How to use the Resolve Color page for NEWBIES - [from a PRO]

hi my name is darren mostin and this episode is aimed for complete beginners in the color page this is an episode for absolute newbies on getting from the edit page into the color page and understanding what's going on so i'm not just going to show you what each menu does i'm going to show you properly how to use the color page if you are experiencing the color page i suggest you do not watch this video this is 30 minutes of your life you'll definitely want back but i have had some requests so i'm going to keep an eye on the stats and comments and see if it's something that people do want so let's go and take a look okay so we're currently sitting in the edit page in resolve so this is our completed edit so we've got maybe i know 30 shots on video track one and then there's a few cutaways on video track two so we've got maybe 10 shots there so we've probably got about 40 odd shots here to grade now the grade it happens in the color page and the color page talks to the edit page all these pages talk to each other so if i go to the color page now we're exactly on the shop that we were on in the edit page there's our edit timeline here you can see that quite clearly there video layer one video layer two so there's our cutaways there so each of these little lines these little icons is a video edit so you go back to the edit page and let's put it onto this track here this clip sorry back to the color page and there we are we're on the exactly the same time code and the time code is here so i can also move up and down the edits in the color page so this is just a pictorial display of my edit page i can't make edit changes in the color page so you can't actually grab a clip and move it you have to go back to the edit page to do that so if i wanted to just move this shot and maybe move this one over here go back to the color page and that has happened okay so you can't actually do any editing in the color page each of these edits here also has a picture icon above it so this is every single shot in my edit so i reckon there was about 40 or 50 shots if i go to the end here there is in fact 46 shots so that's including video layer 1 and video layer 2 there's 46 shots in total so just bear in mind all these pages talk to each other you can go to the deliver page anytime you can go to fairlight do your audio mixing i'll let's move that timeline now and if i go to the color page we're on exactly that same shot again all right so each of these talk to each other it's really straightforward so any edit changes happen in the edit page and then when you want to grade it go to the color page so before we look at basic color grading i'm just going to talk you through this whole interface so the top left panel here is uh currently the media pool so that is exactly the same as the first page here this is exactly what's going on in here all these clips that are in here are shown in the color page here now you can't actually edit from here remember so if i want to use these clips i have to go back to the edit page and there you see the media pool there it's just in a different view at the minute so i can switch that back to picture view and that is exactly the same as that um so i don't actually need this um so i can change it to be something else so i can change it to be luts so we're not going to cover luts in this episode i'm going to stick to just getting you going and understanding the color page but these are essentially look up tables that help us do color balancing if you want but what i prefer to have is this thing called gallery and what the gallery does there's fewer there already is it's a it's a still which is basically a grade so i can use i can save grades and i can use these to apply to other clips so if i want to copy and paste grades so for example this shot here happens quite a few times in this sequence so it's here and here there's no point in me grading that individually two or three or four times if i save a still i can literally apply it to the shop and we'll look at that in a moment so this page here is the main viewer so this is essentially what's on my output so when i render the program this is what i'm seeing so if i don't color grade this shot and just leave it like that that is what is exported as soon as i make any changes in here the colors let me just do something for example if i just adjust the gamma you see that changing in the viewer and if you have an external monitor you'll see exactly this image on that monitor down here you've got the transport control so i can play stop we can go back to the beginning this one allows you to loop the clip so i'm on this clip currently if i just keep playing it it will just play in a loop this is the sequence name so this comes from the edit so here is my sequence name and you can select other sequences just by clicking on here this is my time code so my current um time code of the clip and we've got a few other tools here that we'll look at this one is essentially for trying to match shots so it's a wipe so if i double click this shot here you'll see that i can literally wipe between the two so i'm comparing side by side i can switch that on and off here okay this one is a side by side view um i probably won't look at that in this particular episode and this one's our highlight which we will look at a bit later this icon here allows you to enable and disable the grade so if i just put another grade on i can literally enable and disable it so it's bypass just reset that and then on this side here we've got the node tree so a node is think of it like a layer so you always have one note to start with this green dot here represents my original materials this is the ungraded material and this represents the output i.e what i'm seeing on here and everything that happens in between is how we build up a grade so we're going to look at that in some detail so that's the node tree we can switch all these on and off up here so if i want to get rid of these clips here i can just click on here and get rid of those if i want to get rid of the timeline which is our edit timeline we can click on here this is where we change from media pool to gallery to luts so it's quite easy to open and close some of these panels depending on whether you're working on a laptop or whether you've got the dual screens or whatever you can lay it out pretty well openfx is a whole load of plugins that allow us to do special effects so they're really quite specific and i might show you those i'll i'll see how long this takes to record and here we have a thing called lightbox which is basically all these icons here all these scenes and you just view them like this so instead of viewing the timeline we've literally got shot one shot two shot three and it's a really easy way to just have a quick general look at your footage and your edit there's some quite useful little tricks with it okay so down here as we've mentioned this is all our clips okay if you want to see how many clips you've got you can also click this little i button here and that gives you information so i can see here we've got 46 clips so before i start a grading session i normally press this i button the information button and have a look at how many clips i've got to work with for example if i'm grading documentary stuff you might have 800 1 000 clips quite easily so if i've got two days to grade that i know that i've got to grade 400 shots a day so that's quite useful just have a look at how much work you've got to do you switch that off by just changing the mode so this one is our scopes i've done a whole episode on scope so have a watch of that if you're not clear how to use scopes but you can basically select from here which one you want to work with i normally leave it on waveform just as a general just while i'm sort of generally starting and this one here is keyframing and we're not going to do keyframing today but that keyframe allows you to start the shot with one look and finish it with with a different look so you can literally do a dynamic grade so you could go from let's say you're moving from you want it to look like a sunrise for example you could have it quite dark at the beginning and then go sort of nice and warm towards the end just using keyframes so i normally just leave the waveform up there okay so down in this section is our main grading tool so this is the tools that we've got to perform the grade and when we make any adjustment to these tools the information whatever we do is saved onto the node okay so if i now just um if we go to here have a look at saturation so if i lift the saturation up on here you just literally put your mouse on the number and just move from left to right if you want to reset that just double click the word so here you can see the saturation moving up and now you see on the node itself let me just make that a little bit bigger you see on the node itself that we have a little icon and that is telling me that we've done a primary color correction so we have here primaries so a primary color correction is basically you're affecting the whole shot and over here we have our secondary color correction so this is where you can isolate a portion of the shot or a section or a particular color and you're grading just that region so we'll have a look at both those but basically you start off with a primary you want to get your shot into a good place we'll do that in a moment so if i just reset that so the little circles here is reset so anyway you see that is a reset sign so just reset that and that's now my node has nothing on it which means we're still seeing the original image so that's my first node so the first node what i do is i use that to get a good balance so let's just take a look at let's start on this guy here so it's the main entry so you can start anywhere you want i mean you don't have to grade from the beginning normally i do grade from the beginning but you don't have to um so oh do you know what looks great from the beginning why not okay so let's take this shot here and it's got a dissolve on it so that's dissolve is being honored because the edit page will probably see that yeah so you can see that happening there so the dissolve is coming from here so it's talking directly to the color page so that's another good rule as well is when you're gonna grade a shot is don't just go to the shot and start grading because the camera might even move around it could be you could be grading this dog and then it's out of shots in a few frames and then you realize that you should be grading this guy so just always have a quick look through the shot so you know what you've got to work with so it's a just a good rule don't always just go from the first frame i'm going to find a suitable point in the shot to use as my reference point so let's just do it with the dog's eyes open and we're going to start grading so the primary wheels is a good place to start so primary wheels or primary bars it's the same thing uh is split into four regions okay so lift is uh the darker areas gamma is your mid-tones and gain is your highlights so it's so it's the darker areas so if i adjust this wheel here i'm i'm adjusting more in the darker regions than i am in the lighter regions if i adjust this one here i'm adjusting just more of the mid-tones okay but obviously mid-tones become shadows as well and cover highlights but not as strong as each individual wheel and then here i'm really lifting up the highlights and you can see that on the scopes here so if i just if i adjust this you'll see just the top more of the top half of the scope is moving than if i use the lift so i'm going to reset that and the first thing i do is use this one called offset and what offset does is it it's not shadows midtones or highlights it's the entire image so it's really your exposure so again i'll just make i just get the image set to somewhere comfortable so i'm looking at the scopes here and i'm trying to get it just roughly in the middle there and then i'm going to make adjustments to the lift so i'm just going to bring down my shadows and again have a look at my episode on scopes if you know how to read these but i'm basically just sitting it above zero if i go below zero the image starts to get crushed so you can see i'm losing detail in the blacks there let's bring that back up let's look at our game again i don't want to go all the way up but somewhere around there and just have a look at my gamma and i'm going to put a bit of saturation in i'm happy with that for the moment and what i'm going to do is just label that on my node here so if you right-click and say node label and i'll just call that base grade so i'm going to add another node now and i'll show you why i'm doing that so i'm going to right hand click on here say add node and say add serial or you can press alt s now the reason i'm doing that is because i can do anything i want now i'm just randomly moving all this around and if you basically make a bit of a mess of that like i have done here i can right hand click on that node reset and i've still got my nice base grade um locked so this layer i can do whatever i want to and i can always go back to this layer here so i'm kind of using the node here as a as a full stop if you like so i've done my base grade happy with that just move on to the next node before i've even thought about what i'm going to do so as soon as i stop and i'm happy with the look i normally just add another node so that if i do something and it looks worse i can always go back to where i was think of it like layers in photoshop it's a little bit like that okay so i'm just going to right click and reset that node what i'm going to do now is look at so far we've looked at luminance so we've looked at lift gamma gained luminance and offset but i want to start adjusting the colors now so on these color wheels we can adjust uh just color in the shadows just color in the mid tones and just color in the highlights and you see here this dog the blacks look a little bit blue to me so i'm just going to warm those up so i'm going to go to my lift and just push it towards red now you don't have to push a lot i've hardly moved that and you see that's changed quite a fair bit there so let me just push it a little bit more that way so this is where it's good to have a panel uh one of the resolve panels or a tangent panel and it allows you with the balls and the wheels that you see on those panels this is what i'm doing so the balls basically move this and the wheels are just the brightness so they're they are really useful because it's quite hard to get precise with the mouse but when you're just learning this is absolutely fine so if i want to just warm up the highlights i'll just push up here okay a little bit more saturation so i'm adding saturation on top of saturation that's fine these are serial nodes so basically what happens here gets taken over to this second node and we then add some more grade so this line here this is remember our source this is the original shot goes into here the green dot is rgb in it's the is the video signal input then the video signal comes out of this node with its color grade and goes into the second node and we go out of the second node to the output okay so this this grade plus this grade equals the output again you can just move these around as you like so you can see that slight adjustment that we did has made a big difference now i'm not going to make a new node just yet because i'm not quite finished on here and what i'm going to do is add a little bit of contrast so down here you've got these number one and number two that means there's two menus and these are our main primary adjustment tools down here beyond the wheels so on tab number one you've got contrast and so if i adjust that it increases the contrast or decrease the contrast which is where you want to go and the pivot works with the contrast so as i adjust the pivot i'm adjusting the point at which contrast occurs okay next to that is saturation as you've already seen um hue is obviously going to change the entire color so it's actually shifting the color so use that one carefully this is a good one to use for slightly adjusting skin tones luma mix i've done a whole episode on luma mix so have a watch of that and that explains that pretty clearly but don't worry about this stuff when you're just starting second tab color temperature so this is a really easy way of warming up or cooling down an entire shot tint is basically adjusting between green and magenta so again another useful one for skin tones if you've got quite green looking skin tones you could normally just tweak it by adjusting the tint again double click the word to reset mid-tone detail is basically good for sharpening or softening skin so it's a softener and sharpen but a little bit more subtle than that color boost is a kind of saturation but it's working in a slightly different way and we've got shadow and highlight so these are great for recovering blown out highlights if you've got highlights if you've shot the sky and your clouds are really overexposed by putting down highlights you can often retrieve that information you can see on my waveform it's just lifting the very tops down same with shadows if you've got crushed shadows you can lift them up here and hopefully we cover a bit of detail it depends how well you've shot the footage to start with okay so that's that's those uh primary controls plus we've got the color wheels and the balance so that's this is our main area that i work in when i'm starting a grade and so just for clarity here i would normally start my grades with a color space transform and some people use luts but i really don't want to go into that in this beginner's tutorial i think once you've got a grasp of these tools you can start progressing onto that stuff but there's no reason to use them you can work perfectly happily with just these tools and you can see already we're getting a good result out of that if i bypass that that's where we started and we're now there already so i've not even touched luts or anything like that so i think just learn the controls first and you'll be fine so the primary wheels we've now covered there are other tools in here i'm not going to go through each of these because when you're just starting out you don't need to use those just yet um but there is another important one and that's the curves so over here i've got our curves we've got keying windows we're gonna go through these but here in my curves is another way of grading and i use both some people just like working in the curves some people just use the wheels i tend to use both so let's just add another serial node and look at what's going on here so this is our shadows and this is our highlights and what we can do is just pull the curve and you see we're making adjustments to the darker regions and adjustments to the lighter regions here and this is our sort of mid tones so it's exactly the same sort of thing as the three wheels you're just doing it on a curve there are other tools in the curves that are very specific and one of them is actually isolating a channel so these are currently ganged together but we could just say if we want to take a bit of red out we could just click on the red channel only and we're now just adjusting reds so that's another way of working with that so it's just another way of grading it's another tool that you can grade with if you want to link them all back again click on there and you're off now in the curves there are you see these dots here this means that there's multiple curve menus and if we pull down here you can see we've got all these different ones as well and each one of these behaves slightly different so for example hue versus saturation if i click on here you get this graph comes up let's say you want to make the red hair a little less saturated if you click on it you get a point appear here and you can literally pull down and you can see the red just getting it a little bit less saturated so this is a secondary correction that i'm making now so i'm just going to pull that down a little bit and there that's done so i've done that on a separate node if i don't like it we can switch that node off even if you just click on the number it will just switch it off that's where we were and that's where we are now so we've got our main curve if we go back to that here there's our main curve and we've done that little red desaturation so remember a primary grade is when you're affecting the whole shot and a secondary grade is when you're isolating an area so we've just done a secondary grade by isolating the red using the curves and desaturating it so that's a secondary grade now i might choose at this point to just add another serial node so i can save that moment in time so let's add another serial and the other thing i could do is i could save this look so far as a still so if i right hand click in the viewer and say grab still what it does it grabs a thumbnail of my note tree so this thumbnail here contains these four nodes in fact if i right click on it and say display node graph there's the nodes sitting inside and we can use that to our advantage if we go to this shot here what we can do is just drag this still onto here and that is applied to the grade so we've now got this shot and this shot so it's just copied the grade over let me just make the note tree a bit clearer for you and you see we've even got the labels that we put on it so that's just a really nice quick way of copying grades but it also means i'm saving a version so i'm saving a version of the grade so we go back to this shot so let's just say we want to take contrast down a little bit then what we can do is compare this look to the look we've just done so if i double click this this brings up our image wipe and you can now see that's with slightly more contrast and that's with less and you can choose which one you want so if you prefer it more contrasty which i think i'd do in this one we can either take that node off or we can just copy this node so it's probably easier for me to take that note off so i can right hand click and reset and we're back to the contrasty look if you've got a little bit of an edge there just switch the wipe off here so hopefully this is starting to make sense now we've got our timeline remember this is our individual edits we can go to any shot we want and grade it in any order we want and we've got our four nodes here so we're building up serial nodes really easily so we've got our level going in and it's coming out of this one into this one and then these two looks are feeding into the third node and then this is feeding into the fourth node which currently has nothing on it's just an empty node uh if you press command d you can disable a single node so if we want to see what it's like without this we can do that and we can command d and do that just to check that you're happy what each node is doing and we could have done all these moves that we've made all these grades could have all happened on one node but just to give you that flexibility i advise that you do it on separate nodes and it doesn't matter how many nodes you build up so just to show you if i go back to the edit page there's our shot but it's now graded so we're sitting on shot two in the edit the other edits aren't graded yet but this one is now graded and we can bypass the grade even in the edit page by clicking up here okay so that's just to show you that the pages are talking to each other so i can go to color if i want to make an edit in here i can click in here make that shot shorter back to the color page that's now shorter you can't tell here that it's shorter but you can hear okay let's have a look at some of the other tools available so i'm going to go on to my fourth note remember we reset this so there's nothing on there so far and the next tool along here in our secondaries is a qualifier so what this does is allow us to key a certain color to allow us to isolate it to grade it so i've graded a shot further on down the timeline here so i've just done a base grade on that which is what we've done so far i'm on a second clean node and basically what i can do is use this now to sample one of the colors so we might want to sample his skin tone for example so we just take the qualifier from here and just sample his skin and there you see it's just grabbed the skin tone now i need to do a lot of work on this key to get it right so basically start playing with these tools here but i'm not going to do that in this tutorial it's just to show you what the tool is doing now this gray area here is to show me what won't be affected so you can switch that on and off here it's called highlight and so only the areas that you can see the color of are what will be affected and so let me show you if i take that off now and if we adjust hue which is back here you see that we're changing the skin tone just only what we've sampled on that key okay so the cleaner the key the more natural it's going to look if you've got a bad key like we've got here there's a lot of extra things been picked up in that they're all going to be affected as well so just be careful you need to play around with these settings i might do a tutorial on how to do good keying but it's uh you just need to practice in here really okay so let's just reset that one the one next to it is a power window now these are great so if you want to isolate an area so again that becomes a secondary then you can use these tools and you've got different shapes and the common ones are probably circle so here you can change the shape of it and the outside one is softness so you've got a soft edge so if we put that on him here then we could lighten him up maybe and you see that's happening just inside the window it's not affecting any of the other parts of the shot and if we invert that window so we turn it inside out by clicking here then it does the opposite so whatever we're doing here is not affected by the window so these power windows are really useful so that puts a sort of darker shape around him which brings him more into focus and so this tool here allows you to just isolate a certain area so if i switch this one off what we can do now is just draw a shape around our character and once i close that then that becomes effective let's put some softness on it always put softness on these windows it's always good to put softness on and then just invert it and now we've just drawn our own shape and darkened just the edges okay so the next tool is a tracking tool and this works with windows so you basically have to have a window first and then you track it so let's find this shot doesn't actually move much so let me find another shot this one here moves yeah so let's imagine we've done our first grade in fact let's just copy this grade onto here and see how well it copies across so if i middle mouse click i keep this one highlighted in red if i middle mouse click this one this is a really good technique it literally copies the grade over now what i want to do is get rid of that window so i'm going to reset that and we've got not a bad start there um so let's take our pen tool here i'm just going to draw around his head now obviously he moves so that's not going to be very good so what i'm going to do is go to the tracker and press track forward you can track backwards or forwards and just literally press go and that will follow his head so what we can do now is still affect just his face or just his head but even though he's moving it doesn't matter so just to be extreme if i just line it up that's done now so if i go back to the beginning and press play again that's following so the tracker is really powerful in here i'm just going to reset that because it doesn't look very nice okay the next one in here is blur and sharpen so you've got blur sharp and a mist so in fact if you stay on the blur tool if you move up it'll blur and if you move down it sharpens so you don't you really need to go through the other tools if you don't want to so again these work with windows so if i put a window let's say you want to blur out his face then you can put the window on it and then go to here and the blur happens just inside the window and if you want to see the window if you click here you can actually see the power window so that's what that tool does let's reset that again this one i'm not going to explain in this tutorial this one here is sizing so if you want to do any pan zooming etc you can do that in here you can also do that in the edit page using the transforms so if i'm on this shot here go to your inspector and you've got zoom and positioning here so it's pretty much the same tool so we're kind of getting there now let's go back to our dog because we've got the most nodes on there you can see how we've built up this grade pretty well i'm just going to show you one less thing so if i go to this here open effects and what these are are real special effects each one is doing a very different job and if you just scroll down there's loads of stuff in here that does sort of crazy stuff um i've done a few tutorials on some of this stuff before but for example here you've got d flicker if you've got flickering issues sharpening um there is lens flares and glows and things like that so if you want to just put a special effect on there we can just go ahead and put a lens flare on you just drag and drop it onto the node and there it is and i can reposition that wherever i want it to be so that is what these open effects are they're very particular plugins that give you just that little bit extra edge in your grade so i just thought i'd show you that but don't worry too much about that when you're just starting out remember as soon as you've finished you can go to the deliver page and export and all your grades are there so you just literally deliver it out now obviously we're only scratching at the surface of what the color page can do it is incredibly advanced tool but i was hoping that just gives you a good overview and a deeper understanding of the layout and how everything kind of works together so once you're comfortable with this level take a look at my other tutorials where i go into much more depth about specific areas you

Channel: Darren Mostyn

Views: 20,626

Keywords: How to use the Resolve Color page for NEWBIES, How to use the Resolve Colour Page for Newbies, How to use the resolve color page for NOOBS, How to use the resolve color page for begginers, resolve, davinci resolve, resolve17, DaVinci Resolve 17, how to use resolve, editing with resolve, learning resolve, tips for resolve, colour grading, color grading, killer tips davinci resolve, killer tips, Color tab for newbies, Resolve v premiere pro

Id: QeL1TJdqVRY

Length: 28min 3sec (1683 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2020