The Colour Space Transform tool simplifies grading multiple camera shoots - allowing you to use the same, or similar grade, across the board, with only minimal adjustments needed to match up your footage. Overall, it's extremely useful, especially when you're shooting on a budget, and you need to match more expensive, capable cameras with less capable ones. Don't forget I use Artlist for my background music and you can get an extra 2 months free with this link - artlist.io/artlist-70446/?artlist_aid=RobEllis_888&RobEllis_888&RobEllis_888 :D And check out - robelliscinematography.com/downloads - Two Cinematic Colour Grades in Davinci Resolve - 21 Minute Video Tutorial for £8! Thank you all for your continued support!
So other videos told me to use "Shot Match To This Clip" and it was overexposing like crazy. I was using a Sony a7c and my iphone11 for different angles and the colors were wildly different. This did the trick and saved me a headache. Thanks for the education! You're a true pro!
This is an excellent video! I often use just my smartphone as a b cam for simple interview type stuff on a tripod and it would be great knowing what you have just taught. Because I've been manually working to get it as close as possible. Thanks for this video!
this is stunning masterful content better than most on RU-vid by a mile !! I'm spreading your channel everywhere please don't stop with the videos !! And mabey throw in a ad or something just so you get a bit of money to keep the content coming 😊👌
this was an absolute lifesaver on a project that we shot between an ursa mini pro and an A7sii. I spent a half day manually trying to color match each shot in the first scene and it was a NIGHTMARE. And now I just colored the entire video and it looks beautiful! A7sii footage has never looked so good matched to the ursa color space!!! No more fighting gross green mids and yellows in the touchy 4:2:0 Slog2!
@@RobEllisCinematographer Yes! we were sort of skipping resolve on quick turnaround projects because it just took too much extra time, but now it's necessary to turn things around quickly enough! lumetri is fine for last minute adjustments but the color space transform is essential! I had played around with it years ago but didn't totally understand it (after watching the insane Insider knowledge series) and I should have stuck with it. Next I need a tutorial on how to better develop one's eye for subtlety in grading
Man thanks for the tips, I am new at using color space transform, but this is definetly interesting and helpful. I work with a collegue that have a d810 and every time we need to match with my 5dii. This new tricks I'll use it for sure in my new project with him
Great idea! Actually that reminds me. Today i drove past a pond in the city surrounded by trees and pointed out to my passenger how the sun was perfectly bouncing off the water and giving this beautiful dancing backlight light on the leaves of the trees. My friend said it looked like a scene from blade runner.
Cheers Rob, this is super helpful! It's even useful for single camera narrative or doc stuff where you have to use an 'inferior' camera maybe due to form factor and shooting situation. You can just jump into resolve and use this colour space transform to quickly get to a more 'filmic' looking colour space that matches the look of your preferred camera. I'm going to have a play with this. Thanks for sharing.
Yes definitely! Probably something I should've touched on in the video! Especially if you're used to grading for a certain camera but you've shot on something else - you can just transform to the colour space you usually work with. Thanks for the support! :)
rob you are one of the best teaching! We have the possibility to see a well explained tutorial of ACCES, and also how to do it with different cameras, it is still difficult for me to match this method, and if we apply a lut, we must lower the end in the node mask section in the gain output?
Thank you! I'm actually working on an upgrade to the colour grading tutorial on my website (www.robelliscinematography.com/downloads) right now, which covers working in ACES and using LUTs, which also involves the colour space transform tool. It should be done and up within the next month or so :)
My friend, you are a life saver. I have some Slog3 footage from Sony a6400 which I need to match up with the non-log footage from older Canon 600D (mp4 or MOV, need to double-check). Was your footage as well non-log, can I use the same approach?
Thanks!! It's impossible to find a video showing how to grade footage from a non-Z Nikon in Davinci. There are probably one or two out there still shooting from their Nikon DXX(X)'s...like me.
I have a doubt when we begin to colour grade For a Nikon z6 footage shoot in flat picture profile in davinci resolve ,which profiles to choose as input colour space and input gamma on Color space transform node ?
How can I do the same for photos but in camera, so the Jpeg comes out exactly matching the newest colors (Using Sony A6400 and trying to get the color science of the newest releases). Please help!
Great info, I used this method quit some time, now I try to use Cinematch 1.05. It seems with this program you transform more or less the same color between 2 camera's. However I am a bit of disappointed with that program. I try t get the famous black magic colors with my Canon 5DMark3. But without any succes. What is your opinion about this program?
Hey i have a question. I want to color grade my footage but i have only a nikon z50 wich has no log profile. So i made my own flat picture profile with the programm picture control utility 2 and uploaded it onto my camera. And now i want to convert it into rec 709 for applying luts and stuff like that. Is there a way to "reverse" the settings i made in picture control utility 2 so that i can work with rec 709? I hope you have time to answer Have a great day!
Really useful video! I'm impressed at how crisp that D800 shot looks compared to the BMMCC. My own D810 shots haven't looked that good. Did the picture profile you used in-camera have sharpening turned on, or did you apply sharpening in Resolve?
Thanks! I didn't de-noise or sharpen any of the clips - the BMMCC was shooting with no ND filter so I had to shoot at a pretty small aperture, on a relatively cheap lens, all of this would've contributed to the apparent softness when compared the D800. The Micro definitely resolves much sharper images than the D800! The video was more about colour than overall IQ so I left it as is! :)
Hi Rob, Thank you so much... I learnt a lot from your tutorial especially in lighting technique...can you also do fcpx tutorials in color grading pls ... thank you !
Thank you! I haven't got any current plans to do tutorials in FCPX, as I use Resolve... but Resolve is an amazing piece of software, and has a free version which has practically everything the full version does ;)
Excellent ! Now I need to know how I can match a lesser 8bit h264 camera to a 12 bit raw powerhouse. How can I get consistent rendering without artifacts and banding..
The D800 footage in the clips shown in the video are matched to 12 bit raw footage from the Blackmagic cams :) obviously there's never going to be a perfect way to match things like this as RAW etc, will always be more robust and not break down as easily - but get to know the less capable camera, find out how to get the best image out of it and you can mitigate any issues you get from using a lower quality bit rate and help it to match better to the more capable cameras.
Thanks for the video. Would I be able to convert HLG3 to SLOG2/3 using this method? I'd like to shoot in Sony HLG3 but have LUTs designed for SLOG2 and SLOG3.
I stick to SRGB with older cameras unless I know for sure they are in a rec709 colour space, but it's dependant on what you shot with! No harm in experimenting and seeing what works
Hi Rob. Good video, helps me understand colour spaces a bit better. Quick question, how does this process compare to using a chip chart and try to match shots that way?
Oh wow I can now actually dust off my old 5D Mark II and realistically use it as a B-Cam to my Sony A7SII with relative ease! I know older cameras have “Pseudo-Log” Color Spaces you can choose like Technicolor CineStyle for Canon. Would choosing sRGB still work for that or am I better off shooting in the standard color space to match?
Yes! This is one of the main reasons why I find the colour space transform so useful, along with the super scale tool, you can still get loads of mileage out of your older cameras. Resolve is a wonderful bit of software! The Log or Flat profiles on the older cams are generally just picture profiles rather than actual colour spaces so you can shoot in a "Log" picture profile to squeeze a bit more information from the image and still select sRGB. I shoot in a flat profile I bought for my Nikon years ago and do this :)
Rob Ellis Thanks for the reply! There has DEFINITELY been some client work I’ve done where I wished I had a multi-cam setup for better coverage. I feared I would have to break the bank to get another camera of the same make and model in order to achieve that. So this has been a godsend. Thank you so much for this! Some might hate me for saying this but you should do more paid tutorials on your website in tandem with these quick YT tips! I feel bad for getting all this absolutely useful and concise information for free lol.
I have a tiny youtube channel I do for work called the nonprofit filmmaker where I teach nonprofits how to make their own content on a budget. Can I borrow this tip and walk people through it on my channel?
In your Stills Gallery, you should see your Stills Albums and Powergrades Albums on the left side (you can right click and add more of each type of album) - if you drag a still into a Powergrade folder, that folder will be there in any project with any stills you've put in there :)
It would definitely improve this process if you need an absolute exact match, but you don't always have the time or access to shoot things like this, especially on fast paced live music video shoots, etc!
For sure, but ACES can be a somewhat more complicated workflow when you want to use the LUTs that you may be used to using, etc, and you do still need to make adjustments to match things up. I still use colour space transforms in ACES anyway - but that's a whole other video haha
If by match you mean an easy way to get them closer to each other under 2 minutes then yeah I can see that. But even on my small dinky iPhone I can see these are not fully matched. You only showed one example of a before and after as well. It doesn’t really show that it works if you only show one example. And here I don’t even need to see another example as I can clearly see the slight different saturation levels and the hue of the leaves on the Nikon are more yellow/warm. The scopes are just as important as the color space transform. Maybe I missed that part, but you should have showed that as those give u more accurate readings.
So the leaves on the tree have more of a yellow hue on the ends - the video at the start I'm actually in a slightly different position to the stills you can see at 5:30 - you can see the match much better there. I did mention in the video that after your initial adjustments, you can jump in and get more detailed with your changes. Quick changes with minimal adjustments will never be absolutely perfect, and they don't necessarily need to be - as long as they can cut together well enough to not cause distraction in the audience when viewing the final product, you're all good. Overall though, try it for yourself - you'll be in a better position to know if it works for you or not :)
For sure, but you still need to make adjustments in ACES to match shots from different cameras, and it's a bit of a different workflow. Plus not everyone uses ACES :) there are many ways to achieve the same thing!