From the course: DaVinci Resolve 12 Essential Training

About this rig - DaVinci Resolve Tutorial

From the course: DaVinci Resolve 12 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

About this rig

“

- I’ve got a lot of stuff here on my desktop, and you might be saying, “Patrick, what is all of this? I’ve never seen any of this, except for maybe the laptop.” Now, in a later chapter, we’re going to go through all the gear and the hardware that DaVinci Resolve 12 supports, minimum requirements, all that stuff we’re going to cover. I’m not going to cover that here. What I want to talk to you about is this other stuff here, what’s going on. Let’s first talk about this. This is the reference monitor that I use when I’m color correcting. Why don’t I just use the laptop, right? Well the answer to that is, number one, the laptop, look how small that is right there, right? You can see, just physically, the size, between looking at the reference image as a postage stamp on my interface, compared to having it dedicated full-time, full-screen, no interface elements, looking at me. On top of that, I know this has been calibrated, I know it’s 100% accurate, and it gives me confidence. Confidence as a colorist is everything. If you don’t have confidence in your work, and in the quality of your work, it’ll end up translating to your clients. They’ll know it. The other thing I’ve got here, is a control surface, and this is a tangent element. And there are many different types of control surfaces you can go out and buy. The reason I’ve got this here, really, is, and for both of these, it’s kind of aspirational. I want to show you what you could be aspiring to, if you really want to get good and fast at color correction, you need these tools to help you speed through it. I talked about the 1,145 shots I had to color correct in three and a half days. I couldn’t do that just with a mouse. I had to do it with a control surface. It allows me to work very quickly. It means that I can sit here and do stuff here, and not look at the interface. I can look over here at my reference monitor, making changes, and then I develop muscle memory. I learn, every time I press this button here, and that button there, I know precisely what it’s going to do. It means I don’t have to find my mouse, right? I can just be looking at this monitor, and then just go press, and press, and there we go. I know exactly what the software is going to be performing. So that’s what we’ve got set up here, we’ve got a full-time, dedicated reference monitor, we have got a control surface, and they come in a range of sizes and prices. There’s probably something there in your budget. It’s something to upgrade to and aspire to. And finally, the last question I often get is, “Well Patrick, if I follow along and do this training, do I know what I’m doing if I don’t have a reference monitor? If I’m just using my computer, does this training make sense?" And the answer is yeah, it totally makes sense, because for me, I want to teach you good concepts. And it’s important that you get good concepts. If your monitor’s pushing a little green, it means you’re going to color correct a little extra green out of it, but if you do it right, you’re always moving consistently in that one direction, so there’s going to be a consistency to all of your work. And that, in color correction, is what’s really important. Consistency is everything. That’s how you’ll be judged, so even if you’re a little bit off, because you’re just working off of your display on your computer or on your laptop, that’s okay, especially for learning purposes. It’s when you start billing clients for money and you start making promises, that’s when you really want to think about upgrading to something like an external display. And if you’re wondering, "How the heck am I getting all of this stuff connected to the external reference monitor, to my control surface?" Well to get to the external monitor, I’m using something like this, an UltraStudio Mini Monitor, which takes, basically, a Thunderbolt out of my computer, and feeds that into my reference display. As we talk about in a later movie on gear, you’ve got to go with a Blackmagic device. It’s Blackmagic software, so it’s Blackmagic hardware that allows you to send out your signal full-time to an external reference monitor. And on the control surface it’s simple. It’s either USB or ethernet, depending on the brand of control surface you’re using.

Contents