Pro Colorist Reviews Resolve's New Film Look Creator | Resolve 19 Beta

in this video we're diving into the brand new Beta release of resolve 19 and in particular we're going to focus in on one of the coolest new features inside of resolve 19 the film look Creator plug-in this is the first effort from Black Magic design to include look development features inside of the Native resolve tool set and there's a lot to talk about so we're going to take a look at this plugin I'm going to tell you what I really like about it where I feel like there's room for improvement and how I would implement this plugin in a look development practice so let's Dive Right In and talk about the uh film look Creator inside of resolve 19 before we get started just for some basic context I am in the setup that I typically in when I'm working here on the channel I've got my color management happening in nodes I'm going out to rec 709 from my D Vinci wide gamut working space here at the Timeline level of my node graph I have my shots organized by camera into groups in each of those groups I have an input transform taking me from the camera metric to my space I've got my template node graph where I'm going to be doing my grading here at the clip level though we're not going to be spending really any time here today because we're working on implementing an overall look and then back here at the Timeline level I've got my macro level transforms this is my macro technical transform that's taking me out to my uh display color space and then we are going to do our creative our macro level creative transform or our look uh here in this section of the node graph as well so to get started what I'm going to do is prepend a Serial node and and since I'm prepending this kind of leads me right to what I think is the first really strong point about this lookdev plugin here inside of resolve and that's that it works in scene space it works in color managed workflows that's huge I would definitely not want to use a lookdev plugin that doesn't work this way so really really big that it works in this way and we can slide it right into a modern color managed workflow so we've got our node prepended let's drop this plugin on here and see what it's all about so we're going to say film look creator let's drop it on and first thing that I'll call out this is obvious but we just needed a big change on our image right soon as we dropped it on bunch of stuff changed now this might seem innocuous or maybe even like a benefit but something that I will call out as a small critique is that when I'm in the mode of doing look development as opposed to Simply using a l that I like that comes from a trustworthy Source something like my 2383 L if I'm in a mode of look development that means I want to be the author I want want to shape every aspect of that look that I'm creating so as a result I really want to be starting from a neutral blank canvas position and then introduce the ingredients to my look one by one and kind of feel my way through that process another way to think of this would be right now even if every position of every slider in this plug-in is exactly what I need and I don't need to make any further changes beyond what I get from the default when I drop the plugin on here I still kind of want to zero things out and I want to find my way to this point organically because that's really the heartbeat of look development is it's all about authorship and about greater control then we can get with something like a lot where we really can only decide to turn it off turn it on or scale it back to less than 100% intensity in the case of something like this we have the ability and we want to exert a little bit more control so by that logic we ideally would be kind of starting from zero and adding things piece by piece and have full control over every piece that's not exactly the case here but we of course do have lots of control we're just not starting from a sort of true neutral position just wanted to kind of call that out as we get started here let's take a look at what we've got when we're uh looking at this plugin so we've got lots of different sections first thing I'm going to do here because we do have lots of different sections and I want to learn this tool kind of in order of what's most important and I want to bite off little bits at a time so that I can master and get fluent in one thing at a time before I try to get the entire plug-in uh sort of fluent in my brain what I'm going to to Aid that is I'm going to turn this 3D L compatible checkbox on this checkbox exists so that whatever I do here is going to be compatible with outputting a 3D L if I'm for example creating a viewing L that's going to be loaded into a camera on set that's why it's actually here but it has another purpose for us which is that it's going to confine us to only the operations that directly affect contrast and color rather than texture of our image that's great because those are more fundamental alterations than the Tex textural alterations and we can focus on those things we can get familiar with what all the sliders related to those things mean and once we're feeling confident and fluent in that area we can easily turn this back off and look at all the additional options available to us right for now we'll leave that on we've got this color blend slider that's just going to allow us to mix uh as kind of a master fader everything that we've done down below into the image so we can take it from obviously zero all the way up to 100 color space overrides that is sort of zipped up and left aside as it should be that's not something you're typically going to want or need to interact with and let's now look at our color settings this is kind of one of the two sections of our color dimension of the film look Creator now there's a bunch of Sliders even within this one piece here but to help kind of guide things and to help us from getting too overwhelmed I want to give you a sense of priority here all right here's what I'm going to suggest to you if you can get something that looks nice using nothing but your contrast your subtractive set and maybe your richness as a third really even just contrast and subtractive set you should be able to get a really nice looking image with nothing but those adjustments okay so those are the places where you're going to want to focus and that's what I'm going to do here is I'm just going to kind of adjust those things by eye until I'm getting something that I like something else that I'll emphasize as we're starting to build our first look is you want to be light on your feet you want to be bouncing around looks aren't about one shot looks are about lots of shots they're about every shot in the timeline right so you don't want to get it's to too stuck or too fixated on a single shot and I'm going to be bouncing around and kind of looking at how this feels on different images making sure that I like what I'm seeing on these different images so far so good I might back up on that subtractive sat just a little bit and like I said contrast and subtractive sat are really the main ones that I would focus on here this and there's a range some of these I would be a little more hesitant to touch some of them I really wouldn't touch at all unless I'm in a very specific situation examples of that last category exposure generally speaking we don't want a uh look to move our exposure up or down unless we're explicitly doing a more advanced type of push pull workflow generally going to leave that alone as a result highlights you're going to see that's going to have a very narrow effect on the upper end of your curve and isn't typically something you're going to need to adjust at all you could but you don't necessarily need to do anything here fade this is going to adjust your black point this could be nice to bring up just a little bit but less important than some of these others maybe in that kind of middle tier of like yeah sometimes you'll want to uh play with that certainly no harm in doing so white balance tint and skin bias I'm going to encourage you guys kind of like with exposure just leave those alone it's not that they're bad that you would never ever want to touch them but you want to touch them under specific circumstances and honestly when you're at more of like an expert level of user because these have the potential to bias your image in a problematic way in a way that's more appropriate for color correcting an image than creating a look they also have the ability to break your image okay to create artifacts or non uh smooth areas that are going to create problems on a shot without you even realizing it worst thing that a look can do is look great for 20 shots and then break on the 21st shot that is something that we want to avoid at all costs and this really leads to something else I want to uh point out about this plug-in this plugin doesn't give us feedback as to exactly what we're doing in the way that I would know necessarily want on the 1D side if I want to see for example how smooth is my 1D contrast curve that I'm effectively drawing with this image I could go over to my edit page and I could go to the end of my node graph or the end of my timeline rather go to my generators grab a grayscale right click on this gray scale to create a compound clip this is necessary so that the uh asset will show up back on the color page I'm going to hit create go back over to color and now just within resolves natives tool set I have the ability if I go over here and I flip to my waveform I have the ability to see how I am affecting things with my adjustment like so so you can see the result of this highlight or of this fade adjustment like so and you can really get a sense for that that's just on the ond side your white balance and your tint and your skin bias those have an impact on your 1D but they may not only have an impact on your 1D they may have an impact on your 3D and I want to just take a quick detour to talk about graphing things in a 3D space when we're talking about look development uh let's go back to our image here let's go back to this one and we'll get our film look Creator back in play I'm just going to tab over to a free program called lattice where we can evaluate what we're talking about here here are two Luts and here are the 3D graphs of these Luts Mars is from my Voyager L pack 2383 DWG DWG is my free 2383 print film emulation L now what we are seeing described by this cube is a very very mild as opposed to a very very strict restraint on what saturations are allowed through this look right and these are things that may not be obvious visually on a particular image because if I don't have saturations that exist outside of this constrained Cube I won't see much change I might not realize that my colors have been constrained in that way and again kind of in my example of like discovering an artifact on shot 21 I might be grading for 100 shots and then realize oh wow like that neon sign is really really being like flattened out and left less Vivid than I would want and then find that I'm kind of backed into a corner with the look that I've created right so viewing things in 3D is important for look development the fact that we can't view things in 3D here in this plug-in is is challenging and it basically means that we need to be more conservative with what we're doing because without being able to see what's happening here we have to go off the intuition that like hey if I don't set any of these sliders too far left or right I'm not going to impose too much of a change on my queue the only caveat there is that there are actually things happening within this plugin that there are not sliders for at all so within our presets here there are things happening based on what we cect up here that we have no direct control over whatsoever so that's the only caveat that even then we don't have that full 3D cube context and there could be things happening to the cube that are not immediately visually obvious this is maybe the biggest kind of like caveat or asterisk or gotcha about this plug-in in its current form is we really need a bit more context when we're doing lookdev if we're going to be confident that our look is going to work on all of the shots in our timeline and work for all the different shooting conditions that might be encountered when it's being used as something like a viewing lot all right let's keep going here we've looked at our color settings pretty thoroughly uh just to round it out richness and bleach bypass these are really great and you can create all kinds of interesting looks by playing with these different sliders kind of intuitively and just seeing what you can get now let's go down to our split tone split tone pretty self-explanatory split tone is essentially pushing a cocktail of cool colors into the shadows and warm colors into the highlights of the image that creates color contrast it creates depth it creates kind of a painterly Feeling and it's something that we typically see with a film print so we've got a strong association with uh cinematic movie like renderings when we see this kind of split tone treatment of our images I think it's super cool to see this implemented as a native tool a native option right here with M resolve let's turn it on and let's go to town so I'm going to turn this on I'm going to crank up the amount and you can see that essentially what we've got here is a hue angle that determines on my Vector scope what is the effective Hue angle the two complimentary colors that are going to be playing off of each other right now I'm at 20 degrees where zero would be right here 20 is going to be somewhere around here so somewhere like so is where my complimentary color scheme is currently running and if I were to rotate further then I would be getting more and more toward like a yellow blue complimentary scheme as opposed to like an orange teal complimentary scheme right makes sense now here's the part that I think uh can be really fun especially for images like this from like all right what we've done so far like that's feeling good but I feel like I'm getting a little strong in my skin tones it's getting a little bit warm maybe I could readjust things here and back off or I can kind of create a Counterpoint to that with my split tone by combining these sliders with the pivot slider and here's another scenario where I want to graph what I'm doing to get a sense for it you can see here in my waveform I've got red or rather blue and green happening down here in the bottom at a certain point I cross over and things get neutral for a second and then I start getting red and green here on the top and I start dropping in my blue that's how I'm getting that blue push in the bottom warm push in the top or in this case kind of a greenish push yellowish push as you can see and you can even see as I rotate my Hue angle we can get a kind of stronger visual of that complimentary axis that we're creating right now what I want to show you is if I move my Pivot up I'm moving where that crossover between warm Shadow or rather cool shadow and warm highlight happens and why that's cool is if I look at an image like this one and I start climbing my Pivot up I'm really starting to bite into those areas that are already warmer in nature and now they're starting to get some cooling applied to them right so this can be a great way of kind of like counteracting or complementing what we're doing up here in our color settings with our split tone and this is another sort of like theme or convention within lookdev that makes lookdev fun and also makes it really challenging to sort of develop principles for is it's all about the interaction between the things that you're doing and it's all about having the right set of Sliders that allow you to do lots of different stuff and about having a sort of framework or a practice that you're comfortable with that allows you to move some things over here and then counteract what you did with this over here and to work in a kind of gentle interactive holistic way and develop really interesting really cool looks that you know are going to hold up really really well on all of your images whether you're in a grading stage or whether you are developing a lot in partnership with uh someone who's in in production who needs to use that L to gather a wide variety of different shots so that's kind of like the the tow of look development if you want to call it that it's all about kind of gently moving things around and creating almost like a playground for your light and for your color and for your pixels to play Within that's going to work really nicely so that's the split tone side of things and like I said now that we've looked at the color side it becomes much easier to kick this off and start to look at all the textural and spatial stuff available to us in this plugin there's a lot here some of it's self-explanatory vignette pretty self-explanatory we're going to be knocking down the edges of our frame in kind of a fixed way H I really like this obviously there was a halation plugin available in resolve before version 19 but this Hol the character of it it feels a lot better to me so I think this is a huge plus to the uh plug-in here if we look at the way this sort of plays on the image let's go up with it to exaggerate it like that looks really really nice and maybe here remember I turned by highlights down a little bit maybe I want to bring those back up and make sure I'm not constraining things which it looks like I'm not so that's good so we've got this solation we can even uh control the sort of blur and the effective Hue of our halation that's huge like that's great control and the visual result is way better than the previous H plugin so that's awesome the bloom this is just just going to kind of soften and Bloom things brighten them effectively while softening them up in the top end we can see a little bit in an image like this one I think that can be really nice in the right settings grain kind of similar to the Holi like this is a big upgrade from the previous grain plugin in terms of like the way it feels on the image so I feel like a lot of this textural stuff they they really spent time to improve on the prior generation uh of uh feature or Plugin for uh and I'm really really glad they did cuz I think this is honestly this might be where this plug-in shines more so than with the color stuff is with the textural pieces um so we've got our grain flicker gate weave and filmgate these are all going to be you know like different elements of like this is going to model the sort of flicker of a projector bulb gate weave is going to model the registration of a film print as it moves through that projector little more bespoke things that might not be right for every project but great for them to be available to us filmgate this is maybe the most extreme like that's just not going to be appropriate for most of your projects probably but good thing that it's there and you've got these different presets so uh that's nice as well so lots of different options with this plugin that's probably a decent first Roundup of all of the sliders there's a lot going on in here and like I said really what I want to encourage you to do is take the time to get fluent and comfortable with this in stages and what I like most about this being included in resolve is it means that Blackmagic designer listening to users like us who are curious and interested in taking more control of our image and exerting more authorship over our image and this really gives us an opportunity as practitioners of look development which as you've heard me emphasize many times here on the channel before that's a different muscle than color grading that's a really fun muscle to develop what this plugin does is it gives us the option to develop that muscle or to explore whether it's even a muscle that we want to develop without having to go and sift through a galaxy of dctl or party plugins and it allows us to scratch that itch and to begin our process and then we can evaluate what works great for me in this plugin what's missing in this plugin where do I want to take my look Dev practice from here and I can tell you from experience that's a very fun Journey that doesn't have a uh tidy uh sort of path or uh you know linearity to it but sure is a fun journey to take so I am super glad to see this plugin inside of resolve I hope this was a helpful kind of initial primer into the plugin and what I think is working great working okay uh and uh you know could stand to be improved and I hope this is something that either allows you to go deeper with your existing look Dev uh Journey or gets you curious maybe for the very first time about look development and gets you to start exploring the concepts of look development right here inside of resolve 19

Channel: Cullen Kelly

Views: 14,959

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Id: 7m77CXt39i0

Length: 19min 28sec (1168 seconds)

Published: Sun May 05 2024