vincenzo andolina

Hi Kyle, there is no secret sauce in this industry, footage that is the result of the director vision and dop job on set is the king. Good film look can be achieved using resolve luts that comes for free, some other good alternatives are: Filmbox (like the halation, you can tweak it a lot and in HDR works great) Ravengrade Luts/DCTLs Dehancer Cinegrain FILM Pipeline (built for aces cct) Juan Melara luts/powergrades These are all valid options that I personally tried, you can also do amazing grades without using any magic lut, avoid free luts from web they can easily break. Have a look also at DCTLs, there are some free and some paid, some of them are similar and you can download a demo to check the differences. Those that pop to my mind are MONOnodes, KH, CullenKelly, PixelTools

Hi Jackey, 1- If you are doing your corrections and grade before the output transform, then you are working scene referred. 2- Correct. About your final question it just depends. Do you want that project to be future-proof? What if the client will ask before final delivery for an hdr version? Do you have a lot of different cameras (think about documentaries) that needs to be matched, maybe using RCM or Aces could be a good choice instead of managing everything with groups and node based color management. It is just up to client/delivery needs and you personal preference. Personally for commercials I use resolve YRGB and match the timeline color space to the main camera so color space aware tools/ofx will behave the right way. When there is even the smallest possibility that later we could have to switch to hdr or for long format with hdr delivery I use Aces.