Dope NEON TEXT Effect in Davinci Resolve

[Music] what up folks it's alex here mr alex tech and in this video i'm going to show you how to create that real simple neon sign effect with tracking in davinci resolve it's a really cool effect it's actually surprisingly easy to do but you will need to find yourself a neon font the one i'm using is called marquee moon it's free and you can download it from the link down in the description below or alternatively just shoot over to google and type in free neon fonts and you're sure to find one now all of the stock footage i use is a mixture of artgrid and pexels.com and right at the end i use a dirt overlay which is also available from art grid but it's not free you do need a subscription to be able to use that right with all that out the way let's open up davinci resolve and i'll show you how to do it so here we are within davinci resolve we're currently on the edit tab and i've got my timeline set up ready to go so i just need to add my footage now this is the footage we're going to use for this demonstration there's a little bit of camera movement so we're going to have to track it and that should give you a good demonstration of how this works now i don't need 20 odd seconds of this so i'm just going to cut it down because it makes life a little bit easier when we're in fusion and then we can give it a right click and we're going to open in the fusion page now once we're in fusion here your screen should look something like this if you're missing this area down the bottom the nodes you just need to click on the nodes icon up here just to enable that and then once you're in nodes you can use your middle mouse button to click and drag to move this light around so you can get it in the right place so now we just need to start adding some nodes to create our neon text so the first thing we're going to add is of course a text node so on this little bar here just underneath your preview window we've got this t over on the left hand side just click hold your mouse drag that onto this line until it turns yellow and blue like so and then release now add a text node as well as a merge node now this is personal preference but what i like to do i always grab the text node and i put it up here somewhere and then i just have all of my other nodes working down just helps to keep them in order for me it makes life a little bit easier give the text node a click open up the inspector in the top right hand corner make sure you're on the text tab and then in the text box just write whatever you want your neon to say so i'm just going to put mr alex tech underneath that we've got our font feel free to use any font you want as mentioned in the intro i'm using the one called marquee moon so i'm just going to find that and there it is and then that's it that's all i do at this point we're going to come back and make any other amendments to the fonts the color all that sort of stuff in a moment now in your preview window here if you hold your middle mouse button down and drag you can use it like a hand tool to move everything around if we just release that if we hold control and then scroll in we can zoom in just to get a closer look at what we're doing and again click and hold to move it around so now we've zoomed in we can see what we're doing we can start adding some additional nodes so make sure to click on this text node down here in your node so it's highlighted in red and then hit control and space bar on your keyboard this will open the select tool box so the first thing we want to add is a drop shadow the drop shadow just as the effect makes it look far nicer more realistic so i'm just going to type in drop to find my drop shadow and then click add now because we have the text node highlighted it should have put the drop shadow on this line ready to go if you didn't and the drop shadow is over here like this it's not connected to the text all you need to do hold the shift key grab this node put it on this line until it changes color release your mouse button and then that will attach like so give the drop shadow a click open up the inspector go to the drop shadow and then we've got strength angle distance and blur now have a play with this until it looks how you want it what i like to do i bring the blur right down just give it a tiny little bit of blur but i still want to be able to read the text within the shadow we can then just bring the distance in and then we can just change the angle now what i like to do here is i'll look for a reference so i've got this cable at the top here and you can see the shadow is underneath so this is obviously being naturally lit from above so we're just going to use that as a rough guide and we'll change the angle so the shadow is underneath and we'll go with something like that but feel free have a play with those until you're happy now we just need to add some glow to give it it neon look so give the drop shadow a click ctrl and space once again to open up the select tool and then we're going to use soft glow so i'm just going to type in soft and i've got this one here soft glow i'm going to click add and i'll add our node once again in the inspector we've got threshold gain and glow size so threshold i generally just leave as it is gain will adjust the brightness so if you go really bright or you can bring the gain right down i'm gonna go with about one and a half something like that and then we've got the glow size what i like to do is to make the glow size quite big and that helps to just spill the light out onto the surroundings which just makes it look a little bit more realistic a little bit more authentic now it's at this point i'll go back to my text node and i'll change the color so i'm just going to click within color to get my color picker and then i can pick my color now generally i like sort of faded pastely colors but you can do whatever you want really so i'm just going to go with a pastel sort of blue for this one something like that sort of a sire but pick whatever you want have a play with different colors to see which works best for you and your scene once i'm happy i'm going to click ok and it's going to look something like that so that starts to look pretty cool i'm just going to zoom out so i can see everything now if i hit play you can see that this obviously video moves around so we do need to do a little bit of tracking so come down to your nodes click on the media in one so that one's highlighted in red we'll do our control and space once again to open up our select tool and then from here you're going to type planar p-l-a-n-a-r and you want to find the planar tracker and then we're going to click add that will add the tracker here in between your media in and your merge give that a click and then in the inspector we've got a few options now the first thing you want to do find the point on your timeline where you think you can get a good track so basically you're looking for something with lots of contrast it doesn't really matter what area i use because it doesn't pan or it doesn't move around too much so i can just pick anywhere i like within the timeline let's just go with here and then we want to click on set and that's going to change our reference time to 90. and then within our preview window we want to select the things that we want to track so i've got this sign here it's got lots of contrast lots of harsh edges so i think that should give us a pretty good track so what i'm going to do click around it rough as you like just to give it a selection like so underneath here we've got a few options the only one i generally change is the tracker i change it from point to hybrid point slash area just because i generally get a better track and then underneath here we've got these options so i want to click on this one which is apply to the end and what it's going to do is track this object all the way through our clip right to the very end so i'm going to hit that now we've got our tracking markers and it's tracking done and then we could go up to the top and hit go to go back to our reference time which is 90 and then we're going to hit this one to track backwards to the beginning of the clip and there we go so that's given us a really good solid track by the looks of things so then we just hit create planar transform and that will give us a planar transform node so all this is is a transform node which contains all of that tracking data so i'm going to give it a click hold shift and then just attach it to this line like so and then if we just come up to the top go to the beginning we can hit play and have a look at how well our text has been tracked and that seems to have done a pretty solid job on the off chance you have some issues with your tracking just delete that play in the transform go back to your planar tracker and then just try changing the motion type perspective should in theory give you the best tracking but if it's doing something weird try changing it to translation translation rotation or translation rotation and scale and just seeing if you get better results with those if however you are happy with your tracking you can then just delete you're playing our tracker because you don't need it anymore and now the tracking is done we can start messing around with the rest i then go back to my text tool and then we can start to put it in the right place so i'm going to click on the layout tab i'm going to change the center so i can just drag this over and again what i like to do here is i'll look for references so i want to change the perspective a little bit so that it looks like it's actually sitting on this wall and we've got a few references that we can use we've got this sign we've got this line here and we've also got this bottom bit here so first of all i'll change the center so it's roughly in the right place like so i'll expand rotation and then we've got x y and z axes so the z or the z is just the rotation so i'm going to use this bottom line here let's put this down here on this line and we'll adjust that rotation until that looks about right perfect and then we can adjust our y-axis so if it's of a sort of on an angled wall or whatever you need to do you can just adjust that accordingly we've got to go with about that and then we've also got our x-axis so if it's slanted up or down this one is so i'm going to use this line for my reference now and just slant it backwards a little bit like so and then we'll just change our center to put it where we want it so let's just go with about there now if we zoom back out and hit play that's starting to look pretty good now at this point you can go back in change your color mess around with your drop shadow or your soft glow just to get it looking exactly as you want it but from here you're pretty much done we've got our mr alex tech we've got it in the right place and it's been tracked throughout the clip if you want to finish it off with one final touch what i'd like to do click on your playing transform down here hit ctrl and space once again to open up your select tool and then i'm just going to type in flickr to add a flicker edition add that and then if we hit play you can see everything will start flashing like so giving it a slightly more neon look if we give the flicker edition a click within the inspector there's a few things that you can change in here i like to change the flicker type from gamma to gain so it's changing the gain rather than the gamma just looks a little bit more subtle bit more realistic and then we can also just change the range how bright it is from dark to light we can also change the speed how quick it's flickering and then in the flicker quality there's a few more options that you can mess around with have a play with until you've got it looking exactly as you want it and then if we just jump back into the edit tab and we can hit play we've got something that looks like this you can then do whatever you need to within here if you need to make any amendments to it the easiest way just give it a right click open in the fusion page and then you back here with all of your notes you can make any amendments start messing with it do any changes that you need to do one last thing if we just jump back into the edit tab from here if you give it a click you can stabilize the footage so this is a little bit shaky so if i want i can just hit stabilize i can stabilize this footage because it's got all the tracking done it's got a text already in there it will track everything so we can just reduce some of that movement and then to really finish it off to really sell the effect you might want to use an overlay like i did in the intro so i'm just going to grab one of these dust ones or add it on top like so let's give it a bit of a zoo and then we're going to come down to composite and change that to add and then we'll just reduce the opacity a little bit and there we go we've now got this shot which looks really quite cool and it's as easy as that and there you go it's as easy as that and i actually think it looks really really cool this one so if you did enjoy it give me a thumbs up if you've got any comments or feedback shove them down in the comment section below and if you're new here you enjoyed the video consider hitting that subscribe button for me thanks for watching folks take it easy i'll catch you next time see ya i'm

Channel: MrAlexTech

Views: 31,894

Keywords: MrAlexTech, Mr Alex Tech, davinci resolve, resolve, davinci resolve 16, davinci resolve 17, davinci resolve beginners, neon, neon sign, davinci resolve neon, neon davinci resolve 16, davinci resolve neon text, how to add neon effect in davinci resolve, how to make neon text in davinci resolve 16, neon outline davinci resolve, neon text effect davinci resolve, davinci resolve neon effect, davinci resolve 17 neon effect, davinci resolve fusion neon

Id: RuvjBAXj7g0

Length: 13min 11sec (791 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 29 2021