Exposure, highlights and shadows
Median and range of the picture, the share of pixels that clip or crush, with limits you can change. Clipping is reported as information, never as an automatic mistake: a lamp or the sun is meant to clip.
Professional Image Quality Control
FILMCHECK
Inspect your footage. Identify potential image problems. Verify your final grade. FILMCHECK gives filmmakers and colorists a fast, focused way to inspect exposure, highlights, shadows, color balance, saturation, skin tones and other image characteristics directly inside DaVinci Resolve.
Your gradeFILMCHECK report
The frame is synthetic and the report is the real engine's output for that frame - not a mockup.
What it does
RGB and white balance
Channel averages and channel-by-channel clipping, plus a warm / cool / green / magenta bias measured on the near-neutral parts of the frame. It says nothing about your intention, only what the picture does.
Saturation and contrast
How much of the frame is extremely saturated, and whether the tonal spread is flat or very hard, with the shadow / midtone / highlight share of the picture.
Skin-tone diagnostics
A colour-based skin model finds likely skin and reports how far it sits from the vectorscope skin line. It is probabilistic: wood or sand of a similar hue can match, and FILMCHECK never changes skin.
Estimated noise and tonal smoothness
A robust noise estimate from fine detail in flat-looking areas, and a histogram gap check for banding and posterisation. Both are labelled as estimates.
Diagnostic overlays
Exposure false colour, highlights, shadows, saturation, skin tone, RGB channel clipping, chroma and noise, with strength control and an optional legend. View Off returns your clean image at no cost.
Shot consistency
Set a baseline shot, then compare other shots for exposure, contrast, colour balance and saturation. It only reports differences; it never changes a shot.
Limits and presets
Standard, Broadcast, Cinema, Web and Custom starting limits. They are practical defaults, not official delivery specifications. FAIL appears only when you set your own delivery limit.
The interface
- CHECK
- Analyze, Reset Analysis, Input Encoding, Limits, Sensitivity
- REPORT
- Image Check summary and ten items: Exposure, Highlights, Shadows, RGB Balance, White Balance, Saturation, Contrast, Skin Tone, Noise, Smoothness
- DIAGNOSTICS
- View, Overlay Strength, Show Guides, Report Details
- SHOT CONSISTENCY
- Set Baseline, Compare, Baseline, Result
- LIMITS
- Highlight Level and Limit, Shadow Level and Limit, Saturation Level and Limit, Delivery Limit (FAIL)
- ADVANCED
- Sampling Quality
What it is - and is not
- It is an analysis assistant. It measures and visualises; the artistic decisions stay with you, and it never changes exposure, contrast, saturation, white balance or skin tones.
- With View set to Off the plug-in does nothing at all and the host skips it. Overlays are drawn into the picture, so set View back to Off before you render.
- The inspector report refreshes when you press Analyze (OpenFX does not let a plug-in rewrite its own parameters while playing). The on-screen Report view recomputes on every frame instead.
- Skin detection, noise and smoothness are estimates. They can be wrong on unusual footage, and the report says so.
- It is not a substitute for calibrated scopes or a certified delivery QC system, and it does not claim compliance with any broadcaster or streaming specification.
- All analysis runs on your computer. Frames are never uploaded.
Requirements
- Windows 10 or 11 (x64)
- DaVinci Resolve with OpenFX support (see the compatibility list on the Installation page for the versions that have actually been tested)
- FILMCHECK analyses on the CPU and needs no GPU. Timings measured on one development PC are in the documentation.