Mountain lodge color grade | Andy Matthias

Did a grading project awhile back for a real estate client. The footage was shot as RAW DNG image sequences on a Canon 5D. My initial thought was, “Great! just import the sequences natively into DaVinci Resolve and do everything right there!” No matter what I tried, I still felt like something was off, I wasn’t getting the results that I wanted. The initial video was really dark (as you can see in the video attached), so that might have had something to do with it. What I needed was a well balanced starting point, then give it the mood. What I found worked really good, and seemed to have a ton of control over the image, was importing the sequences into After Effects first. That way I could pre-grade in the Adobe RAW adjustment panel to give me the balanced starting point I wanted. I then exported them back out, brought them into Resolve for the final grading pass. Here is the video, showing the original clip and final result: