Kino: Pro Video Camera

What do, say, furniture stores do when they "run out of users"?

> If the thing needs updates or changes regularly say once very 6 months....due to changes in standard or just keeping things updated....this stuff costs money to keep developers paid.

The problem is of course, that the industry has settled into a nash equilibrium of constantly changing things, so regular people have to continuously update software, as a way to charge rents, on top of whatever productive improvements they provide.

Unboxing experience in an app is super cool.

You seem to misunderstand the role of LUTs in color grading. LUTs (Look-Up Tables — a simple multi-dimensional array data structure) describe how one color is transformed into another, and they are used for efficient color transformations. In Resolve, the tools you described help build a LUT in memory, which is then applied to each pixel in each frame, often using SIMD instructions for efficiency. This avoids the need to procedurally apply each setting to each pixel individually, which is way slow.

Drawing windows, mattes, tracking, and other masking tools determine where and how the LUT is applied within the rendering pipeline.

> Source? That's a very gross oversimplification of what a color session is like. LUTs don't do tracking. LUTs don't do keys. LUTs don't do mattes.

I work in AAA games and have written code for tonemapping and color grading. We often use a gbuffer (graphics buffer that could be seen as a 2D screen-shaped image that is never shown) to mask different objects in the scene and apply different LUTs accordingly. So, it is not only LUTs that are applied in a similar screen-space way, but also masking is similar.

> There's so much more going into color grading than "apply LUT here". Just look at the control surfaces for Resolve and the number of knobs/buttons/rollers. Would something that just applied LUTs need all of that?

On a low level, it essentially is about applying LUTs. How you create these LUTs and how you mask their application are crucial aspects of the process. But ultimately, a LUT is applied to pixels. You are talking about the artistry techniques involved in making a LUT and masking where it is applied, which is not debated.

LUTs are not just files you can import and export to grade the whole image or frame. They are a fundamental compact data structure that makes SIMD operations easy, which is why they are used in grading. If you set up a color grading pipeline with nodes in Resolve, it is very likely compiled into one or more LUTs, which are then applied to the frames.

Not understanding might not be far from the fact, but it is probably just posturing. I doubt most of the Tubers understand it themselves which is the real reason they can't share. They saw it on some other YT video, and then made it like it was their own idea.

I've tried to explain how to use waveforms/vectorscopes and why they are important. Those things are rarely used any more, and people just don't realize how much more difficult they make it on themselves by not using them. Just because you can push that knob to an 11 doesn't mean you should. Pushing that knob while looking at the scopes will tell you when to stop. This was life or death when making content for broadcast.

Also, I've seen all sorts of weird things that blindly applying a LUT wouldn't solve. There was a specific Red camera in town that had a very strange issue where the green color channel was not recording correctly. One shoot we had footage on was of an ice cream type place that had lots of whipped cream on the desserts. However, as you pushed the levels up, the green lagged behind so as the red and blue channels were maxing out the color on the screen went magenta. Applying a LUT would have looked terrible, but the colorist was able to go in to adjust the levels of the green channel separately so that the cream went back to white. It saved the shoot because a camera was not working properly.

There's also interesting tricks to do like when shooting through windows of a high rise will give a green tint to things. So lowering just the green channel will bring things back which could be a specific LUT, but the thing with LUTs is they tend to get used for the wrong reasons. Shooting underwater without a filter can also be dialed back, but it's specific to camera/depth type of situations.

Another common ask was to "open up the eyes". Well lit faces are notoriously hard as the sunken eye sockets just naturally shadow. So you add a window to the eyes and push the exposure up to achieve the effect that no LUT will ever achieve. If the camera moves for a tracking shot, the windows can track along with it. No LUT will ever accomplish that either. The eye is naturally attracted to the brightest area of the screen, so there's ways of grading something so that it suddenly receives some attention that a LUT would not get there, again using windows. Some of the internationalization of releases have small forensic tells in them to indicate which locale it might have been leaked from. One specific example was a stack of towels in the background of various colors. Through color correction, they changed the colors of the towels to be different for each region.

So so so many things that well graded footage can have done to it that "you wouldn't understand" but would never come close to achieving with a LUT. Wouldn't understand is very harsh though, and is a total cop out from someone that sounds very pompous. I would say "wouldn't consider" as something that could be done let alone needed to be done.

How do you guys manage new versions?

Updates have always been a PITA on iOS. There’s no way to charge for them.