The first version of this post was going to be a lot more polished. Then I remembered the client review where two back-to-back clips — both shot on the same camera, same day — looked like they came from different films. We'd applied a grade to one and left the other on its original LOG curve. Simple oversight, but it shipped.
That's when we locked in a project template and stopped winging the setup. Here's what's in it.
Project setup: how we configure color management
The first decision in any DaVinci Resolve project is whether you're working in a managed or unmanaged color pipeline. We always use managed — specifically, DaVinci YRGB Color Science with DaVinci Wide Gamut Intermediate as the timeline color space.
The reason is that DaVinci Wide Gamut is a larger container than any camera's native color space. Grade everything in Wide Gamut and the math stays consistent regardless of whether the B-roll came from a Sony FX3, a DJI Mavic 3 Cine, or a client's iPhone. You set your input transform per clip, grade in the middle, and set one output transform for the whole timeline. Swap the delivery format later and only the last node changes.
Never grade directly on a LOG signal. Set up your input and output transforms first — grade in the middle.
Output color space: Rec.709 Gamma 2.4 for broadcast and web. For social delivery we stay in Rec.709 but bump the gamma to 2.2, which holds up better on phone screens that aren't calibrated to a viewing standard.
Node tree: what goes in every project
We use a three-section node tree as the base. Every clip in every project starts with the same structure before anything creative happens.
Node 1 — Input transform. A Color Space Transform (CST) node that takes whatever the camera recorded (S-Log3, V-Log, D-Log M from the drone, etc.) and converts it to DaVinci Wide Gamut Intermediate. This node is locked after it's set. Nothing creative, no adjustments — just the technical conversion that gets everything onto the same starting line.
Nodes 2 and 3 — Lift, gamma, and contrast; then primary color. Two separate nodes rather than one, because separating luminance from color makes it much easier to go back and fix one without breaking the other. We set black point and white point first using the parade scope (more on that below), then balance the color in the second node.
Node 4 — Look node. Optional. If the project has a defined look — a particular grade the client approved in the style frame — it lives here. We use this node sparingly on corporate work and more heavily on brand campaigns where color is part of the identity.
Final node — Output transform. Another CST, converting from DaVinci Wide Gamut Intermediate to the delivery color space. For Rec.709 web delivery this is straightforward. For HDR deliverables we set up a second output node in a parallel branch.
That's the whole tree for a standard project. Five nodes, maybe six. Anyone who shows you a 20-node starting template for commercial web video is overcomplicating it.
Scopes: what we actually watch
Two scopes, always open: the parade waveform and the vectorscope. That's it.
The parade waveform shows luminance by channel — red, green, blue — stacked side by side. We use this to anchor black and white points before any creative work starts. Black should sit at 0, white at 1023 for legal range, and the three channels should be roughly balanced when you're looking at something neutral (a gray card, a white wall, a patch of concrete). If the red channel is sitting higher than the blue, you're looking at a warm color cast and you fix it here, not by adding blue later.
Use scopes to anchor exposure, then trust your eyes for the grade. Not the other way around.
The vectorscope shows where your colors are landing in the hue wheel. Skin tones — regardless of skin color — should fall along the skin tone line that runs roughly at the 11 o'clock position on the vectorscope. If they're drifting toward orange or pink, the grade is pushing them, not the subject.
What we don't use during grading: the regular waveform (the parade tells us more), RGB parade vs luma parade depending on the situation, and we avoid trusting the on-screen preview on anything except a calibrated display.
Monitor calibration
We grade on a calibrated reference monitor set to Rec.709. We don't grade on a MacBook display, even with the display color profile set to Rec.709 — consumer displays change with age, angle, and ambient lighting in ways a proper reference panel doesn't.
If you're doing occasional commercial work and can't justify a dedicated reference monitor, the next best option is to probe-calibrate whatever you have with a colorimeter and DisplayCAL. It won't match a proper reference panel, but it will be dramatically more consistent than uncalibrated. Budget around $150–250 for a decent colorimeter (X-Rite i1Display Pro is the most common in our price range) and a few hours the first time you do it.
One rule we don't break: we always do a final review pass on the delivered file in a browser, on a phone, and on a TV. Grades that look perfect in Resolve can fall apart on screens that are cranked to maximum brightness with vivid mode on. The vectorscope is great for technical accuracy — it's not a substitute for seeing how the thing looks on the actual screens your client's customers use.
Delivery formats
For client video projects, we deliver in two formats depending on the use case.
H.265 10-bit for web and social. Smaller file, excellent quality at normal viewing sizes, handles fine detail in skies and skin tones without the banding you get in 8-bit H.264. We target 20–40 Mbps for final delivery. If the client wants to download and re-upload to their own channels, we give them a slightly higher bitrate master (50–80 Mbps) so they're not compressing an already-compressed file.
ProRes 422 HQ for file handoff. Any time a client or third party might need to do further editing — drop the video into a presentation, cut it into another piece, hand it to a broadcast partner — they get ProRes. It's large (a one-minute clip is roughly 2–4 GB), but it survives multiple generations of compression without visual damage. We export with color space tagging set to Rec.709 in the file metadata so anyone opening it in another NLE doesn't have to guess.
One thing we changed after the delivery incident mentioned at the top: we always export a stills contact sheet from Resolve before sending anything. Ten random frames, saved as a single PDF, sent alongside the video. If a clip slipped through with the wrong grade, you catch it in 30 seconds instead of after the client has already reviewed the full cut.
The setup isn't fancy. But it's repeatable, which is worth more than fancy on most commercial projects.
If you're evaluating video production vendors and want to know whether they have a real workflow or they're winging it, ask them what their output color space is. The answer tells you a lot.
— Cole