Resolve 17 Color Management Tips and Pat’s Revised Fixed Node Tree

Day 13: 24 Insights in 24 Days New Year Marathon

HDR Palette 101 Part 4 – Setting up RCM 2.0 and Pat’s New Node Tree

In our 2020 New Year Marathon, I shared the evolution of my fixed node tree in ML #918. Today, you see how I’ve modified my workflow and node structure to accommodate the HDR Palette and working within the confines of Resolve Color Management (RCM). But before we talk about that…

Part 1: The Basics of preparing your color management settings and input color spaces (for the uninitiated)

The first 9 minutes of this Insight I walk you through how I think about setting up Resolve 17’s color management options. We start with a system-defined preset, switch it to Custom, and tweak it a bit. We also talk about the importance of tagging your footage’s ‘Input Color Space’ – for this workflow to perform as intended.

Part 2: The re-evolution of my fixed node tree

Many of us at Mixing Light, if we’re color grading in DaVinci Resolve and do lots of long-form work, are fixed-node junkies. In fact, Joey D’Anna and I have both added Insights to this series on fixed-node trees. So it’s not surprising I want to spend some time talking about how RCM 2.0 and the HDR Palette have changed my approach to building a fixed node tree.

This happened after I spent 60 hours on an indie feature film (including 20 hours of pre-color grading testing of Resolve 17 Beta), and found I wanted to completely re-work my node structure.

At 9:30 into this Insight, we take a tour of my revised node tree.

If you’ve watch my ‘Evolution of a Node Tree’ Insight then the back end of this node structure looks very familiar. It’s the front half of the node tree that I made some big changes. I’ll need a few more projects to see how this stands up – but I always expect to do some customization from project-to-project.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts?

Share them with us in the comments! It’s how the Mixing Light community comes together to help each other out.

– pat