[In progress] Hellraiser (1987) [Project: Celluloid]

[spoRv]

Veeeery far to be a Resolve expert, but lately I'm "studying" video cards and their chance to be wisely used with Resolve, along eventual good CPUs... so, may you post your hardware configuration? At least I may try to tell if it's "good enough" for Resolve!

[LucasGodzilla]

Veeeery far to be a Resolve expert, but lately I'm "studying" video cards and their chance to be wisely used with Resolve, along eventual good CPUs... so, may you post your hardware configuration? At least I may try to tell if it's "good enough" for Resolve!

Actually, I just remembered something that I didn't think much of when I first installed Resolve and I guess that's now biting me. I vaguely recall seeing a diagnostic message from the program saying that my computer is not able to support Resolve 15 to its full capacity (however it did state that basic color grading should be fine). Obviously, it seems Resolve has a hard time now that I have way more LUTs to dabble with.

Unfortunately, as a result, I'm going to have to look into other programs that can cut the movie up and apply LUTs onto clips manually–excluding AVISynth cause I have practically zero understanding of the program and the last time I did try to learn batch-command programs for things like these it took me half a day. I do have Sony Vegas 14 but that doesn't support LUTs and there doesn't seem to be a free plugin to fix that (there is one that claimed to be free but costs $3 which is cheap but I'm cheaper, sorry lol). I also have Magix Movie Edit Pro (forgot what edition) but it's uninstalled and Final Cut Pro for a Mac I have (but that thing is damn slow and then I would have to figure out how to bloody drag that massive converted file of the movie for editing).

In short, I'm a bit crippled right now. I'm not sure what to do now. The only solution I have apart from just to keep searching for a free LUT plugin for Vegas or getting new hardware (unlikely) would be to literally package up all of my LUTS and crap (and hopefully the movie timeline for all of the cuts) and see if it's possible to have someone else apply the LUTs or something (Boy wouldn't that be "fun").

[spoRv]

You can also try to install Resolve 14; this "may" be less resource-hungry!

Again, post your hardware, I'm curious now!

[LucasGodzilla]

You can also try to install Resolve 14; this "may" be less resource-hungry!

Again, post your hardware, I'm curious now!

I'm also running a GTX 970 for a graphics card.

I'm also seeing right now what would happen if I reconvert the corrupt LUTs since it seems it may be the Cube files. That does seem to fix the issue of LUTs simply not working, however, it doesn't seem to fix the weird issue with the colors in some areas (the green grains on that still of Pinhead for example). Does anyone have a solution or an idea as to why it's happening?

Scratch that, I'm wrong, it still doesn't work and I don't know why. Dammit.

I have no clue what to do at this point cause I believe Resolve 14 has essentially the same system requirements as 15. In short, I'm crippled in terms of doing a specific shot-by-shot grade and can't do anything about it, and I don't intend to make a single comp grade, apply it and call it a day cause then you may as well just watch an older release of the movie.

[deleted user]

Try Premiere? It can apply LUTs via the "Lumetri" effect.

[spoRv]

Sure you have not to upgrade just to regrade a movie!

For what I saw lately around, the bottleneck could be in the CPU, and/or the RAM, and/or the GPU; as Resolve rely quite heavily on GPU, IF you may think to upgrade something, I'd try replacing GPU first - a 8GB card should do, an RX 580 is relatively quite cheap, expecially used.

My hint: if you have a nice friend with a powerful card, that is craz... kind enough to let you try it, go for it!

[LucasGodzilla]

Okay, the more and more I dig into the problem, the more and more I begin to realize why some things have gone so screwy. It seems that it was the LUTS after all. When I made all of the LUTS for each of those shots, I did it using the 32-bit version of Dr. Dre's tool instead of the unofficial 64 bit since I read it was more accurate. Turns out that seems to be the problem since the majority of the Cubes from that program come out corrupted since I tested it with the 64-bit and those work. On top of that, I figured out with the weird coloration. Basically, from what I can tell, in the brighter / whiter shots, the colors seemed to have swapped out with alternate colors (the following pics coming from the new composite grade).

However, after fiddling with the curve, I found that if I lower the (presuming to be) highlight curve, I was able to fix this issue trivially. So all in all, things should be able to proceed like before, the only issue is that I'll have to re-build all of the grades from the newly-received stills, but hey, better than nothing right?

[deleted user]

Those discolored highlights are a known (at least to me and DrDre) problem with DrDre's tool. As you discovered, one way to deal with it is to adjust the pre-LUT luma/RGB curve in the highlights just before the artifacts begin to appear (you can use a similar method for somewhat recovering highlights when matching to a reference with blown highlights by compressing the highlights curve pre-LUT, and then using a post-LUT curve to expand the highlights again). Another way to improve on it is the 2-pass method I described earlier. So you would basically take the graded shot, like yours with the green bulb, then paint over the green in Photoshop so it becomes white, then run it through DrDre again.

Yet another way to deal with it, is to always include a small gradient/"color wheel" in both input and output image when creating your LUT in DrDre. Ideally in the reference image you adjust the colors of that one a bit so that it becomes very roughly representative of the color differences between the sources.

The problem seems to occur most often when the LUT is being created from images that have a lower luminance range (for example lacking any real highlights) than the footage the LUT is to be used on later. Lacking highlight information, DrDre has no idea how to map those higher values, resulting in often random artifacts in the highlights. So, just add a gradient that has all the values missing from the source image, it will help mitigate the problem a little, depending on severity of the problem and how big you make the gradient. Sometimes even a small pure white bar can help. Naturally, that doesn't mean that you will get "correct" values there, just that they will at least be somewhat more reasonable, as it will orient itself on those reference values where it can't find anything in the frame itself.

It can also occur when the alignment of the frames isn't perfect. You're probably doing it already, but running the images through Photoshop's Auto-Align is something you should be doing.

Those are just a few experience values I got from working with DrDre, hope it's of any use.

[LucasGodzilla]

Those discolored highlights are a known (at least to me and DrDre) problem with DrDre's tool. As you discovered, one way to deal with it is to adjust the pre-LUT luma/RGB curve in the highlights just before the artifacts begin to appear (you can use a similar method for somewhat recovering highlights when matching to a reference with blown highlights by compressing the highlights curve pre-LUT, and then using a post-LUT curve to expand the highlights again). Another way to improve on it is the 2-pass method I described earlier. So you would basically take the graded shot, like yours with the green bulb, then paint over the green in Photoshop so it becomes white, then run it through DrDre again.

Thanks for the advice. I will most likely just tweak the highlights at the end of the day though since I find way too many of the shots to be way too bright anyway, probably due to the Arrow transfer since they cranked up the brightness in some areas a little too much, so simply adjusting the curve will likely do the trick.

I wish JohnCarpenterFan had some stills of the outdoor / daylight segments because I'm sure the problem would be averted for the most part since this problem is most frequent in those segments and would help provide those missing highlights as you mentioned (And the finale feels off in-terms of colors since I've seen it much bluer in some snippets–such as in the trailer Turisu posted back–but for all I know those could be false so I'm not going to adjust those without a true reference). But hey, I'm happy with what I already have.

My current plan all-in-all: Do the regrade like before, make a second-pass grade for everything, then adjust the highlights and see how it looks from there. I'm hoping with that second pass the highlights issue won't be as big of an issue since there actually are a few areas in the scanned stills–such as this–that should provide the missing highlights.

[deleted user]

Hope you get some good results.

Hey by the way, if you want to improve quality more and have enough space, you could take the encode of the same master from the Germany Blu Ray and overlay the two with 0.5 opacity, combining them to hopefully get a better overall quality. Thats basically kind of what I was thinking of doing, but since you're going all-in on this, may as well do it properly. I can help you out with getting the German encode if you need it. I think the Arrow version has some weird grain issues iirc (weirdly moving grain fields), that might help a bit.