LUTs for LOG: Why You Should Use a LUT with LOG Footage - DaVinci Resolve 14

If you’re new to shooting a LOG profile with your camera and are finding that the color of your footage isn’t looking as natural as you’d expect, it might be that using the camera manufacturer’s LOG LUT will make a big difference.

This was my exact situation: I started shooting with the Blackmagic Design Ursa Mini Pro using the “Film” profile (which is a LOG profile). But I found that skin tones generally looked rather too pink or magenta. I was baffled until my friend Jacob Fenn, who is a colorist, showed me this technique in DaVinci Resolve 14. Simply using the color space transform effect to apply the BMD 4.6k LUT solved the problem!

Links to gear discussed and used to record this session:

Blackmagic Design Ursa Mini Pro Cinema Camera

Ursa Viewfinder - Good for when shooting outdoors in the sun

Ursa Mini Pro SSD Recorder -allows you to record to standard, affordable 2.5” SSD drives

Anton Bauer 90Wh Digital Battery - about 2 hours of life with viewfinder and SSD recorder. This battery keeps track of a bunch of metadata which the Anton Bauer performance charger takes into account to optimize charging

Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8 OS ART Lens (used on the single shot of Cary on my Ursa Mini Pro)

Electrovoice RE20 Dynamic Microphone (This is what I used to record the voice over for this episode)

Antelope Audio Orion Studio Audio Interface (Thunderbolt and USB 3.0)

Copyright 2017 by Curtis Judd