All about Color Nodes in Davinci Resolve 17 - plus an advanced tip!

hello everyone today we're going to look at the nodes in davinci resolve and specifically the nodes on the color page let's quickly do an introduction of what this window is all about and if you don't see this window up at the top there's a node button go ahead and click on that and this is the order of operations that you're going to use to color your footage this little note on the left hand side is our original footage so that's what we're looking at here this node is a serial node so this is where we're going to be making our adjustments if we continue to follow down this line this is our end result so again just remember that this is your original footage i have this node selected obviously because it's our only node so if i come down to offset and i were to change that to blue we're looking at the final result over here which is this one and it is blue obviously because we're taking our original footage moving it through this node which we just adjusted down here and the final result is what we're looking at changing our footage to that blue color now just to be clear you're not necessarily limited what you can do in each node i could come down here come to our curves maybe boost up the exposure come here maybe put a window so we're only limiting our changes to one specific area the problem that you might run into is this may be less confusing in the sense that you won't have a lot of nodes on the right hand side but there are definitely a couple downsides and you're actually looking at one right now if we were to add a window such as this that limits us if we want to make any other adjustments in other words let's say i wanted to turn this footage orange now if i were to head down here maybe to our hdr color wheels and then adjust the temperature on our global settings you'll notice that it only changed it within that window that we created so in order for us to do that we can right click add node add serial node and then now if i wanted to make everything orange i can go ahead and maybe choose the global settings and make the adjustment that way obviously in the middle there it's that purple color but that's only because of this node right here if i were to click on this number to disable it and get rid of this overlay now our entire footage is orange and that's another benefit of doing things in different nodes let me go ahead and reset the note grades on these for example if i wanted to color balance this let's come down here i'll click on the shirt and then in this one i'll reset the note right there we'll color balance it in this first node second node we'll go ahead and change the temperature make it a little bit warmer and then maybe in this third node i'll select something like her green here so i'll come over here to the qualifier select this up here is our highlight mode so i can see what i've chosen maybe expand that a little bit turn off highlight mode so now that we've had these three different options checked we can selectively disable them now if we want to see our original footage we can choose this option up here and then that's our original footage but if i turn this back on and we want it to see what it looks like without the orange cast on it i can click on this and that turns it off for us so this is more of an organizational tool i have the last node selected i selected her green here so i can come down to hue maybe and i can rotate this it may not be the best key but i'm just trying to show you so now she has the purple in her hair so now we can click on this and determine whether or not we think that looks the way that we want it to so you can definitely see a benefit of separating certain actions into different nodes obviously there's a time where you can actually combine certain adjustments on the same node but for things like this it may be in your best interest to actually separate them we can actually come in here to make the organization better by right clicking node label and i can put balance here head over to this next one node label and we can do orange cast and here of course we can choose here adjustment and then this way we can just stay organized now let me go ahead and reset all these note grades so now we're back again to our original footage let's say i wanted to put a blue cast over everything i'm going to come to our middle node and i'm going to select certain parts of the footage again so i have my qualifier selected i'll come here let's go ahead and adjust the width and just to avoid confusion i'm actually going to come in here select this node hit delete on my keyboard and we can get rid of that one i'll deselect the highlight mode so just to reiterate we have our original footage we've changed it blue we've selected certain items within our scene and this is the end result we haven't made any adjustment so it looks exactly the same as it does here with this selected i'm going to come in here and adjust the saturation so you may notice that the hair is a little more saturated than normal again i will click on this and we will see a little side by side of course it's not the best looking footage but i'm just trying to show you what happens if we were to take this node and move it over here we're going to end up with a different result and that's why the order of operations is important so i'm going to click on e that will extract our node from the node tree i'll move this over grab this wait for it to change color put it in there and now nothing really happened and we've lost the saturation on the areas that we've selected in fact if i come over here to highlight mode nothing selected anymore and the reason that is is because we're selecting that from our original footage let me take off highlight mode click this to change it back to our original footage just to by pass all the grades that we've performed and this is what we're looking at nothing has changed in this node here the only thing that we have changed is where it's pulling the information from so to say it a different way the colors that we have in this footage after we make the adjustment don't exist in our original footage now just to show you that nothing has changed here i'm going to hit e to extract it again move it on this side and then now we have all our adjustments back if i come over to highlight mode there's everything that we've selected let me turn off highlight mode let me stop bypassing the color grade and you'll notice that now we have the saturation adjustments that we made i'll click this off and on just to show you so just be sure that you're paying attention to where the node is grabbing the information from because depending on where it is in this node tree on the right hand side it will definitely affect your footage differently than if it was in different part of the node tree the next node that we're going to look at is what's called the outside node now here we chose a key i selected a certain color and then i made my adjustments i came down to our color wheels down here and adjusted the saturation and the saturation was adjusted only in those areas now if we wanted to make an inverse of what we selected we can right click add node add outside node now because i still have the highlight on you may notice what the difference is let me go ahead and swap between the two if we look at her hair we can see that it's saturated and nothing else is selected if we come over here now her hair isn't selected it may be easier if i change this into black and white mode so now everything that we're selecting in this node is in white and everything that was selecting in this node is the opposite and that's in white so anything we adjust on this node here on the right hand side will only affect those white areas let me turn off highlight mode and let's go ahead and maybe come down here and lower the saturation and you'll notice that we only affected the saturation in the areas that were selected and now that we've added this outside note i did want to bring up another point about these notes i'm going to make them a little bit larger here these green connections that you're seeing is the rgb footage so you have your red green and blue channels and it's basically just sending the information all the way through the blue connections at the bottom have to do with keys now i do plan on going to the keying options in a different video but just keep that in mind that in most cases depending on what you're doing you are going to use these rgb connections up here with the different green connectors on each node but that anytime you see the blue that has to do with a key so we've covered serial nodes and outside nodes let's go ahead and select those i'll hit delete i'm going to now reset the node grade here and we're back to our original footage the next thing that we're going to look at are parallel nodes so if i right click here add node add parallel node it added a separate node underneath it and it added this connector on the right hand side i will add another node and now you may be able to determine why they call these parallel nodes because you are making the adjustments at the same time so whereas before we had that blue color and we had to take the information either from that blue color that we adjusted or our original footage here we can pull different keys from our original footage and make our adjustments without having to worry about it affecting any subsequent nodes down the line so here let's say i wanted to choose a qualifier and select your skin i'll turn on highlight mode and i'm going to make the width a little wider here all right and that's fine with me i'm going to select this mode so i can see what i've chosen and in this top note over here let's say i wanted to turn everything a little bit more orange i'll come back to the bottom here let me take off highlight mode and let's increase the saturation on her skin and maybe we'll change the color just so it's more obvious now remember the reason this is working the way that it is is because we're pulling this from the original footage so if i bypass all the grades this is what both of these nodes are pulling the information from if i were to take this node and put it after this node here we wouldn't get as clean of a key and the reason for that if i were to click on this node and then choose the highlight node a lot of these colors are now very similar so it will be a lot more difficult to make those adjustments in fact let's go ahead and choose this note here we can see that we've selected her skin maybe some across the bottom here and some on the right hand side let's go ahead and move this over i'm going to get rid of this i'll disconnect this connect that up over here and connect this to this and now you notice that it's selected a lot more of our footage so that's the benefit of a parallel node you can still make those two adjustments but as i mentioned before now you're pulling from different source footage because we made this adjustment in the first key now it's affecting our second node because a lot of the footage is very similar let's go ahead and extract this node right here i'll hit e move it over here let's reconnect it to our original footage and actually i'll turn off highlight mode let me disconnect this and then now i'll show you a different note we'll right click choose add node and then now we're going to choose layer mixer node now if i were to connect this the way that it's shown right now it works as designed now let me show you what's happening here we can actually switch back and forth between parallel node and layer mixer node so this little node right here if we right click morph into parallel node you'll see that these two are being sort of mixed together this is good if you want to have more of a natural transition between the two if i right click and choose morph into layer mixer node now the green that we selected stays true to the adjustment that we made what i mean by that is if i were to choose highlight mode this is our final node so this is pretty much our final image if i were to select the key adjustment that we made over here the color is exactly the same so whereas on a parallel node it's sort of a mathematical equation where it mixes the different colors the layer mixer node treats these as layers one thing you may notice too is that it almost seems different than you may initially assume now if that was a little confusing let me show you what i mean i'll take the highlight mode off if i were to switch these two options here let's disconnect it i'll take the top one put it on the bottom take the bottom put it on the top now we're not getting the same result whatever is on the bottom on this node here takes precedence over everything else so the reason that we were able to see our key here is because we had that connection on the bottom and that only works with the layer mixer node so if i were to come here right click and choose into parallel and disconnect we're getting the same result for our parallel node no matter how we mix it again remember how this looks i will disconnect and nothing's changed the other nice thing with the parallel nodes and the mixer nodes is that you can actually add more inputs so i can right click add one input so now i have a third option i can go ahead and just add another node and continue to make different selections and make different adjustments and go ahead and connect them right here same rule applies this bottom one will take precedence over any other nodes that are connected up here one last thing i'd like to discuss about parallel nodes is that depending on how they're being used you could actually come in here and choose this serial node and select certain part of the footage add another serial node over here select a different part of the footage and continue to just add serial nodes down the line and for example if you're choosing different parts of the footage such as this red right here and using the different node to select the yellow you'll probably end up with the same result as if you had chosen a parallel node instead of these two serial notes having said that again you just want to keep in mind what you're doing in the process so in other words if i were to take the blue inner shirt and make it similar to this color here in this first note in the second note if i wanted to key her hair now it's going to be also selecting the color that's similar in her shirt all that said if you didn't want a long line of serial notes and it just became confusing that way and you just want to organize keys into one particular section you could actually just come here right click add node parallel and again if you're just selecting and keying different parts of the footage you could even come here add another parallel node and do the same thing that way in this way you're not having to scroll in and out of your note tree in order to see all your nodes if you had continued to put serial notes down the rest of this line however if your note tree becomes really confusing within this window you can actually come in here and maybe select all of these right click and choose create compound node this way it's all in one area and it's less confusing now of course if you wanted to see what was in this node you could right click decompose compound node and you'll have all your original nodes back but that's just another way that you can stay organized so if i come up to this color menu at the top and i choose nodes you'll see that we've covered the serial node there's a serial before current and that's pretty much what it sounds like there's nothing really special about that particular one it just puts a regular serial node right before whatever node you have selected parallel node we've discussed layer node we just discussed also if i choose appender node that will put it at the end of our node tree as you see here and these are really useful especially if you're using these key combinations on the right hand side outside note we've also discussed i'm going to skip over this one just for a moment and you'll notice that we have these other options down here let's go ahead and make this less convoluted to look at so i'm going to select these and actually let me show you one thing too you can actually come in here select these hit delete and now there's no node left if you right click there's actually no option for serial node what you can do is hit alt s and now we're back where we started regarding the other options that we saw up here if we choose nodes and add serial node plus cpw what that stands for is a window so if we come in here now we have a circle window now that i have this here let me show you the options that we have when we right click if we right click and choose add node we have our corrector node which is just a regular serial node i can go ahead and add that in here if i right click i can add node and add a serial before as we discussed the parallel layer and outside if i right click not on a node and choose add node we have the corrector which i just showed you the parallel mixer which is where we connect the two nodes into i'll delete that right click add node layer mixer same idea key mixer again which i'm not discussing in this video but i will have a video about keys and the splitter and combiner i'll click on this right now and you'll see what the splitter node is but if we go ahead and delete that right there come up to color nodes and add splitter combiner node it does the work for us so whereas if i were to right click and choose add node and then splitter it will just give me this node and then i'll have to build this myself so it's nice that we can come up here to color nodes and then add the splitter combiner node and it does the work for us i am going to come here right click and add a node so we just have a serial on the other side so what we're looking at here what it split is the different channels this is the red channel the green channel and the blue channel so very quickly just to show you that that's what's happening here what i'll do is come down to our sizing window i'll make sure i have note sizing sometimes it will say input or something else just make sure you choose note sizing if i choose pan now you can see that the top one is our red channel if i come down here to the blue i can pin it in the opposite direction and you'll notice that that's our blue channel so if you wanted to you could actually create this effect i wouldn't use this to create this particular effect as there are effects that do stuff similar to this but something like this would be nice to move in the other direction so let's say that you have footage where the channels are a little bit off you could come in here and actually use the sizing down here to make the adjustments so that they line up the other thing that you could do if i go ahead and reset the node grades on these is focus on only one particular channel you may or may not be familiar but certain channels may be noisier than other channels so if i choose highlight mode now we're looking at the blue channel so let me go ahead and move in a little bit and maybe go through our footage and i'm not sure with the youtube compression if it's going to be that obvious but i do see a lot of compression artifacts not necessarily noise i suppose back there but if i come to the green channel there's not as much so what i can do is come over here to our blue channel choose our noise reduction i'll choose temporal noise reduction i will change this maybe to three frames uh maybe better and then boost this up a little bit and then now we've cleaned up that channel now i think something like this is better than if we had just added noise reduction on top of everything else let me show you what i mean if we go ahead and choose a certain part of this footage let me see here so let's go ahead and save it still and i'll show you why in a moment so i'm going to right click on this footage grab still come over into our gallery now if i come over here and i right click and choose display node graph i can click on node and then uncheck color attributes choose motion effects which is our noise reduction and then what i can do is take that effect and drag it onto this node on the left hand side and i'll show you why we're doing that so i'll take this node drag that here and now it's added the effect onto this node i'll close out of this window close out of our gallery so i'm going to deselect this node down here what we're doing is just disabling the adjustment we made which is the noise reduction on the blue channel and i'm going to toggle off the noise reduction on our main footage over here keep an eye on the hair so if i disable it we get a lot of detail back the other thing that i've noticed too is it seems to almost shift the footage to show you what i mean let's focus on this part of her hair so if i enable it again it seems to make things move around and if you look at this portion over here it actually blurs it so much that it seems like it's disappearing so let's go ahead and disable this which we can actually leave disabled because again this is where it's pulling it from this is our original footage it will go through this disabled node and continue down the line now if we re-enable the same noise reduction remember we pulled it from the gallery over here it responds differently so i'll click on this and now we're not having those moving hairs and we're not losing the information over here so setting it up like this where it's rgb and maybe using it for noise reduction and just blurring the blue channel is a better way than trying to apply noise reduction over everything else now a little bonus tip here at the end let's go ahead and reset these i'm going to reset the note grade so let's say you didn't want to focus on the rgb channels and you would find it more productive to have these be something else let's say hue saturation and luminance there's no way to right click here and do that if you right click the only options you have are add node lock node and delete node but there's still a way that you can do this so let me just move this window over a little bit so we have more room i'll take these and slide them over i'll take this and slide it over here so with this selected what i'm going to do is choose add node add serial so we have a second serial node right here i'll come over to open effects color space transform and output color space i'm not going to use what i'm using for this particular timeline i'm going to come down here and choose our hue saturation and luminance it makes our footage look strange let me go ahead and fit that there now in order to turn it back to something that makes more sense what i can do is just convert it back to the normal timeline color space so let's go ahead and make sure that this is selected right click add node at serial just so we have one at the end but i will use this one and add our color space transform and input color space we're going to select the same exact thing and it looks normal now because the output color space is the timeline so we're changing it from the hue saturation and luminance back to what we have on the timeline now these three channels now are our hue saturation and luminance and if i choose highlight mode this will show the different luminance levels this will show the different saturation levels and this will show the different hues obviously it's not showing the different hues as different colors it's just showing you the broad range that you have so this is something that you can use for compositing i will show that in another video if that's something that you're interested in go ahead and let me know and i will create that video but just to show you what i mean if we click on this first note over here and i come over to our color wheels adjust the saturation keep an eye on this middle node right here now the other nodes were affected but obviously not as much as this one and having said that that just shows that when you adjust the saturation it does affect the other channels let me go ahead and reset that let's come over to our curves i will adjust the luminance and you can see that it's affecting this one and this one but not so much our hue because we're not adjusting the colors so if i select this again keep an eye on that top one and not much is being changed so this is a good way if you wanted to visualize the different channels but you didn't want them to just be rgb which is what you get as default using the splitter combiner now this was just an overview of the different options you have for nodes in the color page you may be able to decipher why this is potentially better than using a layer based system such as in premiere pro i didn't really address that in this video along with keying and along with compositing if that's something that you're interested in maybe a little side by side go ahead and let me know in the comment section below all my social links are in the description below i'm pretty active on twitter so if you're not already following me over there go ahead and do that thanks for watching i'll see you guys in the next video

Channel: Post. Color. Gear.

Views: 3,486

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Id: b0D0j28z9mU

Length: 28min 17sec (1697 seconds)

Published: Wed May 26 2021