First attempt at colour grading with Davinci Resolve and Technicolour Cinemastyle

Ramalama

Ramalama

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I've been getting frustrated with the quality of my video compared to the stills I take, I shoot mostly with a Canon 70d, and any moving footage with a Gopro silver and Feiyu tech g4.

I've spent the last couple of weeks looking at ways to get more dynamic range out of the 70d, and managed to set up the Technicolour cinemastyle picture style on the Canon, and I've been learning how to use Davinci Resolve.

I thought I'd start a thread, firstly to show anyone interested in doing the same the sort of results you can get, and also if anyone's been through the learning curve could give me any tips or feedback on how to improve from here on in.

The following clip is my first attempt at colour grading, it's a shot from the Upper Derwent Valley in the Peak District.

The first six seconds or so is the shot with the Cinemastyle picture style unedited, the next six seconds is the same footage colour graded with a free ground control LUT as the base, with a bit of extra sharpening and a few colour tweaks, the last portion is the same scene shot on a standard Canon picture style.

If anyone is interested I'll post up a more detailed explanation on how I've got to this point, and if anyone has any tips on how to improve the center section, the part of the clip I've been colour grading, then that would be much appreciated.

View: https://vimeo.com/178810170
 
If you put magic lantern on your 70d you can shoot raw video so I presume that would give you the best base for grading?
I could be totally wrong as i am only just learning about video and canons.
 
All three are exhibiting errors:
1) has the blacks lifted - did you PLUGE the monitor?
2) is oversaturated and is aliasing like mad - far too sharp for HD
3) has the highlights badly clipped - make sure you are outputting legal range video

There also seems to be a white shift - you were grading under D65 lighting?

You need to do the grade in two passes - 1 get all the images appearing neutral and correct, 2 add any stylistics you want. Don't just add LUTs (unless you wrote them yourself and know exactly what they do).
 
Thank you for the feedback, that's excellent.

The first part and the third part were straight out the camera, no1 was taken with the Technicolour Cinestyle and no3 was taken with a standard Canon picture profile, I added them in to show the difference in footage between the profiles.

The middle part is the bit I've attempted to colour grade, so your feedback there is very welcome, it looks like I've oversaturated and over sharpened.

I'll take on board your comment on using LUTs, I'm not going to learn that way.
As for monitor and lighting, I'm just using a laptop at home, so for now I'm going to have to make do with that.
 
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Resolve doesn't really like computer monitors. In fact BMD state that the only way to correctly grade with Resolve is to use a separate external calibrated device, ( They list 2 both of which are not cheap). .Resolve does not take into account any monitor calibration settings on the host computer. You can get it to work with a Mac ( just) but I think you are going to struggle with anything else.
 
Irrespective of which ambient lighting you're using it in, you need to Pluge the screen to set the black level to match your eye adaptation.

You should also try and use a video screen. If you use a TV, you need to find settings off the web to make it standards compliant. TVs usually boost the brightness and saturation and adjust the gamma. If you grade on that, your video signal will be under saturated and dark.
 
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