DaVinci Resolve: Staying Consistent and Having a Uniform Look for a Series

We’ll be the first to admit that getting a consistent color correction look in a series can be frustrating. Luckily, DaVinci Resolve has various tools to reveal, compare and fix these issues.

While we are fortunate enough to live in a world full of advanced technology that leads the way we record video, there are still significant differences in how each camera’s sensor handles color science. That results in a significantly different look from one manufacturer to the other.

This difference leaves us with the sad realisation that a simple copy and paste of a grade from one shot to another won’t yield the same result. Even using a different lighting setup can drastically affect the outcome of our color correction from clip to clip.

In this article, we’ll address the thing colorists dread the most—shot pairing. To reveal the problem shots, we will use some tips and tools to highlight what needs to be fixed so you can have a common and consistent color correction throughout your series.

Here is what we’ll cover:

• Grabbing and applying stills — save current node structure for later reuse
• Image wipe — correcting with the reference in the same viewer
• Split-screen — correcting with the reference still side by side
• Neighbor clips — referencing neighboring clips surrounding the main clip
• Selected clips — correcting with a clip selection in the viewer
• Lightbox — displaying the timeline in a grid view

Check out the YouTube playlist to see all published videos in this season.