We Couldn’t Come up With a Title for This Post

Something doesn’t seem quite right here. 

In this video with Armando Ferriera where Shane Ruggieri explains how to work with Sony footage, the renowned authority on HDR does something peculiar…

“The first thing that I would do is I would come in – let me turn this this monitor off – I would first come in and I would do what’s called a color transform or a camera transform and that’s what this first node is here. And I’m basically taking the S-Gamut and saying take the S-Gamut, take the Sony log, which is the color gamma as well as the the color volume and convert it into a Rec.2020 space and SMPTE 2084, which is a PQ gamut, so we can look those terms up for you but it’s really just saying that’s how I’m working. I’m not looking at Rec.709, I’m working in a PQ color space and so take that footage and lay it in there so that the image looks proper.”

– Shane Mario Ruggieri

We’re pretty certain that the transform should be the very last operation on the timeline, but in the video, Ruggieri appears to be highlighting the first node in the node tree. In their article on setting up DaVinci Resolve for a Dolby Vision project, Dolby themselves recommend a scene-referred workflow. Walter Volpatto explains why he doesn’t change the working color space to PQ. He works in a log color space and the transform to PQ is the final step. Keep in mind though that most of his clients are shooting in an SDR lighting environment and monitoring in SDR with a show LUT developed for SDR. Thoughts?