Common Mistake Beginners make when Grading LOG Footage

[Music] what's going on guys this is qazi welcome back to another epic video it's been a while i think it's been three or four weeks since i put out a video so my apologies i've been just working non-stop family business all that good stuff but we're back and this time i'm gonna be showing you uh one of the common mistakes that beginners make and this is coming straight from like hardcore data all right so in my master class i do weekly competitions and this is without fail happens with all beginner colors so i'm going to show you the wrong way first the beginner way first and then i'm going to show you how to approach it like a pro so get super pumped about that if you're a beginner filmmaker who wants to make their work stand out color grading is one of the most effective ways to do that if you're coming from premiere pro or final cut 10 then looking at a node based software like resolve will just confuse the heck out of you in this free training you're not only going to learn everything about nodes you will also learn to build the perfect node tree regardless of the project that you're working on i will end the session with an extended q a these questions came from you guys click the link in the description to sign up for this free training and guys if you're enjoying the content please go ahead smash that like button subscribe to my channel for more awesomeness make sure you're following me on instagram and let's roll the intro all right so this is the shot we're going to be working with um it's shot on alexa in log log c and that's what we can see in our scopes right the image is opened up we got a lot of room up top and at the bottom and usually what would happen with an amateur or a beginner is that they would look at this and go i want to protect everything in my shadows and in highlights right like they would just want to make sure that they take full advantage of that dynamic range now that is an amateur move so let's go ahead and build this grade as a beginner and then we'll do a pro version so first thing a beginner would do is they will take their lift and bring it down so they can you know get close to the zero point and then they'll take their gain and bring it up to open up their image okay at that point they'll go all right i can push it a little bit more so they'll take their lift and they'll bring it down and then bring it back up because they're scared to clip anything right so they don't want to clip anything they'll keep it somewhere around here that's where they will leave their image okay they wouldn't want to push it anymore because they think that then they're going to be getting rid of tons of information and then it's not 15 stops of dynamic range anymore so this is where they will keep it they'll give it some saturation so let's give it some saturation and then let's go ahead and balance this image out right there's way too much yellow we can see it in our vector scope so go under color temp pull it back a little bit up until something like that and now that's looking good and they'll park it somewhere around here most of the time they'll do everything in one node okay so this is based on tons of data in my master class i do weekly competitions and this is something that i keep seeing from beginner colorist okay so this is where they're sitting right looking pretty good if you go all the way back to log to what they came up with is pretty good now let me show you just a few examples of what's going on when we look at pro work so all these examples are going to be from company 3 so i'm going to pull up this image and then let's just check it out look at the scopes how push this image is look at the colors in the image in the vector scope compared to our image and now look at the vector scopes here and then overall image is just touching the bottom touching the top and just so much contrast and look the difference this was looking good when we saw it next to log and that's the mistake because of lack of experience um as a beginner you think that you've come a long way from log to rec 709 ish world but it's still not the same as pro work let's look at some more examples look at this one so look at the scopes how pushed it is and now if i look at the beginner version compared to what industry pros are doing the difference is night and day look at this look at the tires you don't see any detail here and look at the scopes it's bottom line clipping we don't see any information here but that's okay because the meat is the car and we need to see that color that needs to shine and then everything else is secondary and that's the focus once again when i go to beginner now compared to pro work look at the difference okay so now let's add a version i'm going to go ahead reset this node and we will build a pro version and it's just going to be consist of four simple nodes so nothing extreme going on here now there's two ways to go about converting your image first so we can do it the cst way or you can uh just use re's lut provided in davinci resolve and convert your image that way but i'm just going to use color space transform and i'm going to go select aria alexa for color space and then log c for my input gamma and all of a sudden it looks great like you can go well print it we went from this to that in two simple steps it's perfect but we're not done yet what we need to do here is i want to bring down the highlights it's too bright right so like i can just go in my primaries and one thing that i want to tell you before i even jump in don't be afraid of messing around with all these tools you're not going to break anything worst case scenario you can just right click and reset your node grade right so here what i'm going to do is i'm going to take my gain i'm going to bring it down and i'm going to take my gamma and bring it up just a little bit and then just keep my gain somewhere around here and now i'm going to go under my contrast and i'm going to crank it okay and i'm gonna go too far and then i'm gonna come back out i am going for a commercial look and as we can see even in these ads like how push these looks are we are okay we're we're sitting right now now i can totally see that there's way too much yellow and red in my image and we can see it in our parade too like look at where the red is sitting and then green and then blue so let's balance it out right so what i'm going to do is i'm going to take out some of that red so let's pull this down i'm going to also take out some of that yellow by subtracting yellow and you can see what i'm doing in my offset right here that's where the changes are made okay so i'm going to add some blue because i want to make sure the jacket looks proper it looks white and now my jacket is looking good there's still a lot of yellow so i want to subtract some more yellow um don't be afraid to keep going now let's come back a little bit here this is not looking bad right like if i look at my vectorscope right now it's looking pretty good can we take advantage of like maybe one more blue like i'll come back i'll i'll stay right here so this is good enough right so overall there's still a little bit more red which is okay because if i take my cyan and push it up right that is really going to balance that out right like now it's making a difference being bringing us pretty close to where we're supposed to be so i can keep it somewhere around here i can add one more blue and at this point we are pretty well balanced everything is looking good and if i click on my qualifier hover over here and look at where her skin is sitting you can see it in the vector scope we're pretty good i think we can string it a little bit more toward red like right now there is a bit more yellow in the skin it's not too bad so we can go ahead and do that right now i can go under uh my third node and go under hue versus hue so i'm under hue versus hue right now all i can do is just click right here select that and then go ahead and just swing it a little bit towards red like like i said i don't want to push it too much okay that's not the point so this does the trick this makes the skin look really nice it pulls it over close to my skin tone indicator both of their skin skins are looking much better now another thing just um extracurricular um what i want to do is i want to select the yellow here sample it and then under my hue versus luminance bring it down just a little bit not too much and then i want to go under hue versus saturation again click on the yellow crank it up a little bit just add a little bit more love and if i do before and after you see like instead of being like a distracting object it becomes a lot more pleasing to the eye so i'm going to leave it right there i'm going to go to my last node uh one of the main things as a colorist is that we have to shape light we're basically cinematographers best friend in post-production okay so i'm going to take this i'm going to pull this over here somewhere around here and all i want to do now is i want to go under my primaries i want to take my gamma and i want to just like bring it down quite a bit and then pull it up a little bit like that and now if i do before and after we're making a big difference and even like his skin is picking up more saturation which is making his skin looks way better now so that's it and it evens out what's happening on this side and it puts the emphasis where it's supposed to be so this is where our image is and now if we compare this to our beginner's image which we thought was pushed was way better than log to like where we came so let's go ahead grab a still i'm actually going to move this still over here and now let's go ahead back to our pro version and then let's bring up our amateur version and let's swipe it back and forth and look at the difference so this is the pro version that was created effortlessly a few moves compared to our amateur version and once again now if we go and look at some of the pro work that's being done out there and if i pull up this shot over here and look at it we can see that now we are starting to push our image i mean look at the vector scope like the colors so like now we're really uh getting the most out of our image okay now there's a couple of things that we can do at this point right like i'm happy right now everything is looking very cinematic it's looking very very good i wouldn't want to make any more changes to that um our image is sitting we're supposed to be once again we can go right here maybe try to add add some magenta and see what happens i don't know i don't love it i've but if you think this is a bit too green then you can add some magenta and let's see if we can add some yellow no yellow doesn't do anything so we can keep it here like if we just want to add just a tiny bit more magenta so then the wall is not looking so green because like before it looks like before it's looking like this right so if this is looking too green you can add one magenta but personally for me i like the cinematic nature of where we're sitting right now and let's check out the final look in full screen [Music] for the purpose of this video was simple i wanted to give you permission that it's okay to push your images because that's what's happening in the real world and as you can see the results were just night and day so if you're enjoying the content you know what to do smash that like button subscribe to my channel for more awesomeness do not forget to watch the free training literally will take you to the next next level link is down below and i will see you guys in the next [Music] video

Channel: Waqas Qazi

Views: 251,248

Keywords: davinci resolve, davinci, davinci resolve studio, davinci tutorial, davinci resolve free, resolve color grading, color grading davinci resolve, colorist, color grading, color correction, davinci resolve tutorial, blackmagic design, davinci resolve color grading, davinci resolve effects, theqazman, davinci resolve 17, resolve 17, davinci resolve 17 tutorial, davinci 17, davinci resolve 16, davinci resolve 16 tutorial, waqas qazi, davinci resolve 16 color grading, film look

Id: P1VKvN9VycU

Length: 12min 39sec (759 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 05 2021