The DEFINITIVE DaVinci Resolve 17 Tutorial for Beginners to Hero Guide

see how we're going from getting passed over to creating films people rave about in davinci resolve 17. you might be wondering if resolve is right for you and if it's something that you can start using to make a difference in your filmmaking after helping tens of thousands of filmmakers for the past 10 years improve the look of their films and resolve i'm here to tell you it will and in this video you'll be able to go from being a beginner to getting a high-end look that sets you apart in minutes my name is denver riddle and i'm a colorist this is the definitive beginner's guide to davinci resolve 17. if you've opened up the software before and then promptly closed it because it felt too overwhelming i know how that feels and i've actually been there which is why we're gonna go through this step by step so that by the end of the video you'll be able to go from being a beginner in davinci resolve 17 to getting a high-end look that people go crazy for now while youtube is a fantastic resource for learning about so many different kinds of subjects if you are looking for a comprehensive training that takes you all the way through discovering the art of color grading and getting the big budget hollywood film looks i want to let you know about a free training workshop i'm going to be doing where i reveal my top color grading secrets to attend just click the link in the description below and i hope to see you there alright let's do this thing when you first start up davinci resolve 17 it will open to the project manager with a single blank untitled project i've already added some projects so mine will look a little bit different than yours to get started let's create a new project by double clicking over the blank untitled project and we're in let's save this project so go to file save project and choose a name for it and now we're in now davinci resolve is divided into seven pages following a left to right workflow where we import footage in the media page assemble our edit in the cut page or the edit page work on vfx and graphics in the fusion page do our color grading on the color page design and mix our audio in the fairlight page and finally export our project from the deliver page it's just that simple the media page is where we can preview clips by double clicking on them and import them into the project by dragging them into the media pool i'm just going to import a few pre-trimmed clips and once they're in the media pool we can go to the cut page or the edit page now you might be confused why there are two pages well not to worry both let you edit just like you would in any other nle but the cut page is a streamlined version of the edit page for making fast quick cuts in a fast-paced environment like a new show or delivering to the web what's great is that you can begin your edit in the cut page to get your roughs and then move to the edit page to continue refining your edit so let's begin our edit in the cut page i'll create a new timeline by going to file then new timeline we'll give it a name and then click create this will create for us a new timeline now let's double click on our first clip so it will show on our source monitor and select the in and out points using the keyboard shortcuts i for in and o for out then to bring our selection to the timeline let's use the insert tool with the shortcut f9 now i'll select in and out points for the second clip and use the append tool to add the clip to the end of the timeline after my first one for that you can just drag and drop it after the first clip or use the keyboard shortcut shift plus f12. but let's say you want to replace the first clip to do that we can use the ripple over write tool or use the keyboard shortcut shift f10 i'll keep working on this until i have a rough cut and then we can refine this with the trim tools we'll place the cursor at the very beginning or the very end of a clip and drag this performs a ripple edit similar to final cut pro x magnetic timeline placing the cursor between clips allows us to perform what's called a roll edit which moves the edit point while expanding and contracting the adjacent clips placing our cursor on the thumbnail portion of the video track and then dragging performs what's called a slip edit which leaves the clips where they are in the timeline but moves the in and out points of the source clip so there's all kinds of cool ways that we can perform different edits now let's jump into the edit page in this page you can cut and trim your clips like in the cut page but with a more traditional nla interface if this is more familiar to you then you can just actually skip the cut page and go straight here to the edit page first again the cut page is just for working quickly you'll see that the edit page has a traditional layout where you can bring clips in from the media pool a source or preview monitor to set in and out points the program or timeline monitor that plays back our edit the timeline itself the effects library to access transitions and filters and the inspector panel so we can make changes to the scale position rotation of our clips or for changing any of the properties from the effects and transitions that we apply here in the edit page we have the same editorial tools like we have in the cut page for doing inserts over writing trimming and the blade or razor tool but don't forget these tools can automatically be selected based on where we actually click on the clip in the timeline so davinci resolve 17 is a really powerful editor that is fully mature all right once our edit is looking the way that we like it we're now ready to do the fun part and that is color grading now because this is a high level overview and our emphasis is more on the color grading which we teach to we'll just briefly touch on the fusion page so you at least know that it is there and what it is used for in the fusion page we have the nodes section with an input and an output the input is for our original image coming in and the output is for our image going out in between is where we do our vfx and compositing so let's say for instance we want to add a blur effect over our talent's face we'll go to the effect library choose blur effect and this will be added to the node tree we'll then go to the inspector and increase the blur value but you'll see however this affects the entire image so we'll need to add a mask going to the effects library i'll choose mask and ellipse a node representing the mask is added to the node tree as a property of the blur effect and we can position and resize the mask on the viewer or use the options in the inspector tab we can also use a merge node to merge multiple effects over the same image too and this allows to do tracking 3d compositing all kinds of stuff now most people won't need to use the fusion page so you can just skip over it completely but it is there for vfx artists and finishers alright let's go ahead and delete this blur effect and let's jump to the color page at the top we have the viewer and the nodal tree where we keep track of our corrections in the middle section we have all the clips in the project represented as thumbnails and the bottom section is where we have our color tools now before i jump in and start grading this thing let's first discuss basic terminology for how we define color the three basic terms that we use to define color are hue saturation and luma hue is the name we call colors saturation is the intensity or vividness of a hue and luma is the brightness or shade of you it's also important to know how to read the video scopes which can be super beneficial we'll bring up the scopes by right clicking on the viewer and selecting show scopes the two scopes i always use are the waveform in color overlay mode and the vector scope with the flesh line turned on the waveform lets us correct for exposure and with the rgb mode selected and checking the colorize option it'll actually allow us to correct for white balance issues when the color channels line up evenly if i overlay an image over top of the waveform you can see that the trace the stuff you see here actually corresponds with the image of the girl walking and jumping and the sky the vectorscope corresponds directly with the color wheel and i've overlaid it here for convenience it shows us what colors are in the image as well as their saturation the further the trace extends from the center of the scope the more saturated or vivid the colors are here's a simple but powerful workflow for color correction we first want to correct the exposure or brightness of the image second the white balance or color temperature if there are any issues and lastly the saturation by either increasing or reducing it this will make more sense as we actually do it i'll choose this clip as our hero shot let's first make a correction to the exposure this image using the primary color wheels the horizontal wheels adjust the exposure and the pucks in the middle of the color wheels adjust the color the lift mostly just for the shadows or darkest parts of the image the game for the highlights or brightest parts of the image and the gamma for the midtones or everything else in between this fourth wheel is the offset control which adjusts the entire image and there are some circumstances where you'd want to use it now looking at this you can see that it's really flat this is a very common way to see it if you capture in a log or flat picture profile so how we'll correct this shot is we'll adjust the shadows first with the lift control while watching the waveform we want to bring the trace of the shadows down until the darkest parts of the image sit right above zero then we'll bring up the highlights so that the brightest parts of the trace sit right about here near the top we'll then bring the midtones up by pulling up on the gamma slider this gives us good contrast and exposure this is the first step next we'll fix the color temperature since our image looks a little too warm we can clearly see the red trace dominating the mid-tones and highlights of our waveform our goal here is to neutralize or white balance the whites so the way to do that is to first find something in the image that should be white in this case we can use the top of this van our goal is to get the color channels to align evenly and when they do the trace will turn white indicating that we've achieved white balance a quick and easy way to do this is with the white balance eye dropper found under the lift wheel keep an eye over here on the trace as i click on the white van and voila a huge part of the trace corresponding to the van and the billboard turns white now in case you're not happy with the result or if the whites look too sterile or clinical we can manually adjust them using the temperature and tint sliders in this case i think we can warm up the image a little bit lastly let's boost the color by increasing the saturation here's what the clip looks like before and after the correction doesn't that look awesome again our first objective using this workflow is to bring our image to a neutral starting point and if this looks right to you give the video a like as that will help the algorithm alright now that our hero shot is color corrected let's move on on this next shot we'll repeat the procedure going for a nice balance of exposure with the lift gamma and gain controls if you're having a hard time judging exposure using the scopes another great way to do this in davinci resolve 17 is using defaults colors effects to do that we'll add a new node go to the open effects panel look for false color and then apply it by default the plug-in mode is set to specific camera model and the models available are all from blackmagic but if you set the mode to creative and choose exposure guide under the creative style menu you get a proper false color mode for exposure here the highlights are yellow orange and red when they start to blow out absolute black is purple shadows are represented as blue and dark gray and the mid tones go from green and pink to a light gray which is where the skin tones should be using this as a guide we can now use the wheels to make each range fall under its corresponding colors and you can see the skin tones turning pink and the tree shadows turning blue the top of the model's hat is clipping so we can go to the log wheels and use the highlights wheel to bring down just the very top of the trace once we're done just click over the false color node to disable it the color temperature in the shot looks off so we'll again use the white balance eyedropper this time over her backpack we'll then refine it a little manually lastly we'll add some saturation too moving to the third shot we want to match it to the first shot for obvious reasons since this is pretty much a tighter version of our hero shot to give us a good starting point and to save time let's copy the correction from the first clip to this one to do that we'll go to the first shot open up the gallery right click on the viewer and select grab still what this does is it adds a still to the gallery saving our correction so we can use it later on now coming back to this clip we'll right click on the still in the gallery and select apply grade and bada bing bada bang that gives us a good starting point but you'll see that we do have some matching issues to help us with shot matching let me share with you my preferred method for doing this we'll turn on a split screen view and change the drop down to selected clips if we now command or control click if you're on windows on shot 1 we can now see the images side by side we can also see them side by side in the waveform which makes matching a breeze to match the traces better we'll bring the shadows midtones and highlights up with the offset control that's a nice looking match still i think the mid-tones could benefit from a small boost but this time we're going to use another new feature of davinci resolve 17 the hdr grading palette which lets you create new color wheels with custom roll-off for specific tonal ranges we have wheels for black dark shadow light highlights and specular and pressing this button you can see what areas they actually affect if you open up this other menu you can see a trace showing what area covers each will you can change their range and fall off and even create new zones in this case i'll use the light wheel and bring up the exposure just a bit in the interest of time i've already gone ahead and performed color correction to these remaining clips but in this shot you'll see that her dress looks as if it's a different shade of green compared to the other shots to fix this we'll need to do what's called a secondary or an isolated color correction on only the dress well fortunately we can easily do this in resolve by creating a new node and we'll use one of my favorite tools for doing secondaries that's with the hueverse hue curve we'll place two points on the color spectrum to isolate the green tones then add a center point and drag up a little bit to lean those green hues more towards yellow it looks better but a little too saturated so we'll go to the huber's sat curve isolate the green tones again and drag the middle point down to desaturate them a little now what i love about resolve is that there's never a single way of doing things blackmagic design is always coming up with new tools that let us be more precise or just provide a different approach to how we do things starting in the release of davinci resolve 17 we have the color warper tool an alternative to the hue and saturation curves i'll disable this last node create a new one and now let's fix the dress with the warper tool we'll make sure to set it up to hsl so it becomes equivalent to the vector scope and now you can move the points in the mesh to effectively modify the trace changing the hue and saturation you can even forget about picking a point in the mesh and go directly to the image itself click on a hue that you want to change and move the cursor around to change it you can even add more points to the mesh to be more precise in this case i'll choose a 12 points mesh from the center to the outer edge so let's click on the dress and move the points towards yellow and desaturate a little moving the points toward the center that's it now you'll see when i move a point other points around it are affected in case you want to be very precise you can pin points using this tool to make sure they don't get affected by your correction the color warper has a second tool named chromaluma to change the luma value for a hue let's say i don't like the shadows on the model's neck with the chroma luma tool opened i'll find a point for the next shadows with the color picker then i'll drag the point up but you'll see it affects the whole image so let's reset that and enable auto lock this locks the other points so they don't move i'll choose one point lock so even the nearest points won't move and enable auto pin surrounding single point now let's move the point up and you'll see that the other points keep their position pretty cool trick right so far we can say that our base correction is done but let's imagine the client has this crazy idea about changing the model's dress from green to magenta the problem with that is there's a lot of green in these shots i mean look at all those trees so the only way to further qualify or isolate the dress are with masks let's take this shot of the model running for example first i'll use the hueverse hue curve to isolate the green tones and change the dress to magenta you'll see this is affecting the foliage and trees then going to the windows panel if i choose a circle mask it won't do the trick right we would still get lots of foliage inside the mask if i go to the curves window and draw a shape mask around her i have to be very precise and if i try to track it the tracker won't work her arms and legs are moving there's just too much going on so what are we going to do well before davinci resolve 17 the only solution to this would be frame by frame tracking but now we have the magic mask with the magic mask you only need to draw strokes over your subject and resolve will use ai to determine the edges of the subject and automatically key it you can enable the mask overlay feature to check if the key is good enough you can draw more blue strokes to include the missing parts or red strokes to erase what you don't want then hit the forward button and resolve will calculate the mask for the whole shot now let's hit play and bon appetit a perfectly masked dress there are some errors here and there and you can keep adding strokes as much as you want but this is a huge time saver now i won't be doing this for all the shots this is just an example of the power now found in davinci resolve 17. i'll disable the node and move on to our next step and that's creating an awesome look for these clips i'm going to show you a quick way to apply the same look on top of all these clips and this will save you tons of time and ensure that you have a consistent look across the board this will save you so much time that when your spouse or significant other or kids when they come and nag you you'll be able to play with them or do whatever else it is that you want okay so to do that we'll select all the clips in the timeline using the shift key to select a row we'll then right click and choose the option add into new group we'll give it a name in this case we'll call it the aviator since it's going to be inspired by the aviator by martin scorsese then click ok then we'll change this drop down from clip to group post clip this simply means that when we want to make a change it's applied to all the clips in the group you see if i push an arbitrary color into one of the clips you see that they're all updated with the same change all right let me reset that and now let's create the look the aviator is pretty crazy in terms of color grading with different grades for different scenes and time periods what unifies the look of the film is that all these grades are always duo tone and very unnatural for example in this scene everything is teal and red in this other red and green here red and blue now all this may look too unnatural and the look relies heavily on the art direction but we can create a watered-down version of this and i think this will work really well with the scene and then you can also download this look as a lut the goal is to create a look made up primarily of orange and green and you can see how this fits really well with the scene in our first note let's dial up the contrast for our look to stay organized we'll right click on the note and choose node label in this case i'll just call this contrast for this part of the look we'll use the custom curves which allow us to make complex adjustments to the exposure now just a quick crash course on the way this works the bottom point adjusts the shadows the top point adjusts the highlights and we can make as many points along the curve in between to fine-tune the contrast in this case we don't want to affect the highlights or the shadows too much so we'll create contrast in between these areas known as the undertones and overtones i'll make a point here in the undertones and drag it down this improves the density of the undertones but it makes the image look a little too dark so let's add another point here in the overtones and drag it up there that looks nice now we have much richer contrast for color let's add another node and name it color here i'll use the color warper in the hue saturation mode make sure it's set to hsl and change it to 16 points looking at the trace you can see how we have a range of yellows oranges and reds so i'll move the points for those yellows and reds towards orange and bring the saturation down a bit we have lots of teal and blue too so i'll move those points towards green and bring the saturation down too you can see that i'm not being too aggressive here you can see there's some yellow red and teals in the image keeping it natural i can see some small magenta and purple details on the image that are very small but i'm going to move those points toward the center to make sure they end up desaturated if i toggle the grade off and back on again a few times you can see a huge difference and what a great look this is making it look like a fashion shoot as a final touch i want to apply one of the luts from the 70 luts master collection which you can download for free from color grading central here's a link to the download in the card i want to show you how we can preview these luts in real time with the lut browser at the top left of our screen we'll find the lut browser option let's go ahead and click on it and now we have a list of all of our luts now this is also the same as if you were to right click on a note to see a list of luts but the big difference here is that we have a visual preview of the lot before we apply it and this makes finding the right lut for your project so much easier i'll navigate to the 70 luts master collection and hovering the cursor over the lut thumbnails you'll see a real-time preview of each lut in the viewer we'll choose a three strip lut by double clicking on it at first you'll see it's too strong but that's okay because we can dial it back to taste by going to the key panel and pull back on the output gain control until we have a result that we're happy with that luck gives us the final push that this look needed now let's play this whole thing back what a really cool look of greens and oranges all right to wrap this all up i'll jump to the fairlight page although we've placed a lot of emphasis on the color grading which i believe is resolves greatest strength i think it's also worth pointing out the fairlight page which gives us professional audio tools that you'd normally only find in high-end tv and film production tools so it's truly remarkable that we've been given so much now to keep things in perspective if you have simple audio needs like adjusting levels etc you can handle all that within the edit page but if you know what you're doing and need some high-end audio finishing or mastering you can do that in the fairlight page so let's explore it briefly here we have access to the media pool we have the effects library which will list any vst audio plugins that you have on your system if you're an audio person you'll understand this the index section which displays the track list and markers we have the timeline and transport controls a mixer meters made it out of section and inspector to see the characteristics of any audio clip and pretty much anything else that you need to make a really sweet audio mix in my particular case i don't have any audio with these clips so we can just jump to the deliver page but i want you to see everything that is in here now the deliver page has four sections the render settings the viewer the timeline and the render queue where we basically press go for this project we'll output for uploading to youtube so we can choose one of the convenient presets specify a location for exporting and finally click add to render queue then start render it's as easy as that now i know that we covered a lot of things here but my purpose was to help you to get started in davinci resolve 17 so you can start seeing a difference in your films today if you're looking for more guided help in discovering the power of color grading i want to invite you to our one hour color grading workshop where i reveal the top color grading secrets used in hollywood and how best to do color grading in davinci resolve 17. you'll find a link to register for the workshop in the description below on the web class i reveal how i went from getting passed over as a wedding videographer during the recession of 2008 to improving the look of my films and landing client work with some of the biggest brands like facebook you'll get the same techniques i used that have had the biggest impact on my career so if you're serious and want to be guided every step of the way you don't want to miss it i also want to point out that if you want to learn more about our color grading academy it's the only way you can do that people ask if we do formal training well this is your opportunity to discover that and we'll have a special offer for the training as well as cinemagrade our special color grading plug-in at the end of the presentation so be sure to save your seat click the subscribe button and then the bell for more grading videos i hope that you've enjoyed this beginner's guide as much as i've enjoyed creating it for you and i look forward to seeing you at the training have a great day [Music] you

Channel: Color Grading Central

Views: 64,294

Keywords: davinci resolve 17, davinci resolve 17 tutorial for beginners, davinci resolve tutorial, davinci resolve 17 tutorial, resolve 17, how to use davinci resolve 17, davinci resolve color grading, color grading davinci resolve, davinci resolve, color grading central, denver riddle

Id: TYi_y5cjFkY

Length: 28min 8sec (1688 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 24 2021