Grading With Tangent

Before we get to the main event – grading a feature film with DaVinci Resolve – I would like to take some time to look at hardware controllers. 

Resolve, even more so than Apple’s Color, really needs a hardware controller. There are no on-screen lows, mids and highs colour wheels, as with Color – Resolve’s Lift, Gamma and Gain user interface controls are LRGB (Luminance, Red, Green, Blue) sliders. Pulling out a bit of magenta or even warming up a clip – simple with a trackball – is possible but infuriating when you have to juggle individual primary colours. Blakckmagic have retained the DaVinci hardware controller product line, but they are fiendishly expensive.

Fortunately, UK company Tangent make a great colour correction control surface called Wave. It has a street (i.e. Internet!) price of about £1100 including VAT and the Mac release of Resolve communicates with it natively – no need to install drivers.

The panel connects to your Mac through USB and is bus powered. The unit itself is very light and surprisingly big – which makes it nice to work with but takes up quite a lot of desk real-estate if you aren’t making a permanent installation. Three trackball and jog wheel sections correspond to Resolve’s Lift, Gamma and Gain, and three very clear, blue displays – each with three rotary encoders and three button – allow you to control most of the other grading features of Resolve, including adding nodes, Power Windows, Qualifiers and so on.

To the right of the panel is a transport control section and nine function keys. The panel is supplied with an overlay for these keys so you can write what each of them does – a cheap and cheerful solution but it works.

In use, the trackballs feel smooth and responsive – Resolve’s Config screen allows you to adjust the sensitivity of the controls if the default isn’t to your taste. As you would expect, it transforms the use of the primary colour controls from barely useable to a complete joy. If I’m being picky, the buttons feel a bit cheap, and having to move from the trackball to the jog wheel is easier on other control surfaces, where the jog wheel surrounds the ball. These are minor gripes, however, and totally understandable given the price point of the panel – more importantly the Wave works, and works reliably. It’s also much easier to set up that its JL Cooper and Euphonix competitors, as well as being cheaper, though, with its slightly flimsier controls, you may want to look elsewhere if you are expecting heavy, 24/7 grading work.

Tangent also have a software support package that runs on the Mac and allows you to use a Wave with Color. It’s also compatible with Assimilate Scratch, and a whole host of other applications (check out www.tangentdevices.co.uk for further information).