PRO Colorist Hacks You NEED to Know

so in this episode I want to show you 10 hacks in the color page these are not necessarily new things these are things I do on a fairly regular basis that certainly improve my productivity in the color page so I'm going to share those with you and this episode has come about I'm getting close to my 100 000 subscribers which is really exciting for me and I put a post out in my community tab just saying if anyone's got ideas for episodes they'd like to see leading up to that and this episode was suggested by Thomas zamola so thank you for that and it's basically a nod to my first ever episode which was also 10 color page tips so if you haven't subscribed yet and you do enjoy my content think about subscribing get me to that hundred thousand and when I get there I'm gonna do a huge live stream and I don't know what I'm going to do for it yet but I'm gonna make it good so anyway let's get on with this so tip number one is using display qualifier Focus so let me show you how that works so down here we've got our Scopes okay and if I want to sample an image you need to be in this mode here this qualifier mode if I just put my cursor over anywhere on this image what I can do is use display qualifier Focus which is down here and this allows me to see exactly where I am on the scope so this is great for measuring uh skin tones and just seeing what level you're at with your skin tones your skin tone should be sitting somewhere around this region here so if I just put this on her skin tone there we can see that we're quite clearly sitting in pretty much exactly where I want it to be it also works in the other Scopes as well so I can use it in my parade and then I can see the individual RGB values as well so it's a really good little tip so tip number two is a little hack I do using still so what I'm going to do is create a new album in here and I'm going to call it fixes and what I do and if I find a problem on a shot and I don't want to fix it exactly at that moment I just mark it with a still maybe I've got my client with me I don't be messing around with this sort of stuff yet we want to carry on with the grade and I'll come and do all my fixes at the end so let me show you what I mean I'm going to play this shot through and you see there's an exposure change there so I'm just using my left and right arrow keys to find the exact frame so what I could do is just put a marker on here so I could just right and click here and say add marker like so but what I do instead is I grab a still of it so I'm going to grab that as a still it's going to go into the folder that I've got highlighted and what this does is it actually takes a Time code stamp as well so it's exactly that frame so when I finish my program so we just grade all the rest of the show I go to my fixes folder and have a look at all the items that need fixing and if I right hand click on here and just say match reference wipe frame it goes to that exact frame so that I know exactly what I need to do once I've done it I just right click and delete them so tip number three is in my effects Library so you bring up the effects Library by clicking up here and obviously DaVinci Resolve has evolved over many versions now and the effects library is really getting pretty populated and sometimes it's quite hard to find the actual one that you want so what I can do is either use the search bar here so let's search for halation for example and there it is all what I can do is just press this star icon next to it collect rid of that one and then if you click up here you can go to your favorites and all the ones I've starred are now in my favorites folder so it's easy to find the ones I use on a regular basis the other thing you can do in here is just collapse them by just simply double clicking here and then you can just see the categories so tip number four involves the effects as well so what I'm going to do is bring that halation onto a node and you see here we have all this menus appear now some of these open effects have very extensive menus and a better view to work with this is to press shift and F this way you get a nice large image to work with so you can accurately have a look at what's happening in your menus but also you see all the menus available for that particular effect so that's shift and F it's a really nice view shift F again takes you back to where you were so tip number five is one of my favorites this is playheads these have been in here forever and not many people know they actually exist so what are playheads in DaVinci Resolve we've got our playhead here okay but actually inside the system is four different playheads that you can activate so if we up to here to the color you you can go to active playhead and if I now go not playhead a but activate playhead B what happens when I move this playhead is the playhead a gets left behind and playhead B becomes the new playhead and what this means is that any point in time I can go back to Here by simply loading up playhead a now this keyboard shortcut to actually flick between the two of those if I press Ctrl option and then use my numeric keypad I can press one for a and two for B so let's load up another two if we go X to play here C then you see A and B are left behind and then let's load up D as well d and there we go we've got four playheads this is great for long form documentaries if you just want to Mark particular scenes you might want to be able to do a comparison for this and it's really easy so again control option and then one two three four and then which everyone is active when you press play is the one that starts moving to reset those just go to the color menu exit playhead and reset and if you've got the advanced panel you can actually activate those directly on your panel so tip number six is using versions so we're quite used to using the still image wipe here so if I double click one of these there's our wipe so we can this is the shot we're grading this is the still wipe and this is a really good way of balancing shots together you just have them side by side and you can see them side by side on the Scopes but versions takes it to the next level so let's click on here which is our versions and we can pull down this menu and select any different type of versions so for example here we've got neighbor Clips so this is showing me the two clips previous to the shot and one after it and we can see them all side by side so it's a really good way of just checking that you're staying balanced throughout your scene but we can go beyond that as well so you can have selected still grades so this is comparing the grade from the still that I select here okay if you want to see the actual still you go selected still images and so for example if I go to my Vector scope you're actually seeing the two images sat on top of each other so if I select another one you can see that's quite clearly the pink one and there's the blue one so that means I can help balance these shots easily so let's take this one and if I just move my Offset you can see the trace moving here so all I've got to do is get them sat on top of each other and we know that they're balanced and the other useful trick with versions is that you can actually utilize those playheads so if I select playheads in here like so we've got our four playheads and the beauty of this is I can choose the exact frame that I want to see in the version so if I go to option control one which is playhead a I can now move it frame by frame to line it up exactly where I want it to be analyzed so this is good if you've got an interview for example and they're facing that way you want to bring them around so you can see their skin and you can see where the light's actually Bouncing Off Their Skin you can use your playheads to get the exact frame that you want so it's a really useful little tip so tip number seven is a quick hack using Windows so what I'm going to do is I'm going to select a window here I'm going to draw a shape I can't see it yet so select it here and I'm going to do a kind of vignette shape so something like that and then we need to invert it so it actually becomes a vignette and I use these quite a lot so what I'm going to do is actually save it as a preset instead of having to draw that shape each time what you can do is click on here say save as new preset I'm going to call it that's done and then I can make another shape here and I can save that as vignette too and then when I want to apply a new shape let's go to another shot and I want to put a vignette on here I can simply click here and select the vignette that I want and it's done so tip number eight is using my node graph now when you say the still you can actually right hand click on it and say display node graph and that shows you everything that is involved on that still so these are all the different nodes that I've used and I can take one node property let's take this one number 12 for example if your middle Mouse Click by the way you can move around this you can expand these out and I can drag just that node and copy it to another clip so I've just taken the color warper property and applied it there but you can do that without saving it as a still so you can go to any shot in your timeline here right hand click on it and just say display node graph there's the node graph for that particular shot and take any property and apply it to another clip so it's really simple to do without saving a still okay tip number nine is about layers so when you're working in multiple layers on your timeline let's just get show you what's going on here if we guess the beginning you can see we've got a whole layer of Graphics going on here now when it goes to the color page you see all those layers here okay but when I go between the shots what it's actually doing when I go to the next clip it's actually flicking between the graphics and I don't want that I just want to grade the shots I don't want to grade the actual Graphics so what I could do is disable that track so it's V6 is the graphics however the graphics have now literally disappeared so I can't see them anymore you might want to see the graphic as a reference or it might be an overlay it might be a light leak or something like that so instead of disabling the track what you can do is press option and click it so I'm clicking on V6 with my option key pressed so what it does is it disables that track but you still see the graphic or the light leak or whatever you've got on that track so that's a really good way of being able to grade underneath Graphics but when I want to grade the next shot anything on V6 IE my Graphics is not included so tip number 10 is great if you work on a laptop what I want to do is get the most out of this color page interface so what we can do is get rid of the timeline for example and we can get rid of the clips but I find the clips are actually quite useful to have but the hack is this if I bring my Clips back you can actually change the size of them so if I go to my view go to timeline thumbnail size and then also it makes them bigger than they need to be we can actually go small medium or large put that down to small we've got more area to work with now for our nodes and our menus and that sort of thing but we still see all the thumbnails so we can actually right and click and still go and display our node graph as we were doing before so I hope at least a few of those hacks were new to you and they're going to help your productivity moving forward if you like this content think about subscribing hit the like button for me I've got about three years worth of content on YouTube so check out my playlists and look after yourselves and I'll see in the next episode [Music]

Channel: Darren Mostyn

Views: 77,259

Keywords: color grading tutorial, how to color grade, color grading, darren mostyn, dehancer, motionvfx, looks, resolve 18.5, resolve 18, davinci resolve, grading, colour grading tutorial, how to colour grade, professional colorist, pro colourist, Color hacks, Darren moisten, colour tips, color tips, colour hacks, resolve hacks

Id: yGVP6p1f58w

Length: 10min 14sec (614 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 19 2023