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To control the quality of CRI files, use the ‘decode quality’ and ‘play quality’ CinemaDNG settings located in the Camera Raw panel of the project Settings. These settings are ‘full’ by default. On computers with low processor or memory resources, these settings may be lowered but this will affect the quality of the final render.
Set the Timeline Resolution
DaVinci Resolve displays and renders the output from the scanner using the same resolution as the timeline. For example, for 35mm 4 perforation film, a custom resolution of 4096x3072 would be required for maximum resolution.
For more information on the cropped image area resolutions for all film gauges, refer to the ‘effective resolutions’ in the ‘specifications’ section. Alternatively, for the full native resolution of the captured clip, access the ‘clips attributes’ in DaVinci Resolve.
Adjusting the Color of the Scanner
DaVinci Resolve’s film scanner panel gives you control over the exposure and color temperature of the light used to illuminate the film for scanning. You can adjust these via the light source master wheel and RGB controls, in order to maximize the amount of information you’re extracting from each frame, while preventing any part of the image from being irretrievably clipped. While it’s true that CRI is a raw image format, there’s no latitude beyond the internal data range used by DaVinci, so be mindful that if you’re clipping data in the built in video scopes while scanning, it might be clipped permanently in the scanned media.
How often you’ll adjust the color and exposure of scanned shots depends on how much variety there is in the scenes on a particular film roll. For example, some rolls may have many takes of the same scene, all of which have the same lighting and which can share the same adjustments.
Meanwhile, other rolls may have a variety of different scenes with widely different lighting in each one, necessitating you to make individual adjustments for each scanned clip to maximize data quality.
This is important because the light source master wheel and RGB controls cannot be automatically changed between scanned clips in a log and capture workflow. This means that the current light source settings will be used for all clips you scan until you manually change those settings again, even for clips that you’ve logged from different parts of a film roll. This means that the log and capture style of working is only advisable in situations where it makes sense to log multiple clips that share the same light source master wheel and RGB control adjustments.