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

UPDATE (28.11.2023) - I have made some corrections, included more solutions and addressed some of the 18.6 UI changes that have occurred since the video came out. If you would prefer to read the older documentation that matches the video instructions, please click here: https://shore-soprano-87f.notion.site/Fusion-Color-Management-18-5-8ffe32a6c9744ca19cab1b1b9737c3a4

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/wide gamut spaces (most HDR formats), 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 DaVinci Resolve pages.

This is directly related to Fusion’s internal color space, what the Fusion viewer 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 line 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 color management options that would be as widely applicable as possible to the average user. The requirements I set for myself was to present solutions that:

Would work for beginners. They would require no complex back-end coding or installation of third party color management plugins.
Were future-proof. Their setup should not require configuration for future deliverables.
Operated within Fusion’s color space. This would allow the user to fully 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 a mistake or presented any of the information poorly.

To add to these intentions, an additional outcome I’m hoping for is for the average reader to be able to build their own color management solutions by understanding the DaVinci Resolve signal flow and how the image is managed at every stage.

Image Processing in DaVinci Resolve

Before we start looking at solutions, we need to see the exact order in which the signal is being processed and color managed. In the DaVinci Resolve reference manual, in chapter 141, on page 3127, you’ll find the image processing operations diagram:

https://documents.blackmagicdesign.com/UserManuals/DaVinci_Resolve_18_Reference_Manual.pdf#page=3127