A Guide To Nodes - DaVinci Resolve Basics Tutorial

hey guys this is Casey Faris thanks for checking out another one of my videos today I want to talk about nodes being familiar with nodes and how they work is essential if you want to be good at resolve and the thing is a lot of people are really scared of nodes they don't really understand them it's kind of a different way of working with things and so it can be really intimidating so for just a few minutes I want to go through and just kind of give you a crash course I guess on all the different types of nodes and resolve and show you what they're used for and how I use them of this nice tracking shot of this girl walking down to the beach which is what we're going to be working with on a couple nodes okay so basics on nodes here is the node graph this is where you organize all of your nodes within a grade and a good way to think about nodes is just it's like a piece of your grade so maybe you have your basic correction here so if you start messing with the color wheels and changing things around all of those adjustments and everything live in this first node that's selected now you can do a bunch within just one node but where resolve gets really powerful is when you can combine nodes so let's say I like this initial grade in this shot but now I want to get a little more detailed and adjust some parts of the shot it would be really tricky to do all of that in the same node because if I say want to select this lady's shirt and I go and grab my window you see it's limiting all of that grading that I did just to that window so I can't really just work on a part of the image and leave the rest of it intact so what you have to do is work in different nodes so if you right click on a node you can say change label and that's what I'm going to do so that we can stay organized so I'm going to call this primary and a primary correction is just a correction that's over everything and I'm going to hit alt s and what that's going to do is add another node and the reason I used all s is because this is a serial node and how it works is everything that I've done in this node now gets brought into this node as its input and so if I make this node really pink this node is starting out with a image if I were to disable this node by just clicking on the number you see I'm starting with this original image it's pretty much the same thing is if I only had one node and this was connected to my input and so the grade flows from left to right so first we're going to make it pink and then we're going to desaturate it that's how the node graph works and that's especially how serial nodes work they work in order and so if I make it pink and then desaturate it add another serial node and make it blue it's going to end up blue but if I were to switch the order around which I can do just by selecting and deleting these lines and moving things around and reconnecting all of my nodes you see I get a different result that's because the order of these nodes really matters so I'm going to go back to my original grade here and so this first node is a serial node and I can stack as many of these as I want and do stuff in whatever order I want and it will just pile on those Corrections now if you're already lost and you're like what in the world how is how does this work think about a serial node as an adjustment layer in Photoshop something like that okay so we have this first node is our first layer second node is our second layer third nodes our third layer and so on and each layer only affects the layers that were below it and so I'm starting with my primary balance and then I'm making it pink then I'm making it blue and then I'm warming up those mid-tones so it's all in order now a lot of the time a serial node is what you're going to be using it's really easy just to do your primary grade and then maybe let's say you want to do a vignette and so you'll make a second node make your circle window and darken down those edges so that makes sense we have the primary grade and then we're putting a vignette over it it's in order for most basic grading that's pretty much what you're going to use so the first node that pops up by default is a serial node and so you can do your adjustments in serial node if you want to adjust more parts of the image you can make new nodes but they all flow into each other so I'll call this primary and then let's call this ants maybe what I want to do in this one is change the color of all this plant life and so I'm going to grab my gear and I use my 3d keyer and just draw on a few of these plants and when hit shift h4 highlight and adjust my key a little bit of course I'd normally spend a little more time but just showing you so I have my plants key now and let's say I just want to I don't know do some horrible thing where I make all the plants a lavender field is this ladies just like going out there to have a super bad allergic reaction or something so now I have all of my purple plants and that's qualified with this here that's selecting this specific green so if I turn this off and go back to my primary node and I don't know let's say I'll cool this down a little bit and then I turned back on my plants node look what happens absolutely nothing because this node is looking for this warm green color which just isn't there anymore because I messed with it in my primary so that sucks now I have to go back and rekey things so now I can grab my stuff and key it again so that's one of those things to keep in mind when you're working with serial nodes they all flow into each other so if you make an adjustment in an early note the later nodes are going to be affected so let's do this a smarter way I'm going to get rid of my plants node make my primary something tasteful again now what I'm going to do is add a different type of node so with my first node selected I'm going to go up to nodes and hit add parallel node and what a parallel node does is instead of adjusting things after the first node it adjusts them at the same time so the image that is being input into number 3 looks just like this and the image for number 1 looks just like this so they're getting the exact same image and now if I grab my key and play with the hue and make the horrible purple plants go up to my primary and if I change things around look it doesn't change that key and so I'm doing both of these adjustments at the same time I'm doing all my primary stuff warming those mid-tones and I'm also making the plants purple and I can just go crazy sauce with this and it doesn't mess with my key because this note is taking its key from the input not from this node so that's a really smart way to work if you're doing a lot of secondaries and doing a lot of fancy things in the later nodes that you don't want to mess up when you change your first note so we've done serial nodes and parallel nodes and I'm just going to reset this so now let's look at a node that's kind of similar to a parallel node and it's called a lair node and what I'm going to do is just add another serial node and I'm going to select this and go to nodes add layer node and that looks almost exactly like a parallel node except for this little doohickey right here says layer instead of parallel now parallel nodes combined together they're doing a bunch of different things all at the same time a layer node actually composites on top of another layer and it's kind of set up a little weird this layer thing I can right click on it and say add one input and I can add a bunch of inputs and just have tons and tons of layers here but the very first the very top one is actually the bottom layer and the right bottom one is actually the top layer and so let's take a look at how this works if I make my first layer just the bluest ever and then my second layer the orangist ever then the image that I'm going to get is orange because the orange layer is on top of the blue layer if I were to switch these by deleting these connecting lines and drawing new ones now I have my blue layer on top of my orange layer because the blue layer is connected to the second dot and the orange layer is on the first dot so that's compositing two images and just like layers in Photoshop or After Effects you can even turn down the opacity which in resolve is this key output right here and turn that down and kind of mix in between them which is pretty convenient I can also draw a window on one of my layers and it's using this window as a mask and putting this blue layer on top of the orange layer so it's pretty much just like layers and Photoshop or After Effects so you can use masks you can also do this with keys and so I'll reset this layer and I'll do our favorite key just grab some of these plants again and you see as I grab them it's taking this keyed image and layering it on top of the orange layer so now we have green plants on the orange layer so if you weren't making some kind of acid trip how in the world would you use something like this here's one of the big uses for layer nodes so here I have some footage of guy on his bike big thanks to this guy one of our awesome ground control fans for this footage and let's say I want to do the teal and orange look so what I'm going to do is maybe do kind of a basic grade here do a nice primary so let's call this primary and then I'll make a new node and this is going to be my background and then I'm going to go up to nodes and hit add layer node and then this is going to be my foreground because remember lower dots are actually higher layers so my background let's say I want to make that really really blue and something that's kind of weird about layers in resolve is it's hard to just look at one layer even if you turn off the upper layers you're still not actually looking at the lower layers it's super weird and so what I always do is just hit highlight what I have my lower layer selected and I can see exactly what I'm doing just in my lower layers so I'm going to make my background kind of this blue something like that and then my upper layer I'm going to key and I'm going to key his skin and so now we have those natural skin tones on top of that blue and so if I didn't composite those skin tones that's what it would look like and to tweak this a little bit I can select my foreground layer go to my key and turn down the opacity and kind of mix in between the two so I don't have that purple skin I can kind of blend it so that it looks natural so that's a great way to use layer nodes so we have two more nodes to touch on the first one is really easy it's called an outside node and so I'm going to make a serial node here and I'll make a circle and if I right-click on this and say add outside node what that does is make another serial node that has the opposite alpha channel and so I'm if I move this window around you can see it moves around in my second node too so I'll make my first node blue my second node orange and the second node is the opposite of the first note this works really great for vignettes things like that I can make a circle window and adjust my inside like this and then make an outside node and do my actual vignette and so I have a little more control than just doing a vignette on top of my primary so that's a nice tool to have the last type of node is called a splitter combiner node so I have my primary grade I'm going to go up to nodes and say add splitter combiner node and what this does is break this image into three channels red green and blue and the reason you would use this is either to remap channels and do kind of some fancy color effects and you can also denoise or blur just the blue Channel and sometimes clean up your footage a little better that way another thing you can do is just maybe blur the red Channel or the green Channel to have some nice subtle diffusion on the shot probably something that you won't use that often but it's nice to know what's there so those are the different types of notes in resolve hopefully that wasn't too scary for you hopefully that shine some light on the big scary node monster if you have any questions or comments leave them in the comments below if you like this video make sure to hit like and for more DaVinci Resolve tutorials color grading tutorials post-production tutorials make sure to subscribe to my channel here on youtube once again my name is Casey Ferriss thanks for watching you

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 355,339

Keywords: nodes, guide, gopro luts, parallel nodes, outside node, sony luts, layer node, splitter combiner nodes, serial node, node, dji luts, ground control, parallel node, protune luts, tutorial, how to, drone luts, davinci resolve, color grading luts, serial nodes, blackmagic luts, resolve 12, tip, film luts, splitter combiner node, layer nodes

Id: LOLoVnSClSs

Length: 12min 43sec (763 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 27 2016