The documentary series 'Climate Fightback', graded with DaVinci

Faced with an overwhelming amount of images in various formats, colorist Luo Chengyuan had to finish color grading for all three episodes in six days, with each episode consisting of 700 or 800 shots.

Climate Fightback, a three-episode documentary produced by Entertainment Co. for China Central Television (CCTV) using the DaVinci Resolve Studio solution, along with a DaVinci Resolve Mini Panel, from Blackmagic Design, in its post-production and finishing.

The documentary reflects humanity's efforts to confront climate changes arising from industrialization. The twelve months of recording resulted in an immense amount of recorded material including 50TB of data from the Chinese production team alone.

Faced with an overwhelming amount of images in various formats, colorist Luo Chengyuan had to finish color grading for all three episodes of Climate Fightback in six days, with each episode consisting of 700 or 800 shots. This meant that it was crucial that the editing system and the color system worked together for maximum efficiency.

Because this is a nature documentary, the director wanted Chengyuan to ensure that the color reproduction was accurate and consistent. This was easily achievable thanks to DaVinci Resolve's extensive toolset along with the functionality of the DaVinci Resolve Mini Panel.

"This project required the editing and grading teams to work together, with a very tight deadline, so we couldn't waste time. We estimated that it would take us about three days to complete the shaping and copying of the material obtained, so the director decided to use a workflow based on DaVinci Resolve's 'Scene Cut Detection' function, which allowed us to save that time, as well as space on the hard drive," Chengyuan said.

High precision

Speaking about the accuracy of this tool, he added that "it is capable of recognizing more than 95% of the cuts, and the first chapter alone contained 780 shots in total, although after using this function, that number increased to 885. The additional sequences were fades to white and dissolves that generally help visualize the groups of scene cuts. All I had to do was eliminate those cut points. Detecting the scenes in an episode took me four and a half minutes, and it took me less than forty to find the transitions and removing the points that had been added. Once this process was done, the number of shots was reduced to 745, which in my opinion is quite accurate compared to the original 780.

"Also, the curve options in the program are very flexible and can be used to make adjustments to a specific region of an image based on hue, hue or saturation, without affecting the rest of the content. For example, the director wanted the scene where the fish are killed in the harbor to have a cold look, which combined with a pool of blood on the floor, resulted in an overly gory look, so I used the hue vs. curve. saturation with the aim of reducing the saturation of the red color. In fact, it is very easy to oversaturate it, and that is why this function was very useful for me to fix chromatic excesses of saturation, such as in shots with red flowers or insects in the grass," he added.

In a sequence with pandas, the director of Climate Fightback He noticed that the fur of these wild animals had a yellowish tone after the first stage of grading, which made the bear look very dirty. In order to achieve a clean look, the colorist reduced the saturation of the animal's hair with the luminance vs. saturation and hue vs. saturation, along with the Power Windows tracking tool and keyframing capabilities. Regarding the tracking function, he added that "this Resolve option is very precise, and it is possible to adjust a large number of parameters. In short, it is very flexible."

Lou often used both the midtone and sharpness controls while grading the documentary. "I was able to reduce blurring problems by increasing the values ​​in these parameters. I used the same technique in the close-ups of the scene on the Tibet plateau, in order to illuminate the skin texture of the men there," said the colorist.

In documentary productions, the recording team may encounter uncontrollable lighting conditions from time to time, and hence the colorist may need to process low-light sequences. “Image noise can be very noticeable simply by increasing the brightness and contrast, so I used the temporal and spatial noise reduction features offered by DaVinci Resolve Studio to reduce it,” concludes Lou.