Show pipeline & show LUT design

ExpertDuration Explainer-led + ~5 min supplementTools DaVinci Resolve (free)

Why this lesson

Up to now you’ve color-managed your project. A show pipeline is the version of that decision that a hundred people downstream have to live with. When a production starts, someone decides the working space, the display transform, and the look — and locks them into a document that the on-set DIT, the dailies lab, editorial, every VFX vendor, and the final colorist all follow. Get it right and the image the DP approved on set is the image that comes out of finishing months later. Get it wrong and every department is quietly fighting a different color model. This is the skill that separates a colorist from someone who can run color for a production — and there’s no free video that teaches it, so the explainer carries it.

Watch

No open-internet video teaches show-pipeline design directly — it’s the clearest gap in the free landscape and the reason facilities charge for it. The closest useful framing is Cullen Kelly’s “Level 5 — Look Developer,” where a look stops being a grade and becomes a repeatable system built from vision, knowledge and tool-set. Watch it as the mindset, then read the explainer for the actual pipeline.

Segment: 43:24–46:30 — Level 5 'Look Developer': synthesizing a look into a repeatable systemwatch full video

Watch for: The jump from making a look to owning one as a system — vision plus knowledge plus tool-set. That systematization is exactly what a show pipeline is: the look, made portable and reproducible across a whole production.

The explainer

A show pipeline is a fixed chain every shot passes through. Strip away the creative grade and a production’s color has a skeleton: input transform (each camera’s log/gamut mapped in, per 2.1–2.2) → working / timeline color space (where everyone grades) → the show look → output transform / DRT (one per deliverable — Rec.709, P3, HDR). Designing the pipeline means choosing each link once, writing it down, and making sure every vendor reconstructs the identical chain. The grade is the variable; the pipeline is the constant.

Choosing the working space. This is the biggest decision. Pick a wide, scene-referred space so the whole production has headroom — ACEScct if you want the industry-standard, broadly-supported interchange (features, multi-vendor shows), or DaVinci Wide Gamut / Intermediate for a Resolve-native facility. The rule from Level 3.1 applies at scale: grade scene-referred, deliver display-referred. Everything downstream inherits this choice, so it belongs at the top of the document.

The show LUT. A show LUT (or show look) is the production’s agreed baseline look, locked early with the DP and director and applied everywhere: the DIT loads it for on-set monitoring, the dailies lab bakes it so editorial cuts with it, VFX previews under it, and the final colorist starts from it. Its whole job is that everyone, at every stage, sees the same intended image — no surprises when the “flat” dailies suddenly get a look in finishing. A show LUT is not a creative LUT you downloaded; it’s built for this show, from a reference frame the DP signed off on, and version-controlled like code (ShowLook_v04, with a changelog).

Where the look sits — the decision that separates amateurs. Bake the look into a Rec.709 signal and you’ve trapped it: the day the client asks for HDR, your look is welded to the SDR display transform and you have to rebuild it. Instead, place the show look as a scene-referred LMT (Look Modification Transform) — before the DRT. Then one look feeds every output: swap the ODT for a P3-D65 1000-nit HDR render and the same creative intent flows through, tone-mapped correctly for the new display. This is the pipeline-level version of “the look belongs late, but before output” you learned in 2.10, and it’s why show looks live scene-referred.

AMF — the pipeline as portable metadata. How does a VFX house in another country rebuild your exact chain? An AMF (ACES Metadata File) carries it: working space, each clip’s IDT, the LMT (your show look), and the ODT, all as a small XML sidecar. Hand over the plates plus the AMF and the vendor reconstructs an identical pipeline rather than eyeballing it. It’s the show pipeline written in a form software can read — the natural companion to the human-readable pipeline document you’ll write for the capstone.

Pipeline design is a document, not a vibe. The deliverable of this skill is a written show pipeline document everyone works from. A workable outline:

1. Working space & color science — ACEScct or DWG; ACES version; Resolve color science setting.
2. Input transforms — the IDT for every camera and source on the show (ARRI, Sony, drone, archival, graphics).
3. Show LUT / look — what it is, how it was derived and approved, where it lives (LMT, scene-referred), and its version.
4. Output transforms — one ODT per deliverable: Rec.709/Gamma 2.4 SDR, P3-D65 HDR, cinema XYZ, etc.
5. Dailies CDL workflow — how on-set CDLs are captured, exported and carried to conform (Lesson 3.9).
6. VFX interchange spec — plate format, working space, whether plates travel graded or un-graded, and the AMF (Lesson 3.9).
7. Deliverables & QC — the master formats and the spec they’re QC’d against (Lesson 3.8).

That document is the show pipeline. Writing one is your Level 3 capstone.

Do it

1. Build the pipeline skeleton in Resolve: a group pre-clip node doing the input CST per camera, a timeline node holding a placeholder show look, and an output CST — the chain a whole show would ride on.
2. Put your look on the timeline node as an LMT-style step (scene-referred, before output). Now swap the output CST from Rec.709 to P3 and confirm the same look survives into the new display space. That survival is the payoff of placing it correctly.
3. Version your look: save it as ShowLook_v01 in the gallery/PowerGrade, tweak it, save v02, and keep a one-line changelog. Treat it like code.
4. Draft the seven-section pipeline document above for an imaginary two-camera show. This is your capstone deliverable in miniature.

Show Pipeline Document — fill-in template for the seven-section pipeline documentshow-pipeline-template.pdf150 KBOriginal course material — free to useLevel 3 workbook — every Do it exercise, 3.1–3.10, plus the capstone (printable)level-3-workbook.pdf764 KBOriginal course material — free to use

Terms introduced

Terms introduced in this lesson

• Show LUT / show look
• Pipeline design
• AMF (ACES Metadata File)

Each term links to the glossary, where it is defined by the way you just used it.

Check

Check yourself

1. What is a "show LUT" (or show look)?

   A creative LUT you download and slap on individual shotsThe production’s agreed baseline look, locked early and applied consistently everywhere — on-set monitoring, dailies, editorial, VFX and final — so everyone sees the same intended imageA LUT that only the DIT usesThe output transform for Rec.709

2. Where in a scene-referred pipeline should the show look ideally sit?

   After the display transform, baked into the Rec.709 signalAs a scene-referred LMT — before the DRT — so a single look survives when you swap the output transform for HDR vs SDRIt doesn’t matter where it sitsOnly inside the camera

3. What problem does an AMF (ACES Metadata File) solve?

   It carries the whole color pipeline — working space, IDT, the LMT/show look, and ODT — as portable metadata, so every vendor rebuilds an identical pipeline instead of guessingIt replaces the CDLIt stores the audio mixIt compresses the video for delivery

4. Why design the pipeline before the first frame is graded?

   To slow the production downBecause dailies, editorial, VFX and finishing all have to speak the same color language from day one — a pipeline decided late means re-doing everyone’s workSo the colorist can charge moreIt’s only a legal requirement

Check answers

You can move on when you can… draw a show pipeline as an input → working-space → look → output chain, explain why the show look sits scene-referred before the DRT, say what an AMF carries, and write a pipeline document with the seven sections above.

Mark this lesson complete

Go deeper

Read

• ACESCentral (acescentral.com): the AMF specification and the LMT / working-space documentation — the authoritative source for how a scene-referred show pipeline is actually described.
• Netflix Partner Help — Color Management (partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com): a real streamer’s published expectations for working space, ACES and delivery — a live example of a pipeline spec you’d design against.
• Chris Brejon — CG Cinematography, ch.1 (chrisbrejon.com): reinforces why the look belongs scene-referred, from the CG/VFX side that has to consume your pipeline.

The paid path — named honestly: show-LUT and pipeline design is the single most gated skill in color, and the course that owns it is colour.training’s SHOWLUT (Dado Valentic), with Mixing Light’s node-architecture and pipeline guides as the other structured option. When you’re building pipelines for money, that’s the training to buy — this page is the free map of the territory it teaches in depth.

Next up: 3.4 · DCTL — reading and writing the small color-math programs your pipeline can be built from.