Scene referred color correction 101

Your documentary was shot over the course of seven years with some ungodly amount of cameras? We can deal with that! Especially in long format, most colorists I know work in what we call “Scene Referred”. Scene Referred refers to working on footage as it exists in reality (not compressed for the screen) and grading prior to the display transforms. The way I approach this as a colorist is that my project will have a working color space. I work in Resolve so it’s often DaVinci Wide Gamut. ACEs is another Scene Referred space that some use. So if that’s my timeline space my system (with input from me) will convert (mathematically) all of the various camera color spaces turned over into a unified color space. I will then grade within this space (the aforementioned DaVinci Wide Gamut) and, depending on where your piece is headed to be displayed we will apply the appropriate display transform at the end of this pipeline (rec709 for monitors, DCI-P3 for projection, rec2020 for HDR are some examples). Scene referred is about working with your footage in the space it was captured in and giving us the greatest amount of flexibility to adjust, correct, and change the values. Yes, in both instances we are making decisions based on how the image is looking on a specific monitor. The big difference between scene referred and display referred is where this math is happening. In scene referred all the math is happening prior to the display transform. In display referred the math is happening after the image has been compressed to fit the display.