I still haven’t had time to watch the workprint, but I’m just chiming in so you know I’m still following the technical details you’re going through in the thread, even though it’s above my head in terms of contributing anything useful to it.
That’s okay. All that’s going on at the moment is that I’m trying to find a good balance in the color grade between accurate skin tones and keeping the grading from going full orange and teal like so many present-day movies often do. It’s tricky, but worth it.
On the bright side, I found that I can save more time by grading the timeline instead of the individual edits on Resolve. That way, I don’t have to spend days color correcting every single edit I’ve made while also ensuring consistency across the entire movie. So there’s a good chance I might be able to fix the issue sooner rather than later. I still have to watch the edit in full to see if I’ve missed something, but I’m feeling confident in the results.
I never did much colour correction other than fixing big obvious differences between shots, but I remember the people who were very meticulous with it would usually apply a standard grading across a whole scene, then go in and tweak individual shots for consistency. That was with raw footage, which I realise is different than working with footage that’s already been graded and finalised, but I figure the same principle would apply.
The more detailed explanation is that you start the color grade with what is known as a Look-Up Table (LUT), and then you color correct it. I tried this back in Episode I, and used a Blackmagic Design 4k Film to Extended Video v4 LUT on the edit, and at the time, I thought it looked amazing. But when I watched the edit on my HDTV, I discovered that a lot of the darker scenes were impossible to see. Even after readjusting, I still had a hard time brightening up the image so that the smaller details could be made visible. I scrapped the LUT, learned the value of using scopes, and I’ve done most of my work using the color wheels and curves on DaVinci Resolve. After I finished Episode II, Resolve got an update from 16 to 17, and now I’m using HDR color wheels for Episode III. I’m really enjoying these new color wheels, and they’re a vast improvement over the old ones.
Anyway, I think I’ve come up with something. I have a long work day tomorrow, but I’ll see how the color grade looks the day after.