An astrologer who shoots his content with a Sony mirrorless camera and who follows Cullen Kelly’s YouTube channel asked whether it made any difference if he used Resolve Color Management and DaVinci Wide Gamut or a CST (as Cullen demonstrated in his short DaVinci Resolve tutorial) to which we replied:
“They should look identical. However, if you’re just shooting your own material exclusively with Sony, there is no advantage whatsoever to using DWG. In fact, all LUTs for Sony cameras, including the terrific free ones from Picture Shop, are for S-log3/S-Gamut3.cine, not DWG. Furthermore, if you’re going to be using any working color space other than the camera’s native color space, you should be creating a viewing LUT to ensure that the color and tonality you see on set are identical to what you see in the colorist bay. Because, as Cullen has said repeatedly, good color management means taking what the camera saw to what the display is capable of reproducing. Not only that, but the fewer the number of transforms the better.”
But you can bet we’ll never hear back from him again. Because that’s not the answer he wanted to hear.
This is how Erik Messerschmidt ensured that the color and tonality seen on the set of Mindhunter Season 2 was identical to that seen in the grading suite:
“The production and post team created an ACES workflow throughout — from capture and on-set monitoring into post for editorial, the DI and conform. Even though they are capturing in 8K, they are seeing a live debayer in 1080.
“The camera does a debayer and then you can put that debayered image into any encoded space you like,” Messerschmidt explains. “In our case we have the camera output ACES CC, which is essentially ACES log…Then we apply a transform in the monitor to that ACES log and we transform it into Dolby PQ HDR and Rec 2020. We built a series of LUTs that allowed us to monitor it in PQ and Rec 2020.”
The colorist can then focus on creatively graded the footage, knowing it is arriving with a look that represents what was intended during acquisition.”
So yeah, whether your working color space is DWG or ACES, you’ll absolutely want to create a viewing LUT to make sure that what you’re monitoring on set is what’s seen in the grading suite.
The Daejeon Chronicles 
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