(dramatic music) - What's up, guys? This is Qazi. Welcome to another epic
tutorial, Knives Out. I just watched the film two days ago, and it was borderline distracting, it was just so good, the way it looked and the way it was lit. Steve Yedlin killed it. He was the cinematographer on this, and the FotoKem team and the color science that they put behind their movies is just, it's second to none. I mean, think of Tenet, that's coming out with Christopher Nolan. Think of Dunkirk. Think of Joker. They were a part of that, and once you start picking up the pattern, what they're doing, you're gonna start noticing which movies are done by FotoKem. So guys, this is the one thing
that I want to talk about. When I'm recreating these looks, never have I ever said to you guys that, hey, this is how it was achieved, and that's for the dead. I mean, these companies put a lot of money behind research and development. They develop their own film emulations, and they are just, they are color scientists. I mean, they're doing thing
that we don't even know about, and that's the edge that FotoKem has over some other company, and then Company 3 has
over some other companies, and you've got Technicolor, and each one has their own built in look and DNA that we feel
when we watch a movie, and then we do our research, and we figure out, okay,
it was done by this post-production facility
or whatever have you. So, all of us deep that in mind, okay? What I'm showing you here is for all the other 99.9%
of the people in the world that are working, you know, that don't have the backing to send their work to finish in FotoKem, or something like that. So what can you do? And this is the premise of this channel, and whatever I'm here to teach, okay? I'm not even using anything
outside of Resolve. I wanna keep it as tight as possible, so anyone around the world
can apply these techniques and then get similar results. Okay, once again, just
remember the key words: similar results. That said, I want everybody
to pause this video right now and drop in a comment, and tell me which camera
do you think this footage is shot with that we're
gonna be recreating and mimicking the look from Knives Out. Knives Out, when I watched it first, I thought it was shot on film. I was 100% positive it was shot on film, then when I did my digging, I realized that it was shot on Alexa 65, which is the same camera used on Joker. It's a large format camera, a true 65 millimeter camera. This camera is so rad that
you cannot even purchase it. This is rental only. So I don't even want to
know how much it costs, but when you find out, the footage that I'm working with, which camera that was shot with, it's gonna blow your freakin' mind for the price and what we're
gonna be able to achieve. So that's gonna unshackle, you know, that thing in your brain that says, "I need to be working with RED or Alexas "to get that caliber of work." You're gonna be surprised. Are you guys super pumped? And for those that wanna level
up their color grading game, check out the link in the description. One hour long free training where I will show you how to
get the perfect skin tones out of your Sony S-Log 8 bit footage, how to get the clean white look. It's the go-to commercial look. How to get the creamy film look. How to fix the dreaded gamma shift, and much, much more. Link is in the description. Guys, you know if you're
enjoying the content, smash that like button. The only way for these
videos and this channel to blow the F up, I need your help. Go smash that like button. Subscribe to my channel
for more awesomeness. Follow me on Instagram. You know, I'm dropping value
bombs there every single day. Let's roll the intro. (driving music) All right, let's get
this show on the road. Let's just start off
with our color palette, so we can study it better, and try to understand
what is really going on. So I'm gonna make this bigger, push this over for a second, and just look at it. How rich this image is, and obviously tons is goin'
on with the art direction, and that has a lot to do with it, but you can still see the
richness of this image, and that's the beauty of FotoKem. Their process is just second to none, so this is what we got. And let's just bring our scopes back, and see what we got to work with. And here's our shot. This is filmed on Gh5, so guys, we're going from Alexa 65, which I don't even think you can buy. It's rental only, the camera, so freakin' expensive. It's a large format camera, and then here, you got a camera that you
can pick up on eBay for less than $1,000, and the flicker and all
that stuff that's goin' on, we're gonna fix that. I'm gonna show you a cool technique to take care of that, but this is what we got, so let me pick my hero frame. I'm gonna park it somewhere around here. Let's say this is our hero frame. Let's start building out our node tree, and then we'll go from there, okay? So this does not require noise reduction, so I'm not even gonna
dedicate a node for that. So first one is gonna be
my just regular exposure. The second node is gonna
be our creative LUTs, so creative LUT. This is where we're gonna
achieve that film look, and then we're gonna
create a background node, and then I'm gonna be using
layer mixer at this time, and then this one is gonna be my skin, and then I'm gonna create
another layer mixer, and this one is going to be my highlights. I'm just gonna call it high, and then this one is gonna
be our look adjustment. I'm gonna have about three more guys that I'm gonna play with, so I'm just gonna keep 'em here. I'm not gonna name them right now. And then obviously, we're
gonna have our resharpening. I'm gonna have my grain, and I'm gonna have my deflicker. So that's the structure, okay? This is what we're gonna be working with. Let's just bring it up and
keep it somewhere around here. So first things first. I'm gonna be using Resolve's own LUT. That way, I'm not using something that you guys don't have, so film looks are part of
Resolve's LUT package, okay? So it should be in there, and the one that we're gonna be using is gonna be the 2383 D65, and as you go lower in numbers, D60, D55, it gets warmer, so we're gonna be using
the one where we get somewhat of a neutral image, so I'm gonna drop that on, and already you see it looks
super film like, right? Just print it. We're done. There is quite a bit
that needs to be done, but this is a good starting point, so let's just go back
in here to Knives Out, and pull up our image, and you guys know what we're gonna do. Click right here, and then selected still images. That's what we wanna do. I'm gonna make it a little bit bigger. I'm gonna push this over a little bit, so you guys can see
clearly what's going on. And hopefully we can still see our nodes. Yep, we do. So see, we're pretty far apart. You can see it in the scope, what's happening, so we got quite a ways to go, okay? Not on my hero frame, so I'm gonna park it
somewhere around here, so obviously like I said, we don't have to worry
about this red that much. We don't have that red in here, so we don't have to worry about it. We're gonna have to nail this. We got these tones here. We have to nail the skin, which is not gonna be a problem. We're gonna make sure that
we keep the shirt neutral, just like how his blue is true blue, and his white is true white, so we're gonna keep this, you know, as is, and then we're just gonna go from there, and we can see the highlights
have a little cool tones, because this is the window
light that's coming through, so that's what's creating
like a, you know, light blue color in the highlights, and we're gonna try to
do the same thing here. Although, our lights are
completely different, and they shouldn't be that, but we're just gonna try to
get it in that world, okay? That's what we got going on. So I'm gonna go in my skin tone. One thing that you need
to know about layer mixer is that anything that's
underneath takes precedent, meaning if I don't turn this off, nothing is going to happen here. I can prove it to you. See what I mean? Nothing is happening because
basically you can see it in the node that things are happening, but because this is still activated, it's not gonna effect anything. So once I turn this off, all of a sudden we see
what's happening here. So this is how the
layer mixer works, okay? The bottom one takes
precedent over the top one. So I'm gonna go ahead
and grab my dude's skin, so let's go in here, and I'm just gonna click right here. Do qualifier, and just grab his skin from here. That's okay. I'm gonna open it up a little bit, and then let's move it around. This is pretty good. I'm gonna control it quite a bit, so just wanna keep it
somewhere around here, move it around, keep it clean. Okay, so that's not bad. Now I'm gonna go ahead and make the, just denoise it around here, and now this is what you need to do, okay? You need to restrict it, so we're gonna keep it
somewhere around here. Like that, and then obviously, give it a shape. Turn it around a little bit. And then feather it out, something like that. And now we have a pretty good key that we can do whatever with, okay? So I'm gonna go back in here, make it bigger, and now we can start dialing
in our colors for the skin. Okay, so what I need to do is I'm gonna start with my gamma right here. I'm gonna start giving
it this brownish-red. So I'm gonna start going in that world, like you can see it. We're giving it that rich skin, and then we're gonna
counter it with my gain. You start adding some of these cool tones, so I'm gonna go in the opposite direction, and start adding some of these cool tones, and you can see that it's giving us close to that skin. So before and after,
big difference, right? So much more life. So I'm gonna keep it
somewhere around here for now. That's okay. I'm gonna keep it here, and now I wanna go in my background, and start getting our deep
blacks that we see here. And that's gonna be pretty easy, because it's basically gonna not touch what we selected here, and then effect everything else, and that's exactly what we wanna do. I'm gonna go under my
log wheels in my shadow, and I'm gonna pull it down. See, all of a sudden, we're getting the deep
blacks that we see here. This is already looking so good. So I'm gonna leave it
somewhere around here. This is looking pretty good. This is fine. And then here, I'm gonna go back in here, in my highlights, and let's just do our classic I'm gonna do shift H so you guys can see what I'm grabbing, and I'm gonna get somewhere around here. I just wanna grab these
specular highlights. And now what can I do to restrict these, so it doesn't grab this? It's pretty simple. Let's kill the saturated areas, so if I bring this down, it's gonna get rid of all of that, and it's only gonna select the skin. So see, work smart, don't work too hard. And then I'm gonna go back and denoise, and just bring it around 10-ish. And now we grab that area right there, and all I wanna do here is I wanna go in my offset, and I wanna start bringing
some of these cool tones. So I'm gonna just see, if I do before and after. Let me just make it bigger
so you guys can see this. See? So if I do, I'm actually gonna go closer, so you guys can really see it. I do before, see this warm skin tones? And now we're bringing these
cool highlights in there, and that's getting us closer to what we got going on right there. So we can even push it a little bit more. Be very gentle. So before, after, right? It's really creating that
believable white light, and that's the point of it. You wanna create this look in a way where it doesn't look forced. Okay, so it's already looking
really, really good, okay? Where we started to where we are, I mean, we're coming a long way. Now in my look adjustment, what I want to do is I wanna do some heavy push and pull, okay? What I mean by that is I'm gonna go in my lift gamma gain, and really start pushing
colors to start getting these neutral tones along
with like tons of separation, 'cause like right now, everything is living in this warm world, whereas here, everything lives
where it's supposed to be. The best way that I can describe it, so let's try to start doing that. So I'm gonna take my lift, and I'm gonna start taking
it somewhere around here. I'm gonna take my gamma, and I'm gonna start
bringing in that warmth, and right now I'm just
focusing on the wood, and trying to go in that direction. And then I'm gonna take my gain, and I'm gonna start bringing
a lot of cool tones. And if I do a before and after, we're creating a lot of separation now, so you can already see like even how this is splitting up
from the background now, so that's the whole point of it, right? So I'm gonna keep going, but not too much. And, my gain, I mean, obviously, go too far, and then try to make a, you know, bring it back. So what I see here is that
this is looking pretty good. This is actually looking really good, like skin is kinda off, but everything else is
looking pretty good. And now what I wanna do
is just go in my gamma, and kinda compensate for the skin. So if I do before and after, just look at the kinda
separation that we're creating. Like really. Just look at this to this. How much we're separating the
background and everything, and even if you look at this color, like it's really starting to come in. Okay, quite a bit. So look adjustment-wise, this is where I'm gonna park it for now, and what I wanna do is I wanna go back in my skin and
just kinda add some richness in there again, okay? So I'm just gonna take my gamma, and start move it around. Now if I do before and after, like look how much this
skin node is doing. Unreal. I'm gonna park it here for now, and then I wanna go in here and start bringing down some colors, and then bring up some colors. So let's start with hue versus options. I'm gonna go under my hue versus hue, and take my reds and
start moving it around, and we're gonna start seeing
what's happening, right? So basically, I'm just
looking at this wood, and I'm trying to get it in that world, and it's kinda getting there, right? And I'm not really worried about the skin, because we have our skin pulled out, so we can always go in there and fix it, or even better, we can just grab this, send it through, and say, hey, don't effect the skin, just effect everything else. So I can just go invert it. Then that way, we don't even have to do any manual labor. Like now we're effecting
everything around it, but not the skin. Now I wanna go back in there, hue versus hue, and mess with my yellows, and that's gonna be a big one, because I'm just looking at this and this, like these colors, and I'm just trying to get
this and that in that space, and I think we already did it, so if I turn it off, see where it is? And then if I bring it back, so you can see we're adding
a really nice warmth. Now if I turn it off and on, you can see the difference, how big of a difference we're making. I mean, look at the wood before, and then look at it after. It has that red in there now. And then look at the lights. They're looking so much better. And even this right here
is looking so much better. Let's say that you like that gold, because it has some of this in here, and you want to keep it. That's not a problem at all, because what you can do is you can just go in here. You can do a couple of things. You can either restrict it. Let me show you that technique too. So what we can do is we can go in here, in the picker, pick this, and now it tells us that
this is where that color is, so I can come in here, and basically bring it back to zero, so it leaves that color alone, and then it still goes in and manipulates the lights a little bit. Not too much, but a little bit. It brings a little bit
of the red in the lights, but then it leaves this as is, okay? If that's the kind of
thing that you wanna do. We still made a lot of changes. We still got that red in the wood, and it's looking believable. Everything is looking really, really good. Now I wanna go in here. Let's do hue versus saturation. First thing is to just grab it from here, and just move it around, and see what's happening, right? So I can go and bring the saturation up, and like let's see if that's the option that we want to go with. I don't think so, so I'm gonna keep it, bringing it down like takes
the edge off a little bit, to be honest with you. And then once again, we
can send that information through and say don't effect my skin, just effect everything else, so then that way the
skin stays pretty rich, but then it brings down the saturation on everything around it, so actually we're getting closer. If you look at this to that, we're kinda getting closer, so I don't mind that. I'm gonna keep it there, okay? Now what else I wanna do, I'm gonna go to my next node, and here what I want to show you is we're gonna go under our
hue versus luminance, and now that's a big one, because one thing that
separates film from digital is that there's so much depth in colors, and that depth comes from having control over your hue versus luminance. Let me explain. I'm gonna grab my reds, and I'm gonna pull it down, and just look at his skin, and look at the environment around, and how close we're gonna start
getting to this skin tone. Okay, so I'm gonna grab this, and I'm gonna start pulling it down. Okay? I'm not gonna pull it down too much, but I'm gonna keep it
somewhere around here. Just look at this, how even and how rich the skin gets. Like these are the deep colors. I mean, look at this. Like, right there to here. These are the deep colors that makes film look like film. Now if I make this bigger, and you see it, I just look at the depth we're adding. Just boom, before, after. The saturated colors, but in a different way. It's not just cranking the saturation. Just look at the skin, okay? So this thing is freaking magic. Now you can try it with other ones too, but I think the red is the
most prominent one for here, but I can just show you what yellow does, but obviously, I don't think we need that. We, yeah, we don't
certainly need that at all, so I'm gonna keep that there. As a matter of fact, let's raise this, because I mean, it's up to you, but for me, raising it gives us this
specular highlights in the back, and it actually does not ruin it. I think it helps, to be honest with you. It just adds more drama into the image. I personally would leave it like that. It just adds like a three
dimension in this image. And one more thing that I want to do, let me look at the contrast and see if we're nailing it. I think we can do more
with the contrast, okay? I actually think we can
do more with the contrast, so what I want to do is I'm gonna create another layer right here, and you know I'm creating these layers. All this can be done in one. I'm just doing this so I can
break it up for you guys, so you can follow along, what is happening in each one, but obviously hue versus options can all be in one node. And that's totally fine. As a matter of fact, if I'm working on a professional project, that's what I would do, but I just, because this is sort of a complex grade, I want to break it up
so it makes sense to you what is really happening. And then this one, consider this one as our
global adjustment, okay? So this one is our global adjustment, and what I want to do is I'm gonna raise this, and I'm gonna go on my RGB curves, and I'm gonna raise it up just a tiny bit. Not too much, just a tiny bit. And then, maybe a little bit, and then I'm gonna pull this down. Something like that. Let me see what it's doing. And I'm gonna grab it from the top. And then I'm gonna ease
it out a little bit. Okay, let me think about this, because I think there's some
really deep blacks here, and we didn't have those. So I think this might be doing it, and I'm gonna leave it on, and then I'm gonna go in my log wheels, and I'm gonna try to even
out the blue channel, right? The blue channel is a little lifted, compared to like where
the blue channel is here, so I'm gonna even that out. I'm gonna bring that down. Somewhere around here. And now I'm gonna turn it on and off, and I think it's a little
bit more even, right? So let's do this. We're gonna do this. All right, so this image
is way more saturated, so we're gonna have to
bring the saturation down. So one thing that I'm gonna try, I'm gonna go back in this layer, and I'm gonna show you this technique. It's pretty cool. So saturation versus saturation. Sometimes it can just come
in here on the top end and pull it down a little bit. Not too much. And you see how it takes the sting off? I mean, this does not look bad at all. Like, this is how it was before. This is how it is afterwards, so I mean, you can obviously
split the difference, but this does wonders. I mean, just look at it. And sometimes the best strategy is to kinda pull back and look at it, like what's happening. You really get to see if you're getting colder, or if you're getting in that world. I would want to go back
into my look adjustment, and just mess with some
of these parameters a little bit more, okay? So I'm gonna go back in
my gamma and pull it down. Go in my lift, and level it out. And then gain, bring it down. Okay. All right, that's not bad at all. I'm gonna go back in my skin, and just work on it a little bit, because I wanna bring some more warmth. All right, and I'm gonna go back in here, and just go in my hue
versus saturation this time, and just try to bring my, I'm gonna bring my red down quite a bit, and then obviously pull that up. And then I'm gonna try to do the same thing with yellow. I mean, this node really
makes it look like film. It does wonders. Okay, so I'm liking
where we're going, okay? So let's do one to one. Let's look at the wood, do like where our wood is. It's really good. I mean, it does a lot. Let me see if I can even
push it a little bit more. I'm gonna grab it from here. So if I do before and after, and look at that wood, like see how brown that is, and now it's getting so red. So that does quite a bit. The skin is looking pretty good. I guess what we can do is maybe bring a little bit of a warmth back. So I'm just gonna go in my gain, and kinda split the difference, so that's what I just did. And let's go in our sharpen, and obviously, like we gotta
sharpen it up quite a bit, because this image is so sharp. I mean, just look at it. So we wanna make sure
that this does that too, and it does now. And then we're gonna go in our grain. We're gonna drop that
in the usual suspect. I'm gonna go to 35 millimeter, and then I'm just really gonna crank it, because there's so much grain here. And it's so nice. I'm gonna make it even, push it even more, and you guys can see
if I get pretty close, that the grain is doing its thing. When I do a before and after, you guys can see it. Okay, and then deflicker, obviously we're gonna go in here. I'm gonna type in deflicker, and then just drop that in, and you don't even have to do anything. It's just gonna take care of it. And it's gonna take a minute to render. If I go here, you guys gonna see what's happening, so I've gone in my playback, and turned on my render cache to smart, so this blue line is basically
rendering this image, and once it goes through the entire thing, it'll be ready for a playback without any dropped frames. All right, so let's play it through. All right, so you guys believe
that this is a freakin' footage shot with a
thousand dollar camera Gh5? And what we created. So I'm gonna hide this. I'm gonna bring in this image, and sometimes it's good
to just go back and forth and read it. I mean guys, come on. Not having the fancy color science. Not having all the best
color scientists in the world behind you, helping you out, creating your unreal show LUTs, like we started with
what we got in Resolve, and this is what we ended up with. So I personally think that our image is still kinda too saturated, so I'm gonna do a few things, but let's turn these two off first, so we can move freely. And let's just go into
our global adjustment, and create another node, so we can just like really
mess around with it, and see what's happening, and what we need to do, so this image is so saturated, but then in the shadows, it might not be so saturated, so whereas my shadows
are really saturated, so one technique that I'm gonna show you is that let's just in this node, create another node so that
we can mess around with it. Go under your luminance versus saturation, and just pull it from your shadows, so this right here is your dark parts, and you know, bright parts. So I'm gonna grab it from here, and I'm gonna pull that down a little bit. And basically I'm just
focusing on his lips. I'm gonna try to get the
lips in the same world, and I'm gonna park it
somewhere around here. So now if I do before and after, and obviously, you can just
grab it from the middle point, and then bring it back, so it gets saturated where
it's supposed to be saturated. But this is gonna be such a little nuance that you really need to
focus on certain areas to see if it's making a difference or not, but like if we get really close, to the hair, you can see it. Like in here you can see it, that it just makes a
subtle difference that it's barely there. I mean, let's just even
push it a little bit, so we can see what it's really doing. It is a very subtle difference, but gives it a very much of a film look. Look at that. These are the little nuances, and this is the kinda
stuff that you have to do to really get the look that you want, and if I turn it on and off, honestly, I can live with either/or. I'm like really, really
nitpicking at this point. I feel like I like
everything that it does, minus what it does to my skin, because I still want some
of that saturation back. I'm gonna go in my gamma, and I'm gonna try to bring it back. I'm gonna go in here and try to bring some of that back. Not too much. So now if we go back in here, what we did, yep, I wanna leave it in. I think it really cleans it up. I think it really adds to the film look. Yeah, the skin is looking really good. All right, so I'm pretty happy with this. I'm gonna go ahead and
turn everything off, and then go one by one, where we started to where we ended up. Don't forget this is shot on Gh5. So we started with our creative LUT, which was a 2383 D65, and then we went in and pulled a skin, worked on our background to like really bring the shadows down, and then added some
warmth in the highlights. Look adjustment did quite a bit, and then that's where the
nuance started happening. We did a lot of hue versus options. It just cleaned up everything, and then hue versus
luminance was a big one to give us that film look, and even out his skin, and then in the global adjustment, we just got rid of the blue hue that we had in the shadows, and just evened out everything else. And then went in, and used our luminance versus saturation to really clean up the shadows even more, to keep the look pristine. Added sharpening, grain, deflicker, and this is our final look. I mean, let's just check
it out in full screen. (dramatic music) I hope you guys had a blast, and come on, a thousand dollar camera. You can pick up Gh5 for less than a grand, if you're pretty savvy like myself. So we created this look with the Gh5. People who say the dynamic
range on Gh5 is terrible. The V-Log is terrible. The noise is terrible. I mean, come on, just look at this, and what we were able to create without using any third party plug-ins, without using any FotoKem magic. So sky's the limit. Keep that attitude. Work hard, get obsessed, get possessed. Make sure to check out the link to the training in the description, if you want to jump start
your career in color grading, or just want to blow up as a filmmaker. Smash that like button. Subscribe to my channel
for more awesomeness, and I will see you in the next video. (driving music)
