(upbeat music) - In this video I'm gonna be showing you some of the hottest
features in Resolve 17.4, Elation, ACES 1.3,
automatic color management, custom mixer, and much, much more. Now before we get into
the tutorial section, let me just say this, you can watch these sort
of videos all day long and it's not gonna matter, unless you start implementing these tools into your workflow. Usually, new stuff is cool
for the first one or two weeks and then we just go back to our old ways. I'm telling you the
stuff that is packed here in this video, I handpicked the things that are extremely practical and I feel like are true game changers. So, I will say give me 21 days. Everything that I show you here, try to implement all of these tools once every day for the next 21 days and eventually it will be a muscle memory and you will be using these
in your color grading pipeline without any hesitation. And we recently did a survey, majority of you,
regardless of the skillset are struggling with shot
matching, skin tones, balancing and working
with eight-bit footage. So I created a one-hour long free training that covers all of that, plus, we'll wrap up the training
with an extensive Q&A. And you'll also get a link to
download the practice footage, power grades and some of my personal LUTS. But do not forget to check
out the training link, it's down below. And let's take this
moment to pause the video for one second, smash the like button. And anybody who hasn't been
subscribed to the channel, there's about 57 percent of the people watching this content
that are not subscribed. Subscribe to the channel,
hit the bell icon so you can be notified when
we drop brand new content. Follow me on Instagram for tons of short form tips and tricks and let's roll the info. (upbeat music) All right, guys, time to
get this party started. I am always extremely excited when a new update comes out and when we get features like this. Because it makes me feel
like a kid in a playground. Right, like, I can just
do anything that I want. I don't know anything about certain tools that they just added, so I can just have fun with it. Learn as I go. And then, after I got a
good grasp on what it is, I can come back around and
share the wealth with you all. So we're gonna start off with our Automatic Color Management. So I brought in a bunch
of different clips, right. We've got some R3D files,
we've got some RE-RAW and then we got some
PRO-RES in there, B-RAW, all that good stuff. So it's a jambalaya of
bunch of different clips. But as I go through them, and you can see it
right here in my canvas, that all of these are in log as of now. So first thing that I wanna do, you see how there's pillar boxing here and then there's awkward,
like, letter boxing here. And that's just because
of a specific aspect ratio that all these clips are using. So what I'm gonna do is, I'm
just gonna grab all of them under my retime and scaling I'm just gonna go ahead
and just click on fill, so we are set there for now, and in order to set up
Auto Color Management, so under Color Science if you
leave everything to unmanaged it's gonna be like this, DaVinci YRBG, but if you wanna use
Resolve's Color Management then your gonna select color manage, and in here now they have this right here that you can check on and they already had
made huge improvements by giving us this in Resolve 17, which took out a lot of the
confusion to just, like, really get in there, click on SDR Rec 709, and you knew that you were in good hands you can just, ready to grade, and not worry about small things that could go wrong down the road. With Resolve 17.4, they
made it even easier so you can check this
Automatic Color Management and it just simplifies the F out of it because now it's just as simple as, like, hey, are you gonna be
grading an SDR or HDR what do you wanna do? If you wanna just do HDR
your ready to go, you know, you can select your HDR
preferences here so, like, if I'm doing a proper
monitoring I will select HDR PQ, and just go from there or if
I'm working in SDR Rec 709, then I select SDR, SDR
Rec 709, I'm ready to go. All I have to do is just
click save, and automatically, these clips should convert to
Rec 709 and we will see that, boom, done. Proper Rec 709 conversion
through Resolve Color Management. But as I scroll through, you'll see this clip nothing changed. Why? Because this is not a RAW
clip, this is a progress clip, meaning we need to tell Resolve what camera this clip is from. Now, if I go here this is our RE RAW, so this is converted properly to Rec 709, and we can see that in our
scopes, and then if I keep going this is B-RAW, this is
also converted beautifully we can see that here, that looks great. And now if I go here, this
was shot on Arri Alexa, but, once again, this clip is in ProRes 444, so we need to tell it,
that hey, this clip, if I do a right-click and
go under Input Color Space, I need to tell it, hey,
this is from RE Log-C, as soon as I do that,
great, Rec 709 conversion, ready to go. We need to do the same thing
here, this was shot on RED, so I'm gonna have to go in
here and I'm gonna say, hey, REDWideGamut with Log3G10,
as soon as I do that, boom. We've got a perfect
conversion. So by doing that, we know that all the math
is correct on the back and we don't have to
worry about anything else we can just get going, okay. So that is the first feature
that I wanted to bring up that it is really cool that
Resolve keeps simplifying it. Now if you do want more control you can always go back to
how things were before. You can even get more
control by clicking on this, and separate your Color
Space to your GAMMA or you can go in here and just,
like, really go old-school when you click on custom and select every single feature here as you would before
before Resolve 17, okay. So now I can just go
here and set that back to DiVinci Wide Gamut from
my timeline Color Space and DiVinci YRGB and come back
out and as soon as I do that now we have to, again, tell it
through Color Space Transform what we're trying to do. Moving on to one of my
best and favorite features of Resolve 17.4, I'm
talking about ACES 1.3. Now, ACES 1.3 has been
out for awhile, okay, so if you go here and
look at this article, this came out on April 30th,
so ACES 1.3 has been out, but Resolve took their time to
a proper implementation of it and now finally we get to have ACES 1.3 and the ultimate new
feature inside ACES 1.3 is this right here. So they give us some extra
features that we can turn on to get rid of that weird fringing that would happen around our
neon or saturated colors. I'll give you an example
of what I'm talking about. So let's go back into
our project settings. This time under my Color Science, I'm gonna select ACEScct, and by default this might not
be selected, okay, for you, this might be set to 1.1
or whatever, so go ahead, select 1.3, but before I even do that let me show you even with ACES 1.2 this is how it looked like
before, so we can go here, just for examples sake, I'm gonna use Color Space
Aware grading tools, this is important for HDR
pallet in our color warper so as soon as I do that and
hit save, look what happens, okay, so I do this, and I go here, and if I punch in and show you this, like, what's happening right here. This is not how it's supposed to be, okay. And you see, like, what's
happening on the edges of these mangentas and blues, their just completely blown out, and let me give you an example of, like, what I'm talking about. So I'm gonna go here and grab that still, and now what I'm gonna go
and do is go back in here, change that to let's say,
Color Managed and come back out and if we punch in now, and
look at how everything looks and all the colors are protected, that's not what was happening with this so if I bring back my
ACES transform with 1.2 you see what's happening
with these colors? That was a massive,
massive, massive problem with ACES in the past, okay. Especially when your working with, like, a set of challenging situations like this. And that defeated the
purpose for many people to even use`ACEScct because they just don't want
to deal with this, like, where you have to micromanage, go in and make those changes
manually, shot by shot, and you have to be aware of that. Well, here's the thing
now, if I go back in here, go back to ACEScct, if I click right here, just look at the menu in this area, okay, if I click right here
and go to ACES 1.3, boom, we get this option, ACES
Reference Gamut Compress, okay, so apply ACES Reference Gamut Compress, and as soon as I do
that, look what happens. So, I'm gonna click
right here to check that, I'm also going to check, use Color Apace Aware Grading Tools, and as soon as I hit save,
boom, look at this now. It is perfect. Look at that, our scopes. And now I'm gonna go back and bring back our ACES 1.2 transform,
look at the vectorscope and how these colors are just
blown out and their gone, compared to ACES 1.3, it
is absolute perfection and, honestly, this opens up the
door for everybody to use ACES, because, let me just
grab this still, okay, and show you one more thing. So if I go back in here, go to Resolve's Color
Management SDR and go here, and look at the two images,
let's make them bigger, let's hide this, and now,
if I bring in my ACES, so this is our ACES 1.3, and this is our Resolve Color Management, and if you look at the
initial look that we get, I'm talking about our base,
our starting off point, I just personally feel like ACES 1.3 is so much more cinematic, so
I'm gonna bring this back on, our DiVinci Wide Gamut,
compared to our ACES 1.3, and just look at everything right, like, all these colors and how
everything pops, like, the contrast I feel like
is just done so well, that it is an amazing starting
off point and now from here it just makes our job so
much easier to drive it home, and create a look that we want. All right, so now, let's talk about one of
the most talked about tools that Resolve added in their 17.4, I'm talking about Halation, okay. Before we jump in there, let's just go back there
and work with unmanaged, so I'm just gonna go and
choose DaVinci Wide Gamut and use Color Space Gamma,
that could stay the same, and as soon as I come
back out here,`so now, use Color Space Transform
to do a proper conversion which is no problem, so
I'm just gonna type in, Color Space Transform, and you guys know I've put this downstream and if you wanna learn more about that you can watch the free training
to why, this is how I do it. So I'm gonna click right here, I'm gonna select REDWideGamut,
under my Color Space and I'm gonna select Log3G10,
and as soon as I do that, now I have to select rec 709
here, and Gamma 2.4 here, to do a proper conversion
and as soon as we do that, everything is looking how it
looked in DiVinci Wide Gamut. So I'm gonna go ahead and hit Shift-S to create a node prior, and I'm gonna create a
couple of more nodes, so let's just do three more nodes, and what I wanna show
you here is for Halation, I'm gonna give you two
different examples, okay. One, how normally people
would use Halation which would be after
their Rec 709 settings they will create a new node and then they will just type in Halation and now if we drop that on, this is how most people
would use it, okay. And if I drop that on, the
effect is pretty heavy, right, it just kind of comes in really hard and if I do before and after,
it's sort of unrealistic. So here what I need to do is
I'm gonna open my effects, and I'm gonna go under threshold
and start controlling it, right, so, like, let's just take it easy, because it was just
way, way, way too much. I can also hit view isolated, so I can really see what I'm controlling. Here's the problem, when this Halation comes
after your Rec 709 conversion, look, my threshold is all the
way to as far as we can go and it is pretty much
selecting everything. It's not really giving me an opportunity to get granular with that.
What do I mean by that? Now we have to control our Halation based on what we're stuck with because we don't have more control over how much fine-tuning we
can do at this level, okay. And here, I can just go
and control the strength now I have to pull it back
because I'm, like, okay, this is way to much. So it kind of water downs
the effect of this Halation compared to where I would
like it, and you know what? Let's just exaggerate it a little bit to kind of show the
difference, what we're doing. So I'm gonna keep it somewhere around here so even on YouTube it can be noticeable, and I'm gonna go ahead
and grab that still. So this is one way of, like,
how people would use it. Downstream, the Halation effect. I am going to flip the script
and hit E, to detach that and then use my Halation in
the beginning, so upstream. Why am I doing that? Because most of the time
Halation is embedded in your negative, film negative, when it comes in to the finishing room that Halation is already part of it. It is not something that
was added after the fact. And that is the reason why, I would use my Halation upstream. And look at, already the results are
so much more convincing and check this out, if I
go under view isolated, now do you see the difference? Before we were pretty much
stuck somewhere around here and we couldn't go any
further, whereas here, this is the control that
I need for my Halation. Because now, I can just
really, really go granular through something like
this, and now if I come out, just look at that. And the effect is just so much
more believable right now. And now, I can go under my
strength and go, all right, let's take it easy, let's pull it back, and if I punch in here,
and if do before and after, this is very nice. A little
exaggerated, but it's okay, I like it. And if I go right
here, before and after, man, it just, I am so happy that Resolve
added that this is unbelievable. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Okay, look at this, basic grain, now you can click right here,
append grain internally, and you can add grain, once again guys, why are we doing all of this here, is because when you
shoot something on film, all of these things are already embedded when the footage comes into
the grading room, okay, so just remember that. And I am loving the way
this grain works too. It is kind of limiting compared to what the
grain OFX has to offer, but I feel like it does the job, okay, and it does a really, really nice job. So here obviously the
strength is way to much, so I'm gonna pull it back. I
will exaggerate it a little bit and once again it's really
hard to see the grain effect on YouTube, so one, make sure you guys are
watching this video in 4K so make sure that it's set to 4K and by me exaggerating the grain this much hopefully it will really come through. So guys look at this. I mean, I am so happy that
Resolve added this effect, I mean, just look at what we
just did. How good it looks. And how much control we
have over this, and also, did you guys see the difference
between this versus that? This, I just pulled up my
reference image from the gallery and this is what we were using before where the effect was used downstream, compared to Halation effect used upstream. Which is how it's supposed to be. See like how cheesy and lame it looks when it's used downstream, I mean, look at of this compared
to using it upstream. How we're using it now. I
mean, just look at this effect, like, look at, this is
how to incorrectly use it, which would be to put it after your CSD and all your conversions, and this is when you
use it before everything as if it was embedded in your footage when it came in through Resolve. So guys, that's why I always tell you, the sequence where everything
goes in DiVinci Resolve is essential for you
to know what goes where and I go in depth in my free training explaining all of that and then if wanna take
that to the next level then get the master class because I explain so much
more about these things, okay. Because it just, literally, will make it or break it your grade. This is the difference between somebody's grade
looking really cheap to somebody's stuff looking high-end. This is where we're gonna
leave our Halation for now. And now what I'm gonna
do is I'm gonna show you the power of another tool
that is extremely effective, and I'm talking about Custom Mixer, okay. So let's just jump right in, so first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go under
my primaries, my offset, and let's just take some of the Red out. I feel like the overall
image is just kinda, the white-balance needs some work. So I'm gonna go ahead and pull that down to something like this, and I like what this is doing to my image it has a very cinematic look, and I think I can leave it here and it just feels a bit more balanced too and we can see it here, like, how much it's living in the
warm quadrant compared to, like, pulling it back and just
kinda evening everything out. So, I like what it's doing
here, and now in this node, so let's just call these
nodes what they are, right, so, like, this is Halation,
and grain, and then this is our glow, so what I'm
gonna do here is I'm gonna go under my glow, and
I'm gonna drop that on, and after I drop on my glow
I'm gonna go and select soft-light and as soon as I do that I'm gonna have to go in here
and pull my shine threshold to, like, really control what I'm doing. So I'm gonna keep it
somewhere around here, okay. And now a couple of things that I wanna do Is I wanna go back in here in this node, and go under my primaries, take my contrast and
kind of crank it, right, so not to much, but even
something like that. And now when I do this, and
I drop my glow, I feel like, I'm gonna take the shine threshold and open it up a little bit so I just feel like
now, I need to add more, I need to balance it out a bit
more, it's still really blue. So I'm gonna go in here,
I'm gonna keep pushing it, my offset. So this looks really cool,
I feel like it's just, it's a really nice grade that we created. All right, this is where things are
gonna get very interesting. So now I'm gonna come
in here and type custom and drop on custom mixer,
and as soon as you do that this is what happens, your like, whoa, what just happened here. So what you need to do is
right-click here and add OFX input as soon as we do that, now I'm gonna take my
primaries input, or output, and put that into my custom mixer so basically what's happening now is that we're taking these two nodes and we're either blending
them or combining them. So, like, right now, I am blending them. Meaning if I go all the way to the left, nothing is happening. Like, nothing is happening, this is where everything
was before this node. But now as soon as I grab
this and start moving it over, now I am basically bypassing glow and only using primaries, so that is the blend. And if I put it in the middle, I'm using 50 percent capacity
of these two nodes, okay, so that's the way you want to look at it. But, again the thing is
what I told you earlier this tool is so brand new
and I'm still messing with it that it's just a lot of fun to experiment, and figure out what is really happening. Under advanced options
we can click right here and select a bunch of different options. So here I can go ahead and
select overlay, if I'm going for, like, a bleach bypass effect
or something like that and obviously it is very, very pushed. So now what I would do is I
would just grab that and keep pulling it back until I go, you know what, this is a very strong
effect, but I like it. I like where her skin is sitting,
and it's just very moody, and this could be, you know,
very appropriate for the season we're going through Halloween
so it's a horror film and this might be a ghost in the back, it's not a real person, and
this look is kind of cool, so we can print it. But, let's just reset that and start playing with it even more. The thing that I'm really
liking about this effect is blend is really cool and there's many things that you can do but it's the combine that
I really, really like. Because it just gives
us so many more options so I'm gonna pop all of these open and let's just start going through them and start having fun with it, okay. So now, our input one would
be this or, I'm sorry, would be this, and our input
two would be that, okay. So if I take this and start
moving it around, see, like, we're really accentuating the glow now and then if I come in here
and start pulling this down we're basically taking our primaries node and effecting that, okay. But if I go under my offset, I am looking at this as, like,
how subtractive colors work, okay, so let me explain
what I am talking about. So if I go in here and I
ungang this, and now I say, you know what I wanna do is,
I wanna just add more cyan, like, more of a, you know, FilMic look, but I'd really wanna push it,
and I've pushed it too far, so I'm gonna go, you know,
let's just add more blue and then let's add more
magenta to kind of even it out and look what I'm doing, as
soon as I'm adding these colors it's just bringing so much
more color density to my image. And if I do before and after, just check out the kind of
look we're creating, like, how interesting this is, and now, at this point I can still
go under advance options and click right here, and
select something, like, soft light, or select
something like overlay. But I can still use these options to create fun looks, right. And now I can come in here
and go, you know what, I wanna keep my input two here, but then I wanna take my glow
and I wanna keep pushing it, to something like that. And now we can come back here and we can go lets just
keep pulling these back, to once again, just add more
color density to our image. So if I do this and you
guys can look at it, like, what kind of interesting
effect we have created. I just personally feel
like it is so powerful what we can do here and if we wanna just bring
up a little bit more detail in the mid-tones we can do that here and once again if we just
wanna control our glow we can do it here and then
that would be our combined and we can always go to
normal and it's just, like, a little punch here. And guys, look at this. Look at how we were able
to create such a cool look without using custom curves
or any of that, just basically taking two of our nodes
and combining them, or we can also, again, blend them. So this is a brand new tool, I'm gonna be playing
around with it a lot more to have even a better
understanding and as I do, I'm gonna be sharing those tips with you, as we move forward. But, this is something really cool, I feel like we created a
really interesting look, and I can take my red and really, maybe, park it somewhere around
here and take, you know, add maybe just a tiny bit more magenta and that just looks really balanced and very, very clean
look, and now lets move on to another very cool aspect
of 17.4 which is, Node Info. Okay, so the reason why
Node Info is really cool is that now I'm gonna give you an example. So let's just go here and just
for the sake of it so, like, let's just say I go here and
I'm using this LUT on here which obviously does not work
so we will never do that. But I wanna show you
something really cool. If you hover over and just
leave your cursor on your node, it will tell you exactly
which LUT this is, before it would just tell
you that you're using a LUT, but it wouldn't necessarily
which flavor of that LUT, so now you can just hover over, before you had to right-click
and do review selected LUT, to know which LUT you were using, now you can just hover over and do that. So that, I feel like, is very, very cool and is a new addition
that is a huge time saver. And now what I wanna show
you is, Automatic Node Input. So what that does, is this. So let's say, I create another node here
and then we do a parallel node and we'll pull this down, now if eventually I
decide to add another node and if I just like that to my node 4 and now I wanna put that in here, before I had to right-click and manually add additional
input here, in my parallel, now I can just grab
this and get close to it and it does an automatic
input for me, okay, so I can just go in here and release and it will create and
Automatic Node Input. So that is another time
saver in Resolve 17.4. All right, moving onto our last tool and staying on the topic of
time saving this is unbelievable and I'm so glad they did that, a lot of your compositing tools have this as a standard feature but Resolve never had
that and finally they do, so if I were to track her
face, I can go in here now, before we had forward tracking, so let's just we're right here, okay, and we wanna track the face now. But before we had to do forward track, and then come back here
and do a reverse track, now we can just hit this new button right here in the middle that says, track forward and reverse
and look how smart this is. I can just hit that,
and it's gonna go ahead, track forward and, boom,
it's gonna skip back and now it's gonna start
tracking backwards. Huge, huge, huge time saver. And let me create a new node,
and show you another feature. This also works under Magic Mask, okay, so I can come in here under face, and hover over to select
her face right there and as soon as I do that we
can see the face is selected, I can do the same exact thing. This button, that we saw under tracking, and as soon as I click
it, it's gonna go forward and it's gonna go backwards, but obviously it defeats the purpose because where I selected
it, wasn't in the middle, so, let's just go here and select it. So now we have selected,
we're right in the middle so If I click this, it's gonna
track everything forward, and then it's gonna jump back and it's gonna track everything backwards with one click we don't have
to sit here and do it manually. So now let's just kill everything and then rebuild it to where
we started to where we ended up so obviously we're using our
CST to covert it to Rec 709 and then we went in and did
some primaries, basic stuff, nothing crazy, and went
and added some glow and then by using the custom mixer, we were able to create a
very, very interesting look and guys, look at this.
This is powerful, like, how every color belongs and it's just not cracking your image or doing anything but
just accentuating so much to create that film look and then finally we used the new Halation and grain plugin built into
Resolve and just look at this. How impressive the
Resolve's are, so first, when you drop that on it
is super heavy-handed, but after messing around with it and finding the right
balance, oh my god, I mean, we truly created a film look by using only Resolve plugins
without the use of any LUTS and that right there is
powerful, and on that note, let's check out the final
look in full screen. (upbeat music) so initially I wanted to make
this, like, a 10 minute video, but I know there were certain
topics that I really had to, like, get in and make sense of it so hopefully you guys found this helpful and if there's any specific
tool that you saw here that you would like us
to do a deep-dive on, drop a comment below. Make sure to check out
the link to the training, in the description below. And guys, for enjoying the
content, smash that like button. Subscribe to my channel
for more awesomeness. And remember, Learn and Apply. I will see you guys in the next video. (upbeat music)
