You messed up BAD if you used this TOOL on an 8-Bit Footage | DaVinci Resolve Tutorial

        What’s going on everyone! Welcome back to yet another epic tutorial. In this video I am going to point out one of the most common mistakes that beginners make when it comes to working with 8-bit footage.

        Alright, now we are inside Resolve and this is the clip we are working with.

This is shot in 4k 8-bit.

        I’ve already done a primary correction and separated the skin from the background because everything was leaning towards tons of cool tones. One thing you need to know about grading your footage is that with 8-bit footage, you have to be extremely diligent and accurate on set. You have to shoot it right. If the color temperature is off, if the exposure is off, it’s really hard to create color and contrast separation in post.

        Now that’s not what this video is about. When I say “You messed up bad when using this tool” what am I talking about? I am talking about the qualifier. This goes without fail. Whenever I see a beginner colorist, they jump in and start narrow, then go broad. Or they never go broad.

        Now let’s create a hypothetical situation. Let’s say a director of photography or creative director asks to turn the birds in the back into more of a cyan. If you don’t have a lot of experience with 8-bit footage, you’d hit shift+H and qualify the birds.

Now zoom in and look.

What are all those blocks that we see. This artifacting stuff. What is that? Now when you hit play, you’ll see a bunch of chatter in the footage. This is detrimental. What do I mean? Let’s make a change and I’ll show you.

Now look at what it does to the image.

This happens because 8-bit footage does not have enough information that you need to pull a clean key. You have to do A LOT to hopefully pull a cleaner key.

        Now let’s move to another shot that was filmed in Arri Alexa UHD 10-bit.

Now this was sent to me as a bake n’ blade method. Usually Arri is 12-bit. So let me show you the difference between 8-bit and 10-bit. Now I am going to select the sky and watch how clean it is comparatively.

Then I can adjust parameters and clean it up even more.

Then I can use my offset and change the color in the sky and it’s clean.

Now let’s say you have to work on 8-bit as a professional. What can you do to get the best results? The best way is to use the custom curves and use your hue vs. options. For this one, we will use hue vs hue. You can just click on the color you want to change and it’ll make a couple dots where that color is.

Then what I would do is spread out the outside points for a smoother effect.

Then we can make our change.

Now we have a lot cleaner of a result. There is no chatter, no artifacting and we are achieving a very similar result with 0 issues. This is the best thing you can do with your 8-bit footage.

        Now I would recommend doing this even on the 10-bit and 12-bit footage. Qualifier should only be used if you’re going for a very extreme look, or if there is enough color separation that you know you can grab something and throw a bit of a denoiser and everything will be perfect. But a majority of the time, you can get an impeccable result using just this way I showed you.

        You just saw the power of this tool when it comes to dealing with 8-bit footage. That’s the name of the game when it comes to color grading. You can’t just pick up any tool for any job and camera. You have to be very specific and methodical in your approach. It’s not rocket science but there is a method to that madness.

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