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R3D source media, recorded by the various models of RED DIGITAL CINEMA cameras, contains one of the most elaborate sets of raw parameters of any of the camera formats. These settings are divided into four different groups.
Master RED Settings
The Master RED settings are the most important, handling decode quality and the control governing whether the original camera metadata is used, or if you’re overriding the camera metadata project- wide with custom settings.
These settings also contain the drop-down menus that let you choose the color space and gamma curve used to transform the raw image data into image data for processing in DaVinci Resolve when debayering R3D clips. Which Color Space and Gamma Curve settings you use are solely a matter of preference; there is no absolute requirement to use one or the other for any given type of workflow. You’re simply looking for settings that provide the best starting point for the media you have, given the type of grading you’re looking to do.
For example, in many cases combining the REDcolor3 Color Space setting and REDlog Film gamma curve will offer a starting point that retains the most image detail with the greatest latitude for adjustment. On the other hand, if you’re working in a hurry, for example to generate dailies for offline editing, using one of the REDcolor Color Space settings with one of the REDgamma settings can offer an image that’s more immediately pleasing and that requires fewer adjustments to achieve an acceptable result. These are not recommendations, they’re only examples. As always, the ideal
settings for your project depend heavily on the quality of the source media, so you should experiment with media from your own projects to find the most suitable results to your eye.
Master
These top settings determine the image quality that you’re choosing to extract from the R3D source media. The tradeoff is that higher quality media at higher resolution will be more processor-intensive to debayer, depending on your workstation’s capabilities.
— Decode Quality: Determines the image quality of the decoded R3D data that’s handed off to the DaVinci Resolve image processing pipeline. The Decode Quality you select has a direct impact on real time performance. Decoding performance depends entirely on the hardware capabilities of your system.
On the most modern systems, R3D files can be decoded using accelerated GPU-based debayering if you set the Use GPU for R3D drop-down menu to Debayer in the Decode Options panel of
the DaVinci Resolve System Settings. DaVinci Resolve 16.1.2 introduced the latest RED API- enabling 8K-accelerated debayering using Cuda. Otherwise, R3D files can be decoded with high performance using multi-core CPU processing if your workstation has fast enough CPUs.
If necessary, you can also choose a lower quality setting that provides better real time playback on systems with limited performance while you work, and then switch to a higher quality when rendering the final output. A “Force debayer res to highest quality” checkbox in the Render Settings list of the Deliver page makes it easy to follow this workflow.