Davinci Resolve HDR Workflow

Davinci Resolve HDR workflow may appear intimidating at first glance, but it’s actually not as difficult as it may seem. There is a catch though, you will need to get a few things before you can actually color grade in HDR beforehand.

What is HDR?

In simple terms, HDR stands for “High Dynamic Range”. I am sure most of us already know this…However, how does it translates to color grading workflow? There are two molecules that make HDR happen. The first one is a Luma and the one is color space. Together combined they make up HDR images.

Traditional TV signal locked to relatively outdated color space rec709. Which is essentially very limited, because it locks at 100nits of brightness. For those who don’t know nit equivalent 1nit of brightness = 1cdm2 monitor brightness. I am trying to simplify as much as I can here…

That means most of you in the world viewing tv signal at 100nits of mastered rec709 color space. Now you as an end user may increase the brightness on your tv, however by making it brightness you not really getting any extra details out of what’s being broadcasted to you.

The image example below represents major color spaces used in modern-day entertainment.

Rec709 represents TV signals such as news broadcasts or some local tv stations. Almost every YouTube video is mastered under the rec709 guideline.

DCI-P3 is what you typically will see in the proper movie theater with a gamma of 2.6. It’s slightly larger than rec709, you see about 25% more color as we can see on the chart. P3 is typically mastered at 10bit vs 8bit sRGB

Gear we need

In order to work with HDR on our computer we need a few things. First of all, we going to need a decklink card to output a pure 12-bit signal to our monitor.

This is the cheapest card you can get to view HDR in 4k signal on your monitor. It includes both HDMI and SDI output for your monitor. Why do we need this card for?

This is not just a random clickbait ad you may think, currently, regular graphics cards are unable to display HDR signal in software such as Davinci Resolve. We need this card to feed the output on our dedicated monitor, which am going to talk about next.

Decklink Card is placed on the mini PCI on your motherboard, so when building a PC, keep that in mind.

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Disclaimer: Decklink card doesn’t do any calculations nor cannot be used as a graphics card. It simply outputs the signal. All calculations are done with your primary graphics card!

What about the monitor? There are tons of regular and gaming monitors that claim they support HDR and another fancy nonsense wordplay…however, there is only a handful of real monitors that are suitable for HDR workflow. You may use technically any monitor you like for GUI preview, but for dedicated monitor it needs to be a certain type.

Here I am going to go crazy and talk about sort of outdated dinosaur HDR monitors like Canon etc that cost $30,000. But the rather practical gear that is being used by many top Hollywood colorists including myself.

The truth is, as much as you want to be closer to 100% rec2020 coverage, realistically few percent can cost thousands of dollars, and realistically nobody really cares if you few percent coverages away from “ideal” trust me on this one.

I personally use Asus ProArt 32 Inches and am extremely happy with it. See below. It supports all HDR standards. HDR10+ / HLG / Dolby Vision and ideal for my workflow.

Another monitor that I personally worked on but not as good as the Asus ProArt is the BenQ Professional Series.

There are other companies out there, but I can’t give any guarantees because I never used them.

Finally, I want to point out the importance of the cables, in my example, I am outputting signal over HDMI, and yes for wanna-be pros, yes you can output HDR over HDMI signal! Be sure to get a good HDMI cable, it doesn’t need to be the most expensive one, but they are all made differently! Anyways, this is the one I use.

Before moving on to the next chapter, don’t forget to check out other cool posts In my BLOG

Now What?

We got the gear! Now What? Let’s dive into Davinci Resolve HDR Workflow and start setting things up! For this demo, I partnered up with new Stock Footage Platform called FindStory. Use code ARAMK to get 20% Discount on any subscription 🙂 A little advertisement plug if you don’t mind I hope!

Alright! Let’s start our Davinci Resolve! Currently, we are on version 18. something so let’s do the usual and add clips into out project!

Now That we loaded our clips and created new timeline let’s start setting up our project for HDR workflow! Click on the gear at the bottom right corner to open project settings.

Under Color Management Tab, let’s change color science to Davinci YRGB managed, color processing HDR rec2020 PQ.

PQ HDR defines HDR10, HDR10+, and Dolby Vision, as all use the same target color space – Rec2020 Gamut, with the same PQ EOTF.

Now that we’ve set the project color environment, let’s set the master settings!

Video monitoring tab represents your external aka dedicated monitor, here is where decklink card and professional grading monitor are a must! Since we going to be working under 12but signal, even though my monitor can only support 10bit, make sure to also enable HDR metadata over HDMI. Depending on the monitor it may or may not automatically switch to PQ. Asus ProArt switches automatically once it detects the HDR setting’s environment!

IMPORTANT!: Once you save your settings, the camera raw color space controls are no longer relevant. You have switched to work under rec2020 PQ. Color Space and Gamma Curve are greyed out.

Now that we have set all the project settings into HDR, last thing we need is to set our scopes to display HDR content properly. In your scopes settings change to HDR ST2084

Currently, Dolby Vision Supports maximum of 10,000 nits of brightness. For most of us, the tops going to be around 1500-2000 nits of brightness.

Color Grading

Now that we set our project, we can start color grading.

Currently, there is no way to show how HDR actually looks on the web with the standard images, so the images below are simulated to mimic what HDR grading looks like.