Reference still

A reference still is a frozen frame you grab from your balanced anchor shot and store in the gallery. Unlike a still you keep for its grade, a reference still is used purely as a target: you wipe it against another shot (a wipe compare) and read both on the RGB parade so you can match the second shot’s channel heights to the reference’s. In Resolve you can even label it “reference” so you remember there is no node tree worth preserving — it exists only to guide the match. It is the backbone of shot matching.

First used in: 2.3 · Shot matching