Do you have to color grade every clip?

No. You normalize every clip. You grade scenes.

Those are two different operations that beginners are usually taught as one, which is why the question feels so daunting. Normalizing means applying the log conversion so the clip is viewable, and balancing means setting exposure and white balance so it sits where it should. Both genuinely do have to happen to every clip, because every clip was shot under slightly different conditions. Grading means making creative decisions about how the finished thing should look, and those decisions belong to a scene, a sequence or the whole film. You make each one once.

A hundred clip timeline therefore involves a hundred small technical corrections and a handful of creative decisions. If you have been treating it as a hundred creative decisions, that is where the dread comes from, and the fix is a change of method rather than a change of skill.

Normalize per clip, grade per scene

The normalization pass is fast and boring, which is the point. Per clip you are checking that the log conversion is applied, that the face or the key subject sits at a sensible level on the waveform, and that neutral objects are actually neutral on the parade. Once the habit is there, that is quick work per clip, and none of it is creative. If a clip needs more than that, it usually has a real problem: it is underexposed, or it came from a second camera that does not match, which is a different job covered in why your cameras don't match.

The grading pass then happens above that layer, on groups of clips that share a location, a time of day and an intent. Interior kitchen, morning. Exterior street, dusk. Those are your units. Within one of them, every shot should already look like a sibling because you normalized them, so one look applies cleanly to all of them.

Get the order wrong and the work multiplies. Build the look first and you will spend the rest of the edit re-tuning it for every clip that was half a stop off.

Do you color grade before or after editing?

After, without much argument.

Every color decision you make against a cut that is still moving is a decision you will make again when the cut changes, and cuts always change. Lock picture, then grade. The exception is a client who needs a graded look to approve the edit, in which case apply one rough look to the whole timeline as a placeholder, agree the edit, and throw the placeholder away before doing the real work.

There is a practical reason too. Once picture is locked, the timeline stops being a hundred separate clips in your head and becomes a handful of scenes, which is the unit the grade actually works in.

How one decision reaches many clips

Four mechanisms, in rough order of how much they scale.

An adjustment layer or adjustment clip sits above a range of the timeline and processes everything under it. Anything that should be true of the whole film goes here: the final look, an overall contrast decision, a grain pass. One control, every clip beneath it.

Groups are the same idea organized by content rather than by time. Blackmagic describes Resolve groups as separating parts of the grading process into groups of clips with similar needs, so you grade the group, then handle whatever is unique about individual shots, then apply a look to the whole group afterwards. A wedding edit where ceremony, reception and portraits each get their own group is doing exactly the thing the feature was built for.

Copying a grade is the manual version and still the most used. You grade one hero shot in a scene properly, then paste that grade onto the rest of the scene and adjust each one slightly. Resolve's stills gallery exists partly for this, letting you save and re-use grades across a project.

Shot matching automates the adjust-each-one-slightly step. In Resolve you select a clip, right click another, and it moves the second toward the first in color, contrast and brightness. It works well as a first pass on shots that are already normalized, and badly as a last pass, for reasons we went through in how shot matching works in AI color grading.

Is color grading necessary at all?

Correction is. A grade is optional.

If your footage is log, something has to convert it or it will stay flat and lifeless, which is the whole subject of why your S-Log3 footage looks washed out. If your clips were shot across a changing afternoon, something has to reconcile them or the cut will flicker between warm and cool. That work is not a style choice.

The creative layer on top genuinely is optional, and plenty of well received work has almost none of it. A documentary that is consistently and correctly exposed reads as more professional than one with an aggressive look and mismatched shots. Consistency beats style, every time, and it is also the cheaper of the two to achieve.

Where automation actually removes work

The repetitive part of this job is finding the boundaries. On a flattened export, or a long multicam timeline, most of the labor is identifying where one shot ends and the next begins so you can treat them as units.

That is a solved problem. Blackmagic attributes scene cut detection to the DaVinci Neural Engine and puts it in the same category as its other AI tools, which the company describes as solving "complex, repetitive and time consuming problems". Once the cuts are known, per shot work can be issued automatically rather than by hand, which is the difference between a hundred manual operations and a hundred automatic ones. We wrote up the mechanics of cut detection separately in how AI scene detection works.

That is also the shape of our own product, disclosed plainly. Leumos AI is a browser-based color grading studio: you upload an exported edit, it finds the scene cuts, and it grades each shot toward a reference image rather than asking you to grade each shot by hand. The input side is ACES based, with transforms for the common log formats, so the normalization pass described above happens per source automatically. It grades and renders 4K ProRes or H.265 in the cloud, and it does not edit, so picture has to be locked first. It is in closed beta as of Q3 2026, so the thing you can do today is join the waitlist at leumos.ai.

How long does color grading take?

Longer than you think for the first project and much less for the fifth, because the time is dominated by decisions rather than by clicks.

The useful planning rule is that normalization scales with clip count and grading scales with scene count. A four hundred clip wedding shot in eight locations is eight creative decisions plus four hundred quick corrections. Treated as four hundred creative decisions it becomes an order of magnitude more work and the result looks worse, because nobody keeps four hundred independent judgments consistent with each other.

If the machine rather than the method is what is slowing you down, that has separate causes and separate fixes, covered in why your 4K render is taking hours and how to grade log footage without DaVinci Resolve.

Sources

• Blackmagic Design: DaVinci Resolve color page for groups of clips with similar needs, the stills gallery for organizing and re-using grades, and the shot match behavior of moving color, contrast and brightness toward a selected clip.
• Blackmagic Design: DaVinci Resolve Studio for scene cut detection being among the DaVinci Neural Engine features and the description of those tools as addressing repetitive, time consuming problems.
• ACES documentation: system overview for Input Transforms converting camera native data into a single common encoding before any creative decision is made.