The job of color management is to take what the camera saw and transform it into what the display can show. That’s Cullen Kelly’s definition of color management. And when we perform what is one of the most basic types of color management – simply placing a single CST at the very end of our node tree and doing our grading underneath it – what we’re seeing is much better color and tonality than what we were able to achieve by doing project wide color management. Or, at least it gets us there more easily. Please download the folder and if you’ve got time, try grading some of your own footage using the settings below. Oh, and please leave feedback! Thanks so much everyone.
BTW, nobody on earth seems to know what the OOTF in the CST of OFX is for, except that it makes the image darker. During his ResolveCon presentation on color management, Cullen Kelly said to turn this on for scene-referred color management.
The Daejeon Chronicles 
Very interesting observation – and you’re right – as a starting point for a grade , it is much nicer default. What is going on here then?
That’s what I’d like to know.
What I would say, before referring to the Resolve manual again is just a repeat of what Cullen said, but in other words, instead of a direct (EOTF) conversion of SLog3 to display nits, it’s converting to scene gamma which loses the direct to PQ mathematical transformation and instead maps to scene gamma which is relative (IRE), and thereby is a log curve contained within the PQ space but not necessarily exactly following the same curve path. The question that arises then, is what is the log power? For example, 709 is 2.2 or 2.4 power gamma. What power of gamma is used underneath the PQ space for forward OOTF? From what I remember reading in the manual, is that there is no right or wrong answer, it’s just whatever works better for your intent, and when I played around with it, sometimes it looked better to me and sometimes it didn’t. As for the white point adaptation, a little more accurate if box is unchecked for BRAW, but if using something other (SLOG3) or mixed types better to check the box. When understanding these video transfer functions, the equations usually are split into 3 with one part doing something (some log power) for the bottom of the curve, something else for the middle and something else for the top, such complex curves having a non-constant radius.
Thanks so much for that, Tom.