A DaVinci Resolve PowerGrade that carries the structure of a working grade and none of the look — labelled, wired, and empty. Import it once and start every clip on a real tree. And two of its stages are compound nodes that hold a Studio-or-free choice: use a Studio feature if you have it, or combine free effects to match it.
Signal runs left to right — clean-up first, creative look last, with a foreground / background split in the middle. The Noise Reduction and Look stages are compound nodes (the stacked ones): double-click them in Resolve and they open into a small Studio-or-free tree. Tap any node here to read what it holds.
click a node
Read live from the exported grade with Resolve's API. The seven single nodes are empty. The two stacked ones — Noise Reduction and Look — each open into three, below.
This is the whole idea, in miniature. Resolve's best cleanup and film-look tools are Studio-only. So the two stages that would reach for them are built as compound nodes with both paths inside: a slot for the Studio feature if you own it, and the free combination that matches it if you don't. Nothing is applied — every node is an empty, labelled slot. Double-click the stage in Resolve to open it.
Inside · Noise Reduction — node 01, opened
Turn on the first node — Resolve's spatial + temporal noise reduction. It ships off, so the grade opens clean in the free edition instead of erroring on a tool you can't run.
Drop Hush on Free NR for measured, transparent denoise, then let the Sat-vs-Lum node pull the last of the colour noise out of the shadows — both free-edition tools, same result.
Inside · Look — node 09, opened
Resolve's one-node film answer — film response, halation and grain together. Studio-only, so it's a slot here, not a baked-in effect.
Build the look from stock nodes — subtractive colour, a glow for halation, grain — or drop Speak in and get film tone, H&D curves, halation and grain in one free plugin.
.drx (the grade) and a
.dpx (its thumbnail). Resolve reads the grade from one and the still from the other;
the import fails if they're not in the same folder..drx. The still lands in
the album.Imports and applies in the free edition — the Studio slots are empty and off, so nothing errors on a tool you can't run.
Looks don't travel — they're tied to a camera, a timeline colour space, a shot. Structure does. A good grade almost always ends up with the same skeleton; shipping that skeleton, empty, saves you rebuilding it on every project and starting each clip staring at a single blank node.
The two stages that would reach for Studio-only tools — noise reduction and the film look — hold both options inside. Own Studio? Flip on Studio NR or Film Look Creator. Don't? The free path is right there, labelled, and it lands in the same place. That's the whole project, in two nodes.
Noise Reduction sits first, Look sits last — and those are exactly where Hush and Speak plug in. Take the noise out at the top of the tree; put the optical character back at the bottom. The scaffold is shaped around that order on purpose.
The FG / BG parallel branch is the move most grades reach for eventually — key the subject, grade it separately from its background, recombine. It's here from the start so you add a window, not a whole node structure, when the shot needs it.
The free path's denoise node. Resolve's own NR is Studio-only — which is the entire reason Hush exists. Drop it here and clean at the top of the tree, measured and showing its work.
Get Hush ↓The free answer to Film Look Creator: film tone, subtractive colour, halation and grain, at the end of the tree. Where the image gets its voice back after everything else has cleaned it.
Get Speak ↓The .dpx preview is Hush's synthetic validation card — no third-party footage is
embedded in either file.
The grade is a 160 KB .drx. The size is the uncompressed 4K .dpx
still, which barely zips — an HD export would be a fraction of it.
This one carries no corrections, so there's nothing to mistranslate on import — but keep the look you build on it matched to your timeline's colour space.
Free, MIT, free-edition safe — with a Studio-or-free choice built into the two stages that need it. Drop Hush and Speak on the free paths.