Every colourist has their own version of this moment. You open a project someone else started, or one you left untouched for three weeks, and you're greeted by a clip with eleven nodes — some labelled, most not. There's a CST buried in the middle for reasons nobody can explain. There are stacked qualifiers that probably made sense at the time. And the grade is technically fine, but you have no idea where to start trimming it.
I've been on both sides of that. For the first few years I worked in Resolve, I built node trees the way a lot of people do: add a node when you need one, label it later (or never), and rely on memory to know what's doing what. It works until it doesn't.
The three-node base I use now isn't complicated. That's the point.
The structure
Three serial nodes, every job, regardless of format or camera. Each node has one job. The names are consistent so I can find things without thinking:
That's it. Three nodes, three jobs. I can be in any clip on any timeline and know exactly where I am within about two seconds.
Why DWG/Intermediate as the working space
The reason for normalising to DaVinci Wide Gamut Intermediate rather than going directly to Rec.709 comes down to headroom. DWG is an enormous colour space — your primaries and secondaries have room to move without clipping or shifting unexpectedly. When you make a contrast adjustment in a small-gamut space, you're always trading off against what's sitting at the edges. In DWG, those edges are far enough out that you rarely run into them.
The other advantage is that it makes mixed-camera jobs significantly less painful. If you're cutting between Sony and ARRI, both normalise to the same working space via their respective CSTs. By the time you're in BALANCE, you're grading the same world, not two different interpretations of it.
The naming convention is not optional
NORMALISE, BALANCE, LOOK. In caps, every time. It sounds like a small thing but it matters more than it seems. When you're on a tight timeline and need to check whether the offline passed the wrong colour temp, you don't want to spend time figuring out which node is which. You want to click BALANCE and have it be BALANCE.
It also matters when someone else opens your project — which happens more often than you'd expect. Your nodes being readable is a form of professional courtesy.
When three nodes aren't enough
They're a base, not a ceiling. Once the three-node foundation is down, I'll add nodes when there's a specific, defined reason — a secondary for a sky that needs isolating, a vignette node, a node for a motivated colour shift the director wants. Each additional node gets a label. Each label describes what the node does, not what it touches (DARKEN SKY, not BLUE).
The principle stays the same whether I'm on a commercial with a dozen clips or a documentary with three hundred. Every node earns its place. Anything that doesn't have a reason to exist gets deleted.
If you're starting from scratch or trying to clean up an inherited project, this is the structure I'd build toward. The time you spend setting it up consistently is paid back the first time you need to revise a grade under pressure and already know where everything is.