Heck, I'm still shooting on Standard and calling it good
Really, that is the important part. If it looks good, then it is good.
Shooting in Flat or LOG (or even RAW) codecs will give you more flexibility down the road, should you need it. But you might not need it...
Then there was Daria Fissoun talking with Casey Faris about Color Management:
Is everything those two are discussing relevant to your workflow?
For most people, probably not.
Now, about 90% of what I shoot is in LOG (Panasonic V-LOG, actually), so I actually do apply the workflow they discuss in their videos pretty regularly.
But that is because I need the expanded dynamic range and I shoot in a lot of mixed lighting (natural daylight, tungsten lights, and fluorescent lights all in the same shot). So the flexibility of shooting in log helps me out for what I am trying to accomplish.
But I would say that most people either shoot in standard / natural profile, or maybe portrait profile, and call it a day. Some people might shoot in a LOG profile and apply a LUT they bought off the internet.
Resolve itself has built-in (as in FREE) LUT's for many cameras, but they usually only have ones for the LOG or RAW profiles of the cameras. I don't think they have one for Nikon's flat profile.
There have been a few mentions above of loading one of the third-party flat profiles on to your phone (I think something like CineFlat and TesseFlat or something like that). I think these are even FLATTER than Nikon's built in Flat profile.
They also make corresponding LUT's which you can import in to Resolve.
This makes grading MUCH EASIER, but a lot less flexible.
In my quest to just make it as simple as possible for me to get up and running in DR17, I've been binge watching tutorials on Y'Tub
And they range from total beginner tutorials to videos that purport to be for the beginner but are pretty darn involved
First there was Waqas Qazi's "beginner" tutorial:
Yikes! Does your workflow look like that?
Sometimes I worry about Qazi.
Don't get me wrong, he is a professional and I believe he does coloring for commercials and movies.
But every time he says, "Here's a simple way to..." you know there are going to be 37 nodes and his node tree is going to look like a Jackson Pollock painting.
Bottom Line Advice:
1) Keep it simple. Shoot in standard or natural or portrait. Something that looks good straight out of camera until you have some time to understand grading.
2) Focus on in-camera things, namely, getting the white balance correct, getting your exposure correct, focus, and learning any camera movements that might help with your video.
3) Put interesting things in front of the camera. It's "moving pictures" after all, so be sure that there is something worth watching in front of the lens.
4) Get good audio as best as you can. Maybe that means you need to record audio at the location (if you do, be on alert for wind noise, the bane of everyone recording audio outdoors). Or maybe it just means find some nice background music.
5) Work on editing. There are entire books written on good editing, but I would say just use editing to keep things interesting. If I were doing travel videos (even if they are just of the family), it is good to keep them short and sweet. I would look in to how to use the Cut page in resolve first because I think that will be the fastest way to edit for you.
6) Time-lapse / fast motion video: You can either shoot time-lapse photos and stitch them together, or you can shoot regular 30fps video and then just increase the speed in Resolve. Great for shooting things like clouds moving above a field or a cityscape with traffic going by.
I wouldn't start to worry about shooting in LOG or RAW or even FLAT profiles until you have something of a pretty good concept of the above 6 points first points. You don't have to master them, but try to be consistent at them.
Hope this helps.
