DaVinci Resolve easy for beginners?

Is DaVinci Resolve easy for beginners?

You're wondering why I need to learn resolve I'm great at Premiere Pro or Final Cut 10 well let me tell you to resolve is an entirely different Beast now what do Spider-Man no way home Jurassic world and top gun Maverick have in common you guessed it they're all graded in resolved so why wouldn't you want to learn the most powerful finishing tool in the world oh and it's free so on Google just type in DaVinci

Resolve for free download and then what you want to do is just click on this guy right here and here you have both versions you can either purchase the studio version which I highly recommend or just get the free version so I'm gonna hit this guy and then click on you can get the full version to resolve 17 or get the beta of resolve 18. so it's up to you but I'm just going to go ahead and start

Downloading 18. you have to fill out your information and then hit register and download and it's going to start downloading I have resolved 18 so I'm not going to go ahead and download that but you have to do this to get the software for free so once it's downloaded let's go ahead and turn it on [Applause] so this is what you're gonna see when you first launch resolve okay and what

You need to do is click on this guy right here and then it's going to open up your project libraries and these libraries are the same as Final Cut 10. so if you're used to that each Library contains a bunch of different projects right this is the same so what you want to do is instead of like the local database that is stored on your program files or your C drive on Windows or your Macintosh HD you

Don't want to do that ever because if the main operating system gets corrupted everything is gone so what you want to do is click on ADD project library and then in here you can do two things if you already had a database you can connect to it by clicking on connect or I'm assuming you're just getting into resolve so this is your first time you can click on Create and now call it something so I can call it DaVinci Resolve 18 and that could be it and then

You have to browse and find a location I will highly recommend finding the fast fastest drive with the most storage okay so once you find that go ahead and click open and then once you do you can just hit create and it's going to create a database and then that's going to be your default database so if there is an orange outline that means that's the database you're in okay and once that's done all we have to do is just double tap to open a new project

And now we're inside resolved and it's going to look like this go over to the media page and now what we want to do is the first thing is to go under the ventures of keyboard customization so now you guys are probably familiar with this if you're using Premiere Pro or Final Cut 10 this is no different you can click on this guy right here and then pick whichever tool you're most comfortable with that keyboard layout

And then you can just modify it from there okay so that would be my first pro tip if you're starting in resolve to make the transition easier the next step is going to be clicking on your DaVinci Resolve preferences here and then once we go into preferences the only uh things that I'm going to touch base on the first one is going to be media storage make sure you pick immediate storage and again it should be the

Fastest drive with the most storage so pick that location because that's where all your gallery Stills and cache files are going to be stored cache files whatever I don't care but Gallery Stills are extremely important okay once you start building a wide Library a huge Library you don't want your gallery Stills to go offline so moving on we're going to go to memory and GPU and in here just make sure that everything is set to Auto under GPU configuration and

That should be good enough under user we're going to look at project save and local and what you want to do is if by default live to save is on but project backup is not turned on make sure you turn that on and then set it appropriately however you like to work and then click on your browse and the location that you want to pick here should be different than where you're saving everything else why

Because if God forbid that one drive that you have everything is on something happens to that drive this way you're going to have your project backup saved somewhere else okay so it's a good contingency plan now we're going to move on to our project settings so I'm going to click right here this little Cogwheel and in our project settings a couple of things that we need to look at when you drop and drag and drop your first clip just

Like Premiere Pro and Final Cut 10 it's going to modify the entire project settings and the timeline so you don't have to worry about this for now okay uh what you do have to worry about is this guy right here you want to make sure that you select again the fastest driver with the most storage for working folders all three folders all right and that's all for the project settings for now so I'm just going to hit save and come out

Now I'm going to go ahead and locate the clip I want to bring in and I'm just going to grab it and drag and drop okay and see how it's going to prompt and ask you to set the appropriate settings so I'm going to hit change and now everything is ready to go I don't have to do anything else okay and at this point, I can just click on this clip and then right click and say create a new timeline and let's just give this timeline a name and we're going to call

It DaVinci Resolve tutorial, okay and now we have a new timeline you can go under your edit page and you should be able to see your timeline right here so this does not have an audio track all we have is just this one clip now we're going to be setting up this project in Asus and if you are wondering why one word

Dark the most beautiful show ever existed was graded in Asus and I did an interview with Stefan the colorist for those that are interested to watch it comment below but in all seriousness, Asus is the golden standard and rightfully so Netflix Technicolor Disney Warner Brothers Dolby Laboratories DreamWorks film Pixar MPC these are some of the most known brands that are deeply rooted in the entire Asus pipeline now once you grade in this color space your

Time will be cut in half with Superior results so let's jump in alright so time to put that to you so I'm going to click on my project settings I'm going to go under color management and then under color science, I'm going to go ahead and select Acer CCT and in here I prefer leaving the Asus input to transform to no input transform why because most of the time people shoot with multiple different cameras and if

You set this to a specific camera that's just gonna create problems okay so leave it as is and then for our output transform this is going to be Rec 709 okay because our output is going to be for a web and just online which the color space is going to be Rec 709 so we're going to leave it to that and then make sure to select use color space aware grading tools so when you're using HDR palette or color warper they're going to behave in the right color space

Which is going to be Asus CCT okay that's all I have to do here I'm just going to go ahead and select save so this happens right because we still need to feed the proper camera information before I show you how to transform your footage properly for Asus let's just do a quick page overview and what we see here is on the top left side we got our Gallery Luts and media pool three different categories here um on this side and majority of the time

You're going to be dancing between these two okay or you can just click and buy more real estate especially if you're working on just a single screen and then in the middle, we got our nodes this is where the majority of the magic happens on the right side you got your effects if you're not using them you can just click this guy and buy again more real estate on the bottom left side this is where all your primaries controls are your secondary controls are in the middle

Right here and then your Scopes keyframe and your metadata information are on the bottom right okay so that's all you need to know for now all right this is a beginner tutorial I want you to just get going since this is a beginner tutorial I'm going to keep the grading process to the absolute Essentials and for those that want to Deep dive then I suggest you check out my free one-hour training it is a much more in-depth course that

\Covers topics like conform a process where you bring footage in and out of resolve from say a Premiere Pro or Final Cut 10. I will also share my tricks to help you match your shots like a pro nailing skin tones is expected of you and I got some secrets that will take your game to the next level the information packed in this training is worth the two-day boot camp so definitely check it out link is in the description and let's get grading so now

Let's get to the good part grading this shot and what is going on it looks awful before I even jump into transforming this shot properly what I want to do is click on this guy right here to expand my Scopes now you can set up your Scopes however you like you can do a 2 up quad up or nine Scopes but it will require a bigger real estate but what I'm going to do here I just got a quad up going on I got

For the waveform on the left I got a colorized waveform on the top right then I got parade and vectorscope and then in here I just made sure to check display qualifier focus in my Vector scope I made sure to turn on show a skin indicator and that's it that's all that's happening here okay so now let's click on this guy right here where it says Clips I'm going to right click on this clip and I'm gonna go under Asus input transform and we know that it's

Sony and we know that it's s-log 3 as gamut 3 cine so I'm going to click on that and it looks like this and you might go well it still doesn't look right quasi but I will disagree with this is properly transformed it was just shot Overexposed so the general rule when it comes to shooting digitally is exposed to the right better and that's what's Happening Here Right everything looks Overexposed but because of the magic of Aces we're going to be able to bring

That is perfect and you'll never even notice that it was shot Overexposed so let's do that right now I'm gonna create three nodes that's all we're gonna be doing guys it's just going to be the simplest grade you've ever seen yet the most effective first note I'm gonna call primaries this is where I'm going to make all my primary adjustments this we're going to call secondary this is where we're going to do some jaggery

Poker here this one I'm going to call curve or Curves this is my tone mapping is going to take place right here okay so now let's go to our primaries and all I want to do is I want to go under my HDR palette why because this Global offset in your HDR palette works exactly like how the exposure works on your camera meaning let's just say this looks Overexposed about two stops Overexposed I can click on

Exposure double tap in here and type in negative two so basically subtract two stops and if I hit enter boom look at what just happened to look at this magic everything came in everything looks good to look at the top the roll off up here Asus kicking in hard giving you that magic everything is looking good and can I push it more can I pull it down more I don't know but let's try it so if I grab this and pull this down more I think

Yeah I think we can like go in about two and a half stops like that and then at this point I'm gonna go under my curves I'm going to go under my primaries and just use contrast and pivot okay I'm going to keep it simple and I'm going to start cranking it I don't want to go too far but this is something like this looks pretty good I want to go under my primaries and I see a lot of warmth, okay my entire image is sitting on this top

Right quadrant which is like these warm tones and we gotta balance it out so I'm gonna go under my offset my printer lights in my primaries and I'm gonna grab this and I'm going to start pulling it around okay until it starts to look somewhat normal so I'm going to leave it right here and I'm gonna hover over here to make sure what my skin tones look like and skin tone indicator you'll see right there when I hover over it is looking pretty good

Yeah it's looking pretty good I think I just want to warm it up a touch so I'm just gonna grab it and warm it up a touch and now I'm gonna hover over right here I think I want to warm it up a little bit more but not necessarily add red okay this is looking much better so I'm happy with this and if I do before and after or if I just reset this and then this is where we started this is where

We ended up looking so much better now with that I feel like we can just go under our primaries take my left and pull it down just a tiny bit not too much but I want to see what else I can get out of this image so even something like this and then I want to take my gain and crank it up a little bit I don't want her to have too much contrast though but I think this is looking much better

Okay so I'm gonna leave it right here at this point what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go under my secondaries and I'm going to go under windows this is how you access your windows right here I'm going to click on this circular little guy and I'm going to use the UI on the screen to control these I'm going to click right here and rotate it just slightly it's always a good practice to rotate your windows so they're not so linear and symmetrical

And at this point what I want to do is I'm going to move this up right now I'm going to go under my softness I'm going to crank it to somewhere around 12 ish something like that and at this point, I'm going to hit shift H so you guys can see what's going on I want to invert my window so I can affect the outside of it okay and let's just make it a little bit bigger I'm gonna move it over a little bit like that

And now what I want to do is I want to hit shift H so we can see what's happening I want to take my gamma I want to start cranking that down I'm going to go too far and I'm going to start pulling it up and then I'm going to leave it somewhere around here and now if I do before and after look at the difference and if I just click out of that window you guys can see the difference that we're making

Right just look at that what we created so I'm going to pull this down now three simple Windows I did not have to track it because she's right in the middle and um the reason why I wanted to build a new tree like this is that it is repeatable and it is super simple not intimidating at all okay so let's just kill these and let me show you so we started with setting up our

Exposure then we went and created a nice contrast we went back to our primaries and we adjusted the colors using our offset and then we created a window to control the background so we have more emphasis on our girl in the middle and uh there's no artifacting none of that and guys look at this the result we were able to achieve now mind you this is your Rec 709 so people who are like Rec 709 looks better look Rec 709 always will be a starting point, okay it will

Never be your final grade so this was the rec 709 out of this camera and this is what we ended up with that is just one direction the beauty of color grading is that you can go in hundred different ways but this same footage now let's jump into our deliver page and Export this puppy out all you have to do in here just use the presets okay as a starting point so if you want to export it for YouTube or Vimeo h264 Master

You're good to go if you want to export a Master with the highest quality you can just do programs 422 HQ or you can change that to 444 especially if you're working with Alexa or red footage once you're set up you can just hit add to render queue and then it's going to ask you hey where do you want to save this file and let's just say that we go here under deliverables we hit save and now it's going to add it right here and then once it's added here all you have to do

It just hit render all and boom it's going to shoot it there under file name obviously you can change the name if you like and then that is going to get updated right here hit render all and you're ready to go and it's just that simple so there you go quick and easy overview on how to start making your footage sing if you have any content suggestions drop them in the comments also what was the last movie or show that you watched and what did you think

Of the color, I want to know I just re-watched Shutter Island and the look is to die for it came out a while back but it still holds up ridiculously