Surface Tracker Logo Replacement in the Colour Page of DaVinci Resolve 18

hey everyone in today's tutorial i want to show you how to replace a t-shirt logo in davinci resolve 18 just using the color page with a new surface tracker tool let's take a little bit of a look all right so we're in resolve 18 at the moment it's currently in public beta so there might be a few bugs here and there but if you are using this either now or in the future this method should be the same so i want to take you through it at the moment i've just got a bit of a test clip here of me having a bit of a pretend interview not really much going on however i do want to point out a few things about this particular technique that are going to be really important to know and it is quite specific in some ways it's really going to i think work best for static shots like what we've got at the moment and it's going to work best for people unlike myself who talk a lot with their hands if you have for example the talent who goes like this and basically covers the logo with their hand at some point it's going to get a little bit complicated this method isn't going to work as well so you might be better off moving to a workflow infusion or after effects compositing software in order to do that a little bit better but if you are lucky enough to have a good little interview clip like this where you can do it really easily uh we'll go ahead and i'll show you how to do that now all right so first things first what i'm gonna do is open up the effects panel here and i'm just going to search for surface tracker and i'm going to drag it into our node area here just and create a new separate node we don't need to add it onto anything and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to hold shift and drag it over this line here which is going to connect it up so it does become a part of our node tree and structure and what i'm going to do first is i'm going to go ahead and click shift f on the mac in order to get a little bit closer to this t-shirt and with my surface tracker selected i can now start adding some points around this particular logo beautiful and once i've joined it what i can do is i can go ahead and click on the mesh section this kind of acts as a little bit of a step one step two step three and as you can see it's generated a little bit of a mesh for us here this is going to be enough surface area for us to add our logo as well our new logo so i'm pretty happy with this and obviously if there are any sort of issues or i want to add some more points i can do that in this particular part of the process as well in this case i'm fairly happy with it i'm going to go to track and i'm going to go ahead and click uh well i'm currently not at the start and this is something that's going to happen a fair bit too so if it does it's no issue all i'm going to do is i'm going to click track forwards and i'm going to track backwards as well so now that i've done that track forwards i'm going to track backwards too let it do its thing beautiful so what i can do now is i can just go ahead and play the clip through just make sure that mesh is actually sticking onto that particular area it looks like it's doing a fairly good job so i'm fairly happy with it and then what i'm going to do is go ahead and click on the result section now at this point i can hit shift f again to go back to my previous view and just fit this back into the viewer and now at this point i want to go ahead and import my logo in the color page i can just go to the top left here and click on media pool deer logo and i'm just going to drag it into here again as a separate node and it'll import as an external map to begin with but obviously we've got some color information there too so if i want to get the confirmation we're just going to hit alt s on the keyboard or option s on the mac and as you can see it's gone ahead and give us the color information but obviously we don't have that matte information uh here so what i can do is i can actually again connect it up just linking the top one to the bottom one here this blue and blue which basically gives us our alpha channel coming across and then what i can do is i can pipe this into the surface tracker as well so again i'm just going to drag these two parts of the image just across both the normal standard sort of color output and our alpha output as well i'm going to go back to the surface tracker and i'm going to click on overlay placement go to reference and as you can see well actually can't see anything at the moment but the d logo is there and if i sort of drag this across you can kind of see that it's there but it's just too big at the moment we want to bring it down and make it fill this only this particular part of the frame so as i sort of bring this down you can see the plane starts to do some really crazy 3d stuff that's normal obviously it's going to allow us to give us our perspective and make sure that it tracks properly onto the surface make sure that it just fits within our bounds too because if it's going outside of those bounds it's going to mean that we're going to have some cutoff of this particular logo all right so now i've basically got it in the pocket for the moment i think this is looking fairly okay again we're really lucky that this t-shirt is fairly flat there's not a lot of perspective to it if there was we might need to refine it give it a little bit more finessing but right now i'm fairly happy with that and if we just go ahead and play it through you can see it sticks on fairly well although probably just the bottom of the d here is getting cut off so what i want to do is i want to go back to my reference again sort of drag it and make sure that we aren't cutting it off so it's looking fairly good but obviously we've still got that logo there so that's the next part of this process is we're going to go ahead and replace the logo the original logo on the t-shirt and so what i'm going to do is again shift f is going to get me back out to the the main section and show me every all the different controls i'm then going to basically select all three of these nodes and i'm going to hit command d on the mac and again that's going to go ahead and turn off these particular nodes just for the moment so now we've turned off our specific nodes we're going to go ahead and add our patch replacer before we do that we're actually going to do one more thing we're actually going to track this first so i'm going to hit again with our first connector node selected i'm going to hit option s on the mac or alt s on a windows computer and i'm going to go ahead and basically go over to our tracker panel here and resolve i'm going to make sure by default it will be a window tracker so power window track we've got no power windows on this at the moment so i'm going to go over to the effects part of this tracker and i'm going to go ahead and add a point now i've done this multiple times now and i can tell you that as much as we always want as much tracking data as possible sometimes when you've got a more difficult track like what this is at the moment i'll show you why it's a little bit more of a difficult track we want to actually have less points because the more points that we have the more confused everything is going to get and how the patcher plays a tool just jumping around the entire screen a single point has actually worked really well so as much as some motion graphics people vfx people are going single point motion tracking how does that even work uh it can work it can work in this particular instance because we're pretty lucky we don't have a lot of detail that we will basically this particular part of the image doesn't have a lot of specific intricate detail that we need to replace so when we're tracking we always want to find a point of high contrast with edges and so something like the middle here kind of where we have an intersecting line with the black and the white and what i'm going to do is i'm just going to again shift f is going to get us back out and i'm just going to track this forward and see how this goes now it's not great i'm going to be honest with you and it has really struggled with this particular clip again i tried it using multiple tracking points and the result was actually worse than what i've got right now so it does drift a little bit which is not great and you might want to dial again depending on your clip you might have a bit more luck than i did you might want to start dialing it in a little bit more or choosing again points on this t-shirt which are going to be a little bit better to track but again make sure that we are sort of tracking something that is around that same area so potentially the logo itself because if for example you do a track on the arm of the t-shirt or you do a track on the face that's obviously going to move independently of the logo so it's going to give you a totally different tracking information tracking data compared to actually tracking the logo itself so again this track isn't looking great but i'm going to leave it for the moment we're going to see how we go all right i'm going to go to effects and i'm just going to search patch replacer and i'm going to add it on to that same node now with the patch replacer tool we get two parts uh two ellipses by default we can change this to squares or rectangles if we'd like but the one on the right is going to be what we're replacing so i'm going to go ahead and bring this one down and the one on the left is what we're replacing it with so what i generally want to do is i want to just make sure that what we've got right now is just covering over exactly what we need and nothing more and this one here is again an area that's going to be nice and easy to match again potentially with this t-shirt the least amount of creases as possible is going to really help us out but let's say for example we're over here because we had to be we can use the replacement detail just to drag this one down a little bit and it almost creates a bit of a blur just to help blend it a little bit better in this case i'm going to drag it up to the top here now much to a slight replacement detail reduction and if i hide this as well i can kind of just blur the edges too not too much because again we're going to start to see the logo but it's going to help blend it in a little bit more now what i'm going to do is i'm going to watch it back moment of truth right single frame looks fine is it going to work okay for the overall shot let's have a look it's not bad and as i said previously i did this with multiple tracking points and it was going crazy so sometimes the single tracking point is all we need even if it drifts off a little bit it's not going to be as noticeable on this particular t-shirt because it's just black even as it moves just slightly more to the left or the right it's not noticeable uh so we're pretty lucky here again if you have a bit more of a complicated shot you might need to do a little bit more finessing on that track in this case we got pretty lucky so now we've done that i can select on these three nodes again i can hit command d to bring them back on to the image now that red's looking pretty harsh to be honest it is just like a full red in photoshop so i probably could have done a little bit better to finesse that color a little bit more but in this case i'm going to go down to compositing this one again you can kind of dial in yourself i think a screen potentially with a slight reduction in the amount of opacity might help us out and so now with that all done let's have a little bit of a look at our final track and replacement of this particular logo not bad again pretty simple uh and again the clip has to be pretty pretty tight in terms of the specifications for this to actually work but again it gives you a bit of a proof of concept of being able to do something in the color page of resolve without having to go through a dedicated compositing software and i think that's really exciting and especially as we move into version 18 of resolve i can definitely see a big shift towards being able to do a lot more in the color page than you could previously do which again gives more people the option to bypass fusion which is a very powerful compositing tool very i guess useful in terms of vfx workflows and motion graphics in some cases but again a lot of people potentially don't want to have to learn how to do that especially when you're just trying to do something as simple as replacing a t-shirt logo as we've just proven and demonstrated in this particular example so again if you have any feedback or comments or you feel like you could have done this a better way please let me know i'm open to learning as well i think this is a you know a cool proof of concept and i'm really happy with how it turned out in this particular use case if you're trying it's not working for you uh please again let me know and tell me why and hopefully in the future we can keep refining this down and just get it even better so thank you so much for watching i really hope you've enjoyed this tutorial and let me know if you want to see more of them but otherwise make sure to like subscribe to the channel if you're enjoying it and i'll see you all in the next video all right we're going to get there we are going to get there could take many years

Channel: Matt Quattro

Views: 15,718

Keywords: Davinci Resolve 18, Blackmagic Design, Fusion, After Effects, Compositing, Logo Replacement, VFX, Motion Graphics, Surface Tracker

Id: CuFkigh9NyE

Length: 11min 47sec (707 seconds)

Published: Thu May 05 2022