Transcripts
1. Intro: Anyone who's used to Vinci
Resolve has seen these things. They're called nodes, and Da Vinci Resolve is
a node-based program. One of the first questions that any resolve user ask
is, what are they? Why do I need them? How do I use them and how do they work? In this class, I'm
going to enter all those questions
for you and I'm going to give you
all the answers. [MUSIC] This class
is for anyone who's wanting to improve
their grade and basically have a
grade that's a lot more like a
professional colorist. Any professional colorist uses a combination of serial nodes, parallel nodes, and
layer nodes to get a really great,
high-quality, clean grade. I'm Fred Trevino,
and I've been in colorist for over ten years, and I've graded over 50
feature-length film and hundreds of short-form projects
for companies like HBO, Google, ESPN, Versace,
and a lot more. What I hope you get out
of this class is to learn what a node is and how
they all work together. Every professional colorist uses a combination of all these, a serial node, a parallel node, and layer nodes altogether to create really
great clean high-end grades. Also in this class, I'm not just going to show you how they all work individually, but I'm going to put them
all together in a grade so you can see how they might
work in the real world. Also, at the end, I'll
have a project for you so that you can
download the footage, work on them on your own, and get real-world
hands-on experience. If you're ready to get started, let's jump right in.
2. What Are Nodes?: In this lesson, before we
jump into the lessons, I just wanted to give
a quick explanation of what nodes are, how they work, and
some of the benefits of using nodes in
DaVinci Resolve. Which by the way, absolutely if you want to get any good grade, you definitely have to use nodes and the different
kinds of nodes. Most of the time
when beginners are trying to do something
in DaVinci Resolve, it's because they're using the wrong node or
they don't know what they're doing with
the nodes and they're using a serial node
for everything. Basically, DaVinci Resolve works base off of a node tree, or a node structure
of adjustments. What that means is basically that it works on a
system where you apply one adjustment and then you apply a second
adjustment and then that second adjustment is based
off of the first and they all layer and piggyback
off of each other. Some of the benefits of
nodes are, Number 1, organization, it's much
better to have, say, five or six different
nodes where maybe the node Number 1 is called
base adjustment, node Number 2 is
called contrast, Number 3 is maybe called
color temperature, four is maybe an
adjustment on the face, five is an adjustment
in the background, six is maybe on trees, etc. It's easier to look at something as a no-tree showing Steps 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 all the way through
the end of your grade. Another reason that
that's useful on a professional level
is when you're sitting with someone
and you're working, you have to be able
to break apart every single step and show
them the before, the after. This is what it
looked like before I made this person's face a little brighter or a little darker. It's a big part of staying organized as a
professional colorist. Now the technical side
of nodes is that they work based off the color science and the pipeline of DaVinci Resolve is that
when you apply nodes, they all either work one after the other based off of
what came before it. Or for example, in a parallel node, things
happen simultaneously. Or for example, in a layer node, things get layered on
top of each other. These are all things
that you have to see in the real-world so you can
see how they function, how they work together, how they work
individually so you can get the most out of them. Now that I've got
that out of the way, let's jump right in and
talk about serial nodes.
3. What are Serial Nodes?: In this lesson we are going
to cover serial node, which is the most
basic type of node. Let's jump right in. To give you an idea of
how serial nodes work, as the name gives you a hint, it's really a way of
working where you simply do one adjustment and you just stack them on
top of each other. If you are familiar
with Photoshop, it works that way where
you do adjustment one and that builds
on adjustment two and then two bills on 3, 4, 5 and they're just
stacked on each other. The one that you do next is based on the one
that came before it. In this situation,
this one here, the eye boost, can be adjusted based off of this and this can be
adjusted based off of that, and this can be adjusted
based off of this, et cetera. Let's jump right in so I can show you what
I mean by that. Then, all of these will make sense once we cover that
in the next lessons, the parallel node and also
the layer node because they all work together and they
all make sense together. For this grade for example, here we have this nice
shot here of makeup. The first adjustment
that I'm going to do is just a very basic adjustment. If I turn this on
the first node in this node tree, it's
basically that. Again, it really
doesn't matter what the before and after looks like, this class isn't really about the color correction per se
and how I did something, so I just pre-made
these node trees. But this is the original
shot and then this is the initial adjustment
and then from here made an adjustment
to the skin, so if I turn this on, you can see that what I actually
did was I went down here and I keyed her skin and
I warmed up her skin. Again, this is the skin
before and this is after. Then the third thing
I did is I went over here into the curves, which if you haven't checked out my recent class on
curves, check that out, and I went here and you
can see that I selected the blues to make that pop, and I also selected
the reds by simply clicking on the
reds and the blues. That's the before, and that's the after,
before and after. I'm making very
basic adjustments. Then on the fourth node, I adjusted the contrast again
to give it a little bit of a pop. I went with that. There we go. Then
on this last one, I just created a window to make the eye pop
forward a little bit. This was before, and
this is after. Go here. Then I also added a microscopic
amount of sharpening, which again doesn't
matter because we're just learning about
serial nodes. But again, this was the
before and this is the after. That's basically how
serial nodes work. It's that simple, so simple that at this point it may be a
little bit confusing. But again, once you see
how the next lesson, how parallel nodes work and
how low layer nodes work, this will make a
little bit more sense. The way this pipeline works
and the color correction, think of this dot here
as the original clip, and that's the
highest quality clip. As you make adjustment 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, you get further away from the original clip,
the original file. In some ways, you don't
take this the wrong way, but in some ways
you lose quality, a certain quality or a certain
type of dynamic range. Don't get scared, this
does not mean at all that if you have 30 nodes or 10 nodes that you don't want to have
that many serial nodes because the one at
the very end will be super low quality, like you're working off of a HD clip that's very pixelated, that's not what I mean by that. What I mean is that
the dynamic range of certain colors in certain
shadows and certain highlights, maybe tougher to manipulate
once you start going down the line on serial nodes if
you only use serial nodes. That's what the next
lessons are for, where I'll cover parallel nodes. Again, this stuff
tends to scare people, this also does not mean do not use serial nodes
because serial nodes are what's used 90 percent
of the time in all grades. But I think to understand nodes, a part of it is understanding
the pipeline of how color works and also how some visual effects
work, how Photoshop works. Those of you that have a
little Photoshop experience may understand what I mean by the fact that things layer on top of each other and stack
on top of each other. In a nutshell, that's
how they work. This is the source
original file, and then as you make more
and more adjustments, if you're making basic
adjustments like this where, this is not a dramatic grade, I went from this to this. Even though it didn't make
a lot of adjustments, it's nothing super
crazy, super stylized, I'm just simply making what you might call a
basic color correction, which is why serial
nodes work fine. In the next lesson, I'm going to cover
parallel nodes, which will give you insights of when those are useful
and how you can use serial nodes and parallel nodes together.
I'll see you there.
4. What are Parallel Nodes?: Now we are on the lesson
on parallel nodes. Right away you will
see that the node tree looks pretty different
from the serial nodes, which is all one
continuous line. Again, I'll show you
step-by-step about what was done here so you
can see how they work. Node 1, I did again
a base adjustment, this is by the way, is
the exact same adjustment as I did on the serial nodes. Then what I did from
here is I applied a very heavy warming adjustment. You probably think this
looks crazy right now, but I applied a
very heavy warmth to the shot and then I did
something similar as before, I then selected the orange in her eye and made an
adjustment there, the pink in the eye and made an adjustment there
to bring it out a little, and then I added blue and made an adjustment to the blues to bring that out a little bit. That was basically just
adding a little warmth to that to cancel out the heavier color
temperature change that I did on the first node. For the pink one same thing. I just added blue to
the color temperature to cancel out the
warmth on the pink, and then the orange is
already orange but I still pulled back a little bit. Since that one is already
orange anyway and that's the look that
we were going for. Then towards the end here
I simply added a vignette. That's the look that
we were going for, a warm look or the makeup
still pops out a little bit. The way a parallel
node works is that, the way these are stacked up
in parallel to each other, it means that if you remember what I said
in a previous lesson, that the nodes build upon what came before them
and that nodes that are closer to this point
here are closer to the source original clip that has all of
the dynamic range. You can see that they're all pulling from this base grade. The warmth is
pulling from there, the orange is pulling from here, the pink is pulling from there, and the blue is
pulling from there. Why did I build this
adjustment that way? Well, let me show you how I not, let me turn these
off to show you. Had I done a serial node tree
to try to create that look, it wouldn't have worked or if it would have worked it
would have been a lot harder, it would have taken
a lot longer and it just wouldn't have
looked as good. I'm just going to
turn it all off. Had I gone here and done my
base adjustment and then gone to warmth and then
created a serial node, which you do by
hitting option "S". Or the long way is going
up the color nodes, add serial node,
but that's easier. But had I created the warmth here and then edit
a serial node, which is what this is here, I'll just name that serial. There we go. Then try to key
the blue or select the blue, which is what I did here. Let me see, I keyed
this blue but now watch me try it
on a serial node. You can see that I
can't select the blue, I can't get it as easily, and it selects all of her skin, it selects the blue, it selects her eye, it selects her eyelashes, it selects this whole
big chunk here. It grabs because it's doing this selection based off of
this very, very yellow shot. To DaVinci Resolve, even though it's a
very smart program, computers are still pretty dumb. What it's doing it's making this key off of this very
yellow warm shot. To DaVinci Resolve,
it can't know that, "Oh, you're trying to
click on the blue." Even though it's blue to us, DaVinci Resolve sees it
as a shade of orange because it has such
a heavy orange cast. When you click on that, what it's seeing is orange
and a heavy orange cast, which is why it
selects all of that. If I turn that off
and go to this blue, you can see right away
what the key selected. This was obviously
tweaked a little bit, but the keys are much easier
to select because it's doing this blue off of
this image here. See how it's taking this
blue from this image, and in this image, the blue is a lot
easier to pick out, it's much more obvious. Even if I turn this
off and that's mean I'm just going to
make an additional blue, an additional
parallel node here, link to that, and then I click on the blue. See what I did, it just is a much cleaner key
than what this did, which is a total mess. You're doing this, or
you're doing this. You decide which one's better. This one is way better
and way easier. Let me delete this horrible one, I'll delete that one and I'll turn that on
so you can see it. That in a nutshell describes
how a parallel node works, how it thinks, how it functions, and the fact is that it
pulls everything off of what came before it so you
get a cleaner adjustment, a cleaner key, a cleaner grade. It might be with the curves, it might be with all tools, it grabs everything
from this right here, this cleaner image, not this. Remember that next time
you do an adjustment, something that a lot of
beginners do is they simply do a ton of cereal
nodes and they have something like
that and then they get way down here and then they
tried to key something, try to adjust it,
and it's hard to do. Delete those. But if you do a parallel,
you could do that. Just remember that next time, that's how a
parallel node works. Then at the end here
I can just turn that on to add a little
bit more style to it. But in the next lesson now, we are going to
cover layer nodes, which are similar to parallel nodes but they're
a little bit different, so I'll see you there.
5. What is a Layer Mixer Node?: Here is the lesson
on layer nodes. Like I said before, this is
similar to parallel nodes, but just have a slight
difference to them. Also before we jump in, I just want to point out that layer nodes are definitely
a rarely used node. I feel like what you're going
to use most of the time, is a serial node, and then, in a
very close second, it's parallel node, or really all of those together. Layer node is one of
those things that honestly is very rare. You usually use them
for special effects, or very extreme grades, or very stylized grades. The way they basically work, here's the node
structure which you can see is similar to parallel, the only difference
is this icon here, it looks a little different. I'm going to make
the first adjustment same as always, the
base adjustment. Then one thing you need to
remember about these here, as soon as I make a
layer adjustment here, which is Option L, or again, long way here, which by the way, this shows you the
keyboard shortcut in case you're curious, Option L, the way layer nodes work is a little confusing because again, going back to Photoshop
or parallel nodes, when you have things like this that are stacked
on each other, usually, what
happens is you have, this is the bottom
layer and then this is the top layer and
things progress up, and the thing on top is dominant over the
thing on the bottom, but in a layer node,
it's the opposite. If I turn this on,
nothing happens. If I turn this on, that's the warmth
that we did before. One thing that I usually do
when I create a layer node, just for visual purposes, because we're probably all
visual people is I just flip these because
for layer nodes, the bottom node is actually
visually represented on top. I usually just do
that so that I know that this is actually the bottom and then
when I turn on blue, boom, you can see
it turned it on. The way layer nodes work is that similar to the
parallel nodes, they do draw
information from here, however, with layer nodes rather than blending all of them
together, if you remember, I had the warmth and I
had the blue selected, and the red makeup, and the orange, and they
all blended together in a parallel node, with this, for example, when I
turn this on and off, and I show it to you here, rather than this and this blending together
into one grade, whenever you key something
or bring something out, you're literally bringing
out this original image. In a parallel node, it would be a thing
where I'm warming it up and then I'm
selecting the blue. Then I would, for example, go into the warmth. Notice there's no adjustment
here to the warmth at all, because in a parallel
node you would typically create the warmth and then it's too warm and
then you would key the blue, then the blue would probably
look something like that, like it did in the
previous lesson, and then you make the
adjustment to bring out the blue and make it
pop a little bit more. That's not how the
layer nodes work. The way the layer nodes
work is that it's literally cutting
out that part of the orange image to show you what's underneath
it, which is this. For example, if I were
to turn this off, that is why when I
turn this on and off, you don't see any change at all, and it's because what's
actually happening, it's showing me this speck of blue here through the warmth. Again, that's basically
what's happening. If I were to say just
to create another one, Option L, you can see
it's immediately clear, which is something
that's confusing at first when you're
first doing this, it's immediately clear and
then if I were to select, let me go here and qualify, let's say the red, there you go. What happened was it
simply keyed the red but it opened the window to what's underneath
it, which is this. I'm not keying it and then
doing any other adjustment, just letting it pop through. That's useful in a
lot of situations. Again, I don't want to spend
too much time on this lesson because there's a lot of other ways to do what
this tool does now. It's definitely an older tool. It has its time, and its place, and its purpose, and it's a good tool to know, but it is very rarely used. In a year I maybe
use this two times, and I think most
colorists are the same. But it does have a place because
sometimes, for example, if you click on this "Layer adjustment mixer," if you're
wanting to do crazy effects, you can always
right-click on this. Go to Composite
Mode and then blend different things if
you're wanting to create crazy looking
things like that, here like I'm changing it. That's basically what
the layer node does. It's more for effects. It's more for experimentation
to pull things across, whereas the parallel
node is used for color correction and they
just all work together. This stack things on top and is more for visual
effects purposes. Then to keep it going, you see I just went ahead
and turned on the vignette. That's the layer mixer node. In the next lesson, I'm going to put all
of these together. That also will probably make this come out a little
bit more clear and the parallel nodes come
out clear and you'll see them all working together in a grade so you can see how they might work in real life.
I'll see you there.
6. Bringing it All Together : Now in this lesson
we're going to put it all together
and build a grade. Here we have an
entirely new shot, it looks nice from the get-go. Again, a base adjustment is
what we do in the first one. This is a Serial Node, and it's really just
a basic shadows, mid-tones highlights adjustment, and then here I did
a parallel node. The first thing I did is I want to push this a little bit
towards the look for this, make it prettier and
more pronounced. I push the pinks
out a little bit. That's probably pretty obvious, but I'll go before and
after and said the before, you could see it
had a green tone to it, and there's after. Then I selected her skin. I did that by keying
her skin here, apply a little blur
radius to smooth it out, and then I also applied a
little denoising as well. There we go. That just
creates the effect. This is the before, after just to bring out her
skin a little bit better. Before, after it looks
a little warmer, healthier and more tanned. The reason I did that is just to have both of these keys draw from this and to make for a cleaner adjustment
and a cleaner grade. Because had I tried to key
this from the pink image, it might have been a
little bit hard to do, because it might've pulled
some of the white background, for example and by having them both work off
of the original, it just makes the
keying and everything simpler, easier and faster. Then after this I created a layer adjustment and notice that these are crisscrossed. Remember, because in
the layer adjustment it's backwards and you want to move that
to the top so you can know that this is
actually the base layer, which is this effect
that I created just to give it like a pink
stylized look. But that's a bit heavy handed. It cuts off part of her body
and her body and the top, and so then I keyed
her skin again. I did that to bring up
this layer of skin, the warm skin tones
that I created before so I don't lose those
with the pink over it. I keyed the skin again, and notice how it
brings that out because it cuts
out this layer of skin through the layer so that I don't have this
heavy handed approach. You can see it brings her out. That's a pretty complicated
grade that I'm showing to you very easily,
very quickly. If you tried to
do something like this without a layer node, it would be really tough to do. It would take way longer. It might even borderline
visual effects. But again, by going
to a base grade, adding pink to the overall image and balancing out the greens, keying her skin so it looks
really nice and healthy, and then I want to
add this effect, but then I want to
smooth out the effect by bringing out the
skin again and not losing it behind that pink wall. I do a layer node. Then from here I can maybe add an additional serial node here
to bring it all together, and then maybe I'll go here and just play with the exposure, bring it down to give
it a little bit more of a moody look like that. Then we can see that if
we play through this, here's to look we created. We went from this look which
you see has green to this. We could make a little
bit more adjustments. Her eyes are too black
and I could do stuff there to bring those
out a little bit more. But for now really that
is bringing everything together from serial nodes to parallel nodes
to layer nodes. In the next lesson I'm going
to go over the project, which I really hope you do, because really that's
the best way to learn. If you just watch the videos, you'll probably
forget half of it. In the next lesson,
I'm going to go over the project. I'll see you there.
7. Project: In this lesson, I want
to go over the project. It's really going to be
a pretty simple project. This is a project that
you definitely want to do because of all things nodes are definitely something
that once you do a little bit of hands-on
experience you'll definitely understand them much
more because they are such an abstract tool
to use in Resolve. What you want to do is
you want to go into the Project & Resources page on the website and over
here on the right, simply click on the
clip and download it. The clip is called
nodes great clip.mp4, bring it into Da Vinci Resolve. If you'd like, you can follow
along on the Putting It Altogether lesson that came before and just go
through the steps, but here, really quickly, I'm just going to
cover what was done. What I did was just
simply a base adjustment. You don't have to do
exactly what I did. In fact, I prefer if you
just had fun with it. Do your own thing, get creative with it, but this is basically just a
Lift Gamma Gain adjustment. Then from here, I adjusted the tint to make it a
little bit less green. Again, here's what I did just a little bit of adding
a little bit of the magenta to it and then
I keyed her skin tone, actually both of
their skin tones by going into the key
here, selecting it, and then again adding a blur radius just
so that the keys are a little bit smoother
and then I also like adding a little
bit of denoise. Then the next one I went
through and I added these pink effect towards the bottom just by simply
creating a square window, inverting it here, and then pushing
the gain towards the magenta pink direction. Then what really created the
effect after that was adding a layer node in which I keyed the skin again and
did the same blur and denoising to
make it a smoother, easier, more realistic key, and then I just simply adjusted. This is just a very
simple in the HDR window. I simply adjusted the exposure and dropped that
down a little bit. Again, I know I went through
there quickly but it's basically because I want
you to use your creativity. You don't have to
do this exactly. You can adjust the base to your liking and then do these other adjustments
however you'd like. What I want you to
again to really understand is just
the basic guidelines. It's really just
about going in here, doing a grade while using a serial node, some
parallel nodes, a layer node, and then if you want
to finish it off with a final serial node so you can see how they
all come together. Then from there,
it's much easier for me to see these in motion. Export it, upload it to YouTube, and then just in
the projects page, share your YouTube link. Make sure it's public and not private so
that I can view it, let you know what I think. That's the project, definitely, hands-on is a much
better way to go when learning about nodes
and so do that. Let me know if you have
questions at all in the discussions and I'm looking forward to seeing
all of your projects.
8. Final Thoughts: That's the end. Congratulations
on finishing the class. Hopefully, you have a better understanding
of nodes now, how they work, and how
they work together. Definitely download the footage, work on the project, and any questions you have ask below in the discussions page. Also, if you're interested in any supplementary
videos or lessons, check out my YouTube
channel here. I'm always posting stuff or also check out
my other classes. I cover everything from intro stuff all the
way to advanced stuff. Thank you again, and
I'll see you next time.
Fred Trevino, Colorist & Top Teacher
