This week on MacBreak Studio, we talk about how you can start to think about incorporating remote grades into your color grading workflow in DaVinci Resolve 16.

As opposed to local grades, which only affect the specific instance of a single timeline clip, remote grades are applied to all timeline clips that come from the same source clip in the media pool. A good example of their efficacy is in a typical interview-b-roll edit where the timeline includes multiple soundbites from the same single interview clip.

In such cases, you may be used to copying grades from one clip to another, either directly in the timeline, or by grabbing stills. Those techniques are useful to a point, but can still be time consuming and subject to error since you have to manually locate each clip that needs the same grade applied. Using the Lightbox can assist in this process, but it’s still easy to miss a clip. And if you need to adjust the grade, unless you’ve created a group of the clips or are using shared nodes, you need to copy once again.

Remote grades, on the other hand, only need to be applied to a single clip and then will appear immediately on every other clip in the timeline from the same source. They will also appear on any other timeline you create in the same project, assuming you have set the timeline to use remote grades (you can set entire timelines, a filtered timeline, or individual clips to use local or remote grades). You can also copy grades between local and remote versions if you started with a local grade and decide a remote grade would be more efficient.

Remote grades can also be used by a DIT to do a one-light pass (either a quick balance grade or applying a LUT or some combination) before handing off the project to an editor, who can edit with graded project, and when that edit makes it to the colorist (who these days may well be the same person), the initial grade is already in place.

Check it out above and let us know what you think.