Knowing what your colour tools do...

This is a quick and rather unscientific test to show how different colour grading applications behave when using that most basic if tools, the gain control. (There's no audio or v.o. on this test)

This is a follow up to a discovery I made when using DaVinci Resolve - I found that I got different results when I used the mouse to when I used a control panel. Patrick at www.mixinglight.com did a brilliant follow up to this discovery - well worth watching if you're a Resolve user.

To show how the applications differ - and to display my awesome colour grading skills (!) - I'm simply getting a blue matte, balancing it to grey using the gain 'ball' and then seeing what happens when I increase the overall gain (except that it isn't always called gain). The question is; does the balanced grey colour matte remain grey?

And the results in my test are...

Speedgrade, Fusion, and Quantel Rio (Assist) do maintain the colour balance and Premiere Pro (Lumetri Color Wheels) and MambaFX don't maintain the balance. This isn't to say there's a problem or a bug here or to imply that one application is better than the other - just taking care to understand exactly how each tool behaves.