Automatic Color Correction With DaVinci Resolve

2.2 When to Correct

Knowing when to colour correct will depend on your editor, your workflow preferences, your space requirements and more. In this lesson, you'll find out when to colour correct for maximum workflow efficiency. So let's talk about the video editing post production workflow process. In general it goes something like this. You import your assets, you organize them, trim them, assemble a rough edit, refine your at it do colour correction colour grading all you mixing, finalization, exporting. Those last little steps are a little bit flexible when you do the audio edit. And finishing and exporting. Well probably you'd export last. But the main point to understand here is that colour correction is towards the end of the process. And in a normal workflow, that makes the most amount of sense because you don't wanna be doing colour correction on footage that's either never gonna be used, or is going to be trimmed out. The process that I'm going to show you of using Resolve to do the colour correction and then getting your footage back inside your editor may work to do it, at that point in that post-production workflow process, and It may not. If you can't do it at that particular point in the workflow process, because of a limitation in your software or the footage that you're working on. You're going to have to basically do all the colour correction first and then start you're at it in your editor. Now for most big professional editors like Premiere, Final Cut, and Avid, and probably a few others. You can do it at that point in time near the end of the post-production workflow process. For other video editors, you may have to do all the colour corrections first. But not to worry because either way the process is going to be very very fast. Now what are those limitations. Well in a lot of video editors you can create your sequence and then you can export something called an exchange format which is basically a little file that says these are the clips in this sequence, here's where they're located, and here's how long they are, but right, it's basically a representation of your edit in a tiny little file. This file is either an XML, AAF, or EDL. What you can do with a lot of editors is take this little exchange format file, let's say it's an XML, and you can export that then you can import that into Resolve and your sequence with all of the shots shows up in Resolve exactly like it was in your editor. Then you can get to work doing your colour correction, and you can export it from Resolve, transcode your footage, and then re-export in XML from Resolve. Then in your editor you import the XML and then you get a new sequence with all the colour corrected footage. Now whether that will work or not depends on if your software can export one of those exchange formats and if your project is using a certain kind of footage. Now, a lot of different types of footage from different cameras will work the types of footage that I have found that does not work very well is AVCHD footage or at least certain flavors of AVCHD footage. It's something with the time code in that little XML file that gets goofed up when it comes out of your editor And you try and import that into resolve. That type of footage works just fine in resolve and in almost every editor but exporting that little X M L file in re-importing it into resolve doesn't work quite right with some kinds of A.B.C. H.D. footage For lots of other cameras and lots of other codecs it works just fine, but I know with my camera the Canon C100, it does not work. If that solution doesn't work for you, you still may be able to get away with doing colour correction at that point in the workflow process towards the end of the process. If you can re link your files in your editor. So the idea here is lots of editors will allow you to re link files, so you can take your files that are located somewhere let's say you have all your assets in a particular folder what you can do is rename that folder and then when you open up your project in your editor it will say, I don't know where any of these files are. And what you can do at that point is re link them. So you point your editor to a different version of those files, with all the same file names but maybe they have a different file extension. And then everything will reopen up and look exactly the same. And how that works with this colour correction process is you can take all of your original files open them up in Resolve, do your colour corrections, transcode them in Resolve, put them in a different folder with the same file names but different file extensions then rename that folder where all your original assets were and when you open up your project. It'll say I don't know where these files are and you can say look over here. They're right here and your whole project will open up with the new color corrected files and it will work exactly the same, but now all your files are colour corrected. And that is a very seamless process as well. If either of those two options don't work, what you can do is before you start editing, and this doesn't go with the kind of standard workflow process, but it is one way to do it. Before you start editing, open all of your clips in Resolve, do your colour corrections, transcode all your footage Then start your edit. Now let me be a little bit more work because you're gonna be transcoding a lot more footage than you need to and working on files that you may not need in the final edit but depending on your editor that's what you have to do. Now I'm fairly certain that with Premiere, Final cut and Avid you can relink your files with no problem. So you can do the colour correction towards the end of the post-production workflow process. With other applications like hit film and light works, it may not work the same way. You may run into trouble, it's something that you're going to want to test either way. But the whole point is to consider when you want to do colour correction in the video workflow process. Ideally, it would happen towards the end, but depending on your editor, you may have to colour correct all of your footage first and then get to editing. If that process of relinking files and importing and exploiting XML files or EDLs or AAF files sounds confusing, Don't worry. I want to show you exactly how it works in an upcoming lesson. For now, you're ready to move on to the next lesson in this course, where you're going to get an overview of the interface in resolve.