Emily Haine

How is Autodesk doing with Flame these days?

Depends on the context, but density is brightness and tone could relate to the tonal curve. Brightness and individual curve adjustments are a good combination to work a desirable contrast into the image.

One of the main differences was that you you couldn't load footage directly into the Resolve version, but now you can through the "Loader node" in V15.

Hi Jeremy. I simply mean that a film image often have deep blacks in the mids.

I love this presentation, you make everything look so easy.

Watch your corrections through a curve and see how the image acts. For every little curve adjustment you make, the prior corrections will behave differently and you will get a different result. Good luck.

Can't think of a better place than Lowepost for these things, it's really mentioned everywhere, you just have to know what to look for. From the Hobbit article: "Luma curves are one of my favourite tools to use in achieving a richer, bolder look. By grabbing a still of how a shot sits with the desired exposure levels etc and playing with the curve in conjunction with Lift Gamma Gain, you are able to get some extra tone into areas of the picture that the standard tools can’t reach alone. Often you end up in the same place as your still with no perceivable difference, but sometimes, with enough experimenting, you can come up with some beautiful richness and depth and still keep the same exposure level to what you started with and desired in the first place, just a much richer frame in certain subtle areas. This doesn’t always work so you have to be judicious."

I didn't necessarily mean to say that you need to work with the curve controls. What I ment is that you can reach a more filmic contrast by sending primary contrast corrections through a custom curve or a pre-defined one in a LUT. The corrections on your first layer will then be altered by how the curve on your next layer swing and that combination will give you more control of in which range the deep black falls. Film bend of the top of the curves very gently and I can agree that lowering the brightest values can look more cinematic. Pivoting the deepest black towards the mids is also a thing many colorists do.

It seems like the new Fusion class with Lee will cover how to do exactly what you are asking about.

My take on this is that the key is to understand brightness and contrast. The colorists you are referring to primarily run all their contrast adjustments through a curve. Understanding a thing or two about color harmony also helps.

I'm a huge fan of Kevin, and impressed by the high level of quality content on this site!

BlackMagic Design just announced Blackmagic Raw - https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagicursaminipro/blackmagicraw ..."easier to use and much better quality than popular video format". Interesting statement. EM

Good point. You sometime want to retain the sequence TC. Right click on the reference clip, go to clip attributes and change current frame to match the sequence timecode.

The workaround is to click on the track number (v1, v2...) or copy the clips to a new timeline. This is an annoying bug that's been around for a long time now.