How to Color Grade a Documentary | DaVinci Resolve 16 Tutorial

      What is going on everyone, today we are going to be discussing how to grade a documentary. This is a real world scenario because it is a real job I worked on. I want to take you through the process of how I landed the gig, to delivering the job. So let’s go.

        Starting first off, we are going to talk about how I landed the gig. The guy reached out on instagram. He had originally reached out on a commercial, but the timing wasn’t right. Then he reached about this documentary, saying that it was a low budget gig.

        So this leads me to point number two, service exchange. I wanted to turn this transaction into a win-win for us. So I asked to have the footage for my masterclass so my students can have professionally shot footage to work on. He agreed.

        So, since there was no budget, I wanted to set the expectations straight. I told him I would be doing just a base grade and only be able to give him a day. Since it was a 9 minute film with tons of shots, I told him it would be just that base grade. He was totally fine with it.

        Now what cameras were used? The main camera used was a RED Gemini, with a Pocket 4k as a B-Cam, as well as a mavic pro and gopros.

        What was our post-workflow? We went with a bake-n-blade. I asked for a clean out, which is just the raw footage, no effects, nothing.

        Let’s get into it. This is what I got. A prores 4:4:4:4 file and all I did was right click and say scene cut detection.

That then turns into all of this.

I then selected all of my clips and put them into a timeline. Once that was done I went into my color tab and started grading.

        The first thing I would recommend doing is selecting the lightbox mode, which allows you to see a lot of the footage at once, but also gives you a lot of information. This is also a cool way to see what you have. The first thing I do, other than watch it through, is to look at it and see what I got. I try to find matching “scenes/clips,” find the talking heads, then start assessing how I am going to attack this.

        Let’s just jump right in. I started with the talking head. This whole thing is based on the Kodak 2383 LUT. So the first node I worked on was the last node, which was the LUT.

The reason I keep my LUT at the end is that I don’t want to contaminate my look after the LUT. We want our look DNA at the end.

        Then I went into my primaries and did a lot of heavy lifting.

        Moving onto the third node, I added a bit of a look, again, using the primaries.

But then I did go into my LOG wheels to try and dial in the look a bit more.

As you can see I really pushed it by cranking the midtones over towards the orange/red side of things.

        Then the next node, I again used some primaries to dial back on some of the green that was seeping into the image.

        Moving on, we added some sharpening to .47 like we generally do, then added some film grain and noise reduction. So this is the final look.

        Now that the first shot was out of the way, let’s take a look at the black magic. It needed a bit more work because after the LUT, the image looked different from our RED shot.

Then moving onto my primaries, I really pushed it into the ballpark. I also added some contrast and took away some saturation.

        Then I went in and did a similar look to get that green in for that film look. It does a bit too much though.

        To counter the amount of green it adds, I again went into a new node and pulled out some of that to neutralize it a bit more.

        Moving to the first node, I had to tame the highlights.

This is something that on cheaper cameras you have to deal with. The pocket 4k is no slouch, but there is a reason why REDs and Alexa cost so much.

        That shot is done now. We are close, not 1:1, but close enough and the client was happy with it so I parked it there.

        Then I moved to this shot.

I picked this shot next because the first two were so challenging, I wanted to work on an easier shot after. That is one tip I would give is to make sure you do an easy shot after a challenging shot. You need to keep the job fun and interesting.

        My approach with this shot was more surgical. We are obviously starting off by dropping in that Kodak 2383 LUT as our look DNA.

        Then in my third node, a majority of my corrections happened. I started off by using my color wheels to brighten, but also balance the image.

You can see that I just barely touched the lift and gamma, but I took the gain to town to brighten up the image a lot. Then I also added some contrast to get that color separation. I did attempt to play around with color curves, but I decided to leave it instead.

        One thing to note quickly is that I have a standardized node tree for this project. You all know that I like to have one for projects, but sometimes, like in this case, not all of the nodes will be used. That’s okay.

I just like to have some of them available. What’s fun is that really, this whole look came down to the one node (other than the LUT). It was that simple. I did add some sharpening, noise reduction, and grain but the main look was created in those two nodes.

        Now moving to the very first shot, I wanted to make more of an impact so I gave it a bit more love. I started off with that Kodak LUT.

Obviously the color is out of whack.

        Then moving to the third node, I used my lift, gamma, and gain to really dial in the look.

You can see I hit these hard. I messed a lot with the lift and gamma to try and get that red out, while also keeping the rocks in the warmer color space. Then I used my hue vs hue to give it a little nudge.

        Moving to the next node, I dropped the saturation just a touch.

        Then moving to our second node, I qualified our rocks using the luminance qualifier to bring down the exposure.

Now moving into my ninth node, I created a power window around the grass area, and tracked it.

Then I wanted to pop this out, so I pushed the contrast to give it some depth, then used hue vs hue to pop out the color a bit more.

That was it, other than some noise reduction, sharpening and film grain.

        Moving onto another shot, here we see that this shot has a different feel because it’s darker, maybe shot at a different time of day, but I still wanted to get it close.

For this, I again started with our LUT.

        I did want it to match with everything else, so I went into my third node and I used lift, gamma, and gain to help dial in that look. I also used some contrast too.

From here I went into my rgb curves and used my hue vs hue to get the rocks to match.

That’s about it. I added sharpening, noise reduction, and grain but otherwise untouched. I just wanted to make sure it felt like it belongs.

        Now moving onto the next shot, this one is a tough one, but also sort of a one-off. We don’t have many like this in the documentary.

Now again, starting off with our Kodak 2383 LUT.

        Everything is still a bit lifted, so I went into my third node and just popped it and made him a silhouette.

We added some color contrast in this image too by just adding the contrast.

        That was it on that shot. I added sharpening, grain, and noise reduction but otherwise I left it at that.

        Moving onto the next shot, this was a tough one as it was really dark.

        When you add the LUT, it doesn’t make it much better. So what do you do?

        I wanted to go for that Joker interrogation scene. That green with the orange. So I ran with that.

Again, that’s all that happened. Other than sharpening, grain, and noise reduction I left it at that. Very simple, very clean. I didn’t try to do too much. If it were a bigger budget project, then yes I would have done a lot more to it. But in this case, it wasn’t necessary. It was shot beautifully.

        Now for the driving shots, shooting outside of the car, I didn’t want to spend too much time so what I did was to create a bit of color contrast with some teal in the lower ends, then warmth at the top.

        Here is the base.

        Here is the grade after the LUT.

        Then here is after the color wheels. I took the lift more towards cyan to bring some of that into the lower parts of the image, then I took the gain towards the warmer side of things to add that color contrast. I brought up the contrast and offset in the image too.

There we go. Now onto the next shot, we have shown a similar grade, but what I want to show in this one is why mastering your lift, gamma, and gain wheels is the key to professional grading. Just watch.

        Here is the original image.

        Then I added our LUT, and just look at how the image just wasn't looking good.

        Now, I move to my color wheels and boom. I used my temperature and tint to get that red cast out, then I quickly brought down my lift a bit and then to keep the color in the rocks I brought up the highlights. But look at how I saved this image by using my lift, gamma, and gain.

        Now, I move to my color wheels and boom. I used my temperature and tint to get that red cast out, then I quickly brought down my lift a bit and then to keep the color in the rocks I brought up the highlights. But look at how I saved this image by using my lift, gamma, and gain.

        Moving onto another beautiful shot, let’s break this down.

        Now I throw on a LUT.

        Then again, using my color wheels. I did a bit of that temperature and tint action.

Then I moved into my contrast and pivot. I then finished it off with some color wheel adjustments. I took my lift down a bit, took my gamma and gain towards the warmer side of things, and then brought my overall offset up a slight bit.

        I knew I could do something more, so I went into my luminance qualifier to grab just the background.

And then I did a quick move of the gain to put some more color into the image, as well as bringing down the highlights.

        There we have it. That’s how easy it is to make a dull shot look gorgeous.

One thing to note is that the lift, gamma, and gain is a dance. When you move one, you move another in the opposite direction. For example, when you bring down the lift, you need to bring up the gain to counter that.

        You’ll also notice that in this documentary I’m not allowing the highlights to go much beyond that 896 mark on our curves. I’m pushing the images because I have that 16-bit from the RED Gemini, so why not. This is where knowing your camera can help you in the process know how much you can push the image.

        Now moving onto this shot, we are going to cover how to take advantage of the dynamic range.

        Let’s first add our LUT.

        Then we went into our primaries to mess with the image. As you can see we added some contrast and pivot then finished with our wheels. We brought our lift down a bit, brought our gamma over to the left, and then brought our gain up and over to the left.

        Now this is looking great, but here is where we get into our dynamic range. I knew there was more I could be doing with this image, so what I did was I used the luma qualifier to grab just the sky.

From there I pulled it down using the highlight slider, then used my gain to move it over to the cyan/blue color.

Now this. I might as well have gained about two stops of dynamic range and brought it back. Most people say it’s easy to work with RED, but it’s not. If you don’t know how to properly work with the image, you can break it very easily.

        One last landscape shot.

        We are going to add our LUT to this.

        For my primaries I brought up the shadows and down on the highlights to give it almost an HDR type vibe.

Then I adjusted the lift a bit up and to the right, I brought the gamma down and then brought the gain down, but the color wheel portion up. Then I brought the overall offset down. I also cranked the contrast up a lot.

        Then I went back again for a second pass. Just look at what it is doing to the highlights.

That comes from dropping the highlights slider, as well as playing with the gain.

I also messed a bit with the hue vs hue curves to make the yellow a bit more matching to the red.

There we go. That’s the look. See how simple and easy it is? We got that HDR look going on too.

        We are now going to move into my favorite shot of the entire film. Let’s break it down starting with the raw image.

Super Violenceweight title

        Then we crushed the look with our lift, gamma, and gain. Just look at it. We brought our offset way down, moved our gain up, our gamma over to the left, and our lift down a bit to create that color separation. Then we added some contrast.

Boom. Just look at how beautiful that is.

        Then in my next node I did a bit of my hue vs saturation to bring down the red, but bring the overall saturation up.

        Now moving to the next shot, this one again was super dark.

        When I dropped a LUT on it, it didn’t help. It’s murky, noisy, crazy where it’s sitting.

        So I went into my lift, gamma, and gain and just went all in. I cranked up the offset, gain, and gamma. Then I added some contrast and brought the lift down just a hair.

        Then I went into the next node and used the offset to get the look to match a bit more with the rest of the film.

Boom. We really changed that shot and made it look a lot better. To see where we came from to where we ended, just crazy.

        Now if you want to watch the video, I tackled a few more shots in there that were similar to the ones I’ve done in here, but what needs to be taken away from this is

Using your primary wheels can really help get you that base you need, but they can also help dial in the look that you are going for. Sometimes sticking with simple things can be enough. Look at the results we were able to achieve by using a very simple process.

        One thing I do like to do at the end is go back to my lightbox mode and zoom in a bit to look at these as a whole scene.

This helps me feel it out and see if the color is helping the story, looking great, but most importantly, do they all match. The client was blown away and I was happy with the results. This was a win-win for me.

        I hope this gave you a broader perspective of what it takes to grade a documentary like this. Even though stuff was shot beautifully, you can see we overcame challenges. Once you commit to a look DNA, you can see that it’s not always easy to finish everything. We still had to use qualifiers and windows to help achieve those looks. So I hope you can take away something from this!

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