THE BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO Learn how to create Hollywood caliber digital film and video with the world’s most advanced editing, visual effects, color correction and audio post production solution! by Paul Saccone and Dion Scoppettuolo Download DAVINCI RESOLVE Free!
THE BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO DAVINCI RESOLVE 16 by Paul Saccone and Dion Scoppettuolo
The Beginner’s Guide to DaVinci Resolve 16 Paul Saccone and Dion Scoppettuolo Copyright © 2020 by Blackmagic Design Pty Ltd Blackmagic Design www.blackmagicdesign.com To report errors, please send a note to learning@blackmagicdesign.com. Series Editor: Patricia Montesion Series Director: Dion Scoppettuolo Editor: Bob Lindstrom Contributing Authors: Daria Fissoun, Mary Plummer, Patrick Inhofer, Casey Faris Cover Design: Blackmagic Design Notice of Rights All rights reserved.
Contents ix Getting Started x 2 3 xiii Introduction to Editing in the Cut Page 1 Starting in the cut page 2 Adding clips to a timeline 5 Reviewing clips using source tape 8 Appending clips to the timeline 9 Marking In and Out with precision 10 Using intelligent editing tools 13 Editing multiple camera angles 21 Trimming edits 26 Lesson Review 35 Adding effects and publishing in the cut page 37 Mixing audio 38 Switching transitions 41 Resizing and stabilizing clips 48 Changi
Contents iv 4 5 6 Reviewing and scrubbing clips 74 Viewing clip metadata 76 Adding custom metadata 78 Making new bins 80 Displaying keyword smart bins 81 Saving custom bin views 84 Lesson Review 85 Assembling a Rough Cut 87 Creating a timeline 88 Making the first edit 89 Scrubbing with JKL keys 93 Inserting clips into a timeline 95 Using timecode 101 Overwriting video only 103 Editing from a bin 106 Replacing a shot 110 Lesson Review 113 Moving Clips in the Timeline 1
8 9 148 Trimming with the Selection Tool 151 Lesson Review 155 Applying Transitions and Effects 157 Fading Clips In and Out 158 Adding Cross Dissolves 160 Customizing Transitions 162 Saving Custom Presets 164 Applying Transitions and Filters from the Effects Library 165 Reframing Shots 169 Rendering and Background Caching 174 Creating a Constant Speed Change 176 Lesson Review 181 An Introduction to Audio Post and Sound Design 183 Working with Audio on the Edit Page 189 Working
Contents vi Exploring the Interface 224 Renaming and Color Coding Tracks 228 Viewing a Spotting List 229 Changing Track Formats 231 Trimming Clips in Fairlight 232 Aligning Sound Effects 235 Recording Audio in a Timeline 237 Modifying Clip Attributes 240 Using Fairlight FX 243 Setting Track Levels 249 Lesson Review 251 An Introduction to Visual Effects Compositing 253 10 Creating Graphics and Effects in Fusion 259 Exploring the interface 260 Adding clips from the media pool 26
307 Learning the Color Page Layout 308 Modifying Lift, Gamma, and Gain 310 Using other Primary Corrector Controls 314 Understanding Nodes 318 Making Secondary Color Corrections 319 Applying Resolve FX 323 Tracking Power Windows 326 Lesson Review 327 12 Performing Primary Color Corrections 329 Using DaVinci Resolve Color Management 330 Making Automatic Corrections 336 Balancing Color and Brightness using the Color Wheels 338 Checking Adjustments on Scopes 340 Making a Neutral Color
Contents viii Mixing a Black-and-white Shot 384 Using a Look up Table for Quick Looks 386 Creating a Bleach Bypass 393 Saving Grades Across Projects 396 Lesson Review 397 15 Delivering a Final Program 399 Creating a Web Streaming File 400 Creating a Custom Preset 402 Lesson Review 407 16 Managing Media and Databases 409 Consolidating Media 410 Copying Projects and Media to a New Hard Drive 412 Working with the DaVinci Resolve Database 414 Lesson Review 417 Index 419 About the
Foreword ix Welcome to The Beginner’s Guide to DaVinci Resolve 16 Foreword DaVinci Resolve 16 is the only post production solution that brings editing, color correction, audio post and visual effects together in the same software application! The most exciting thing about DaVinci Resolve 16 is the revolutionary new cut page, which is designed specifically for editors that need to work quickly and on tight deadlines.
Getting Started x Getting Started Welcome to The Beginner’s Guide to DaVinci Resolve 16, the official Blackmagic Design Training and Certification book that teaches editors, artists and students how to edit, composite, color correct, and mix audio in DaVinci Resolve. All you need is a Mac or Windows computer, the free download version of DaVinci Resolve 16, and a passion to learn.
The Blackmagic Design Training and Certification Program Blackmagic Design publishes several training books that take your skills farther in DaVinci Resolve 16.
Getting Started xii Download DaVinci Resolve To download the free version of DaVinci Resolve 16.1 or later from the Blackmagic Design website: 1 2 3 4 5 Open a web browser on your Windows or Mac computer. In the address field of your web browser, type: www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve. On the DaVinci Resolve landing page, click the Download button. On the download page, click the Mac or Windows button, depending on your computer’s operating system.
Acknowledgments xiii We would like to thank the following individuals for their contributions of media used throughout the book: Acknowledgments Brian J Terwilliger, Terwilliger Productions for “Living In the Age of Airplanes” Nuyen Anh Nguyen, Second Tomorrow Studios for “Hyperlight”
Lesson 1 Introduction to Editing in the Cut Page Whether you use DaVinci Resolve on a Mac, Windows, or Linux computer, this training guide will teach you how to take a project from its initial setup to a final output. You’ll become familiar with the standard menus and buttons, as well as essential editing, effects, color correction, and audio sweetening workflows. These first two lessons are used as an introduction to the revolutionary new cut page which is designed for speed so you can edit projects fast.
Introduction to Editing in the Cut Page The remaining lessons in this book will go into detail on the media, edit, fusion, color, fairlight and deliver pages. Let’s get started! Lesson 1 2 In designing the cut page, Blackmagic Design took a step back and put a lot of thought into how to innovate and make editing faster. The cut page and the edit page provide different interfaces for these two very different cultures of editors. The cut page removes wasteful steps and anything that could slow you down.
At the bottom of the window, click the cut button to switch to the cut page, if necessary. The toolbar contains playback, editing and transition buttons The media pool contains all of the source clips for a project The upper timeline shows the entire edited timeline The viewer switches between your clips and edited story in the timeline The lower timeline shows a detailed view of your current timeline position In the upper left area is the media pool.
6 Within that folder, select the Lesson 01 folder, then the Quick to Cook folder and click open. A useful dialog appears informing you that the clips you are importing are different than the default 1920 x1080 full HD video resolution and frame rate that DaVinci Resolve uses. Using this dialog you can switch Resolve’s settings to match the clips’ format, without having to open a settings window. 7 Click Change to have the settings in DaVinci Resolve match the size and frame rate of the incoming clips.
TIP Timecode is a number containing hours, minutes, seconds and frames, which is assigned to each frame of digital video when the clip is recorded. Referencing this eight digit number, it can be easier to locate a given frame of video. The clips rearrange in the bin based on the time of day they were recorded. Before you move on you’ll want to save and name this project because we will continue with it in lesson 2. 10 Choose File > Save project and name the project Cooking Show.
2 Press the spacebar to play the clip in the viewer. This is the main take in this cooking show. Since our host doesn’t start speaking immediately, we can cut off the beginning of this clip before we add it to the timeline. 3 At the bottom of the viewer, drag the white in point handle so it is just before the host begins to speak. As you drag, the audio waveform zooms in automatically, making it easier to position the in point just before the host speaks.
6 Drag the play head in the upper timeline, back to the left end until you are at the beginning of the edit. The lower timeline shows a more zoomed in, detailed view of the current position. In the lower timeline, the play head always remains in the center while the timeline scrolls under it. 7 Press the spacebar to play the timeline until you hear the chef on the right say “prawn and basil spaghettini” (about 1/3rd of the way through the clip).
8 Reviewing clips using source tape Introduction to Editing in the Cut Page Rather than double clicking each clip and playing them one by one in the viewer, you can find specific clips faster using the source tape feature. Back when editing was done using videotape, finding and reviewing content was easy because you could just shuttle up and down the tape to find the right area. Shuttling up and down a tape also provided the critical benefit of familiarizing you with the content.
Click the fast review button to play quickly through all the clips in the source tape string of clips. The fast review button plays through the clips at faster speeds for longer clips. When you reach one of the shorter clips, fast review will automatically slow down playback a bit so you don’t miss shorter clips. This gives you a quick and easy way to review new material which is important if you’re editing unfamiliar clips that someone else has shot.
Lesson 1 Introduction to Editing in the Cut Page 10 TIP A timecode display for the current play head position is located in the lower right corner of the viewer. You can use that to position the play head around 00:08:20 :00 2 Press I to mark an in point and then press O to set an out point after the host says “Make sure you join us next time”. To add this clip to the end of the timeline, you can use the append button.
While still in the source tape viewer, drag the play head near the end of the first clip where the chef picks up the pasta for the first time. 2 3 Press the I key on your keyboard to mark the start also called an in point. Under the viewer, from the left side of the audio waveform display, drag the scratch trim button to move slowly across the clip and precisely set the in point just before the chef says “so this is spaghettini” .
The audio waveform under the viewer is magnified to show a more detailed view of the audio as you move across a clip with the scratch trim button. Lesson 1 Introduction to Editing in the Cut Page 12 4 5 With the in point set, press shift-I to go to the in point. Press spacebar to play until you hear the host say “So what are we moving on to” then press O to mark the end also called the out point. By dragging the right side scratch trim button, you can refine the current out point.
Using intelligent editing tools 13 Many of the editing tools in the cut page have extra intelligence built in to help you make better decisions. Even the familiar edit types like insert are given a bit more intelligence than you might normally expect. Let’s first locate the timeline play head where we want a new clip inserted. Using intelligent editing tools 1 2 In the upper timeline, move the playhead near the start of the last clip.
4 5 Press I to mark an in point. Drag over the jog control again to move the play head forwards until the chef says “eyebrows OK? Intact?” and press O to mark an out point. With the timeline play head already near the cut where you want this new clip inserted, the smart insert button will handle the rest. 6 Click the smart insert button in the toolbar. The smart insert finds the nearest edit point and inserts the source clip in between the two existing clips in the timeline.
15 Using intelligent editing tools 10 In the source tape viewer, drag over the third clip, the side view. 11 Use the jog control to position the play head near the start of the clip, just after the host says “There’s a bit of a technique to that isn’t there?” 12 Mark an in point and continue jogging through the clip until the chef says “a bit of muscle” and they both laugh. Then mark an out point.
The boring detector window that opens allows you to define clips that may be too long as well as clips that may be too short. You can use this window to highlight areas in the timeline you consider to be too long or too short for this program. 2 Using the top slider in the window, change the value to 15. This sets the analysis to highlight areas of clips that extend longer than 15 seconds.
4 Play the timeline from the start and stop when the host says “really quick..”. We can make this opening a bit more interesting by cutting to a close up of the host as she introduces herself and the chef. Unfortunately, we don’t have a close up, but we can make one using the close up edit in the cut page. 5 6 Using the lower timeline time ruler, move the timeline so it is positioned right after the host says “really quick”. Click the close up edit button in the toolbar.
1 Starting at the first clip in the timeline, use the lower timeline to position the play head at the end of the close up you added to video track 2. Lesson 1 Introduction to Editing in the Cut Page 18 For this cutaway, we would like the new clip to play over the end of the master shot on V1 where the chef describes the dish she will make. To ensure the clip starts and stops precisely over this area, we can mark an in and out point in the timeline. 2 3 Press I to mark an in point.
4 6 Click the source tape button or press Q to return to viewing all the source clips in the viewer. In the source tape, locate the third clip from the end which shows a top view of the cutting board Position the play head just as the chef grabs the pepper mill and brings it into frame. 7 Press I to mark an in point. 5 You will only need an in point since you already have an in and out set in the timeline. This is traditionally called a three-point edit.
Replacing a clip with ripple overwrite The last shot is also highlighted as being a little too long. Since the first part of this shot just has them slurping noodles, we’ll cut the clip into two sections and then replace the first half with something more interesting. 1 In the upper timeline, move to the last clip in the timeline, where they have mostly eaten the noodle but before the host turns to the camera.
We’ll use this shot to replace the one that is currently in the timeline. Press I to mark an in point, and mark an out point after she says “micro basil”. You could insert this new clip and then delete the old one from the timeline but that seems like a lot of extra work. Instead, you can use the ripple overwrite button. 7 In the toolbar click the ripple overwrite button. 8 In the timeline, back up to the previous clip to review your new edit.
The boring detector highlights the end of this clip as being a bit too long. It might be nicer to break this shot up and switch to a few different angles while cutting the prawns. We can switch to the sync bin to see the other camera angles available at this time. 2 Click the sync bin button above the media pool. The sync bin arranges clips based on the camera # and their time code. All the camera angles in the bin that match the current timeline location are displayed under the sync bin play head.
Drag the timeline play back to the side view where the chef start to cut the prawn, just before she says “cutting the prawn in half”. To select a new angle you want to use you just click in the viewer. 5 Click camera 2, the master shot of the two women. The in point of camera 2 is automatically set to match the current timeline location. The out point is set at a default 5 seconds duration. To make the edit, we’ll use the source overwrite button. 6 In the toolbar, click the source overwrite button.
The source overwrite adds the new camera angle on top of the existing video track. Since the source overwrite takes full advantage of the matching timecode, the angles line up perfectly and the action remains in sync. Performing a source overwrite places the timeline playhead at the end of the newly added clip, so you are ready to make another edit. 7 In the viewer, click camera 4 to switch to the top view of the cutting board.
You are not always going to have clips with matching timecode. So, built into the cut page is a sync window where you can align clips in a variety of ways other than timecode. 1 2 Click on the media pool button to hide the sync bin. To the right of the import folder button, click the sync window button. The sync window opens to show all the clips in the current bin and their sync relationships.
26 Trimming edits Introduction to Editing in the Cut Page As simple as adding clips to the timeline can seem, you often need to modify the in or out point after the clip gets added to the timeline. Instead of splitting clips and deleting sections, you can fine tune a clip’s start point or end point using the cut page’s trimming features. In the cut page, there are three areas where you can trim a clip.
TIP The red highlight that appears when you select this in point indicates there are no additional frames available to extend this clip. As you drag, the viewer goes into trim mode, with a 2 up view to show you the last frame of the clip you are trimming and the first frame of the next clip. TIP The white outline that is displayed in the lower timeline as you trim shows the remaining frames you have in the source clip.
Lesson 1 Introduction to Editing in the Cut Page 28 5 Play over the master shot to hear the chef describe spaghettini as angle hair pasta. This clip can be more concise if we trim the end so the clip stops after the chef says “sometimes it’s called angle hair pasta”. Just like the lower timeline, the upper timeline is a fully functional timeline where you can move clips around and trim them. It is especially convenient when dealing with longer clips.
Use the upper timeline to go the start of the 3rd clip on video track 1. This shows the side view of the prawns being cut. 2 Play over the start of the clip and listen to the audio. 29 Trimming edits 1 As you play over the beginning of the clip you’ll hear the chef start out with the word “yeah”. You’ll want to cut this unnecessary word out from the start of this clip. It’s only a few frames so it can be tricky to do by dragging in the timeline.
The viewer’s trim editor show a close up view of the previous outgoing clip and the next incoming clip. The transition point is identified by a white vertical line in the center of the film strips. This is often called an A/B trimmer since the outgoing clip also called the A side, appears as a filmstrip on the left, and the incoming clip called the B side appears on the right.
Whereas ripple trimming adds or removes frames from a single side of a cut (In point or out point), rolling trims simultaneously trim both sides of the cut. You can perform rolling trims where ever it is most convenient, the upper timeline, lower timeline or directly in the viewer. 1 Play over the second set of cut away clips on video track 2 of the prawns getting cut. This will make for a better cut if we switch just as the chef’s hand pushes palm down on the knife.
3 Lesson 1 Introduction to Editing in the Cut Page 32 Drag the cut to the right until you see the hand palm down on the knife. TIP You can perform rolling trims in the upper timeline or in the viewer as well. 4 From the lower timeline time ruler, drag the timeline so the play head is just before the two clips on V2 and play to review the change.
3 Drag the in point to the left until you see the host turn her head towards the chef. Notice when you trim how all the remaining clip on video track 2 never ripple their position in the timeline. They remain in the same exact location. 4 Play over the beginning of the timeline to see the new starting point for the close up.
3 Lesson 1 Introduction to Editing in the Cut Page 34 Drag the slip icon to the left to select a range that is later in the clip. As you drag, the viewer changes to a 4-up display that allows you to compare all relevant outgoing and incoming frames. The most important frames are the upper two frames, which show the starting and ending frames of the clip being slipped. The lower frames show the clips on either side of the one you are slipping.
Lesson Review 35 1 Lesson Review 2 3 4 5 True or False: Importing a folder of media from the operating system automatically makes the folder into a bin. True or False: The only way to view clips is to view them strung out in source tape mode. True False: Source tape mode is based on the bin you are viewing and the sort order of that bin. True or False: Source overwrite requires that two clips be synced. True or False: Trimming can only be performed in the upper timeline or the lower timeline.
36 Answers Lesson 1 Introduction to Editing in the Cut Page 1 2 3 4 5 True. Importing a folder of media from the operating system automatically makes the folder into a bin. False. You can view clips from a bin in source tape mode or, if you double click a clip in a bin you can view that clip individually. True. Source tape mode is based on the bin you are viewing and the sort order of that bin. True. Source overwrite requires that two clips be synced. False.
Lesson 2 Adding effects and publishing in the cut page In this chapter, you’ll continue working on the Quick to Cook promo you started in lesson 1. If you haven’t completed that lesson, return to it and follow the steps so you can continue with this lesson. Time Mixing audio 38 You have completed most of the editing for this promo. We may still add one or two more clips, but the overall focus in this lesson is learning the different ways the cut page can enhance the appearance of our promo.
Mixing audio Adding effects and publishing in the cut page Most productions will include some music and this short promotion video is no exception. Let’s import the audio, listen to the music and then add it to the timeline. Lesson 2 38 1 2 Open DaVinci Resolve and open the Cooking Show project you created in the previous lesson. Play over the timeline to review the entire story you have created. It’s looking very good but we can make it sound better.
Press the spacebar to play a few seconds of the music clip, and press spacebar again to stop playback. You will add the entire music track because it is exactly one minute long, which is the target length of your short project. Currently, you have only one audio track that goes along with the video. However, DaVinci Resolve automatically adds an audio track when you drag an audio clip below the main track in the timeline.
Lesson 2 Adding effects and publishing in the cut page 40 3 4 5 Drag the play head to the start of the timeline. Press the spacebar to begin playback. Drag the volume slider to the left until it is somewhere just over half way, or wherever it sounds appropriate to you compared to the women speaking. 6 When you are done setting the volume level, press the spacebar to stop playing the timeline. In the lower left of the viewer, click the tools button to hide the viewer toolbar.
Back up in the timeline and press spacebar to hear the improved sounding audio. You have multiple ways to adjust audio levels in DaVinci Resolve, but using the cut page tools is one of the easiest ways. You’ll learn more about setting audio levels and audio post production in Lessons 8 and 9. In this lesson, let’s turn towards adding some video effects. Switching transitions A transition is the change over from one clip to the next. You’ve used one type of transition already in the first lesson.
2 Position the play head near the next to last cut in the timeline. Make sure the smart indicator is over the last cut. Lesson 2 Adding effects and publishing in the cut page 42 In the toolbar are three transition buttons that can be used to switch between different transition types. 3 In the toolbar, click the cross dissolve button to switch the transition to a half second cross dissolve.
Move the mouse pointer over the right edge of the transition icon in the lower timeline. The mouse pointer changes to a resize cursor. 6 Drag the right edge of the transition out to extend the duration of the cross dissolve to 1:00. The tool tip that appears as you drag shows the current duration as well as the amount you have added to each side of the transition. 7 Move the play head before the cross dissolve and play to review your change. You can switch transitions for clips on video track 2 as well.
Lesson 2 Adding effects and publishing in the cut page 44 9 In the toolbar, click the cross dissolve button to switch the transition to a half second cross dissolve. 10 Move the play head before the cross dissolve and play to review the addition. This transition doesn’t seem to work as nicely as the first one, but it is easy to switch back from the cross dissolve to a cut using the toolbar buttons. 11 Again move the play head near the transition at the start of the top view clip on video track 2.
Play from the start of the clip until it ends. Sometimes the on camera talent may not be at ease with being on camera. They can stumble over words or repeat themselves. Removing these slight speaking errors can make the talent seem more professional. Our chef say “umm” in the middle of her explanation of what spaghettini is and this would sound better without it. So, let’s cut that out.
Lesson 2 Adding effects and publishing in the cut page 46 TIP A jump cut is an abrupt switch between two clips that appear very similar in content and framing. Jump cuts are usually avoided because they are jarring to the audience although at times they can be used as a creative choice. 9 Move the play head near the cut we just created. 10 In the toolbar click the smooth cut button to add the transition.
The three transition buttons are not all the transitions in DaVinci Resolve. Other transitions can be added from the transitions browser. 1 Position the play head near the next to last cut in the timeline where you added the cross dissolve earlier. You can add transitions from the transitions browser on to straight cuts or other transition types just by drag and drop. 2 In the upper left corner of the DaVinci Resolve window, click the transitions button.
Lesson 2 Adding effects and publishing in the cut page 48 4 Play over the new transition to see the change. The Dip to Color Dissolve transition is a cross dissolve that transitions to a pure white color in the middle of the transition. TIP You can add a transition from the transition browser to multiple cuts at once by selecting all the clips in the timeline, then right clicking over the transition in the browser and choosing “add to selected edit points and clips”.
3 Select the clip in the timeline and position the play head over the center of the clip so you can see the host looking into the camera. In the lower left corner of the viewer, click the tools button. The viewer toolbar defaults to show the transform controls which are used to scale, reposition, rotate and flip the clip. You can use the number field in the toolbar or, the on screen controls in the viewer.
7 Adding effects and publishing in the cut page 50 Play over the next cut away clip. Lesson 2 Something that maybe was not as noticeable when the clip was added, is the slight shaking of the camera when the knife pushes down hard to cut the prawn. Fixing that using another of the tools in the viewer toolbar is incredibly simple. TIP You can click the circular reset button on the far right side of the viewer toolbar to reset the parameters for the currently displayed tool.
12 Click the stabilize button to begin the process. Stabilization quickly analyzes the motion and then removes it. 13 One the analysis is complete, play over the clip to see the results. You can compare any adjustment you make in the tools panel to the original clip by disabling the adjustment. 14 On the left side of the viewer toolbar, click the stabilizer switch to disable the stabilization and view the original clip.
Lesson 2 Adding effects and publishing in the cut page 52 2 Select the clip and in the viewer toolbar click the speed button. The first number field on the left is the percentage of speed for the currently selected clip. When set to 1.0 the clips plays back at 100% speed. Setting the value to 0.5 will cause the clip to play back at 50% speed. 3 Hover the mouse pointer over the speed percentage field. Using this virtual slider you can drag in the value field to change the number.
Adding a title 53 Your promotional video needs a title. Producing a good title whether as the opening or as a simple lower third is an art form that uses typography, color, and animation in creative ways, drawing from graphic design principles that date back centuries. Maybe expectations for this one minute promo are not so lofty, but we can still create some great looking titles, really quickly using the title browser in the cut page.
Lesson 2 Adding effects and publishing in the cut page 54 4 In the upper timeline, move the play head over middle of the newly added title to see the title and the video under it. The default title is displayed in the viewer but you can change the text and modify other title parameters using a floating inspector. 5 6 Select the title clip in the upper timeline and open the viewer toolbar. In the viewer toolbar, click the title button and then click Open Inspector to open a floating Inspector window.
Using the effects library 55 Now let’s say we want the text to pop out a bit more from the background. This can be super easy to do using the filter effects that come with DaVinci Resolve. Using the effects library 1 In the upper-left area of the screen, click the effects library button. DaVinci Resolve includes high quality and very unique filter effects called Resolve FX, that are easily accessible in the effects library.
5 In the viewer toolbar, select the effects button then click the open inspector button. The floating inspector window opens, this time showing controls for the vignette. 6 7 Increase the size to around 0.7 so you can see more of the image. Click the Color swatch to open the OS color picker and select a white color. The color changes the vignette from a darker moody appearance to a lighter one that better fits the mood of our cooking show.
In the upper timeline, select the cutting board clip where you applied the vignette effect. In the viewer toolbar, click the dynamic zoom button. Unlike other tools in the viewer toolbar, the dynamic zoom controls are disabled by default, so you first need to enable them. 3 Click the switch to enable dynamic zoom. The dynamic zoom button turns red and the effect is applied, so you can now play the clip to see the results. 4 5 Position the play head at the start of the title.
Lesson 2 Adding effects and publishing in the cut page 58 1 Position the play head at the start of the timeline and play the entire story you have created. As you play, pay particular attention to the audio. You may have noticed (especially if you were wearing headphones) that audio from the side view camera only plays out of the left channel. The rest of the audio is stereo, playing out of both the left and right channels.
TIP You can drag effects onto the upper or lower timeline depending on which you find easier to target. The stereo fixer custom controls are displayed once you apply it to a clip. The controls consist of a series of buttons that you can use to redistribute the single channel sound into stereo. The first button is the default setting and it does not change the audio of the clip. The second button swaps the channels and the third button takes the mix of the two channels to create a single mono channel.
60 Sharing to YouTube and Vimeo Adding effects and publishing in the cut page OK, you’ve created a story and now you need to get it posted to popular streaming web sites as quickly as possible. In the cut page you can upload directly to YouTube or Vimeo as well as create higher resolution master files. 1 In the upper right corner of the cut page, click the quick export button. The quick export window includes commonly used presets for creating a movie file of your timeline. Click the Vimeo button.
NOTE If you do not have a Vimeo account enter your YouTube account information and follow along by uploading to YouTube in place of Vimeo. If you have neither account, read through the remaining steps to learn how the process can help in the future. 5 When you have completed the sign in process, click save on the preferences window. The quick export window will now show the preset format for Vimeo based on your timeline.
62 Lesson 2 Adding effects and publishing in the cut page Editing faster with the DaVinci Resolve Editor Keyboard The DaVinci Resolve Editor Keyboard is designed for professional editors who need to work faster and turn around work quickly.
Lesson Review 1 2 3 4 5 True or False: All transitions are dragged from the transition browser and applied to the timeline. True or False: To modify the speed, resizing or a filter effect on a clip you must open the viewer toolbar and select the appropriate button. True False: To disable the dynamic zoom you must rest the parameters back to their default setting. True or False: You can only use the top five title templates while in the cut page. All other title templates are only editable in the edit page.
64 Answers Lesson 2 Adding effects and publishing in the cut page 1 2 3 4 5 False. You can apply a cross dissolve and smooth cut or switch back to a straight cut using the buttons in the toolbar. True. you must open the viewer toolbar and select the appropriate button. False. The switch on the far left side of the viewer toolbar will enable and disable any of the tools. False. You can use all title templates while in the cut page. True.
Lesson 3 Organizing a New Project Producing film and video content is a very creative and exciting process. Lessons 1 and 2 gave you a look at that process in the cut page. Now, you’re going to start back at the beginning and get a more detailed look at how the media and edit pages handle similar tasks for longer format, more involved projects.
66 Configuring essential settings Organizing a New Project When you started the project in the lesson 1, you didn’t configure any settings at all. In fact, you even didn’t give your project a name until the end of the lesson. That project was designed to skip the sometimes dry project setup tasks and jump right into the fun stuff. Now you’ll take a step back and correctly set up a new project. To do so, let’s return to the project manager.
To close all the extra panels that you may have opened in previous projects, choose Workspace > Reset UI Layout. DaVinci Resolve uses default values for project settings such as frame rate for playback, and output resolution. You can customize these values in the project settings window. 5 Choose File > Project settings to open the project settings window. In this lesson, you’ll use clips with a frame size of 1280 x 720 pixels running at 23.976 frames-per-second (fps).
9 Choose DaVinci Resolve > Preferences, or press Cmd-, (comma) in macOS, or Ctrl-, (comma) in Windows to open the preferences window. Lesson 3 Organizing a New Project 68 Similar to the project settings window, the preferences window has categories along the left side. The preferences window opens to the media storage category which is the one you’ll typically want to set up. The media storage category allows you to add drives, often called “scratch disks,” to your system when using DaVinci Resolve.
TIP If you purchased DaVinci Resolve from the macOS App Store, add the fastest largest drive first, then enable “Automatically display attached local and network storage locations”. Enabling this check box before adding your scratch disk will cause macOS to add the Macintosh HD drive as the first drive. The preference window has two tabs at the top. The default selected tab is the system tab. Its settings, like the media storage settings, are specific to your computer hardware for all projects.
Lesson 3 Organizing a New Project 70 15 Click save to close the preferences window. TIP Changing some options in preferences will require you to restart DaVinci Resolve. Now your set up is complete; but before you learn how to import clips, let’s get clear about some of the unique aspects of the DaVinci Resolve interface.
The media page is divided into five areas: The media pool contains all of the media for your current project, organized in bins. You can import files from the drives in the library browser into the media pool for each project. Viewer for previewing video Metadata editor for viewing, adding, or editing clip metadata The media page gives you the most flexibility and functionality when it comes to importing media from your hard drives.
1 In the library browser sidebar to the left, click the icon of your computer’s internal hard drive. 2 In the right panel, navigate to your Documents folder. 3 In the Documents folder, double-click the R16 Intro lessons folder. Lesson 3 Organizing a New Project 72 The library displays several subfolders in the R16 intro lessons folder. You’ll import clips for this project from the video clips folder located in the Lesson 03 folder.
Choose Edit > Select All to select all the clips displayed in the library, or press Cmd-A (macOS) or Ctrl-A (Windows). 8 Drag any selected clip from the library into the media pool where it is labeled “No clips in media pool”. TIP You can also drag clips directly into the media pool from the macOS finder or Windows Explorer. All the selected clips are added to the master bin in the media pool. Every project always includes a master bin.
Lesson 3 Organizing a New Project 74 Importing Folders Instead of selecting each of the clips you want to import and adding them all to the master bin, you can import an entire folder and automatically create a custom bin. 1 In the upper area of the library, click the back arrow to view the contents of the Lesson 03 folder. 2 Right-click the audio folder, and choose “Add folders and subfolders to media pool (create bins)”.
NOTE Due to screen and window size differences, the order of clips in your bin may appear slightly different from the figures shown in this lesson. 3 Move the mouse pointer back and forth over the thumbnail to scrub quickly through the clip and see it in the viewer. TIP Live preview can be disabled in the options menu located in the upper-right corner of the viewer. The live media preview feature allows you to quickly skim over a clip without having to play it.
Lesson 3 Organizing a New Project 76 3 Move the mouse pointer left and right over the thumbnail. As you move the pointer left and right, DaVinci Resolve displays various frames from the clip as if you were fast forwarding and rewinding through it. 4 Move the pointer over the thumbnail until you see the yellow airplane. This image will make a better representative frame than the blue water.
Viewing clip metadata 77 The upper section of the metadata editor displays some essential clip information such as name, duration, and frame size. However, because a production can include an enormous amount of metadata for every clip, a drop down menu in the upper-right corner of the metadata editor lets you choose other categories of metadata. In the upper-right corner of the metadata editor, in the drop down menu, choose shot & scene.
78 Adding custom metadata Organizing a New Project Standard metadata that is captured or created automatically on set during production is certainly helpful when organizing clips, but adding your own metadata is also important. In almost every project, you’ll organize content using some form of metadata. Some of that metadata must be added manually in DaVinci Resolve. Lesson 3 1 The current lesson has only a few shots from one small scene, so it’s not very difficult to stay organized.
3 In the master bin, select 02_possible to shoot it then Cmd-click (macOS) or Ctrl-click (Windows) 03_or it didnt make the movie to select it, too. 4 With both clips selected, in the keyword field of the metadata editor, enter the letters INT. A list of standard keywords and previously entered keywords that start with I-N-T are displayed. It’s helpful to select keywords from the list if they are available, rather than running the risk of misspelling.
Making new bins Organizing a New Project Bins are like folders, or containers, for all your clips. Although all the video clips that you import go into the default master bin, it is not very efficient to rely entirely on a single bin to hold all of them. It’s like having a filing cabinet and stuffing everything in one folder. A better strategy is to create custom folders or bins and organize your clips in a way that makes it easier for you to find them later.
Displaying keyword smart bins 81 Smart bins search your entire project to group clips based on metadata that you define. For example, you can create a smart bin that automatically finds all of the audio clips in your project or all of the clips captured using a specific camera. Best of all, a smart bin’s contents will continually update as new footage is added to your project. That means you don’t have to manually organize footage when using metadata and smart bins.
3 Click media pool properties, and in the menu, choose metadata - shot & scene because this was the metadata category chosen when you entered the interview keyword. 4 5 6 Set the metadata type drop down menu to Keywords, Set the third metadata criteria drop down menu to “does not contain”. In the text entry field, type interview, and click create smart bin. Lesson 3 Organizing a New Project 82 You now have a smart bin that includes all the clips that do not have the keyword Interview applied to them.
You‘ve now removed all of the audio clips from this smart bin, but you also need to eliminate any timelines. 12 Click the add filter criteria button to add another criteria field. The new fields use similar criteria as the previous one so you need to change only the last two items. 13 Change “is” to “is not” and change the last item from video to timeline. 14 Click OK to close the dialog and update the smart bin.
84 Saving custom bin views Organizing a New Project Beyond organizing clips into bins, you can organize how content appears in those bins. Clips in bins can be shown in list view as well as thumbnail view and can display as much or as little metadata as you’d like. Select the B-Roll bin. 2 At the upper-right of the media pool, click the list view button. Lesson 3 1 The media pool switches from showing the clips as thumbnails to showing clips in a text list.
After making these changes, you have a nice, slimmed-down number of columns that display only the essential information that you might want to see. You can save as many different bin views as necessary and recall them from the menu later. To save a bin view, you can use the same contextual menu. 6 Ctrl-click (macOS) or right-click (Windows) one of the bin column headings, and in the contextual menu, choose create column layout. 7 Type Basic View as the column layout name, and click OK.
Lesson 3 Organizing a New Project 86 Answers 1 True. You can set the timeline resolution and frame rate in the project settings. 2 True. Smart bins are automatically created for keywords. 3 Live save and project backups are located in the User Preferences > Project Save and Load panel. 4 The media files do not change their locations after you add them to the media pool. They remain in their original locations in their original formats and resolutions. 5 False.
Lesson 4 Assembling a Rough Cut With your content imported and organized, you are ready to start editing in the Edit page. The first pass at developing a timeline is called the rough cut. The goal is to place clips in the rough order you’ll want them in your final program. It is the equivalent of sketching a picture rather than precisely drawing one. In this lesson, you’ll use the edit page and look at the various ways to begin a rough cut.
Creating a timeline Assembling a Rough Cut Before you can start editing, you must create a timeline into which you place clips in the order you’ll want to use them. DaVinci Resolve 16 projects can contain one or more edited timelines. As you experiment with multiple versions of a timeline, it can be helpful to duplicate your timeline by selecting Edit > Duplicate Timeline. Unlike the cut page, you can place timelines in any bin, not just the master bin.
TIP You can click the use custom settings button to override the project settings for the timeline format, frame rate, monitoring and output configuration. An empty timeline is added to the timeline editor and the name of the timeline is displayed above the timeline viewer, just as the name of the viewed clip is displayed above the source viewer. An icon for that timeline is added to the Rough Cuts bin.
Lesson 4 Assembling a Rough Cut 90 1 Select the Interview smart bin, and click the thumbnail view button to display the clips as thumbnails. 2 In the smart bin, double-click the 01_shoot the real world clip to load it into the source viewer. Because this clip has dialog, you can use an audio waveform overlay to quickly locate the portion of the clip you want to include in your timeline. 3 In the options menu above the source viewer, choose show zoomed audio waveform.
8 Press the I key to mark an in point. After marking an in point, play the clip for roughly 10 more seconds until the man says, “making all the things possible.” Then press the spacebar to stop playback. Again, use the arrow keys to nudge the playhead right after the word “possible”, and press the O key to mark an out point.
When you are ready to add your first clip to the timeline, the easiest way to see all of the available editing functions is to use the edit overlay. 10 Drag from the center of the source viewer into the timeline viewer but do not yet release the mouse button. Lesson 4 Assembling a Rough Cut 92 The edit overlay appears in the timeline viewer displaying seven edit functions which differ slightly from the cut page: Overwrite covers up a clip (or part of a clip) in your timeline using the new clip.
Scrubbing with JKL keys Using the JKL keys can help you quickly scan through clips. It’s like using the fast forward and rewind buttons on your DVR so you can find exactly the right frame. The L key plays forward, the J key plays backward, and the K key stops playback. Tapping the L or J keys multiple times will speed up playback. Holding down K while tapping L or J will playback in slow motion. Let’s give it a try.
Lesson 4 Assembling a Rough Cut 94 4 Press the J key to go back near the start of the sentence, and press K to pause playback when you arrive there. Don’t forget to use the audio waveform as a guide to locate where the sentence starts. When you are near the start of the sentence, you can be more precise by playing at half speed using key combinations.
You can now edit this range into your timeline. Just as you more efficiently placed the in and out point using the JKL keys, you’ll now speed up the actual edit using the toolbar. 13 Position the playhead at the end of the last clip in the timeline. Although you can mark in and out points in the timeline, the timeline playhead will act as an implicit In point if neither mark exists. The toolbar below the source and timeline viewers contains many of the most common functions that you’ll use during editing.
2 Position the playhead between the two interview clips in the timeline. As you drag, the playhead should snap to the cut point, ensuring that you are in the right spot. Lesson 4 Assembling a Rough Cut 96 TIP The snapping behavior can be disabled by clicking the snapping button in the toolbar, or pressing N. 3 In the bin list, click the B-Roll smart bin, and double-click the 08_SOUTH_POLE_DC3 clip to load it into the source viewer.
From the beginning of the clip, drag the source viewer’s jog bar until you see the tail of the plane emerge from behind the sign. 97 Inserting clips into a timeline 5 This spot in the clip gives you a little buffer room from the very first frame so it will work as your in point. 6 Press the I key to mark an in point in the source viewer. This shot doesn’t have a lot of action and it isn’t very long, so you will use all of it.
7 Assembling a Rough Cut 98 To make the edit, drag from the center of the source viewer into the timeline viewer. When the edit overlay appears, drag over the word “Insert” and release the mouse button. Lesson 4 When you choose Insert in the edit overlay, the source clip is added to the timeline by pushing the second clip in the timeline to the right to make room. The overall duration of the timeline is extended by the duration of the added clip.
Press the J+K and K+L keys to play slowly over the last two sentences and locate the space between the sentences “It didn’t make the movie” and “It was really important.” 99 Inserting clips into a timeline 3 This brief gap between the two sentences is where you will insert a new clip. It can be easier to locate that small gap when you zoom into the timeline waveform. 4 In the toolbar, drag the zoom slider to the right to zoom in to the interview clip and see more detail in the audio waveform.
7 Move to the start of the clip and press spacebar to watch this clip and stop playback somewhere in its middle. For this edit, you will use the entire clip. If you do not enter any marks on a source clip, DaVinci Resolve uses the entire clip. Instead of using the edit overlay to choose an edit, this time you’ll perform the Insert edit using the toolbar edit button. The insert edit button provides the same editing function as choosing “Insert” in the overlay.
Using timecode 101 Up until now, you’ve placed clips in your timeline using sound and picture as a rough guides. An alternative guide is to use timecode numbers. Using timecode lets you specify the exact duration of a clip before you edit it into the timeline. Using timecode 1 In the B-Roll bin, double-click the 05_BAY_AREA_LIGHTS clip to load it into the source viewer.
Lesson 4 Assembling a Rough Cut 102 TIP When using a keyboard without a number pad, press Shift-= (equals sign) to enter a + (plus sign). You’ll use this frame for your in point. 3 Press I to mark an in point. You can also identify a playhead location by exact seconds and frames if you have precise values you want to use. Let’s move ahead four seconds and 10 frames in this clip. 4 Type +410, and then press Return or Enter. The playhead jumps forward four seconds and 10 frames.
In the toolbar, click the insert button, or press the F9 key to Insert edit the clip. Press Shift-Z to see the entire timeline. Then position the timeline playhead at the start of the second interview clip, and press spacebar to review the last half of the timeline. When you start to rely on keyboard shortcuts for a lot of your editing, it is important to be aware of which viewer is active.
2 Assembling a Rough Cut Press spacebar to play the interview. The first line is, “If it was possible to shoot it you wanted to go shoot it.” Instead of having him onscreen during that time, it would look nicer to have one of those impressive, almost impossible shots. This time, you’ll make an in and out point in the timeline because you know you would like the duration of the new shot to be the length of that first sentence.
Move to the start of the clip and press spacebar to play the clip. This is a well-framed shot of a large jet landing. Let’s mark an in point just as you see the landing wheels at the top of the screen. 9 Drag the source viewer jog bar from the beginning of the clip until the wheels of the plane are visible in the frame. You need to mark only an in point on this source clip because you already have the duration set in the timeline. 10 Press I to mark an in point.
The destination control displays no outline when it is disabled. As a result, audio source material on A1 will not be edited into the timeline. 12 In the toolbar, click the overwrite button, or press F10. Lesson 4 Assembling a Rough Cut 106 The overwrite edit caused a few seconds of the second interview clip to be covered by the new 04_JET_LANDING_2 clip. The audio from the interview, however, remained, and can be heard even when the cut-away is visible.
Select the B-Roll smart bin, and hover your mouse pointer over 01 A380 TAXI. 3 Move your mouse back and forth over the thumbnail to preview the frames in the viewer. This is a quick way to preview clips and set in and out points without explicitly loading the clip in the viewer. 4 Skim the mouse pointer all the way to the left of the thumbnail to the start of the clip, and press I to set an in point A thin white line appears vertically on the thumbnail to indicate the presence of an in point.
8 Skim to the right on the thumbnail until the you can no longer see the Lufthansa name on the plane, and press O to mark an out point. 9 Hover your mouse pointer over 09_HAWAIIAN_LANDING. Lesson 4 Assembling a Rough Cut 108 10 Mark an in point at the start of the clip, and an out point in the middle of the clip. To place these clips into the timeline, you learned in Lesson 1 that you can drag from a bin directly to the timeline, but this method limits you to an overwrite edit.
109 Editing from a bin 12 In the media pool, click the 01_A380_TAXI clip, and then Cmd-click (macOS) or Ctrl-click (Windows) the 02_A380_TAKE OFF and the 09_HAWAIIAN_LANDING clips. The three clips are outlined in red to indicate that they are selected. 13 Drag the clips directly into the timeline viewer, and when the edit overlay appears, move the pointer over Insert and release the mouse button. All three clips are inserted into the timeline based on the order they are displayed in the bin.
Lesson 4 Assembling a Rough Cut 110 14 Choose View > Zoom > Zoom to Fit, or press Shift-Z, to see the entire timeline in the window. 15 Go to the start of the timeline, and choose Workspace > Viewer Mode > Cinema Viewer, or press Cmd-F (macOS) or Ctrl-F (Windows), to play the entire program in full screen view. Combining the technique of marking points in the bin with the edit overlay options makes drag-and-drop style editing much more flexible and viable as an advanced editing technique.
In the B-Roll smart bin, double-click the 10_MALDIVES clip, and press spacebar to view it in the source viewer. 111 Replacing a shot 2 You would like to have the plane fly in from overhead about a third of the way into the clip. Without setting any marks, the replace edit will swap one shot for another by aligning the current frame in the source viewer with the current frame in the timeline. 3 In the timeline, position the playhead over the center of 04_JET_LANDING_2 clip.
TIP Zooming is always centered on the current position of the playhead, even if the playhead is offscreen. 5 Move the playhead roughly one-third of the way into the 04_JET_LANDING_2 clip. Around the time when you first see the jet engines enter the frame. Lesson 4 Assembling a Rough Cut 112 This is the time location when you want the plane to come into the frame on the 10_MALDIVES shot. 6 In the source viewer, drag the jog bar until you first see the plane coming into frame.
8 9 In the toolbar, click the replace edit button, or press F11. 113 The replace edit figures out the in and out points you need based on the timeline clip you are replacing. Lesson Review 7 Choose View > Zoom > Zoom to Fit, or press Shift-Z, to see the entire timeline. Drag the playhead to the start of the timeline and play the program you have created so far. Whenever you have a spare moment while you are editing, it is always a smart idea to take a step back and watch the entire program.
Lesson 4 Assembling a Rough Cut 114 Answers 1 The Insert editing function will add a new clip into the timeline by splitting two existing clips to make room for the new clip. 2 The active viewer displays the clip or timeline name above the viewer, highlighted in red. 3 True. Pressing J will play in reverse. Pressing K+J will play in reverse at half speed. 4 Drag multiple clips from a bin into the timeline viewer, and use the edit overlay to select any editing function, including Insert. 5 False.
Lesson 5 Moving Clips in the Timeline Like the cut page, the timeline is much more than just a view of the edits you make. Once you start putting a project together, the timeline quickly becomes the hub of all activity. It is the place where you will move segments around, split clips in half, and delete segments altogether. Knowing how to operate in the timeline will improve your editing skills. Time This lesson takes approximately 30 minutes to complete.
116 Importing projects and relinking media Moving Clips in the Timeline When someone sends you a DaVinci Resolve 16 project from another computer or you want to move a project from one computer to another, you need to import the project file and relink the media. Lesson 5 1 For instance, if you were moving from a desktop computer to a portable laptop to edit on-the-go, you would export the project from the desktop computer and import it on the laptop.
In the media pool sidebar, select the master bin, and double-click any clip to open it in the source viewer. 117 Importing projects and relinking media 5 These clips are offline. You need to guide DaVinci Resolve to the locations of the media so it can relink the media and clips to the project. You can do so just by selecting the bins that contain the offline clips, which in this case, is every bin in the project.
Lesson 5 Moving Clips in the Timeline 118 7 In the select source folder dialog, select the Documents > R16 Intro lessons folder. Click OK. Relinking the master bin automatically relinks all of the clips in all of the bins, as well as the timelines in those bins. 8 In the Rough Cuts bin, double-click the 01 Cut Copy paste timeline to load it into the timeline viewer. Play the timeline to review the cuts that you will work with in this lesson.
Right-click any one of the selected clips, and in the menu, choose Clip Color > Navy. 119 Color coding clips 3 Now let’s color code all the B-Roll clips. 4 5 In the bin list, select the B-Roll Smart Bin. Click any clip in the media pool, and choose Edit > Select All, or press Cmd-A (macOS) or Ctrl-A (Windows), to select all the clips in that bin.
Lesson 5 Moving Clips in the Timeline 120 6 Right-click any one of the selected clips, and in the contextual menu, choose Clip Color > Brown. All the timeline clips from the Interview and the B-Roll bins are now color coded to navy blue or brown. As you make changes in the timeline, the differentiation in color will make it easier for you to locate these categories of clips.
In the timeline, select the 09_HAWAIIAN_LANDING clip. Because the audio and video tracks are part of the same clip, they are both selected in the timeline. 4 Choose Edit > Ripple Delete, or press Shift-Delete or Shift-Backspace. Both the audio and video tracks of the clip are removed, or extracted, from the timeline, but not deleted from the bin or your hard drive. In addition, the gap is closed up because all of the clips positioned after the 09_HAWAIIAN_LANDING clip shift to the left.
The linked selection is no longer highlighted, indicating that the function is disabled. With the association between video and sync audio track temporarily disabled, you can move and delete them independently. TIP You can temporarily disable the linked selection button without going to the toolbar by Option-clicking (macOS) or Alt-clicking (Windows) a clip. 4 In the timeline, select the audio track of the 01_A380_TAXI clip.
In the toolbar, drag the zoom slider to the right until the 02_if it was possible interview clip almost fills the entire timeline window. Zooming in will help you identify the sentence by giving you a more detailed view of the audio waveform. Using the waveform as a guide, you’ll mark the range you want to delete using in and out points. 4 Use your J-K-L keys to slowly play back and forth over the interview clip until you locate the start of the line, “stay at that location longer.
With the range identified, you can delete it, or more precisely, ripple delete it so you don’t leave a gap in the timeline. However, if you deleted the range right now, you’d run into a problem. To see the problem, let’s delete the range, observe the problem, and then figure out how to solve it. 8 Lesson 5 Moving Clips in the Timeline 124 Press Shift-Delete/Backspace to remove the range. The range between the in and out points is deleted on the interview, but is also deleted on the music track.
13 In the timeline track header, on the A2 track, click the auto select button to enable it so you don’t forget to do so later. Although creating a backup isn’t all that critical in this training project, when you start making dramatic changes to any rough cut, such as deleting lots of clips, it’s a good idea to duplicate your timeline so you can return to a previous version. Splitting clips In some cases, you might want to create space between sentences to improve pacing.
Lesson 5 Moving Clips in the Timeline 126 2 Drag the timeline playhead to the start of the 10_Maldives clip. 3 Press the spacebar to play the timeline, and stop playback when the audio from the interview says, “If the weather wasn’t right.” Creating some separation from the first sentence—“If it was possible to shoot it, you wanted to go shoot it”—seems like the right thing to do because that is a complete thought that you want the audience to soak in.
Position the left edge of the razor blade pointer directly over the playhead on the audio track, and click to split the clip. 127 Splitting clips 6 The clip is divided based on where the left edge of the razor blade pointer was located when you clicked. You now have a separated clip that you can reposition. TIP To split every clip under the playhead that has a track with auto select enabled, choose Timeline > Split Clip, or press Cmd-\ (backslash) in macOS, or Ctrl-\ (backslash) in Windows.
9 To move the clip one second earlier in the timeline, type -1. (minus, 1, period), and press Enter or Return. Lesson 5 Moving Clips in the Timeline 128 TIP You can nudge the selected clip one frame at a time by pressing, (comma) to move one frame left or . (period) to move one frame right. Pressing Shift-, (comma) or Shift-. (period) nudges the playhead five frames to the left or right, respectively. The audio moves one second toward the beginning of the timeline.
Position the playhead at the start of the 01_A380_TAXI clip in the timeline. 2 Press the spacebar to play to the end of the timeline DaVinci Resolve has some useful cut/copy/paste operations that work on clips you’ve selected in the timeline. They can be very helpful when moving clips from one end of the timeline to the other, such as the two A380 jets clips you have at the end of this timeline.
5 In the timeline, position the playhead at the end of the first interview clip. Moving Clips in the Timeline 6 In the timeline header, click the Audio 2 auto select button because you want to paste onto only the Video and Audio 1 tracks. 7 Choose Edit > Paste Insert, or press Cmd-Shift-V (macOS) or Ctrl-Shift-V (Windows). Lesson 5 130 The clips are inserted at the position of the playhead.
If you don’t have to move a clip over more than two or three clips, you can just swap its position. 1 In the timeline, click the 05_BAY_AREA_LIGHTS clip to select it. 2 Drag the clip to the right. Once you begin dragging, hold down Cmd-Shift (macOS) or Ctrl-Shift (Windows) until you are at the start of the 11_MOVIE_CREDITS clip. The 05_BAY_AREA_LIGHTS clip and the last interview clip swap positions.
Lesson 5 Moving Clips in the Timeline 132 Answers 1 Relinking from the master bin relinks all of the clips in every bin. 2 The link selection button is located in the edit page toolbar. 3 It allows you to split a clip into sections in the timeline. 4 It toggles between showing the entire timeline in the window and returning to the previous magnification level. 5 False. As long as the selection mode tool is the active tool in the toolbar, you can move a clip without using any keyboard modifiers.
Lesson 6 Refining a Timeline The real artistry of editing is achieved in the pacing of the clips you assembled in the timeline. Pacing is refined by shortening or extending clips by a few seconds or even just a few frames to get the perfect timing between the two. Time Customizing the Layout for Trimming 134 The edit page in DaVinci Resolve includes many of the same precision trimming tools that you learned in the Cut page plus a number of unique techniques you can use to address your creative needs.
134 Customizing the Layout for Trimming Refining a Timeline DaVinci Resolve lets you customize and save your user interface layouts to make various workflows easier. For example, the current interface layout has somewhat small dual viewers that are unsuitable for trimming. Before you dive into trimming, let’s optimize your layout for that process. Lesson 6 1 2 Open DaVinci Resolve if necessary, and then open the Age of Airplanes project.
Position the mouse pointer between the toolbar and the transport controls. 6 When the pointer changes to a resize cursor, drag down the horizontal divider while leaving a little bit of room above the video track in the timeline. You can save this layout as your Big Trim layout and use it in all of your projects. 7 8 Choose Workspace > Layout Presets > Save Layout as Preset. In the dialog, enter Big Trim as the layout name, and click OK.
4 In the toolbar, drag the zoom slider to the right until the first clip fills half of the timeline window. 5 Position the playhead between the words “so” and “in this film.” Use the audio waveform as a guide to position the playhead between the words. Lesson 6 Refining a Timeline 136 This playhead position is where you want the clip to start. You can perform the trim‑to‑playhead function using two different tools. Let’s first apply the selection mode tool that you are already using.
Position the playhead at the start of timeline, and press the spacebar to listen to the first clip. 8 Although the clip starts on the correct word, it no longer starts at the beginning of the timeline. A gap now exists between the start of the timeline and the first clip. You’ll have to undo that trim, and try another tool. 9 Choose Edit > Undo, or press Cmd-Z (macOS) or Ctrl-Z (Windows), to undo the previous trim. 10 In the toolbar, select the trim edit mode tool, or press T.
14 Position the playhead at the end of the statement, “Shoot the real world,” while ensuring that you do not include any of the following sentence. Lesson 6 Refining a Timeline 138 TIP You can press the Left and right arrow keys to nudge the playhead one frame forward or backward to position it more precisely. Instead of using the trim start function, you can use the trim end function to remove frames from the end of the clip.
139 Ripple Trimming 16 Choose Trim > Trim End, or press Shift-] (right bracket). The end of the clips on Video 1 and Audio 1 are trimmed to the playhead but the music track remains unchanged. The remaining clips in the timeline are shifted to the left by the same number of frames that you just removed. 17 In the toolbar, select the Selection mode tool, or press A. 18 Position the playhead at the start of timeline, and start playback to review your top and tail trims.
3 Position the playhead at the start of the 10_MALDIVES clip. 4 Below the timeline, drag the scroll bar to the right to center the playhead. 5 In the toolbar, drag the zoom slider to the right to increase the size of the 10 MALDIVES clip in the timeline. Lesson 6 Refining a Timeline 140 You now have two choices. You can use the Selection mode tool to add frames to the beginning of the Maldives, and thereby overwrite some of the end frames on the A380 clips that comes before it.
Position the trim edit mode cursor over the beginning, or head, of the 10_MALDIVES clip. When the cursor is on the right side of the cut, you can trim the head of the clip. This is where you want to trim. 9 Drag the head of the cut slightly to the left and hold the cursor there for a moment. As you drag, the timeline viewer splits to show you the last frame of the outgoing clip on the left and the first frame of the incoming clip on the right.
11 To review the trim point, choose Playback > Play Around/To > Play Around Current Frame, or press / (slash). Refining a Timeline 142 TIP The number of seconds played before and after any play around command is determined by the pre-roll and post-roll settings in the editing user preferences. Lesson 6 Although trimming in the edit page timeline is similar to the cut page, there is one major difference. Only V1 ripple trims in the cut page.
5 6 To review the trim point, choose Playback > Play Around/To > Play Around Current Frame, or press / (slash). To return one frame to the start of the Maldives clip, press the, (comma) key once. TIP Choosing Playback > Loop and then playing around the current frame allows you to use the . (period) and, (comma) keys on-the-fly as you loop over the transition. Whether you use the number pad or drag to trim is really your choice. Although using the number pad may be faster, it is also less visual.
TIP In macOS, press Cmd-+ (plus sign) or Cmd- - (minus sign) to incrementally zoom in and out of the timeline. In Windows, press Ctrl-+ (plus sign) or Ctrl- (minus sign) to incrementally zoom in and out of the timeline. 3 4 Click the trim edit mode button, or press T, to enter trim edit mode, if necessary. Place the pointer over the right side of the cut point, over the start of the 02_If it was possible clip. 5 Click to select the start of the 02_If it was possible clip for ripple trimming.
8 Once again, select the start of the 02_If it was possible clip for ripple trimming. With the linked selection function disabled, only the video edit point is selected. 9 To review the selected cut, choose Playback > Play Around/To > Play Around Current Frame, or press / (slash). Offsetting the video from the audio so that one is seen or heard sooner than the other is a technique used in editing to improve program flow.
That has a lot to do with the state of the auto select button that you used earlier in this lesson. Refining a Timeline Here, the auto select function was trying to keep your timeline in sync while you were trimming. To more fully understand how this works, let’s trim a bit more, this time with auto select disabled for the audio track. Lesson 6 146 11 On Audio 1, click the auto select button to disable it.
Keeping audio and video in sync is always a concern (and a chore) for editors. The linked selection function is invaluable in assisting you with that effort on a clip-by-clip basis and the auto select buttons are invaluable on a timeline basis. Although it’s necessary to disable both in some situations, it’s good practice to enable them most of the time.
5 On the video track, click the cut point to select both the end of the 02_if_it_was_possible interview clip and the start of the 05_BAY AREA_LIGHTS clip. Lesson 6 Refining a Timeline 148 TIP When a cut point is selected with the ripple or roll cursor, pressing the U key toggles between each side of the edit to select that side for trimming. With both sides of the cut selected, any adjustments will be made equally to both sides of the cut.
Position the playhead at the start of the 01_A380_TAXI clip. 3 Press the spacebar to play the timeline until you see the 10_MALDIVES clip. 149 Slipping a Clip 2 The 02_A380_TAKEOFF clip starts a bit slow and ends before the plane is out of the frame. Could you trim both ends of the cut to fix this? Sure, but you could perform the same correction more quickly using the slip tool.
7 Drag to the left to slip the clip until you see the plane leave the frame in the upper right of the viewer. Lesson 6 Refining a Timeline 150 As you drag, the same 4-up display you viewed in the Cut page is shown in the edit page. This allows you to compare all relevant outgoing and incoming frames. The upper two frames show the starting and ending frames of the clip being slipped.
Trimming with the Selection Tool 151 When you trimmed in the Cut page on video track 2 in Lesson 1, it opened up a gap or over wrote the incoming clip. To get that same behavior in the edit page, you use the standard selection tool instead of the trim edit mode. The difference being that trimming with the selection tool in the edit page will perform the same way no matter which track you trim on.
8 Hover the mouse pointer over the start of the 06_MILKYWAY clip. Refining a Timeline 9 Drag the start of the 06_MILKYWAY clip to the right until the tool tip displays +4:00. Lesson 6 152 Unlike using the ripple trim tool, when using the trim edit tool, trimming one side of an edit using the selection mode tool leaves a gap. Marking a Gap You can’t leave the gap in your program so you will have to fill it with a clip. Let’s look in the B-Roll bin for a clip to fill this gap.
In the B-Roll bin, double-click the 07_Kenya clip to load it into the viewer, and press the spacebar to play it. 153 Trimming with the Selection Tool 2 The 07_KENYA clip is the only clip in the bin that you haven’t used, so it is a good candidate for filling the gap. 3 In the viewer, drag the jog bar back until the plane’s reflection in the water points straight up. You’ll mark your In point here.
4 Press I to mark an in point on the source clip. The gap is the range in the timeline you are trying to fill, so you needn’t add an out point on the source clip; but you will need to mark in and out points in the timeline based on the duration of the gap. 5 Drag the timeline playhead into the center of the gap.
In the timeline header, disable the auto select buttons for Audio 2 leaving Video 1 Audio 1 with auto select buttons enabled. 8 Choose Mark > Mark Clip, or press X. 155 Lesson Review 7 TIP When multiple video tracks have Auto Select enabled, the lowest numbered video track is the target track. With auto select enabled on Video 1, the Mark Clip command correctly used the gap duration to set the in and out points. All that is left to do is make the edit.
Lesson 6 Refining a Timeline 156 Answers 1 In the timeline header, disable the track’s auto select button. 2 You can save a layout preset in the Workspace menu. 3 The left side of the two-up display shows the last frame of the outgoing clip, whereas the right side shows the first frame of the incoming clip. 4 A roll trim will adjust the durations of both of the clips that share the trim point. A ripple trim will shorten or lengthen the selected side of the trim. 5 Yes.
Lesson 7 Applying Transitions and Effects Once you have the basic structure of a scene, you can begin to open up a whole new avenue of creativity by adding graphics and effects. It doesn’t matter what type of program you are creating; these additions can be as simple as a cross-fade or as fantastic as a morphing transition. Many effects are subtle, even hidden, while others are meant to be attention grabbers.
158 Fading Clips In and Out Applying Transitions and Effects Many programs start with a fade transition (fade-in) and end with one (fade-out). When you fade, you are mixing two elements. One element is a video clip and the other is a completely black frame, or in DaVinci Resolve, an empty part of the timeline. Open the Age of Airplanes project, if necessary. In the Rough Cuts bin, double-click the 03 Transitions and FX rough cut.
Drag the Audio Track Height slider all the way to the right. 6 Drag the Video Track Height slider about mid-way, and click the Timeline View Options button again to hide the options. Position the playhead at the start of the timeline. To begin this trailer, you’ll add a very quick fade-in. In the timeline, place the pointer over the 01_shoot the real world clip.
Lesson 7 Applying Transitions and Effects 160 11 Play the start of the timeline to watch the fade. TIP You can drag the playhead from the start of a clip to where you want the fade-in to end, and then in the Trim menu, choose Fade In to playhead. Adjusting fade handles is a fast and easily accessed method for placing and refining fades-in and -out. Adding Cross Dissolves You can add the same transitions you applied in the Cut page. The Effects library includes all the same options.
As if you were going to perform a rolling trim, locate the mouse pointer directly over the edit between 08_SOUTH_POLE_DC3 and 07_KENYA. 5 When the pointer changes to a rolling trim cursor, click the cut to select it. The green rolling trim handles appear on both sides of the edit point. 6 Choose Timeline > Add Transition, or press Cmd-T (macOS) or Ctrl-T (Windows). A dissolve with a one-second duration is added to the edit point.
Shortening and Lengthening Transitions Changing the duration of a transition can be done just like the Cut page, by dragging the transition directly in the timeline. 1 Place the mouse pointer over the right edge of the dissolve between 08_SOUTH_ POLE_DC3 and 07_KENYA. 2 Drag the right edge in toward the edit until the tool tip reads -00:06. Lesson 7 Applying Transitions and Effects 162 As you drag, the transition is shortened by six frames on both sides of the edit for a total decrease of 12 frames.
Customizing Transitions 163 The Inspector displays the transition parameters. The upper half of the Inspector has parameters that are common to all transitions. These include Duration, Alignment, and Transition Style. The lower half has parameters specific to the current transition. 2 In the Alignment drop down menu, choose Start On Edit. Previously, half of the dissolve’s duration started before the edit point; now it begins at the edit point. 3 In the Cross Dissolve Style menu, choose Film.
Lesson 7 Applying Transitions and Effects 164 4 In the Ease menu, choose In & Out to create a smoother transition. 5 Play the modified Film Dissolve to view your changes. Now that you have customized a transition, you’ll learn how to save it for repeated use. Saving Custom Presets After customizing a transition, you can save that transition and its customizations into the Effects Library for use in future projects. 1 2 In the timeline, right-click the customized Cross Dissolve transition.
All custom presets are located at the bottom of the effects library in the User section. The icons are highlighted in yellow to make them easier to identify. 6 Scroll to the bottom of the Effects Library to locate your saved preset. If your saved preset is something you plan on using as a signature transition throughout a program, you may want to save it as the standard transition.
Lesson 7 Applying Transitions and Effects 166 2 From the Effects Library, drag the Blur Dissolve transition over the existing cross dissolve in the timeline. 3 Release the mouse button to replace the cross dissolve with the blur dissolve. The blur dissolve combines a cross dissolve with a horizontal or vertical blur. 4 Play the timeline to view the blur dissolve. The Inspector has specific controls for each wipe or transition effect you apply.
In the sidebar category list, select OpenFX, and in the search field, type Tilt. 5 Drag the Tilt-Shift Blur filter onto the 05_BAY AREA LIGHTS clip in the timeline. The Tilt-Shift Blur filter is added; but if you are using the free version of DaVinci Resolve, a dialog box indicates that this effect is available only in the Studio version. However, you can still try it out without upgrading, although the results will include a watermark. 6 7 Click Not Yet to continue.
Lesson 7 Applying Transitions and Effects 168 8 At the top of the Inspector, click the OpenFX tab. TIP To reset a single parameter or the entire effect, click the circular Reset button to the right of the Inspector. You can quickly compare the filtered shot to the original by disabling the effect in the Inspector. 9 At the top of the Inspector, click the Disable button to the left of the filter effect’s name. Click it again to enable the effect.
Reframing Shots 169 Most of the time, you’re going to be editing high-definition (HD) or maybe ultra highdefinition (UHD) projects that use a 16×9 aspect ratio. But sometimes you’ll need (or want) to edit and view your program using a different aspect ratio. You can do so using the output blanking menu. Reframing Shots 1 Choose Timeline > Output Blanking > 2.39. The aspect ratio of 2.39:1, which is used for 35mm theatrical widescreen, is applied in the viewer.
4 In the Y Position numeric field, drag to the left until the value shows -50.00. This is better positioning for the subject. You’ll have to copy this to the remaining interview shots. 5 6 Choose Edit > Copy, or press Cmd-C (macOS) or Ctrl-C (Windows). From the timeline menu choose Select clips with Clip Color > Navy. This will select all the interview clips in the timeline since previously in lesson 4, we color coded those clips navy.
TIP Another way to copy and paste effects is to use adjustment clips from the Effects Library. Place an adjustment clip above clips on a new track on the timeline, add an effect to the adjustment clip, and then re-use it over any other clips you want.
4 To scale the clip, drag a handle in any corner of the bounding box away from the center until the zoom value shows 1.200. Lesson 7 Applying Transitions and Effects 172 By default, the zoom X and Y values are linked together so the clip is resized equally in X and Y, thereby keeping its normal aspect ratio. TIP In the magnification menu (in the upper-left of the viewer) you can change how the frame is sized in the viewer.
3 Position the playhead about one-third of the way into the 05 BAY AREA LIGHTS clip. 173 4 In the Inspector, click the zoom keyframe button to the right of the Zoom X and Y numeric fields. Animating a parameter requires that you set at least two values for it on separate frames. The first keyframe that signifies the start of the animation is now set. You’ll set the second value where you want the image to stop scaling.
Lesson 7 Applying Transitions and Effects 174 9 Right click over the red diamond keyframe icon and choose ease out. This will smooth the motion as the animation starts. 10 Click the go to next keyframe button to jump to the last keyframe. 11 Right click over the red diamond keyframe icon and choose ease in. This will smooth the motion as the animation ends. Now, we can adjust timing of the animation as well. 12 Zoom into the timeline to see the 05 BAY AREA LIGHTS clip clearly.
Choose Playback > Render Cache> Smart. The smart cache operates on timeline-specific effects such as transitions, opacity adjustments, and composite mode superimpositions. Regions of the timeline that require caching have a red bar over them, whereas regions that are already cached have a blue bar over them. All of this is easy enough, but you have additional settings to customize the caching operation. 2 Choose File > Project settings > Master settings.
TIP To delete all of the rendered cache files for the current project, choose Playback > Delete Render Cache > All. Lesson 7 Applying Transitions and Effects 176 Now that your smart caching is set, DaVinci Resolve will automatically render everything necessary to optimize playback for your effects. When you reopen a project, cached clips are still cached; but when you change any cached effect, it will need to be re-cached.
In the Speed numeric field, enter 50, and click Change to close the dialog. 177 Creating a Constant Speed Change 4 Setting this value to 50% means that the clip will play at half the timeline frame rate — in this case, 12 frames per second. To indicate that the clip’s playback speed has been changed, a small speed change icon is displayed next to the clip’s name in the timeline. 5 Play the clip to see the speed change results.
2 3 In the toolbar, select the trim tool, or press T. Move the pointer to the right edge of the Speed Change bar. The pointer turns into a double-arrow cursor. 4 Lesson 7 Applying Transitions and Effects 178 Drag the edge of the Speed Change bar to the right to lengthen the clip until the speed display at the bottom of the clip reads 40%. Dragging the Speed Change bar to the left extends the duration of the clip by slowing down its playback speed.
When the retime controls are displayed, you have the option of using a drop down menu at the bottom of the clip to change the speed instead of trimming it using the Speed Change bar. 9 At the bottom of the 06_MILKYWAY clip, click the retime drop down menu. This menu includes options for common slow and fast speeds, as well as the ability to set speed points for variable retiming. Still other options allow you to reset or reverse the playback. 10 In the menu, choose Reverse Segment.
Applying Transitions and Effects 180 You have three options for processing clip retiming: Nearest, Frame Blend, and Optical Flow. Lesson 7 Nearest is the fastest processing option but delivers the lowest-quality results. This simple operation duplicates frames to create slow motion which often causes stepping artifacts even in clips that have just a moderate amount of movement. Nearest is the default option set on the Master settings of the project settings.
Lesson Review 181 1 Why would you be unable to drag a transition to extend its duration in the Edit page timeline? 2 How do you save a custom transition preset? 3 True or false? You set up and enable background caching in the Inspector.
Lesson 7 Applying Transitions and Effects 182 Answers 1 If no media handles are available on either side of the transition, you will not be able to drag the transition to extend its duration. 2 To save a custom transition preset, right-click the transition on the timeline, and choose Create Transition Preset. 3 False. Background caching is set up and enabled in the Project settings. 4 Two keyframes are needed at two different clip locations and of two different values to create an animation.
183 An Introduction to Audio Post and Sound Design Chances are you’ve heard the adages “Seeing is believing” and “A picture is worth a thousand words.” However, when it comes to motion pictures, both the visuals and soundtrack are equally important. In fact, a great soundtrack sells the onscreen illusion, manipulates emotions, transports the audience into the scene and captivates their imagination.
184 What is Audio Post Production? Let’s start with a few basic terms. Audio post production refers to the process of making a soundtrack for moving images. Notice the use of “moving images,” which encompasses all projects great and small from movie theaters to streaming videos and everything in-between. A soundtrack is simply the audio that accompanies a finished project. How your audience experiences the finished project is greatly influenced by the soundtrack.
post begins, the editor can use a duplicate timeline to make any new changes. Then the audio editor can easily merge the changes between timelines with DaVinci Resolve’s powerful timeline comparison tool. DaVinci Resolve has the audio tools needed for the highest quality audio post production, and is ideal for small projects yet powerful enough for big Hollywood studios and broadcast productions to use as well.
186 After the dialogue is cleaned up, the volume levels are balanced to be consistent on each dialogue track. If dialogue can’t be used because it is damaged, noisy, or unclear, it must be replaced with audio from other takes or re-recorded. The process of re-recording production dialogue is called automatic dialogue replacement (ADR) or looping. Dialogue editing can be time consuming and laborious.
Music Editing Music editing involves placing different music elements into the soundtrack to enhance the mood or story. All soundtrack music falls into one of two categories: music occurring within the scene that the characters can hear, so-called source or diegetic music; and non-diegetic music that is added in post for the benefit of the audience, the background score. Diegetic music needs special attention to make sure that the volume levels, placement, effects and presence fit the context of the scene.
188 The Fairlight page mixer includes the four most common dynamics controls in one easy-touse panel. The compressor is used to narrow the dynamic range by lowering the loudest peaks and bringing them closer to the lowest peaks. The expander, in contrast, expands the dynamic range to increase the difference between the loudest and quietest peaks.
Lesson 8 Working with Audio on the Edit Page Depending on the size of your project, you may be responsible for the basic audio tracks or for the entire sound design. Even if you plan to hand off your final mix to an audio editor, you still need to give your client a sense of what that final audio mix may sound like. Time On the Edit page, DaVinci Resolve 16 includes audio editing and mixing tools to help you mix your soundtrack.
190 Working with Markers Working with Audio on the Edit Page You will create your mix using a similar version of the current timeline. Because that timeline already has narration and music in place, you’ll begin by identifying areas that could benefit from sound effects. You can use markers to annotate clips in the source, identify a specific time in the timeline, or label a range of time. Such markers are often used as reminders for a task that you want to do later.
On the clip, double-click the blue marker; or select the marker, and press Shift-M to open the marker dialog. 191 Working with Markers 6 You can change the color of markers to further organize your work. For instance, you could add green markers where graphics were needed and purple markers where effects were needed. You could also add notes to markers that are more descriptive of your changes. 7 Click the red color swatch, and in the Name field, type SFX. In the Notes field, type Add Roaring Take Off.
Lesson 8 Working with Audio on the Edit Page 192 8 In the timeline, position the playhead in the middle of the 10_MALDIVES clip and select it. For this clip, you’ll use the fastest method, a keyboard shortcut. 9 Press the M key twice. The first M key press adds the marker; the second press opens the dialog. 10 In the dialog Name field, type SFX; in the Notes field, type Add Overhead Sea Plane, and make the marker red. Click Done.
TIP Ripple trimming a clip in the timeline will move a marker in the Timeline Ruler to the same duration as the trim. All your red color markers are added into the program. Marking a Range of Frames Markers are not limited to identifying a single frame on a clip or in the time ruler. You can also use them to mark a range of frames. Let’s mark a clip range where you want to add a comment about a visual correction you want made to a clip.
4 Hold the Option-drag (macOS) or Alt-drag (Windows) the marker to the other end of the clip. The marker expands to cover the length of the clip. Now you can add a note and even draw on the frames. 5 6 Press Shift-M to open the Markers dialog. In the name field, enter VFX; and in the notes field, type Move the plane down in the frame. Click Done to close the dialog.
TIP In the timeline viewer drop down menu, choosing Annotations will automatically add a marker when one doesn’t exist at the current position. Enabling the on-screen controls for annotations adds an annotation toolbar in the upper left corner of the viewer with three options: The draw tool, arrow tool and color drop down. 8 Click the arrow icon; then, starting at the plane’s cockpit, drag down to the wheels of the plane. 9 In the color drop down menu, choose yellow.
Lesson 8 Working with Audio on the Edit Page 196 10 In the timeline viewer drop down menu, click the annotation tool to hide the annotation toolbar. You’ll return your attention to the red markers as you continue to work on audio. You’ll need to locate sound effects that match your marker notes. Adding markers in the Source Viewer You’ll also find markers invaluable when applied to source clips. Markers on a source clip can add notes as in the timeline.
Play the first five seconds of the Sound FX clip. 197 Annotating on Clips 2 Fortunately, the first sound effect in this clip is a prop plane buzzing. To add a marker to the source clip in the viewer, you can use the same keyboard shortcut. 3 Position the source viewer’s jog bar over the peak of the sound effect (the highest part of the waveform).
4 Press the M key. A marker is added to the source clip under the source viewer’s jog bar. You also can add notes to source clip markers. 5 Press M again to open the dialog, and in the Name field, type Plane Overhead. Click Done. Lesson 8 Working with Audio on the Edit Page 198 Your first sound effect is marked and identified. The marker will help you locate this effect later when you want to begin editing.
Annotating on Clips 199 The initial sound of the prop plane engine would not fit the visual of the South Pole plane. You’ll need to play a little farther into the sound effect and place a marker when the engine really gets going. 2 3 4 Play the clip to find a location where the engine sound is revving loudly. Press M to add a marker in the source viewer. Press M a second time to open the dialog. In the Name field, type Loud Prop Plane.
6 Lesson 8 Working with Audio on the Edit Page 200 Type 300 to create a duration of three seconds, press Enter on the keyboard and click Done. TIP Instead of entering a duration for the marker range, you could Option-drag (macOS) or Alt-drag (Windows) the marker to extend the range. This time you’ll add in and out points around the area you are interested in and then convert them to markers. This will be a roaring jet taking off for the A380 Takeoff clip.
TIP You can also convert duration markers to in and out points in the same contextual menu. The Duration marker is added to identify the same frames as the in and out points. You can use the same pop-up menu to open the dialog. 11 Right-click in the marker range, and in the pop-up menu, choose Modify Marker. The dialog opens. 12 In the Name field, type Roaring Jet Take Off and click Done. You’ve identified sound effects that fill the requirements of the markers in the timeline.
2 Drag up on the horizontal divider that separates the audio and video tracks until the video track is at the top of the timeline. As you did in the previous lesson, you can change the appearance of the tracks in the Timeline View Options menu. 3 In the toolbar, click the Timeline View Options button to open the drop down menu. Lesson 8 Working with Audio on the Edit Page 202 Here you will change the height of the video and audio tracks to suit your upcoming tasks.
In the Timeline View Options, click the audio waveform button to display audio waveforms in the timeline tracks. 9 Click the Timeline View Options button to hide the drop down menu. Now your timeline is better configured for audio editing and mixing. You’ll later add other interface elements to help control and monitor the audio; but for now, displaying larger waveforms in the timeline will help you edit in the sound effects.
3 Drag down the A1 destination control to Audio 3 to align the A1 track in the source viewer with the Audio 3 track in the timeline. Now that the tracks are patched, you can edit your first sound effect into the timeline. Let’s locate that first sound effect. 4 In the source viewer, navigate to the first marker in the clip by choosing playback > Previous Marker three times, or pressing Shift-up arrow three times.
Position the playhead on the frame where the nose of the plane and the floats have just entered the frame. 205 Adding and Patching Tracks 7 TIP If the playhead is difficult to move precisely, press the N key, or click the snapping button in the toolbar, to disable snapping. The playhead will no longer snap to the marker. Unlike using a replace edit to replace a clip on the same track, you must set in and out points when replacing a clip into an empty track as you are doing here in Audio 3.
Color Coding Tracks You can organize your tracks even further by adding another layer of color organization. You already color coded the video clips, but you can also color code tracks in the timeline. To make it easier to parse your timeline, let’s color code the music track with orange and the sound effects track with green. 1 2 Right-click the Audio 2 timeline header. In the pop-up menu, choose Change Track Color > Orange.
In a short timeline such as the one you have here, navigating to each marker isn’t much of a challenge. On more involved projects, however, you’ll need a quick way to locate one specific marker among dozens of other markers. The Edit Index is a list view of all the editing events (clips and markers) in the current timeline. 1 At the top of the DaVinci Resolve window, click the Edit Index button. The Edit Index opens below the Media pool, showing all of the editing events and columns of metadata.
Lesson 8 Working with Audio on the Edit Page 208 Now you can identify each marker by its color, and the note you entered. 6 Click the red marker that contains the note, “Add Roaring Take Off.” The timeline jumps to the marker on the 02_A380_Takeoff clip. This is the next clip to which you’ll add sound effects. Instead of trying to find the marker in the Source viewer, DaVinci Resolve has an easier way that you’ll use next.
Markers added to source clips can be viewed in the list view of a bin. If the markers have a duration, you can use them like multiple in and out points and edit them directly into the timeline. 1 Above the Media pool, click the list view button. The sound effects clip has a disclosure arrow to the left of its name. Clicking this disclosure arrow will display the markers you added to the clip. 2 Click the disclosure arrow next to the Sound FX clip.
TIP Double-clicking the marker in the bin’s list view will open the clip into the source viewer with the jog bar placed at the marker. 4 In the Edit Index, click the SFX - Add Loud Prop Plane entry to relocate the timeline playhead to that marker position. 5 From the Audio bin, drag the Loud Prop Plane marker to the Audio 3 track so it aligns with the start of the 08_SOUTH_POLE_DC3 clip. 6 Move the playhead to the start of the timeline, and play over your newly added sound effects.
In the timeline, select the 02_A380_TAKEOFF clip. In Audio 3, Cmd-click (macOS) or Ctrl-click (Windows) the sound effect clip directly under 02_A380_TAKEOFF. These two clips should stay together if you later want to move the A380 clip or even delete it. To do so, you need to link them together. 3 Right-click the selected SOUND FX clip, and in the pop-up menu, choose Link Clips. A small link icon appears in the timeline before the clip name.
Working with Audio on the Edit Page Monitoring, Soloing, and Muting Audio When you start to edit your audio, the first thing you need to do is sit back and listen. Just play the tracks to hear them in the context of the picture. Lesson 8 212 2 3 Press the Home key to move the playhead back to the start of the timeline. On Audio 1, click the solo button to temporarily silence the other audio tracks. 4 Press the spacebar to play the timeline.
Reading Meters and Setting Targets 213 Before you make any clip volume adjustments, it is a good idea to know how to read an RMS (root mean square) peak meter such as the one used in the mixer. The meters in the mixer use a decibel (dB) scale to measure the volume of your audio clips. These meters range from a maximum of 0 dB down to -50 dB. Any audio levels above 0 dB are distorted, so you must always keep audio levels below 0 dB.
Lesson 8 Working with Audio on the Edit Page 214 Normalizing Audio With all video and audio edited into your timeline, you’re ready to set the relative audio levels for your project. You’ll start by examining the tracks that contain the primary audio – in this case, the interview clips on Audio 1 – and setting those clips to their maximum volume levels. 1 2 3 4 Position the playhead at the start of the timeline. Ensure that only the audio 1 track is solo enabled.
Choose Independent. 8 Click Normalize, and play over the audio on track 1 to hear what should now be a consistent audio level. As the audio plays, watch the meters in the mixer. The average levels should be bouncing around 012 dBFS. The loudest peak on the track should never go above the target -10 dBFS. Setting Levels in the Inspector As you played over the track, you may have noticed that the next to last clip sounded considerably lower than the others.
3 Drag the Volume slider to the right until it reaches about 10. TIP To increase or decrease the volume of a selected clip, press Cmd-Option-+ (plus sign) and Cmd-Option- - (minus sign) in macOS, or Ctrl-Alt-+ (plus sign) and Ctrl-Alt- - (minus sign) in Windows. 4 Lesson 8 Working with Audio on the Edit Page 216 Play through the clip and watch the meters to ensure that they fall somewhere between -10 and -15 dB.
When your mouse pointer changes to an up and down arrow pointer, drag the volume curve down until the tool tip reads roughly -10 dB. You have now lowered the volume by 10 dB. TIP The tool tip displays the offset relative to the current level. It is not showing the exact dB level that the audio will reach on the meters. The term dB Full Scale or dBFS expresses exact meter readings, but a simple dB value expresses an offset level. All the sound effects probably sounded a bit loud on first playthrough.
Changing a Level within a Clip Working with Audio on the Edit Page The music track is the final track that you’ll integrate into your mix. Level setting here is slightly more involved than with the other tracks because you really want to set two different levels within this one music clip. The music should be at a quiet level as it plays under the interview portion of the timeline, and then gradually increase in volume when the interview stops.
6 7 8 Click in an empty gray area of the timeline to ensure that no clips are selected. Type -12, and press Enter/Return to move the playhead back half a second. Option-click (macOS) or Alt-click (Windows) the level curve under the playhead position to add a keyframe. You’ve now set the duration that the gradual volume change, or ramp, will occur. Changing the vertical position of the second keyframe will cause a ramp up in volume. 9 Position the pointer over the second keyframe on the music clip.
Adding Audio Fades Most audio fades are added as a corrective process to soften the incoming or outgoing audio clip. Subtle fades are often applied to narration and dialogue when plosives, particularly those that start with P and B, are too harsh to leave unchanged. You’ll also find that you’ll use the obvious fade-in and fade-out on music. 1 Play over the start of the timeline until the music begins. No matter how low you set this music, it always comes in abruptly.
Lesson Review 221 1 What must you select to add a marker to the timeline ruler? 2 Where do you find a list of all the markers on the timeline? 3 How do you add a keyframe to an audio clip’s volume line in the timeline? 4 What can you do in the Normalize Audio dialog? Lesson Review 5 True or false? When reading an RMS/Peak meter in the Edit page, audio that is around -5 dbFS is very quiet.
Lesson 8 Working with Audio on the Edit Page 222 Answers 1 Nothing can be selected in the timeline when you want to add a marker to the timeline ruler. 2 The Edit index can display a list of some or all of the timeline markers. 3 Option-click (macOS) or Alt-click (Windows) the volume line. 4 In the Normalize Audio dialog, you can enter a dbFS value, and thereby set the loudest peak of a selected clip or group of clips to that value. 5 False.
Lesson 9 Mixing Sound in Fairlight: Exploring the Interface Why do professional productions spend so much time, talent, and (yes) money to create perfect soundtracks? The answer is that high-quality sound is essential to visual storytelling. It is often the difference between an amateur and a professional production. Time The Fairlight page in DaVinci Resolve 16 is designed specifically for realizing cinematic-quality sound in your productions.
Lesson 9 Mixing Sound in Fairlight: Exploring the Interface 224 Exploring the Interface Let’s talk about workflow. You are almost finished with your edit, and your project is now more or less complete. At some point, you have to move on to audio finishing. Traditionally, all audio post-production was completed separately from editing using standalone audio software. As a result, media conversions and duplication of work were necessary just to share the edited timeline with an audio-post application.
4 In the upper-right corner of the interface toolbar, click the Meters button to open the Monitoring panel. As the name suggests, the monitoring panel displays all of the audio and video contents of the current timeline. There is also an expandable mixer that you can use for balancing track levels. 5 6 In the interface toolbar, click the Mixer button to show the mixer. Drag the left edge of the Mixer toward the left to expand the mixer until it shows the channel strips for all five tracks.
At a glance, you can see that the Fairlight Mixer is loaded with controls, especially at the top where you’ll find an Effects slot, EQ, Dynamics, and Pan controls. You’ll work more with the mixer later in the lesson. For now, let’s play the project. Luckily, many of the playback techniques you learned when using the Edit page will also apply here. Lesson 9 Mixing Sound in Fairlight: Exploring the Interface 226 7 8 9 10 11 Drag the playhead to the start of the timeline, or press the Home key.
Previewing Video In a traditional audio-post workflow, an audio editor will need a separate reference video to use as a guide when building the soundtrack. In Resolve, you do not need a reference video because the Fairlight page includes a handy viewer that shows the timeline’s video. You can also see the edited clip segments on a video track in the timeline. 1 Press the spacebar, and watch the meters and viewer during playback. The meters display all your track and output levels.
Renaming and Color Coding Tracks Track organization becomes extremely important as you expand the number of audio tracks and need to navigate through them quickly. Instead of trying to remember the track number that you used for different types of tracks, you can rename tracks to describe their contents. For this project, you’ll use capital letters to name individual tracks.
Right-click the SFX 01 track header, and choose Change Track Color > Lime. 7 8 Do the same for SFX 02. On the DRUM HITS track, right-click the header, and choose Change Track Color > Yellow. Do the same for MUSIC. 229 Viewing a Spotting List 6 9 Now, the similar sound-element tracks are color coded to match, thereby making it easier to parse a large timeline.
Lesson 9 Mixing Sound in Fairlight: Exploring the Interface 230 1 In the upper-left of the Interface toolbar, click the Index button. The Index is divided into two tabs. The first tab lists all the tracks in the current timeline. The second tab shows the markers added to the timeline. 2 In the Index, click the Markers tab. The Markers index shows a thumbnail and timecode location for each timeline marker. It also displays any text typed into the name and notes fields in a list view.
231 Double-click the first marker in the list. TIP In the Fairlight page, press Shift-up and down arrow keys to move the playhead from marker to marker just as you would in the Edit page. The playhead jumps to the marker position in the timeline. The note attached to this marker asks why the Sync narration is stereo. Although it isn’t unusual to find editors cutting dialogue in stereo, spoken word tracks are often recorded and edited in mono.
3 Right-click the A1 SYNC track header, and choose Change Track Type To > Mono. After you convert the track type, three key indicators let you know the track was changed. The label to the right of the track name now reads 1.0 to indicate a mono track. The meter to the right of the track header shows a single volume meter instead of two meters. Lastly, the clips on the track show only one channel.
In the Index, double-click the second marker. The playhead jumps to the end of the first timeline clip on the SYNC track. The marker note in the Index claims the narration cuts off too early. 2 In the toolbar, drag the horizontal slider to zoom in to the narration clip until it nearly fills the timeline window. Let’s first play over the clip to hear the narration. 3 In the toolbar, click the range selection tool, or press R, and click the clip on the A1, SYNC track.
Because you modified only the ending, let’s not listen to the entire clip. Just audition the range near the end. TIP You can split a clip by choosing Timeline > Razor, using the scissors icon in the toolbar, or pressing Cmd-B (macOS) or Ctrl-B (Windows). 8 Position the range selection cursor just below the clip and to the right. 9 Drag a selection rectangle around the end of the clip until you run out of room near the timeline header.
Once your narration or spoken word tracks are edited, you can turn your attention to editing sound effects and music. Sometimes you’ll use music which is completely mixed for the entire project, and at other times you’ll receive music split into individual music cues. Still other times you’ll have mixed music on which you want to add transients or short sound hits that adds an audible exclamation point. 1 Double-click the third marker in the index, “Copy drum hit”.
8 As you did in Lesson 3, use the J, K, and L keys to position the playhead directly over the start of the drum sound waveform. 9 Un-solo A4 DRUM HITS. 10 Select the clip in the A4, DRUM HITS tracks, and press Cmd-C (macOS) or Ctrl-C (Windows). 11 Drag the playhead down toward the end of the timeline. Lesson 9 Mixing Sound in Fairlight: Exploring the Interface 236 As you move the playhead, the copy of the clip is seen as a translucent clip that follows the playhead.
If you find that the alignment is not perfect, just as in the Edit page, you can press the, (comma) and . (period) keys to nudge the clip a few frames forward or backward. Recording Audio in a Timeline You can record your own voiceover in DaVinci Resolve right in the Fairlight page timeline. All you need to do is set up a microphone, patch the microphone input to a track, arm the track, and start recording. In this exercise, you’ll record a temporary ending voiceover tag for this trailer.
Lesson 9 Mixing Sound in Fairlight: Exploring the Interface 238 3 4 5 In DaVinci Resolve, open the Age of Airplanes project. Choose File > Project settings. Click the Capture and Playback settings. 6 In the “Save clips to” field, click the browser button, and choose a location to store your newly recorded audio files. Click Save to close the Project settings window. Hide the Monitoring panel (Meters), and show the Mixer.
4 In the track header, double-click the Audio 2 name, and type VO because this will be your voiceover track. In the upper-right corner of the window, click the Mixer button to open the mixer. Input settings appear at the top of each channel strip just below the track number assignment. Tracks without an assigned input display No Input. 5 At the top of the A2 channel strip, in the Input pop-up menu, choose Input.
NOTE Before recording, it’s a good idea to know your lines. Here is the ending tag line for the trailer: “In the age of airplanes, we’ve become explorers once again.” Lesson 9 Mixing Sound in Fairlight: Exploring the Interface 240 2 Practice your line once or twice prior to recording. When recording, you do not want any of the other tracks to be audible, or they also will be recorded. 3 4 Solo track A2 VO. In the transport controls. click the record button.
Modifying Clip Attributes 241 All your audio clips are visible in the bin. You can preview them to find the right clip and edit it into the project. 3 Click the HF VO clip to load it in the Media pool preview player at the top of the panel. Without playing the clip, the appearance of the two waveforms should tell you that this is a stereo clip. You should also see that the upper channel (channel 1) waveforms peak is lower which indicates it is a quieter channel.
The left channel, channel 1, does not sound as clear as the right channel, channel 2. It is often the case that dialogue or interviews are recorded with two microphones. A boom mic is typically the primary and clearest mic while a lavalier or lapel mic is useful primarily as a backup. You now need to ensure that channel 2 is used when you edit your professional VO clip onto your mono track. 4 In the bin, right-click the HF VO clip, and choose Clip attributes.
243 Using Fairlight FX 10 Drag the HF VO clip from the Media pool, and place it so the start of the clip lines up with the playhead position in the timeline. 11 Position the playhead just before the new VO clip, and play the timeline to hear the mix of all the tracks. Now that you know how to set up, remap, and edit your dialogue tracks, you’re ready to address the sound quality of your project.
Lesson 9 Mixing Sound in Fairlight: Exploring the Interface 244 3 Press Option-/ (slash) in macOS or Alt-/ (slash) in Windows to play from the in to out points. In the VO, you can hear a low-pitched background buzz. This is not an uncommon problem and can happen when an electrical signal seeps into your audio cables. Typically, it is due to poor electrical grounding or poor audio cable shielding.
In the FairlightFX category, drag the De-Hummer plug-in onto the VO clip in the timeline. 245 Using Fairlight FX 5 When you apply the plug-in, the De-Hummer dialog opens with controls to specify the type of hum you have. TIP If the Inspector is open, it will also show controls for the De-Hummer. There you can click the Trash can icon to remove the effect.
6 In the Frequency section, click the 60 Hz button to set the De-Hummer to notch out the 60 Hz frequency. The graph in the De-Hummer displays frequencies along the bottom. Low frequencies are to the left and higher frequencies are to the right. The dips in the graph indicate the narrow bands of frequencies that are being cut out or diminished in the clip.
The De-Hummer is one of the most frequently used plug-ins, even for picture editors because it addresses a very common problem with very little effort. Applying Noise Reduction to an Entire Track In the previous exercise you applied a repair plug-in to an individual clip. You can also apply plug-ins to an entire track, either from the effects inserts at the top of the mixer or by dragging the effect from the Effects Library to the track header in the timeline.
6 Click the learn button and play over the 10 seconds of room tone. then stop playback. Lesson 9 Mixing Sound in Fairlight: Exploring the Interface 248 Clicking the learn button and playing over the noise you wish to remove, subtracts that same noise from the other clips on the track. That’s the benefit of applying the plugins to a track and editing all clips from one source onto its own track. 7 Move the playhead to the start of the timeline and play to hear the corrected interview clips.
Audio balance is the key to the entire sound-mixing process. When you achieve balance in your mix, you have successfully done your job. In the previous lesson you performed volume adjustments at the clip level; but to achieve overall balance, you must now adjust entire tracks relative to one another. 1 2 In the upper-left corner of the Interface toolbar, click the Effects Library button to close the Effects Library and open more room for the timeline.
Lesson 9 Mixing Sound in Fairlight: Exploring the Interface 250 3 Press Shift-Z to see the entire timeline. Position the playhead at the start of the timeline, and press the spacebar to play the entire program. Overall, the sync sound interview clips seem too low. No problem. You can the adjust the volume level for the entire track using the corresponding SYNC fader in the Mixer. 4 Play the timeline again, and drag up the SYNC fader until the interview voice plays a more clearly audible level.
Lesson Review 251 1 On the Fairlight page, which panel shows a viewer for the video? 2 How do you identify the track you want to record on in the Fairlight page timeline? 3 Within a bin, how do you change a stereo clip to mono? 4 True or false? A De-Hummer can remove only 50 and 60 Hz noises from stereo clips. Lesson Review 5 True or false? You can apply Fairlight FX to a clip or an entire track.
Lesson 9 Mixing Sound in Fairlight: Exploring the Interface 252 Answers 1 On the Fairlight page, the Meters panel (located in the user interface toolbar) shows a viewer for the timeline’s video. 2 In the Fairlight page timeline, you select the track you want to record on by clicking the Arm Recording button (R) in the timeline track header. 3 You can change a stereo clip to mono from a bin by right-clicking the clip and choosing Clip attributes. 4 False.
253 An Introduction to Visual Effects Compositing When mutants attack or aliens land spaceships on Earth, filmmakers turn to visual effects artists to make those shots reality. You can use visual effects to create images that cannot be realized with live action production. Anything that’s too difficult, too dangerous, or even too expensive to capture with a camera, you can create with visual effects compositing.
254 What is Visual Effects Compositing? Compositing is the process of combining two or more images to make a unique, new image. But it’s not just about combining images. You can composite many different elements such as video clips, animations, text, mattes, particles, and graphics. Sometimes these elements are called layers because they are layered on top of each other to produce the new image. Many tasks fall under the umbrella of visual effects.
255 Animals and Kids The unpredictable nature of working with animals and children can slow each shooting day to a crawl. Being able to divide and conquer a shot by splitting it up and shooting animals separately from main action can ensure that you get the shot completed without schedule overruns. Through seamless compositing, you can combine each section of a frame to create a realistic split-screen composite that looks like one take.
256 With the 3D controls in Fusion, you also can simulate the light direction, atmospheric haze, and realistic parallax camera movement, all elements that can make the difference between a believable, sky replacement and a cheap, artificial fake. Performance/Cosmetic Fixes Correcting or improving an actor’s not-quite-perfect performance can avoid the need for expensive reshoots. This common compositing task is rarely noticed by an audience and can be simple to do, depending on the required fix.
You can take environment enhancements to the next level to create entire set extensions that visually transport your audience to a specific location (while keeping your production safe at home on a sound stage.) Instead of shipping the whole cast and crew to the Himalayan foothills, you can replace the background of your shots with temples and mountains and snow. For period pieces or science fiction, such effects can save enormous amounts of time and money because you don’t have to build massive sets.
258 If all the elements that make up a composite are meant to be in the same location, then you must make sure that light hits them all from the same direction. Simulating relative sizes, parallax motion, and depth to a real-world level of detail is essential to the realism of an effects shot. As you begin creating visual effects, start small. The Fusion page is very deep and incredibly powerful.
Lesson 10 Creating Graphics and Effects in Fusion Visual effects make the fantastic and impossible look completely realistic. Whether you’re in a theater watching the latest studio blockbuster, viewing a show on your iPhone, or at home on a big screen television, visual effects are everywhere.
Lesson 10 Creating Graphics and Effects in Fusion 260 In this lesson, you’ll build some common effects. You’ll explore both visual effects and motion graphics in exercises that will teach you how to composite shots, create a green screen key, and design animated titles using Fusion ’s powerful text layout and keyframe animation tools. You’ll acquire basic skills needed so you can continue to explore the Fusion page on your own, try out additional tools, and customize your own effects.
The left and right viewers can show different images or effects from your composite. 261 Exploring the interface The toolbar has buttons for adding commonly used effects or tools to the node editor. The work area can show any combination of the node editor, keyframes editor, or spline editor. In the Inspector, you can display and manipulate the parameter of any selected effect or tool in the node editor. By default, the work area displays the node editor.
6 Creating Graphics and Effects in Fusion 262 In the node editor, select the media in 1 node, and press the 1 key to display the image in viewer 1 to the left. Viewer 1 Viewer 2 Lesson 10 TIP The terms node and tool are used interchangeably to refer to an imageprocessing operation. You can rename nodes to describe their function or image. 7 Select the media in1 node. Press the F2 key, and rename the media in 1 node ACTRESS. 8 Select the media out node.
9 Drag the playhead slowly through the render range from the first yellow line on the left to the second yellow line on the right. As you drag the playhead through the render range, the current time display (to the right of the time ruler) displays the current frame number. To the left of the time ruler, you can see the render range start and end frame. Under the time ruler, you can drag a two-handled scroll bar to zoom into the render range.
Adding the first effect To understand the basic principles of working with nodes instead of layers, let’s add a simple effect to this clip. The most common tools or effects that you will want to use are located in the toolbar. 1 Hover your mouse pointer over the first tool in the toolbar to display a tooltip with the name of the tool. A thin divider separates each of the six toolbar categories. From left-to-right the categories are: generators, color, compositing/transforms, masks, particles, and 3D.
To give this shot a colder, outer space feel, in the Inspector drag the color indicator towards blue until the ACTRESS has a light blue tint in viewer 2 . 265 Exploring the interface 6 While the results are shown in viewer 2, viewer 1 still displays the original, unaltered ACTRESS image. By using the two viewers to see different aspects of your effect, you can more precisely compare and modify your adjustments.
Creating Graphics and Effects in Fusion Adding clips from the media pool On the most basic level, visual effects are about combining two or more images to make a new image. Although you currently have only a single clip from the edit page timeline in your composite, you can access any clip from your project in the media pool. For the creation of this sci-fi shot, you will add a computer-generated heads-up display (HUD) to make it appear that the actress looking at a computer display.
Select the media in 1 node, and press F2 to rename the node to HUD; then, press 1 to display it in viewer 1. In the lower-left of the HUD node, a small white dot, called the view indicator button, is highlighted to indicate that the node is displayed on viewer 1. On the OUTPUT node, a second view indicator button is highlighted to the right of the first to indicate that this node is displayed on viewer 2.
Lesson 10 Creating Graphics and Effects in Fusion 268 Understanding the merge node The merge node is one of the most important and commonly used tools on the Fusion page. It composites, or blends, two images. You can add the merge node—as you would add other effects—by dragging it from the toolbar and inserting it in the node editor between the color corrector and OUTPUT nodes.
3 To connect the HUD graphic into the foreground input of the merge node, drag the square output from the HUD node into the green foreground input of the merge node. By adding the HUD graphic into the foreground input, you composite that graphic on top of the actress using the graphic’s built-in alpha channel transparency.
Inserting and adjusting effects Node order is the single most important concept to understand in any node-based compositing system. Where you insert a node in the tree and the order in which you connect nodes determines the results of your composite. The frame size of the HUD graphic is slightly larger than the background, so some of it is cut off. You’ll need to add a transform node—but in precisely the correct location—to resize the graphic without resizing the background.
TIP In the lower-left corner of the interface, the status bar displays basic metadata about any selected node. When a node is selected in the node editor, the parameters for adjusting that node appear in the Inspector with on-screen controls displayed in the viewer. 3 In the Inspector, drag the transform size slider to the left to scale down the graphic until the logo on the left is no longer cut off. Adding additional effects to the same shot is as easy as clicking the tool in the toolbar.
Often, computer graphics must be softened so they appear more natural when composited over live action. Next, you’ll add a very small amount of blur to better blend the graphic with the live action background. 5 In the Inspector, drag the blur size slider to around 1.5 to slightly soften the graphics. TIP If can be easier to enter values rather than dragging sliders when changing controls.
Merge nodes only process two images at a time, foreground and background. To add additional images, often called elements or plates, to a composite, you must chain merge nodes together using the output of one merge as the foreground or background of another merge. That’s how you’ll add a scratched glass element that we’ll again get from the media pool. 1 2 3 In the upper-left corner of the interface, click the media pool button. From the master bin, drag the glass clip to an empty area of the node editor.
7 In the node editor, select the merge 2 node; and in the Inspector, drag the blend slider to 0.3 to lower the opacity of glass element. Creating Graphics and Effects in Fusion 274 Lesson 10 You can find more sophisticated blending operations in the apply mode drop down menu. These settings use simple mathematical operations to blend images based on the color and luminance of the foreground and background.
Effects have an input and an output for connecting other nodes. These connections are color coded with a yellow triangle to represent the primary input and a white square to represent an output. Nodes also have an effect mask input for masking use, as represented by a blue triangle. You can use the mask input to limit the area of the image that is affected by an effect. Let’s create a subtle vignette that will darken the area around the actress’ face. 1 In the node editor, select the Color corrector node.
5 Lesson 10 Creating Graphics and Effects in Fusion 276 In the Inspector, select the Invert checkbox to reverse the ellipse matte. A few more adjustments will make the darkened vignette look even nicer. 6 In the Inspector, refine the ellipse matte by increasing the soft edge slider to create a more gradual transition from the center to the darkened edges. TIP A small gray dot appearing under any parameter slider indicates the default position of that parameter.
In viewer 2, drag the right edge of the ellipse to expand its width and cover more of the frame. 277 Adding effects from the effects library 7 8 In the transport controls, above the toolbar, press the first frame button to move the playhead to the start of the render range, and press the Spacebar to play through the composite. The first time the composite is played, DaVinci Resolve loads the effect into RAM. A green line under the time ruler indicates the cached regions of the composite.
2 In the upper-left of the Fusion page, click the effects library button. The library is organized by category. There are categories for everything from paint and particles to masking, image filters, tracking, and more. 3 In the Effects library, select the blur category and click the Soft Glow tool to add it to the node editor. The soft glow gives the HUD a more realistic and dramatic appearance. Lesson 10 Creating Graphics and Effects in Fusion 278 Now we’ll add some light reflections.
From the ResolveFX Light category, drag the Lens Reflections tool over the connection line between the Merge 2 node and the OUTPUT nodes. When half of the line turns blue, release the mouse button to insert the Lens Reflections tool as a new node. ] 6 In the inspector, increase the Global brightness and Global blur values to suit your taste.
2 Move the playhead over the second red marker in the timeline 3 In the timeline, select the clip on Video 2. Press D to disable it, and view the Video 1 track. Lesson 10 Creating Graphics and Effects in Fusion 280 The Video track is a computer-generated spaceship clip. Video 2 has a green screen clip. 4 Press D again to re-enable the green screen clip on Video 2. You can use the Edit page timeline to layer, trim, and align the elements, and then bring multiple clips into the Fusion page.
In the timeline, select both clips, then right—click, and choose new Fusion clip. 281 Using Layers from the Edit Page 5 The new Fusion clip is created in the timeline and added to the selected bin. The two layers are collapsed into a container of sorts, yet both layers are still accessible in the Fusion page. TIP You can display all the layers of a Fusion clip in the edit page timeline by right-clicking the Fusion clip, and choosing open in timeline.
8 Right-click the media in 1 node, and choose Rename, or press F2. Rename the node as PLANET_BKGD. 9 Select the media in 2 node, and press the 1 key. 10 Right-click, the media in 2 node, choose Rename (or press F2), and rename the node as GREENSCREEN_FRGD. The merge node matches the way the two clips are layered in the timeline, but it does not have keying capabilities. To key the greenscreen shot, you need to add a keyer tool.
Click the Tools disclosure arrow, and select the Matte category. Click the Delta Keyer once. Because the GREENSCREEN_FRGD node was selected in the Node editor, the Delta keyer is connected to the GREENSCREEN_FRGD output. The Delta Keyer is the most advanced color difference keyer in the Fusion page, and it is very simple to use. 3 Select the Delta keyer node, and press 1 to display its output in viewer 1.
The matte or alpha channel for our live action shot is displayed. Even on the cleanest of green screen keys, such as you have here, you must refine the matte a bit to ensure that areas intended to be opaque appear solidly white and transparent areas appear solidly black. 7 Drag the playhead through the shot and look for areas in the white opaque regions that appear gray. At the same time, look for areas in the black transparent regions that also appear gray.
Drag the low threshold slider to the right until the black is clear of all gray areas except the reflection of his face and the green button on the right side of the wall. 10 Drag the high threshold slider to the left until the white is clear of all gray areas 11 Click the color controls button above viewer 1 to return to the color output of the Delta keyer.
2 Lesson 10 Creating Graphics and Effects in Fusion 286 In the viewer, resize and reposition the ellipse over the circular object on the right side of the frame. Now you will have to connect it into the Solid mask input on the delta keyer. You can hover the mouse point over any input on a node to reveal the input’s name. 3 Hover the mouse pointer over the bright white input on the deltakeyer to reveal the tooltip.
Set the Solid Replace Mode menu to hard color, then drag the eye dropper into the viewer to select the red color of the sign. The hard color replaces the green screen color with whatever you select using the eye dropped. Choosing the red color from the sign, blends the object nicely into the set. Adding text+ in the Edit page Good graphics—whether they are main titles, still images, or even captions within a program—should convey important information while remaining true to the look of the program.
4 In the Inspector’s styled text field, type HYPERLIGHT. 5 Below the Styled Text field, choose the Open Sans font for macOS or SegoeUI for Windows. Below the font selection, set the type face to Light. 6 Lesson 10 Creating Graphics and Effects in Fusion 288 Next, you’ll slightly increase the text size. 7 In the Inspector, drag the size slider to increase the text size to around 0.1 The Text+ tool has incredibly flexible styling options called shading elements.
10 Select the color stop on the left, and change the color to light yellow. Select the color stop on the right, and change it to a darker golden yellow. The fill color of text is one of eight shading elements. The remaining shading elements are located in the Inspector in the shading elements drop down menu. Although you could change all of these elements, the first white fill shading element is the only one enabled by default. Other elements must be enabled individually.
13 Adjust the offset X and Y parameters to position the soft drop shadow below and slightly to the left of the text. Creating Graphics and Effects in Fusion 290 Lesson 10 As mentioned, you can add up to eight shading elements to create fills, shadows, outlines, borders, and glows. In addition, you have control over the position, shearing, and rotation of each shading element, so your title design options are nearly limitless.
Animating with Keyframes 291 The ability to change elements over time is a crucial feature of any visual effects and motion graphics application. The Fusion page handles basic keyframe animation in the same manner that you already know from the Edit page, but goes much deeper with full keyframes and spline editors. Let’s start by animating the Rays node. Animating with Keyframes 1 Press Cmd-left arrow (macOS) or Ctrl-left arrow (Windows) to move the playhead to the start of the render range.
7 Position the playhead roughly halfway through the render range and drag the weight parameter to 3.0 8 Move to the end of the render range and drag the weight slider back to 0 again. To draw more attention to the title of the film, you’ll animate the letters so they slowly spread out over the duration of the clip. 9 Select the template node, and In the Inspector, click the text tab.
293 Animating with Keyframes 13 In the Inspector, drag the tracking slider to the right to about 1.5 As soon as you drag the Tracking slider, a new keyframe is added at the current location of the playhead. 14 Press Cmd-left arrow (macOS) or Ctrl-left arrow (Windows) to move the playhead to the start of the render range. 15 Press spacebar to review the animation. As you have seen, setting keyframes in the Fusion page Inspector is identical to doing so in the Edit page.
2 In the upper-left corner of the Resolve window, click the nodes button to hide the node editor. The keyframes editor shows each node stacked in a familiar timeline interface. Even though the keyframe tracks are stacked like layers, the vertical order of these tracks has no impact on your composite. The tracks effect only when clips start, when they end, and the keyframes that they contain.
Press Cmd-left arrow (macOS) or Ctrl-left arrow (Windows) to move the playhead back to the start of the render range, and press the spacebar to review the new adjustments. The keyframes editor provides a straightforward way to adjust the timing of elements and keyframes. However, it doesn’t provide any visual way to adjust the acceleration between keyframes. On a very basic level, that is what the spline editor does.
TIP You can pan and zoom in any panel of the Fusion page by holding down the middle mouse button and dragging to pan, and holding down Cmd (macOS) or Ctrl (Windows) and scrolling with the middle mouse button to zoom in and out. 9 In the spline editor, drag a selection rectangle around both keyframes. Lesson 10 Creating Graphics and Effects in Fusion 296 10 In the lower-left corner of the spline editor, click the Smooth button, or press Shift-S.
297 Lesson Review Smoothing the keyframes creates an S-curve and adds spline handles to each keyframe. The result of smoothing both keyframes will be a more natural ease to the start of the animation and a nice ease at the end. 11 Press Cmd-left arrow (macOS) or Ctrl-left arrow (Windows) to move the playhead to the start of the render range. Press spacebar to review your new adjustments. The Fusion page is a feature-rich, powerful compositing application that has been in development for several years.
Lesson 10 Creating Graphics and Effects in Fusion 298 Answers 1 In the Fusion page, to display the output of a node on viewer 1, select the node and press the 1 key. 2 To switch shots in the Fusion page, on the upper toolbar, click the clips button, and then click the thumbnail of the shot you want to work on. 3 A merge node is used to composite two images. 4 The yellow input on the merge node is for the background input. 5 False.
299 An Introduction to Color Correction Before you get into the technical side of color correction and learn how DaVinci Resolve 15’s powerful color correction tools work, it’s important to take a moment to understand color correction and the creative medium it is. Color correction is not something you can do by learning the controls of the color corrector, and it’s not something you can do well just using the scopes. It’s a highly creative skill in itself.
300 The following lessons cover the basics you’ll need to learn to begin harnessing the power of the Color page in your own projects – be they feature films, episodic television, web series, short subjects, spots, promos, or corporate videos. No matter what you work on, these formats employ the same fundamental grading techniques and the same basic tools; so, if you’re new to the world of professional color grading, don’t worry.
301 Cooler Warmer Of course, what these varied illuminants mean depends on the visual palette you develop. Warm lighting that denotes romance in one film may instead portray roiling, desert-bound discomfort in another. Their impact, depends on the associations that your grading makes between the visuals and the story.
302 Documentary photography may very often be concerned with presenting a supposedly unvarnished (yet gloriously rendered) look at the world. And yet, even this ”realistic” look at the world is a fabrication, as every adjustment you make to improve the visibility of a subject, enhance the glory of nature, clean up some archival footage, or push the surroundings of the frame to recede artfully into the background, can be as carefully thought out and manipulated as any music video grade.
Color correction can be considered the process of choosing which parts of the raw image data to display to create a pleasing image for the viewer. Developing the Image The latest generation of digital cinema cameras are almost all capable of either shooting raw color space image data, or at the very least, recording RGB image data with a log-encoded exposure. Doing so preserves the maximum amount of image data for manipulation during the color correction process.
304 An underexposed image (left) The corrected image for the audience (right) Of course, in some situations, you may find it necessary to fix media that has more substantial problems in color and exposure. In these cases, the tools exist to make far more involved changes to the image; however, the quality of your results will depend heavily on the quality and “latitude” of your source media.
Of course, it’s not all about subtlety and correction. It’s often appropriate, when grading music videos and commercials, for instance, to bring some radical visual style to a piece. Here, too, DaVinci Resolve provides an abundance of features for manipulating unexpected aspects of the image. For example, you can use custom curves to create an illusion of chemical cross-processing.
Lesson 11 Quick start: color correction Like editing, color correction is an art form that takes time to learn and master. Color is an incredibly powerful creative tool that can define the style and convey the mood of your film. If you give yourself the time to practice and learn, you’ll be able to master this exciting skill and create images that look amazing! Time This quick start lesson will provide a fast overview of the most important colorcorrection tools to get you comfortable with how they work.
Remember, DaVinci Resolve was originally developed for high-end color correction and finishing on feature films. That means you’re about to work with the same tools that Hollywood’s top colorists use to correct and finish the biggest blockbuster films, episodic television shows, and commercials. Learning the Color Page Layout The technical and creative process of color correction takes place within the color page in DaVinci Resolve 16. Let’s start by examining the color page layout.
The color page is divided into seven main areas. The viewer shows the frame at the play heads current position in the timeline. The gallery includes saved adjustments that you can copy to other clips in the timeline. The left palettes contain primary adjustments for color, contrast, and RAW image processing. The node editor connects color corrections, image adjustments, and effects to create unique looks . The center palettes provide access to curves, Windows, tracking and keying controls.
6 Select the last thumbnail in the timeline. An orange outline appears around the selected thumbnail, and the play head jumps to the first frame of that clip. 7 Lesson 11 Quick start: color correction 310 Below the thumbnail, double-click the Apple ProRes 422 name to switch to viewing clip names. The mini-timeline below the thumbnails displays thin bars to represent each clip. A bar’s width is proportional to a clip’s duration.
Using the primary corrector, you can achieve a refined result because you can divide the image into tonal regions. 311 The lift, gamma, and gain controls broadly correspond to the dark, midrange, and bright regions in the image. Within each region, you can adjust hue and luma values to create a wide variety of styles. For instance, if you wanted to adjust color or brightness in the dark areas, you would move the lift region.
4 Drag the Gamma master wheel to the right until the Y luminance value displays around 0.05. Lesson 11 Quick start: color correction 312 The master wheel under the gamma color balance control adjusts the overall brightness while maintaining the black and white points that you set previously. When dragging this control to the right, the overall image becomes brighter. When the tonal adjustments are made, you can then adjust color using the color wheels.
In the gamma color balance control, drag the control slightly toward magenta. 313 Modifying Lift, Gamma, and Gain 7 The gamma color balance control tints the midrange of your image. Let’s compare the corrected image you’ve made to the original image. 8 Click the Bypass button in the upper right of the viewer or press Shift-D, to see the original image. Then Click the Bypass button again, or press Shift-D, to view the corrected image.
9 In the upper-right corner of the gamma color balance control, click the reset button. You can also reset the entire primary corrector using the panel reset button. 10 In the upper-right corner of the primary corrector panel, click the reset button. Lesson 11 Quick start: color correction 314 The lift, gamma, and gain controls are not isolated adjustments that change only the dark, midrange, and bright areas. In fact, their ranges overlap by a considerable amount.
Select thumbnail 02. 315 Using other Primary Corrector Controls 1 The color in this shot appears a bit dark and low in contrast. Although you can modify contrast using the primary corrector as you did earlier, the color page also includes some very quick and easy options. 2 In the adjustment controls below the color wheels, position the pointer over the contrast value field. TIP Depending on your screen resolution, the names of each adjustment control may not be visible.
Lesson 11 Quick start: color correction 316 3 With your pointer in the contrast value field, drag to the right until the value reaches 1.3. The adjustment controls have a second page of parameters for globally improving your shot. 4 Click the 2 button to display the second page of the adjustment controls. You can further refine the contrast using the shadow and highlight controls. These are similar to adjusting the low end of gamma and gain master wheels.
On page 2 of the adjustments, color boost and midtone detail are two good adjustments that can add a nice visual punch to your shots. Color boost allows you to increase/decrease the saturation of lower saturated colors without changing high saturated colors as much. This clip already has very saturated colors. We’d like to keep the vibrant colors of the of the yellow lemons, red peppers and red cans behind our host and chef but bring down the saturation in their skin tones to be more natural.
In both the color boost and midtone detail controls, a little goes a long way. A typical way to adjust these is to first add more correction than you want and then slowly back off until you find an acceptable result. Lesson 11 Quick start: color correction 318 As always, when you make a significant adjustment, you should compare it to the original image. 3 Click the bypass button, or press Shift-D, to see the original image.
Making Secondary Color Corrections 319 So far, you’ve made adjustments to an entire image, so-called primary color corrections. Secondary color corrections isolate only parts of an image to make very specific changes to a particular image area. A classic but extreme example is turning an entire image to black and white except for one object. Let’s apply secondary color correction to a much more common task that you’ll be able to use on many of your productions.
However, you also have the option of creating additional nodes in which each node contains one or more corrections that affect the image. Using multiple nodes, each containing separate adjustments, you can exercise more precise control over the order of those adjustments and more easily track and modify them. Let’s add a second node to the node editor to separate the adjustment that you will apply to the teal dish.
In the viewer, hover the mouse pointer over the teal dish. The pointer changes to an eyedropper to indicate that you can sample an area of the image you want to isolate. 6 Click anywhere on the teal dish to sample its hue value. Once you click the viewer, three points are added to the line in the hue vs. hue palette. The center point is the actual hue you selected. The other two points constrain the range of hues you will be adjusting as you drag the center point. 7 In the hue vs.
9 Click the number 2 on the node, or press Cmd-D (macOS) or Ctrl-D (Windows). Lesson 11 Quick start: color correction 322 Now you are viewing the neutral correction without the shifted hue on the dish. 10 Click the number 2 on the node, or press Cmd-D (macOS) or Ctrl-D (Windows). Although you selected the teal from the dish, teal (or shades of light blue) appear in other areas of the image and they are also affected by the hue adjustment.
DaVinci Resolve includes many high-quality filter effects called Resolve FX that include blurs, glows, film grain, and lens flares. You can apply these effects to an entire clip or you can combine them with spline shapes called windows to isolate an effect to one area of the frame. 1 Click thumbnail 07. 2 Press the spacebar to play the clip. This clip already has basic color correction on its first node, so you’ll place a second node to add an effect.
7 In the middle of the toolbar, click the power window button. You can use power windows to isolate a part of the frame. Unlike the hue vs. hue curve, you use spline-based shapes instead of a hue selection. 8 Click the circular power window shape to add it to the clip. Lesson 11 Quick start: color correction 324 9 Drag one of the corners of the circular power window so that the inner circle is roughly the size of the host’s head on the left.
325 Applying Resolve FX 11 Above the node editor, click the OpenFX button. In the OpenFX panel, you’ll typically find a list of the third party filter effect plugins that you added to DaVinci Resolve. However, it also contains a list of Resolve FX that are included with the application. 12 Scroll down the OpenFX library to find the Mosaic Blur effect. Drag the effect onto the FACE node that contains the power window. When the mosaic blur is added, it fills in the power window to obscure the face.
13 In the OpenFX settings panel, raise the pixel frequency to around 100 to increase the number of mosaic squares used in the power window. Lesson 11 Quick start: color correction 326 The mosaic is placed for this one frame only. Because the woman moves throughout the shot, you will need to track the power window to ensure that it follows her around as she moves.
Click the zoom and rotate checkboxes to deselect those transforms. 4 Begin tracking by clicking the track forward button. 5 Once the track is completed, scrub or play through the clip to see the results. The tracker causes the power window to perfectly follow the woman’s face. This quick start lesson was only a brief overview of how to use the controls in the color page.
Lesson 11 Quick start: color correction 328 Answers 1 2 3 4 5 The Master wheel below the Lift color wheel adjusts the black point. The Temperature control is used to warm up or cool down a shot. False. You can use the Primaries wheels used to change the color of a specific item in a clip if a Power Window is used to isolate the item. To get a Power Window to follow a moving object you would use the Tracker palette.
Lesson 12 Performing Primary Color Corrections With so many tools at your fingertips, the creative possibilities in DaVinci Resolve 16 are endless! In addition to the creative judgment you’ll develop as a colorist, you’ll also need to master some fundamental techniques. Along with stylizing the look and being creative, you’re also responsible for ensuring a consistency, or color continuity for the entire project. Time This lesson takes approximately 45 minutes to complete.
Lesson 12 Performing Primary Color Corrections 330 Using DaVinci Resolve Color Management Filmmaking is technical, and can at times be complicated. Few aspects of the process illustrate this as well as cameras and their various file formats. Each camera manufacturer tries to give you the best-looking image possible, even if it means that image doesn’t necessarily look great on your HD monitor right out of the camera.
In the project manager, open the Wyoming Ranch project then in the timelines bin, double click the Wyoming Ranch thumbnail to load the timeline. You are now ready to enable a color-managed workflow. 5 In the timeline, move the play head over the second clip. This shot is a good image in which to see the results of color management. This is a camera original file from a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K.
However, you want to change the Input color space value to match the device that recorded the imported clips. 8 Because these clips were shot with a Blackmagic Pocket 4K camera, set the Input color space to Blackmagic Design Pocket 4K Film Gen. v4. TIP Although you can change the Output color space at any time when you are delivering to different display devices, never change the Input or Timeline color space once you have started color grading your clips.
333 Using DaVinci Resolve Color Management 10 Move the play head over the last shot in the timeline. This shot has blown out highlights. At first it may appear that the blown out highlights are a color management mistake. However, Color Management only tries to match up equivalent tonal ranges in an image. Anything that falls outside the Output range will appear blown out.
Sometimes the effects of DaVinci Resolve color management are subtle, sometimes they are very obvious like what we have just experienced. Lesson 12 Performing Primary Color Corrections 334 The results depend on the camera and how the image was originally exposed. Since one setting cannot work for all cameras, when you have clips from different camera’s you can override the project setting and set clips individually. 13 Click on the first clip in the timeline.
335 Using DaVinci Resolve Color Management 14 Right click the thumbnail in the timeline and choose Input color space > sRGB. The graphic is now displayed with the correct colors but a slightly lower luminance values due to the simple remapping we did earlier. You can correct this at the end of the lesson when you have more knowledge about color correction and monitoring. It is important to note that you have not color corrected these clips, although they may appear to look better.
Making Automatic Corrections Because unforeseen or unavoidable situations occur during production, clips can be recorded with an incorrect color tint, have highlights that are dull, or shadows that are muddy. Therefore, you always start the color correction process by balancing every shot in your program. Doing so unifies your shots for the creative look you may later apply to them.
Move the mouse pointer over the viewer, and click the darkest area of the horse on the right. 337 Making Automatic Corrections 3 TIP If you need to zoom in to the viewer, position the mouse pointer over the viewer, and scroll the middle mouse wheel. The image should become a bit darker. Clicking the shadow area identifies it as absolute black and corrects any tint in the black so that no single color channel dominates in the shadow regions. Now, you will do the same for the white point.
Lesson 12 Performing Primary Color Corrections 338 6 From the upper right corner of the viewer, click the Bypass Color and Fusion button to disable the grade. 7 Click the Bypass button again to enable your grade. When using the black and white point pickers it is important to click areas you know should be the purely black and purely white in the image or you risk making the image worse.
To improve tonal range, you can use the primary correction tools you used in the previous lesson. 2 Drag the Lift master wheel to the left until the Y luminance value is near -0.20. As you drag the Lift master wheel to the left, the darkest areas in the image become darker. 3 To decrease the highlights, drag the Gain master wheel until the Y luminance value displays 0.60. 4 To brighten up the image, drag the gamma master wheel to the right, until it is around 0.15.
Now that you have maximized the contrast, you can compare those changes with the original image, this time using the menu option. Lesson 12 Performing Primary Color Corrections 340 5 Choose View > Bypass Color and Fusion > Bypass All Grades, or press Shift-D, to see the original image; then press Shift-D again to view the corrected image. With just a few simple adjustments you have created a better-looking shot in which the image shadows appear rich and dark while the highlights have detail.
Reading the Parade from left to right, each channel corresponds to the image displayed in the viewer. For instance, the left part of the red, green, and blue trace corresponds to the left part of the image. This layout makes it easy to look at the scope and know exactly which area you are evaluating. 341 Checking Adjustments on Scopes The Parade scope graphs each color channel individually. The graph is read from bottom to top with absolute black at line 0 and absolute white at line 1023.
TIP You can switch back to the keyframe editor and hide the video scopes to free up your graphics card’s processor and improve play back performance. In general, the bottom of the trace should fall somewhere between 0 and 128 on the graph. If some elements of the shot are absolutely black, then the trace should fall closer to 0. If the darkest part of your image is more of a dark gray like the trees on our hillside, then it might fall closer to line 128 on the graph.
343 Checking Adjustments on Scopes It is clear this image appears to have a blue tint. While the tint can be seen with your eyes, you can confirm it in the Parade. The blue trace is shifted higher than red or green which is an indication that a blue tint exists in the shadows and the highlights. Having a distinct blue or orange tint, or cast, in an image is a common white-balance issue.
7 Now remove the color cast from the highlights by dragging the Gain color indicator toward yellow/orange until the tops of the red, green, and blue trace in the Parade are fairly level with each other. 8 Press Shift-D to see the original image, then press Shift-D again to see your correction. Lesson 12 Performing Primary Color Corrections 344 You’ve created a balanced, neutral color correction using the primary corrector on one shot.
A lot of the power in DaVinci Resolve comes from the flexibility of its toolset which provides many ways to do the same thing. To learn more about the primary corrector toolset, you’ll explore another method for creating a balanced correction on a new shot. 1 In the timeline, select clip 06. This is the first in a number of interview shots.
3 Drag the Lift Y bar down until the Y luminance value is near -0.03. Lesson 12 Performing Primary Color Corrections 346 Once again, the darkest areas in the image become a bit darker. Unfortunately, the highlights in this image are trickier to adjust because, unlike the previous shot, this image has no white anywhere in the frame. However, using your eyes, you can see that you need to bring down the highlights.
7 Hover the eyedropper over the brightest part of the gray scarf directly to the right of the man’s face. The RGB values show a higher level of red in the dark gray area of the scarf. If the scarf should be a neutral dark gray color (which you are assuming it should be), then you need to balance these RGB values. TIP You can display 10-bit numeric values (0-1023) with the RGB picker by choosing View > Show RGB Picker Values In > 10 bit.
10 Keep making small adjustments to the red, green, and blue Gamma bars until the RGB values are nearly even. After making critical adjustments, it’s good to compare your changes to the original shot. 11 Choose View > Bypass All Grades, or press Shift-D, to see the original image; and then press Shift-D again to view your corrected clip. Lesson 12 Performing Primary Color Corrections 348 With these adjustments, the image now has a much better neutral balance and contrast. You did that quickly.
Drag the Highlights value to the right until the green trace reaches the 896 line. These two adjustments are similar to adjusting the master wheels under the lift and gain regions. To balance the color you can use the temperature control. 5 Drag the temperature value to the left to until the tops of each channel in the trace are more or less even along the 896 line. Mid tone detail used sparingly can add a nice pop to soft images like the one we have here.
Using Curves for Primary Color Corrections In this exercise, you’ll look at the last method of creating a balance shot. Using the Custom curves you’ll have the greatest degree of flexibility for making tonal and color adjustments but it also requires a bit more finessing. 1 Select clip 15. Lesson 12 Performing Primary Color Corrections 350 Looking at the image you can tell this shot is over exposed so we’ll correct that first. 2 Drag the offset master wheel to the left until it is around 5.
TIP When you hear the terms tonal values or the tonal range, we are talking about brightness values. Tonal range TIP In the Color page, each clip has its own undo/redo history. That is choosing Edit > Undo will undo different steps depending on which clip is currently selected. Image tonal range Like the Primaries bars you can adjust luminance separately from RGB channels. The end points in the custom curve graph are used to adjust the black and white points.
This point is the black point control. Similar to the Y bar in the Lift primaries bars, adjusting this point raises or lowers the black point in a clip without modifying the saturation in the shadows. Lesson 12 Performing Primary Color Corrections 352 5 Drag the point up until the red trace in the Parade skims along the 0 line. Moving the black point up lifts the black point, the darkest part of the image.
Choose View > Bypass All Grades, or press Shift-D, to see the original image, and then press Shift-D again to compare your corrected clip to the original. Now you can work on color balance by adjusting the curve for the individual channels. Using nodes to separate tonal and color balancing Looking at the parade scope, you can see the shadows in the blue channel trace appear slightly higher than the red and green channels. While the highlights in the blue channel trace appear lower.
5 Drag the blue channel’s black control point just a hair the right until the wheel on the tractor has less of a blue tint. The blue trace in the Parade scope will align at the bottom of the graph with the red and green traces. 6 Drag the blue channel’s white control point to the left until the blue trace in the Parade scope aligns at the top of the graph with the red and green traces. This will remove any green tint in the clouds.
Click the green curve line about a third of the way up from the black point control. Adding a point here means we will be adjusting primarily in the darker mid-tones but not exclusively. 10 Drag the control point down slightly until the image no longer has a significant green tint. Dragging the point lower in the graph decreases the green in the midtones by adding more red/magenta. To compare the changes you just made, you can disable node 02, the node in which the changes were made.
In this exercise, you’ll explore a few of the simplest tools that DaVinci Resolve provides for moving a correction from one clip to another. You’ll use these tools to create a seamless flow of sequential shots. 1 In the thumbnail timeline, select clip 04. Lesson 12 Performing Primary Color Corrections 356 This is the second shot of the snowy field with the barn. One of the simplest shot matching situations is when you have clips that were recorded at the same time using the same camera.
4 Select clip 15. This is the shot of the tractor that you balanced using two nodes. If you want to copy and paste an entire grade, there is an equally simple method. 5 Select clip 16. This is a similar shot to the tractor. It appears to be from the same area and the same time of day. 6 Move your mouse pointer over clip 15’s thumbnail and click with the middle mouse button.
7 Select clip 09. Lesson 12 Performing Primary Color Corrections 358 This clip is another shot you balance earlier and following it are two additional shots which appear to be from the same scene. We’ll use yet another method of easily copying entire grades from one clip to another. 8 9 Click on clip 10 and then clip 11 to see the two ungraded clips. Click back on clip 10. This is the first ungraded clip we will work on. 10 Choose Color > Apply Grade form one clip prior or press the = (equal) key.
The shots all feel like one continuous sequence. Brightness, hue, and saturation look consistent. It may seem odd that there are two functions to copy a grade from one and two clips prior to the selected clip but if you think about a dramatic scene where you often cut back and forth between a shot and then a reverse angle of the shot, these two menu functions can come in very handy.
A reference still image is saved into the Gallery. The still image also contains all the instructions to rebuild the correction for that shot. It’s helpful to name these stills so you will later know exactly what they do. Lesson 12 Performing Primary Color Corrections 360 3 4 Right-click the still, and choose Change Label. Name the still RANCHER BALANCED. Gallery stills make it easy to apply an entire correction to one or more clips. 5 Click clip 17 near the end of the timeline.
To compare clip 17 to the reference still of clip 06, double-click the RANCHER BALANCE still in the Gallery to open it into the viewer. 361 Copying Corrections between Similar Shots 6 By default, a vertical split appears in the viewer. The shot from the timeline (thumbnail 17) is on the left. The selected still in the Gallery is on the right. 7 8 Choose Workspace > Viewer Mode > Enhanced Viewer, or press Option-F (macOS) or Alt-F (Windows), to expand the viewer.
9 Choose Workspace > Viewer Mode > Enhanced Viewer, or press Option-F (macOS) or Alt-F (Windows), to display the Gallery. 10 In the Gallery, right-click the RANCHER BALANCE still, and choose Apply Grade. The timeline clip now has the color correction applied from the still. However, as is often the case, because the lighting is different between the original clips, the Apply the sill hasn’t solved our issue completely. The color seems right but it is still too dark in comparison.
363 Lesson Review 14 To disable the image wipe in the viewer, click the image wipe button in the upper-left corner of the viewer. Shot matching is made easier when you start using the Gallery and reference stills to help your analysis and inform your color-correction moves. You should also use the scopes to minimize any visual quirks because your visual perception naturally tends to force the shots to match.
364 Answers Lesson 12 Performing Primary Color Corrections 1 2 3 4 5 The 1023 line on the Parade scope represents pure white. Anything above the 1023 line is clipped and loses detail. False. You can adjust luminance as well as the red, green, and blue channels using the custom curves in the Color page. You can save a still to the Gallery by right-clicking the viewer, and choosing Grab Still.
Lesson 13 Making Secondary Adjustments Primary adjustments let you work on the entire image, whereas secondary adjustments let you isolate and work on specific parts of an image. Time For example, you might want to change the color of a car from blue to red without affecting the rest of the shot, or add warmth and saturation to an actor’s skin, or create a vignette to help focus the viewer’s attention in a specific area of the scene. DaVinci Resolve features many powerful tools to do this.
Lesson 13 Making Secondary Adjustments 366 Making secondary adjustments with HSL Curves The first part of making a secondary color correction is to isolate the adjustment to its own node. This allows you to make very specific adjustments without modifying the primary grade you have already completed. Using multiple nodes, each containing separate adjustments, you can exercise more precise control over the order of those adjustments and more easily track and modify them.
In the toolbar, click the Curves palette. In the upper right corner of the Curves palette click the drop down arrow next to the word Custom. This menu shows the five different HSL curves that can be used to make simple secondary adjustments. The name of each HSL curve displays the property that will be selected and then how that property will be adjusted. For instance, Hue vs Sat will select a hue from the image and adjust the saturation of that particular hue. Let’s try it out on our red tractor.
Clicking in the viewer adds three points to the line in the graph. In this instance, since red is at the end of the color spectrum, the last point loops around to the left side. The middle point is the precise hue shade you selected in the viewer. The outer two points limit the range of red hue that will be adjusted. 10 Drag the middle point in the graph up to increase the red saturation.
Selecting areas with Qualifiers The qualifier palette is another method of isolating a color for secondary color corrections. Compared to the HSL curves, it is a more sophisticated palette that includes several ways to select that color using hue, luminance, and saturation. This detailed level of control enables you to get a clean isolation, or matte, of objects even when other elements in the shot are of a similar color. TIP Qualifiers are used only as a method of creating a matte.
4 In the central palettes, click the qualifier icon. In this clip, you will want to preserve the pink scarf. When the qualifier palette is selected, hovering your mouse pointer over the viewer will display an eyedropper that is used to select the color you want to preserve. 5 Drag over an area from under her chin to the bottom of the scarf. Lesson 13 Making Secondary Adjustments 370 TIP The eyedropper is not only used with the qualifier palette.
371 Selecting areas with Qualifiers As you can see, the selection is not very clean. There’s a variety of ways to improve it. The first will be to add additional samples of the color into the qualifier palette. TIP You can change how your selection is presented using the three icons in the upper-right corner of the viewer. Next to the standard grayscale highlight icon, you also have the highlight B/W icon that outputs your image as a black-and-white matte.
8 Lesson 13 Making Secondary Adjustments 372 In the viewer, drag over the upper right brighter side of the pink scarf down to the bottom. TIP You can press Cmd-Z (macOS) or Ctrl-Z (Windows) to undo an incorrect selection. 9 In the Selection range palette, return to the default eye dropper picker on the left. You should now see a fuller selection that still has imperfections. You can now fine tune your selection by adjusting the Hue, Saturation, and Luminance values in the qualifier palette.
11 In the upper-right corner of the viewer, click the highlight B/W icon. 12 To the right of the Qualifier, adjust the Matte finesse controls Clean Black and Clean White to remove smaller, unwanted white and black specks that appear in the matte. The goal when adjusting the Matte finesse controls is to produce a clean black-andwhite image. Gray areas are seen primarily in transparent areas of which there are none in this shot. 13 Click Page 2 in the Matte finesse controls, and set Mode to Grow.
16 In the adjustments strip below the Color wheels, drag the Hue value in either direction to shift the pink color in the viewer to another color. Lesson 13 Making Secondary Adjustments 374 17 In the adjustment strip, double-click the Hue label to reset the value. Notice how the lips are too close in color to the scarf to get good separation.
2 With node 03 selected, in the adjustment controls strip, drag the Sat field to a value of 0. You can increase the drama in this shot by increasing the contrast in the black-andwhite portion of the image. 3 With node 03 selected, in the adjustment controls strip, drag the Contrast slider to 1.1. The ability to reuse key data is a beneficial component of node-based workflows. It speeds up the grading process by requiring you to perform only a single key, and reuse it multiple times.
the best option is to use a Power Window to limit which part of the frame the qualifier operates on. For instance, in our shot you may notice her lips still showing a bit of color. Instead of fiddling with the Qualifier which would affect the scarf selection, you’ll use a window to mask out everything except the scarf. 1 Select node 02 in the node editor. 2 In the toolbar, in the central palettes, click the window palette icon 3 In the list of Power Windows, click the curve button to activate it.
To complete the custom shape, click the first point in the shape to close it. When the shape has been created, the Power Window will exclude the rest of the image, keeping only the selection inside the box. Combining the qualifier with a Power Window has allowed you to quickly make a clean selection based on the hue of the element, while just as quickly excluding interfering elements from your selection. Using both tools meant that you didn’t have to draw an overly precise Power Window around the box.
6 Select clip 14, the close up interview clip of the woman. Lesson 13 Making Secondary Adjustments 378 We’ll first set up the nodes we will need for matching the previous interview shot. 7 8 9 Press Option-S (macOS) or Alt-S (Windows) to add a second node and label the node SCARF. Right click over the second node and choose Add Node > Add Outside. Label the outside node OUTSIDE. Now we will copy over nodes form the previous interview.
Selecting only these two items will ensure we do not copy over the tracking data, since she moves differently in this new interview shot than in the previous one. 14 Click Apply at the bottom of the window to paste the selected attributes. The outside node is simpler since we want the entire node’s changes. 15 Select clip 08 , select node 03 then press Cmd-C (macOS) or Ctrl-C (Windows). 16 Select clip 14 , select the OUTSIDE node, then press Cmd-V (macOS) or Ctrl-V (Windows).
1 Select thumbnail number 13, and play the clip. Lesson 13 Making Secondary Adjustments 380 This is a nice shot but unfortunately the camera is a bit too shaky. You can use the stabilizer to either lock down the shot and remove all camera motion, or leave the general camera move but smooth out the motion. For this shot we would like to keep that hand held feel but smooth out the movement. 2 In the drop down menu in the upper-right corner of the Tracker palette, choose Stabilizer.
Change the smooth setting to 0.75 to increase the amount of smoothing Click the stabilize button again, then play the clip. The stabilized clip is scaled a bit to fill the frame. Any time you stabilize a shot, the clip must move up and down, as well as side to side, to offset the camera movement in the shot. Moving the clip in this way obviously makes the edges of the clip visible as they move in and out of the viewer.
382 Answers Lesson 13 Making Secondary Adjustments 1 2 3 4 5 Clicking the Highlight button above the Color page viewer displays pixels that are selected by a qualifier or Power Window. These selected areas are displayed with their normal colors and will be affected by any color adjustment. Non-selected areas are displayed as gray pixels and will not be affected by color adjustments. False. The default qualifier is based on Hue, Saturation, and Luminance.
Lesson 14 Designing Creative Looks Now that you’re familiar with the primary and secondary tools, you should begin exploring the creative implications of grading. The colors within a scene can influence how your audience should feel. Cold tones denote a brooding character and warm colors tend to signify that everything is going well. Time You can also use color to quickly communicate place and time by creating distinct looks for each location and/or time period.
Lesson 14 Designing Creative Looks 384 Mixing a Black-and-white Shot When going through the previous lesson you saw that one of the adjustment controls was Sat, or Saturation. This simple setting sets the strength of your colors, allowing you to push them beyond their originally recorded values or to decrease them completely, thereby turning the image to black and white. In the Color page, you have several methods for turning a color image to black and white.
In the toolbar, click the RGB Mixer button to open the RGB Mixer palette. 8 At the bottom of the palette, select the Monochrome checkbox. Doing so will turn your image black and white. Many of the controls under the individual red, green, and blue output bars will be dimmed and unavailable. When an image is set to monochrome, you can control only the degree to which red, green, and blue channels contribute to the black and white mix.
10 Experiment by dragging the green and red output bars to see how they affect the image. Notice how strongly some elements are affected when they directly correspond to the channel color. By adjusting the red output, you can make the sky darker since it has no red in it. 11 Set the red output around 0.90, the green output to 0, and the blue output to 0.10 to create a nice high contrast look.
DaVinci Resolve comes with a variety of LUTs that you can start using right away. However, one of the strengths of DaVinci Resolve and its LUT workflows is the ability to create custom LUTs and share them with other colorists, as well as adding LUTs created by third-party developers. You will begin by installing a third-party LUT. For this exercise, let’s assume you downloaded a LUT from one of the popular LUT-creation websites.
5 From the Lesson 14 folder, drag the Lesson_14_LUT.cube file into the Training folder. Lesson 14 Designing Creative Looks 388 TIP DaVinci Resolve creates and uses LUTs in the DaVinci Resolve .cube format. This is an open LUT format and can be reviewed technically in a simple text editor. 6 7 Click in DaVinci Resolve, and in the color management project setting window, click Update Lists. In the project settings window, click Save.
389 LUTs are commonly used for monitoring on set. They allow you to change how a video signal displays when content is captured on camera. When the signal is captured using a filmic non-linear gamma curve, an HD monitor will display a very flat image with low contrast and saturation. If you apply a LUT to the display or camera view finder it can convert the signal to appear as HD (Rec 709)—the contrast will become much more pronounced, and the colors more saturated.
5 Designing Creative Looks 390 Right-click the LUT thumbnail, and choose Apply LUT to Current Node. Lesson 14 You have now applied the look up table you installed previously. The LUT has changed the look of the clip but as is common with LUTs, it has also clipped the highlights. It is up to you to bring the highlights back and then expand the dynamic range. TIP LUTs will change the appearance of your clip within a single node.
Drag the Lift master wheel to the right until the bottom of trace in the parade scope is no longer crushed along the 0 line. 391 Using a Look up Table for Quick Looks 7 Now that you have the entire image data without any clipping, you can use another node to increase the contrast. 8 9 Right-click node 02, and in the menu, choose Add Node > Add Serial, or press Option-S (macOS) or Alt-S (Windows).
Saving LUTs Once you’ve customized some LUTs, you may want to save them for future use. Instead of saving this look to the Gallery, we’ll save it back into the LUT browser. 1 Right-click thumbnail 18, and choose Generate 3D LUT (CUBE). 2 In the “Save LUT as” dialog, type the name Cold Air LUT, and save it into the Training LUT folder. Click Save. Lesson 14 Designing Creative Looks 392 3 TIP If you have difficulty locating where LUTS are saved, use the navigation paths below.
In this exercise, you’ll create a bleach bypass look for the same shot. The bleach bypass process, sometimes called a silver retention or ENR process, is a low-saturation, high-contrast look. It stems from a film development process in which the bleaching stage was, well, bypassed. It can be seen in many television shows and films including Reds, Saving Private Ryan, and Seven. 1 Right click over node 02 and choose Color > Reset Node Grade to remove the LUT look and delete node 03 from the node editor.
5 Click on the curve line about one-third of the way up from the bottom of the line to add a point to manipulate the shadows.
Drag down the lower control point until it reaches the first grid line to condense the shadows. 8 Drag up the upper control point until it reaches the grid line above it to condense the highlights. 395 Creating a Bleach Bypass 7 9 Right-click in the viewer, and choose Grab Still. Moving both points into this S-shaped curve adds more contrast to your shot and produces a very simple bleached bypass look when combined with the low saturation.
396 Designing Creative Looks Understanding additive color What color do you get when you mix all the colors of the rainbow? Some people will think of how light refracts from a prism and say that every color combined produces white. Others pause and think about what happens when you mix all the colors in your paint palette, resulting in a colorless gray sludge. Lesson 14 However, the true answer depends on whether you are treating colors in an additive or subtractive sense.
TIP If the resulting stills sidebar list is too narrow to read, drag the divider to expand the sidebar to the right. In the list panel, you’ll find a folder called PowerGrade 1. This folder can store Stills like a regular Gallery album, but the PowerGrade 1 folder is shared across all projects in your system. 3 Drag a still from your stills album into the PowerGrade 1 album. When you open your next project, the Color page will already have this grade present in the PowerGrade1 album.
398 Answers Lesson 14 Designing Creative Looks 1 2 3 4 5 Desaturating an image equally lowers the saturation levels of red, green, and blue. When the RGB mixer is set to monochrome, the resulting black-and-white image is created by independently adjusting the luminance of the Red, Green, or Blue channel, thereby yielding a more controllable black-and-white result. False. The merge node is available only in the Fusion page and it is used to combine images.
Lesson 15 Delivering a Final Program Everybody’s workflow is different, and the Deliver page is designed to give you flexible options for creating output from low-resolution editing proxies to the highest quality master files. You can batch render multiple files to multiple resolutions, compression formats, and destinations, all from the same project. With so many different options available on the Deliver page, you might think it would be difficult to learn. But it isn’t.
Lesson 15 Delivering a Final Program 400 Creating a Web Streaming File Almost every project ends up on a web-streaming service in some form, even if it’s just as promotional material. To output the most common file-based output formats, DaVinci Resolve includes easy setups, presets that automatically configure all the parameters for an output type that you select. 1 2 3 In DaVinci Resolve, open the Age of Airplanes project that you worked on in previous lessons.
At the top of the Render Settings, click the Vimeo preset. When you choose one of the presets, DaVinci Resolve configures the Render Settings to output a file that conforms to the destination’s requirements. If you wanted to stop at this point and output the file, you could do so. The only parameter you would need to set would be the destination of the output file.
7 Lesson 15 Delivering a Final Program 402 Click the Upload directly to Vimeo checkbox. TIP In order for the automatic upload to work, you must enter your YouTube or Vimeo account information in the DaVinci Resolve > Preferences window. 8 At the bottom of the Render Settings panel, click the Add to Render Queue button. The job is added to the Render Queue on the right side of the window. The Render Queue acts as a temporary holding area for jobs that you want to output from DaVinci Resolve.
At the top of the Render Settings, click Custom. Clicking Custom makes all of the options in the Render Settings available for selection, and begins the process of creating a new preset. First, you can decide if you want every clip in the timeline to render out as its own individual file or as a single file. 2 At the top of the settings, click the “Single clip” button to output a single movie file. 3 Click the Video tab, and in the Video Format menu, choose EXR.
Next, because you want to send only one shot from your timeline to the VFX staff, you need to mark the range you want to render. 8 9 In the Deliver page timeline, move the playhead over the 08_SOUTH_POLE_DC3 clip. Choose Mark > Mark Clip, or press X, to add in and out points around the South Pole clip. Lesson 15 Delivering a Final Program 404 The marks in the timeline identify the region that you will render out. You can now save these settings as your own customized VFX preset.
The Burn-in controls can be accessed from any page. 4 Choose Workspace > Data Burn-In to open the Data Burn window. The left side of the Data Burn window includes a list of possible data types to overlay on the video. Selecting the checkbox next to any option enables it. 5 In the list of burn-in data, select the Record Timecode checkbox to overlay the record timecode on the output movie file. 6 Select the Custom Text1 checkbox to add a text watermark.
7 In the Custom Output Text field, enter DO NOT DISTRIBUTE. 8 Drag the Size slider to the right to increase the text size to 55. The viewer displays all the changes to the Data burn-In settings as you make them. You are now ready to output this vimeo file. 9 Close the Burn window to return to the Deliver page. Lesson 15 Delivering a Final Program 406 Now you can save the Render Settings preset in case you want to reuse it at some point.
13 When you do want to render one of your own projects, in the Render Queue, select the items that you want to render. Then click the Start Render button at the bottom of the Render Queue to begin the process. One by one, the jobs will render out and be marked as completed. 14 What you will find useful right now is knowing how to clear the Render Queue. In the upper-right corner of the Render Queue, click the Options drop down menu.
Lesson 15 Delivering a Final Program 408 Answers 1 Choose Workspace > Data Burn In. 2 YouTube and Vimeo are the two online services which have presets in the Deliver page Render Settings 3 True. Presets provide the most common options. To view all the options available, click the Custom render setting. 4 To save a custom preset on the Deliver page, in the Render Settings option menu (the three dots in the upper-right corner), choose Save as New Preset.
Lesson 16 Managing Media and Databases Unlike almost all other editing, audio mixing, or color grading software, DaVinci Resolve uses an industry-standard database to store all of your projects, bins, clips and timelines-basically any item that is not an audio or video media file is kept in the database. As a result, DaVinci Resolve works a little differently from other apps when you want to move projects from one system to another or create backups of your projects.
Lesson 16 Managing Media and Databases 410 Consolidating Media NOTE The following exercise uses a second hard drive for consolidating media. It is not recommended that you perform these steps on this project. However, you are urged to read through the lesson to gain an understanding of the process. Before we explore database management, let’s start with a topic that is a bit more down to earth: media management. Almost every project will need some kind of media management.
Click the Browse button, and in the File Destination dialog, navigate to a location where you want to copy the media. Click OK. TIP You can click the New folder button to create a folder for the consolidated files that you create. If you don’t do so, you might end up with too many files on the top level of a hard drive and no way to know which files to keep and which to delete. The option to consolidate media requires that you select one or more timelines to determine which files to keep.
Lesson 16 Managing Media and Databases 412 8 Select “Relink to new files” to use the new, copied media in the timeline instead of the existing media. If you were finalizing these steps, you would now click Start to begin consolidating the media, but in this case do not do so.
2 In the Archive dialog, navigate to a drive where you want to save the project, and click Save. All of the media and the project file containing your bins and timelines are copied into a folder with the extension .dra. This folder contains everything you need to open your project on another computer. Be assured that the original media remains in their original locations, and that the two sets of media are completely identical.
Lesson 16 Managing Media and Databases 414 Working with the DaVinci Resolve Database If you want to move or backup all of your projects and timelines, then you must do so within the database. DaVinci Resolve must be open because projects and all their associated bins, clips, and timelines are not independent files that you can find (and freely manipulate) on your hard drive. And while that may suggest a process that is more complicated than you may be accustomed to, it brings a lot of benefits.
3 At the top of the New Database dialog, click the Create tab to start creating a new database. 4 In the Name field, enter resolve101, and click in the Location field to locate where you want to save the database. 5 Navigate to Documents > 16 Intro lessons > Lesson 16. 415 Working with the DaVinci Resolve Database useful for organization; for instance, you might create a new database at the start of every year or at the start of each school semester.
The location is added into the database dialog where you can now add it to DaVinci Resolve. 6 Click Create in the database dialog. The resolve101 database now appears in your list of disk databases. Clicking any of the databases listed will switch to that database. The newly added resolve101 database is already selected and ready for your new projects.
In the list of databases, make sure the resolve101 database is selected. At the top of the window, click the backup button. Generally, databases range in size from a couple of hundred megabytes to a couple of gigabytes; but unlike media, they can easily be saved to a cloud backup storage system or a small local hard drive. 3 4 Navigate to the hard drive or cloud-based storage where you want to back up your database, and click Save.
Lesson 16 Managing Media and Databases 418 Answers 1 False. The Media Manager manages only media; it does not manage bins. 2 In the Media Manager, selected media can be copied, moved, or transcoded. 3 Exporting creates only a DRP (DaVinci Resolve Project) format file which contains only the project metadata. Archiving creates a folder with the DRA extension that includes a DRP file for the project, along with all the media files contained in that project.
Index Index 419 Numbers 2.39:1 aspect ratio, 169 4-up display, 150 8-bit RGB values, 347 10-bit numeric values, 347 16×9 aspect ratio, 169 1280×720 HD 720P resolution, 401 1920×1080 HD video resolution, 4 Symbols / (slash) key, 173 + (plus sign), entering, 102 A A1 SYNC track, 231–232 additive color, 396. See also color wheels; subtractive color adjustments, checking on scopes, 340–344 ADR (automatic dialogue replacement), 186, 240 Alt key.
Index 420 Burn-in controls, 405 Bypass All Grades, 347 Bypass button, 338 C cached content, changing drive for, 68 caching, turning on, 175, 265 camera angles, editing, 21–25 camera buttons, 50–51 channels, listening to, 242 Cinema Viewer, 110 clip attributes, 241–243 clip metadata, viewing, 76–77. See also metadata clipping level, 213 clips.
D databases, 414–417 DaVinci Resolve Editor Keyboard, 62 dB (decibel) scale, 213, 217 De-Hummer dialog, 245 delete key, pressing, 7 deleting audio, 121–122 clips, 45, 124 clips without leaving gaps, 120–125 markers, 192–193 ranges within clips, 122–125 rendered cache files, 176 tracks, 203 transitions, 161 video, 121–122 Deliver page, 70–71, 407 destination controls, 105 dialogue editing, 185–186, 213 diegetic music, 187 .diskdb file, 417 dissolves.
Index 422 Fairlight page (continued) track formats, 231–232 track levels, 249–250 trimming clips, 232–234 Fairlight FX, 244–248 Fairlight Mixer, 226 fast review button, 9 File Destination dialog, 411 file formats, 407 filters, applying from Effects library, 165–168.
J J-cut, reviewing, 146 JKL keys, 93–95, 99, 123, 145, 226 jog control, 13, 15, 97 jump cuts, 44–46. See also clips K keyboard mapping, 69 keyboard shortcuts.
Index 424 markers (continued) navigating, 231 playing back, 204 sorting, 231 using, 190–193 viewing in bins, 209–210 Markers tab, 230 marking gaps, 152–155 master bin, 73, 118 Master settings, 175. See also settings mattes, creating with qualifiers, 369–374 media consolidating, 410–412 copying to hard drives, 412–413 relinking, 116–118 media page, 70–71 media pool adding clips from, 266–267 hiding, 134 unhiding, 152 using, 3, 71 media storage category, pro merge node, 268–269 metadata.
Q Q, pressing, 19–20, 103 qualifiers combining with Power Windows, 375–377 selecting areas, 369–374 quick export button, 60 QuickTime H.
Index 426 scrubbing clips, 74–76 with JKL keys, 93–95 secondary adjustments HSL curves, 366–369 selecting areas with qualifiers, 369–374 secondary color corrections, 319–322 Select All clips, 73, 118 selecting areas with qualifiers, 369–374 clips, 109, 129 video edit points, 144 Selection and Trim tools, using for retiming, 177–178 selection mode button, 127 Selection tool, 150–155, 234, 237 selections presenting, 371 reversing with outside nodes, 374–375 sentences, identifying, 123 serial, adding, 366, 3
U UI Layout, resetting, 152 underexposed image, 304 undoing steps, 92, 124, 137, 146, 178, 313, 372 user cache, 265 V video deleting, 121–122 previewing, 227 Video Attributes category, 170 video edit points, selecting, 144 video only, overwriting, 103–106 video resolution, 4 video scope button, 340 video track 2, 28, 32, 52.
About the Authors 428 About the Authors Paul Saccone has been working in the post production industry for over 20 years and is an editorial workflow expert. He’s based in San Francisco, California where he lives with his husband, Ryan, and their dogs, Chloe and Gracie. This is his second book, which means that someone must have read his first one. From 1998 to 2013 Paul worked at Apple and was the Product Manager for Final Cut Pro versions 2 through 7, including Final Cut Studio.
THE BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO DaVinci Resolve 16 is the world’s most advanced editing, visual effects, color correction, and audio post production solution for feature films, television shows and commercials. Its revolutionary workflow lets you switch between tasks with a single click, so you don’t have to learn multiple programs or translate projects between different applications.
