kye

Have you had a look at the BM documentation? They have a document called something like the "hardware guide" for Resolve, it steps through all the different combinations and gives specific advice on things. It's not a complete answer to every question but it's a good place to start.

It's kind of a funny thing because I get mixed feedback about how much the different world's are aware of each other. I can push the point here with people who don't seem to have worked in the industry and not get anywhere, or also have strange feedback from people here who don't seem to understand that you can get cinematic footage without using a grey-card to manually WB or set manual exposure with histograms or false colour, and even if my gopro could do that it wouldn't be practical to do that for every shot when I'm swimming in a lake underneath a waterfall! The guys over at LGG assured me that they were aware of how compromised the real-world shooting conditions are for one-person operations or low-budget productions, especially if there's travel or uncontrolled situations involved, so I think it's an awareness thing and that will range from person to person. Personally, my journey with film started about 20 years ago when I got involved in film through my sister who went to film school and I helped her co-produce a few short films, as well as helping on set and in post with my home recording studio I had for making my own music. I did a producers course, we got a couple of film grants and did the local festival circuit for a few years before she moved away and I let it go. It was only a year or so ago that I swapped over from photos to video for family and travel adventures and I started editing video myself and started learning the specific skills that I didn't have. A few people have been confused by me talking about how a film set is run when on the other hand I look like an amateur moving from photos to video. We all have our own combination of experience and skills. At least we don't have the constant barrage of new people coming in and asking the same questions (that are answered really clearly in the manual) over and over again like they do on the BM Resolve forums!

Yes. But, "ever" is a really long time.

The GH5 is one of those cameras where far more people own one (or more) than are visible from forum posts and YT reviews etc. They are workhorses. Even if no more MFT cameras or lenses are released ever again there will still be many thousands of users making millions of videos per year for the next 5+ years. 4K 10-bit isn't going anywhere soon. There are major networks in the US who still shoot 1080 and broadcast 720, and people watch YT on their phones. My recommendation is to work out exactly what features you require in a camera system, to review your options and then go buy what you need. If you aren't sure about a GH5 vs something newer then that means the GH5 already meets your requirements and so you're just tempted by shiny toys of new cameras. At the end of the day, a camera is a tool to make stuff. Either buy a GH5 and stop worrying about what's around the corner and go make stuff, or keep what you have and stop worrying about what's around the corner and go make stuff. If you're worried about the resale value of the camera then maybe stick with the camera you already own and go buy stocks instead - tech is the worst investment possible

This page is very useful for working out lens mounts! http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Lens_mounts

I'd watch his equipment reviews but suggest there are more experienced colourists you can learn from. When I said earlier I had to un-learn things, many of them were from Aram.

This channel has a bunch of interesting stuff for free: https://www.youtube.com/user/LearnColorGrading/videos

Yeah, that's my problem too. I know how to drive Resolve and what curves and the other controls do, what I don't know is what to do to take a shot and make it look great. My next push might be to find some before and after shots done by skilled colourists and try and replicate their grades. When people do the before/after wipe in their showreel that might be something I can emulate. Especially when they do a few wipes showing how they built the grade.

Looks like some serious CA around the highlights. Is there also some around the girls face? (It looks like there is a red flare there?)

Chris Hall - Anatomy of a Grade series: https://vimeo.com/chrishallcolor Serious grades including a Day for Night conversion. Colour grading The Hobbit: https://lowepost.com/color-grading/case-studies/the-hobbit-r4/

Sites and resources: The first place to look for Resolve info is the 1000+ page manual, which is excellent. It answers most questions if you're learning Resolve. BM forums for Resolve: https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewforum.php?f=21 There are people there who use Resolve all day every day, as well as newbies asking the same questions over and over.. a great resource. LiftGammaGain.com forums are the best place to find professional colourists.. https://www.liftgammagain.com/forum/index.php LGG sub-forums of particular interest are: Colour: https://www.liftgammagain.com/forum/index.php?forums/color.9/ Looks: https://www.liftgammagain.com/forum/index.php?forums/looks.49/ Resolve: https://www.liftgammagain.com/forum/index.php?forums/resolve.36/ Lowepost is some excellent free articles and good (but not very busy) forums: https://lowepost.com Intermediate Codecs comparison table (very useful reference for proxies etc) https://blog.frame.io/2017/02/13/50-intermediate-codecs-compared/ PostPerspective is about post-production and has some interesting colour articles: https://postperspective.com PremiumBeat has some interesting articles: https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/ MixingLight is a paid site but has some free resources worth checking out: https://mixinglight.com LUTcalc is a plugin that generates LUTs for converting between colour spaces and gammas, and although in Resolve I'd recommend using the Colour Space Transform OFX plugin over a lut (the plugin doesn't clip data like LUTs do) this LUT generator has a few colour spaces that the Resolve plugin doesn't have, eg, GoPro, so it has its uses: https://cameramanben.github.io/LUTCalc/LUTCalc/index.html

There are awesome resources for colour grading and Resolve techniques out there, but they're scattered around the place, and are hard to find. Please post anything awesome you find. (Note: for those that are new to Resolve or colour grading, there are lots of YT "colourists" who have very little actual knowledge. These people provide a steady stream of bad habits, misleading and flat-out wrong information. There are exceptions, but on the whole you should be very suspicious of people selling LUTs and pumping out video after video - most of these people are professional LUT salespeople and/or YouTubers and not professional colourists!) Juan Melara is excellent. If you watch all the below you'll get a sense of how he uses Resolve, especially the Colour Space Transform plugin and which tools in Resolve are designed to work in which colour spaces.

I would imagine there would be additional grading. The GH5 + GHa LUT is equivalent to an Alexa with Rec709 LUT. Most people would add a complete look after the rec709 conversion if they shot Alexa, so the same applies here I think. To get you to sign up. Everyone wants you to sign up because then they can market to you. It's a PITA to sign up, so they have to offer some kind of reward.

I registered there in Jan this year, still haven't been approved. I kept tabs on it for a couple of months, and people who registered after me became common around the place, I figured that they didn't want new users and gave up. Having good moderation on forums is critical, and if you're so incompetent that you can't approve new users then your forum isn't worth any of my time.

I kind of don't know what to think about Casey Faris. On one hand he uses the simple controls like the pros tend to, he seems to be able to do difficult things pretty quickly and efficiently (like matching cameras), and in comparison to most other YT grading people who sell LUT packs he looks level-headed and like he knows what he's doing. There's a YT colourist who bragged in one of their videos that they don't plan their grading videos, they just hit record and then make up the grade as they go along. However, if you compare him to Juan Melara then there's an enormous gap between Juan and every other YT colourist I'm aware of. Juan doesn't even seem to use Resolve in the same way that everyone else does - it's kind of like he's from another planet. His videos are absolute tours of force, and it's obvious that he has enormous depth of technical knowledge about colour spaces, colour conversion theory, etc. These are good examples of the level of knowledge that Juan has: Whenever Juans videos are discussed on the LGG forums the pros there admire him but aren't amazed, so from their reaction I have concluded that Juan is very knowledgable but not beyond the norm for professional colourists. I think film-making on YT is kind of becoming it's own universe and people like Casey stand out. However in the traditional world of film-making there are colourists who are part of professional guilds, work as part of the feature film industry, go to industry conferences, and some of them teach - either in person or behind paywalls and we've never even heard of them. The YT world and that professional world don't really have much contact with each other, so if it wasn't for people like Juan Melara we almost wouldn't know that there are people who put the rest of us to shame. In a sense, Casey is doing just fine, and if he can make footage look good and match different cameras together then that's all that's needed. There's no right or wrong way to do art, after all. However, once you become aware of the skill level that is out there in the industry then it's a bit hard to look at the YT colourists who sell LUTs and wonder if they're professional colourists or if they're really just LUT salespeople who only need to know enough more than their customers to appear knowledgeable enough to make good LUTs. When there are people like Juan who know so much more than the colourists who take log / non-rec709 footage and just adjust it with the LGG wheels or contrast controls it makes you wonder what else they're telling you that's flat our wrong, let alone just unhelpful advice. I watched many hours of YT colourists to get familiar with Resolve, and after studying Juans videos and reading lots of LGG threads, I realised that much of the techniques I'd learned from YT were just bad advice, and I needed to unlearn them and learn good replacement techniques.

Yes, but is it a pocket cinema camera? (Yes, I'm kidding... welcome to the forums!)

I sympathise about device overload. While I don't carry that many devices, I certainly own that many through past upgrades and whatnot. Unfortunately these days it seems that we buy new gear when the new device adds one extra feature to the existing products with their dozens of features.

That looks interesting, but lots of reviews talk of bugs and the In App purchases don't make it clear what functionality you get with the app purchase. How do you use it for video editing? Just to extend your desktop?

I was referring to the physical controller, the software itself, and the controllermate software you have to buy on top of that. I remember jerry-rigging a midi synth programming box to my computer and using a virtual MIDI driver and a MIDI processing program to change the MIDI commands from the programmer into MIDI control messages, and it was a mess to setup and install and the above setup doesn't seem to be that much different. During the demo video the guy mentions a few different menus that seem to be controlled in different ways via different methods. I'm also a bit reminded of the PC days when you'd put a computer together and it wouldn't work and the support for each product would blame the other products and you'd be stuck in the middle with "have you tried restarting it?" as your only logical approach! I guess that's maybe why the other controllers are so much more expensive - because they can be. Resolve has brought cutting edge tools to the masses for a ridiculously cheap price but I guess the hardware options are still price gouging for what is essentially some drivers and a hardware controller worth a couple of hundred dollars. Your controller video is impressive, but I couldn't work out how you were steering the ant walking across the colour checker? ? I think with all of this stuff there's a learning curve and you need to use it enough for that time to be paid off, and you need to use it enough to even remember what buttons do what. I use Resolve enough to remember the basic stuff, but I find that I have to solve a problem two or three times to remember that I've already solved it and to remember what hotkey I set it to! and remembering the button combination on the controller is probably just as difficult as remembering the hotkey on the normal keyboard. Then again I'm not grading often, and when I am it's more in-depth troubleshooting rather than simple and repetitive, so I'm not really the target market. What I would pay for ahead of a hardware controller is something that would let me use my iPad as an external monitor while editing. A 13inch laptop doesn't have the ideal amount of screen realestate for Resolve and its a lot tougher to take an external monitor travelling with you than to pack an iPad too!

Here's what I suspect most people use MD for...

If you put a 60fps clip on a 24fps timeline and set it to 40% speed it will play it back at 24p, using all the frames in the original clip. The fps in the dialogue box is wrong. If you leave the clip attributes as default and change the speed on the timeline you can have the same clip appear multiple times on the timeline at different speeds.

I have just put a bunch of money into MFT and I think apart from choosing the lenses that give you the right look, the elephant in the room is about investing into the MFT system at a time when everyone seems to be going to FF. For me, I don't see my GH5 as an investment - it's something I will pay to use for the next few years and at some point I'll sell and take a large loss, or would keep as a B-camera. I suspect that my MFT lenses may also suffer the same drop in value, and I'm ok with that. If you're ok with that too then that's great, but if you're not then I'd suggest you consider what the MFT lens system is likely to be worth when you're up for your next camera upgrade that isn't MFT. Maybe the system will live on and if it does then that's great, but if it doesn't then be prepared for that outcome. In terms of the 'look', you can always buy sharper lenses and soften them in post (which works to some degree) or buy filters that will do the job in-camera. The added advantage of filters is that the look is adjustable, eg with Tiffen they supply various 'strengths' so you can choose which you like, or even buy multiples and swap depending on the project. With lens softness (eg, the Helios) you get one look (including the Bokeh, which at MFT crop isn't that strong, but is still there) so you better be happy with it.

FF 8K RAW shooting camera with 16 stop DR and anamorphic adapter..... on a gimbal!

Interesting. Although by the time you buy all the things it's not a huge discount. Do you use a controller to grade? I've looked at controllers before and ended up not having much idea about if they're even worth it for me. I see professional colourists constantly talking about their process being mostly to do very simple adjustments (LGG wheels) to every shot, so it's about speed and therefore a control surface with the large colour balls is the perfect tool. Of course they also build a look, but in Resolve you can just do that in one location for the whole timeline so speed isn't important there. If they're doing a feature then it might involve tracking windows across many shots, but for TV and doc work that doesn't seem to be the case. For me, who shoots in less than ideal situations that require much more correction and attention, and also shoot fewer and much shorter videos so I don't really need the basic/bulk approach.

Actually, the Black Friday sale on Filmsimplified.com is pretty good - 85% off on the Resolve training, and I've just bought it It's designed for beginners so i'm not sure how much stuff I've worked out already, but it includes Fusion which I have no clue about, and Fairlight which I only have basic knowledge of, so that should be useful!