How to batch grade and export many clips

Every shot needs its own treatment, and almost none of them need it applied by hand. Those two facts sit together because a grade is built from adjustments that belong at different levels. The log conversion belongs to the source format. Exposure and white balance belong to the shot. The look belongs to the scene or the whole programme. Batch tools let you put each adjustment at the level where it is genuinely true, so one change reaches every clip sharing that level. Batch export is a separate mechanism, and confusing the two is why people render a timeline once per clip.

Where an adjustment lives decides how far it scales

Ask how many clips an adjustment is true for. A log conversion is true for every clip from that camera in that format. A white balance correction is true for one shot. A contrast curve is true for a scene, or the whole piece.

Put all three on the clip and three adjustments that scale differently become one that scales like the narrowest, which is one clip. That is why grading 300 clips by hand feels impossible: the same handful of decisions retyped 300 times because they were stored in the wrong place. The beginner's version of this is in do you have to color grade every clip.

Adjustment layers and where they break down

The simplest version is a clip sitting above other clips, pushing its effects down onto them. DaVinci Resolve calls it an Adjustment Clip: any filters or effects applied to it are also applied to everything underneath, including Resolve FX, Fusion page effects, and Color page grading and sizing. Premiere's adjustment layer does the same job in the same place.

The breakdown is predictable. An adjustment layer reaches clips by position on the timeline, and position has nothing to do with source. The moment the timeline mixes two cameras, or log with baked-in Rec.709, the one thing you cannot put on the layer is the normalization, because that step has to differ per source. If your timeline mixes formats, matching log footage to baked-in LUT clips covers what that costs.

Resolve groups give you four places to put a grade

Groups fix the level problem properly. Select a set of clips, right-click, create a group, and the Node Editor gains four extra modes, processed in sequence.

Group Pre-Clip node trees affect every clip in the group at once, and Blackmagic names the use case exactly: an overall grade to start a scene from, such as when you need to normalize a group of log-encoded clips in a specific way. Clip node trees affect only the selected clip and run after Pre-Clip, where matching one shot to another belongs. Group Post-Clip trees affect the whole group again but after the clip adjustments, which Blackmagic suggests for a creative look. Timeline trees affect every clip in the timeline.

Normalization sits in Pre-Clip because it is true for the group, balance sits in Clip because it is true for one shot, the look sits in Post-Clip or Timeline. Change the look afterwards and you change it once.

Blackmagic's suggestions for what to group by are worth taking literally: all clips in a scene, all clips from a specific camera, all headshots of one person, all clips from one angle of coverage. Grouping by camera pays for itself on a multicam job, the workflow side of why your cameras don't match. Deleting a group clears it while preserving each clip's last applied grade.

Shared nodes handle overlapping sets of clips

Groups have one structural limit. A clip belongs to one group, while real footage belongs to several overlapping sets at once: this camera, this scene, this actor's close-ups.

Shared nodes solve that. Blackmagic describes them as similar to group grades except that they need no grouping and can be added to any normal grade, with changes rippling automatically to every other instance of that node. Right-click a Corrector node, choose Save as Shared node, and Resolve locks it so you cannot casually adjust something affecting fifty clips. Blackmagic's examples are the useful ones: a Color Space Transform or LUT at the head of every clip from one source, a base correction on every talking head shot of one interviewee, a shot matching adjustment on each clip from one angle. Being ordinary nodes, they mix freely with clip-specific ones.

Copying a grade from one clip to many

Sometimes you just want this grade on those clips. Select the clips you are copying to, then middle-click the clip, gallery still or memory you are copying from, or right-click it and choose Apply Grade. For shot-reverse-shot cutting, the equals key copies from one clip back and minus from two clips back. A PowerGrade album is shared across every project in a project library, which is how a house look survives from job to job.

Two settings control what travels. All, Color and Sizing decides whether a copy brings the grade, the input sizing, or both. The Apply Grades Using submenu decides what happens to keyframes: none copied, aligned to source timecode, or aligned to the start frame. A keyframed grade coming out as nonsense on a different clip is almost always that setting rather than a bug.

Versions automate the same thing. Local versions are the default and unlinked. Remote versions link every clip sharing the same Media Pool source file across all timelines, so grading one grades all of them. Blackmagic is honest about the trade: adjusting one linked clip individually means creating another version or switching it to local. Excellent for a repeated interview take, a nuisance where every clip is unique.

The same idea in Premiere

Premiere expresses all of this through the Lumetri Color effect, which lives on the clip. Copy a graded clip, select the clips you want it on, paste its attributes, and the effect travels. Put Lumetri on an adjustment layer instead and it covers everything below it.

What Premiere lacks is a per-source layer underneath the clip grade, which is why mixed-format Premiere timelines duplicate the conversion onto every clip. Its colour management fills part of that gap by detecting log formats, with the side effect that adding your own LUT stacks a second transform: Premiere is applying a LUT to my log footage.

Batch export is a different problem from batch grading

The question that starts most searches here is exporting many clips with their own in and out points and the grade applied. That is a rendering feature, not a grading one.

Resolve's Deliver page offers two modes. Single Clip renders the selected timeline range as one media file. Individual Clips renders each clip as its own file, with timecode cloned from the original source media and, in a mixed frame rate project, each clip at its own frame rate. It also unlocks its own options: render at source resolution, add frame handles, use the source filename, place clips in separate folders, and choose whether timeline effects are baked in.

The restriction that answers the in and out points question is Blackmagic's own: "If you're in Individual Clips mode, In and Out points automatically snap to the nearest clip In or Out point in the Timeline. You cannot render partial clips in Individual Clips mode, but you may do so in Single Clip mode." Batch export therefore gives you whole clips as cut in the timeline. Sub-clip ranges need either Single Clip renders queued one at a time, or the ranges cut into the timeline first so the boundaries are the ones you meant.

Thumbnail filtering interacts with this. Filter the timeline and you can only set up jobs in Individual Clips mode. That sounds like a limitation and is the most useful part: filtering to unrendered clips, or clips modified since the last pass, then rendering only those, avoids re-rendering a whole programme after one note.

Where each of these runs out

Adjustment layers run out at the first mixed-source timeline, because normalization cannot live on them. Groups run out when a clip needs to belong to more than one set, which is what shared nodes exist for. Copying and versions run out when clips are genuinely different: a wedding timeline where no two shots share a source file gets nothing from remote versions.

Batch export runs out at machine time. Individual Clips mode will happily queue 300 renders, and then your workstation renders 300 files at whatever speed it renders, an architecture question rather than a workflow one: why your 4K render is taking hours.

All of it runs out where the per-shot work is the bottleneck. Groups make the shared decisions cheap. They do nothing about 300 shots needing 300 individual balance passes.

Leumos AI is our attempt at that last part. It is a browser-based grading studio: you upload an edit, it detects the scene cuts, and each shot is graded toward a reference image, with an ACES based input transform applied per format first. It returns a 4K ProRes or H.265 render from the cloud, so nothing installs and there is no GPU requirement. What comes back is rendered graded files, not grade data, LUTs, XML or CDL, so it is not a substitute for a colourist's session. Closed beta, waitlist at leumos.ai; the cut detection is written up in AI scene detection, explained.

If mixed cameras brought you here, matching Nikon Z with Sony and Canon and how to grade V-Log footage cover the format side.

Frequently asked questions

Do I have to color grade every clip individually?

Every clip needs its own normalization and balance, and neither has to be typed in per clip. Put normalization at group or shared node level so it applies once per source, and the look at scene or timeline level. What is left per clip is exposure and white balance, a fraction of what it looks like at the start.

Can I batch export clips with in and out points and the grade applied?

Not as partial clips. Individual Clips mode snaps in and out points to the nearest clip boundary, though Single Clip mode can render partials. Cut the ranges you want into the timeline first, so the clip boundaries are the ones you intended, then render in Individual Clips mode.

What is the difference between a group and a shared node in Resolve?

A group is a set of clips that gains extra node editor levels, and a clip belongs to only one. A shared node is a single node whose changes ripple to every copy of it, needs no group, and can be added to any grade, so one clip can carry several from different overlapping sets.

Sources

• Blackmagic Design, DaVinci Resolve 20 Reference Manual, fetched 2026-08-15: Adjustment Clips, the four group node modes and their order, grouping suggestions and deletion behaviour, shared nodes, the copy methods and keyframe options, local versus remote versions, the Single Clip and Individual Clips render modes, the partial clip restriction and thumbnail filtering.
• The Premiere section describes tool behaviour rather than quoting Adobe. Adobe's help pages did not respond while this was written, so no figures or menu wording are attributed to Adobe above.