- Hey everyone, Resolve 18 is here and it is filled with some
really exciting features. In this video, we are gonna
look at the Surface Tracker and Depth Map effect. Before we get started, I
wanted to give a shout out to some of the other features that we are looking
forward to getting into in a future video. First of all, Intuitive Object Mask. It was demoed at NAB, but it's not yet released
in the public beta. And then secondly, of
course, Blackmagic Cloud, with its very own
dedicated storage hardware. I think the use of the word cloud might have some people a little confused, whereas the cloud, is it on the internet or is it in the hardware? We'll get into that. Hopefully, we'll be able to
get our hands on that soon and demo it for you. But for now, we've been playing around with the Surface Tracker
and Depth Map effects. If you wanna see how they work or maybe get some ideas for
how you can start using them in your workflows, this is for you. - [Announcer] For a steady
stream of new tutorials from professional Hollywood editors, be sure to subscribe to the
Film Editing Pro channel and turn on notifications. - I've got this beautiful hiking shot for us to play around with. I wanna use the Surface Tracker to remove this trail marker
that's painted on the rock, and the Depth Map effect to
grade the sky differently from the foreground in this image. Let's start with removing
the trail marker. I'm going to open up my effects browser, find the Surface Tracker and
drag it into my node tree. The Surface Tracker has two inputs, input one and input two. Input one is for the
image that we are tracking and attempting to patch. Input two is for the patch that we're gonna project
onto the Surface Tracker. For the time being, I'm
gonna feed input one and input two the same image. It'll become clearer while
we're doing that later. When I select the Surface Tracker node, the OpenFX overlay is automatically
selected in my viewer. By clicking on the image,
I can create the boundary of the surface track. Take note, I've deliberately
chosen to do this on the last frame of my clip. That's because the camera's pushing closer and I get the best view
of the trail marker on the last frame of the clip. Next, we wanna head over to the mesh tab. There's two different ways for Resolve to generate this mesh. The first is automatic, the second is using a uniform grid where the points are arranged
in a nice uniform grid. I'm gonna go with
automatic point locations 'cause there's plenty
of nice crisp features for Resolve to track. Now, we can go to the track tab. I'm gonna change the quality
from faster to better. And because we're on
the last frame of video, I'm gonna click track backwards. It's not super quick, it's not super slow, I am gonna use the magic of
editing to speed this up though. Perfect. Now, we can head to the results tab. I'm gonna go back to that
last frame of the video where we had the best
view of the trail marker. Let's see if we can understand
what's happening here. The Surface Tracker is warping
input two onto input one. It's basically taking a
snapshot of that second input, just one single frame, and
warping it onto that surface as the video plays out. Which frame is it using? At the moment, it's currently
using the first frame. I'm gonna switch the overlay
source to our reference frame. Because I started my track from
the last frame of the video, by default, that frame has
been set as my reference frame. You can see here my
reference frame is frame 452. It's pretty easy to change
your reference frame, just position the playhead
and click, set to current. Now, wait a moment, we're trying
to replace the trail marker but it's just as visible as ever. That's not a problem because
we can reposition or shift the overlay that is being
applied to the Surface Tracker. Check out the positioning dropdown. I can reposition my overlay using sliders, or alternatively, just by clicking and dragging on the canvas. When you move the canvas
around, be careful. If you click and drag on these red lines, you will warp or distort the image. But if you click somewhere in the middle, it'll just do a simple move operation. We've got a nice clean patch
of rock under the trail marker. So I'm gonna move the overlay up so I can use that clean rock
to patch the trail marker. I'll adjust the softness
so I don't get a hard edge on the Surface Tracker's bounds. Let's turn off my FX overlay
so I can see how it looks. I'll play it back. I'm going to pipe my patch
through a corrector node, and use a little bit of gamma
to match the rocks better. There's so much more you can
do with the Surface Tracker. You can project images
and logos onto surfaces, even moving videos. But for now, let's have a
look at the Depth Map effect. I'm gonna start by dragging
the effect into my notary. At the moment, the Depth Map effect is a little bit processor intensive, so get ready to wait a while and to put up with slower playback. It's done a pretty good job of working out the depth in the scene. Now, because this is an OpenFX node, it's not a corrector node, you'll see that I can't
apply any corrections to it. What I need to do is send the
alpha channel from this node to an ordinary corrector node, then I can use it to make adjustments. I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong, but at the moment for me,
the alpha channel output only works when I turn
off the Depth Map preview. Now, if I head over to node
five and turn on highlight mode, you'll see that it is just selecting, oh, at the moment, the
foreground of the image. That's easy for me to fix
in my node key controls, I can just invert the key. This isn't particularly
helpful at the moment. Although it is selecting the sky, it's also selecting a
lot of the foreground. You'll notice though that the foreground
becomes more transparent the closer we get to the camera. Let's head back to the Depth Map node. I'll turn my preview back on. And I'm gonna check this
box here, adjust map levels. By manipulating the near
limit and the far limit, I can make the Depth Map more aggressive. It's basically an alpha map. White represents parts of the image that are going to be opaque. Black represents parts of the image that are gonna be transparent. Obviously, with the caveat
that I've flipped the key in my corrector node. I'll turn the Depth Map preview back off and go back to corrector node number five. It's done a really good
job of selecting the sky. It has also selected a
little bit of the foreground. Obviously, I could refine the Depth Map a little bit further if I
wanted, but I kind of like this, I think it's gonna work really
well with the atmosphere that I want to add to the image. Let's turn highlight mode off. I'm gonna drive some cyan
and blue into the gamma. And then I'm gonna add
another corrector node, connect to the alpha channels, grab a power gradient. I'm gonna use this just to add a little bit of a gradient to the sky, so it gets darker as we go up. No matter how far down I
drag this gradient window, look, the grade is not gonna affect the foreground of my image because I'm using the Depth
Map to control its opacity. Let's see how this performs playback-wise. I'm getting about six to
eight frames per second. I'm on an M1 Max. Maybe this will get a little bit better with subsequent releases that make the effect more efficient, but I'm pretty happy with this. This is more than good enough for me to preview the effects of the grade. I've also picked out some other clips so that we can look at the Surface Tracker and Depth Map effect
in different scenarios. The Surface Tracker does not
use your original source media. It uses whatever changes that you've made in any of the corrector nodes
that are upstream from it. That means there are
things that you can do that make your image harder to track, and there are things that you can do that make your image easier to track. To demonstrate, I'm
currently in the mesh tab. Every time I hit this button here, Resolve will analyze the
image and create a mesh based on the points of
interest it finds in the image. Look what happens if I turn on this node here that's upstream, that improves the contrast and
the visibility of the texture on the back of his jacket. When I come back into my mesh
tab and hit regenerate mesh, you'll see that it
identifies way more points as a part of its mesh. I'm not too sure how the plugin works, but I'm assuming that the changes that I've made to the image are gonna make it easier to track. I might be wrong. Either way, I can have this node on while I'm tracking the image. And then after I'm done tracking,
turn it off or delete it to go back to the nicer looking image. On flat images like this, the
Depth Map effect is fantastic for isolating foreground subjects. Try the isolation tools. Because my subject is in the foreground, I'm going to decrease my target depth. That's pretty fantastic. Let's see how that looks
on my corrector node. As you can see, the plugin won't give
you a pixel perfect mask. Kind of reminds me of the magic mask. It's pretty fantastic,
but it is not a substitute for properly rotoscoping someone out. But if I head back to my Depth Map, I can turn on this map finesse
post processing controls down here and add a little bit of blur. I'll go back to my corrector node, let's see how that's looking. I can turn highlight mode off now, and I can manipulate just
the foreground of this image. One last example. Depth Map does a really good job even with complex scenes like this. In Depth Map, you can clearly
see the model walking, all of the sign posts,
the bus that's passing. These adjust map levels controls
are really, really good, but there are other ways that you can manipulate the Depth Map. For example, if I pipe its output to an ordinary corrector node, then I can manipulate that
Depth Map using my curves. There are scenarios where you might find that a more intuitive way of editing it. (bright upbeat music) All right, that's it for now. If you enjoyed the video, please give it a thumbs up
and don't forget to subscribe, so you don't miss out on future videos. And if you have any specific questions or maybe a suggestion for a future video, please leave it down in the comment. Thanks for watching everyone. (soft music)
- [Announcer] Hey there, for tons more free editing training, head over to our website
filmeditingpro.com/freetraining. Here, you can download free editing guides along with high quality video
training courses created by our team of professional
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