"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up everybody welcome back to the show I did a video when I was in New York last week and after I posted that I had several people ask me if I could do a tutorial on how I'm doing color grading in video and I'd be happy to do that I am using an application that is free it's called D Vinci resolve 12 and it is amazing and this is a good day to show that to you because I'm in the office doing some editing for artist series videos so come on over to the computer and let's check out Da Vinci resolve okay so we're going to talk about Da Vinci resolve 12 today and what I want to do is give you a very basic basic overview of how D Vinci resolve works and so this is kind of targeted at complete beginners if you guys are interested in seeing me do some more indepth tutorials on video color grading please let me know in the comment section I would be happy to consider it it is a lot of fun now Da Vinci resolve is made by a company called Blackmagic design and Blackmagic have been around for a long time and they're mainly known as a hardware company they make things like capture cards um these cool control surfaces like you see in this picture here and they make cameras now as well and they ALS o have this um application called avenci resolve which is a very powerful and very versatile color grading application designed for video and it also has a full-fledged video editor in it now too so you really can use this for your entire production workflow and it's absolutely free and that's the best part and so if you're interested in downloading DCI resolve I will put a link in the show description on this page here you can kind of see what the differences are there is a paid version called Da Vinci Stu resolve studio and there really aren't a lot of differen between this and the free one but this comparison chart has them and mainly it's limited to things like you can't do uh color grading for 3D video for instance I don't do any 3D so that's not a big deal for me um there are some limitations as well on things like noise reduction and effects that you can use but it's really you get a full-fledged application for free which is pretty amazing so anyway so I want to talk about workflow and how you're going to set stuff up in here and the first time you open Da Vinci resolve um you're going to set up a new project and just to give you an overview here down at the bottom of the screen you're going to see these four tabs each one of these tabs represents a workspace and they kind of move in order of your workflow for doing a video so when you're under the media tab if you don't have a project set up see I already have one set up in here and this is actually one of the videos I did last week that I put up from when I was in New York but you'll have to set up a project and I'll go over that really briefly here but basically in under the media tab you'll want to import your footage so over on the left hand side you see a map to all your drives that are connected and you'll bring in the footage to the media pool is what this is called down here once you have all your media in the project you're going to go over to the edit window and you have all of your tools here for video editing and it works on a standard timeline much like you'd see in Final Cut Pro or premere or something like that um over on the left hand side up here you can see this is my media pool so if I want to bring in more media and drag and drop is how you do it it's really easy to do you can create transitions in here and so the whole idea with your workflow is that you're going to bring in your media do your edit first and then color is kind of one of the last things you do and the reason typically uh it goes that way is because you want to make sure scenes match from shot to shot so if you do all your color correction before you edit um you're kind of locked into that and it can create some problems for you later then you got to go find files and try to bring them in so that's typically the way we work is we do color grading at the end and so if I click over on the color tab here this is how we're going to do our color grading and this is the kind of the core of what I want to talk about in this video so D Vinci resolve 12 is what we call a nodal editor and it works on a series of nodes and so on the left hand side over here we see our preview window and you can see I've got this shot here this is that building in New York that is the old Jazz Loft that Eugene Smith lived in and over on the right hand side here we see by default you have a node set up already now I can click and drag the node to move it around so if you need to organize things because you're usually going to create multiple nodes and these lines that come up to the node represent you know the signal here so over on the left hand side this little box represents your out or sorry the input that goes into the node and then the node connects to the output which is what we're seeing on the screen the reason it does this is because you can do some very complicated things in here if you're doing green screen work or if you're doing stuff with masks and you want to be able to send outputs of nodes to other nodes but not have them necessarily affect the main output anyway so there's a lot of complex things that you can do in here but not editors it's really easy to want to think that they work like layers like such as Photoshop but I want to show you the difference so I have this Frame actually set up in Photoshop here so if we go over to photoshop what I'm going to do is I'm going to create two adjustment layers I'm just going to create two curves layers here because I want you to see how this works so if I take the bottom curves layer this curves one and what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring my my darks up or sorry I'm going to bring my darks down I'm going to really Crush those blacks and we're just really going to go hard with it and so if I go to the next curves layer that sits above it and I try to recover those there's no information to recover you see it just kind of gets milky white and it's not bringing any detail back and so in a way even though Photoshop we think of it as non-destructive editing it is destructive in the sense that the layers impact how they sit on top of one another so a layer on top of another layer um can have information that it can't access and vice versa so that's what I did is I basically just crushed all my blacks in one layer and then tried to uncrush them in another and it didn't work now if I go over to Da Vinci resolve and what I'm going to do is set up two nodes and so these are serial nodes is what they are and there's different types of nodes but for the case of Simplicity we'll only work with serial in this video so I'm going to take one node and I'm going to take my curves adjustment and I'm going to crush those blacks like we did in Photoshop and you're going to see in my preview window that they totally get crushed and in the second node I'm going to try to revive them and bring them back and whoa look at that you can see that I can pretty much bring it back to the way it looked originally so that's the really cool thing about using a nodal editor and where it becomes very powerful it's a little harder to get your head around because you don't have that metaphor of the layers but the nodes are necessarily they're independent of one another so you can actually compensate for Corrections in other nodes that's not what they're designed for but but you you don't lose any information from node to node and I think that's really important uh whereas Photoshop you do and so that's why this is a nodal editor now we have different types of nodes and I'm going to right click in my workspace I'm going to say reset all grades and if you go up under the nodes window here's how you add nodes and so you can add serial nodes I use a lot of the shortcuts there's also parallel and layer nodes as well layer nodes you can imagine they work like layers and so forth so anyway so it what typically you're going to do is create a series of nodes and the way I like to work in here is I'll kind of do uh primary adjustments on one node is what we call it where you're dealing with you maybe your your levels or your curves and then maybe I'll do my color adjustments on another one and then I'll add my vignette to another one or you know I'll go in order like that so that way if I make a mistake um one you can turn the nodes on and off to compare them uh but I also know where all my color Corrections are so I'm going to go ahead and set up a couple nodes here so we can you know maybe work with this footage a little bit now one thing you're going to notice here too is on the bottom of the screen here okay so first of all we looked at the top here and how the nodes work in the middle of the screen you see thumbnails and this is my timeline so so I can jump to different sections of my video to perform color Corrections on the bottom of the screen here and this does get compressed if you're using a laptop or a smaller screen but on the left hand side I have my color wheels in the middle I have a ton of options here as far as curves go and then I can also get into keying and sharpening and a bunch of fancy stuff there on the right on the lower right corner um I have it set up so I can see my Scopes and this is important because Scopes will they they'll help you see things kind of visually in a wave form and what you're seeing here's three channels the red green and blue channels and you're seeing that you know as these numbers increase towards the top this is where the highlights are so obviously 1023 is going to be bright white and zero would be dark black and the footage that you're seeing in here is a little bit washed out in general and so for instance this shot in fact most of these shots in here I did with my Sony RX100 markv it allows you to shoot with what is called a log profile and a log profile it it looks really flat and a little washed out in the end like you're seeing here but it allows you an enormous amount of flexibility because like for instance things that just like in photography when you shoot a picture and whatever's on your negative if you're shooting film or whatever's on the raw file if you're shooting digital if blacks go too dark you can't get them back then once they're too too dark you lose all your detail and same when you blow highlights and so what a log profile allows you to do is shoot with everything kind of compressed in the middle here and so I'm not really losing any detail in the shadows of the highlights let me bump over to another uh example here so like for instance this one which is the control tower at LaGuardia so uh I have all my Shadows you can still see all the detail in I don't have a lot of noise in here and I've also protected the highlights so I'll add a couple nodes in here and we'll make some adjustments now first one I'll show you is how to deal with the color wheels over here so the wheels have you know basically this little color spectrum and they also have a little dial underneath and the dial raises and lowers whatever it is that you're adjusting so for instance if you go from left to right you're going to see lift gamma and gain and lift are shadows gamma is midtones and Gain Is highlights so that's one way you can think of it so what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to lower the lift and when I lower that you're going to see that the Shadows become darker in my final output and if I raise the gain you're going to see that I am getting bright highlights here now actually they're starting to blow out here and I can tell because I'm losing detail and you can also see them cuz they're going above 1023 or 896 on the Scopes over here so anyway if you want to reset anything there's a reset button for each one of these color wheels or there also is a master reset the other thing I can do is let's bring the highlights up a little bit bring my Shadows down just a hair and essentially we're just Dell logging the footage here but I can also um give a color preference towards like for instance Shadows or highlights so maybe I want to take my my highlights and grab that button in the middle and start bringing them more yellow and then maybe you could take your lift or your shadows and take your darks and make them more blue blue or green and then you start getting kind of these color cast effects which could be an interesting look depending on what you want to do you see this a lot in feature films it gives you that Blockbuster look so you know learning how to manipulate color balance within each one of those regions is is kind of key for figuring that out another thing that you consider is using what we call Luts and a Lut is an acronym that stands for look up table and color lookup tables sometimes you hear people refer to these as but um a lot is basically a file that you can save that gives the software instructions for how to color grade an image and this can be particularly useful if you're trying to emulate the look of a certain film stock or you let's just say that I like this look that's set up and I want to be able to save that and apply it to other footage one thing I can do is right click on the thumbnail there and just say generate 3D L Cube and this will know where to generate that and save it and I've created my own Luts for things before with specific looks that I like you can also purchase Luts and uh I like the impulse Luts quite a bit I will link those up in the show description if you guys are interested in those and so a lot will save you a lot of time so let's use another example here so let's just do a quick grade on this I'm going to create a new node and let's use a lookup table I'll use one of the impulse Luts and let's just use codc ector and that looks pretty good that's a good start let's create another uh node and maybe I want to bring down my lift just a little bit make a little darker create a little more moodiness in there and let's say I want to do another node and let's create a venue yet so I'm going to go over here add a circle let's invert that I'm going to make it really big I know I'm working really fast but I'm just showing you what's possible in here so we're going to going adjust the softness on the edges there and then what I'll do is bring my gamma down and we'll create a bit of a vignette and maybe I want to actually go in I'm going to do this with a parallel node but I want to just do some color Corrections on the skin tones of my face I can go in here and grab the another Circle we'll put it kind of over my face here so it'll only the corrections will only impact what's in this circle area and let's bring the softness up just a little bit and maybe I'll bring my gain up make it brighter but bring my gamma down to add contrast and it's starting to look good maybe actually go in here and dial a little bit of yellow into there maybe a little less green okay and so let's pring that off so you can see before and after I'm going to turn all the nodes off and you can see we went from that to that really quickly now this isn't perfect but this is kind of how you're going to do your color ating and you can cut and paste things between nodes and copy looks over and it's really really powerful what you can do in here the final thing that you're going to use with the vent resolve is the deliver tab down here once I click on this I have several options I can deliver my timeline as a single clip or I can you know separate them out and into actual individual Source Clips which could be useful if you're just touching up some footage or something and you have a lot of options in here in terms of file name and video formats and all that stuff and so basically what you're going to do is add all of your footage to the render q and then start the render and then you're good to go so that is a brief overview of Da Vinci resolve and if this is something you guys would like to see more of please leave me a comment and let me know I know this is more of a photography Channel than a video channel but I'm happy to oblige if you guys are interested in color grading for video and if you enjoyed this video please remember to like it and share it with your friends and as always subscribe to the Art of Photography so you'll always be up to date on all the latest and greatest stuff that I do until the next video I'll see you guys then laterwhat's up everybody welcome back to the show I did a video when I was in New York last week and after I posted that I had several people ask me if I could do a tutorial on how I'm doing color grading in video and I'd be happy to do that I am using an application that is free it's called D Vinci resolve 12 and it is amazing and this is a good day to show that to you because I'm in the office doing some editing for artist series videos so come on over to the computer and let's check out Da Vinci resolve okay so we're going to talk about Da Vinci resolve 12 today and what I want to do is give you a very basic basic overview of how D Vinci resolve works and so this is kind of targeted at complete beginners if you guys are interested in seeing me do some more indepth tutorials on video color grading please let me know in the comment section I would be happy to consider it it is a lot of fun now Da Vinci resolve is made by a company called Blackmagic design and Blackmagic have been around for a long time and they're mainly known as a hardware company they make things like capture cards um these cool control surfaces like you see in this picture here and they make cameras now as well and they ALS o have this um application called avenci resolve which is a very powerful and very versatile color grading application designed for video and it also has a full-fledged video editor in it now too so you really can use this for your entire production workflow and it's absolutely free and that's the best part and so if you're interested in downloading DCI resolve I will put a link in the show description on this page here you can kind of see what the differences are there is a paid version called Da Vinci Stu resolve studio and there really aren't a lot of differen between this and the free one but this comparison chart has them and mainly it's limited to things like you can't do uh color grading for 3D video for instance I don't do any 3D so that's not a big deal for me um there are some limitations as well on things like noise reduction and effects that you can use but it's really you get a full-fledged application for free which is pretty amazing so anyway so I want to talk about workflow and how you're going to set stuff up in here and the first time you open Da Vinci resolve um you're going to set up a new project and just to give you an overview here down at the bottom of the screen you're going to see these four tabs each one of these tabs represents a workspace and they kind of move in order of your workflow for doing a video so when you're under the media tab if you don't have a project set up see I already have one set up in here and this is actually one of the videos I did last week that I put up from when I was in New York but you'll have to set up a project and I'll go over that really briefly here but basically in under the media tab you'll want to import your footage so over on the left hand side you see a map to all your drives that are connected and you'll bring in the footage to the media pool is what this is called down here once you have all your media in the project you're going to go over to the edit window and you have all of your tools here for video editing and it works on a standard timeline much like you'd see in Final Cut Pro or premere or something like that um over on the left hand side up here you can see this is my media pool so if I want to bring in more media and drag and drop is how you do it it's really easy to do you can create transitions in here and so the whole idea with your workflow is that you're going to bring in your media do your edit first and then color is kind of one of the last things you do and the reason typically uh it goes that way is because you want to make sure scenes match from shot to shot so if you do all your color correction before you edit um you're kind of locked into that and it can create some problems for you later then you got to go find files and try to bring them in so that's typically the way we work is we do color grading at the end and so if I click over on the color tab here this is how we're going to do our color grading and this is the kind of the core of what I want to talk about in this video so D Vinci resolve 12 is what we call a nodal editor and it works on a series of nodes and so on the left hand side over here we see our preview window and you can see I've got this shot here this is that building in New York that is the old Jazz Loft that Eugene Smith lived in and over on the right hand side here we see by default you have a node set up already now I can click and drag the node to move it around so if you need to organize things because you're usually going to create multiple nodes and these lines that come up to the node represent you know the signal here so over on the left hand side this little box represents your out or sorry the input that goes into the node and then the node connects to the output which is what we're seeing on the screen the reason it does this is because you can do some very complicated things in here if you're doing green screen work or if you're doing stuff with masks and you want to be able to send outputs of nodes to other nodes but not have them necessarily affect the main output anyway so there's a lot of complex things that you can do in here but not editors it's really easy to want to think that they work like layers like such as Photoshop but I want to show you the difference so I have this Frame actually set up in Photoshop here so if we go over to photoshop what I'm going to do is I'm going to create two adjustment layers I'm just going to create two curves layers here because I want you to see how this works so if I take the bottom curves layer this curves one and what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring my my darks up or sorry I'm going to bring my darks down I'm going to really Crush those blacks and we're just really going to go hard with it and so if I go to the next curves layer that sits above it and I try to recover those there's no information to recover you see it just kind of gets milky white and it's not bringing any detail back and so in a way even though Photoshop we think of it as non-destructive editing it is destructive in the sense that the layers impact how they sit on top of one another so a layer on top of another layer um can have information that it can't access and vice versa so that's what I did is I basically just crushed all my blacks in one layer and then tried to uncrush them in another and it didn't work now if I go over to Da Vinci resolve and what I'm going to do is set up two nodes and so these are serial nodes is what they are and there's different types of nodes but for the case of Simplicity we'll only work with serial in this video so I'm going to take one node and I'm going to take my curves adjustment and I'm going to crush those blacks like we did in Photoshop and you're going to see in my preview window that they totally get crushed and in the second node I'm going to try to revive them and bring them back and whoa look at that you can see that I can pretty much bring it back to the way it looked originally so that's the really cool thing about using a nodal editor and where it becomes very powerful it's a little harder to get your head around because you don't have that metaphor of the layers but the nodes are necessarily they're independent of one another so you can actually compensate for Corrections in other nodes that's not what they're designed for but but you you don't lose any information from node to node and I think that's really important uh whereas Photoshop you do and so that's why this is a nodal editor now we have different types of nodes and I'm going to right click in my workspace I'm going to say reset all grades and if you go up under the nodes window here's how you add nodes and so you can add serial nodes I use a lot of the shortcuts there's also parallel and layer nodes as well layer nodes you can imagine they work like layers and so forth so anyway so it what typically you're going to do is create a series of nodes and the way I like to work in here is I'll kind of do uh primary adjustments on one node is what we call it where you're dealing with you maybe your your levels or your curves and then maybe I'll do my color adjustments on another one and then I'll add my vignette to another one or you know I'll go in order like that so that way if I make a mistake um one you can turn the nodes on and off to compare them uh but I also know where all my color Corrections are so I'm going to go ahead and set up a couple nodes here so we can you know maybe work with this footage a little bit now one thing you're going to notice here too is on the bottom of the screen here okay so first of all we looked at the top here and how the nodes work in the middle of the screen you see thumbnails and this is my timeline so so I can jump to different sections of my video to perform color Corrections on the bottom of the screen here and this does get compressed if you're using a laptop or a smaller screen but on the left hand side I have my color wheels in the middle I have a ton of options here as far as curves go and then I can also get into keying and sharpening and a bunch of fancy stuff there on the right on the lower right corner um I have it set up so I can see my Scopes and this is important because Scopes will they they'll help you see things kind of visually in a wave form and what you're seeing here's three channels the red green and blue channels and you're seeing that you know as these numbers increase towards the top this is where the highlights are so obviously 1023 is going to be bright white and zero would be dark black and the footage that you're seeing in here is a little bit washed out in general and so for instance this shot in fact most of these shots in here I did with my Sony RX100 markv it allows you to shoot with what is called a log profile and a log profile it it looks really flat and a little washed out in the end like you're seeing here but it allows you an enormous amount of flexibility because like for instance things that just like in photography when you shoot a picture and whatever's on your negative if you're shooting film or whatever's on the raw file if you're shooting digital if blacks go too dark you can't get them back then once they're too too dark you lose all your detail and same when you blow highlights and so what a log profile allows you to do is shoot with everything kind of compressed in the middle here and so I'm not really losing any detail in the shadows of the highlights let me bump over to another uh example here so like for instance this one which is the control tower at LaGuardia so uh I have all my Shadows you can still see all the detail in I don't have a lot of noise in here and I've also protected the highlights so I'll add a couple nodes in here and we'll make some adjustments now first one I'll show you is how to deal with the color wheels over here so the wheels have you know basically this little color spectrum and they also have a little dial underneath and the dial raises and lowers whatever it is that you're adjusting so for instance if you go from left to right you're going to see lift gamma and gain and lift are shadows gamma is midtones and Gain Is highlights so that's one way you can think of it so what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to lower the lift and when I lower that you're going to see that the Shadows become darker in my final output and if I raise the gain you're going to see that I am getting bright highlights here now actually they're starting to blow out here and I can tell because I'm losing detail and you can also see them cuz they're going above 1023 or 896 on the Scopes over here so anyway if you want to reset anything there's a reset button for each one of these color wheels or there also is a master reset the other thing I can do is let's bring the highlights up a little bit bring my Shadows down just a hair and essentially we're just Dell logging the footage here but I can also um give a color preference towards like for instance Shadows or highlights so maybe I want to take my my highlights and grab that button in the middle and start bringing them more yellow and then maybe you could take your lift or your shadows and take your darks and make them more blue blue or green and then you start getting kind of these color cast effects which could be an interesting look depending on what you want to do you see this a lot in feature films it gives you that Blockbuster look so you know learning how to manipulate color balance within each one of those regions is is kind of key for figuring that out another thing that you consider is using what we call Luts and a Lut is an acronym that stands for look up table and color lookup tables sometimes you hear people refer to these as but um a lot is basically a file that you can save that gives the software instructions for how to color grade an image and this can be particularly useful if you're trying to emulate the look of a certain film stock or you let's just say that I like this look that's set up and I want to be able to save that and apply it to other footage one thing I can do is right click on the thumbnail there and just say generate 3D L Cube and this will know where to generate that and save it and I've created my own Luts for things before with specific looks that I like you can also purchase Luts and uh I like the impulse Luts quite a bit I will link those up in the show description if you guys are interested in those and so a lot will save you a lot of time so let's use another example here so let's just do a quick grade on this I'm going to create a new node and let's use a lookup table I'll use one of the impulse Luts and let's just use codc ector and that looks pretty good that's a good start let's create another uh node and maybe I want to bring down my lift just a little bit make a little darker create a little more moodiness in there and let's say I want to do another node and let's create a venue yet so I'm going to go over here add a circle let's invert that I'm going to make it really big I know I'm working really fast but I'm just showing you what's possible in here so we're going to going adjust the softness on the edges there and then what I'll do is bring my gamma down and we'll create a bit of a vignette and maybe I want to actually go in I'm going to do this with a parallel node but I want to just do some color Corrections on the skin tones of my face I can go in here and grab the another Circle we'll put it kind of over my face here so it'll only the corrections will only impact what's in this circle area and let's bring the softness up just a little bit and maybe I'll bring my gain up make it brighter but bring my gamma down to add contrast and it's starting to look good maybe actually go in here and dial a little bit of yellow into there maybe a little less green okay and so let's pring that off so you can see before and after I'm going to turn all the nodes off and you can see we went from that to that really quickly now this isn't perfect but this is kind of how you're going to do your color ating and you can cut and paste things between nodes and copy looks over and it's really really powerful what you can do in here the final thing that you're going to use with the vent resolve is the deliver tab down here once I click on this I have several options I can deliver my timeline as a single clip or I can you know separate them out and into actual individual Source Clips which could be useful if you're just touching up some footage or something and you have a lot of options in here in terms of file name and video formats and all that stuff and so basically what you're going to do is add all of your footage to the render q and then start the render and then you're good to go so that is a brief overview of Da Vinci resolve and if this is something you guys would like to see more of please leave me a comment and let me know I know this is more of a photography Channel than a video channel but I'm happy to oblige if you guys are interested in color grading for video and if you enjoyed this video please remember to like it and share it with your friends and as always subscribe to the Art of Photography so you'll always be up to date on all the latest and greatest stuff that I do until the next video I'll see you guys then later\n"