Welcome to the supporting documentation for the Fusion Color Management video on DaVinci Master Key. Please leave comments in the video if you have questions or corrections!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6GLDi-UADk

LATEST DOCUMENT FOR DAVINCI RESOVLE 18.6 (28.11.2023) - https://www.notion.so/Fusion-Color-Management-2165c1daadfd4d31802f8ebfbc3971c1

Introduction

Hi, I’m Daria. I made this video (and document) to summarise all the solutions I found for working in Fusion in a variety of color management environments.

Challenges of Fusion Color Management

DaVinci Resolve ‘page’ system is pretty extraordinary - it allows you to edit, grade, mix, and composite your projects without turning files over to other applications. This means no time-consuming rendering and no juggling of file standards, compression and color information.

The Fusion page is a unique component of this harmonious system. As it is designed for high-end compositing workflows, it operates within its own internal color space, independent from the rest of the pages: sRGB Linear. This is a popular working color space amongst professional compositing applications due to its mathematically-consistent approach to color and luminance values.

This internal color space is not an issue in non-color managed projects, and it mostly works fine in standard dynamic range (SDR). However, in high dynamic range (HDR), DaVinci Wide Gamut (DWG), and ACES color managed-projects, we start to see a disconnect between what we see in Fusion, in Fusion’s Viewer LUT, and in the other pages.

This is directly related to Fusion’s internal color space, what the Fusion LUT is designed to do, and what DaVinci Resolve’s color management is anticipating when it maps Fusion signals. In wider gamut workflows, these three don’t always add up.

My intentions

Over, the years, in conversations with colleagues, and through online research, I’ve found a variety of effective solutions for these color and gamut issues.

However, these solutions were often irrelevant to my workflows, or behaved more like bandaids - short-term solutions to very specific problems. They would often not be stable across different media types, or failed when switching between deliverables.

I wanted to find and present options that would be as widely applicable as possible to the average user. The requirements I set for myself was to present solutions that:

  1. Would work for beginners. They would require no complex back-end coding or installation of third party color management.
  2. Were future-proof. Their setup should not require configuration for future deliverables.
  3. Operated within Fusion’s color space. This would allow the user to take advantage of Davinci Resolve’s 32-bit floating point working space.

I believe I have been able to achieve this, but if I realise in future that I have made a mistake or if I find better options, I will update my written summary and pin a post in the YouTube video’s comments. I encourage you, dear reader, to comment if you think I’ve made dire mistakes or presented the information poorly.

Project Setup

In this section, I will take you through the setup of the template project I used in the video to demonstrate all the color management scenarios.

  1. Create a new DaVinci Resolve Project.
  2. In the Edit page, drag a 5-second Fusion Composition into a new timeline.