’s Favorite New Can’t Miss Features

April 23, 2016

Resolve 12.5 is here and Dan shares his thoughts on the exciting brand new features and how they can be used to help you colour correct better.


Nerd Christmas has arrived and yet another version of DaVinci Resolve is here for us to enjoy grading with.

I am insanely pleased with this version which focuses on bug fixes and everyday issues rather than shiny new features.

The proof was in the pudding for me this week.

My first day back after NAB and I conformed a phantom job…in one click!

All the complex timewarps came across easily and I used the amazing “set to zero” option in the camera raw options to make sure the phantom matched the 00:00:00:00 transcodes that editorial used.

Let’s take a look at my favorite new features so far. We will, of course, be covering these all in more detail soon!

My Favorite New Features

  • Node & Power Windows Refinement – Such simple updates but they have to top my list due to how much faster my life has become. Selecting nodes, moving nodes, extracting nodes, and being able to lasso every point of a power curve window have changed my day to day grading immensely.
  • Temperature & Tint Controls – The temperature and tint controls have to get the second spot as I use them constantly! Every primary grade now is pretty much balanced with the Temp & tint sliders.
  • Color Space Transform – The color space transform is a refreshing new way to deal with log footage or any footage at all that needs to be converted. The issue we had with the Arri LUT was that it would clip anything in your path. This is not the case when you use the Color Space Transform to do the same job. Massive improvement as far as working with log footage is concerned. Expect another insight in this area soon!
  • Resolve FX- I’m still learning all about the Resolve FX but it gives us a huge amount of new options. My favourites so far are the color transform, grain, glow and lens blur. The lens blur is far far better than the built in blur when trying to achieve a realistic result. When I spoke to BMD at NAB they said they were hoping to push most of these effects to the GPU for speedy and quick finishing work.
  • Color Blending Mode – The color blending mode is something that comes up time and time again when I’m working with designers or photographers. They are so used to being able to add an RGB value of a color to create a solid layer (for example the client branded color) and then use the color blending mode to apply it over the image. This can be great with branded colors and gradients to add a unique feel to the footage that I think would be very hard to replicate with traditional grading controls.
  • Power Bins – For me, the power bin media is all about keeping my most used elements close at hand. Things like scanned grain, film masks, light leaks and anything I can come up with for adding texture. When you add something into your power media Resolve can then use it in any project you work on. Simple idea but saves lots and lots of time!

Check out my video below for my favorite features in action!

As always any questions or things to add please use the comments below

-Dan


Comments

Homepage Forums Resolve 12.5 – Dan’s Favorite New Can’t Miss Features

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  • Waqas Qazi
    Member

    As always concise and extremely helpful. Thanks Dan!

  • Wow! The color space transform is worth changing habits for. Not sure why it didn’t occur to me as an epic feature. JPEG damage is great for matching capturing skype calls, if one is a bit rough and one is super clean. Thanks Dan!

  • Thanks Dan! Would there be any reason for you to still use the old tint and temperature controls in the Raw settings?

  • I think the RCM is still a better approach then the color space transform when using raw files because the raw tab can hand off artificially clipped data to the first node where as with RCM it doesn’t.

    On a side note: Are the viewer LUTs grayed out for anyone else in 12.5? Not sure why resolve is ignoring my viewer LUT


  • Marc Wielage
    Member

    I’m not convinced the Temp/Tint controls are anything more than a variation of the Primary controls. Patrick hits on some limitations in the color science being used elsewhere. I don’t dispute there are people that prefer using these sliders. I agree with Dan that the Node changes alone are amazing and worth the price of admission.


  • Margus Voll
    Member

    Lovely. You work more like Flame artist now and not just colorist.


  • Margus Voll
    Member

    Maybe you could do more in depth version for light wrap and edge blur ? I see it really handy when working with VFX plates in Resolve directly. Till now we had to recomp in Fusion to get “natural” results. Doing it in Resolve makes things much faster.


  • Dan Moran
    Member

    I will indeed sir! I used to work on flame and work with 5 amazingly talented compositors so I will make sure to cover this more 🙂


  • Dan Moran
    Member

    Totally agree sir! I was very impressed initially but I’d love to see something more like baselights base grade


  • Marc Wielage
    Member

    I gotta say, Base Grade is very intriguing, and the color science people at Baselight are first-rate and very bright.


  • Marc Wielage
    Member

    Light wrap could be a huge game-changer.

  • As far as I can tell the RCM and the Color Space Transform are just straight up colorspace conversions. Neither contain any tone mapping from scene to display referred. So I would still rather use a LUT like the ARRI K1S1 (last in the chain) or an ACES RRT/ODT. Otherwise I am doing all of the tone mapping in my grade.

  • The color transform OFX happens after the raw tab hands over the data in a lossy manner where as the RCM translates all the data bypassing the raw tab.


  • Dan Moran
    Member

    I still haven’t used RCM very much. Stubbornness I know but maybe I need to force myself to use it for a week to see how I get on

  • The only weird thing I noticed was some fringing in the extreme out of range areas when mapped to req709. The addition of the red color mappings has been great though.

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