MZ Studio hits the right tones with Resolve
Published: ASIA
CHINA: Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve Studio and DaVinci Resolve Advanced Panel were used by Shanghai-based production house MZ Studio as it graded the commercial for smartphone manufacturer Vivo’s X9. Featuring Taiwanese star Eddie Peng Yu-yen using the phone to take selfies across different settings, such as running in the morning, and at a nighttime party, the commercial’s director has specified varying tones.
‘The director asked that the running in the morning scene have a cool tone that a typical morning in Shanghai would have,’ recalled Chen Zheng, colourist at MZ. ‘The filming location was to be warm and loving and the night party colourful. For all the scenes, it must look pristine and the skin tone must be natural.’
Mr Zheng used DaVinci Resolve Studio to create the look that the director sought from the raw footage obtained. ‘For primary grading, I tried to get the colours back to the footage and from there turned the overall tone towards blue a little bit to create the feeling of a cool morning,’ he explained. ‘With the Offset feature in Resolve’s Colour Wheels, I was able to make a blue biased look while making sure the image was very clean.
‘For a natural skin tone, I needed to get up the brightness of the skin. The YRGB Lift/Gamma/Gain in Colour Wheels allowed me to adjust the luminance channel independently, so all I had to do was make a key on the skin and increase the Y value of Gain or Gamma, and then I got a very natural skin tone.’