Fix Text Color Management
Editing with the project wide - Davinci Resolve YRGB Color Managed workflow can simply color grading and compositing, but there’s a problem with it as soon as you add ANY Fusion generated graphic or title - In older versions white became grey and this is fixed in Resolve 19’s Automatic HDR color management setting. But still - Fusion generated colors, like this specific Home Depot Orange HEX value of F96302 get shifted. See this is the same value entered, with different results - it’s like a totally different shade of orange.
By the way - this is a simple Text Plus from the Edit Page titles and it is a Fusion generated Graphic - so even if you never ever plan to open Fusion - this tutorial matters for you too!
But don’t sweat it - I have a quick fix, so you can match your exact brand colors and it’s even simpler then I taught 4 years ago on this same topic.
My current project settings are DaVinci YRGB Color Managed with the checkbox for automatic color management with the timeline processing using the HDR preset. My output color space is SDR Rec.709, which will give me 1-1-1 QuickTime tags, which is perfect for any delivery that I do.
After you change the color science in the project settings to DaVinci Color Managed - all the raw clips will get normalized to display correctly on a Rec.709 screen. You still have all the flexibility under the hood to manipulate the color and exposure. If it’s not a raw clip, you right click to tag the input color space - which I do often with Sony SLog3 footage just like this. Bam. Great starting point!
Text+ Color Shift Solution
The solution is to right-click on the text plus the title and check the box to bypass color management.
You’ll see this fixes the problem when the graphic is not super-imposed on a layer above anything else.
Even just a black solid generator will show this jump in color.
So the final step to avoid the color managed color shift is Render in Place after bypassing color management on the clip.
Render in Place helps you get real-time playback with any heavy effects by creating a stand-alone video file that it swaps out for you right there in your sequence. It’s like as if you went to the deliver page to export a single clip, then re-imported it into your project, and then recut or conformed it to your timeline. But this does all 3 of those steps at once for you! That’s powerful!
You can trim these files or use them anywhere else (like even on a collaborative shared cloud project) which you can’t do with a standard render cache file.
Before rendering in Place for a title graphic, make sure your timeline resolution is your final export resolution. If you edit at 1080 and export 4k, you should temporarily change your timeline or project to 4k to make a 4k title.
Also select a Renders bin before rendering so you can stay organized as you go. Resolve will place the rendered quicktime in that selected bin as it’s created.
Then - right click - or even batch select titles and choose Render in Place. Format I like is QuickTime and Codec does matter. On a Mac, use Apple ProRes 4444, and on a Windows computer, use DNxHR 444 12-bit.
If you need to make a change, right click to decompose to original, revise the text, and render in place again.
Now - the one consideration when using project or timeline based color management is for graphics that are added to a clip as an effect, or a transition - in other words - if a fusion graphic color is internally comped to your footage - I don’t know of a solution here, other than using a node based color management approach instead. Darren Mostyn and Cullen Kelley are great resources to learn more about color page node based color management.
