Nodes for Noobs | Resolve Color Page Tutorial | Serial, Parallel & Layer Nodes

if you're new to davinci resolve or maybe you're thinking about switching or maybe just trying out the free version but you're put off by this whole node business i want to set you straight this is going to be a very introductory and kind of base level introduction and how the nodes work in the color page specifically once you get in there and start playing around you'll realize that it's not too bad and it's actually quite lovely yes lovely is the word that i need the first node type we're going to talk about is the serial node not breakfast cereal but cereal as in a series of nodes this is what you're going to use probably 90 or more of the time you're working in davinci resolve until you get much more advanced and that's fine serial notes can do pretty much everything you need them to do in this clip here i have already created a series of nodes a series of serials so you can see how they work they just lay out in a row from left to right serial node essentially means that you take the rgb output of one node and it gets sent to the next node and then whatever adjustments you make to this node are going to get combined with the previous one and then sent to the third one you have this cascading or cumulative effect this clip has nothing done to it this is what you'll see when you first open up a clip in the color page and resolve you'll just have one serial node sitting here waiting for you to do stuff to create another node it's very simple you can right click on it come down to add node and add serial much more simply i would just do the keyboard command which is option or alt and s and you can just go ahead and add as many as you want to just by doing that very easily and if you want to also add a node before the highlighted node you can hit shift s and that will add one before you can also just right click add node add serial before okay i'm going to create a couple more and just show you this cumulative effect i'm going to come down to mid detail this little adjustment here i'm going to crank this all the way up to 100 let me make this bigger so you can see so that's as much as you can adjust this on one node however if you click on the next node and do the same adjustment crank mid detail up to 100 that gets added on to the first node so you basically double the effect and double the amount that you can do on one individual node and if you come to the third node you can do the same just reset these nodes and to reset a node you can just right click reset node grade right click reset node grade and reset another way to illustrate this i'm back on this first note here and i'm going to come down to my offset here and i'm just going to pull this all the way to the right so that's maxed out this is much of this blue that i can add but if i come to the second node i can do the same and then the third node can do the same a great way to think about node workflow in davinci resolve is almost as an organizational tool the great thing about it is it's so easy to see what you're doing to each node and if something were to go wrong if you went too far then you can easily just redo that that correction redo that adjustment and i can illustrate that here if i go to this clip instead of doing everything on a series of nodes here i've done a whole bunch of corrections to just one node kind of zoom in here and you can see that this is starting to fall apart this isn't looking too good this is getting blocky and the colors don't look great i don't know exactly where i went wrong here because everything's done on this one node if you hover over here you can see that it's got a lut it's got a color space transform it's got some log grade and some custom curves so which one of those is the culprit coming back to this one if something were going wrong here you can easily toggle a node on and off if you hover your mouse over the node number if you left click on that number it'll toggle that node off or you can hit command or control d to toggle a node on and off you can also highlight multiple nodes and command or control d to toggle multiple nodes on and off so this way you can easily find out where something is going wrong and then you can make adjustments to it accordingly a couple of other things to know about serial nodes and nodes in general as you can see here i've labeled them to label a node you just right click on it and go to node label and it'll give you a little text pop out thing that you can type in whatever you want to it also shows you what's happening on a node these little icons of course you might not know what they mean immediately but if you just hover your mouse and leave it it will show you that there's a log grade and some custom curves on this one another cool thing that you can do with these nodes is reorder them so the order does matter but of course without a lot of experience and practice you might not know exactly what order to put things in if you hover your mouse over this line which is connecting the rgb output and of one node to another one if you hover over the right side of that line you can see it turns blue if you click that it will disconnect the two nodes here and i'm just going to disconnect this balance one and then if you just click and drag grab that line there and move it to the triangle of the next node then it will reconnect so everything's reconnected and it's being output for you to see so let's say maybe if you want to try putting the contrast before the balance you can just grab this plug it in and then plug that in to put it back the way it was another way to reconnect things hold down the shift key and then drag a node when that line turns yellow you can let go of the shift and left mouse button and it'll reconnect so you can see there that there is a difference between having the balance before the contrast and the contrast before the balance but it's really easy to play around with it and see what effect it's having like i said you can really do the vast majority of things you want to do in the color page with serial notes i'm going to go ahead and show you parallel nodes in the layer nodes as well just so that you know that they're there and potentially what you can do with them but just encourage you not to get bogged down in all of that if you don't want to and just really stick with these serial notes let's go ahead and move on to the parallel nodes or the parallel mixer this is probably more appropriately called coming back to our clip with nothing happening yet to create a parallel node we'll do the same thing to create a serial and that's hit option or alt and then s so that created a new serial and then you can right click on that one come down to add node and add parallel of course there's a keyboard shortcut for creating these this is technically a node if you want to create more serials after this one just hit option or alt s so once you've done that created a new node you can hit option or alt and p and that will create parallel nodes for you so what's happening here is that you now have two nodes which are taking the rgb output of the previous node and then their rgb output is going into this thing which if you hover over it will let you know that it is a parallel mixer what this allows you to do is make adjustments to these nodes and whatever adjustments you make here are not going to be cumulative like they are in a serial node but they're just going to mix together in equal parts and then get output to whatever comes afterward here are three parallel nodes so they're taking the output of this which is just a gray background using a power window i've created a red green and blue circle and then just position them so that they overlap a little bit and as you can see where they overlap they are transparent so the colors mix together before i get into a more practical application i want to go ahead and jump over to the layer mixer because it's easy to understand these in opposition to each other or in comparison with each other so here's basically the same thing so instead of having a parallel mixer we have a layer mixer and this is created just like the other one so if you come to a node and you hit option or alt and s to create another serial right click on it add node and then add layer or of course you can hit option or alt and then l instead of having things mixed together things are overlapping and a little bit counter-intuitively the thing on the bottom overlaps the thing above it the blue one is on the bottom it's being output into this bottom triangle here so this is overlapping the green and the red the green is in the next one so it's being overlapped by the blue but it's overlapping the red and then finally the red is going into this top one so it's being overlapped by both the green and the blue now that we know what they are let's go ahead and see kind of a more practical application for using these things i don't want to get into whether this is a good idea but what i see people commonly do on youtube and in like color grading tutorials using a parallel or layer mixer to isolate skin tones so that they retain more of their natural skin look as opposed to taking on a color cast so in this clip here i've got a couple of serial nodes and then after this contrast i've created parallel in this top one which i've labeled look you can see that it has a primary offset coming down here to the primaries i've just dragged this down towards the blue in the cyan i'm just giving the whole image a color cast in this bottom one here which i've labeled skin it's got a primary offset an hsl qualifier etc etc so what i've done on this one let's come over to my qualification let me turn that highlight on i've tried to isolate the skin tones the skin tones here in this node are not taking on that bluish cast so they're separate basically from this one because the blue is being done here it's not being done prior but what happens is they're getting mixed together even though the skin has been isolated it's still taking on a blue cast because these two get mixed evenly in an output if i were to turn off this one you can see what it's doing even though there's still a blue cast it's not as strong as if there were no skin isolation whatsoever so there it is on zoom in a little bit and there it's off so it's doing something right now if you were to do the same thing in a layer mixer this top one it has a primary offset i've done the same thing just drag this over towards the blue and the cyan this bottom one here has a qualifier highlight that in comparison to the parallel mixer the layer mixer is allowing the skin tones to take on less of that blue because as you remember the bottom node is overlapping the top node if you were to reorganize that and put the look in this bottom triangle and the skin in the top triangle now this blue is overlapping the skin so it's not really having any effect another thing that's happening here as you can see is this key coming over to the key controls click on that the key output in davinci resolve is the way that you can dial the strength of an effect up and down i've changed the key output gain to 0.517 if i just reset this to its default one value this is what effect that qualification is having which looks crazy the dude looks like an oompa loompa so in order to make that look a little bit more natural what i've done is just dial that strength of that qualification down so it blends in slightly more if you want to see more videos about video editing color and other post-production stuff check out this playlist and while you're clicking hit that subscribe and like button

Channel: Phillip R Peck

Views: 22,981

Keywords: Nodes for Noobs | Resolve Color Page Tutorial | Serial, Parallel & Layer Nodes, davinci resolve, nodes, color page, serial nodes, parallel nodes, layer nodes, layer mixer, parallel mixer, tutorial, resolve color page

Id: 2-99zFvVnT8

Length: 12min 3sec (723 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 26 2022