How to use the brand new DEPTH MAP tool in Davinci Resolve 18 Studio! Full Overview & Tutorial

depth map is an incredible new feature within davinci resolve studio 18 which will automatically pick up on foreground and background elements allowing you to do selective coloring put titles or other effects behind people like this and you can use it to do some really cool practical effects like blurring everyone within the foreground like this and even create fake depth of field effects like this all without doing a single bit of tracking making the entire process much quicker and much easier now this is limited to the paid studio version of davinci resolve is not available within the free version and that's because it's using the davinci resolve neural engine which is the ai engine which actually leads me nicely onto this video sponsor nvidia studio and scanned computers nvidia studio is a new software and hardware platform utilizing technology to make creative work easier and more efficient rtx studio high performance systems are loaded with the world's most powerful nvidia geforce rtx gpus and those gpus have dedicated ai tensor cores which accelerate the davinci resolve neural engine ensuring you can run the new davinci resolve 18 effects like the depth map and surface tracker as well as older effects like magic masks speed warp and face refinements effortlessly and scam computers are one of the biggest and most trusted resellers of nvidia studio certified products in europe so click the link below to check out their line of nvidia studios certified laptops plus their own line of award-winning 3xs nvidia studio approved custom systems built specifically for creators this video was actually recorded on my very own scan 3xs system running an nvidia rtx 3090 which of course makes light work of those new depth map effects so first of all where do you find it well it actually exists within the effects library under open effects and the refine area on both the edit page and the color page now there is a distinction between the two versions i found the version on the edit page is best if you just want to really quickly mask something out whereas the version on the color page is best for obviously color grading but also applying some selective effects now for this quick opening demo i'm going to show you it on the edit page just because it's slightly more visual but then we'll go into some real life examples towards the end so let's open it up and take a look so i'm on the edit page i've got my effects library open open effects and then within refine depth map will drop that on this footage here so i'm going to open up the inspector go to effects open effect and i've got all of my depth map controls within here now i'm going to set the quality to faster because it just means that i get full real-time playback and it makes for a slightly nicer demonstration so what's going on well it's actually quite simple what davinci resolve has done really cleverly is it's figured out whatever's in the foreground and the background so the foreground is represented by white and then background is represented by black and anything that's black is going to have an alpha so that's going to be transparent so what i'm going to do just to make this slightly more visual i'm going to grab a generator four color gradient and put this underneath so that black area there there's some trees we can see this light gray area here he's kind of light gray these are all light gray so there's going to be some transparency over the entire image but this sky area is going to be really transparent whereas he's going to be a little bit more opaque so i'm just going to turn off the depth map preview and that's exactly what we see this guy is letting in some of the colors through and the bleach is over here but the sky and the trees are nearly all transparent because that's the furthest away and this is closest to the screen so how do you tweak it well in the effects you've got a few options you've got a resulting map adjustment for starters and you just need to tick this adjust map levels and then we've got the far limit the near limit and the gamma the far limit allows you to adjust where this background is so basically this background is quite far away it's sort of imagine a invisible line it's sort of on the trees we can still see the trees we want to bring that towards us so that we can get rid of all of the tree and the sky area and we do that using this far limit so we can bring our imaginary line closer to us making anything that's kind of just past this guy in terms of depth will go black meaning it's more transparent and again if we turn the preview off this gives us a really nice visual if we increase this far limit it goes further out and then we can bring it back in now our near limit does the same thing but this time it's for our weight levels it's for our foreground so at the minute our guy here is kind of an off gray so it will be a little bit transparent so we're going to move our near limits just a little bit out like so and again we've got this invisible line we're saying anything up until this point we don't want any transparency we want to be completely opaque so we can move this near limit all the way out to the trees or just encompassing this guy again if we turn the depth preview off we can see our little line going all the way out so anything in this foreground area here we don't see any of the four color gradient underneath but we don't want that we basically just want the guy so we're going to go something like that and there we go now the gamma the government represents the fade between the light and dark areas so it's kind of like a contrast we can make it so there's a real big fade between the two or we can make it so it's quite a harsh line between the foreground and the background like so underneath there we've got this we've got an isolate specific depth and we've got isolation so i'm going to give that a tick this allows us to basically do the same thing but it's much much harsher rather than having a nice soft edge a nice soft fade between the white and the black the foreground the background instead now we get a real harsh edge so we can move this line it's much much thinner imagine the line is a thinner line we're basically isolating subjects so i want just this guy so i'm going to make him super white hot like that and then everything else is black so if we were to turn the preview off we can just see this guy and then we've got the four color gradient coming through pretty much everywhere else except for anything in the scene which is in line with our dude we've then got tolerance which basically just makes that line that we're talking about thicker or thinner so we can be really precise with what we're selecting and then we've got the softness which just softens the edge of that line now i'm going to turn my preview off so we've got this we've got a nice harsh isolated subject against our four color gradient now we need to go down to our map finesse and we've got post processing so you can see it is quite a harsh edge let's zoom in on his hair here we've got a little bit of sky coming through and we've got a harsh edge here if we turn on the post processing that just sort of fades the edge a little bit so we've got a bit more control we've got expand and contract blur and post filter so we can just contract or expand this mask in relation to our subject and leave that as it is we can then change the amount of blur between our mask like so we can have loads of blur or not much at all and then we've got this post filter which will try and filter out all the differences now i found that this is actually quite good generally with hair and that sort of thing so it does work quite well so you want to use all of these controls to try and finesse this mask to get it looking exactly as you want it now i know that example we've done with the full color gradient doesn't exactly look very good but hopefully it's giving you a good understanding of what all of those controls actually do now in terms of actual practical examples i've got a few of those set up so let's take a look so for this first example we're going to do some selective color grading i've got this footage of me in my studio so we're going to give it a click and then go into the color page i've got my nodes open i've got my depth map from my effects library so i'm just going to drag that onto my nodes and release like so and now it's all ready to go now that important distinction i mentioned earlier on the color page the black areas don't necessarily represent alpha instead think of it this way all of your white or foreground elements are the elements which are going to have your color grade or your effects applied and any black areas won't have them applied so you are kind of masking but you're masking the color grade or the effect rather than actually masking something out revealing what's underneath so what i want to do for this example is to do some color grading of either me or the background so my depth map looks pretty good but that's a bit gray and i'm a bit faded as well so i'm just going to come to my adjust map levels i'm going to bring the far limit in so that the background is completely out and then i'm going to bring my near limit down just so i'm completely hot white like so and that should pretty much do the job now we don't want to do the color grading on this depth map no do want to add a new one so i'm just going to hit alt and s on my keyboard to add a new serial node and then all we need to do is drag the little blue box to the blue triangle to connect them up and then we could do any of our grading on this node here now we do want to turn our depth map preview off so we can see what we're doing we'll go to our new node and then all we can do here is any of the color grading that we want to do so let's say i wanted to adjust the temperature i could bring this down or all the way up making me really hot or cold and if i hit play it will track it all the way through because it's just looking at our foreground element not our background elements we could change any of our gain our offset do whatever we wanted in here if we wanted to do the opposite we wanted to grade our background instead all you do hop over to our depth map choose invert that will switch it so now i'm not selected the background is instead we'll go to our grading node and then let's just do the same thing let's mess with our offset it's nice and obvious we could bring that up or down as we need to as you can see my mask is a little bit harsh so we're just going to go back to my depth map go to our post processing turn that on straight away that's actually done a pretty good job of just adding a bit of finesse to the hair and a bit of blur around my shoulders so i think that'll do the job let's say that i actually wanted to just bring this temperature up and maybe lift up the game bring down the shadows whatever add a bit of contrast to the background something like that you can do it really quickly and really easily simple selective grading done now we're going to stick on the color page for a couple of examples but this time we're using blur so this is the example we used at the beginning it's just me in front of the tv and i want to pixelate myself so i've already got my depth map on there we're just going to toggle the preview on so we can see what we're doing we're going to adjust the map levels for starters because we want to bring the background completely out and then we want to bring me so i'm nice and white let's just track through that looks pretty good there's a few other bits coming in so what i'm actually going to do is just add the isolation as well which should get rid of most of those that's looking pretty good we'll come back to the post processing we won't worry about that for now i'm going to add my new node alt and s will connect the blue to the blue we'll go back to my depth map i'm just going to turn off the preview go back to our new node and for this one i'm just going to use the mosaic blur we drop that on this new node because our node is downstream from the depth map our mosaic blur will only be applied to anything within our depth map so i.e that's me because i'm in the foreground now there is a bit of a harsh edge so i'm going to go back to my depth map we'll apply the post-processing on this one for this i think i just want to expand it there we go that looks pretty good and now we've got me all blurred out in the foreground again if i wanted to reverse this and blur out the background instead in the depth map invert the background is completely mosaic pixelated and i'm ready to go now another great example of the depth map is replicating a shallow depth of field or that bokeh sort of effect so i've got my depth map on here ready to go we're going to use the depth map preview and we're going to adjust our map levels now for this one because i want it to sort of slowly go out of focus i'm not going to use the isolation like i did before i don't want that hard cut i want it to slowly get more and more blurry into the background so i'm actually going to leave the far limit as it is that looks pretty good it's quite far away we're actually going to move the neo limit out a bit so sort of this bit here is our foreground and it slowly starts to fade they may even just increase the gamma so it's a nice soft gradient to our things with our effect applied to those without so we'll just turn our depth map preview off now it's actually not this guy that i want to have the effect applied to it's the opposite so i'm going to go to invert now i'm going to create my new node alt and s like so we'll connect the blue to the blue and then what i'm going to do for this one down here in this blur area here we've got the radius i'm just going to drag this right up and you can see it's starting to blur our background but it isn't harsh it sort of slowly gets more and more blurry as things go further into the background we do have a bit of a harsh edge here so i'm going to go to my depth map turn on the post processing that starts to look a little bit better i could finesse it a bit more but it sort of works and if we hit play we've got a much blurrier background again you'd want to tweak that to get it just right but for a real quick example that doesn't look too bad at all so as you can see it works well and it's actually really quick to do things which usually would be quite difficult if you're trying to mask now we're going to jump back over to the edit page and we're going to do some fun little masking there's some cool stuff that you can do with titles like this which again usually would take some masking some effort and it's now actually really easy so we're on the edit page and i've got this footage here with this title and basically i want the ice skater guy to be on top of the title so he's moving in front of it so first thing i do i've got this clip down here this is the main footage i'm going to make a duplicate of this so i'm going to hold alt on my keyboard drag up to create a duplicate on this third track so we've got the footage the text and then the footage underneath so i'm going to grab my depth map we're going to drop this on this top piece footage like so we'll give it a click in the inspector effects and then we've got the depth map options within here so same thing again i just want the focus to be on our guy so i'm going to adjust the map we're going to add some isolation we're going to move the near limit so we can catch him and we're not going to do too much else really we'll maybe finesse it a bit we'll have a look see how that looks now if we just turn the depth map off this will add our alpha so the only thing visible from this top clip is anything that was in the foreground so now he's above our title yes i'd need to finesse it let's go back into the effects we'll go to the processing maybe it works better with it off actually and there we go we've got our guy above our title really quickly and easily so let's try this last one here we've got these ladies walking in front and we're going to do the same thing so we're going to duplicate this hold alt and drag up we're going to drop a depth map on the top one we're going to adjust the map levels and again all we want to do is to select the people walking past but not these stuff these bushes in the background so we're going to bring the far limit forwards to get rid of those the near limit just there even without isolation that looks like it's done a really really good job maybe a bit off but let's just try it anyway now if we go to the beginning hit play our ladies are going to walk in front of our title like so how awesome is that it's basically magic and talking of magic thank you very much to this video sponsor nvidia and scan computers be sure to check out scan's selection of nvidia studio laptops and award-winning three xs systems by clicking on the link down in the description below thanks for watching see ya

Channel: MrAlexTech

Views: 156,420

Keywords: MrAlexTech, Mr Alex Tech, davinci resolve, davinci resolve 18, depth map, davinci resolve depth map, davinci resolve tutorial, masking, colour grading, new effects

Id: b2fwxkZfga8

Length: 15min 32sec (932 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 25 2022