how to set up a scene-referred workflow in davinci resolve
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
There's a point in most colorists' learning curve where things stop working and they don't know why. The grades look muddy. The colors shift weird when you push them. The look that worked on one clip falls apart on another.
A lot of the time, the problem isn't the grade. It's the pipeline.
Specifically: whether you're working scene-referred or display-referred. Most people never make that distinction consciously. They just grade. And that's fine until it isn't.
what scene-referred actually means
When you grade display-referred, you're working directly in the output color space - usually Rec.709. Your timeline is in Rec.709, your adjustments happen in Rec.709, and what you see is (roughly) what you get. It works. But it's limiting. Rec.709 is a small, compressed color space designed for display. When you push exposure or saturation in that space, you hit walls fast. Colors clip. Skin tones fall apart. You run out of room.
Scene-referred grading works differently. You keep your footage in a wide, linear color space through most of the grading process — something like DaVinci Wide Gamut — and only convert to your output color space at the very end. The grade happens in a space that has a lot more room to move. The result is cleaner adjustments, better color science, and grades that hold up when you push them.
why it matters for real-world footage
In a controlled studio environment with perfect exposure, display-referred grading often looks fine. You're working in a narrow range and everything behaves.
Throw in some real-world footage - inconsistent light, mixed sources, handheld in a market, a sunrise with blown highlights - and display-referred starts to break down. You're fighting the color space instead of working with it.
Scene-referred gives your footage somewhere to breathe. You can recover more, push more, and the transforms at the end do the heavy lifting to bring it into Rec.709 cleanly.
how to set it up in davinci resolve
The setup isn't complicated once you understand what each piece is doing.
1. set your timeline color space to DaVinci Wide Gamut
In Project Settings > Color Management, set your timeline color space to DaVinci Wide Gamut, Davinci Intermediate. This is the working color space - wide, linear-ish, with room to move.
2. set your output color space to Rec.709 Gamma 2.4
This is your display transform. Everything gets converted to this at the end of the pipeline. Rec.709 Gamma 2.4 is the standard for most delivery.
3. use a Color Space Transform (CST) node to bring footage into your timeline space
At the start of your node tree, add a Color Space Transform node. Input: your camera's log format (S-Log3, LogC, BRaw, etc.). Output: DaVinci Wide Gamut, Davinci Intermediate.
Now you're grading in your working space. All your adjustments happen in a wide, stable environment before the final transform.
4. grade in the middle
This is where your exposure work, color balance, contrast, and creative adjustments live. You're in a wide color space with headroom. Push it without hitting walls.
5. output transform at the end
Your final node converts from DaVinci Wide Gamut to Rec.709 Gamma 2.4. This is where you can also add film print emulation - something like Kodak 2383 - if you want a film-influenced output.
a note on understanding scopes in this workflow
One thing that catches people off: when you're working in DaVinci Wide Gamut, your scopes will look different than you expect. Values can go above 100 on the waveform. Colors look muted before the output transform. That's normal. Don't grade to what the scopes tell you in isolation. Grade to the image, and let the output transform do its job.
this is the foundation coolgrades is built on
The coolgrades pipeline uses exactly this workflow - DaVinci Wide Gamut timeline, CST in, grade in the middle, Rec.709 Gamma 2.4 out, with Kodak 2383 print film emulation in the output stage.
We built it this way because it's the most stable, flexible approach for footage shot in changing conditions. You can take a frame from perfect golden hour and a frame from a grey overcast morning and bring them to the same place. That's what a good pipeline does.
The masterclass inside coolgrades walks through every single node in this chain - what it's doing, why it's positioned where it is, and how to adapt it to different cameras and situations.
If you want to understand scene-referred grading from the inside out, that's the fastest way we know to get there.
— ricardo & camille
