Uploaded June 2020 | Updated September 2026, 11 minutes ago
In today's tutorial I do a color grading breakdown for Problematic's latest music video in DaVinci Resolve shot on a Canon M50 (apparently Greg got a new camera so it's actually a 90D my bad y'all). I also have lots of tips for color grading 8 bit video to help you get the results that work for your projects, and there's a tip for some special sauce at the end for an easy effect that helps make an image pop.
Problematic's Latest Music Video: youtube.com/watch?v=nclvhNyvj0k
Everything shown in this video can be done in the free version of Davinci Resolve 16
Download Davinci Resolve for Free: blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve
Notes:
8 Bit color grading is incredibly common as so many consumer cameras shoot 8 bit (eng cameras too) so I figured it was long overdue that I cover some of my do's and don't for 8 bit.
Speaking about bits, while I didn't want to get too deep into it aside from the little blurb I just wanna explain how we arrive at how many shades are available per color channel (RGB). So a bit has the ability to be either a 1 or a 0 so if you had 1 bit you would have two possible combinations which are 1 and 0/f you had 2 bits you have 4 possible combinations which are: 00, 10, 11, 01. When you have 3 bits it's 8 possible combinations and so on. Now this may sound small and that 68 billion possible combinations sounds impossible but you have to realize that this is increasing exponentially. The expression being 2^n where n is the number of bits. Now these bits are available for each channel, so for video each the Red Green and Blue channels have 2^n possible shades where n is the number of bits. So to get the total number of possible colors you the have to calculate how many possible combinations there are with those 3 channels coming together. So we have s^3 where s in the number of shades for each channel. So that's how we end up with these massive leaps. No while the human eye really can't see much more than 10 million colors. The computer you're processing the image with however can see all of these colors. The more colors you have available the less opportunity for banding occurs, you can also pull a better key and there's more granularity. I hope this makes sense and I do highly recommend checking out Videomaker's explainer video on this as it makes things fairly clear. I just felt it was irresponsible not to also provide this information within this video.
Also as I state a number of times in the video, this is just how I did things for this particular project. There's no one right way to operate, just different techniques for different situations.
References:
Bit Depth Explained by Videomaker: youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=6yXYxp0UiVg
The order of Image processing Operations Graphic: Page 2615 of the Resolve Manual
Lens Reflections FX: Pages 2813-2814 of the Resolve Manual
Problematic "Lie": youtube.com/watch?v=kNvatWjmh90
Problematic "Stay Wide Awake": youtube.com/watch?v=3z4YlgW1RA8
The resolve reference manual can be easily found in the help tab of DaVinci Resolve
Gear I use:
Camera - Black Magic Pocket 4k
Microphone - Rode NTK
Main Lens - Meike 12mm f2.8
Other lenses - Meike 35 mm f1.7, Rokinon 50mm T1.5, Rokinon 24mm T1.5
Tripod - Velbon Videomate 638
Computer Specs:
CPU - Ryzen 1700x
GPU - GTX 1070
In today's tutorial I do a color grading breakdown for Problematic's latest music video in DaVinci Resolve shot on a Canon M50 (apparently Greg got a new camera so it's actually a 90D my bad y'all). I also have lots of tips for color grading 8 bit video to help you get the results that work for your projects, and there's a tip for some special sauce at the end for an easy effect that helps make an image pop.
Problematic's Latest Music Video: youtube.com/watch?v=nclvhNyvj0k
Everything shown in this video can be done in the free version of Davinci Resolve 16
Download Davinci Resolve for Free: blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve
Notes:
8 Bit color grading is incredibly common as so many consumer cameras shoot 8 bit (eng cameras too) so I figured it was long overdue that I cover some of my do's and don't for 8 bit.
Speaking about bits, while I didn't want to get too deep into it aside from the little blurb I just wanna explain how we arrive at how many shades are available per color channel (RGB). So a bit has the ability to be either a 1 or a 0 so if you had 1 bit you would have two possible combinations which are 1 and 0/f you had 2 bits you have 4 possible combinations which are: 00, 10, 11, 01. When you have 3 bits it's 8 possible combinations and so on. Now this may sound small and that 68 billion possible combinations sounds impossible but you have to realize that this is increasing exponentially. The expression being 2^n where n is the number of bits. Now these bits are available for each channel, so for video each the Red Green and Blue channels have 2^n possible shades where n is the number of bits. So to get the total number of possible colors you the have to calculate how many possible combinations there are with those 3 channels coming together. So we have s^3 where s in the number of shades for each channel. So that's how we end up with these massive leaps. No while the human eye really can't see much more than 10 million colors. The computer you're processing the image with however can see all of these colors. The more colors you have available the less opportunity for banding occurs, you can also pull a better key and there's more granularity. I hope this makes sense and I do highly recommend checking out Videomaker's explainer video on this as it makes things fairly clear. I just felt it was irresponsible not to also provide this information within this video.
Also as I state a number of times in the video, this is just how I did things for this particular project. There's no one right way to operate, just different techniques for different situations.
References:
Bit Depth Explained by Videomaker: youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=6yXYxp0UiVg
The order of Image processing Operations Graphic: Page 2615 of the Resolve Manual
Lens Reflections FX: Pages 2813-2814 of the Resolve Manual
Problematic "Lie": youtube.com/watch?v=kNvatWjmh90
Problematic "Stay Wide Awake": youtube.com/watch?v=3z4YlgW1RA8
The resolve reference manual can be easily found in the help tab of DaVinci Resolve
Gear I use:
Camera - Black Magic Pocket 4k
Microphone - Rode NTK
Main Lens - Meike 12mm f2.8
Other lenses - Meike 35 mm f1.7, Rokinon 50mm T1.5, Rokinon 24mm T1.5
Tripod - Velbon Videomate 638
Computer Specs:
CPU - Ryzen 1700x
GPU - GTX 1070
