Transcripts
1. Intro: In this class I'm going to
cover 15 lifesaving time saving tips for Da Vinci resolve that are going to make
your life way easier. These will save you tons of time and will make you
much more efficient. So I promise you, whether you're a professional
filmmaker, colorist editor, or an absolute beginner, I promise you probably don't
know most of these tips. I'm Fred Trevino and I've been a professional colorist
for bean box studio. I've graded over 15 feature length films
and I've worked on hundreds of short form projects
for companies like HBO, ESPN Under Armor,
just to name a few. So in the past 15 years, I've learned a lot about
working efficiently quickly. Now these are just 15
unrelated pseudo random tips. But they are tips
that I definitely wanted to let you
know because they are tips that really you only
use in the real world. They're kind of tough to squeeze
into your typical class. So I'm just going to lay
them all out here for you. Pick and choose what you want. But these are tips that I use every single day on
every single project. So with that being said,
let's jump right in.
2. Tip #1 Contrast Pivot: Okay, so tip number one
for Da Vinci resolve is using the contrast pivot
tool in the color window. So I'm sure you understand
what contrast is, but for those of you that don't, contrast is basically what gives your image a little bit of
pop, a little bit of depth. On a technical side, it's really just stretching the darkest dark in your image
to the brightest bright. That normally means
nothing to most people. But just know that when
you increase contrast, you give a little
pop to your image. Your image has a
little bit more depth. And high contrast is good, or low contrast is good depending on the look
you're going for. And then pivot really. And I'm not going to make
this a super technical class, it's going to go
into the weeds in regards to the technical
side of what things do, but just think of pivot is
like fine tuning the contrast. Anytime I adjust the contrast, 99.9% of the time, I also adjust the pivot. Contrast is kind of a
broad adjustment of the contrast and then pivot is a fine tuning adjustment
of the contrast. So really the tip in this
one is the pivot tool, because most people
do adjust contrast. But the pivot tool is really where you can
separate something looking normal or more on the level of a
professional colorist. So if you haven't played
with pivot yet or the combo of contrast
pivot which go together, I would highly recommend
jumping on that right away. And in your next video,
use those tools. Okay, and so now let's
jump over to the next tool where I'm going to let you
know what midtone details do.
3. Tip #2 Midtone Detail: Okay, now tip number two and that is using
mid tone detail. Basically what
midtone detail does, it can help sharpen
the midtone detail in your image or soften the mid
tone detail in your image. It's called midtone detail because in an image
you have shadows, midtones, and highlights. And most of your image, for the most part,
is in the mid tones. Those are usually
things like faces and the brighter
things in an image, Shadows are obviously
the shadows. For example, this window here
would be the highlights. My face and me, my jacket. More mid tones.
Sometimes you need to sharpen your image
just a little bit. But you don't want to
use the sharpened tool because then it looks
too over sharpened. Or sometimes you want
to soften something. Like if you're doing a beauty
grade or a beauty video, or if you just don't
want to show off actors, every pore and every
pimple on their face. You can lower the
midtone detail to soften it a little bit and
it look natural and organic. Or if you want something to
look a little bit more sharp but in a more natural way, more like you're using
a sharper lens and not just like you're increasing
the sharpness in the image, that's where you would
use the midtone detail. Again, use this tool, I
think you'll love it. In most cases, I
use it to soften an image in beauty grades or I use it to sharpen an image. This maybe just a little
bit out of focus. If the cinematographer got
a shot a little bit soft, I'll use the midtone detail
just to sharpen it up. Just a touch, again,
very useful tool. Okay, now let's jump
over to the next lesson where I will start talking
about the HDR tools.
4. Tip #3 HDR Exposure: Okay, tip number three is where we'll start talking
about the HDR tools. The HDR tools are some of my favorite individion resolve when people ask how do
you get a cinematic look, Really that's a very good
basic place to start. The HDR tools are
very misunderstood. But in a nutshell,
just know this HDR to your footage doesn't
have to be HDR footage. You don't have to
shoot an HDR footage. It doesn't really
have to be connected to HDR TV's and
all of that stuff. Just know that HDR tools will give a more
natural, organic optical quality adjustment
to your images, basically. What does that mean? When you use them, it'll
seem more like you did those adjustments in camera
versus in post production, which can tend to look
a little artificial, a little too much like you
slapped the filter on footage. Hdr tools are great for organic, natural optical
quality adjustments. Okay? And so the first
one that we're going to talk about is the exposure tool. So whenever I adjust exposure, for the most part, I
use the HDR tools and I use the exposure
adjustment in the HDR tools. Because again, for those of you that don't know
what exposure is, exposure is basically making your image brighter or darker. Okay. Did you shoot it very bright or did you
shoot it very dark? And if you want to make
your image brighter, you increase the exposure. If you want to make
your image darker, you decrease the exposure. The difference between
this and using it in the normal primary tools is that this will just look more
natural. It's that simple. Again, not going deep dive into the technical
side of things, but there's a time
and a place for the primary exposure adjustment. But if you want something
to just be more organic and naturally
brighter in the way it looks, then I would say use
the HDR tools to make your image
brighter or darker. Okay, now in the next lesson
we're going to stay with HDR tools and cover saturation.
So I'll see you there.
5. Tip #4 HDR Saturation: Okay, so tip number
four, HDR saturation. Same idea as the
exposure tool when you want to make something more saturated or
less saturated. I would recommend using the HDR tools because
it's just a more natural, organic looking
saturation level. If you raise the exposure in
the typical primary tools, things will just tend
to get very bright, very kind of electric, very video looking,
and saturation. And things can look over
saturated very quickly. Raising the saturation tool in the HDR tools is a much
more subtle subdued, prettier way of increasing
the saturation. So I would say always play with the HDR tools and raise
and lower the saturation. So we're staying on the
theme of the HDR tools. The next three tools
are HDR tools. Let's jump over to the next one, which is not as
known as something like exposure or saturation. And that is the light
adjustment in the HDR tools. So let's jump right over
to the next lesson.
6. Tip #5 HDR Light: Okay, so tip number five, HDR tool light. So and every image, as
I mentioned before, you have the shadows, which is the darker part of the image. You have the mid tones, which is the middle. Stuff like my face, my jacket, things like that. Then you have the highlights. And then there's a place between the midtones and the highlights. I am a midtone, my face is mid tones. This window is a highlight. And then something in between
that are known as light. The lights, okay, easily confused with just a
light in the room. This high light here, that's being created by this window here, that would be considered a
light part of an image. In the HDR tools, you can isolate
very specific parts of your image and raise that
or lower that for video. Typically, you are lowering something also because
video tends to have very bright highlights that give it a very video kind of look. Again, If you want to go
with a more cinematic look, you will usually tend to
lower the high lights, okay? Otherwise known as high
light compression, which is again, a technical term for just making things look a little softer, smoother, for example, if you had an image and you thought someone's face
was a little too bright, or someone's skin tone
was a little too bright, or maybe a white shirt or something was a
little too bright. You could simply
adjust the lights in the HDR tools and it would bring down only that tiny
little bit of the image. Most people, if they make
such a fine tune adjustment, will use the key tool. Which means you have
to key the image. It's a lot more work and
can be a lot messier. You can create a lot
of digital noise, and it's just a
harder tool to use. But the HDR tools are great at locking in on very
specific parts of the image. And not only is it easier
and faster to use, but the results tend
to be much better and look much more natural
and much more organic. Use the HDR light tool, and I think your images
will look a little bit more cinematic and you'll save a
lot of time in the grade. In the next tool, we're going to cover highlights or again, things like this bright window right here, I'll see you there.
7. Tip #6 HDR Highlight: Okay, we are moving fast
through these tips. Tip number six is adjusting the highlights
using the HDR tool. This has a very common use, which is basically something
that happens all the time, especially with beginner
cinematographers, filmmaker shooters. And that is when windows
are very blown out, way too bright, overexposed, or something is
very overexposed. One of the most common errors when you're a beginner
cinematographer, if you use the HDR tools and
the high light adjustments, it will bring down just the absolute brightest
parts of the image. You can use the HDR tools to bring something
down like that, and it will only target that very bright
part of the image, creating a very
smooth, kind of misty, organic natural film like prettier highlight
adjustment than just dropping it down
and making it darker. Really, a lot of
these recent tips are using the HDR tools more which are, again, very misunderstood. But I'm showing you the
most common tools to use, which will save
you the most time, and they are the most
commonly used in an image. Okay, so the next one is going to be the opposite
of the highlights, and it's called black offset.
I will see you there.
8. Tip #7 HDR Black Offset: Now in this lesson, I'm
covering tip number seven and that is
the black offset. As the name says, you
adjust the blacks, the darkest parts of the image. In this image here, it would probably
be something like my hair or any shadows
in the background, but most likely my hair. If you have a dark
image at night, you're adjusting a lot more than if you
were shooting see on a bright white sands beach
in Mexico somewhere. So just know that
the black offset is again a film like natural, more organic, optical
quality adjustment. And as far as a
look is concerned, creating a look for a film
or a project black offsets, you see them all the time
because they tend to create a push or pull look
when it comes to film. For those of you that know 35 millimeter actual physical film, you can create looks
that mimic a push or pull in the film processing. If you don't know what that
means, don't worry about it. Just understand that you can
use it to raise the black, the very blackest blacks
or shadows in your image. Or lower them to create a very pretty natural
film like look. Most people will raise the black offset and that
gives you a very popular look. A lot of people don't
know how to do that. There's a lot of
ways to do that. But black offsite is
probably the easiest, fastest, and more natural
looking way of doing it. Okay. So that was
the last HDR tool. If you use all of those
combined together, the light, the black offset, the saturation, the exposure, all those that I've
showed you earlier, I think you will take your projects and
they will just have that extra thing about them that will make them look a
little bit more cinematic. Now we're going to move away to something that's
a little bit more of an efficiency tool and that
is working with power grades. So I'll see you in
the next lesson.
9. Tip #8 Power Grades: Okay, so we're about halfway
done with this class and number eight is working
with power grades. So power grades are a
grade that you save across all your projects in
Divinci resolve so that you can use that
same grade anytime, anywhere on any project, so they're saved in divini
resolve as a whole, not in a specific project
you're working on. So they're most
commonly used to re, use looks or notrees,
things like that. And they're most commonly used in studio situations.
For example, I tend to use power grades
in something like this. A class I shoot in the similar, the same environment
all the time, same lighting set up,
nothing changes, really. Why Reinvent the wheel every
single time and regrade this every single time when
I can save a power grade. And no matter what
class I'm doing, whether it's now or
five years from now, I can simply apply
that power grade. And it applies the
same adjustments for this lighting set up for
this lighting situation. If you are someone who say has shoots a lot of
corporate videos, a lot of interviews, if
you shoot in a studio, or maybe if you're shooting
five different people in the same space on the
same day, at the same time, It might be good to just do one power grade and
apply that to everyone else rather than
having to regrade and reinvent the wheel over
and over and over again. How do you create a power grade? You simply grade a project. For example, I have
a grade for say, this type of interview set up. You have a tab to the left and division resolve.
It says power grades. You simply right
click on the viewer, there's an option,
the save still. If you save it in
the power grade bin, then that grade will be saved universally for all divienture, resolve projects and then when the next
project comes along, you simply paste
that grade to it. Make your small tweaks, small adjustments
that you need to for whatever subtle
differences are in that new project, and
then you're done. It can go from taking 15 to 20 minutes or more to
just taking two or 3 minutes. Power grades are super useful.
10. Tip #9 Power Bins: Okay, so now in this lesson
is similar to power grades. Power grades are more for
colorist and copying looks. But we also have
something in Davinci resolve that are
called Power bins. These are a little
bit more for editors and editing and making
things much more efficient. So what are power bins? Anyone who edits regularly will understand that if
you edit regularly, you have very similar B roll that you use on every project. You have, you know,
titles, graphics, a lot of stuff that
you re use over and over again on whether
you do classes like this or whether you
do Youtube videos or whether you shoot
corporate videos and apply very similar stuff. A lot of editing work can be very repetitive work and power
bins are so that you can save media universally across Davinci resolve
for all projects. So for example, let's say you
have the same B role that use for a lot of your videos or you have the
same music folder, the same titles
and graphics that you import for all
of your projects. Rather than doing that over and over and over again
for every project, which from experience
you may know can get annoying and sometimes
you forget where things are. Well, if you create
a power bin and then import all of your B roll, all of your music
titles, graphics, things that you use regularly
into that power bin. That footage that media will be on every project
that you create. It's there for everything and so that saves you the
time of having to re, import everything,
reorganize everything for every single project. And what you'll
usually have to do is only import your KM or your B M. And then all the
other stuff like B roll will always
be in every project. And the way you
do that is simply going into the top menu there, clicking on the
three little dots and then turning on power bins. And then they'll show
up on the left side. And then whatever you put there, you can create new bins, organize things,
put stuff in there, and then that'll be
in every project. This is one of my
favorite things to do. It saved me so much time
and it makes my editing workflow much faster and
much more efficient. Okay, so now we're
going to stick with the theme of efficiency, and in the next lesson I'm going to discuss the cut page.
So I'll see you there.
11. Tip #10 Cut Page: Okay, so tip number
ten is really a tip, not on a specific tool
like I've been doing, but it's really just about
learning to use the cut page. I do have a class
on the cut page, so if you're interested
check that out. But to put it simply the cut page is something
that ventris off created. It's an editing page
just like the edit page adventure resolve and
I know it's confusing. You have the edit page,
you have the cut page. No one knows what
the differences are. But think of cut page as
something designed for speed efficiency for small
screens like laptops. And it's honestly a
page that I use all of the time because I like to
edit quickly, efficiently. The edit tool has every
bell and whistle, anything you could need under the sun and sometimes you
don't need all that stuff. The way I like to
compare the two is the edit page is like using Photoshop and the cut page
is like using light room. Sometimes you just need
those very basic tools to do a basic quick edit, A first cut, a rough
cut, a second cut. And then when you get down to the very nitty gritty polishing, you jump over to the edit page. Especially if you
edit on a laptop, you see more, you have
only the tools you need. So I would say again, if you
want to edit much faster, much more efficiently,
get familiar with the cut page,
check out my class. And I promise that once you
start using the cut page, you'll rarely jump over to the edit page unless
you absolutely need to. Big tip, very unknown tip. Most people are still using the edit page because it's
the most familiar to them. But I promise if you just spend a few hours getting
familiar with the cut page, you will absolutely love it. So in the next lesson,
I'm going to go a little bit over
the Cloud workflow, which is a little known
workflow that again, you know, all these tips will save you hours and hours of time and
work and wasted energy. And I'll give you a little tip on using the Cloud workflow.
12. Tip #11 Cloud Workflow: Okay, so tip number 11 is to
please use a Cloud workflow. Again, this is another one of those tools that once
you start using it, you wonder how you ever
worked without it beforehand. This one's a little
bit more complex, but I'll try to simplify it. And again, I do have a class on the cloud workflow which I very highly
recommend you taking. But to understand the cloud workflow, let
me give you a scenario. Okay, so let's say you have a Macbook and you also
have a desktop computer. And maybe you have an ipad and you work with
multiple people. You maybe have a director, a cinematographer, or even if
you do everything yourself. Similar to me, I make
all of these classes. I shoot, edit,
color grade, Sound. I do it all myself. What the cloud workflow does, it allows you to shoot on any camera at the highest quality, no
matter how you shoot. Let's say you have a
red camera and you shoot in everything
in 12 K raw, okay? But you may be we just want
to go out somewhere to a coffee shop or you're
traveling and you want to edit. Well, we all know that
you can't really edit this raw red footage
because it's massive. You need terabytes of storage. Your computer may
not be fast enough. A lot of laptops aren't fast
enough and if they are, you have to change the quality setting to like a
quarter or a half, things like that, you
know, things like that. Anyone who's worked
with any sort of four K even, you know, I know a lot of people
who don't shoot in four K because it's too big and their
computer can't handle it. So you can shoot in
this mega giant format, ten K, 100 K, Whatever you bring it into
Davinci resolve, you don't have to
lift the finger. Da Vinci will
automatically create high quality proxies that will work on your system that will play back
smoothly easily. And you can take that laptop, you can take even
the ipad, you know, You can edit on a plane, you can edit on a coffee shop. You can just, you know, work at home so that you can
just work easily and you don't have to worry
about changing the quality and things playing back slowly and having all this hard drive space
that you're taking up. So a cloud workflow creates
proxies of all your footage, it throws it up on
the cloud and it syncs your timeline?
Yes, your timeline, Everything that you're
editing, your first cut, your second cut, your titles, your music, all that stuff. It puts it on the cloud, but it basically takes
you from a place where you're holding
yourself back from shooting in four K or shooting
in eight K or shooting at full quality because there's
too much storage space. Computer can't handle it
and you can work with proxies and you can work on multiple devices and you can
also share those timelines. So if you have a friend who's helping you edit and
they have resolved, you can then share
that timeline. And they'll see on
their computer. They can give notes,
they can collaborate, you can chat in Devin
resolve itself, or if you're working
with an editor, they can edit there and you can see what they're doing
on your computer. It's really
collaborative workflows and efficient workflows so that file size is not an issue anymore and
you can work anytime, any place with anyone
and share any project. I think it's one of those
workflows that just completely changes how you
work, how you do things. And it's a much more modern collaborative workflow. Especially in a world like today where so many people are
working remote and you want to share good
high quality files across the planet
or across town.
13. Tip #12 Audio Presets: Okay, here we are, rounding out the
end tip number 12. And that is again
similar to power bins, power Windows, and that
is to have audio presets. So for those of you who are
doing some audio editing, even if it's basic
audio editing, for example, in my
situation I can talk into a camera and I use
this Lobelia right here. I can do screen
recordings where I have another microphone and then
I also have a shotgun mic. So three different environments, three different microphones. But I shoot in very
similar situations. For example, in this studio, sit up here again, why reinvent the wheel every single time when I can do EQ, and applying my
audio filters and audio adjustments to my
microphones one time. And then you can
save those settings. In the Fair Light
tab, for example, I use maybe a vocal filter all, or a background filter or a
noise reduction filter a lot. And so rather than
redoing those settings every single time
I do them once, I name them after the
microphone, for example. Maybe it might be this lavalier. And then anytime I
shoot anything I just simply go to my preset
drop down filter, select that, and then
my audio is adjusted. I might make small adjustments depending on the situation, but it cuts out 99% of the
work have audio presets, whether you have one
microphone or ten microphones, and it saves you a lot of time. Okay, the next lesson is a
little bit of a weird one, but it solves a
problem that I see a lot of editors make when
they're working with resolve. And that's something
called output blanking. If you don't know what
that is, let's jump to the next lesson
and we'll find out.
14. Tip #13 Output Blanking: Tip number 13 is going to
go for output blanking. This is a very
short one and it's basically a thing where I
see editors all the time. Usually if they're
coming from premiere, they want to have a 235
Matt or 239 Matt on their movie and they put a matt across
the entire timeline, even if it's a three hour movie and they black out the top, the bottom to make a 235
looking aspect ratio. Even if they're editing in
Davinci resolve and they moved over to Davinci resolve
from premiere or final cut, they do the same thing.
It's a waste of time. It's a waste of space
and it's a waste of two time lines that create these black bars across
the whole movie. There's a way to very
easily do this in Davinci resolve and that's
called output blanking. If you go into the
settings at the very top, when you're on the edit page, you can simply go in there, go to output blanking, and turn on whatever
aspect ratio you want. 2, 3, 5, 2, 3, 9, 1, 8, 5, 1, 7, 8, 4, 3. And that will simply apply those black bars across
the entire film, or you can turn them
off If you need to turn them off, that's the tip. Very easy. Save yourself time. Don't drop in a giant map bar across the entire
three hour movie. There you go. Output
blanking will save you time and make your
life a little bit easier.
15. Tip #14 Split Tool: Okay, now in this
lesson, tip number 14, and we're back to color, and this is for people who
want to match multiple shots. I would say a great tool
to use is the split tool. What does the split tool do? It simply shows you
at the same time, two shots, four shots, however many shots
you want to see. It shows them to you
at the very same time on the screen, in the viewer, so that you can then
make adjustments and make sure that all of
those shots are matching. You can switch from shot to shot and make small
tweaks and make adjustments to make sure
everything matches perfectly. It's much easier than
toggling on one shot, jumping to another shot that's 3 minutes down or
ten clips down. And then you have to toggle
back and forth and you're not sure if they match
or playing back. You can simply split tool, select your items,
view them all, and make adjustments
right there in one place. Saves you a lot of
time and it will make your grades much more accurate. Okay, so now on to the last tip, voice isolation. It's
like a magical AI tool. So let's jump over
so you can see how the voice
isolation tool works.
16. Tip #15 Voice Isolation: Okay, so last tip, this one involves audio. We all know about AI. We all know how amazing it is, how scary, good it is, and the voice isolation tool is a perfect example for that. It almost makes it
to the point where you don't even need a
microphone anymore. You don't need to know
anything about audio because you can record the
worst audio for the most part. And I'm not saying
you should do that, but you can record
the worst audio. And the voice
isolation tool uses AI to isolate only your voice, a human voice, and just bring down everything
else around you. So rather than talking about it, let me show you really
quickly what it can do. Okay, so here I am
standing in front of probably one of the worst places that you can shoot for audio. And that is right next
to a busy loud road. You can hear this
is what it sounds like without the voice
isolation feature, and this is what it sounds like with the voice
isolation feature. As you can see, it's
way, way, way better. And again, here it is without the voice
isolation feature. And here it is with the
voice isolation feature on. And here it is with the
voice isolation feature turned on to 50% here it is, to 100% here it is
completely off. You can see there's even a
helicopter on. Here it is. With it on. Again,
as you can see, it makes a huge difference. I would definitely recommend it. You can see with that that the voice isolation tool is amazing at cleaning
background noise. But please don't use
this as a crutch And stop using a microphone and
buy the cheapest microphone. And forget everything you know about recording good audio. This is really meant more for recording good audio,
recording professional audio, and just kind of sweetening your audio a little bit
more, helping it out, or if you're just
in a situation like say a siren or a dog is barking, or there's some hum that came out of
nowhere to remove that. But the voice isolation tool is a lifesaver and it can take even your iphone
microphone and make it sound much closer to a
professional microphone. Okay, so there you go,
the voice isolation tool. So now let's jump over
to the final lesson.
17. Final Thoughts: Okay, so you watched
all 15 tips. Thank you so much for watching. I bet you got a lot out of this and you learned a lot of
new little tips and tricks. And I will say definitely
check out my other classes, especially the cloud, work flow, the cut page, all
that kind of stuff. Also check out my Youtube
channel here for kind of additional videos all
related to my classes, color, grading and
Davinci resolve. Or if you want a one on one lesson with me
about Davinci resolve, you can do that now by simply going into the one
on one lessons. I love meeting my students. See what you guys have to say, what you think, what
questions you have again. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you all later.
