Magic Masking in Davinci Resolve 18 Studio is incredible! Full Tutorial and Examples!

object tracking in davinci resolve studio 18 is finally here that means you can now select and track things in a jiffy and apply some selective color grading some fun effects or even mask things out and it is very impressive but it is limited to the paid studio version of davinci resolve it's not available within the free version and that's because it's using the da vinci neural engine which leads me nicely into 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 it's those gpus which not only drastically improve timeline and rendering performance but also accelerate that davinci neural engine ensuring that you can run all of the brand new davinci resolve 18 effects like the depth map surface tracker and of course object tracking within magic masks effortlessly and scanned 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 one of which i'm actually using right now this is my very own scan 3xs system rocking the nvidia 3090 and i'm going to be using it to edit and record this entire video right with all that other way magic masks is really really clever but there are a few do's and don'ts when using it to make sure that you're using it correctly and you get the best results rather than me running through everything instead open up davinci resolve go to help and you've got the davinci resolve reference manual give that a click jump directly to page 2934 and there's a whole section on magic math we've got loads of do's and don'ts how to deal with hair and even a whole section just about hats so we're going to start with this super duper easy example we've just got this cat chilling on the wall and we want to give him a little track so we're going to give this footage a click and then hop into the color page now to open your magic mask controls on the little menu right in the middle of the screen here you want to come over to this icon the little person with the checkerboard behind it to open up your magic mask now default to the magic mask object controls if you're tracking a person you'll want to use the person controls instead over to the right you've got these two little icons the one on the right is a person tracking so you get your person options the on the left is for object tracking which is the one we're going to use for this example now the first thing you want to do use your playhead to find what's called your reference frame so you need to pick the point where your subject is really nice and clear isn't being obstructed by anything because this is the point where we're going to tell davinci resolve the thing we want it to track so i'm just going to use this frame here that will do this is a nice simple one now again in your magic mask controls make sure you've got this little ink dropper with the plus selected and then you just need to draw a line on your subject you can do a little line or you can squiggle and try and select loads of it like so and release and it'll pick up your subject so just like that it's picked up the cat like so now if you don't see this overlay there's a toggle mask overlay down here in the magic mask controls so if i was just to tick that that will turn it off and we get no red highlighting turn it back on and we get our red highlight like so now just to the left of that while we're here we've got an invert mask so if you wanted the opposite to be selected we could just toggle that so now everything but our cat is selected or we revert it back and now our cat is selected and everything else isn't now you can do as many lines as you need to so that's done a really good job of picking up our cat but you can actually see a little bit of the tail down here has been missed so still with our dropper with the plus selected we're just going to do this little line on the little tail here to get that picked up but i actually went slightly too far and it's added some more down here so what you can then do you can either use the dropper with the little minus icon so you give that a click or what i prefer to do with the dropper with the plus just hold the alt key and you'll see on your preview that the dropper will now have a little minus sign i'm just going to do some squiggles down here the lines will be red and we're just telling davinci resolve that i don't want those things highlighted we'll do another one down here and there we go so the cat with that little tail we don't want any of this wall and we're good to go now before we start tracking there's one last thing you've got this quality and you've got faster and then you've got better and it does exactly what you'd expect faster will give you a faster but less accurate mask and track whereas better will take longer but will generally give you better results i'm going to leave this as faster for this example and then we just need to do our tracking so that's where these tracking controls come in and the main three that you're going to use you've got this little play icon here to play forwards you've got this little back icon to play backwards and then you've got this left and right arrow to play forwards and backwards so my reference frame is right here in the middle so this is the exact point where we've selected everything if i was to move my playhead would actually come off that reference frame if you need to get back to it you just use this little icon right here to go to the reference frame and that will take you back to where you did your little squiggles now mine is right in the middle of my playhead so i need to track forwards and backwards so we're just going to use the little forwards and backwards icon and david resolve will do the rest it's tracking the cat forwards of my reference frame and once it's done that it will then go back and track backwards of the reference frame to make sure the entire timeline is covered and as you can see done a pretty good job of tracking our cat like so now once that's done there are some matte finesse controls down here where you can add some blur to the mask you can clean up the black and the white for reference black is referring to everything that isn't selected so in my case the background whereas white is referring to the subject so you can just use these controls to tidy up the mask as you need to so i'm pretty happy with that so i'm going to turn off my overlay and then i can start to do whatever i want to this mask so i'm just going to come over to my primary wheels and if we just move our offset we can just change the color of our cat to get our cat whatever color we want let's actually get rid of that because we don't want to change the color of the cat but something slightly more realistic i'm going to bring him up with the offset lower the shadows a bit so it's just a little bit brighter hit play and we've just really quickly changed the exposure of our cat without changing anything else on a blue cat i've got a blue cat job done now in this example we've got a dude on a bike which is a much more complicated mask and i just want to show you really quickly how you use the strokes to isolate exactly what you want so we're going to come down to our magic mask i'm going to keep it as faster we're going to find our reference frame this actually zooms into our bike at the end so obviously we're not going to use this we're going to use a point where we've got a really good shot of the bike so i'm going to go with something like this and i'm just going to first select a bit of the bike like so and it's just going to select the front half like this we then need to select the front sort of fender the suspension the wheels the brakes everything else same on the rear and then the back of the bike as well so we're just going to pick up all these points like so now we're missing the handlebars so we're going to grab those and something like that so we've just done a few little strokes like so now it's picked up some random points in the road so first things first i'm going to hold alt so i'm on my minus dropper get rid of those because we don't want them picked up some bits of his shirt so we'll get rid of that and it's picked up his shoes so we're just going to get rid of those and you just go through and you tidy up the mask getting it looking exactly as you want it selected the glove so we're going to get rid of that and try and get it roughly looking like so so i'm pretty happy with that so now what i'm going to do is just to play backwards and it's going to track just the things that we selected you can see clearly here the the guy's leg hasn't been done we can play this forwards as well and as it zooms in it's tracking the bike until it goes out of frame and then we've just got a guy so i'm just going to turn off my toggle and again we could come here we could mess with our exposure we could change the color we could do whatever we want increase the contrast to do any sort of grading we wanted purely on the bike rather than everything else now you can also apply effects so i'm just going to open up my effects library let's just grab the mosaic blur so we can mosaic blur out the bike we're going to drop that on the node and now we've got our mosaic bike like so but the driver is looking pretty good now sometimes you will need to make amendments to your mask either before or after your reference frame so this here is my reference frame because the car was nice and clear but as we go backwards at the very beginning you can see is obscured by this car here and what actually happens if we zoom in a little bit you can see a little bit of the mask is starting to come onto this car in front so we just need to tidy that up so what we're going to do just move my playhead to the very point where it starts to appear on this other car so it's right there and then right there so anything to the left of that we've got a mask but right there this car in front is perfectly clear now we're going to use our negative tool or i'm just going to hold alt on my keyboard and drag just to tell resolve not to touch any of this bit here like so now in my magic masks a little blue bar to the left of where my playhead is there's now no blue bar and that's telling us we need to just re-track that section so i'm not going to hit track forwards and back because everything after this point is absolutely fine we just need to track this backwards so i'm going to hit my play backwards button that's just going to play backwards it's going to mask our car but it's making sure not to select any of this one so now if we hit play it's not coming onto this car in front at all it's just masking our car behind perfectly like so easy peasy now you can actually use the multiple strokes to track multiple things within the same frame as well now this example i'm going to show you is a little bit crazy so let's hop straight into it so i've got this footage it's of this skier and then it goes down to this helicopter down here i'm going to do this essentially wrong what you should do is find your reference point so find a point where they're both nicely in shot so i'd probably go with something like this but instead i went with this so we've got a little bit of the helicopter here and we've got the guy so first things first let's select our dude so we're just going to give him a little squiggle select him like so and then i'm also going to select the helicopter but it's only the side of it so we're just going to come on down here give it a real rough drawing like so and then release now straight away something interesting has happened and it's automatically picked up this helicopter blade i didn't draw anything over here but it's picked it up only half of it though so we just need to fill in the rest so i'm just going to tell it like so now i'm happy with that now we need to track this backwards so we're going to start tracking and something magic is going to happen it picks up the entire helicopter all the blades all the rotor everything and it keeps tracking it all the way up the mountain while also still tracking the skier as well how ridiculous is that this thing really is magic and i've got one last super quick example for you all and that's how to use an alpha output to use magic masks to put titles or whatever behind things like this so we've got this footage of this lady pouring some coffee here and i just want to put something behind the mug and the coffee and the little flask so let's give it a go so first thing i need to do i'm going to duplicate this footage so i'm just going to give it a click on my timeline hold the alt key drag up two tracks so that we've got the footage space footage then i've come down to this bottom one here i'm going to hit d on my keyboard just to disable it because we don't actually need it for now then i'm going to grab a title or i could grab a png or an image whatever and we're going to put this under here like so we'll come back to it and amend it in a moment then we're going to select our top footage and jump into our color page and we're going to use our magic mask and we're going to select our object so first things first our reference frame anything here looks pretty good so we're just going to go i want all of this arm and the flask so we'll do that first make sure our overlay's on it's already picked up the actual drink it's done a really good job there actually then we're going to select the mug as well and the hand it's got the handle but it's selected everything in the middle so we're going to hold alt get rid of that and we'll go with something like that we're going to play this forwards and backwards to track and let's see how it does so that looked like it tracked pretty well indeed and didn't take very long at all so now what we need to do is to add our alpha output so that we get rid of anything that isn't tracked so first things first i need to turn off my overlay then in my nose just right click any empty space and come on down to the add alpha output and then you'll get the little blue dot in the bottom right hand corner then from your node which has got your magic mask on it click the little blue box drag it to the blue circle and there we go that will just get rid of everything that wasn't part of our magic mask which gives us this now i'm not going to mess around with my finesse tools too much but i'm just going to add a bit of a blur just to soften that edge something like that then we're going to jump back into the edit page i'm going to toggle my background back on this one doesn't have the actual magic mask so we're going to hit d on our keyboard just to turn this back on so now basically our foreground is just the arm and the flask and the coffee and then we've got our title and then we've got our background so if we go to the title i can make this as big as i like let's just call this coffee and then if we hit play it's not tracked or animated or anything but you can see just how well of a job it's done at tracking this the pour is perfectly going over the top of the coffee into the mug easy peasy no time at all magic masks for the win now it was thanks to that nvidia 3090 gpu in my scan 3xs system which allowed me to record this tutorial so quickly and so smoothly so do check out scans lineup of nvidia studio certified 3xs systems by clicking on the link down in the description below thanks for watching take it easy i'll catch you next time

Channel: MrAlexTech

Views: 146,158

Keywords: MrAlexTech, Mr Alex Tech, davinci resolve, davinci resolve 18, davinci resolve studio 18, davinci resolve effects, magic masks, object tracking, object mask, new davinci resolve 18, new effects

Id: 7b1Wgqwgl3A

Length: 14min 26sec (866 seconds)

Published: Fri May 06 2022