 Hey, welcome to the Crimson Engine. My name is Rubidium. Today we are looking at this magnificent device, the Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve MicroPanel, and how you can use it to take your color grading to a whole other level. So if you're like me, you spend a lot of time in Resolve, usually playing around with the mouse or the tablet. You have your little color wheels here and you have to like put and then drag it up just a little bit and as you watch your scopes go up and down. But there is another way. The MicroPanel is the smallest in the range of the Resolve control services. There's the Micro, then there's the Mini which has LCDs and model dials at the top. And then finally there's the Advanced which has all kinds of things. This one is I believe $995. When I started making films, 35mm, there was a thing called a base light. Maybe it's still around. And they were $1,000 an hour. So you get free DaVinci Resolve software. You get a $995 control surface and you can do pretty much everything we could do back then. The layout is pretty, you know, simple. I didn't read the instructions because it's all sort of there. I just had to Google a couple of things. Your main three control knobs which represent the lift gamma gain wheels. The darks down on this one, the lights up on this one, the mids up and down on this. And then in the middle you have these little balls that change the color balance. You see it moving around here in the corner. As I move the ball around, it moves around the thing. And then above each wheel you have a way to reset the ball, a one to reset the wheel, and then a button called all that resets both. Now then you have these four banks of little triple dials at the top. The first one is the wide lift gamma gain, so contrast in the darks, the mids, and the highlights. You know, then you have an overall contrast button, the pivot of the contrast. So I can turn the contrast up on this clip and then I can decide where that contrast is applied, where the center of the contrast is. Then you have mid-tone detail, which really just pumps up the contrast on one very specific area, which is the skin. The fourth bank is color boost, which is light saturation, but boosts saturation in the least saturated areas. You can see it does a lot for the skin. Then you have your shadows and highlights, which I use a lot actually, especially to balance your image, bringing up the shadows down the highlights. I wish other reviews on this before I got it, and everyone comments on the build quality and how, you know, this is a level above the other stuff that's out there. And that's totally true, you know, there's an amazing weight to the dials. There's an amazing feel to the way that you can manipulate it. It just feels, you know, it feels, it's not a Toyota kind of console. It's more of a Mercedes kind of console. Each button has its own little reset. So you can go along resetting everything, just clicking the top of it. It is a really well-made, well-designed piece of equipment. Then we come to this bank over here, which is your general grabbing stills, undo, redo, reset, disable, bypass loop, then next node, previous node, next frame, previous frame, and then you've got your play in both directions and you stop down the bottom. And that's pretty much it. That's, that's, you know, the things that compose 90% of your resolved workflow are all here. The real joy of this tablet isn't really in the, you know, the advantages of the, of the mouse. The joy of it is that you can hit this viewer button here and see your clip full screen. And then because you have access to almost everything that you would typically do in Resolve, you can now grade your clip in a way where you can see all the detail of it. You can play it and stop it. You can even go between different nodes and between different clips, between frames, all with that leaving the full screen where you have all this amazing real estate of a full screen monitor. For me, the 5K iMac Retina display, where you can just sort of, you know, you're so free to dial in the look that you want without being distracted by all the other things that are happening. You don't need to go and buy a specific, as long as you have your main monitor calibrated, you don't need to go out and buy a second monitor and then have it next to your computer screen. With the micro tablet, you can do it all through the thing that's right in front of you, which is for me, that's the game changer. That's worth the thousand dollars alone. You can hit the viewer button to tab in and out of your full screen. And you can also possibly, you know, what I might do is set up a second monitor, a second smaller monitor to the side here and use that maybe as my, you know, my video assist and use that just for my scopes. You know, here I have one of my Crimson Engine Luts. I can go between the, flip between the nodes, but then then I can click into my viewer and just use this to sort of fine tune my exposure, to fine tune my contrast, you know, put the blacks where I want them. With a full screen, see what everything is doing. You know, when you're, when you're in, even with the big monitor, when you're in Resolve, you can't really tell what's going on in the little areas. It's just too small. It's only when you can be able to use that full screen viewer thing. Awesome, awesome unit, huge advantage to Colorist. Actually, one of the best things about it is that it comes with a little carry case. The box serves as like a little briefcase thing. It means if you're a Colorist and you work at other people's offices sometimes. This is easily small enough just to put in your bag or your appellate case and bring from job to job. If you're working at other people's studios, other people's facilities, you know, it's small enough to take with you. That's my look at the Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve Micro Panel. Hope you get my hands on the mini panel in the next couple of months and do a review of that as well and see what all those other extra switches and dials. But if you're a Colorist, if you're independent filmmaker, if you're someone that works in Resolve a lot, this is essentially going to double your efficiency, make it a lot easier for you to do what you do and, you know, let you work at a higher degree of precision. Thank you very much for watching. Leave your questions in the comments and I will see you next time.