A trip to NY for Da Vinci Resolve Training with the ICA

   Recently I traveled to Manhattan for a week of training on Da Vinci Resolve. As an editor for the past 6 years I was excited to expand my knowledge in the art and technique of color grading. Learning how to grade would allow me to expand my services as both an Editor and Colorist on behalf of Rum Bum Film & HD Studios.

The course was offered through Manhattan Edit Workshop (http://www.mewshop.com). At MEW, many instructors offer training in Adobe products, FCP, Scratch, Da Vinci Resolve and other software. For this particular course, Da Vinci Resolve 101,201 and Looks, I would be in a classroom for six days. The instructor, Warren Eagles from the ICA, was a great guy from Australia who had more than 20 years of experience working as a Colorist under his belt. If you are interested in the courses Warren and other ICA Instructors have to offer check out their site http://icolorist.com/.

   So day one and two of the course covered the basics of the program which included creating a new project,  the configurations page, importing xml’s and edl’s and conforming offline edits.  On day three we were graduating from the basics of Resolve and moving onto bigger and better things…Resolve 201. Once we got into day four and five we were playing around with trackers, layer mixers, qualifiers and other advanced colorist toolsets. One of my favorites was creating the illusion of day-for-night ( the technique of taking a scene shot in the day and making it look as if it were filmed at night) .Though this technique is a well known technique in the post-production world, there are many ways to create the look. It was cool to see what other students came up with for their day-for-night look. By day six we were onto Warren’s Looks course which covered all the stylistic looks that were originally created in the film days by manipulating the negative and bathing it in chemicals. Some of the films we covered on the topic of looks were, Transformers(orange and teal), Saving Private Ryan( Bleach Bypass), Domino( Color Reversal).

I think what amazed me the most in creating looks was that that the technique was originally created in film and if you understood how they were created in film then creating them digitally was a breeze.

Written by Carlos Gonzalez

Tags: bacardi, bum, color, colorist, da vinci, domino, editor, film, grading, hd, ICA, resolve, rum, saving private ryan, school, studios, transformers, warren eagles