Hollywood Colorist Walter (CSI) about his color grading process

Hollywood Colorist Walter (CSI) about his color grading process

Walter Volpatto (CSI)

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W alter Volpatto (CSI) is one of Hollywood's most successful colorist and some of his movies include Green Book, Dunkirk, Star Wars: The Last Jedi and The Hateful Eight. He primarily works in DaVinci Resolve and uses a fixed node structure that he has developed over the years. 

Lowepost visited Walter at Company 3 LA with our camera team to learn in detail about how he builds his grades.

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HECTOR ANDERSON

This was great.  I had the opportunity to see Walter demonstrate this at a colorist meetup.  I was able to copy the node tree, but had since forgotten much of the details and reasoning behind the placement and creation of certain nodes.  Good refresher.  Thanks for making this happen.

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Victor Riley
On 1/13/2021 at 3:58 AM, Walter Volpatto said:

the reordering of node in V17 is highly aggravating.....

Just a quick heads-up on that @Walter Volpatto: There's now a checkbox for this in Resolve settings: 

image.png.ed772534b258d4127104e6ff9a645dc5.png

 

Edit: This is Resolve 17 /17.1 beta 7 – and is even noted in the changelog for the release: Addressed user preference issue for fixed color page node numbering. https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=132194

Edited by Victor Riley
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Walter Volpatto
On 1/19/2021 at 8:13 AM, Vincent Badia said:

Hi Walter,

May I ask you to clarify how you propagate/ripple the changes.

The way you describe it seems a very fast operation : Perform the change, select the shots to modify, propagate.
But since you don’t use pre/post groups for this, neither shared node. How do you concretely copy and propagate the changes that fast on so many shots at once ?

Thank you very much for your time.

 

In the color menu you have two ways to propagate: [ripple color change to current group] - or - [ripple color changes to selected clips]

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Victor Riley

@Walter Volpatto You talked about using Group Nodes as a place for HDR trims and looks in case there isn't a timeline look. Could you elaborate more on the node structure you're using in Groups and Timeline? I reckon you don't use Pre-Group that much, but I'd be interested in your Post-Group trim node structure and your Timeline node structure.

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Walter Volpatto
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On 1/25/2021 at 2:50 AM, Victor Riley said:

@Walter Volpatto You talked about using Group Nodes as a place for HDR trims and looks in case there isn't a timeline look. Could you elaborate more on the node structure you're using in Groups and Timeline? I reckon you don't use Pre-Group that much, but I'd be interested in your Post-Group trim node structure and your Timeline node structure.

I think is too long of a discussion to be put in few sentences (i should do a color space/workflow with Lowepost...)  but the general ideas are that either (or) in the timeline and POST groups, you want to put two things: the main look of the movie plus any transformation to adapt teh master to a different spec, like HDR.

if you do a HDR mapping per scene, then it goes into the POST group, if you do globally, then it goes in timeline.

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Jesper Hammarbäck

Walter, about the settings in the resolve color management when you work in log.  (the log space im working on)

Lets say I have Alexa footage, are these settings right then for Rec709.
See attached image. :)

Skärmavbild 2021-02-02 kl. 14.52.08.png

Edited by Jesper Hammarbäck
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Walter Volpatto
3 hours ago, Jesper Hammarbäck said:

Walter, about the settings in the resolve color management when you work in log.  (the log space im working on)

Lets say I have Alexa footage, are these settings right then for Rec709.
See attached image. :)

Skärmavbild 2021-02-02 kl. 14.52.08.png

I work in Unmanaged color, i do my own color management.

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