DaVinci Resolve Essentials - Beginner Video Editing Course

1. Introduction to DaVinci Resolve: Hi there. My name is Dan Scott. And in this DaVinci Essentials course, I've teamed up with good friend and master editor, Wampus AKA Brandon Baldovin. So we'll work really hard together to make sure that this is the absolute best DaVinci course on the planet. So sign up and get ready for DaVinci Essentials with Wampus. Resolve isn't hard. It's just unfamiliar. And once somebody explains it the right way, it clicks. Well, hello out there. My name is Brandon Baldovin. But depending on where you look on the Internet, you may also know me as Wampus. If you don't edit with a blanket, I mean, what are we doing? I started out just making fun gaming videos with some friends. I've had the opportunity to work on weddings, music videos, trailers, short form videos, podcasts and long form documentaries. At this point, I've covered it all, if not at least most of it. Mind you, not at the Hollywood level, but I think that's why you and I can be a great fit because I understand where you're coming from. I understand the journey that you're about to go on. And now through Bring Your Own Laptop, I have the opportunity to teach a full course that I can confidently say will prepare you for anything, because the beautiful thing about DaVinci Resolve is that it covers everything and anything in the post production world. And I really mean anything. Unlike its competitors, DaVinci Resolve combines all aspects of the post production process into one comprehensive package, meaning that not only will we become proficient as editors, but we'll learn the basics of motion graphics and animation through the Fusion page, and we'll explore the Color page, which is unparalleled in its capabilities. We're going to cover a lot of techniques, but I'd also like to cover a lot of the Ys. I'd like to do is to give you the right tools and ingredients so that you can create anything that fits your taste. Editing is an art form at the end of the day. There is never a singular, correct or right answer. There are just better choices that we can learn to make. The only thing that you are going to need is your copy of DaVinci Resolve installed on whatever device you plan on learning on. All the course material will be provided for you at the end of each working class project. You will have a final render deliverable that you'll need to upload. Of these projects will be something that you can also use on your portfolio or Show reel to highlight some of the skills that you've learned. With all of that said, if you watch each of the laid out sections without skipping, you know who you are, you will walk away a confident editor and creator. So let's get familiar with DaVinci Resolve. 2. Getting Started in DaVinci Resolve: Everybody, it is officially GT. Let's go ahead and kick off the DaVinci Resolve Essentials course. Now, before we get started, there are a couple of things we need to make sure everybody has ready to go. On the course website, there will be exercise files, which is what we will use throughout the course for example footage and media for you to practice with. Go ahead and click download those files and unzip them. Depending on your operating system, it should look something like this. I'm going to have a couple extra folders in mind, but you should have a folder for each of the sections that we're going to use to talk about DaVinci Resolve. Make sure you move this out of your Downloads folder into an appropriate place on your computer so that we can access them as we move through the course. The other really big thing you're going to want to make sure you have ready to go is DaVinci Resolve. So if you haven't already, go ahead and download DaVinci Resolve. And the only place you should download DaVinci Resolve from is from Black Magic Designs website. Black Magic Design is the company behind DaVinci Resolve, so do not tress any other distributors. Make sure you download from the official source. Now, there are two versions of DaVinci Resolve. There's a free version and a paid version called Studio. Moving forward, if I ever mentioned the word Studio, I'm referring to the paid version of DaVinci Resolve. You are perfectly okay to use the free version throughout the entirety of this course. The free version of DaVinci Resolve is incredibly powerful. And there's only a few we'll call them smarter features inside DaVinci Roll Studio that'll be lacking in the free version. But, this course is tailored to the free version DaVinci. If there is an opportunity to use something that's in the paid version, I'll make sure to call it out. But again, one of the best parts of DaVinci Resolve, and probably the reason why a lot of you guys are here is because there is a free version, and the free version is incredibly powerful. So with that said, I will be editing on DaVinci Resolve 20. You might be operating on an older version DaVinci, or Version 21 and beyond might be out. The only difference that you'll find moving between DaVinci Resolve Version 20 or Version 19, 18, or again, if Version 21 is out at the point that you're watching this, some of the interface elements might be a little bit different. So a menu might have a few more buttons to it, or it might be in a slightly different location. But for the essentials course, everything that we're going to do is going to remain relatively the same. So do not be alarmed if you're not on the exact version that I'm using or if you're on a newer version or an older version. Only thing I'll say is that if you are on an older version, be aware that there might be a few new options that you don't quite have yet. And again, I'm on the Black Magic Design official website. The only thing that I like to call out here is that Black Magic Design actually has a support page. So if I go to the support website, it is here that we can download and access any version of Deventi Resolve that is officially released. So on their website, if you are on the home page, just go up top to Support. And then what you would want to do is go over and click DaVinci Resolve Fusion Software. Now, if I scroll down a little bit, you'll see all of the most recent downloads available for DaVinci Resolve. So if you ever update your software and it introduces new bugs that you don't like, you can always come to the support website and download an older version. Be aware that there is always two versions of the software. There's the DaVinci Resolve. Normal version, and then there's the Studio version. You will not be able to use the Studio version if you do not have a Studio license. Once you download install it, along with the course exercise files, you will be ripping and raring, ready to go. The final comment I'll make on using DaVinci Resolve when it comes to performance is DaVinci Resolve is a pretty RAM intensive software. Meaning that if you're on a slightly older PC or you're using a laptop or there is an iPad version of DaVinci Resolve, you may struggle with playback from time to time. Believe they normally recommend at least 32 gigs of RAM, which is what I'm using. But if you have 64 and higher, you're going to be much better off. With that said, later on the course, we will discuss some techniques for improving and smoothing out playback. Now, I've got one final message for you guys, and then we will officially begin our journeys editing in Dementia Resolve. 3. How to Think About Video Editing: Is the point here? What are we trying to achieve inside this DaVinci Resolve essentials course? Well, before I answer that, the better question is, Why trust me? What makes me qualified to talk to you guys about DaVinci Resolve? Well, I was like you. I had no video editing experience about five to six years ago, and it was required of me to learn. I was put in a position where I needed to help some people, create some videos. And so it was my task to go, Okay, what do I need to know? How do I make effective videos that help tell stories? And like you, I probably searched around for what editing software is best, and then, you know, you land on Deventi Resolve 'cause it's free, you download and you try it. And then there you are. Deventi Resolve in front of your face. Now what? And over the span of the last five, six years, the thing that I think I've done really well is I've figured out what's important. What do we actually need to know? I would wager that the majority of us aren't going to end up in a Hollywood film Studio. Some of us might. Some of you might end up working on a bigger team, but a lot of us are hobbyists or creators or just want to start some kind of an editing journey. So what do we need to understand? If you're just looking for what buttons to click, Google. Google is gonna be your best friend. You can Google how to do SThing, and it'll tell you click this button. That's not what I'm here for. I'm here to help you understand why we do certain things. Why does this work well? Why should we implement a certain tool in a specific scenario? You see, to understand DaVinci Resolve, we need to understand video editing as an art form and a craft because otherwise, what you'll end up doing is making decisions without motivation. And you'll hear that term thrown out a lot if you've watched other tutorials or even listen to myself talk about video editing. What's motivating the decisions that we're making? Why are we using certain tools? Why are we making a cut in a certain location? Or why did we choose to remove or add certain pieces of footage? When we begin to understand those things, we can influence and inform the choices we're making inside the timeline. So my goal here is to provide you with the technical information needed to operate comfortably and confidently Inside Resolve, but also provide the whys. Why are we making the choices and the decisions that we're making? And if I've done my job well, you'll understand how to learn inside DaVinci Resolve, and not just what buttons do I need to click. One final thing I'd like to add, and if you kind of drone out my ramble there for a moment, maybe tune back in. Video editing is equal parts video and audio editing. So what you'll end up finding throughout this course is that we spend a good amount of time talking about how to make cuts and how to make our video look and move better. But we also spend a lot of time talking about audio. Audio is it's the visceral portion of the video. It's what you feel. It's what really invokes a lot of emotion in the Edit. So if you have it, I would really recommend watching, listening, and editing with headphones on. It'll give you a much better appreciation for some of the choices that we're making on the time. But if not, it's totally okay. It's just something I would recommend moving forward. Now, we're going to spend so much time inside Daventure Resolve together. But there's one final thing I do need to cover before we actually open up the program. 4. Understanding Frame Rate and Resolution: A lot of us here are going to be coming from different backgrounds. Some of us might be hobbyists. Some of us might actually be cinematographers that now need to learn how to edit their own footage. And if you're like me, you just work with a lot of screen recordings. So what that means is that there's going to be different bases of starting points for everybody. To make sure we're all on even grounds going into Resolve, I've got one thing I really need to talk about very briefly. There's going to be two vocab terms I throw out through the entire of this course that I need to make sure we all understand. One of them is frame rate. Or normally how it's abbreviated in softwares is F PS or frames per second. So frame rate or FPS frames per second. What does this mean? Of you already going to be familiar with this concept, especially if you're like me and you come from the gaming world. But for those of you who are not, have you ever taken a step back and thought about how cameras actually record footage? Well, it's not black magic, pun intended. In order for moving media to be generated or a video file to be generated, a video camera will record individual frames or stills or images quickly. So if we had a given second worth of time, so this was 0 seconds and 1 second. If I were to take a single still or a single frame or a single image, there is no motion because we have one frame. And in fact, that is a picture, right? If you were to take a picture with your phone, you have one frame. I got one image. Well, a video camera will attempt to grab individual frames at a consistent pace over the span of a second, depending on the number of frames, which would be these guys here that the camera records in a given second, that would be your FPS or your frame rate. So just to reiterate, the frame rate or the FPS is the number of frames per second. Does that make sense? When we talk about video files, what we're really doing, actually, is talking about a lot of images stacked on top of each other, moving very quickly. The concept is still eluding you, it'll definitely begin to make more sense as we hop onto the timeline, but a good visual representation of this would be a flipbook. So you might have seen some comic flick books where they flip through the pages and the pictures move. The reason why this is important is because we're going to work with different frame rates. Some of the more common ones would be 24 FPS, 30 FPS. And if you're in the gaming world, 60 FPS. The number 24 has specific significance because it is the lowest FPS to where the human eye can no longer pick out individual frames. So at 24 FPS, we see a smooth video. When we go below this, the video will appear a little bit laggy or it almost looks like stop motion. 30 FPS is also a common frame rate, and any multiple of 60, so 30 is half of 60 is nice because it divides evenly with the timescale, the natural time scale, you know, 60 seconds in a minute, et cetera. It FPS is a lot less common when working with actual camera footage, unless you were recording for Slootion we'll talk about re timing and slow motion later in the video. But oftentimes when you see OBS recordings or screen recordings, they'll be recorded at 60 FPS. That's how you get that really smooth playback. You'll also notice when something is recorded at a high frame rate and played back because it almost looks uncanny. It feels like too smooth. So we're going to typically operate between 24, and 30. Term that you're going to hear me thrown out is resolution. And I think most people understand what resolution is. But just to clarify real quick, the resolution of your image is the height and the width of that image. Ooh. One of the most common resolutions is 1920 by 1080. And these numbers represent pixels. So 1,920 pixels by 1080 pixels. This gives us a 16 by nine aspect ratio. Another common aspect ratio that you'll see on older footage would be something like four by three, but that is not what we're going to use in this course. We're gonna operating on a 16 by nine aspect ratio. What I really want to call out here is that sometimes I'll throw outt the term 1080 P. The P standing for pixels. Just like 24 FPS, 1920 by 1080 holds special significance because it's considered you could think of it as, like, the base resolution for most things. There are a lot more technical terms when it comes to video files and video editing, but it's not gonna matter if we don't know how to use it and work with it. Inside DaVinci Resolve. So let's go ahead and get started. 5. Starting Up DaVinci Resolve: It is officially about that time. We are going to open Deventi Resolve and begin editing. But real quick, this section, in particular, I think is very important because for one, we are going to open up Deventi Resolve. I'm going to walk you through how to start a project and learn the basics of editing. But the bigger thing that I'd like you to take away here are the whys of what we're road, it's going to be so much more important to understand the decisions you're making and what's motivating them rather than the technique itself. So the question that I would really like you to continue to ask yourself, not only in this section, but throughout the course is why? Why are we making the decisions that we're making, and how does it affect the message or the story that we're trying to convey? With that said, let's go ahead and open up DaVinci Resolve. This is what we're going to be working on throughout this section. It's called a talking head video because there is one person who is talking straight to the camera. We're going to incorporate a sound effect, a simple background music track, some B Roll transitions, and there's some weird stuff going on here with the fact that we've got two layers of videos overlapping each other. And that's something that we're going to address as we go along in this video. Alright. So the first step to start us on our journey is to well, we got to open up the program. So on Windows, I'm going to type my window key, start typing in DaVinci Resolve, and open up the software. So this is the very first window we are going to be greeted by when we open up DaVinci Resolve. This is the project manager, and this is where we create and group our projects together. Now, I'm not going to spend too much time here. You can think of this as kind of the homepage for DaVinci Resolve. The one thing I do want you to double check is to make sure that you're on your local database. Databases are a conversation for a different day, but we don't want to be on the network and we don't want to be in the Cloud. However, just for your awareness, if you do want to collaborate with people online in a DaVinci Resolve project, the Cloud system is an option, so just be aware of that. Now, within the project manager, there's really only two things we can do. If we write click, we can either create a new project or a new folder. What I would like you guys to do is to create a new folder. This way, we can group all of our projects together into one nice, pretty area. I'm going to name my folder the Essentials Course. And hit Create. Now, let's go ahead and open up our Essentials course folder, and from here, we can either now right click and hit New Project or go down on the bottom right corner over here and hit New Project. And this presents the very first decisions that we're going to have to make. We can do this. First is what we're going to name this. So what I would like you to name this project is to dash talking head, because that is the type of video that we are going to be working on. And before you hit Create, there's this second little option down here that says Media location. This will be where DaVinci Resolve attempts to save any temporary files or things that you cache or render in place. Those terms will be things that we continue to explain as we move along. But what I would suggest is setting this location to be wherever you have your course material. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit change location, and I'm going to navigate where I have the course material saved. Now, at the time of recording, this is what my folder structure looks like. Yours might look slightly different than mine, but you're going to want to locate the two dash talking head folder. And then once you're inside the talking head folder, hit Select. If you choose the wrong folder location, is it going to mess up your experience? No. It's just one of those things that's good practice to do for future projects where you're working with different folders and different types of footage. With all that set though, go ahead and hit Create. And here we go. We are now inside DaVinci Resolve. Now, real quick, DaVinci Resolve is what's called an NLE or a non linear editing software. You don't really need to worry about what an NLE is, but the one thing that makes DaVinci Resolve very special is that it includes everything. If you're somebody who's a little bit more familiar with Adobe, they like to split each of their tools into their own program. DaVinci Resolve puts it all into one spot, which is what makes it so powerful. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to cover what each of these pages does and how we're going to cover. There's no need to follow along through this section. I'm going to try to be brief so we can get to actually importing our footage and editing, but I do think that this is important. Over here on the left, we have our Media page. This page is dedicated to importing and sorting through footage. This will be something that we do touch on, and I'll show you why it's powerful and how we use it. Next up, we have the CUT page. Now, something that I do think is a little bit confusing for beginners inside the program is the difference between the CUT and the Edit page. I'm just going to eliminate that question right now. We are not going to use the CUT page. I repeat. We're not going to touch this page. We're not even going to look at it. You just ky. I don't even want you thinking about the CUT page. Obviously, the Cup page is in the program for reason, and what I'll say is that it's mostly used for quick editing. You can think of it as DaVinci Resolves light editor. It's used for processing a lot of footage. And down the road, if you do feel like it's worth it for you to learn the cup page, go crazy. There's nothing wrong with doing it. I just don't think it's going to serve us a great purpose for the bulk of our editing experience. I'm going to skip the Edit page from now because that is where we're ultimately going to end up landing on. Next up is Fusion. And Fusion is DaVinci Resolve version of After Effects. It's what we use for compositing, motion graphics, doing visual work. It's one of my favorite pages inside DaVinci Resolve, and we are going to have a whole section that covers how to use Fusion. So don't be alarmed. We are going to talk about Fusion. After that, we have the Color page. And quite simply put, the Color page is something truly spectacular. You didn't know DaVinci Resolve was actually just a coloring software first. It wasn't until a few years later down the road that they begin to incorporate other editing tools. So, what that means for you is that the Color page is the oldest, it's the most developed. It has the most tools and features, and it is unparalleled when it comes to color correction and color grading. This we will also have a dedicated section on and go over some of the basics for you to use in your own videos. But again, this page is truly incredible. Next up, we have the Fairlight page, and this we will not have a dedicated section on, but this is DaVinci Resolves audio Mixer, meaning that this would be where you would go to EQ or equalize your different music tracks or voiceovers or sound effects, or change the volume levels, add audio effects, et cetera. The Fairlight tends to be a little bit more advanced for somebody who's a bit newer to editing inside DaVinci and will be able to get by just fine on the Edit page. Last stuff is the Deliver page, and all roads lead to here. This will be where we end up saving our final video or rendering our final video is the proper term. That takes us to the Edit page, and this is going to be our home base for the bulk of the course. Now, again, if you are newer to using editing tools, this can feel super overwhelming. So just real quick, let me talk through what the different areas are of the Edit page, and then we'll go ahead and bring in our footage and start to work with it. The one thing that I would like to say, and what you'll begin to find out the more we begin to use DaVinci Resolve is that DaVinci Resolve gives you the ability to do everything, which means that it has buttons for everything that you could want to do. But we're probably only going to end up carrying about 5% of those things. The trick to learning the Edit page is just learning what buttons do I need to click and where do I need to look? Down here in the bottom is our timeline, and this is going to be where we bring in footage and audio and we actually do the book for editing. You could think of this as like the Edit page workspace. We've got two windows up here. We've got one on the left. This is our preview window where we can preview footage in our media pool. And on the right is our primary viewer, and this will be where we view our Edit. Now, top, we've got two rows. This top row that I'm kind of hovering back and forth to gives you the different sub menus insight Debenture Resolve. But again, like I said, we're probably not going to use any of these. We're definitely gonna use the Inspector tab, which is where we can change our video properties, and we might use the Quick Export for quick saving things. But we're not gonna worry about the metadata, and we're definitely gonna use our mixer right away. And the same thing with over here on the left, we're not going to work with Keyframes, or sound library, index effects, et cetera. The one that we are going to use is our media pool. And the media pool is where all our assets are going to live. So all our video and audio and still images are going to live right in here. And now it is almost your turn to follow along. What we're going to do is we're going to bring in our footage and then we're going to create our first timeline. So what I would like you to do is locate your course material, go into Section two, the talking head section and locate Class Project one. And there should be two folders inside of. Going to do is we're going to drag and drop these folders into DaVinci. But before you do that, listen to this real quick. Drag and select your two folders, and we're not going to drop it into the big pool here itself. I want you to drop it into this little side column. Go ahead and hit release. And there's a very important message that pops up. Anytime you add footage for the first time into DaVinci Resolve, it's going to ask, do you want to change the project frame rate? And I'm going to address that in just a little bit. But what I would like you to do is hit Don't change. It is okay if you happen to hit change on accident, but hit don't change. I'll show you how to address that problem later. So don't change, and there we go. All of our footage is now sorted inside DaVinci Resolve in our master folder in our Media pool. The reason why I have you drag it over to the left column is because what will happen is don't follow along here. If you take your folders and just drop it into the main pool itself, it's just going to dump everything here. So nothing is sorted. You just have all your files in here. Could be something that you want to do later down the road, but for right now, we do not want to do that. And if you accidentally did that, hit Control Z. Control Z is the universal undo or Command Z if you're on Mac. Now, if you're in a weird folder, you need help navigating, you can go over to the left column over here and click around to jump to the different folders. If for some reasons yours isn't showing, make sure this little icon on the top left isn't collapsed. And you can always double click on the row up top here to jump up a folder or two. But I can go to my video folder, go to the A roll folder, and now if I hover my mouse, we could see some footage. Walter. And now you are primed to begin working on your first editing project. 6. Initial Project Settings: Alright, so this section is going to be very short and sweet, but please do not skip it. There's just a couple of things we need to make sure are set up appropriately in your project so that weird stuff doesn't happen down the road. Inside DaVinci Resolve, in the very bottom right hand corner, there's two icons. This home icon actually takes you back to your project manager, so you can double check to make sure you're in the right project, but that's not what we're here to talk about. In the very bottom right hand corner, there is this cogwheel. This is your project settings. Go ahead and click that. And this is going to bring up a giormous menu of options and tools that you can end up tweaking and changing for your project. And the key word there being project settings. So these are not global settings. These are only settings that apply to this specific project that we're currently working in. I'm not going to do a full walk through of every single possible setting that we could change we would be here for the full length of the course. But there are two in particular that I would really like you to set correctly. The first one is our timeline resolution. This is going to be the default resolution for the timeline that you're working on. Unless something weird happened, your timeline resolution should be 1920 by 1080. Just double check to make sure it says that. The big one that we do want to change is our timeline frame rate. This is the default frame rate for our timelines. Now, frame rates can always be a little bit confusing for somebody who might be just starting out, but what I'd like you to think about is that 24 frames per second is normally meant for films, movies, and things recorded in real life, and 30 frames per second, a lot of times used for digital recording. There's a lot of reasons and things in between that might dictate which frame rate you choose Edit on. For us, I do want you to change your frame rate 24-30. The only other thing that I'd like you to double check is for your optimized media and Render Cache, these aren't set to uncompressed. This is not something that we're going to dive too deep into in this course, but you can think of proxies and render caches as low memory versions of your footage to help you edit faster. Again, the big thing you want to double check here is that nothing says uncompressed. I'm going to quickly walk through some recommended settings that I would use if I were you. If you don't use exactly these settings, you will still be able to edit just fine. But I do think it's worth a couple of minutes to get really technical right now so we can set these up because we'll use them for the rest of the course. The first two settings are our proxies. Now, proxies are copies of our video files that are a smaller format, which makes it easier to send to other editors to edit on the fly or if they're working remotely. We're gonna set our Proxy Media resolution to quarter and the media format from ProRes HQ to ProRes 422 Proxy. Now, depending on what version of DaVinci Resolve you have, if you're on an older version, you might not have the ProRes Kodak. So if that's the case, go ahead and do DNx HRLB. But for us, we're going to use ProRes four, two, two, two, two, two, two Proxy. Optimized Media is DaVinci Resolve's own version of proxies, and it's probably not something you'll ever really use. But just to be safe, we're going to do the exact same thing. We're going to change the resolution to quarter and the format to 4222 Proxy and same rules apply for DNxHR. And for the last cache format, you guess that we are also going to change it to 422 Proxy. These four settings we're going to cover in a future video, so we're going to leave them default for now. And then we scroll down just a little bit more, we can find our project media location. So if you accidentally boofed on this in the beginning, you can go ahead and reset your media location. The last thing I would double check is to make sure that your proxy generation location, your cash files, and your stills are all saved on a local hard drive. By default, they should be, but for whatever reason, you know, maybe you got an external hard drive, and it randomly set it. Make sure this is set locally to either your C drive or I have two internal hard drives, so minor map to my D drive. And before you hit Save, what I would like to call out is I'm going to scroll all the way back up to the top. There's three dots up top here, and we can do one of two things now. For one, we can set our current settings as our default preset, meaning that each time we start a new project, these settings, including the resolution, the frame rate, the optimized Media proxy resolution, and all of our working folders are set as our default settings. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click these three dots and that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to set our current settings as our default preset. Going to prompt you and say, Hey, are you sure you want to do this? Go ahead. Yeah, I do. I actually I do want to update those. Now, in the future, just for your own reference, let's say you're working on some four K footage, and it's 24 FPS timeline, and you're doing a lot of them, and you don't have to reset this up every time. But what you can do is, again, go to these three dots, and there's this little option here that says, Save current settings is preset. So you can save some presets for your project settings so that again, you don't have to do this every single time. But for now, we are all good to go. So I'm going to go and hit Save. And again, it's going to pop up that big important question. Do you want to change the project frame rate? This time, we are going to say yes, change. Now, again, this is a super important step that we have to take in the beginning of each project. If you mess it up, is your project ruined? No, and I will show you how to address it. But anytime you start a new project, make sure you are setting your default resolution and frame rate every time. 7. Creating Your First Timeline: Right, folks, so we are going to create a timeline and begin to use the Edit page, which is very exciting. I do want to check in with you real quick because I know that these opening sections might feel like we're not doing enough to get the Edit done, but I implore you to continue to be patient and continue to ask yourself why and get just comfortable with these opening concepts because it will pay off down the road. Let's go ahead and hop back into DaVinci Resolve. Now, I want you to locate your Master Media Pool folder. It's the one all the way at the top, and if you've done it correctly, you should see two. You should see your video and audio folders. And what we're going to do is we're going to create a third folder. So I want you to right click in your Media Pool and hit New Bin. Bins are DaVinci Resolve naming terminology for folder. So go ahead, hit New Bin and name this 03 underscore timelines. Perfect. Go ahead and open up this timelines folder. Alright, here we go. So what I'd like you to do is in this blank Media Pool region. Right click. Go to timelines. Ooh. Timelines create new timeline. Now, depending on what version of DaVinci Resolve you're in, this little menu might look a little bit different, but there will be a spot that says timelines create new timeline. Go ahead and click it. And now we're prompted with How do we want to set our timeline up? We're going to leave all of these settings alone. But what I would like you to do is rename it. I mean, you could leave it alone as Timeline one, but I want to name it Main because it is going to be the main working timeline for us. It's prompting you. Do you want to add some video tracks? Do you want to add some audio tracks? Again, leave it alone. But if you are someone who accidentally messed up your project settings, here's where you can fix it. Uncheck this little box down here, and then where I'd like you to click is the Format tab. Double check that we're on a 1920 by 1080 timeline, and our frame is 30. If yours isn't, make it match this. If all this looks okay, go ahead and hit Create eight. And there we go. We've got our very first timeline. Now, I've probably said the word timeline 50 times. What is a timeline? Well, it's a workspace. It's a working area where we can cut up our footage. So let's bring in some footage so that I can show you. Go back over to your Media pool, and you can either click straight into your ArolFolder or go back to the master folder. We're gonna go to video, April, and there should be one video file right here. And what I'm going to ask you to do is go ahead and drag this footage and bring it on down into your timeline. And there we go. Our footage is here. And what a happy looking guy over there. I didn't realize that was gonna be the starting frame. It's too funny. So what I'd like to do is explain a couple of things to you guys before we get a little bit too lost in what the heck are we looking at? First of all, you can now see over here in the right window, we can see what's happening in our timeline. So I'm seeing where my playhead is at in the video. Orange vertical bar right here is called our playhead, and wherever it's in the video is what gets displayed in the preview window. If you would like to move your playhead, you cannot click in the blank space here. You need to click on this ticked line bar up top here and drag it forward. And now we can begin to scrub through our footage. Again, I'm clicking in this upper bar here and scrubbing left and right. If we look down here in the timeline itself, we've got two things going on. We've got this blue bar up top and this green one down below. This is our video track where the visual information is being presented, and the green track is our audio track. These little white blobs that are running across the audio track are our waveform previews, meaning that it is previewing the sound that is going to be said. So if I were to drag my playhead and bring it to the beginning of the video, and then you can either hit the play icon in your preview window or you can hit the Space button. Well, hello, crew. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. And then I can hit the Space button again to stop our playhead from playing. But hopefully, you notice that as soon as our playhead crossed where our audio waveform is at, that was the area where I began to speak. So again, if I drag my playhead back, hit Play? Well, hello, crew, let's talk about. That's where I'm speaking. So if we take a macro look at our timeline here, we can see the spots where I am speaking. Now, there's a couple of things that I'd like to call out, and then we'll begin to move more and more into actually working with this footage. Things first is this guy right over here. This is our timestamp. Again, if I grab my playhead and begin to scrub with our footage, you can see that our time head changes. The one thing that I would like to call out is this far right number over here. Now, you might think that it's milliseconds, but if I scrub very slowly, you can see that it resets at 30. This is our frame number, because, again, a video is created by stitching still images one frame at a time. So if I were to go down to my keyboard and use the left and right arrow, I can scrub through my footage, one frame at a time. Again, I'm using the left and right arrow to scrub through my footage, one frame at a time. Alright, next things next. We're probably not going to need our preview window here, and it's taken up a good chunk of real estate. To hide it so that we can expand our preview viewer, what I'd like you to do is with our timeline previewer here, go to the top right, and there's this little square icon. It's next to, like, the Color page icon. This little square guy, go ahead and click it. And that'll expand our preview window. Typically, I like to work with a single viewer, but I do know that some people prefer to have preview and timeline viewer at the same time. There's not a right or wrong answer. It is just completely up to you. I like working with one big screen. Another quick customization option that I do think is important to show off is right above our timestamp over here, there's this little layered track icon. Go ahead and click that. This will give you your timeline preview and view options. The one that I do like to have on is Stack timelines, and I'm going to show you why in just a second. And if you don't like audio wave forms, you can turn if there's a whole slew of options to kind of change the display of the timeline, so feel free to customize that to fit whatever you'd like. But what I'd like to do real quick is kind of show how you use a timeline and navigate through it, and then I'll walk backwards so that you guys can begin to follow along. Right now we only have one video and one audio track, but if I click on our footage and drag up, you'll see it creates a second one. And we can do this as many times as we would like. We go and bring this back down to track one. And editing with layers works on a hierarchy system, which means that whatever is on the highest track gets displayed over what's on the bottom. So if I wanted to, what I could do and there's no need to follow along here, is I can go to my B Roll and add some footage in here. And you see how now it's displaying this B roll and not the footage underneath? This is a very important concept that I'll continue to reiterate on as we move forward. I can select this footage and hit the VAC Space button to delete it, and now we're right back to where we started. Now, again, we are presented with a whole bunch of buttons that we can click, and now our inspector tab is populated with things that we can change. We don't need to worry about any of that. All that I hope that you see right now is one timeline and a video and audio file. 8. Class Project 1 - The Talking Head: Alrighty. So this is our very first class project, and the class project system is not meant to be scary or intimidating. These are set up so that we can begin to cement some of the ideas that we're learning as we go along with this course. And our very first project will be a talking head project. We've been asked to create a video that is clear, concise and illustrates the points in the video we are editing. The video must be under 60 seconds long, which shouldn't be a problem, and they've asked us to use some B roll along with a backing music track. They've also requested the video be ten ADP and an MP4 file, and we will cover exactly what that means in a future video. One thing that I need to call out so that you guys can receive credit for this course is how to submit the videos. So, unfortunately, we can't upload and host all the videos on the course website. So what I'd like everybody to do is to upload to a streaming service. I would recommend that 99% of people use YouTube because you can create account for free. There's no limits, and it's going to work really well. But if you already have a Vimeo account or you operate on Behans it's totally fine. There are a lot of different streaming sites out there that will work really well. The one thing that we will not be doing is submitting a Dropbox or Google Drive or any kind of cloud service link. Particularly what I'm referencing here is that we should not have to download any files. We should be able to click a link. It opens a video player, and then we can watch whatever you've submitted. I promise you will not get banned off the website if you accidentally do a Google Drive link, but just know that in order to receive credit for this project, we need some kind of streamable link. If you are not super comfortable doing something like this, do not fret at the end of the project. When we've rendered everything out and saved everything, I will do a walk through of how to upload something like YouTube and provide a link so that you can submit it to the website. But with all that precursory stuff out of the way, let's go and hop into the project. 9. Keyboard Shortcuts: Already crew, the glasses are off, so you know this is about to get serious. So we're at right now is we have our timeline set up, and we're ready to begin editing our footage, which means we're gonna have to start using our keyboard and mouse to do some editing. So this section lays out the foundation of how to use those tools. Now, big disclaimer, I'm going to use my keyboard cuts. You do have to use them. But in the course resources, there will be a file that says Bs, keys. Those will be importable keyboard cuts that I'll show you how to use. Again, you don't have to use them, and I will call out when I'm using a specific shortcut and what the default button would be in DaVinci Resolve. This is the system that I found works best for me, and I think is easy to pick up. With that said, let's hop back into DaVinci Resolve. Alright, so there's one thing I'd like to call out real quick, and that's over here. In the bottom left hand corner, I've added a keyboard overlay to my DaVinci Resolve, which means that as I am navigating in DaVinci, it will update to whatever key I'm pressing. Now, again, these are using my keyboard cuts. So let's talk about how we can get those all set up. All the way in the upper left hand corner of DaVinci Resolve, there is a DaVinci Resolve menu item. Go ahead and click that button, and then we're going to find Ooh, keyboard customization. Go ahead and open up that guy. This is going to open up our keyboard customization menu, which is actually pretty well done for DaVinci Resolve. You can click on any key in here, and it will tell you which function or command it is linked to. If you're ever looking for a certain keyboard hot key, you can go over to this little search bar and type in things like Ripple Delete, and it'll tell you which button it is associated with. Go ahead and clear that real quick. Now, for you guys, up in the upper right hand corner over here, it's going to say DaVinci Resolve because this is the default keyboard layout when you start up DaVinci Resolve. If you're somebody who's coming over from Premiere Pro or Final Cut, they do have some presets for those. I don't know how accurate they are to those programs, but they are an option for you if that's something you're already comfortable with. But what I would like you guys to do is all the way in the upper right hand corner of this menu, click these three dots right here. And there's an option to import a preset, which is what we're going to do. So go ahead and click that button. Locate the folder in your course resources that have my keyboard shortcuts in it. It should look something like this, Bs keys or BS keys. It'll be this dot text file. Once you find it, go ahead and hit Okay in this menu to import that preset. And if you've done it correctly in the upper right hand corner, it should say Bs or BS keys. Now, something else that I have provided is this hot key cheat sheet. So as we are going along, if you are ever confused or forget, or if you don't want to use my keyboard shortcuts, but you're hearing me talk about something with navigation or editing, you can always refer to this to help refresh your memory. Once these are all imported, go ahead and save and then close. Now, from here on moving forward, I'm going to be using my keyboard cuts. I will do my best to call out what the default bind is for a certain function or command, but I'm going to be assuming that you imported my keyboard shortcuts. With that said, before we start actually editing our footage, something that I would highly encourage you doing is to update your keyboard shortcuts as we go along. These even set up for me and what I feel like are the easiest and strongest set of keys for beginners. It's something I've developed over time, and it's something that is going to continue to change as I continue to Edit. So you should do the same. Within the first couple of lessons, you're probably not going to know what works best for you, but as we continue to move along, you might find things that you're doing over and over that you wish you could just press a button to do. So feel free to change these layouts. That is something that you want to do, again, go in the upper left hand corner, DaventiRsolve, keyboard customization, find whatever command that is. So maybe you want to change the fast forward hot key. You can type in fast forward. Hit the X on the existing hot key and add your own over here. Once it's all said and done, go ahead and hit safe. And it might not even be a bad idea to go up to this upper right hand corner and save your own keys as a new preset. But for now, I ask you to stick with my keyboard shortcuts through the beginning sections of this course. My right hand is going to stay on the mouse, and my left hand is going to sit on the home row, which is the biggest thing that I'd like you to take away from this section. When I say the home row, I mean the ASD and F keys. So I've got four fingers on the AS, D and F keys, and my right thumb is on the spacebar. The first two buttons we're gonna talk about are the S button and the D button. S is timeline Zoom Out. And D is timeline Zoom in. So we can use S to get a better look at all of the footage on our timeline, and we can use D to be a little bit more precise with how we're making cuts, changes, adjustments to anything on this track. Now the reason why I like using S and D so much is because as we begin editing and as we begin using more and more clips and footage and music, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. If I need to jump to a later part in our timeline, there's a few ways we can go about doing it, but the way I like is if I hit S to Zoom out, I can click and drag my playhead to a later part in the time going to hit D to zoom in, but keep an eye on where our playhead goes as we continue to zoom in. So I'm going to hit D to zoom in, and you see how our playhead stays dead center frame. So anytime I want to re center or jump to a different part in our timeline, I will use S and D to make those jumps. Now, there's a few alternatives to this. One, there's this plus and minus slider up above here in this little mini toolbar. This will do the same thing. We can zoom in and zoom out on our timeline. The default shortcut for doing this is Alt in the scroll wheel or option in the scroll wheel if you're on Mac. Moving forward, if I do ever forget to say it when I say Alt plus a keyboard button, it means Option plus that button on Mac. And same thing with control, it's the command key on Mac. So in the scroll wheel will do the same thing. And if we are trying to actually jump to a later part in our timeline, up in our playbr up above here, we can actually scroll through the entire timeline. Okay, so again, S and D, let's get back to focusing on the home row. So S and D are timeline Zoom in and Zoom out. The next big one that we're going to learn is the A key. And if I press A, it is going to split our clip or it's going to make a cut. Now, the default for this, I believe is Control and B, but we are going to be cutting so much, we cannot be two fingering the cut button. So again, A is cut. There is an alternative to using A. In our little mini editing toolbar uptop here, there is this razor blade icon, and this is our blade mode. I am not a fan of the blade mode, but I know some people that will ride and die with the blade mode, and I'll show you what it does. If I click it, it turns my mouse into a little razor blade. And now we can split our clips whenever I Click. I tend to find this less precise than moving my playhead and cutting. But if this is something you enjoy, you know, go crazy. To tov off the blade mode, you just need to go back up top here and make sure your mouse is highlighted in orange. Again, now to undo, I'm gonna hit Control Z a few times. If you're ever wanting to redo and undo, so if I undo too far and I want to redo those cuts, you can actually hit Control Shift and Z, and it will redo your edits. And again, if you're on Mac that is going to be Command Shift and Z. Alright. So we've got two little cuts here. How do we now get rid of these clips in here? This is actually a bigger decision than you might think because there's two primary ways of deleting footage. First of all, to select this clip, you can either click it, and I'll select the video and audio. Or what you'll often see me do is drag and select. This is just a habit I've got into mostly because we often work with more than one track, or what we'll end up talking about later is like the video and audio might not be linked together. So I end up dragging selecting, so you don't have to do this. You can always click, but just, you know, FYI. Now the first method to delete this is actually going to be the backspace key. So I'm going to take my right hand off the mouse and hit Backspace. It does is it deletes the selected footage. Now, the backspace key is the default key to do this. But now we have this gap in here. So to fix this, one of the things that we can do is we can drag and select the right side of our footage and then left click drag and move it over, and it'll actually snap into place, which is pretty handy. Now, that's not too bad, but what happens if I need to do this again? So we've got this other section that I want to get rid of, so I'll click it. Hit backspace. And again, now I've got to drag and select and pull this over. Now, that's not too bad, but that is three actions required out of us every single time we want to make a change. We have to delete the clip, select footage to the right, and then pull it over. And what were to happen if, say, we had more than just this footage here. So if we had five clips, ten clips, 20 clips, 4,000 clips. I think you can see where I'm getting at. So I'm going to hit Control Z a couple of times. So we have our two splits here remaining. So the second method to remove or delete footage Clips on your timeline is our fourth home row button, and it is Ripple Delete, and it's the FKey. So I'm going to select this clip and watch how these cut points move to the right of this footage. I'm going to hit the Fkey which ripple deletes the footage and see how everything shifts over to the left over here. Ripple deleting closes any gaps created when you delete clips on your timeline. So again, I could click this clip right here, hit F, and it ripple, deletes our footage. And on the surface, that seems much better than just hitting backspace, right? So why would we ever do that? Well, you have to be careful when you ripple delete footage, because if you have more than one track or you've got things that aren't quite lined up with the audio, ripple delete will slide everything over to the left. So it's a very powerful tool, but with great power comes great responsibility. So you just have to be aware of what you're doing. Something else that I just want to point out real quick is DaVinci Resolve is pretty dang awesome. I don't know if I've said that yet. But let's say I hit the back space here, and I do have this gap. DaVinci also has this very cool feature where if I were to click in the gap, so if I left click in this gap here, see how it highlights in gray? I can now hit the F key to ripple delete that gap. So even if you are editing and you've got some space in here that you want to close or things are split for whatever reason, you can always just click gaps and hit F, and it will close the space. So, again, I cannot emphasize enough how important it is. We just really need four keys, the S key, the Dk, the A key, and the F key. That is going to carry you 95% of the way there when it comes to editing any and all of your footage, which means that if we've learned ASD and F, we're ready to start editing our footage. 10. Starting Your Rough Cut: Alright, so we're going to begin what's called the rough cut or sometimes it's called the assembly cut of the Edit, which means we're going to take our raw footage and trim it down until it's in a usable place. And what that means is we're going to get rid of some of the ums and the s and get rid of some of the gaps, the bad takes, et cetera, until we have usable footage for our Edit. And there is one thing in particular that I'm going to show off that is a very important concept in DaVinci Resolve, that I'll take a couple of minutes to talk through, but it is very important to understand and know how to use. So let's go ahead and hop back into Resolve. Right, so let's go ahead and do some editing. Quick reminder. Bottom left hand corner is my input history. So as we continue to move along in the course, you should be able to keep track of what keys I'm pressing. But your timeline might look a little bit different than somebody else's. So what I'd like us all to do is to start fresh together. Hit as to Zoom all the way out on your timeline so that you can see all of your footage, drag and select it all and hit the backspace key to delete it. Or F, or you could have hit F to delete it. Now, what I want you to do is go over to the upper left hand corner here for our Media pool. Go to the video folder, find your April, and let's re brring in our footage. There we go. Now this is personal preference, but I like having the entire bottom section here for my timeline because I like having a little more working real estate. So what I'll do is up in the upper left hand corner of DaVinci Resolve, there's this little square with what do you call that carat? Carrot icon, go ahead and click that, and it will collapse the media pool to just be on this upper portion. So that way we have our entire bottom half for our timeline. Unfortunately in DaVinci Resolve, you can't drag and drop menus around to be in different locations, but we can always grab dividing lines to make sure things fit however we feel best. So sometimes you'll even see me grab this middle bar in between the video and audio tracks to move things around a little bit more if I need to see the audio or if I want to see the video a bit better. So with all that said, though, what we're going to be doing today is I'm going to hit D a couple of times to zoom in. We're going to be cleaning up our footage a little bit. I might throw out working through our footage or trimming, it all kind of means the same thing, different contexts. All I'm trying to say is that in our video, you see how there's these little gaps in here where nothing's being said. We're going to try to get rid of those. There's going to be sections where I goof up. We don't want to include the goof ups there. And we also need to be aware of the things I'm saying in this footage. See, editing is a very active craft, which means that we can't just go along, look for where the audio is and get rid of stuff where there's no audio. We need to be aware of what our subject, in this instance, me, is saying, because at the end of the day, we need to string together all these little bits and pieces so that it makes one cohesive message slash story. So there are moments where you can kind of turn your brain off a little bit, but the sorting process, the rough cut process tends to be something that you do need to pay attention to. So let's start working through it. First things first, I'm going to drag my playhead all the way to the beginning. Oh, it looks like I didn't bring our footage all the way snug on 00. Somebody drag and slide that over. Me spacebar to play. And stop it right before I'm about to speak. Something else you'll see me do throughout this that I want to call out now in case I've already done it a few times is, as the video is playing, oftentimes hit S to zoom out to see kind of where we're at in the total video length and D, to zoom in so I can be a little bit more precise. The other benefit to this, and this is what we discussed in that last section is it keeps our playhead mostly centered. So as I'm playing, I can zoom in, and it'll put our playhead right in the middle. Alright, so I'm going to drag our playhead somewhere to the beginning here. It does not have to be exact. You do not have to copy my timestamps. Those things are unimportant. But I'm going to hit A, to cut, select that first half. That to delete. Now I'm gonna hit space to play through this little bit. Well, hello, crew. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. Perfect. I tapped A to make a cut. Now, a common question that gets asked early on is, where do I cut things off? At what point when I finish saying something, do I make this cut? And what I'd like to say is this. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to hit Shift and use my middle mouse button. Excuse me, shift and the scroll wheel to expand our audio track here. And this is a little exaggerated for the purpose of what we're doing. But it is nice to kind of visualize what I'm saying. Most of the times when somebody is speaking, there is a little tale at the end of their annunciation. This tail might look different depending on what's being said, but I would say 99 times out of 100, there's this little trail that carries through whatever the last word is that we said. So what I would say is try to get your cut to be kind of close to where that tail ends. Doesn't have to be exact, but what will happen is if let's say I make a cut before there, so like right here, I'll play this before I cut it off, so this is the talking section. I'm the beginners ma. Looks like Mike is the final word. If I were to cut off somewhere right here, if I were to ripple delete this with F and you do not have to follow along here. Replay this. I'm the beginner's Mike. Can you feel the abruptness? Maybe you can. Depending on where you cut off this tail, it can feel pretty jarring. So our goal is to leave that little bit. Hey, shift and the scroll wheel to kind of recondense our audio was here. Now, a skill I'd like you to try to form as we begin to work through this footage is looking at these audio waves and trying to determine what's going on. We can use our first clip as an example. You can see kind of the shape and the fullness here. This is when somebody's speaking. Up ahead, we've got a lot of these little, like, blips. I would wager that it's me kind of grunting or making some noises or trying to start what I'm about to say. Yeah, we don't need that. So I'm gonna hit A here to make a cut. F is ripple delete. God and play this, Ford? Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. Perfect. A to cut. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna continue to get rid of some of these, like, weird noises and some of these bad takes. But before we do that, I need to cover a very important editing concept slash technique. 11. The Trim Editor: So we are going to cover how to trim our footage, and we're going to add it to our arsenal of techniques here inside DaVinci Resolve. And I'm going to do it working with just these first two little clips. So I'm gonna put my playhead on this cut, hit D to zoom in a little bit. I'm gonna shift my playhead off to a smidgen, and we need to talk about this right here, this cut point. Something I haven't done yet and something you might have experimented with is shifting this cut point. If I hold my mouse in between so that it's directly in between, you can see that it forms this bracket. And so what I can do is I can shift this cut point around, excuse me. Be very useful for when we want to change when one video leads into the other or the audio as well. So clicking in the middle shifts that. If I move ever so slightly to the Ooh, there we go to the left, my icon changes to a single bracket with this filled rectangle. This allows me to drag the edge of our cut. So if I wanted to get a little bit closer to where I start speaking here, I could again, grab the edge and pull it over. Now we've got this gap in between, so what I could do is drag and select this, pull it over, or I'm going to hit Control Z once. Like I showed off in the last video, we can click the gap, hit F to ripple delete. That process that we went through is typically called trimming your footage 'cause we're shaving off the edge of where things are beginning and ending. Now, here's where some really important stuff comes in. That process is a destructive process, meaning that we cannot recover information if we change this cut point or we trim the edges. Let me show you what I mean. You see this little blurb here where I say Hey. Hey. Okay. If I were to take the cut point of this clip here and shift it over so that I get rid of the hay, if I were to take this second clip and move it to the right, you notice how we don't regain that audio file. That's because when we put audio or video on top of existing audio or video, it overwrites it. It does not store that information underneath. Again, if I were to take this clip right here, move it over to the left, release my mouse button, drag it over the right. You see how it deletes the existing footage? This can become very important because let's say I bring this over to the left and I go, Well, hm my voice is getting cut off here. I need to drag the edge over. Well, then in doing so, we've lost the beginning of this clip. Obviously, the quick fix is to kind of grab that edge here and pull over to the left, and then, you know, problem solved. But on bigger timelines, we want to avoid having this headache. So there is a very powerful tool built into DaVinci that handles this. And it's called our trim mode. So if I go up to our editing tool bar here and I hover over this icon, this will toggle our mouse to go into the Trim Edit mode. Now, if you're using my keyboard shortcuts, I have mapped that to the Shift and W button. So you can either click this icon or hit Shift and W to swap to the Trim Edit mode. Now, this is a very, very special tool, and I'll show you. I were now to go to the edge of our clip here in the trim Edit mode, watch what happens with our audio and video as I move this point. It pushes it to the right. We're not overriding anything. We're pushing our footage away. Vice versa, if I go to the left side, it's going to maintain our footage over here and push it out as well. So if you're ever in a situation where some part of your footage is cut off, what you can do is select the trim mode, go to the edge, and then push it out so that we regain that information. And we don't override anything on the other side of the playhead. Now the trim mode has a lot of really cool features, like, for example, if I were to click on our right clip here and I have my mouse just somewhere in the middle, okay? So it's not sitting on any of the borders or the edges, I can slide the footage so that our cut points remain the same, but the in and out points of our media shift. So if I wanted our audio to be closer to these edge, well, I can slip it that way. Very useful, very powerful tool. To get back to the normal selection mode, you can either hover over the mouse and click it, or I have it mapped to W. So for us to toggle between these two modes, we can either hit Shift and W to go to our trim mode. Or just hit W to go to our normal selection mode, and then we can use the normal selection functions. Again, big takeaway here, moving our footage is a destructive process. Indivintual Resolve, when you move clips or assets on top of each other on the same track, it overwrites it. It deletes it. 12. Cleaning Up Your Rough Cut: We are now getting more comfortable with our keyboard cuts. We know how to trim and Edit our footage, and now we need to finish the rough cut of our Edit. With that said, let's continue Edit. So I'm going to reset this up so that we're at a similar point. Okay, so now we've got our two clips here, and let's continue to play through things. Well, hello, Crew. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. Ah. You might have missed it the first time, but these two clips are saying the exact same thing. So we've got two takes of the same line. This will be a decision that we have to make later on down the road. Until then, I'm going to cut off the edge of this footage here. We can either hit A and F or we could just grab the and pull her in. Let's click this gap here, hit F to ripple delete. And now we've got this big gap here where it doesn't look like anything's being said. As editors, our duties are to scrub through and get familiar with as much of the footage as possible. However, because we know this is a talking head video and I am supposed to be speaking, more than likely this is stuff that's not going to be used. We should always double check by grabbing our playhead and scrubbing through here to make sure nothing's happening. But we can kind of move through this sequence confidently knowing that we'll probably need to get rid of this. So I'm gonna hit A to make a cut. F to delete. Let's go ahead and play through here. Something that a lot of beginning editors will make. Oh, messed up. Let's keep going. So a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make. Oh, massed up again. Remember how I said a skill I'd like you to start forming is looking at audio waves and trying to predict what's going to happen ahead of time. You see how these two audio waveforms are very similar. In my head, because I've been doing this for a little while, I know that more than likely, these are probably the same things being said. And our options are, one, one is a good take and one is a bad take. Two, they're both good takes that we could possibly use. Or three, it is the same take, and I mess up on both of them. And we're ending up with option three here. So what I can do is after both of them hit a F to delete. If for some reason you feel like you need to go back and regain that take, well, lucky for you, we can use that trim mode. So I could hit Shift and W to swap to trim mode. Click our clip here, go to the edge and push it out till we regain it. Now, as I'm scubing through the footage as well, you know how you can kind of hear it in the background audio scrubbing is turned on. If you do not like that there is a way to turn it off. Go up top to the very upper menus over here. Click Timeline, and then we're going to find the audio section, and then audio scrubbing. So I have it mapped to Shift S to turn it on and off. So if you don't want it, you can just toggle it off. But sometimes I like it just to kind of preview what's being said. Alright, so again, we don't need these two sections, so I'm going to go to the beginning here. Hit A to make a cut. That's a delete. And the only thing I'm keeping in mind when I'm cutting ahead of the clips is to make sure I'm not cutting off the head of the audio. The preciseness, again, it doesn't matter too too much. Let's go and play. So a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make is that they focus on the spectacle of the Edit over the story of the Edit. Perfect. Yeah, now, looking ahead, we got this short little blip. Is it likely that this is a good take? No, but we'll go ahead and play it just in case. What we're talking about? See, there is always a chance, 'cause we don't know this audio. We don't know what's being said. We don't know if this is, like, a short exclamation. So there is a chance that this is usable, but more than likely Editor brains on probably don't need it. Let's go ahead and move forward. When we're talking about the thing that really mat When we're talking about what really matters. Okay. Bloofed again. A plus F. See how often I'm pressing the A&F key? So I cannot stress enough that you don't have to use the home row ASD and F, but you should find some keyboard cuts that you are comfortable with that you use over and over. Anyways, let's carry on. When we're talking about what really matters the most at the end of the day, it's the message being told in the video, not what kind of effects you can include. Perfect. Make a cut. Drag my playhead forward. Cut, plus F. You can include. Something else a lot of beginning editors are uncomfortable doing is letting a Cut. Something else a lot of beginning editors are uncomfortable with is cutting naturally. Okay. Perfect. This is a bad take. We'll go ahead and hit Ripple, delete it. Now, sometimes what I'll do, as well, when I'm sorting through footage is, if I hit S to zoom out a little bit, we've still got a little chunk to work through, sometimes you can kind of lose track of where you're at in that Edit. So sometimes what you'll catch me doing is if I hit D to zoom in, I'll just bring whatever that last little clip is that I edited, and I'll bring it up a track. Just so I know for myself, Hey, I've made it at least this far. Stuff to the left has been sorted through. Quick note, though. When I drag footage up and down, you see how there's this hovering timestamp? That's the amount of seconds plus frames, it's been shifted. So if I were to drag it up and go to the right, you see how we're adding frames in seconds, go to the left, frames and seconds. So you want to make sure it's at zero, zero. And if yours isn't snapping, the edges. So see how mine it kind of, like, snaps in when I get close to an edge. Make sure this magnet icon is toggled on. Sometimes it can get turned off if you accidentally pressed the I think is it map to, it's mapped to the end key. If you accidentally press or click it for whatever reason. So just make sure that's turned on. I'm going to bring this. Oop. No, wait. I want it up. I want it up. Alright, Editor Brain turned on, I bet that this is this like an m? Um Sure is. So as you continue to get better and better, a lot of times what you'll see me do is just kind of scrub past it. A F? Something else? Something else a lot of beginning editors feel like something else. A F, bad take. Something else a lot of beginning editors do often is the overuse of pre built in transitions. Until you're more comfortable with how you should Edit a video, I avoid using some of those presets. Perfect. Nicely said, Brandon. We'll make a cut here. And the last thing that I want to talk about is and one of the last things I want to talk about. Okay, take A F. Kind of see the rhythm that we're getting into? One of the last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. Your audio makes up 50% of any video edit. So you should spend as much time as possible. Huh. Okay. So it looks like we got a good sentence, no. One of the last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. Your audio makes up 50% of any video Edit. So you should spend as much time as possible Hmm don't finish the second half. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a cut here and I'm gonna drag it up one track. I'm looking over to the right, and I'm seeing that the audio wave forms don't quite match what's being said here. So just in case I need to use this first half, I don't want to delete this yet. There's the chance that we need to get rid of it, but as of right now, not sure I want to get rid of it. Now, I have a little horizontal mouse wheel, which just lets me do this. Which is pretty fun. A lot of mouses don't have that. So if you ever want to scroll left and right, the hot key is Control plus middle mouse button, and that'll let you move left and right. Or you can always click ahead. As to zoom out, D to zoom in, and that'll recenter your playhead. Alright, Edit brains turn back on again, right? So if I'm looking at this little section of audio waves, we've got a couple of little short blips here that are more than likely not going to be useful. So if I was editing this video for real, what I would do is this. The audio. Scrub forward, I go, Yep, not good. Quick decision, boom, boom. If you're not comfortable doing that, continue to play it. Your audio, the audio The more times you do this, the more confident you'll get with making quick decisions on what to keep and remove. When in doubt, you know, take your time. But either way, we do need to select this F, ripple delete. The audio of the video accounts for over 50. The audio the audio of the don't need any of this. A F. The audio of the video accounts for 50% of the final Edit. So you should spend just as much time working with your audio as you do working with the video. Perfect. Nicely done, Brandon. Okay, so where does this send start? The video accounts for 50% of the final Edit. The audio of the video accounts for 50% of the final Edit. Where does this video start? Excuse me, where does this clip start? And one of the last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. Your audio makes up 50%. Ah. See, this is why we made this step to bring this up a track in case we needed to use it. See, the beginning of this clip leads into what I'm saying here, because when I was recording, I forgot to say this first sentence. So what I'm going to do is scrub forward, zoom in. I'm going to make a cut right before the second part of the clip. Select it. F ripple delete. And now if I were to play this, it should sound somewhat cohesive. Last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. The audio of the video accounts for Perfect. How did I know to do that? Well. I have the benefit of having recorded this video, so I know how I tend to speak and talk. So if you're not sure that's going to work, just keep it. Keep it. We can come back and refine things later, but I'm trying to save us as many iterations as possible. So again, if you're not sure, leave it in there, you can always remove things later on. But we're just trying to train our editors brains to start making some of these confident decisions earlier on. Right, drag my playhead over. I'm going to use my horizontal mouse wheel. Again, you can use control or command and the scroll wheel. Edit her brains turned on. These two waveforms are looking very similar, so I would wager that this is a boof. Hope this helps you guys and excited to talk more about Yep, and we flubbed it. So scrub forward A F. Video. Hope this helps and excited to talk more about editing. Perfect. A F. If I were to hit S to zoom out, I'm going to hold Shift and the scroll wheel to bring in our video tracks a little bit, clean it up, bring our playhead back to the beginning, Zoom in with D a couple of times. And now we have a rough cut of our Edit. Is this a good cut of our Edit? No. But could you, if you had to send this to somebody to take a look at? Yeah, for sure. We've gotten rid of all the gaps. We've gotten rid of all the mess ups, and now we have a somewhat cohesive take of our talking head example. So the next step is to continue to refine this and make it a good Edit. 13. Reviewing Your Edit: We finished our rough cut of the edit, and the next step is to make a more presentable version of the video. So before we do that, what I'd like to do is quickly review where we're at and some of the things that we're going to look for to add to the video and to remove from the video to improve it before we come up with our final delivery. Now, depending on the size of the video and the editor that you're talking to, this stage of the cut will be tag different things. Some people will call it the rough cut. Some people will call it an assembly cut. Some people will just even call it the selects of your Edit. And typically, the first pass is the least fun part of the editing process, but we've done it and now we have our working cut. So what I'd like to do is talk through a couple of things. One of the first things that I like to try to keep in mind is the total length of the video as is. So up in the top left corner by our preview window here is the timestamp of the total timeline length. So right now we're about 57 seconds, which is a little under a minute, which I think is great for this project. Next thing that I'm going to do is play the video from beginning to end so that we continue to familiarize ourself with the footage and the direction that we're going in, and then we can talk through what we're going to need to add into the video. Alright, let's go ahead and play from the beginning. Hello, crew. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. Ah, that's right. We've got more than one take here. Now, there are a few different ways to handle multiple takes, and this becomes more of a pressing issue later down the road, if you're working on a film set that has one, two, three, four, ten different takes. But for us, we just need to pick between the two. So I don't think there's a wrong or right answer here, but what I would like you to do is pick one that you feel like is a stronger version of that opening sentence. Hello, crew. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. I think I personally like the second take because it's saying the same thing and less words, and we get into the rest of the video a little bit faster. So what I'm going to do is select our first take and hit F Triple Delete. Now, again, let's play this video from beginning to end. Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make is that they focus on the spectacle of the Edit over the story of the Edit. When we're talking about what really matters the most at the end of the day, it's the message being told in the video, not what kind of effects you can include. Something else a lot of beginning editors are uncomfortable with is cutting naturally. Something else a lot of beginning editors do often is the overuse of pre built in transitions until you're more comfortable. Okay, and see, this is why we play our video from beginning to end because it looks like in the selection process, I didn't catch this duplicate take of me saying something that doesn't transition well into the rest of the video, right? So if we play this section again, something else a lot of beginning editors are uncomfortable with is cutting naturally. Something else a lot of beginning editors do often is the overuse of pre built in transitions. So what we can do is get rid of this unneeded segment. Let's go ahead and start playing all the way through again. It's the message being told in the video, not what kind of effects you can include. Something else a lot of beginning editors do often is the overuse of pre built in transitions. Until you're more comfortable with how you should Edit a video, I avoid using some of those presets. And one of the last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. The audio of the video accounts for 50% of the final Edit. So you should spend just as much time working with your audio as you do working with the video. Hope this helps and excited to talk more about editing. Perfect. And so now we have one cohesive message throughout the now 46 seconds of video. As editors, what are some things that we should start being conscious of now? Well, for one, we need to start thinking about the pacing of the video. The pacing of a video is a broad stroke term for how fast or slow does the video continue to carry out as you play it? Are things being said quickly? Is there time in between scenes? Are we letting certain shots linger for a long amount of time? Are we cutting very quickly? Depending on the video or the subject matter, a certain rhythm to the video might be more appropriate than another. The pacing is very much so a feel thing, and it's something that I'll try to continue to hammer home on as we continue to progress through the course. The next couple of things that I'm starting to think about are a lack of audio underneath. So there's no music. We have no sound effects to kind of highlight certain things and certain emotions throughout the video. And there's also no visual references throughout the video to highlight some of the things that are being said. Typically, additional footage to the main footage is called B Roll. And the primary footage that is driving the video forward is A role. So what we've done is come up with a cut of our Arol and now we need to start thinking about, is there ways to introduce B roll to highlight some of the things that are being said? And these are the big ticket issues that we need to address. 14. Using the Media Pool to Import and Organize Assets: The next step is to add in assets to the video, meaning music, sound effects, and Bbrol. And the art of choosing your assets is almost as big of a skill as learning how to Edit itself. I think a lot of editors will tell you that the procurement process of acquiring footage and music and sound effects can be more time consuming than actually coming up with the Edit. But lucky for you guys, I've already gone through and acquired the music and sound effect that we're going to use throughout the course. Now, with all that said, I'd like to introduce you guys to the Media page inside DaVinci Resolve. We're not going to spend too much time on it, but it is nice to know where it is and how to use it. So this far, we have been living over here in the Edit page, but don't you forget we've got all these other tools here inside DaVinci Resolve. So let's go ahead and meander on over to the Media page. Now, depending on you and your workflow, you might not spend a lot of time in the Media page, or you might spend a ton of time in the Media page. The Media page is essentially set up to sort through and bring in footage, audio assets, images, et cetera, et cetera. Bottom half here is our Media Pool. So this is everything that we have currently imported into our working project. So we can cycle through our folders just like we could on the Edit page. And if I wanted to, I could double click on some of the footage and we can preview it here in our Media Pool. Quick aside, I have the audio muted here so that it doesn't get in the way of me speaking you ever want to mute and mute stuff, you can just click little Speaker icon, or you can right click and now you have a volume bar, but I'm going to go ahead and keep this muted. Something else that's kind of a fun tool, and you might have seen this on the Edit page is this little circle with two arrows on the left and right side of it. This is your jog wheel. So you've seen me grab my playhead and move it left and right here to quickly scrub through the footage. But if you want to do a little bit more fine tuning, you can click and hold the jog wheel and move your mouse right and left. And now you have a little bit more fine control, I guess, I should say, in your preview. Is what I really wanted to show you guys in the top left corner here. This is where we can preview and import footage. On the upper left here are all your connected drives. You can see I've got a few, including Mr. Berger, who is somebody I am working with right now. And if you click on one of these drives, so if I click on my D Drive, which is my Media Drive, and I have this nice juicy folder over here in my D drive that's called my stock Media folder. And inside this folder is everything I've ever downloaded to work on a video ever. For the most part. So I've got music, stock footage, visual effects, whatever. If you can think of it and it goes in a video, it belongs right in here. So just like File Explorer on Windows or Mac, you can go ahead and open up your various folders. And I can go find my audio folder, and then we can even click on something like sound effects, and I can go to My Save Sound effects over here, and I've got a bunch of folders of random various sound effects. And one of the fun ones to look through is the Woohes. So if I click on my WosesFolder, we can begin to preview some of the Wohes that I have saved here. So if I unmute my audio here, I can drag my mouse over to preview it. If you don't like the mouse dragging preview, which for me sometimes gets in the way of me just kind of scrubbing through stuff. In your preview window, there's three dots in the upper right hand corner. If you click those, and then uncheck live Media preview. Now you can kind of scrub through things without it instantly playing. But I can double click on any one of these to preview it. And where this is nice is if I have something that I find that I'd like to use, so let's say I click here. And I like that little whoosh. But what I can do is go to my pre created sound effects folder that we already created, click there, and I can drag and pull it in. And so a lot of times in the beginning of edits, what we'll end up doing is we'll come up with a rough cut, and then we might sort through some of our assets that we have that we've either been provided or that we've gone and downloaded ourselves and try to procure which we want to use in our video. Now, you guys are going to have access to the sound effects. I'm gonna control Z so that we're all working with the same stuff. The last thing that I like to call out here that is personally my favorite feature of the media pool is there's this little section over here on the left, where it says, favorites. If I grab this middle bar and bring it up so you guys can see it a little better. You can see I have four folders saved here that I call all the time. And so for you, if you have your stuff saved on the C Drive, you can see that sometimes it can be a little bit of a nuisance to find the right folders. So if there is one that you use all the time, you can always right click on that folder and Add folder to favorites, and then it'll locate it over here. So now what I can do is I can go over to my audio Tem, and then I have all my music and sound effects right there so then I can quickly go through, find some of the different music tracks that I have saved and preview them on the fly. Pretty Nato, right? And so, again, if this is a track that I'd like, I can just drag and select it and pull it down into our media pool. So the next steps that we're going to take is we're going to introduce some of these audio items into our video. 15. Adding Music: Very common question at this stage in the video edit is, which do I do first? Audio or add B Roll. And I think what you'll find as you continue to edit is that kind of doesn't matter. It's going to make more sense, for instance, if you're working on a music video to add the music first. But when you're working on, like, something, you know, like a documentary, it might make more sense to structure the video and the B roll before you begin to add in music and sound effects. But what ends up happening a lot of times is you'll do one, and then you'll have to adjust the other, and it's kind of like a little bit of a back and forth game. But for us, we're going to start with some audio. Let's get some audio in the mix. Alright here. So we left off on the Media page, so let's bounce on back over to the Edit page. And depending on what folder you clicked on in the Media page is where your media pool will start. The Edit page. So the first thing that I'd like us to do is to pick an audio track to use, and we've got three here. Now, if you muted your audio in the last section, make sure it is unmuted so that we can preview our audio. And what I'd like you to do is one of two things. One, I'd like you to preview the music and make a decision on which one you'd like to introduce. And there's two ways to do that in DaVinci Resolve. The first way to do that, if you remember, right, a few videos ago, we actually collapsed our video player here into one viewer. So we can undo that by going up to the top right and clicking the split rectangle here to get back our second preview window. And this preview window is specifically set to preview footage in your Media pool. So I can double click on anything in my Media pool to preview it here on the left while maintaining the imagery from our timeline on the right. So what we can do is begin to preview our music by hitting the Space Bar. Now, by default, most music is normalized or it has their audio level max to the max level, so it might be pretty loud when you preview it. If it is coming in a little bit loud, you can always adjust your volume over here by dragging it over to the left just a little bit so your ear drums aren't completely smashed out. So that's one way we can preview our music. The other way would be, again, I just like working with one window at a time. I'm going to re collapse this left window here by going over again to the upper right and clicking our giant rectangle. And now we can just double click instead to preview whatever is in our media pool. That being said, we do lose what's happening over here in our timeline. But for simpler edits and simpler videos, there's often not a need to have both up at the same time. And I will show you when it is appropriate to have both and when it makes a little bit more sense, but I like just having one window. Again, it's completely up to you. There's not a wrong answer here. So let's go ahead and preview our audio. Okay, so this is kind of like a lo fi track. Now, a question that might have formed and you're noggin over there is, how do I know which one of these is good as we begin playing through them? Well, listen to me. You're gonna have to make a choice, an informed choice. Remember, editing is a creative field, so you can have some creative liberty for what makes sense. There's going to be more appropriate choices for music and sound effects as opposed to others, right? So, if we're doing a sad, emotional scene, it's probably not going to make sense to have some kind of, like, thumping EDM music in the background. But like I've said once, and I'll continue to say throughout this course, there's not a correct answer. It's just what makes sense to you. So if you're looking for a little bit of guidance into what kind of song should you begin looking for, well, again, we have to think about the overall message of the video. What is being said in this segment and what kind of audio is going to feel appropriate? So if I were to click my mouse back on the timeline, we're gonna lose our preview. But remember, this video is me talking about some basic editing mistakes. So the music that we choose to use shouldn't feel intrusive. We will probably just want something that sits in the background that just fills in some of the gaps in between the talking points. So I'm gonna double click on that Lo fi song again to continue to preview. And I kind of like the rhythm in that song. Oftentimes, as well, when I'm previewing music, what you can kind of do, and again, remember, we're trying to train ourselves with recognizing waveforms is I'll kind of skim ahead to moments where the beat kicks in or there's a needle drop moment. So you can kind of see here the regularity of the waveform increases, and right around here is probably where the main verse of the song kicks in. So I'll kind of scrub over to here. Perfect. Make a little mental note of that. Let's check out on the last song, you want to double click. So again, when I immediately pull this up, the thing I notice is we've got two kind of driving moments here where there's a lot of stuff going on, and then kind of like a down moment. So I'll probably preview a snippet in here and then a snippet in here to see how each sounds. And if I didn't call it out earlier, unfortunately, you can't drag and move the playhead in this main working area, you have to use this upper section here to scrub through this song. You can also use this little bit down here and the jog wheel, just like we talked about in the last section. So I'm going to go ahead and hit Play. Right away, this is a lot more upbeat than that Lo Fi track that we were using. Hey, I think I've got a general gist of what that sounds like. Let me go ahead and click forward see what this little area sounds like. Interesting. Okay. So each of these songs brings a slightly different vibe and energy. So what should we use? We've got this one called cinematic Documentary Soft Background. We got a lo fi song? And the soft background music To me, personally, this last track sounds a little bit more like it's a news update, and the cinematic one sounds like it's meant for a documentary. I don't know if it quite fits the tone that I'm looking for. There's something about it that invites a little bit more drama that I think that I'm looking for. So I'm going to bring in the ofi background. To do so? Well, we just go to our media pool. We go to that file, and we're going to drag and drop it in. Now, what you're going to kind of see me do is drag and swing it around over here, cause I don't want to happen chance to write some of the dialogue. So what can happen and don't follow this step is you bring in your music, you go here, and then you go, shoot. So what I'm gonna do is go ahead and drag our song, swing it down and around. A common follow up question when it comes to importing music and sound and footage, even is, what if I don't want the whole thing? So, obviously, we're not going to use all 2 minutes and 13 seconds of this song. So what if I only wanted to go up to here? Well, what you can do is set in and out points on any of the media in your media pool. Oh is for Out. And see how our player preview gets cut off short here. If I were to drag my playhead to the left, I is for N. So I equals in O equals out. And if you're currently previewing that media, you can also just drag and pull down from the media preview itself and see how we have a much smaller snippet here. I'm gonna go ahead and hit backspace again. And the reason why I'm not hitting F, remember, F is ripple delete. When I hit F, it's going to look to ripple delete this entire segment from left to right. So watch what happens. See how it shifts everything over to the left. So we got to be careful with our rippling and our deleting. Nate control Z again. Select our music track, Backspace to get rid of it. I'm gonna double click the song preview again. How do we reset our in and out points? Well, we're gonna hit Alt plus I and Alt plus O. The Alt key is a modifier. I'm not sure if I've mentioned it yet, but we will talk more about modifiers later in the future. So again, I equals in Oh, equals out. Alt plus I resets the endpoint, Alt plus Oh, resets the outpoint. Alright, let me go ahead and re drag in our music track here. I'm going to go to the end of our video and then hit A to cut. Now, you notice here that I didn't actually have the song selected before I do that. If you don't have a particular file selected, when you go to make cut, it will cut every single track. So watch as I hit A, it's going to make a cut on everything. So with that said, we just need to make sure we're intentional with our cuts now moving forward that we have multiple tracks and more than one thing happening. Hit Control Z a couple times and then delete this back portion of the music. 16. Mixing Volume: I bring my play head all the way back to the beginning. And before I begin to preview what we have right now, you're probably already wagering that this is going to be too loud. Look at how big the waveforms are compared to our voice. If I were going to play this, the music is going to come in so stinking, strong and loud that we're not going to be able to hear anything. So again, I have my audio over here lowered a little bit so that I don't blow out my eardrums, but I'm going to go ahead and hit play. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make is that they focus on And, wow, can you sure hear the song now, okay? So what volume level should our audio be? With my music track selected, I'm going to go ahead and look to the up right here to our Inspector tab. Now, remember, the Inspector tab is what controls the video and audio properties. So if I were to click on a video track, go to the inspector tab, and if yours isn't open, it's this upper right icon over here that says inspector on it. On one of our video clips, I can go to the video tab, and we have all of our video properties, right? So we got the Zoom, we've got the position, et cetera, et cetera. Gonna click these little reset icons to reset that. When I click the audio track here, we don't have a video tab because well, there's no video, but we do have this very big and important slide over here called volume. We're not going to worry about any of these other intimidating looking things down here. We're just going to look at the volume. Now, you see here how it says zero? Well, that might not quite make sense because obviously we have sound. Our volume is not at zero. Well, what I'd like you to do is this up in the upper right hand corner over here, click the mixer icon. Now, I can't remember what the default opener is, but you might have one of two things. It might say mixer or meters. I would like us to just look at the meters. So if you have the mixer on First open, go to these three dots right next to it and turn it on meters. Now, we have one single bar over here to the right. Now, it might be a bit hard to see, but at the very, very tip top of this bar, you see how it says zero? Most of the time when we're talking about audio, the way that it is produced is it's normalized on a tippy top max of zero. Anything that goes past zero peaks the audio, and it's when you get that, like, real crunchy, squealy noise. And so what that basically means is that when we're working with audio, zero is the max. If we want to lower audio, we need to subtract and bring the audio down. So if I were to bring my playhead all the way to the left and play this let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of You see how we clip this zero mark, which means our music is going past the zero point, which is bad. We do not want that. So again, how lad do we make our music? Well, let me open up my handy dandy very official white board. There are going to be three very general volume ranges that we can sit in depending on what we'd like to do. If we want our audio to be the pr merry driver of the video, meaning music video, a montage, the audio is the thing that is making the video happen, we can go anywhere from, I would say -3 decibels, two -10 decibels. What's decibel? Well, a decibel is the unit of measurement here for our audio. So when we're subtracting volume here, we are doing it in terms of decibels. So It's not just a random floating number here. These are decibels. We would like our audio to be complimentary, meaning something that is heard but isn't quite as loud as our primary audio, we're going to go anywhere from -12 to I will go -21 DB. This volume range is definitely still going to be heard by the viewer, but it's not going to be in a way as much as when we're up in this range. If we want back round music, so something that is not in the way, but can still fill in some of the dead spaces of our video, we're going to shoot for the -30 DB range. We can go a little above and below this, but -30 DB is going to be our happy space. So, what I would like you guys to do is with our volume track selected, you can either type in in the inspector tab -30 or hit Control Z, click and hold this property. So again, I am left clicking and holding and drag this to the left until you hit -30 or what you can do. Hay control Z one is go over to the music track itself in the timeline, and it's going to be a bit tricky to see, but there's this little floating white line right here. And when your mouse hovers over, the icon changes to two up and down arrows, and you can drag the volume down directly on the timeline. Now, it's pretty fast when you do so. So if you'd like to slow down how much it changes, we can hold down the Shift key to add a little granularity when we're changing the volume. And now our music is going to sound like this. And I would recommend having headphones on, because if you're on speakers, it might be a little difficult to hear the music. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make is that they focus on the spectacle of the Edit over the story of the Edit. So see how in moments like this where there's just little pause between the things that are being said, the music kind of fills that gap. That's what we want. The music isn't the focus here. What I'm saying is the focus, and we want to make sure we're hearing what I'm saying. I'd suggest doing in your own time is changing the audio level of the music track here and seeing how it affects the understandability of what I'm saying. I'd also suggest changing where the music starts. Because if you remember, this section right in here is where the main beat of the song kicks in. When I say kicks in, all I mean is that it's starting right there, right, where a lot more of the instruments are coming into play. Increase the volume level a little bit so I can make sure I can hear the song. Do often is the over use. Right? It's right in here. Often, is the overuse of So what I can do is I can make a cut here on the music track exactly where the beat kicks in. And then I can shift this point around to see how it affects the video. So if I wanted to, I could actually have the beat kick in much closer to the beginning portion. So I could drag this over to the left, grab the left handle, pull it over, grab the right handle, extend it. And then what happens if I were to leave this at -18? Right? So somewhere in between this -12 and -21 range. Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make is that they focus on the spectacle of the Edit over the story of the Edit. So you can still hear what's being said, but the music becomes a much bigger presence of the video. So again, experiment, play with these things. See what makes sense to you. Remember, the whole point of this section, in particular, this course is to just experiment and figure out how things affect one another. So, what what I am going to do is I'm going to bring this down back to -30 I would like this to be backing audio. Again, I'm holding down the Shift key to fine tune. It doesn't have to be exact -30.27 is just fine. And now we're ready to move on. 17. J and L Cuts: Would you look at that? I've got headphones on. So we've got music down. Next thing is we're going to try to fine tune our pacing, and the way that we're going to do that is with one of the most important editing techniques you will learn in this course and in your lifetime, okay? And I'm talking about J and L cutting. If you're already familiar with this, fantastic. If not, one of the most common questions I get is, how do I make smooth transitions or smooth cuts? And there's a lot of different answers to that, but my go to is teaching people how to do J and L cutting. What I'm going to do is show you a quick demonstration of what it is and then how we apply it to our own videos. Cool? Cool. Let's do it. This next bit is purely for demonstration. You guys do not have access to this footage. I would just like you guys to watch and follow along as I explain what a J and LCut is. We have two clips here. I have an airplane flying and an airplane landing. As is the transition from this left flying clip to the right landing clip is a standard cut. Sometimes this is called a jump cut. So if I were to hit Play, it sounds and looks like this. Now, the transition as is, isn't awful, but we can apply a J and LCut to strengthen this transition. So what I would like to do is I would like to preview this landing audio before we actually cut to the plane landing. And the way that we do that is as follows. Now, there is more than one way to do a JN LCut, but this is the simplest approach I have found. I'm going to take the left clip and drag it up one track. Opa, let me get rid of this subtitle track real quick. I forgot I had that. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the landing clip and slide it underneath the other clip. Now, what's going to happen when I play this? Well, we are going to see the flying video all the way through to the end of the clip, but we're going to preview the audio before we transition to this scene. And that's going to look something like this. Now, this audio getting cut off abruptly makes this feel a tad bit jarring. So what I'm going to do is on the music track, when I hover at the edge in the upper corners and I can do this on any video, you'll see these little white tabs. If I grab that, I can fade out the audio. So let me go ahead and replay that. As viewers, our mind is being primed for some kind of change that's happening in the next scene. We don't know what it is yet, but we're beginning to hear audio from something that's happening in the future. So now we make this cut, this transition going from flying to landing, we're already primed and geared to see the plane landing. Again, if I were to go full screen, that's going to look and sound something like this. Isn't that pretty cool? It's much smoother than if we were to just go from A to B with nothing in between. Now, in traditional forms of editing, what this ends up looking like is something like this, I'll grab this video track up here, pull it down. If we were to look at this cut point, we form a J. So this is a Jcut. A J cut in video editing is when we preview and lead in with audio from the upcoming scene. An cut is the opposite of this. So if I were to hold down the alt key and drag our cut point over here, now what's gonna happen is we're not going to preview the audio of the upcoming scene, but we're gonna lead out with the audio from the previous scene. And that looks and sounds something like this. And again, if we were to look at this transition point, we have an L that forms here. When and where do we use J and L Cuts? Well, let's go ahead and talk about that. So we're now back on our main working timeline here with our music and our talking head footage, what we're going to do is we're going to begin to introduce J and L cutting to help with the pacing of the video. Here, you don't have to follow on, but you can choose to if you'd like to. What I'm going to do is I'm going to drag and select these first two clips right here. And all I'd like to do is hit Control C, scrub my playhead ahead to any random point outside of our main working area and hit Control V to paste them. So Control C is copy, Control V is paste. I'm going to move my playhead over here. Hit D to zoom in and then use my horizontal scroll wheel to bring these two things in. What I'd like us to do is to begin to string together these different sentences and thoughts so that it feels more cohesive, because as is, there's noticeable gaps in between. So if I were to play this, a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of beginning. Again, Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of It is okay to have natural pauses and dialogue. However, we do want to keep things moving along. There shouldn't be a moment in the video where there is a hiccup, right? There's a noticeable, uh, like a lull in the video. So what we can do is drag up this left track, drag the right track and pull it underneath. Where? Well, let me click my play at here so I can zoom in. Ember how we were saying that after every sentence or break in words, there's a little tale, right? There's a little tail in the audio. And again, I' hitting Shift and the scroll wheel to expand my music tracks. We want to keep this audio tale because otherwise, if we cut it off, the audio will feel it'll feel cut off. So what I like to do is try to line up the head or the beginning of the next audio phrase so that it sits somewhere on this tale. Where? Well, it's very dependent on the flow of the dialogue, but let's go ahead and play this as is. Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make. That's not bad. What if I were to bring it even further? Hey. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of beginning Ooh, a little bit more punchy. It's sounding a little bit more intrusive. What if I were to bring it out a little bit? Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of beginning editor. Interesting. So where should you put it? I don't know. It's time for you to start making some decisions on how you want the pacing and the feeling of the video to sound. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring it forward just a little bit. So if you were looking to imitate me, the head of this audio is sitting somewhere in the tail of this one. It's kind of middle point. So, again, it's gonna sound something like this. What about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of Quick pop quiz. What kind of transition is this? Remember, we're leading in with the audio from the next scene before we're seeing it. Give you 3 seconds to Ah. Jacut. This is a J cut. A Jcut in particular is a very, very powerful tool when working with dialogue. It's how we can maintain the audio sanctity of the previous clip while also pushing along what's being said next. From here, I'm going to show you two techniques that we can use to fine tune this kind of transition, this cut, and then we'll begin applying it to our working timeline. 18. Finalizing Your Rough Cut: Through this next section, we're going to apply our J&L cutting and end up with a close to final version of our Edit. As is, this is where the video portion, the visual portion transitions from this clip to this clip. Well, what if I would like the video to start here, right? So I'd like it to start on this peak of the audio wave right here. There's two ways that we can go about doing this. The first is to use the Alt key to select just the video track. The Alt key is a modifier inside DaVinci Resolve, or it would be the option key if you're in Mac. When we're editing, if we only want to select just the audio, or just the video of a given video and audio clip, we can use the Alt key to select one of those. So with just the video selected, I can grab that right end and pull it in. Or what you can do is you don't even have to select the video track, which is the Alt key. You can hold down the Alt key and drag just the end of it. Because if not, if I were to select both the video and audio, we're getting back to that territory, we're cutting off the audio tail. So, Alt key, drag and select the right end. The alternative to this, so I'm going to hit Control Z. And I'm not as big of a fan of this workflow, but if it makes sense to you, go ahead. I'm going to hold down the Alt key and click the video track again, right? So I just want the video track. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag it down so that they're both on the same track. And now what we can do is grab the transition point and pull it over, forming that more traditional J. So that looks and sounds like this. Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make There we go. Now, let's go apply this to our timeline to improve the pacing of our video. I'm going to hit S to Zoom out shift and scroll wheel to make things a little bit more condensed. I'm going to get rid of these two practice clips by dragon selecting them and hitting F or the backspace key to get rid of them. Now, back to the beginning. D to zoom in. I'm going to begin to work with just our A role here, our talking head footage. While we're doing that, there might be moments where I go to cut. We accidentally cut our music track, which we don't want to do. I'd like to leave our music track alone, as is. So what we can do is this, go ahead and direct your eyes over to the left over here. You might have noticed that each track has a few little icons next to it. Each of these serves a very useful purpose. For example, if I wanted to mute the audio on this first track, well, what I can do is I can click the button. And now we only hear the background audio. Let me check that real quick. What if we've got ten different audio tracks and we only want to hear this third one? Well, the button right next to it is called solo because we will solo that track. Pretty nifty, right? You can also drag and hold down to select multiple tracks at one time. So if I want to unmute and mute, all three tracks, I can drag and select up and down. The icon next to that is the sync lock, which we're not going to address quite yet. But the final one is this lock icon. And when we click that, it locks this track from any changes and adjustments. So if I were to hit A, I cannot cut the music track, and I can't move it either. So if we were to begin Ripple Deleting here, this track is locked in place for all adjustment. So with the music track Locke, let's go back to the beginning of our footage here, and let's begin to do some J cutting. Here's my workflow. Anytime I'm transitioning from this clip to this clip, I will either drag the clip up so that I can begin to adjust the timings of the following clip or I will go to the end and make an arbitrary cut on the tail portion. Could be here? Could we here? Could be here. Doesn't matter. I just need a chunk that I can bring up one level. So that way, I can grab this clip and slide it underneath. Here we go. Mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of beginning editors. Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of beginning Edit. Ah. Problem. We didn't move everything else over. Well, couple solutions. For one, we could drag and select all the footage over here and pull it over. For two, we could go to this little gap in here. F to ripple toe? Or what we can begin doing is using a new keyboard shortcut. And for us, if you've downloaded my cuts, that button is E. E selects everything to the right of the playhead. So if I were to select E, I can pull everything over to the left. If you are using the default keyboard, that button is going to be Alt plus Y or Option plus Y. So now what we're gonna do is we're going to continue to clean up the timeline and improve the pacing. I'm looking to string sentences together. So what I do is something like this. Click towards the end, hip claim. The Edit over the story of the Edit. One more time? Okay. Zoom in. I can probably get rid of this portion right here. Make a cut, F, so that I'm still seeing the tale. And again, it might be hard to see on your guys' end, but I can see a little tail here. Make a cut? On the tail portion, pull it up. Go to the right, and now I'm going to press E to select everything so that when I pull this next clip underneath, I'm grabbing everything. And it's just somewhere arbitrary. The Edit over the story of the Edit. When we're talking about what? Perfect. That sounds pretty good to me. In my mind, I'm just trying to line up head to tail somewhere in there. Again, go over here. Now, what kind of effects you can include? Something else? A lot of beginning. Hold this up. E, slide this underneath. Do you have to do this for every single cut? No. Of course not. If I were to hit Control Z a couple of times, I could just snip off this little bit here so that we're starting right at the beginning of the dialogue so I could hit A, F, so I'm really close to being right at the beginning. What kind of effects you can include? Sothing else a lot of beginning. I think that works perfectly fine, as well. Again, no right answer here. The thing that we're trying to do is just make better choices. Let's go ahead and hit play. Editors do Opten is the overuse of pre built in transitions. Until you're more comfortable with how you should Edit a video, I avoid using some of those presets. Perfect. C. Another thing you could think about doing is in between these pauses here, if you want to make things a little bit tighter, see how there's a little bit of a delay? Built in transitions. Until you're more comfortable. You could even think about making a Jacut here, but I'm gonna leave it alone as it is. Using some of those presets. And one of the last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. The audio? Do we need a Jacut in between here and here? I don't know. Presets. And one of the last things I think as is, it feels a little bit It's pretty natural. I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. The audio of the Here I do want to make a little Jacut. Why? Because I just feel like I kind of want this to punch in sooner. A, cut the tail off, drag up, E to select everything to the right, pull it in. A is focusing on the audio of the video. The audio of the video accounts for 50% of the final Edit. So you should spend just as much time working with your audio as you do working with the video. Hope this helps and Make a little cut here. F, I think one of the big reasons why I like J cutting like this is because there's an element of forgiveness to the Edit. If you don't want to do this and if you want to make sure that the beginning of this clip starts right at the beginning of the dialogue every time, well, you got to be pretty precise there. You need to bring your playhead right to that point right before the dialogue begins. Well, if I do J&L cutting, well, what I can do is I can just grab the tail here and then just pull this in somewhere somewhere relatively close so that it feels somewhat smooth. But you notice how I'm not grabbing the ends here or grabbing the ends here. I'm just moving things to where it feels okay. Video. Hope this helps and excited to talk more about editing. Perfect. I think we can actually cut it right there. And there's one last step. Our music carries on without any of the video. So we need to trim the end of our music here. I'm going to go all the way over to the track three, unlock it, and then pull in the end of our music. And now we're sitting at 44 seconds, and this is what our video looks and sounds like. Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make is that they focus on the spectacle of the Edit over the story of the Edit. When we're talking about what really matters the most at the end of the day, it's the message being told in the video, not what kind of effects you can include. Something else a lot of beginning editors do often is the overuse of pre built in transitions. Until you're more comfortable with how you should Edit a video, I'd avoid using some of those presets. And one of the last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. The audio of the video accounts for 50% of the final edit. So you should spend just as much time working with your audio as you do working with the video. Hope this helps and excited to talk more about editing. Very nice, crew. We're getting close to wrapping up this project. 19. Inserting B-Roll: Alright, so we've got a pretty decent cut of our video now. We've got music. Our video is paced, decently well. Our next step is going to be to add in some visuals, some of the B Roll. Because for the entire video, we are looking at one camera angle and one perspective. It is just me looking right at you in the camera. So let's add in some visual to add a little variety to help kind of smooth things along. On the spectacle of the Edit over the story of the Edit. When we're talking about what really matters the most at the end of the day, it's the message being told in the video, not what kind of effects you can include. So I think right in here, when I'm talking about not focusing on the spectacle and instead focusing on the message of the story, we can introduce some B roll, probably right here on this cut. So again, that's right in here. Editors make is that they focus on the spectacle of the Edit over the story of the Edit. When we're talking about what Yeah, I think right in here, we can introduce some B Roll. So up in our media pool, I'm going to locate the B Roll folder, which is under our video folder. I'm going to click here. And I'm giving us five videos that we can use. Wow. So how do we know what to use and where to put it? Well, again, there's a few ways that we can go about doing this. We can always just individually preview our video by double clicking on it, and then we can kind of sort through and familiarize ourselves with what's been going on. So it looks like we got some snow footage here. And I think my intent with this was to show you guys that in our main working section, I'm talking about how it's more important to show the story over spectacle. And so what I'd like to do is make a little mini story of the skiers in here and the mountains and this imagery, as opposed to this first video up top here, where I've just got some random moving snowboards. Now, here's a cool little trick and workflow technique that I'd like you guys to get in the hang of. So, as is, I am much more familiar with the footage than you guys because I picked it out. So, if you're somebody who's been given a bunch of footage, it's going to be pretty slow to individually click through everything to preview what the heck is going on in here. As always, there's a few techniques to do this, but one of the most straightforward ways is to do this. Drag and select all of your footage in the Media pool, or you can hit Control A to select everything in your BRL folder or your BRL bin, excuse me. Right click, and the very top option for me says, create new timeline using selected clips. Now, before I click that, remember, what is a timeline? Well, we've been working on our main timeline. We've got one timeline right now. Well, in good old DaVinci Resolve, we can create multiple timelines to be working with multiple things all at once. So again, if I drag and select this footage, right click create new timeline using selected clips, we can create a new timeline. And remember how we set up our project settings over here? Well, now, again, everything's all set up, so we don't need to go uncheck this and double check to make sure format and all that is all set up. We just use our project settings, and I'm going to rename this new timeline. We'll just keep it simple for now. B Roll or B underscore Roll. Hey, create. Now, earlier on, I turned on this tabbed option over here so that I can see both my main timeline and my B Roll timeline. If you don't have that, or you would like to now toggle this on, remember, it's this little icon up over top here. Click that and you want display stacked timelines. That'll let you toggle between our main timeline and our B Roll timeline. And now, if I hit S to Zoom out, we can see all of our footage at a glance. Very cool. Very cool, very cool. So I'm going to tight up our media pull really quick because we have a timelines folder. Remember this is where our main timeline is at. So in the BRL folder, it generates our timeline, which is indicated by this little it's pretty small, but it's this little timeline icon in the bottom left corner. I'm going to take that and drag and put it in our timelines bin. So now when I click the timelines folder, I can see both of our working timelines here. So I'm going to toggle over to the main timeline. It play because I'm trying to remember where we wanted to insert some footage. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make is that they focus on the spectacle of the Edit over the story of the Edit. When we're talking. Right here. I think I want to introduce some other video right here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring my playhead here. Click. Anywhere in the empty space, make sure footage is not selected, and I'm going to hit the key. And what that does is it adds a marker on our timeline here so that we can remember where to put our footage. So that way, you don't have to have perfect memorization skills. If you don't want to use M, there's always the marker icon up above here in our little editing tool bar. So let's find something that seems like it might fit. We're looking for something that doesn't have spectacle. We're looking for something that might have a story behind it, maybe some character. Where my head goes are these two skier clips right in here. So I think what I'd like to do is take this clip and bring it over into our main timeline. And now, can you guess what I'm about to say? There's a few ways that we can do this. What I will say and the wrong way to do this is this. Clicking on this clip, hitting Control C to copy it, going back to the main timeline, and then pasting it on the marker. That is going to write everything that we've already laid out because we're pasting it here on the first track. So how do we not do that? Well, let me hit Control Z. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how I would do this and then introduce different methods that might fit your own workflow. For me, what I would probably do is this. I would drag it up one track and one more track. So that way, it's already on the third track. I would hit Control C to copy it, go to the main timeline, hit Control V to paste. And it's going to paste it here on our third track. So now we have our footage separated, ready to go. Alternatively, what I might do, so I'm going to hit backspace here to delete that is I would look to bring it in from our media pool. Now, depending on the amount of footage you have, it might be easy to find this footage or it might be difficult. If you're struggling to find this clip, well, what you can do is on your B Roll timeline, click the footage that you'd like to locate, make sure your playhead is over that footage, and then if you're using my keyboard shortcuts, we would hit Alt F. You'll see it highlights it here in our Media pool. Now what I can do if I go back to my main timeline here, now that I know where my footage is at, I would drag it on down into the timeline. So those two methods are commonly what I do. Let me show you a couple other options that might make a little bit more sense to you. Let me hit backspace here. So again, what I did is I brought this up to the track that I'd like it to be on, hit Control C, and then Control V to paste it here, or I would locate it in my media pool and then drag and insert it down. Now, if you don't want to bring it up to a third track every time you want to copy and paste something from one timeline to another, what you can do is this. And this is kind of a fun one. In the upper right hand corner of our timeline working area, there's this little plus icon right here. See? It's got a little plus with the window pane. If I click that. Whoa. It splits our timeline viewer into two timeline viewers. Now, this might be a little advanced, but what we can do is close our BRL timeline there and open it down here. And if I use shift in the scroll wheel to shrink things and reposition my timelines so that I can see both, well, now I have two working timelines at the same time. This is a very powerful technique. You will probably need to have an okay computer in order to do this. But now what I can do is instead of tapping between the two, I can just click this one clip, hit Control C, click up to this timeline, and again, hit Control V. But again, remember that I brought this up to track three so that it pasted over on track three. I'm gonna control Z to undo that. And you can actually split your timeline workspace into as many timelines as you want. I I'd probably caution doing over more than two. And if you would like to close a certain window, again, over in the right over here, there's an icon now so that I can close that. If I'd like to reopen that Roll timeline, well, I just need to go to my timelines folder and open up the B Roll. Timeline, and there we go. Shift and the scroll wheel to expand these back out so that it's a little bit more visible. Let me go back to the main timeline here. Now, the last option, and this is more a professional technique, but I'd like to show you just so that you're aware of it, go to my Roll folder here. Find that B Skier two footage that I like to use. And there's a set of icons over here in our editing tool bar that are designed to insert footage from our media pool. So we've got this first one here that says Insert clip. Write and replace clip. We're going to avoid using the replace clip for now, but if I were to look at these first two insert and write, if I were to click this footage here and then click the insert option, you can see that it inserts it where my playhead was at. So again, Control Z to undo, Control Shift Z to redo. See how it inserts and shifts everything around. If I were to click this other button here, Ort clip, well, instead of inserting it and shifting everything around, it completely squashes everything underneath it. So how do we make this button work so that it goes over here on track three? Well, let me hit Control Z. Done. Do that. Over here on our video tracks. We've got a few icons, just like the audio tracks when we covered there. All the way over to the left, there's this little blue V one icon. Now, depending on what version of DaVinci Resolve you're on, this might look a little bit different. If you're on an older version, it might be a red rectangled outlined V one. But wherever this lives is where my footage gets inserted when I click that icon. So if I bring it up to video track three and hit the over button, now our video gets inserted on track three. If you choose to do this, you just need to be conscious of where this button lives. But now we have our B roll, and we can begin to add the rest of our footage to fill out this talking head portion. 20. Adding Transitions: Continue to carry on with adding in the rest of our B world, and we're also going to finally take a look at that effects tab and some video transitions. So let's go ahead and hit plane. When we're talking about what really matters the most at the end of the day, it's the message being told in the video, not what kind of effects you not what kind of effects you can do. So I'd like to insert our snowboard scene right here, right on the peak of my audio, A, to cut this Roll footage, backspace to delete. I'm going to go up top to our Media pool here because I know what footage I'm looking for. There's no need for me to tab over the timeline. I'm gonna drag and select and drop in that footage. Perfect. Let's carry on. When we're talking about what really matters the most at the end of the day, it's the message being told in the video, not what kind of effects you can include. Something else a lot of beginning editors do often is the over use of pre built in transitions. Until you're more comfortable. Okay, so something else beginner editors do is use pre built in transitions. I think we're going to need to introduce some more footage in here, but where? Where? Where do we insert it? Well, what feels right? Where is there a natural lull to where we can insert a change in scenery? Facts you can include. Something else a lot of beginning editors do often is the I think it's right in there. Something a lot of beginner editors do often. Something else a lot of beginning editors do often Right in there. This is when I like to have audio scrubbing turned on. Remember, that's in the timeline settings. Audio to two, two, two, two, two. Audio scrubbing. 'Cause then I can kind of fine tune. Beginning editors do often right where I begin to start the next sentence. So I'm going to hit A to make a cut on our motion graphics video here. So that way, I have a natural cut point to insert new footage. Or another option, again, is I can just click somewhere in the timeline and hit M to add a marker. So I think what I'd like to do here is use similar footage to highlight the use of transitions. So if I go back to my B roll timeline here, I've got two wide angle shots of mountains and trees and mountains and trees. I'm gonna go back to my main time line here. I'm going to go over and just find one of these clips. I don't think it really matters which one I begin to drag and drop it in on that cup point. Go ahead and hit play? Editors do often is the overuse of pre built in transitions. Until you're more comfortable with how you should Edit a video, I'd avoid using some of those presets. And one of the last things I want to I'd avoid using some of those presets. I'd avoid using some of those pre pre Now, what do I mean by presets? What are preset transitions? Well, let me show you. Let me go ahead and A to cut here and let's drag in that second clip. Depending on which one you use, use the other version, so I'm gonna ahead and drag and drop this in. And hm, we got a little bit of a problem here. It looks like this video file has video and audio. So when I drag and insert it, the audio is kind of cutting off and overriding the video. Well, I don't want that. So how do we address this? Well, let me hit Control Z to undo all that. If I want to bring in just the video for my Media Pool, well, I can double click here on the Media Pool to preview it, and then there's two icons. There's a video and an audio icon. Well, I can just grab the video icon to bring in just the video. Alternatively, and this is the method I prefer to do. Let me hit Control Z. I can just hold down the Alt key to bring in just the video portion. If you would like just the audio portion, so let me hit Control Z. You can hold down the Shift key. To bring in just the audio. So Alta's video shift is audio. So if I want to bring in just the video, I'm going to hold down the Alt key and drag and insert our footage right there. So now we go from here? How you should Edit a video, I avoid using some of those presets. And one of the last things I To there. Right on presets. So what is a preset transition? Well, you'll notice to this point that we have not used any of them. The only technique that we've been using to cut up our video is that. We've been cutting the video. And that has been a very, very intentional decision on my part. You see, when a lot of people first begin to learn how to Edit, there's a reliance on extras, and that can be effects and transitions that do flashy things. And there is a time and place to use some of these effects and transitions because, I mean, they are in DaVinci resolved for a reason. But if you don't understand why? To use some of them, then what ends up happening is your video tends to look pretty cheesy or pretty amateur. So let me show you what I mean. If I were to go and bring my mouse all the way to upper left here, for the most part, we've been sticking right with the media pool, but there is a nice little tab to the right of it called effects. If I were to click on the Effects tab, Wa. We have our effects. Now, we will cover more of these effects as we go on, but you can see that we have video transitions. We've got titles for texts that we can add in. We've got generators for different kinds of colors that we can add in, along with some of resolves built in effects like some blurs. Well, there's a tab all the way at the top here called video transitions. And the video transitions tab is a very, very dangerous place to go when you're first learning out. And it's for the reasons previously stated. If I were to scroll down here, we've got a bunch. We've got some dissolves. We've got some shaped transitions. And if I hover my mouse over it, we can begin to preview what they do. Splits, slides, boxes. You can kind of go ahead and experiment with all of them. If I wanted to add one into our video, what I would do is I would go to that transition. So I'll just do the arrow Iris transition. Drag and select it. And what you're going to look to do is apply it to the cut point of the video. So right here. And now when I hit Play, it will apply that transition. I did avoid using some of those presets. And what the last thing. There you go. Now, like I said, does having a random arrow mask dissolved transition cents. And when the last? Does that make sense? It's the point I'm emphasizing in the actual talking head here, and what I'd like you guys to remember is that I would only use this kind of transition when there's some motivation behind it. And if you cannot answer what is motivating the use of it, then don't use it. Again, I tend to find that it hurts the video more than it helps it. Now, something that you might have noticed is that I can't adjust the transition to be on the left side of the video. Well, that is because whenever we add transitions into videos, it has to use frames from the previous clip. Oh, let me go ahead and turn off my audio scrubbing. It has to use frames from the previous video and the next video. So, if it's only on the right, that means that it has frames from this video to transition from. But because I inserted the video at the very beginning, right? So this is the very beginning of this video file. But what frame should it use to transition over here? It can't don't have negative frames. This is the beginning. So if we would like to transition in the middle or even have this on the left, well, we need to give it some frames to use. And what I mean by that is this, I'm going to click on the transition itself and hit the backspace key to get rid of it. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut a head and pull it over, so that way, it's not starting on the first frame. So watch this. If I cut here and drag it over to the left, if you look at where my mouse is at, I have cut off a second and 20 frames. Go ahead and release. So now if I were to go and add in another one of these transitions, so let's use something a little bit more abstract. So use the block glitch. Now I can insert it on the middle. And in fact, if I grab this handle, I can pull it out exactly 1 second and 20 frames. But just know that in order to use one of these pre built in transitions, you need to have frames before and after the previous and following clip. Because otherwise, it's got nothing to pull from to use the transition. Alright, so let's go ahead and continue to play. With How You Should Edit a video, I avoid using some of those presets. And when the last? Again, doesn't it, I can't say it enough. Whenever I see something like this, like, a random glitch transition, it doesn't make sense to me. How you should Edit a video. I avoid using some of those presets. And one of the last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. The audio Perfect. So now we are about to begin talking about a different subject matter. So I don't think it makes sense to continue on with the lessons that we were showing before with the snow. So, actually, let me first get rid of this extra B Roll over here, hit backspace to get rid of it. And so I'm going to bring in the edge of our B roll so that it ends right when this new section begins. So now we go like this. Avoid using some of those presets. And one of the last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. The audio of the video accounts for 50%. Perfect. And now we have successfully introduced B Roll into our video. Is this the best use of B Roll? I don't know. Maybe. There's a section here where we begin to talk about using audio more, right? So is there some form of B Roll that we could use here? Maybe, maybe there's something online or maybe you can make something that fits here. Again, these are decisions as editors. We need to start thinking about as reforming our videos. 21. Adding Sound Effects (SFX): We've got one last step before finally rendering out our project, and we'll make it a short one because we'll kind of expand on it later. But we're going to introduce sound effects. Now, sound effects, I'd like to introduce now because understanding sound effects and how to sound design your videos is as important, if not more important than the video Edit. I will say it again, understanding how to do sound design becomes more important than the video edit often. However, for this video, it's a pretty straightforward edit. So we probably don't need a ton of sound effects in the video. Now, if you are still in the Effects tab over here in the upper left hand corner, go ahead and head on back over to the Media pool. I'd like you to locate your audio folder and then the sound effects or SFX folder. And we've got three that we can play around with. We've got a ding. Ah, very nice. We've got a riser. Very nice as well, and a swoosh. These three sound effects will probably be some of the more common categories that you'll use when you're editing. The ding might be considered an impact, and while it's not exactly a thud, it hits and then trails off. A riser is a tension building tool. We have a slow build of audio that ends abruptly. So we've got hits and impacts, risers, and then swooshes. Swooshes and Wohes are very common when it comes to highlighting movement and scene changes. But we don't have a lot of movement here in this video. I don't know if I need to add some swooshes when my head is turning. All I'd like us to do is this. Let me go ahead and play this real quick. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot Right here. Right here, when we're about to begin the conversation point, I would like a little bit of am a little cue that says, Hey, we're going to talk about video editing. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag down the ding to track four, and I'm going to try to line it up right here. I would like the ding, so the beginning of this ding to start right when the video transitions. Now we can move our playhead one frame at a time using the left and right arrow keys, remember? And then I could drag this over to line up with our playhead or we can use another little keyboard shortcut, which is the ma key. And the period key. Comma will shift a clip, one frame to the left. Period. One frame to the right. And so we can fine tune this to kind of sit exactly where we would like. So let's go ahead and let's play that. Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of Uh oh. Problems. If you don't have headphones on, you might not have heard it. But if you did, you probably notice that this ding only comes in on the left headphone. Well, why? Mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of What happened here? Did we do something wrong? No. Not exactly. When you're given audio files, there will be two very common formats for it. There is mono and stereo. Now, stereoples are audio that get output to both the left and right output of your speakers or your headphones, however you are monitoring your audio. So inside that audio file, there is a left and a right audio track. This is how music can pan between the left and right headphone. Audio file that has a mono format has one singular audio output. There is no left or right. So if our ding is mono, why are we only hearing it in the left headphone? Well, if I go back to DaVinci Resolve, and I hover over our audio track here, right where this 2.0 is. You see how it says stereo? That's because this audio track is formatted for a stereo audio file. So what DaVinci is trying to do is output our audio file to a left and right headphone, but it only has one audio track. So it's only going to the left headphone. So there's two ways that we can correct it. The easiest way is to just change this track to be mono. And the way that we do that is we right click Change track type two, Mono and you'll know if you have done it right if you get a one point over here. And now if we were to play it, it should hit both. Some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that at there we go. Loud and proud, both earphones. If for whatever reason you don't want to change the track type, there is a quick fix, as well that's a little bit more convoluted, but I will show you. So I'm gonna change this back to stereo. You can also right click on whatever audio clip that you'd like to change and go to clip attributes. And over here on our audio tab, you can see that it's formatted for Mono over here. Well, this is a stereo track type. So what we would need to do is change the format to stereo. You see, here's the problem. We've got nothing going in our right headphone here. So what we would do is click here and feed in that first channel. Either or works. It's probably gonna be easier, though, to just change this track type to Mono. Now, it's a bit loud. I'd probably like it to sit maybe we'll go down to, like, minus ten. Let's try that. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of beginning Perfect. And I think that's a nice little cue that the video is about to begin. And if I were to zoom out on our timeline, look what we did, guys. We made a video Edit, which means it's time to render or save this final version of our video. 22. The Deliver Page: Alrighty crew, we are ready to deliver our video. Before you do, I recommend on any video edit playing back the video in its entirety on the timeline one more time. It is good to double check to make sure there's no weirdness, there's no irregularities, so let's go ahead and do that. Now, you can either play it back with the timeline still in frame, or if you'd like to full screen the entire thing, the shortcut for that is P. And now we can hit Spacebar to play. Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make is that they focus on the spectacle of the Edit over the story of the Edit. When we're talking about what really matters the most at the end of the day, it's the message being told in the video, not what kind of effects you can include. Something else a lot of beginning editors do often is the overuse of pre built in transitions. Until you're more comfortable with how you should Edit a video, I avoid using some of those presets. And one of the last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. The audio of the video accounts for 50% of the final Edit. So you should spend just as much time working with your audio as you do working with the video. Hope this helps and excited to talk more about editing. Nicely done, everybody. Let's go ahead and save this sucker. We're going to venture over into a new page in Davent Resolve. Look at the bottom right here, we're going to go to the Deliver page. And just like every other page in this program, it may feel intimidating at first, but I promise we're going to click all of two button. Like you to do is go ahead and direct your attention over this left column here. These are our render settings. Now, I am not a Kodak expert. I don't have a master's degree in bit rate. So when I look over here, we got a lot of settings that we can choose. So what do we need to do? Well, I have good news for you. If you go up top here this upper column, we go to the right, we have a bunch of presets for us ready to go. Now, I might spend a little bit of time in the future talking over some of these settings and which ones might matter to you moving forward. But what I'd like us to do to keep things nice and simple is to scroll on over to the right here, and we're just going to click the YouTube ten ADP preset. And that's going to simplify live for us a good bit. Double check to make sure the resolution is 1920 by 1080 because that's the timeline that we're on. By default, it should say timeline frame rate. If it doesn't, make sure it's set to 30. And the format, the format, the format, the format. Now, the YouTube preset limits this to MP4 and QuickTime. QuickTime will render to a dot MOV file. The difference between QuickTime and MP4 really is not that much. So what I'd like you to do is go to MP4 and make sure that your video Kodak is set to h264. Again, do not stress about the rest of these settings. We'll cover them in future videos. The next thing that we need to do is choose where we'd like to save it. I'm going to go ahead and save it to my desktop so that I can find it, and then we just need to name it. I'm going to name ours BYOL Class Project one. Bring your own laptop, Class Project one. And at the very bottom down here, there's a button that says add to render Q. Now before we actually render, one thing I'd like you to double check is that on your timeline, so the same controls apply over here on the Deliver page. So I can shift in the scroll wheel to change the Zoom level, bring this up. Make sure that the in and outpoint are set to your videos in outpoint. Sometimes, if you've got footage hanging out over here, it's going to try to render the entire timeline. So again, O is out, I is in. Make sure we're rendering the proper section here. And if that all looks good, go ahead and go to the bottom left here and add to render Q. And then we're going to click Render A. But we are not quite done yet because you need to submit the video in order to receive credit for the course. So to do that, what I'm going to recommend everybody do is use YouTube. If you don't use YouTube, totally fine. Remember, you can use something like Vimeo, Behance, any other streaming or portfolio service. But a quick reminder, please do not use a Google Drive or a Dropbox link or anything where we're going to have to actually download the video file to review it. It's okay if you accidentally goof up and do that, but just know that in order to receive credit, we're going to need some kind of streaming the example that I'm going to use to demonstrate this with is going to be YouTube. Again, totally okay to use something else, but you're just going to have to figure it out on your own. I'd wager the majority of us all have a YouTube account or a Google account, but to not making assumptions, I'm going to go ahead and walk through the entire process. You will need to go to youtube.com. That is step one. If you don't already have an account, you're going to need to create one. So depending on the current YouTube layout, there'll probably be an option, the upper right hand corner that says sign in. From there, you can either log into your existing Gmail account or create a new. Once you've all signed in and created an account, go ahead and move to the upper right hand corner where your profile icon is. Go ahead and click that icon. And you're going to want to go to YouTube Studio. I may have a few more options than you here, but what you're going to want to locate is YouTube Studio. Go ahead and click that. Now, again, depending on the current iteration of the YouTube Studio user interface, this icon might be moved around, but we're going to want to locate the Create icon. Go ahead and click. Got a few options here. We're going to go with upload videos. That'll give us this big old prompt to locate our video file. So you can either go to your desktop or whatever you saved it, drag and drop the file on or hit the button in the middle and hit Select Files. From there, locate wherever you have rendered and save this file and hit open. And that'll begin the upload process of this video. There's only going to be a couple things we need to change here, and then we are good to go. For one, we should probably rename this to be class project one. And then whatever your name is. Once you've done that, there's two important settings that we need to remember. On YouTube, for any video you upload it, ask if it's kid appropriate. Now, our video is kid friendly, right? But what this is really asking is, is this video safe and marketable for kids? So just be aware in the future, if you were ever to publish videos, unless you are specifically making educational content for children, we're going to check no. This doesn't give it a PG 13 or an R rating. This just says, Hey, don't market this video to kids on YouTube. Once that's all said and done, hitting next. Next, next until you get to the visibility page. And by default, it should say unlisted. This is what we want. Again, unlisted. Do not set this to private, and unless you want this to be public, don't hit public. All unlisted means is that this video is hidden. It's hidden. Nobody can find this on the Internet unless you have the link, which is what we do want. Double check Unlisted, not private, not public, unlisted. And then if you click these two rectangles over here, it will copy the video link for you and then hit Save. And that will save this video to your YouTube Studio. If for whatever reason you lose the link, do not stress, it's very easy to find. Just make sure you're in, again, your YouTube Studio. You can't be on the YouTube homepage and then go over to content. This will list all of the videos that you've uploaded to your YouTube Studio. And again, R says Unlisted here, which is what we want. And if you need that sharable link, there's these three dots right here that you can click. And it says, Get sharable Link. And then, again, we'll copy the link to your clipboard. Once you have that sharable link from YouTube or Vimeo or wherever, go ahead and go to the course project sections in the assignment section and paste it there and submit it. Congratulations, friends. You guys have rendered your very first video inside DaVinci Resolve. 23. Class Project 2 - Talking Head From Scratch: All righty, everybody. It's time for you to venture off on your own into the world of editing. So this will be the second class project, and it's going to be very similar to the first one just so we can get a little bit more practice and repetition and without my hand holding you through the process. It looks like we've been asked to deliver another video that's around a minute in total length. They like us to use some Brol, some music, and some sound effects. Just like the first project, I will be providing some video and audio for you to use. But if you have your own audio library or your own stock video library, or if you want to go and record your own footage, I would highly encourage you to do so. You will definitely not be penalized if you take some creative liberties here. So, in your course material folder in the talking head section, we're going to go ahead and open up class Project two this time. Just like last time, we've got a video and audio folder. Inside this folder, we still have our A role and B Roll. But in the B Roll folder, we've now got two sub classes. We have screen recordings which show screen recordings of Resolve, and we've got some stock media of editors doing their job. So I'll go ahead and let you explore those in your own time. If I go all the way back up top to the audio folder, there's no new surprises this go around. It's very similar. We have music, and we've got three audio tracks that I will let you choose from. And then we also have some sound effects and this will include the sound effects from the previous project, but it also include three new ones for you to explore in your own time. If I were to go into the A Roll folder, we have one talking head video from a new character this time, and you know it's a new character. Because this guy's wearing an orange beanie. I would never wear that. I don't know who this guy is, but this guy's wearing an orange beanie. This will be the video that you start with in this project. Now, this will be the first time you have the reins, and you'll be in control of how you go about editing a video inside DaVinci Resolve. And it's going to be totally okay if you forget something or you go about things a little bit differently than we did in the previous project. Again, there's not a correct way of doing things. There's probably just some smarter choices that you could. One of the decisions that you will need to make is how to start out the project, and that's going to be the final thing that I walk you guys through, and then I'll let you have out it. So if I were to go up to our existing timeline, right? So this is the last project we just finished editing, and we've got two choices as to how we now start Class Project two. Option one, keep everything within this existing project. What I mean by that is if I go over to our Media Pool, go to the master Bin or the Master folder, what we can do is create a new class project two folder, and it would look something like this. So you could right click Go New Bin. And I'm going to actually call this class project one. Why would I do that? Well, with this new bin, I will drag and drop the existing video, audio and timeline bins into this folder, placing all of our footage inside of this class project one folder. I can then right click and create a new bin and make a class project two folder. So if you missed it, all I did is I went up to the Media pool, and I'm in our master folder, and I just made a Class Project one and Project two folder. And I moved the existing footage and bins inside the class project one folder. So then what you could do is you go into Class Project two and create your new bins and new folders and start here, keeping everything within this existing project. This would probably be the approach I would take and I might recommend because we have access to everything that we just finished. So we can quickly refer back to our old timeline and any of the decisions that we made in the past. However, this might be a bit cumbersome and a bit messy for other folks. So option two would be to create a new project. So you need to go to the bottom right hand corner, go to the home icon, right click and hit New Project. From here, walk through step by step exactly how we did Class Project one. So you can name this whatever you like. You could do two class Project two, or you could just name it. Class Project two. Change the location to the Class Project two Media, reset up the project settings and go through the same workflow with setting up your folders. Either option works, and if you do get confused, I encourage you to refer back to some of the previous lessons. My final reminder before kicking you out of the nest is that when you go to submit it, please upload your video as an unlisted link on YouTube or use Vimeo Behance or some other streaming service. Please do not submit a Google Drive, a Dropbox link, anything where we need to download the media to play. Remember, the class projects aren't meant to be scary. This shouldn't be an intimidating process. It's okay if you goof or you take more time than you expected. Good luck, and I'll see you on the other side. 24. Class Project 3 - Tech Product Review: Hopefully, we're starting to get just a little bit more familiar inside DaVinci Resolve. It's totally okay if you're not comfortable, but you're now starting to understand, Okay, I click here, this does that. This kind of belongs in this location, et cetera. So we're going to take it a step further. We're gonna do it with some short form editing. Now, even if you don't plan on editing TikToks or YouTube shorts or whatever the current short form media is, practicing this skill is going to be very valuable for you in the future. As of right now, we've really only edited one kind of video. So what we're going to do is we're going to branch out a little bit, and we're going to push some of the concepts that we've learned a little bit further, as well as introducing some new techniques. And to do so, we're going to use class Project three as the backbones for these lessons. No, we've been asked to create a short form video to promote an office. Goal is to highlight the products used in the setup. The creators also mentioned that they like a clean style. Clean is a word that often gets thrown around with edits, and typically I tend to interpret it as minimal fluff, just like our approach to the talking head. They don't want a lot of extra goofy wildness. They want something straightforward that feels professional. Got similar video length requirements. Looks like we can go a little bit shorter this go around. And the big change is that we're going to be working on a vertical video. So the past edits have been 1920 by 1080. This go round, we are 1080 by 1920. Seems like there's also some B role provided, and we're going to need to use some music and sound effects again. And to submit the project, this will be the last time I called this out specifically. Make sure you're providing us with a streamable link. Please, no Google Drive, no Dropbox link, nothing to where we have to download the video. With that said, let's go ahead and hop into the project. 25. Setting Up a Short Form Project: Alright, so let's go ahead and get started on the Shore form Edit. And in order to do so, we're actually going to create a new project. Now, if you have DaVinci Resolve already open, so let's say you've been powering through the course, what I'd like you to do is go down here to the bottom right hand corner and look for this little home icon. And if you click it, this will bring up our project manager. Or if you are starting up fresh on a new day, re open DaVinci Resolve. And once the project manager opens up, relocate your Essentials course folder, and we should all be starting right here on this screen. And now for Section three, let's go ahead and create a new project. So you can either click the button or right click and hit New Project. And just like last time I was going to ask you a name and where the media is located, so let's go ahead and title this three Tech. Short. And for the location, go ahead and locate wherever you saved your course material and open up the three short form folder. Now, we're going to have two sub folders in here. We want class project three. And once we're in this folder, hit Select and then create this new project. And by default, DaVinci Resolve will open you up on the CUT page. But remember, we're just going to completely ignore this page altogether. Let's go ahead and head over to the Edit page. Ah, this is looking a little bit more familiar. Fun fact, if you do want to hide the Cut page and not even worry about it, you can go all the way up top to the workspace menu, go down to the show page section, and you can actually toggle off the Cut page. This is normally how I work when I'm editing, 'cause I just try to avoid that page altogether. But for the sake of this course, I'll leave it on so I don't create too much confusion. Before we begin importing our media and starting the Edit, let's go ahead and set up our project settings. Now remember, that's in the bottom right hand corner where this little cogwheel is the settings wheel. And if you took my advice from the previous section, our settings should already be pre loaded because we set them as our default settings. So we've got 1920 by 1080, 30 FPS, and all of our proxy and optimized media resolutions are all set. Now, if yours don't load like this, that's totally okay. All I'd like you to do is double check to make sure that your timeline resolution is 1920 by 1080. And we're going to toggle on one extra setting this go around. I want you to use vertical resolution. And what that'll do is swap the width and the height resolution. So that way, we're working on a vertical timeline. Again, for this video, we're going to go ahead and leave it at 30 FPS. Just a quick reminder, the two most common frame rates you'll probably work with are 30 and 24, we're going to stick with 30 this go around. Double check to make sure this is all looking okay. And just like last time, if you'd like to save this as your vertical short form editing preset, you can. You go up to the three dots in the upper right hand corner and hit save current settings as preset. So we can name this vertical 1080 P 30 FPS. Either way, go down and hit Save when you're all done. Now, new to DaVinci Resolve Version 20 and onwards, they have a vertical editing mode. If you're on an older version of DaVinci Resolve, this will not apply for you. But you'll notice that our Media pool gets expanded and our preview window gets really small for some reason. Well, because we're going to be working with a long formatted video, there's a new icon all the way over to the right here. And if I hover over it, it says, Expand view. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on that. And now our media preview is set to be vertical. Now let's go ahead and start to import our assets for the project. Now, last time in the preview section, I had things all nice and neat and organized for you guys. This go around, we're going to begin to work more and more towards more realistic scenarios for you as an editor. And we're going to go ahead and create four folders. So make sure your media pools open up in the upper corner over here. Right click anywhere in this blank space here and hit New Bin. Bins again, are the name for folders inside DaVinci Resolve. And what I'd like you to name this one is 01 underscore recordings. Now, for some reason, when you right click, you don't have the option to add a Bn. You can always go up to the top as well to file and add a new Bin there. And for the second one, we're going to name it 02, underscore Audio. Gonna do this two more times. Right click New Bin, 03, underscore Assets. And one more time, right click New Bin, 04 underscore timelines. Depending on the editor, there will be different naming schemes, organization techniques. I'm going to repeat this over and over. There's no right or wrong way of doing this. It's just whatever makes sense. What I am going to try to continue to reinforce are techniques that are a little bit more common and structured to help you as you begin to work on bigger and bigger projects. All that to say that you don't have to copy this one to one. And as an example, this is a project that I'm currently working on, and I still have the recordings, audio, and timelines folder. But in addition to that, I now have a Roll folder, an effects folder, a renders folder, a visual effects folder, a blender renders folder, and a snap captions folder for when I do captioning. Tailor your organization to the type of video that you are working on. And the last thing that I'd like you to do before we start importing footage is over here on the left column, I like to begin color coordinating things. So where it says, 01 underscore recordings, what I'm going to do is I'm going to right click. Scroll down here and change the Color tag to, I don't know. Let's go with Let's do red. Right, click on the audio, Color tag. Set it to green. Assets. Alright, click, Color tag. Let's do a nice yellow timelines, Color tag. Let's go with blue. When I go back to my master Media pool, it's pretty easy for me to pick out where I'm at in terms of my footage. So let's go ahead and bring in the footage we're working with. Now, we've got four items over here. The first is our A 73s slog two footage. Now, if you're like me and not as familiar with cameras and the way cameras record things, the A 73 is a Sony camera, and it was recorded in the S slog two color space. Now, I've already gone ahead and color corrected the footage, but that is something that we're going to have to learn to address in a later section. If we open up this folder, you will see we've got a bunch of recorded videos. What I'd like you to do is I'm going to drag this folder and I'd like to retain this folder structure. So instead of dragging and dropping it here, remember, we're going to drag it over to the left column, and I'm going to drag it specifically to our recordings folder. Take this, drag it over, drop it in the recordings folder. I was going to ask you, Hey, this is a different frame rate. Do you want to change? No, we don't. We've already set our frame rate for this project. And there we go. Now we can see all of our footage, and it's created a sub folder inside of our recordings folder. Now, there's one last piece that's going to go into our recordings folder, and that's our voiceover, our recorded voiceover, in the course material folder that is tech setup Voiceover. Now, you can either just drag and drop the MP three here or we can create a new bin and title this VO for VoiceOver. Open it, and let's drag in our voice over. Perfect. Go back up top to our master folder. Got a couple more things to bring in. We're gonna bring in our audio. And just like last time we have music and sound effects, and what I'd like you to do is drag and drop these into the audio folder over on the left bar because we want to keep our folder structure. There we go. We've got our music and our sound effects that we can begin to work with. The last thing that we're going to do is go over to our overlays folder, and we've got two overlays in here. And for this last one, what I'd like you to do is open up your assets folder in the media pool. And this time, we're just going to drag and drop our overlays into the media pool itself. And that'll give us our two videos inside the Assets folder. Now we're ready to begin creating some timelines and setting up our Edit. Go to the timelines folder. Right click timelines, Create New timeline. And we're going to create our main working timeline first, so I'm just going to type in main and hit Create. And there we go. The project is set up and ready to roll. 26. Starting the Short Form Rough Cut: Alright, Crew, so now our project is set up, and we're going to go about starting it very similar to how we did in the previous section. But this go round, we're going to be working with a lot more footage. So we're going to begin to incorporate a little bit more of sorting and selecting techniques into your workflow. With that said, let's go ahead and assemble our rough cut of the video. So we have been tasked with creating this short form video for this digital and tech review content creator. So the big question is, where do we start? What is the backbone of this video? You remember last time we were working with the recorded talking head video? Well, for this go around, we're going to be working with voiceover. Now, audio only recordings can come in many shapes and forms, but for us, we've been given one dot wave file. So what I'd like you to do is go ahead and drag and drop it into our timelines. I'm going to hit shift in the scroll wheel to go ahead and expand our two layers here and I hit D to zoom in. The reoccurring theme throughout this section is going to be structure, organization, and methodology. What that means for us is that we're going to begin to make more and more use of the functionalities of the timeline. Here's what I mean. I'm going to take my middle divider up here and drag it up so we've got a little bit more real estate in the audio space. And what I'd like you to do is right click on the Audio One Track. You can click anywhere in this space, but we need to bring up this menu. Go to the Add Tracks button. What we're going to do is we're going to add some tracks below this first track so that we can structure our audio. Now, there's nothing wrong with adding another video track, but I'm going to move this to zero because I just want to add some audio tracks for now. And we're going to add five tracks and make sure it says below audio one. It add tracks. What we're going to do is we're going to rename our audio tracks so that we can designate what kind of audio lives there. So on audio one, I'm going to click in this area over here. I only have to click once, and I'm going to type in Voiceover one. Move my mouse. You can see it. Go down one. We're going to name this VoiceOver two. We're going to do the same thing, but for music and sound effects. So on this third track, we're going to name this music one, second, music, two more times for the sound effects. Sound effects, one sound effects, two. Next, again, we're going to begin to Color coordinate our tracks. And this is all personal preference. This is just the system that I started with and I've continued to use. So all my voiceover tracks, I like to make them purple. Why? I don't know. I feel like I like purple. So I'm going to right click on this track here. Go change track Color, and I'm going to make voice over one purple and to two, two, two, two, voice over two purple. You'll notice it changes the color of our voiceover audio on this track. And you can also set individual colors as well. So I could just right click here, change the clip color to I don't know, we go teal and then I'll change it to teal within these upper tracks. But by default, if you don't change anything, it'll say as purple. For music, I like to go with a nice lime green. So I'm going to right click on these two tracks. Change track, Color two, lime. And then for the sound effects, I like orange. I don't know. There's something about sound effects to me that screams orange. Change track, Color, two, orange. Perfect. Now, why does any of this matter? Why does it matter that we name our tracks and set different colors? Well, well, it's a little bit more important than just making DaVinci Resolve a little bit more colorful. What we can do is instead of manually adjusting all of our audio, if we get smart with our audio tracks, it'll do all the work for us. And hopefully, you guys will continue to see what I mean as we move along. The last thing that I'm going to have you do before we start cutting up our dialogue is to right click on the Voice over one audio track. Go to change track Type two Mano and go ahead and do the exact same thing for voice over two. We're going to change the track type two mano. As a rule of thumb, whenever you are working with dialogue, I would default to a mono audio track unless told otherwise. This rule doesn't always necessarily apply when you're filming on location and you want some kind of panning audio. But for us, there is a fullness to the Voiceover dialogue when we work with a centralized audio wave, as opposed to splitting it to the left and right headphones. If you'd like to do a deeper dive into Mono versus stereo, I highly encourage it. But for now, what I'd like you to do is default when you're working with Voiceover or podcast or any kind of computer recorded dialogue, we want it to be set to mono. We're going to go ahead and go through the same process we did in the previous section, we're going to go ahead and clean up our dialogue, string it together so that it fits and flows and remove any bad takes. So I'm going to go ahead and hit play. This is my freelance desk setup, built entirely for productivity. This is my freelance desk setup, built entirely for productivity. Okay. I like that second take better. Let's go ahead and make a cut here. Hit F, Telit. This is my freelance desk setup, built entirely for productivity. My goal with this setup my goal with this setup is functionality and simplicity. Everything here has a purpose. Okay, get rid of this bad take here, A and F. Jump ahead. I've got two monitors. One horizontal. This is probably going to be a club, right? I got two monitors. Yep. A F. I've got two monitors, one horizontal, one vertical, and my laptop docs right into the setup so I can easily go from portable to full workstation mode. Okay, make a cut here. For audio, I use open back headphones because I like the clean. We got to mess up, A, F. And remember, I'm not being super precise with the cuts. I'm just trying to find the good takes and get rid of the bad ones. For audio, I use open back headphones 'cause I like the clean natural sound they give me. Make a cut, it's time to record, I've got lighting covered with a softbox for fill, a key light for focus, and a light bar for that subtle accent color in the background. And as this playhead moves along, I hope that you guys catch that I'm hitting S and D to zoom in and out to kind of recenter the timeline. When it's time to record, and yes, gaming is a big part of my life, too, okay, get rid of this dead space real quick. And yes. Gaming is a big part of my life, too, so you'll spot some gear I've collected over the years that keeps the setup fun, not just functional. So what do you think? Is there anything you'd add to make this setup even better? Perfect. And we can grab and trim this little section right here. Alright, so we're starting out about 41 seconds, which is definitely short form territory. Let's go ahead and give this a play from beginning to end. This is my freelance desk setup built entirely for productivity. My goal with this setup is functionality and simplicity. Everything here has a purpose. I've got two monitors, one horizontal, one vertical, and my laptop docs right into the setup so I can easily go from portable to full workstation mode. For audio, I use open back headphones because I like the clean, natural sound they give me. When it's time to record, I've got lighting covered with a soft box for fill, a key light for focus, and a light bar for that subtle accent color in the background. And yes, gaming is a big part of my life, too, so you'll spot some gear I've collected over the years that keeps the setup fun, not just functional. So what do you think? Is there anything you'd add to make this setup even better? Alright. I think that sounds pretty good. Question is now what? So I hope throughout that process, you were paying attention to what's being said, because now we need to go ahead and construct this video. So what should next steps be? Should it be to find the footage we need? Should it be to add music? Sound effects, where do we go from here? Well, like always, there's not a wrong answer, but we're going to go ahead and begin to get our footage sorted. 27. Building a Selects Timeline: Now we get to do every editor's favorite part, sort through the footage. Now, at this stage in the video process, I've seen the footage, but that's because I acquired the footage. You have not. So you have no idea what we're going to bring into the video or what your options are for the cut. This is a stage in the Edit that is often the most time consuming. But what we're going to do is, again, provide structure to this to speed up the process so that we're not wasting time or making things more difficult than they need to be. So let's go ahead and hop back into good old DaVinci. Hey, guys, it's time to do some real grown up editing. The next thing that we're going to do is we're going to go over to our Media pool. Locate the recordings folder, and we're gonna go to our A 73s slog two folder. And here we have all of our B Roll footage. Now, what we could begin to do because technically, this isn't too big of a video is we could begin to double click on our videos. Preview them, sort through them this way and try to drag and drop in usable pieces of media. And depending on how much time you have and how much you care, there is really actually nothing wrong with going through, scrubbing through, previewing the footage and drag dropping in anything you might need. But what we're going to do is introduce a system that will become paramount to your success as an editor down the road. Let me go ahead and show you what I mean. Go ahead and go to your timelines folder. And we're going to add a new Bin into our timelines folder, and we're going to call it the exact same thing as our recordings. So I'm going to right click New Bin we're going to name this the A seven, three S slog two timelines folder. And go ahead and open up this new folder. And we're going to go ahead and start creating a few different timelines. But the first one that we're going to do is going to be our Stringout timeline. Now, a Stringout is going to be the same thing as our bulk timeline in the previous section, and this Stringout timeline is going to contain all of our footage strung out. Let me show you what I mean. Now, go ahead and go back up to our master Media Pool folder. I forgot to toggle on our timeline tab display. So let's find our timeline view options. Click that. It display Sac timelines. There we go. That's a little bit better. Go to your recordings folder, find our A 73 folder. And what we're going to do is create that Stringout timeline using all this footage. Now, you can either drag and select to grab everything. You can click on the first one, hold down the Shift key, click on the last one to select everything as well. Or you can hit Control A to select all of your footage. Either way you go about doing it, what I'd like you to do is to right click and find this option right here. Create new timeline using selected clips and bins. What this is going to do is create a new timeline all of our footage already on it. Go ahead and hit Create New timeline using selected clips and bins. We're going to leave the project settings alone, and I'm going to rename this A seven. III for three, underscore Stringout, STRINGOUT hit Create. And that's going to go ahead and create our timeline here with all of our footage on it. In the Media pool, we now have this new timeline file that's called A 73 underscore Stringout. Go ahead and drag and drop this into the A 73s log two folder. Now if I go over to that timelines folder a 73s log two, we have that Stringout timeline. Now I'm going to hit S a couple of times in the timeline itself. Zoom out. And here we go. We can see all of our footage. Now, the Stringout or the bulk timeline or the everything timeline is great because at a glance, we can see everything that we are working with. So this is great. We've got all of our footage now in one place, but we've got 14 minutes worth of footage. That we need to fit into 41 seconds of voice over, which is probably going to be even shorter when we clean this up a little bit more. So how do we do that? Well, again, you could just start scrubbing through here and going, Oh, okay, I like this one, copy it. Paste it over here and then begin to work with it, and, you know, try to try to figure it out piecemeal. But again, systems, structure. Let's make our life a little bit easier because for this project, it's not going to be too bad. L later down the road, bigger pain, bigger headache. And the way that we're going to go about doing this is through creating redundancies in our Edit, meaning we're going to create backups and we're going to create a system to where we can recover anything that we need and find anything that we need quickly. And to start that out, actually we're going to leave this alone. We're going to leave our Stringout timeline all alone here. What I am going to ask you to do is to go up to your media pool find the Stringout timeline. Right click and hit Duplicate Timeline. And now let's open up this copy of our timeline. And what we're going to do from here is to curate our Selects. Now, Selects are what you can think of as, like, the usable versions of our footage. It's going to be pieces of the recorded media that we can actually begin to incorporate into the video. And by duplicating the string out, we leave the bulk of our footage all alone. So if we ever need to go back and find something, we can. We can find it all here. But now we have a version of this timeline that we can begin to cut and make changes without losing the original copies. So before we do that, let's go ahead and rename this to our Selects Timeline. To do that, click on the actual name right here. Like one more time. I'm going to name it our Selects timeline. Now, I've done my best to give us usable footage. But this process isn't exactly quick. It's not just a one click process. We're going to actually have to work to create the sets. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to start it. I'm going to show you why I'm making the decisions that I'm making and then we're going to meet at the end once we're all at a relatively similar point. So I'm gonna take my playhead and go to the beginning. Now, the video that we're working with here is talking about the tech setup. So we're gonna be talking about different things here on the desk and in the office space. So what I'm going to try to do is find footage that is framed well looks somewhat good and showcases something that I think I could probably use in the future. Now we can either hit space to play it at one X speed. We can grab our playhead here and scrub through it fairly quickly. We can hit L to play it. K to stop to play, J, to go in reverse. If I hit L to go forward, and then L one more time, we can start playing in two times speed. One more time, four times speed, eight, 16, 32. You get the point. So whatever method makes the most sense for you, I would go with that. So I'm gonna take my playhead back to the beginning, and I'm just going to play it at one time speed at first. You see how on this first piece of footage on the Oh oh 45 clip, it's pretty shaky. That's because the gentleman filming is doing it with his hands. It's handheld footage. So this footage would be something that I would not need to use. So we know how to hit play. And it looks like now we're beginning to get some smoother footage. So I'm gonna make a cut here, continue to play. Okay, and now it looks like we're getting shaky again, so I'm going to go back to right before we get shaky Cam and make another cut. Now, here's how the sex process works. Once you have a section of somewhat usable footage, click on that clip and drag it up one layer. That's it. So anytime we are playing through our footage and we find something that we think we can use, drag it up one level. So let's go ahead and do this process one more time. This time, I'm going to use JK and L. So I'm going to hit L to hit Play, shaky, pause it, L. Okay. Make a cut here this is looking like we're going to get rid of the shaky Cam. L, and I'm going hit L again to go two times. Now, this stage and me previewing the footage, I'm going to make a cut because it looks like we're getting the same motion and shot over and over. I don't know if we necessarily need more than, you know, a few seconds of that. So I'm gonna go ahead and scrub forward and see if anything changes, and it doesn't look like it. So I'm gonna go ahead and take this little chunk and drag it up. Again, one more time. Let's go ahead. This time, it looks like we're looking at some headphones. So we got Shaky Cam. Okay, now the headphones are in focus. Make a cut. Fast forward. This looks great. This looks great. Okay, Shaky Cam. Make a cut here, drag up, scrub forward. Looks like he's resetting the shot. And here, the cameraman is recentering what we're looking at. So let's go ahead and make a cut. Play. Panning left and right. Go back a little, cut enough. So again, looking for anything that could be usable. And the other thing that I'm keeping in mind is, how much of a certain shot do I need? So at this point, I've got two selects of the headphone footage.'s go ahead and continue to play forward. I'm not making a cut here because the headphones are out of focus. So I'm waiting to see if they come back into focus. Looks like they're readjusting the camera, continue to play. Now we're in focus. Now it looks like we're doing some more shooting. Make a cut. Scrub four. All right. And then we'll lose our shot. Cut, drag up. So on those three clips, I have one, two, three, four, five selects that I could potentially use. What you deem a usable will end up coming down to personal taste and preference. Stay with me now. There's no wrong answers. Do your best to make informed decisions. So I'm going to do this one more time. On this next clip, I'm going to hit Play. Okay, let me scrub back just a little bit. I kind of like how it comes into focus here, so I'm just going to make a cut here as it comes into focus. We'll call it right there. Now, what I'm going to ask you to do is go through the remaining footage. So there's a little over 10 minutes of footage, and I want you to practice picking out your selects. Find usable moments of footage and drag it up one layer. Once you've done that, meet me back here, and we will start the next lesson. 28. Cleaning Up Your Selects: Alrighty. Welcome back. How did it go? How did the selection process go? Question, did you pick a moment from every clip? You'll notice that sometimes if I don't like the look of a certain shot or footage, so there is there was a shot here of the microphone that I just I don't know. I didn't like. I felt like it was too dark. I didn't think it would be usable. So I did not grab a select of that clip. Start thinking to yourself. What metric did I use to determine which was good? Either way, at this stage in the Edit, we should have two tracks. We should have a bottom one of footage that we don't want to use, and we should have an upper track of footage that we deemed was probably pretty good. This process that you just went through is the hardest part of every Edit. If you can get through this, the rest of your job becomes infinitely easier. Let me show you what I mean. What I'd like you to do is drag and select with your mouse the bottom two tracks. Again, I'm using my mouse dragging and selecting these bottom two tracks. Now, do not hit F. What I'd like you to do is hit the backspace button. To delete them. And now what we're left with is just our usable Selects footage. Now, there's a couple of tricks here that I'd like you to pay attention to that will make the cleanup of this very easy. First thing, hit Control A to select the remaining footage. You could, again, always just drag and select everything, but hit Control A to make your life a little bit easier. Now, we're going to have this map to a hockey, but if you ever forget, go up to the very top menu to the Edit menu. Click. And what we're going to do is we're going to hit Delete Gaps, which is Control Shift F. And what that's going to do is delete all of the gaps in between our clips. So now we can pull them down to the first layer and slide them all the way over to the left. And depending on you and your selection process, you should probably have anywhere 6-3 minutes of usable footage. I would say if you're over 6 minutes, you probably weren't aggressive enough with the Selects process. And I think if you're under 3 minutes, you might have been just a little bit too aggressive, but it's probably not that big of a deal. Again, I'm gonna control z a couple of times to show you guys I took the bottom layer of the footage, Backspace to delete, Control A to select, Control Shift F. Control Shift F, deletes the gaps, drag down, slide it over. There we go. And now we have our Selects Timeline, and this is the meat of our Roll footage. Now, there's one more step I'd like you to take here before we move on with our Selects Timeline, hit Control A, to select everything. Hit Control C to copy, and we're not going to copy it into the main timeline. No. What we're going to do is we're going to paste it back into the Stringout timeline. So if you happen to close it, reopen your Stringout timeline, go to the very end of that timeline anywhere. Doesn't have to be a specific timestamp and hit Control V. Now in your head, you might think it, why would we do that? We have our own timeline with the Selects. What check this out. Go all the way up top to the very top menu bar. Hit view Show duplicate frames. And now, what we're seeing is every moment in our Stringout timeline that was pulled for a select. So if at some moment in the editing process, you're going through your selects and wondering where you pulled that footage from, you can quickly find it in your Stringout timeline. Now if you needed to go back and find some more areas where you're like, Oh, I wonder, I feel like maybe I could have grabbed something else, you can find that. So everything that has a duplicate frame is being represented by these upper color bars. I normally like to have this toggled on, because I find it helpful for me when I'm editing to see if I've copied or duplicated anything or, you know, you got anything more than once on your timeline. If you don't like this, you can always turn it on and off by just going to view, show duplicate frames. But again, I like having it on. Now, let's go ahead and go back to our Selects Timeline and begin the next step of our editing process. 29. Organizing and Grouping Selects: And so the final step in the selection and sorting process for us is to clean up our selects, because as is, we have a pretty good cut of our usable footage here, right? But you'll see we have desk footage over here and desk over footage over here. So if we needed to find something in this timeline quickly, it's easier, but not necessarily 100% better. So from here, depending on the scope of the project and the amount of footage that you're working with, you could go about doing this step one of two ways. One, and this would be what I would recommend for bigger projects is we would create another new timeline here for each theme or subject matter. So we would create a new timeline for wide shots of the desk, a new timeline for close ups of products. Maybe we have another shot specifically set up for when we're getting footage of the lighting, et cetera. How you choose to break them down into even more specific timelines is completely up to you. What I'm going to do is option number two, and I'm going to again begin to color coordinate. I'm going to do is begin to group things into like or similar shots. Sometimes people will go about doing this in a way of sorting things sequentially. So if one thing was shot after the other, we want to make sure things are in order, but we're just going to get things a little bit more organized. What that looks like is this. I'm going to go ahead and set our first clip color to Let's go with a nice teal. And I'm going to look for any shots of the desk, be it a white shot anytime we have desk footage, I'm going to go ahead and group it in the beginning. So I'm bringing my playhead forward. Desk, great. Now we have headphones. So I'm going to hit the E key to drag and select everything so that it moves a little bit to the right just so I have this gap here where we have our desk. So what I'm going to do is continue to scrub forward and try to group, I would say the desk shots together and the product shots together. Scrub forward, scrub forward. And you know what I'm noticing here, I have the exact same headphone shot twice. So I'm gonna delete it because we don't need the second shot. Now we continue to scribe Ford, and I'm moving pretty quickly through this because it's not a very exciting part of the process. For you, take your time. There's no rush here unless you're being paid by the hour. But we got products, products, K, Light bar. And I might even pull up this light bar shot because I think I have another one later down that I want to group with that one. Okay, we've got the steam deck, keyboard. And this keyboard shot, I believe, let me pull this up for a second, is, we have some more keyboard shots over here. So I'd like to group these keyboard shots together. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to select this one over here, right? I'm going to hit Control Shift X. When I hit the control shift in X, it's going to ripple, cut. So it brings everything over to the right. I'm going to scrub over to the left to my other keyboard shots and hit Control Shift V to ripple, insert. You notice when I hit Control Shift V, it shifts everything over to the right and bring this down. I'm going to continue to go through here. It looks like we have a dash shot again. Okay, so now let's go ahead and bring that back to that first group. So I'm going to select this Control Shift X to ripple, cut it. Scrub back at the beginning, Control Shift V. Continue to scrub forward. And here's that light bar that I remember. So Control Shift X, go back to over here, Control Shift V. If you ever need help remembering where you are at the timeline, you can do what I'm doing and just drag a clip up to remember your spot. Or if I haven't mentioned it already, you can hit M insert a marker. If you don't want to hit M, there's also a marker button right here to add it. And you can rename it if you need to. There's a lot of different marker options, but that is also a very viable choice. Oh, we've got the desk shot right here. Perfect. Control Shift X. Go back to the beginning, Control Shift V. Looks like we've got a few more desk shots. So I'm going to pull this up because it looks like we've got more than one. Yep, desk, desk, desk, back to headphones. And again, this might feel like I'm moving fairly quickly, but I'm not doing a lot of thinking right now. I'm just impulsively grouping things together. And I'm not necessarily concerned with how things look. I'm just 'cause we already did that, right? We went through the selex process. So I'm just trying to make sure similar things are near similar things. Now, we have headphones here. Imember we had headphones in the beginning. Control Shift X to get rid of that. Yeah, there's our headphones. So I'm going to ripple insert that here. Now, if I were to do a quick scrub on our Selects timeline, we've got all desk shots here. And on this right half, we have all product shots. Perfect. If you wanted to, you can always drag and select these and pull them a little farther away. And again, like, we could even go a step further, and we could color coordinate all of these to be a teal, we could color coordinate all of these to be. I don't know, maybe we go with Apricot? Sure. Take your favorite color. And the final step that we're going to take, and this is another optional one. But if you probably already notice that there isn't a lot of sound happening. Have I ever to scrab through these, we've got some shuffles and muffles, but not a lot of usable dialogue. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to get rid of them because I don't think we're going to need this audio. So how do we select the audio? Because I'm clicking on just the audio part, but we're getting video and audio. Well, there's two options. For one, you can turn off the audio and video link. So in this upper toolbar up here, there's this little L link icon. And while this is toggled on, it will make sure that anytime you click the video or audio of a clip that is linked, you select both. But if I turn this off, now, I can select just one or the other. Very cool. Very handy. But there's an even easier way. What I'm going to do is I'm going to hold down the left Alt key or left option key if you're on Mac. And when I do that and I drag and select, now it's going to select just the audio. If I were to do that without the Alt or option key, it's going to select both. But the Alt key is a modifier, and lets us modify our selections and tools. So holding down the Alt key, drag and select. And remember, we're not going to hit Ev because if we were to ripple, delete that, it's going to ripple, delete everything. What we're going to do is we're going to drag and select and hit the backspace key, and that'll just delete things in place. What you are left with is a juicy little cut up of our timeline. And now we can start editing. 30. Editing B-Roll to Voiceover: Hey, Tim, you have earned the right to edit this video. So let's go ahead and do it. Now, it's been a second since we played our voice over, so let's go back to our main timeline, scrub back to the beginning. I'm just going to play the very first part to kind of remember what we were doing. This is my freelance desk setup built entirely for productivity. My goal with this setup is functionality and simplicity. Okay, that's right. We're doing a desk setup video set. Sometimes it's kind of easy to lose track after you sort through hours and hours and hours of footage. So, as is, we've kind of got two pieces of things that we need to combine together. We have our voiceover, and we have our Selects. So let's go ahead and combine the two. What we're going to do is we're going to look at our voice over here or excuse me, listen to our voiceover and try to pick footage that goes along with the voiceover. There's a few ways that we go about doing this. Obviously, we're going to want to copy and paste some footage over, but we can either have our voiceover open and toggle over to the SelexTline, pick footage and then paste it over, or what we can do is go to our SelexTline, select our footage here, control set to copy, go back to the main timeline, and just paste it at the end over here. Now we're working on one time. Again, this is totally personal preference. If you feel like this is too cluttered, do not stress about it. You can always bouncing back and forth. I am going to go ahead and close out the Stringout timeline for my own OCD. So we just have the main and selects. Let's go ahead and begin to assemble or cut. Let's go ahead and zoom in in the beginning. And now I'm going to begin to be a bit more aggressive with my choices. So let's go ahead and get rid of the dead space here. So cut that gap. After delete, let's go ahead and start playing. This is my freelance desk setup built entirely for productivity. My goal with this setup is fun. Okay. Now, I have an idea in mind that I think is going to come out pretty slick after this opening line. In my head, as I'm editing, I'm trying to picture how this sequence of events is gonna come out. On bigger films and projects, these things are storyboarded, but, you know, for us homegrown editors, we kind of have to storyboard in our head. Later on in the course, I'll cover some different storyboarding techniques. But for now, I'm just trying to visualize how this edits gonna play out. And I think there is something cool we can do in between productivity. My goal with this in between this gap right in here. So for now, I'm going to leave it alone. Let's go ahead and continue to play. My goal with this setup is functionality and simplicity. Everything here has a purpose. Alright, so in here, we've got a little bit of a gap. Now, remember, this is a short form video, which means we need to respect the viewers attention span. It's on a video like this that sometimes we can't afford this half second pause. So I'm going to make a cut here, pull this audio down. Hit E to select everything to the right. We've done this before, our little JNL cutting and pull this over to the left. And I'm keeping all of our voiceover still on our Voiceover audio tracks. Let's go ahead and hit Play. I simplicity. Everything here has a purpose. We've got two monitors. One. Perfect. Let's go ahead and hit E to select everything to the right of our playhead. Pull this in so that head and tail are kind of lining up in simplicity. Everything here has a purpose. We've got two monitors, one horizontal, one vertical, and my laptop docs right into the setup so I can easily go from portable to full workstation mode. Frodior, there's a gap here. Pull this down, E to select, pull this on in. Full to full workstation mode. Frodio I use open back headphones because I like the clean, natural sound they give me. When it's Alright, E, select everything to the right, pull it in. Headphones 'cause I like the clean, natural sound they give me. When it's time to record, I've got lighting covered with a soft box for fill, a key light for focus, and a light bar for that subtle accent color in the background. And, yes. And for this last clip, pull it down. And then drag it underneath. And again, this is one of the reasons why I like Jane cutting this way cause we don't really have to trim off anything or make any cuts. We can just pull things underneath and on top of each other. So from the beginning, let's go ahead and play this. This is my freelance desk setup built entirely for productivity. My goal with this setup is functionality and simplicity. Everything here has a purpose. We've got two monitors, one horizontal, one vertical, and my This line, I'm not sure if it makes sense. Ctonality and simplicity. Everything here has a purpose. I don't know. Does it work for you? I'm thinking about deleting it. Let's go ahead and play it one more time. Goal with this setup is functionality and simplicity. Everything here has a purpose. The goal is functionality. My goal with this setup is functionality and simplicity. Everything here has a purpose. You've got two monitor. Hmm. I feel like it does add value to the video, but maybe this line comes in too quickly. Somebody hit Eta select everything and just pull it to the right a little bit. If you've forgotten as well, coma is to move things one frame at a time to the left. And period, moves things one frame to the right. Go and try this one more time. Productivity. My goal with this setup is functionality and simplicity. Everything here has a purpose. We've got two monitors, one hole. You know, I think that works a little bit better. If you're editing this and you think this line doesn't necessarily need to be involved, you could always cut it. That's totally okay. That would sound something like this. Functionality and simplicity. We've got two monitors, one horizontal, one vertical. Ask yourself, is the video strengthened or weakened by losing that line? These are decisions that we need to continue to make, right? I think as is, it might be a little bit better without it. It feels cleaner. So let's go ahead and leave it out. Anal, one vertical, and my laptop docs right into the setup so I can easily go from portable to full workstation mode. F Audio, I use open back headphones because I like the clean, natural sound they give me. When it's time to record, I've got lighting covered with a softbox for fill, a key light for focus, and a light bar for that subtle accent color in the background. And yes, gaming is a big part of my life, too, so you'll spot some gear I've collected over the years that keeps the setup fun, not just functional. So what do you think? Is there anything you'd add to make this setup even better? So what do we think? Does it sound okay to you? I think we're in an okay spot. I think the dialogue flows decently. Well, if we need to make some small adjustments as we go along, we can, but I think we're in a spot where we can now begin to put footage on top. So let's go back to the beginning. This is my freelance desk setup built entirely for productivity. This is my freelance desk setup. Well, if you had to take a hunch as to what footage might be appropriate here, you might guess that it would probably be the desk setup. Shot that we're going to pick is going to be the opening shot. It's the very first thing anybody's going to see when they click on this video. So what we should probably do is pick one of the better shots, something that establishes what this video is going to be about or, in other words, an establishing shot. And you know what? I kind of like this shot right here. We start a little Zoomed in, and the motion is pulling out so that we can slowly see the desk. So I'm going to make a cut. Right. Let's go somewhere right in here. I'm going to pull it up one track. That indicates to me that, Hey, I'm going to use this footage. Now I'm gonna drag and select it, H control set to copy. Zoom out. Go all the way to the beginning. Zoom in and hit Control V to paste it. Now, remember, because we have that view show duplicate frames option on, I can see this orange bar on our footage, and if I look over to our selex, I can see it over here indicating where I've pulled my selex from. Let's go ahead and zoom back in, and let's play this. This is my freelance desk setup built entirely for productivity. This looks pretty good, but there is one problem. Every time the cameraman is taking a step, we have a little bit of a jitter. So it's a little unstable. So what we can attempt to do is stabilize our footage. Now, there's a couple ways of doing this. One's a bit more advanced that we won't cover. The other lives over here to the right in our inspector tab. If yours is closed, make sure you're up in the upper right hand corner and you open your inspector tab. I'm going to select our footage. Go back to the inspector tab, and I'm just going to open up this bar right here where it says stabilization. Now this feature will attempt to keep the center of our frame still, and it's got three different ways of doing it. There's perspective, similarity, and translation. I tend to have better results with translation. You can go and experiment with whatever mode that you'd like, but I'm going to start with translation. I'm going to leave all these settings the same for now and then just hit stabilize. You'll notice it zooms in just a little bit. And if we go back to the beginning and play our clip now, this is my freelance desk setup, built entirely for productivity. Much better. You can always toggle off your stabilization with this little toggle switch right here. And this was it before. This is my freelance desk setup, built You can notice it pretty drastically right in here where we're moving up and down. So let me go ahead and toggle that back on. And that's looking. This is my freelance desk setup, built entirely for productivity. Much better. And now let's go ahead and complete this process for the rest of the Edit. I'm gonna drag the end here, pull it in. Let's go to the next voiceover line. My goal with this setup is functionality and simplicity. We've got two monitors, one horizontal, one. And I think this line comes in a little bit too abruptly. So I'm going to select everything, hit E, and just slide it out a little bit more to give us a bit more space. E for productivity. My goal with this setup is functionality and simplicity. We've got two monitors, one horizontal, one vertical. My goal with this setup is simplicity, functionality simplicity. Excuse me, functionality and simplicity. So it might be good to show two contrasting shots, one that shows functionality and one simplicity that shows simplicity. So functionality, what might that be if we were to go scrub through our B Roll? Oh, there's this nice clip here where we can see the different hard drives and controllers and peripherals. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull this up the control set to copy, go over our timeline, go to the end here so that my playhead is lining up with the edge of our other B roll and paste. My goal with this setup is functionality and simplicity. Right. And my thought process through this is to line up Brol and try to have some sembulance of pacing so that it flows well with what's being said. So before we talk about simplicity, I'm going to make a cut. Click here. Delete nativity. My goal with this setup is functionality and sim this clips got a good bit of shaky Cam as well. So I have a feeling we're going to need to stabilize most of our footage. With this clip selected, this time, I'm going to try the perspective mode. So I'm gonna leave it on perspective and hit Stabilize. Let's see how that looks. My goal with this setup is functionality and simplicity. Okay, I think that looks pretty good. Simplicity. I'm thinking for simplicity. We find the shot of just the keyboard, if I remember correctly. There it is. There's a shot of just the keyboard. So, this looks like a good starting point. I'm going to make a cut. Let's crub four, just a little bit. Make another cut, pull it up. Control C to copy, and control V to paste. Let's go ahead and play. What this setup is functionality and simplicity. We've got two monitors, one horizontal, one vertical. Two monitors, one vertical, one horizontal. So let's find clip of both the monitors. This could be and just the desk shots. This could be usable. Let's pull that up. Let's scrub through here just see if there's anything that might be a little bit better. I don't think there was anything over here. Or we could even use one of these. You know what? Actually, I kind of like this. I think this looks pretty good. We got cut here, pull this up, Control C to copy, control V to paste. We've got two monitors, one horizontal, one vertical, and my laptop doc's right in and I think let's see if we can't find one that goes in here for the laptop dock. Don't know if there's anything in just the desk footage. What about Did I get a close up of the laptop? Oh, there we go. Perfect. Right here. Let's pull this up. Copy, go back over here, paste. Horizontal one vertical, and my laptop docs right into the setup so I can easily go from portable to full workstation mode. Frodo, I use I think the tail end of this is a little bit smoother than the beginning. So what I'm doing now is I'm dragging the end to see if I had missed something in my Selects process that might be a little bit better. And, yeah, it kind of looks like right here, we stay pretty smooth. So where do I want this clip to end? Easily go from portable to full workstation mode. BradioProably right here, right at the beginning of the next line. So I'm going to drag this up, pull over to the left so that the end sits on our playhead. Grab the beginning, pull it in. There are so many different ways to trim and cut clips. Continue to do what makes the most sense for you. And remember, if the question is, can I do it this way, the answer, 99 times out of 100 is, yes, you just might need to remember what button or what handle you need to drag. And now it's your turn. I'm going to let you guys fill out the rest of our Edit. So we've got about 25 seconds more of B Roll that we need to add here. So I'm gonna meet you guys in the next video with all of our B Roll added to the timeline. 31. Mixing Music and Sound Design: Time to do a little sound design. Now, this go around, we're going to do something a little bit more advanced than we did in the previous section. We're going to continue to add on to the tools and skills we have as editors. But go ahead and pat yourselves on the back because we get to do some of the fun stuff now. Coming up with our first assembly cut, our rough cut, sorting through the footage is always a very difficult process, but it is a necessary process. And now we've earned the ability to add our own flare as editors to try to add some m to the video. So let's go ahead and hop back into Good led DaVinci Resolve. Now, you had some homework. Your job was to finish out the rest of our timeline. How did you do? Was it an easy process? Do you feel like it was hard figuring out which footage you should use? Did you feel like this Selects process was helpful or not so much? Whether or not you felt like it was useful, make note. Now you know in the future, I don't like this workflow, and you can begin to implement your own changes. But this is where I ended up with at the end of last video. This is my freelance desk setup built entirely for productivity. My goal with this setup is functionality and simplicity. I've got two monitors, one horizontal, one vertical, and my laptop docs right into the setup so I can easily go from portable to full workstation mode. For audio, I use open back headphones because I like the clean natural sound they give me. When it's time to record, I've got lighting covered with a soft box for fill, a key light for focus, and a light bar for that subtle accent color in the background. And yes, gaming is a big part of my life, too, so you'll spot some gear I've collected over the years that keeps the setup fun, not just functional. So what do you think? Is there anything you'd add to make this setup even better? Now at this stage in the Edit, we should be able to play our video from beginning to end and not feel a lull or a drag in the video. Obviously, this isn't the most exciting cut, but this should feel fluid. If there's cuts in the video that feel janky or the voiceover doesn't sound like it works well together, we need to address that before we begin to move on. But as is, I think we're in a good spot. So let's go ahead and add in some music. In the media pool, locate your audio folder. Let's find our music folder. This time, I'm giving you four songs you can choose from. Feel free to add something from your own personal library. But for the course material, we've got four we can work with. And if I remember right, I think I like this one, Iana emotional. Yeah, I remember liking the rhythm of this. I like the BPM. I feel like it sounds pretty good. Here are some of the other options. Definitely a bit faster, right? It's got a bit more of a darker tone, but pretty similar to that first song we played. I think this might be a bit too intense. Maybe if there wasn't voice over dialogue and we were editing some kind of a montage, this might work a bit better, but in my opinion, I think it comes across a bit too strong. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take this third track right here, Yana emotional. I'm gonna go ahead and drag and drop it on in to our third track here on the timeline. And because we already color coded this track, it's gonna come in a nice, pungent green. So remember, we've got a couple options here on our track. So I'm going to solo the music track by hitting the S here. Let's go ahead and hit Play. Where does that beat kick in? Right here. Right here, specifically. So I'm gonna make a cut on our music. Now, I'm going to mute this track unsolo it so that I can listen to just the dialogue again. So again, muted and unsoloed it. This is my freelance desk setup built entirely for productivity. My goal with this setup is fun. And I'd like the beat to kick in right in here somewhere. So I'm going to drag that cut music. And so what I've done is I've slid in the beat kick so that it lines up with my playhead, and then I can grab the left end here to restore the beginning of the song. I'm going to unmute, and I'm going to lower the volume by quite a bit. Do you remember what the ranges were that we're shooting for? We're wanting it in the background, anywhere between, like, -24 to -30. I think I had said -30, so let's just start here. This is my freelance desk setup built entirely for productivity. My goal with this setup is functionality and simplicity. I've got two monitor. Now, with our headphones on, this sounds pretty good. Let's begin to do a little music and sound design to improve this. Remember, this is a short form video. So I would like people to get into the video early. I want to establish that this is a good video to watch. So what I'd actually like to do is increase the volume here at the beginning. So I'm going to start at like -16 Ish. This is my freelance desk setup built entirely for productivity. My goal with this setup is functionality and simplicity. I've got two monitors, one horizontal, one vertical. And now we've got a little bit more energy and depth to the video early on. However, I would like my voice to come back in stronger later in the video. So how do I adjust the volume on our music track so that it's higher on one end, lower on the other? Find a point where you'd like to lower the volume. Cut the music track at that point. So again, I had just the music track selected, and I hit A to make a cut there. And then on this right half, I can select it, and then either in my inspector tap or using the little minibar here in the music track, I can pull the volume down. Remember, we can hold down the Shift key to fine tune this. So now it's going to sound something like this. This is my freelance desk setup built entirely for productivity. My goal with this setup is function. Hmm. That change feels a bit too abrupt. Is there any way to smooth out that change in volume? Well, of course, my friends. Of course, there is. And there's two ways to go about doing this. First, what I'd like you to do is go all the way up top to the Effects tab. When your Effects tab opens, we have our video transitions, which we took a look at last time. But there's a little column underneath it called Audio Transitions. We've only got three. We've got three that we can work with. We have a cross fade for all of them. But the first two are adding and subtracting volume before and after the cut, the middle one is a simple cross fade. What I'd like you to do is drag that cross fade zero DV to be right on that music cut. And now, if we were to play it, it's going to sound something like this. This is my freelance desk setup built entirely for productivity. My goal with this setup is functionality. Much smoother. Now, there's a few ways that we can manipulate this transition to work in our advantage. For one, you can click on the transition itself. And if we look over to the right in our inspector tab, we have some options for the transition. So similar how we can change the volume on the timeline and the inspector tab, we can also change the duration on the timeline. And in the right on the Inspector tab. We've got a very powerful option right below that where it says alignment. Now, if I click this first icon, watch where it goes on the timeline. Now the transition is sitting on the left half of the cut. Vice versa, if I click the far right option, sits on the right. So as is, we would now fade into this right half entirely for productivity. My goal with this setup is functionality. And if I were to swap it, we're going to fade in with lower volume quicker. Setup built entirely for productivity. My goal with this setup is function slightly different, right? Here's what I like to do. I like to keep it in the middle. And then depending on how the volume transitions, built entirely for productivity. My goal with this setup is fun. I will take the center cut point here and move it to the left or right, depending on where I would like the fade to sit. And then if I would like it to cross fade more aggressively, I will shrink the transition, or if I want it to be more gradual, I will expand it. And with this transition, we have a very powerful tool that we can use to adjust volume levels of our music or even dialogue and voice over on the fly. Now, I wouldn't be doing my job properly if I didn't show you the alternative option to this. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on the transition and hit Backspace to delete. And it's completely up to you if you follow along with this part. I'm going to right click on the cut right here and hit the Delete through Edit option. And that's going to combine the Edit on our two clips. Now, if you don't like using the audio transition method, here's your other option. At the location where you want to change the audio levels, I want you to hold down the Alt key and click on the volume bar. This is on the timeline. I'm holding down the Alt or option key and clicking on the volume bar. And that's going to add a little circular dot right here. Scrub your playhead to where you would like the new audio level to start. Do the same thing. Alt click. These dots control the volume level at that specific frame. So I can drag this one down to decrease it. I can drag this one up. To increase it, I can also move them left and right. This workflow tends to be a little bit more finicky. It's a little bit more tedious and particular with how you're moving the mouse and clicking. So I prefer to make a cut, lower the volume, and adding an audio transition. So let's go ahead and play that again. This is my freelance desk setup built entirely for productivity. My goal with this setup is functionality and simplicity. That keeps the setup fun, not just functional. So what do you think? Is there anything you'd add to make this setup even better? That's sounding pretty good. The only thing I might do is I might increase the volume a little bit at the end. So I'm gonna make a cut here. Increase the volume just a little bit. So I'm at 19 here. Well, yeah, let's go let's go like 19 something. And in a cross fade. Gear I've collected over the years, that keeps the setup fun, not just functional. So what do you think? Is there anything you'd add to make this setup even better? That might be a little too loud, so let's bring it down just to smidgen. Fun, not just functional. So what do you think? Is there anything you'd add to make this setup even better? Yeah. Hey, that's sounding pretty good. Let's cut out the tail. Back space is a delete. And now, I've got a cool little Edit that I think you guys are gonna enjoy. 32. Creating a Hypercut Effect: Team. Time to do something fun. Now, when it came to setting up this section of the course, I was looking for some fun ways that maybe we could spice up this video, especially because, again, Shore form video, attention spans are low. What are some ways that we can hook somebody into the video so they can stay and watch? Well, if you go over to your media pool, go to the audio folder, go to sound effects. There was a couple that I found that were really fun. There's this grappling gun in mechanical stopwatch. I'm going to click on the Stopwatch first. So I'm double clicking to preview it. Let's see with the grappling gun. These two sound effects would be classified as clicks or gear turns, and they're very commonly used for high frequency cut moments. Let me show you what I mean. Now, what we're going to do is going to be the accumulation of everything that we've learned so far, and we get to do it because we've earned the right to add this. We've gone through, properly sorted through our footage, set up our timeline in a way that we can add a little bit more mp. I'd like you to pick your favorite of the two. I'm going to go with the grappling gun sound effect, particularly because I like how it ends. I'd like you to drag and drop this anywhere on your sound effects track. You could put it on the music track, nobody's gonna come arrest you if you do. But let's try to continue to say organize, and let's put it on our sound effects track. Here's what I had in mind, gang. I think I'm going to solo these first two tracks up here, our voice over tracks. I think it would be cool that after I say, This is my freelance desk setup built entirely for productivity. After I say, This is my freelance desk setup, before we go into all the individual items, we can do a hypercut of all the things in the desk setup to quickly preview what's about to be seen, and then we can lead into the rest of the video. What I mean by hypercut is a sequence of very fast and short cuts. So I'm going to unsolo these two tracks. I'm going to mute and lock the music track because I'd like to leave it alone as is. And I'd like to line up the gear sounds to start right after this dialogue line. So this is going to come in pretty loud, so I'm going to lower the volume just a little bit. And I'm going to bring in the end of this sound so it starts right here, right after I start speaking right here. Let's go ahead and play this tirely for productivity. My goal with this setup is Alright, we need a little real estate to work with because as is the voiceover lines coming in doesn't give us any play with using this sound effect. So I'm going to hit E to select everything to the right of my playhead. And I'm just going to drag it off to the right somewhere somewhere arbitrary. It doesn't have to be exact. Then I'm going to bring in this sound effect. Alright, and so let's go ahead and line this up. Now, in my head, what I'm thinking is that on every one of these clicks or close to every one of these clicks, we cut to something new in the setup. So I'm thinking we started somewhere around here, and then it's going to end right around here. I think that's perfect. And I'm going to bring in the end because we don't need it anymore. Activity. Activity. And now what we can do is cycle through some clips on each one of these clicks. Question. How did I know to do something like this? Well, question back to you. Is there media that you enjoy watching? Is there anime, documentaries, music videos, films, action, suspense, thrillers? You probably have some sense of inspiration in your work and things that you enjoy when it comes to videos that you may or may not be aware of. So for me, what I'm coming up with inspiration for editing this kind of a short, and I'm scrolling through sound effects and music that I could possibly use, when I hear something like this, there's a moment where something clicks, and I think, huh, I wonder if we can make something with this. There's probably a science behind this, but the best thing that I can recommend for you is to bring a more conscious awareness to the films and media that you are consuming. Let's get back to the edit. So what I think I would like to do is introduce a new cut every three frames. Why three? Well, do you guys remember what frame rate we're working on on this timeline? It's a 30 FPS timeline. So if we were to make a new cut every three frames, we are going to be showing a new image every tenth of a second. So here's what we're going to do. With My sound effects selected, I'm going to hit the M button. You'll notice it owns a marker on our sound effect. And I'm going to use my right arrow key to go one, two, three frames forward. Hit M. One, two, three, frames forward. Hit M. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. Now what we're going to do is I'm going to pull in the old desk footage so that it ends right at our first marker here. And we're going to begin to bring in footage and have it line up on each one of these markers. So we don't want our sound effect to move at all, we can always lock this track so it doesn't move. Now we're going to do is let's just pick one clip of our selex. Let's do this one right here. I don't want you to be picky in here. The idea is to learn the technique and not so much create a perfect sequence. I'm going to make a cut here, drag it up, control seat to copy. Go back to our timeline, line it up with our first marker. So again, I'm hitting D to zoom in, paste it in here, and then we're going to go to that new marker, cut it off. Again, go to the products. Sure. The mouse is fine. You don't have to go with the mouse. I'm gonna drag it up, copy, paste. Cut. Now, you could continue to do this process one clip at a time, or we could cheat a little bit. What I want you to do is pick eight more of your favorite clips in the selects over here. It does not matter which. I don't want you to be picky here. Again, technique, not the perfect cut. The way I'm going to do this is I'm going to hold down the Alt key and drag and select. Alt key. Drag and select, or if you're on Mac, option key. Drag and select. Pull over eight. Once you have eight clips over here, now we can cheat a little bit, and we can make them all three frames long. We can do that by either right clicking and hit Change clip duration, or the t key is Control D. Remember, if the question is, can I do this in DaVinci Resolve? The answer is yes, we just got to find where the menu is. I would like each of these to be three frames long. So I'm not going to use the time tab. I'm going to use the frames tab. I type in three. And now we've got all of our clips as three frames long. Do you remember what we did in the Selex process to remove all these gaps? You could either go up to edit, delete gaps or we can hit Control Shift F to delete the gaps. Now if I were to zoom in, we've got three frame clips. I'm going to select this sequence. Hit Control X to cut them. Zoom out with S. Zoom back on over over here and paste them with Control V. And now, if we were to play this sequence right in here, it's going to look something like this. Tirely for productivity. And now we have a hypercut. How cool is that? Isn't that pretty fun? We've got one problem, though. The rest of our footage is still over there. So here's what we're gonna do. I'm going to hit the E key to select everything to the right of our playhead. And because our music track is locked and because our sound effects track is locked, even though I have the music track selected here, it's not gonna move when I pull everything back over. And now that looks something like this. It's my freelance desk setup built entirely for productivity. My goal with this setup is functionality and simplicity. Isn't that pretty fun? Alright, I got one more effect to show you guys before we wrap up this video. 33. Compositing: Alright, crew. I've got one more technique to show you guys, but I show it to you with caution because it is a very slippery slope. What we're going to do is we're going to introduce an overlay, which is something that is overlaid on top of the video to add a little bit more visual flare. Where you can get to travel with this is beginning to over abuse overlays. You'll see a lot of amateur editors take film grain or film reels or moving lights and just put them on top of whatever videos are working on in the hopes of making them more produced. I guess is a good way of saying it. So the way that we're going to use ours has some motivation. It's going to be a motivated transition to get into the rest of the video. Again, it's a good technique to learn, but I err on the side of caution when employing them in your videos. It's just like using those stock video transitions. If you don't know why you're using them, don't stick through the fundamentals. Now, up in the media tab over here, we have one last folder we have not tapped into yet, and that is the Assets folder. We've got two videos here. We have a blue light flare transition and a yellow flare transition. What we're going to do is we're going to use these to transition from our hyper gear cut into the rest of the video. We're going to use it as almost like a climactic transition. Let me show you what I mean. What I'd like you to do is pick one of the two. You can go with blue. You can go with yellow. It doesn't really matter to me. I'm going to go with blue because I like the color blue. And as I begin to drag this down, you'll see that it comes with an audio track, which we don't need. Do you remember how to get just the video? If not, it is the Alt key or the option key. So I'm going to hold down the left Alt key and drag this in so we have just the video. Now when I put this on top of our footage, you can see that it comes in with this black background, which can be a bit problematic because even though the flare is not happening, this lens flare, we can't see our footage underneath. So the question is, how do we use this as our transition? Well, let's start by lining this up. I'm going to scrub through until I find a point where our screen is completely filled by this white light. I'm going to make a cut. I'm going to find that point where we're going from the hypercut to the footage and drag that cut here. And then I'm going to pull the beginning back out. So now we have something that looks a little like this tivity. My goal with this setup is function productivity. My goal with this Okay, so the flare is lined up. But how do we get rid of this black background? Say it with me now. There are multiple ways to go about doing this. There are advanced ways. There are convoluted ways. We can do this on the fusion page. We can do this on the color page. What we're looking to do is to key out the black, meaning we would like to get rid of the black area so that they are transparent. A more advanced way of doing this would be to apply a Luma key, but we don't need to do that. What we've done by dragging this blue flare transition on top of our existing footage is we are attempting to composite this visual effect on top of our B roll. Composite meaning combining two or more things into one. With my footage selected, if I were to go over to the inspector tab, you can see that we have a composite option. There's a drop down menu and opacity. So if I were to take the opacity all the way to zero, well, we can see our footage underneath, but now we can't see the flare anymore. So let me go ahead and bring that back all the way up. Some of you might already be familiar with composite modes if you've done some graphic design or use another editing software. But in essence, the composite mode of your footage is how it interacts with the footage or the layers underneath it. So we can change the composite mode from normal to something like add. Whoa. And there you go. Now we can see our footage underneath. What about color? That does something interesting. Color burn. Well, now we can see color dodge, darken, darken Whoa, there's a lot of composite modes over here. I feel like one of these should work, and your feelings would be correct. I'm going to scrub my play head to a point where we can see some of the blue and some of the background. Now, normally composite modes aren't grouped alphabetically. They're grouped in a manner to where light composite modes are next to similar ones. So what that means is that things like color, color burn, color dodge are normally grouped together, and things like hard light, hard mix, and soft light are normally grouped together. We're going to want either add, lighten, or screen. Each of these will essentially make the dark or black areas transparent. When you're working with things with a black background, normally I would default to screen. Screen is essentially a transparency filter, whereas AD is an additive filter, meaning that it will add lighter areas on top of each other, which can make things a bit more glowy, but it is a fun look. So I'm going to go with screen. And now, if we were to play this Vd. My goal with this setup is fun. We get the footage and then the flare transitions on. Now, there is a little bit of artifact in here, and you might not be able to notice it. But if I were to go one frame to the left, see how it's a little bit darker than one frame to the right when our transition ends. And that is because if I were to go back to the normal composite mode, this is not a perfectly transparent black. It's not a zero, zero, zero black. It's a slightly lighter or excuse me, a slightly darker gray. So if I were to go back to screen, a quick fix for this is to fade it off. So I'm going to hit shift in the scroll wheel to scroll up a little bit until we can see our handles over here, our fade handles, and I'm just going to grab this right one and pull it on over a little bit. Now it will fade off. We have a perfectly clean You can do the same as well to the left side. But you got a perfectly clean transition. My goal with this setup is there's a couple of things that we can do to really sell this sound effect because as is, we have the gears to cycle through our cuts. There's nothing really there for the flare, the transition. So let's go back over to our sound effect tab. And we've got a few that we could choose to work with. We got a camera flash at the cinematic woosh. We got a short firewoh? What are these guys? Ooh. All of those are pretty fun. You can choose whatever one you'd like. I think they all signify this passing flare. I'm going to start with the camera flash. I'm gonna put it on sound effects Track two. Bring this up. Let's resize things just a little bit, and I'm going to make sure that the peak of this sound effect lines up right here on the cut. To bring the volume level down just a little bit. Let's give that a play. My goal with this My goal with this Oh, it might be too quiet to bring this up. My goal with this setup is function. Now you can hear it. I think it still feels a little bit flat. Let's add a few more layers of sound effects. I'm going to click on our bottom sound effects two layer here. Go to add Tracks. We don't need any new video tracks, and I'm going to actually add I'm going to add two layers below sound effects two. Add tracks. Let's go ahead and make sure these are all named and colored properly. So sound effects three, sound effects four. Change the clip color orange. To orange to orange. So what was this one again? Oh, I like that. The short fire whoosh. Go and add that underneath here. And again, I'm looking to line up the peak of this sound effect with where the cut point is. Let's bring this down just a little bit. See how that sounds. Activity. My goal with this setup is. I think that sounds pretty good. The last thing that I'm going to do is there's one sound effect we haven't previewed yet and it's this reversed symbol riser. Risers build tension. It's a rising source of audio. I'm gonna drag that on down. And again, I'm going to have that line up. That cut point, bring the volume level down just a little bit. Entirely for productivity. My goal with this setup is functionality. Now, that has got some meat and some weight to it. What we've done is added depth to our cut and our edit by layering the sound. I cannot emphasize enough how important sound design is to your videos and your edits. But we've got one problem, and it's sitting muted right here on track number three. If I were to unmute this and unlock it, let's play it with the music now. This is my freelance desk setup built entirely for productivity. My goal with this. Did you hear it? Remember how we had locked our music track before adding this gear hypercut? Well, that beat drop is still happening right here on the old point. So we need to take our music track. And move it on over to drop right where the cut is at. We want everything to build into this moment where we are revealing our desk setup. All I need to do is bring the beginning back, go to the end, pull this back, slide it over, and we need to re add our transition here. We zoom in. And now let's check out our desk edit. This is my freelance desk setup built entirely for productivity. My goal with this setup is functionality and simplicity. I've got two monitors, one horizontal, one vertical, and my laptop off. I think the music volume still drops off a little bit too quick. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click our transition. Switch to the right side and pull it over. So it fades off a little bit more gradually. Alright, and here is the edit. This is my freelance desk setup built entirely for productivity. My goal with this setup is functionality and simplicity. I've got two monitors, one horizontal, one vertical, and my laptop docs right into the setup so I can easily go from portable to full workstation mode. For Audio, I use open back headphones because I like the clean, natural sound they give me. When it's time to record, I've got lighting covered with a softbox for fill, a key light for focus, and a light bar for that subtle accent color in the background. And yes, gaming is a big part of my life, too, so you'll spot some gear I've collected over the years that keeps the setup fun, not just functional. So what do you think? Is there anything you'd add to make this setup even better? There we go. Nicely done, everybody. Hey, that's not too bad. For our first Short form edit, I feel like that's got a good bit of energy and paste to it. But let me ask you this. Are there things that are still missing or you feel like could be improved? We could go back and try to add some more sound effects and, you know, continue to improve our sound design. But as is, from what you've learned, what else are you thinking that you might do to improve this video? One of the things that I'm thinking right now is that there is an obvious lack of text and callouts. When you watch shortfm videos, there are often captions. And when we're talking about a laptop, we might have a call out or a line that identifies what this laptop is. These are motion graphics and title graphics that we have not covered yet, but we are going to cover them in fusion. And there are also shots like this that are just a little too dark, and we're going to learn how to improve those in the color page. So nicely done. Last thing we need to do here is render out the footage. And to do that, we're going to go ahead and go over to the Deliver page. And similar to last time, I'm not going to spend too much time covering render settings because I dimentiRsolve, if we scroll over to our presets up top here, there is a TikTok preset, and that will render this out in a vertical format that is already pre formatted for short form platforms. Now, this doesn't have to go on TikTok. This is just a nice preset for all of your vertical video. Go ahead and browse to wherever you would like to save this. I'm going to go to my desktop, and I'm going to name this oh three short form desk setup. And before we add this to the Render Queue, make sure that you're not rendering out the entire timeline because remember, we've got all of our B roll over here. So go to the end of the clip, and this is a funky little rule, but we need to go over to the left, one frame and hit O. This hits the outpoint at the very end of our footage. This is kind of a funky rule and something I might touch on more a little bit later. But if we were to hit O, where our playhead is at the end of the timeline, you'll see it as an extra frame here. That is because DaVinci Resolve looks to the right of the playhead. Again, this is something I might cover a little bit more in the future, but just know if you're trying to get to the very end of your edited sequence, go one frame over to the left and then hit O. Now we'll be perfectly lined up. We can add this to the render Q. And then pat yourself on the back for a job well done. 34. Class Project 4 - The Keyboard Short: And now it is your turn, and we're going to be working with some real footage that was used in a short form Edit. So for Class Project four, we're going to be doing a short form Edit. But we're going to be working with footage that was for a keyboard review, a computer keyboard review. The footage is provided to us by my friend Justin. Justin is in the tech space. He likes reviewing and talking about different tech and technology. And he was who provided the B role for Class Project three. In your course material folder, there will be a Class Project four. We've got two folders, video and audio. I'm going to go ahead and vent her into the video folder. And within the video folder, I'm going to go into our A Roll folder here. This is Justin here. This is a video where he is going to be reviewing three keyboards that he personally owns. There they are. The three keyboards right here. Now, each of the keyboards has a specific name, and I'm not planning on you to know the different brands of keyboards. So what I've gone ahead and done is in that same video folder in the B Roll folder. I've gone ahead and separated the B Roll for the respective keyboards by that keyboard's name. So there's the Ducky, the high ground, and the Wooding. And there's one extra folder that showcases all of the keyboards at once. So for this project, the creator, Justin, is reviewing three of their favorite keyboards and have asked that you make an engaging short from their recordings. Like I mentioned, the appropriate B roll for each brand of keyboard will be located in the respective folders. Do not be afraid to take creative Liberties. Meaning, if you have an idea for the Edit and you want to try something, go for. Now is the time and place to experiment and learn what works and might not work. Make a note here that it's okay to have gaps before, after and in between voice lines. Just like we did with the Hypercut, we don't have to string along each voice line immediately after one of the other. We've been asked to keep it underneath 60 seconds, which shouldn't be a problem and to keep the video vertical. So just like last time we're going 1080 by 1920. We're going to roll music and at least one sound effects to support this story of the video. Very good. So like class Project two, you have a choice to make here. For one, you can keep things within our existing project. So within the existing tech short project, we can go ahead and create a new class project four folder and sort all of our old folders in like a class Project three folder. Or if you want to, you can go to the home icon and create a new class project for project. Either or this project is going to be a great way for you to reinforce the concepts we learned in class Project three. There's one final thing I'd like to show you guys before I go ahead and let you loose. For our a Roll video, I'm going to go ahead and drag and drop it in here. Don't follow along. I'm just going to show this for the purpose of demonstration. Let me go ahead and just insert it on our existing timeline so you guys can see so the original video that Justin gave me was split up into two parts. One, had him talking to the camera where he's looking at the camera, recording a couple of things, and the right half is him reading off his phone for the rest of the dialogue. So I went ahead and trimmed out some of the fat and combined the two together. So just be aware when you're working with this footage, be conscious of what you're playing, what's usable, and what's not. With that said, I wish you luck and God speed on your short form editing journey. 35. Linking and Unlinking Clips: Welcome to stuff I Wish I knew Part one. This might be one of my favorite sections in this course, because we're going to talk about all the useful things. For the bulk of our time here in the course, we focus a lot on techniques and practices. But in this section, we get to talk about all the little fun tips and tricks that make your life a lot easier. In Resolve, if the question is ever, can I do this? The answer is normally yes. And we're going to explore what those yeses are in this section. So let's go ahead and hop straight into it. So for this section, I'm going to keep us in Project three, the Text Short project just because we've already got things imported, we've got stuff laid out, and it'll be easy to quickly demonstrate some of these tools that you guys have at your disposal. And for this first go round, let's go ahead and cover some timeline troubleshooting tools. And one of the most useful is just being able to locate footage from your timeline in your media pool. For us, because we're not working with a lot of footage, it might not be too bad. You know, we can go up to our Media pool, go to the recording section, go here, and then try to find the Oh, oh, what is that COO six oh file, so I could go here. You know, we find it relatively easily. But depending on the scope of your project and the work, it might not always be the most time effective thing to sort through your media pool and try to link file names across. So there's two really helpful shortcuts that will speed up this process. Now, just a quick reminder, I'm going to be assuming that we are using my keyboard shortcuts, but I will do my best to list out the default keys as well. To find our footage in the media pool without searching through folders and bins, all we need to do is hit Alt plus F or Option plus F if you're on Mac. And that locates our footage right here. And we can combine this with the match frame shortcut to find the exact length of this clip on the timeline in the media pool. So with our playhead directly over the clip, this is important that your playhead is above the clip that you're trying to match the frame to. Watch the in and out points down here. If I hit Control plus F here or Command plus F if you're on Mac, you see how it shifts the in and out point? Now, if I were to hold down the Alt keying to bring in, excuse me, the video, you'll see we get the exact same video length. And it is going to be important that your playhead is over the clip that you're trying to match and find in the media pool. If, for instance, my playhead was over here and I select this clip and hit Alt F, it's still going to find that clip in the Media pool. But if I hit Control plus F, you see we get a different in and out point and the preview changes because now we're previewing, we're matching the frame of this footage. So, again, that sequence of events on another clip is move the playhead above the clip you're trying to locate, select that clip on the timeline, Alt plus F, locates it in the Media pool, and then Control plus F sets the in and out point to exactly what little snippet we snagged from the footage. Now I've got one more troubleshooting technique to talk to you guys about and to do so. I'm going to go over to our Stringout timeline because we have both the audio and video here. Now, it really doesn't matter what clip we choose to work with. This is purely for example sake, but there are going to be moments when you're editing when something like this happens, you would like to either move this clip left or right or make a cut, and it only affects one part of it. Let me show you what I mean. Sometimes this little icon, and I think we talked about it in a previous video might be unchecked. This is the linked selection icon which turns on your link selections. A majority of time when you bring in footage from your Media pool to the timeline, it will have linked audio to that video, which is indicated by the little Link icon on the video itself. So, if that selection is turned off, then when I go to drag it, things split up, which can be kind of frustrating because then you have to go back, dragon select to move everything over, and then you do this. And so problems, right? So if you ever have that issue where you're trying to move both things at once and you're only getting one every time you click and select it, make sure this icon is turned on. Vic versa, sometimes this linked icon is turned on, but you're only selecting one thing as well. And that can happen when you do something like this. Let's say I'm working with this footage here, right? And I need to make an audio adjustment on one part of the video, but I don't necessarily want to cut the video itself. Well, sometimes what you'll do is you'll alt click to select just the audio and make a cut, splitting up the audio. And now if I needed to, I could adjust the volume here. We could add audio effects. You know, we could change the audio to be different than this first half. But watch what happens when I select the video. Well, I have the Link Selection turned on, but now nothing is linked to it. Depending on how you Alt select your footage and how you make those changes, sometimes it will unlink the audio and the video. So to re link those things, what we need to do is do it manually. So you can drag and select, right click and go to ink Clips. This is the default shortcut for this Control plus Alt plus L. Normally, I don't have to deal with this too often, so I've left it alone, and I'll normally just right click and relink it. But again, you can always update this to be hockey that you might use more often. You notice when I click that, we get the linked icons back, and now when I select it, Everything is grouped together. 36. Timeline Icons: Something else we haven't talked a lot about yet are these icons over here, which can cause problems if you accidentally turn them on and off when you didn't mean to. So the red icons are the track selectors for changes. It's different than locking a track so that you can't make any changes, but it is analogous to it, and I'll show you what I mean. So let me unlock this track right here. If I accidentally turn off, let's say, the red Audio one icon here, if I don't have anything selected and I hit the A key, you'll see that it only makes a cut on the video. And if I were to even stack this, so let's say I put this video on top of this one here, again, I have only the red track turned off here and I make a cut. You'll see that we cut everything except for track one. Now, if I were to have this video selected and I make a cut, it still works. This just toggles on and off bulk master options for changes that you make on the timeline. So, again, if you're having problems where you're trying to make a cut to multiple things and it's not happening, double check the red icons and check these blue icons. So the blue icons represent what's going to be imported to your timeline from what you have selected in the media pool. Meaning that since I have this video selected here, right? We have a video one and an audio one previewed here. Now, if I were to go over to my Voiceover Media Pool and click here, you'll see that we only have the blue icon for Audio one because there's no video associated with this. Again, if I go back to my videos over here for the Sony S Log two footage and select Video one Audio O. Depending on the footage that you receive, you might preview up to, like, six or ten or even 12 audio tracks, depending again on how many audio files are associated with that footage. Where this can be an issue is, if, for instance, I'm going to go to the end of our timeline here just for an example. I somewhere along the way I accidentally toggle off A one here, and I try to bring in our footage, you'll see it brings in only the video. So that can be frustrating, 'cause you're like, Well, hey, man, I got some voice associated with this, or I have, some audio associated with this, and I can't get it to come in. Double check to make sure that your media pool, preview, timeline track options are toggled on. And now the only other thing that I'll call out, but I feel like you guys might probably already understand this is if you have the lock track turned on, you're not going to be able to bring footage onto that track. And it's the same with the audio. So if I were to accidentally lock both those tracks, I can't bring anything onto those tracks. Now, I'm going to skip over the sync lock toggle really quick just to cover the disable audio and video tracks. For video, we only have one option. That completely disables this entire track. Doesn't delete anything. I just kind of turns it off. For audio, if I'm trying to mute a particular track, we can hit the M button, but I believe we've already played with that option. And synclock is a little bit different. Let me show you what I mean. If I were to hold down the Alt key with this random clip selected and make a duplicate here. If I were to disable Syncloc on Video Track two and Audio Track two, and I select this footage here on Track one, so it's the exact copy just underneath it and hit F, you'll see that it doesn't ripple delete. It stays in place. If I undo that real quick, I'm going to i Control Z and enable Synclock and now I ripple delete. You see it shifts over? So the synclock disables clip shifting operations. That can also include things like our trim editor. So again, just for an example, you don't have to follow along with this part. I'm going to cut off these two clips, ripple delete them so they all shift over. So now we just have a smaller version of that same clip. The Synclock option also works with our trim editor, which is what we played with in the first section to shift video around and extend clips without affecting the cut points. So if I were to hit Shift and W to swap to that mode, go to this cut point and push the video out, you'll see that our top track shifts along with it. That's because the sync clock is enabled. I'm going to hit Control Zeta undo that real quick. If I were to toggle that off. Now when I push everything out, you'll see it stays in place. This can be a useful tool for you if you're working with a lot of tracks of footage and you're not wanting things to shift around when you're ripple deleting and trimming, but it is something that's important to be aware of regardless because, again, sometimes you might be trying to do a particular operation and things aren't moving the way you'd like to. So again, just a quick recap of this section. Alt plus F locates your footage in the Media pool. Control plus F sets the in and out points of that footage. If your audio and video aren't linking double check to make sure the link icon is on and that the clips themselves are linked. And we don't need to use all of these buttons, but it's important to be aware of them if you are having problems. The red icons affect bulk track auto select. So if I toggle this on, hit A, you'll see we don't cut here. The blue icons are related to bringing in media from the media pool. So if I were to turn off Video one and bring this in, you'll see we just get the audio track. The rest of the icons are all associated with the operations you can perform on the track. So locking the track, disabling a track and allowing it to shift when you ripple delete. So very useful things to understand a know, and now we can move on to some really cool tools in DaVinci. 37. Adjustment Clips: Alrighty, let's talk adjustment clips. Or if you're coming over from Premiere or another software, they might be called Adjustment Layers. But either way you go about describing them, this is one of the most important tools an editor can have when it comes to creating looks and effects. Let me show you what I mean. So what I'm going to do is, again, I'm in Project three, that text short that we had worked on. I'm going to go over to our main timeline where we have the finished Edit here. And I'm going to move my playhead to this section right here where we have that rapid cut sequence. I'd like us to do here is go all the way up top here to the Effects tab. Because we're in DaVinci Resolves vertical format, timeline, it's going to pop up the Effects tab with the Media pool. If you're on a normal horizontal timeline, it'll pop it up either right up here or down below here. But either way, it doesn't matter where it lives. We're just looking for our Effects tab. And underneath our toolbox here, find the effects option. And right up top, we have two of the most important features inside DaVinci Resolve when it comes to creating advanced visuals, anything that's a little more unquote complicated. Fusion compositions are what we are going to cover in the next section, so I'm going to leave that alone for now. But we have our adjustment clip right here. Adjustment Clips or adjustment layers, whatever you'd like to call them, are the universal tool for editors. They can do everything and anything we need them to do. Let me show you what I mean, I feel like it's always a little bit more confusing to describe what they are than to just show what they do. So I'm going to select our adjustment clip, and I'm going to drag and drop it above this section. It doesn't really matter how exact it is. We want it to be above our video footage here. But you'll notice that when we drag and drop it in, nothing happens. So what did we just do? Well, nothing really. You see, an adjustment clip is kind of a blank slate for us to do whatever we'd like. And the way that it works is I'm going to pull this down so we can see our video track a little bit better. I'm going to hit shift on the scroll wheel to expand this. The way an adjustment clips is it looks at everything underneath it and applies any change that we've made to the adjustment clip to the footage underneath. Again, it's kind of confusing to describe. So let me show you what I mean. Now, as is, our adjustment clip is above every single video track here, and I might have forgot to make a note, but mine comes in at 2 seconds long. Yours by default will probably come in at one, two, three, four. 5 seconds long? That's a Resolve, preference preset. You can always find that and change that in the upper menu up here, Resolve, preferences, user. Editing. And then if you scroll down a little bit again, I'm in user and editing. You have standard lengths for generators, transitions, stills. If you do want to change your default length, I believe it's this one, the generator duration. But again, I'm going to close that. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how long this is for the purpose of this example. Let's say there's a change that we need to make to all of our footage here, right? So let's say, just for example, I need to zoom in a little bit more on all of our footage. But what I can do is, you know, I could zoom in here, click on this one. Zoom in here, click on this one, Zoom in here, Exanda and go down the line and make those changes. But depending on how many changes you need to make and how many clips you have that you need to change, can be kind of a time consuming process. So I'm going to hit Control Z to undo all those changes with my adjustment clips selected, any property that I change here applies to the video footage underneath it. So I have this selected and I increase the Zoom here. So let's do 1.25. You'll notice that everything else gets zoomed in. It might not be obvious because, you know, you might not be as familiar with the footage, but if I were to hit Control Shift in D to disable it, you'll see that we zoom back to our original Zoom. When the adjustment clip is disabled. And if I haven't already mentioned it, enabling disabling clips is what toggles it on and off. You can always do that by right clicking and hitting Enable disabled clip. My keyboard horcut for that is Control plus Shift plus D. So as long as the adjustment clip is above that footage, it's going to affect the properties of everything underneath it. So if I drag this out a little bit to kind of sit in the middle, watch what happens. When it stays zoomed in, and then as soon as my playhead goes past it, we zoom out. So what that means is that if anything is above it, it won't be affected. So if I take this clip and pull it above the adjustment clip, you'll see that we lose our Zoom there. And this concept tracks for everything. And I mean, literally any change that you can think of applying in DaVinci Resolve, an adjustment clip can be used for it. So again, for example, I'm going to undo the Zoom. I were to go over to our Resolve Effects tab, and let's just drag and drop on a random effect. So let's do I'm going to go up to the magnifying glass here, search for Glow, drag and drop that guy on. And let's bring down our threshold here so that everything is in range. It's not a good look. But again, for the purpose of this example, and I scrub through all of our footage, you will see that it is all very glowy until we get to the end here. So adjustment clips will work for any effects you want to apply. I'll work for any video inspector property you want to apply. When we get to the Color page, it'll also work with any color changes that we'd like to apply, and when we hop into fusion, it'll also work with any fusion changes we'd like to apply. Adjustment Clips are the universal tool for editors. There are some drawbacks to using adjustment clips, and I'll talk about those in just a second. But adjustment clips also stack. So if I were to undo this, and let's say this is the visual look I want. I want this overexposed glow look. And through this little section here, I need to again, either zoom in or maybe I want to crop the footage underneath it. Well, I can go to my Efectab, adjustment clips, drag in another one. Let me color code this so that I know it's different. We'll go with a nice, I don't know. Chocolate? I can bring it in to only affect the clips down here. And let's go over to the crop property. We'll crop a little to the left. Crop a little to the right. Crop a little off the top, a little off the bottom so we get these nice mini rectangles. And you'll see that we're cropping everything underneath it until we get out of our adjustment clip. Now, be aware of the order that you start doing things because, again, adjustment clips affect everything underneath them. So with this brown adjustment clip or chocolate, excuse me, I'm cropping our glow that was applied to the footage. If I were to flip the order here, you'll notice on the video track that we have some light leaking out to the outside. And that's because our glow is being applied to the cropped footage. It doesn't know that these black areas are cropped. It's just looking at the videos underneath it. So it thinks that this just might be a dark area like the laptop screen. So it's still applying the glow outside of that region. So just like math, order of operations does matter while you're editing. Now, there are a couple drawbacks to using adjustment clips, like I mentioned. Let's talk about what those are. I'm going to delete our two example adjustment clips here, and I'm going to add in two more here. Oop. The way an adjustment clip works is that it has to look at everything underneath it, compile it into one video file, and then make those changes. Meaning that, let's say I bring these two clips up like this, right? And I had a lot of overlays and a lot of text titles, and I was doing a lot of processing underneath it. Well, the adjustment clip kind of has to bring in all that information and render it in place to make the changes on the adjustment clip. All I'm saying here is that adjustment clips can cause playback slowdown on your timeline. So if you're doing a lot of things in a particular area and you slap an adjustment clip on top of it, it can definitely slow down your playback speeds. Now, again, adjustment clips aren't accessing the original video file, right? We're not changing properties to this video. We're changing properties of everything underneath the adjustment clip. So what these two adjustment clips are seeing here is a 1080 by 1920 video file because we are on a 1080 by 1920 timeline. So if I were to on this bottom adjustment clip, zoom in here, there's a point where your footage will become pretty blurry. And that's true, no matter how you apply your zoom level, right? Even if you are working with four K footage or eight K footage, there's a point where the change you make begins to ruin the footage a little bit. Watch what happens when I click the adjustment clip above the first one here and try to zoom out. You see how it gets cropped off? That's because, again, the adjustment clip is just looking at what's underneath it. So the only thing it's seeing is this. It's seeing our zoomed in footage here. So it's not accessing any of the information in this clip, right? It's just looking down and saying, Okay, this is what I see, Zoom it out. So if I undo that real quick, this concept also applies to changes we make on the video that the adjustment clip can't see. So let me go to our bottom adjustment clip here and I'm going to undo all those changes. If I click our video file here, zoom it in, go to this one, zoom it out. We all know that there's more information than what we're seeing, but the adjustment clip can't access it. Where this might be a bigger issue for some people is if you're working on a ten eightP timeline. So we're working on a vertical in here, right? So 1080 by 1920, and you bring in four K footage. Well, the only thing the adjustment clip is seeing is 1080 by 1920. So it's not seeing 21 60 by 38 40. It's seeing a down res version of that footage. So if you were to try to zoom in using an adjustment clip, you're going to lose resolution and quality very quickly. Say all that just to reiterate the point that we need to be conscious of what we're doing inside Deventi Resolve. Adjustment clips are extremely useful and powerful for making bulk changes and mass edits to a lot of the timeline without having to do things individually. But if you're making those changes without being conscious of how it's actually affecting your footage, you can run into quality issues down the road. Adjustment Clips, though, very cool, very useful. Let's move on to compound clips. 38. Compound Clips: So let's talk compound clips. Now, compound clips are kind of a way to clean up our timeline. And if you're familiar with coding at all, it's a way to nest our footage. So let me show you what I mean. Now, again, depending on how much stuff you got going on the timeline, you might end up with a lot of tracks. At this moment in time, if you haven't done a lot of editing, that might seem a little farfetched and advanced to you, but I promise the video tracks begin to add up very quickly. So compound clips are a way to combine a chunk of footage into one video file. In. Project three here. I'm on our main timeline, and what I'm going to do is, if you don't already have one added from the previous video, add an adjustment clip to any part, I'm working in our quick cut section. And with our adjustment clip here, let's just go ahead and add an effect. Like you to pick and choose whichever one's your favorite. Depending on whether or not you're in the Studio or free version, the free version will be limited to some of the Resolve effects that you can use. And if that's the case, so like halation will be one you won't have access to, it'll pop up a little window saying you've reached the limitation. So if that's the case, just close the window, delete the effect, and find one that you can add and drop on into your adjustment clip. So for me, I'm going to add the prison blur. The prison blur is a pretty fun one. It adds, like a radio blur, along with some chromatic aberration. It's just kind of a fun one to use when you're creating either digital looks or things need, like a dreamy effect, too. And feel free to go over here and play with some of the settings. It's totally okay to start getting more comfortable with some of the effects in DaVinci Resolve and how they affect your footage. But the big takeaways here is, I want you to have an adjustment clip above your footage. I want you to make sure that this blue flare transition is a part of it and that we're working with our quick cut section. Now, here's what we're going to do. In our master folder here, I would like you to add a new Bin. So I'm going to right click New Bin I'm going to call this 05 underscore VFX. You could name your CC for compound clips. You could spell out. Woo. Compound Clips. I like to kind of group all my fusion stuff and compound work into one folder called VFX. Go ahead and open up that folder. And I want you to drag and select just these three tracks here, and only to the end of this clip right here, whatever this clip may be for you. If you accidentally select more footage than you should, is it the end of the world? No, but try to be pretty close to grabbing this amount right here. Now, I'd like you to right click you can go all the way up top of that menu and hit new compound clip. I have mind map to Control plus Shift plus C I end up doing this so much. Hit okay. Now it's gonna ask you to name it. We can leave this alone. If for some reason you need to have a specific name, go ahead and do that here, but hit Create. And what did you look at that? We're left with one compound clip. So a compound clip kind of does what's in its name. It compounds everything into one piece of footage. Similar to adjustment clips, you know, I can change the Zoom property or any property here, and it's going to affect everything in that compound clip. So when and why, why we want to compound something outside of just, you know, cleaning up our timeline? Well, part of it is just cleaning up the timeline. Sometimes when you're navigating around, it can be a bit cumbersome to have to deal with five video tracks, ten video tracks, so we can compound them in place. The other reason this is nice is because we now can move everything at once. So if you remember, we had a bunch of stuff here, and if we needed to make frame changes, but we'd have to drag and select everything here and move it. So when we compound it, we've got everything nice and neat in one place. And you'll notice that our video is still applying the adjustment layer to where we had the adjustment layer. Mine looks like it gets cut off right here. Now, here's the thing that is so cool about compound clips. The information that we compound it here isn't lost. What I mean by that is when we create a compound clip, it kind of creates a little mini timeline. Let me show you what I mean. If I right click here and scroll all the way up, we have a new option called open and Timeline. If I click that, Would you look at that. All of our original stuff is right here. And the cool thing about compound clips is that any change we make inside the compound clip gets reflected on our primary timeline. So, for example, if I were to disable our adjustment clip, and remember that shortcut is Control Shift plus D, or you can always right click and toggle off enable disable. Now, for me, that was my prism Bler effect. If I go back to my main timeline, look at that. It's no longer there. The cool thing about compound clips, as well, is wherever your playhead is at on the compound clip. So mine's looking at this stuff right here. If I were to right click and hit Open and timeline, you'll see that it's going to match that frame inside the compound clips. So if you're ever making changes and cuts and you're trying to figure out where there's a problem area in your compound clip, you always right click open and timeline, and it's going to take you right there. Now, for me, I'm going to go ahead and close this real quick, hop back over to our main timeline. I again, end up doing this so much that I have mapped this to the C key. So to create a compound clip, I'll use Control Shift plus C, and then to open up that compound clips, I'll just hit, C, there we go. Or in the compound clips. So now I can re enable that adjustment clip and maybe I'll even extend it out all the way. So that way, I have that prism blur all the way to the end of the compound clip. So compound clips, very useful tool, but just like adjustment clips, they do have limitations. So for this next part, you are more than welcome to just watch you do not have to follow along. For the purpose of demonstration, sometimes what'll happen is you'll be working on a lower resolution timeline. You compound footage, and then you try to bring it over to a bigger, more professional, higher res timeline, and you lose quality. Well, that's because, again, we're forming our compound clips on whatever the resolution of the timeline is that we're on. So if I were to go over here, right click, let's make a new I don't know, random test, horizontal Timeline. Let's uncheck use project settings. Go to the format, and let's make a horizontal timeline. So I'm just going to uncheck this here. And I'm going to make this really small. Let's do a 720 timeline. I'm going to do 720 by 480. I create. That's going to make a really small video timeline. I'm going to open up our compound Clip one and its timeline. So now, remember, we're just inside our compound clip where we nested our original footage. I'll highlight those, hit Control C, paste them into our new horizontal timeline. I'm going to create a new compound clip here, and it'll just come up as compound Clip two. We don't need to rename it. Hang. So you know it's a couple of things. One, our prison blur is kind of leaking to the edges over here 'cause the adjustment clips. But two, our compound clip didn't save our footage as 1080 by 1920. It saved it as 720 by 480. So even though I'm gonna hit C to go inside compound Clip two, this looks exactly the same as compound clip one. Compound Clip two was set up as a horizontal timeline, so our clip is saved horizontally. So now we're going to go back to our main timeline here and bring in compound Clip two. And because we're bouncing back and forth between horizontal and vertical timelines, we kind of lost our vertical preview to regain that, just click this icon over here. Go up to this top menu, hit fit, and it might be hard to see in the recording, but if I disable and enable this clip, we're losing some of that resolution, and you can kind of notice it around some of these areas down here. Again, it's going to be kind of tricky to see, but, see, for instance, on the wall, if you look at the spackle, you'll lose a little bit of sharpness. It's just something to be aware of. There will be times where you compound text or effects and they start displaying weird. That's just because you probably compounded it on a timeline that is a mismatch from whatever your current working timeline is. But again, compound clips, super cool, super useful, very practical. 39. Power Bins: Alright, so our last section on stuff I wish I knew P one is going to be Power Bins. You'll notice, I haven't talked a lot about saving presets, and presets are something that we definitely want to start incorporating into our workflow early on to speed up the startup process. Because, as is, every time we've started a new project, we've kind of had to do it from scratch, which is a bit time consuming, especially if we start doing things more and more that are very, very similar. So Power Bins are a way to alleviate that problem. So Power Bins Power Bins Power Bins, Power Bins. Power Bins are the universal folder. So you know, we've set up folders in our media pool, it's master folder. So we've got our recordings, we've got our audio. When we started this new project, you might have caught that we didn't bring in any of the stuff from the original project. My talking head footage isn't in here. The music we use from that project isn't in here. Everything is brand new and fresh. So how do we bring in stuff from one project to another? So you can actually go down here to the Home B, open up your project manager. If I were to open up our talking head project, right, I could paste that footage in here. Pretty cool. But the other thing that we can make use of is our power bins, which are going to be located underneath our master folder in our media pool. If you do not see your Power Bins, do not fret. It's okay. In your media pool, go to the upper right hand corner where these three dots are. Click them, and there's two options Smart Bins and Power Bins. Smart Bins are a very different thing. We do not want Smart Bins on, which I believe are on by default. We want Power Bins. I'm probably not going to cover Smart Bins within the context of this course. If you would like to look into them further, know that Smart Bins are a way of filtering footage. They are useful for very large projects, but again, probably not going to talk about them. We want power bins. If they're turned on, you should see this little drop down over here. And if it's hidden, you might need to grab the divider and kind of slide it up and down until you can see your Power Bins. Alright, I'm going to pull this down so we can make our Power Bins section a little bit more legible. And I'm going to click on this master folder here in our Power Bins. And we got nothing. Well, that's because we haven't set up any things to be saved in our Power Bins. Now, I don't think that there is a universal way to set up your Power Bins. I think there's probably smarter ways of doing it, but this again, should be a place that makes sense for you. And you'll probably discover that the more and more you begin to edit. Again, Power Bins are a universal folder system. So anything that I put into my master Power Bin folder, I can access in any project within the same database. And I do say the same database intentionally because, again, if I were to go to my home menu and open up my project manager, Power Bins do not transfer to if you're on a network, if you're on the DaVinci Resolve Cloud, or like me, if you were on a different database. So I have a database set up for talking about this course. The Power Bins that I set up here don't transfer to my local one, and the local one that I have set up didn't transfer over here. So how do we use Power Bins? Anything that you can save in your media pool, you can save in your Power Bins with one or two very small exceptions. So here's what I mean by that. I'm going to do a couple of smaller examples just to show how it works, and then we'll go ahead and set up a folder system that we'll use in future projects. So what I'd like us to do is go over to the Effects tab and drag it in adjustment clips. We'll practice using some adjustment clips more. I'm gonna go ahead and we'll put it over that same sequence over here and extend it out. And this go around. I want you to go ahead and go to the Resolve Effects. And look for the camera shake if you haven't already used it. Now, the camera shake should be included in both the free and paid version of Resolve. And the camera shake is a pretty fun effect. It gives you some handheld wobble. Now you can increase the amount of the shake to add some really distorted, vibrated effects for, you know, maybe it's an explosion or there's a big monster coming or we can set it up to feel like it's more of a handheld look like we're walking along or we want it to feel a little bit more natural. So, as is, I feel like this is a little much. So all I'm going to do is I'm going to decrease the motion scale and decrease the speed scale. Go ahead and play that. Yeah, that's pretty good. You know, it might not be perfect, but I think that's a good starting point. So what we can do is, for one, if you didn't know, you can drag adjustment clips into your Media pool. So I'm back on my master Media pool, and I put my adjustment clip up there. So now at any point in the timeline, if I wanted to, I could pull that adjustment clip in, and I have that camera shake effect applied to it. How cool. But the other thing we can do is this. I'm gonna rename this to handheld camera shake. And now I'm going to drag it into our master Power bin. We toggle over to the Power Bin, and there we have our generator right there. And just like before, if I wanted to on the timeline, in our Power Bins, I could drag and drop that adjustment clip back down, and we have our handheld camera shake. Very, very cool. So let's go ahead and test out this theory of Power Bins. What I'd like you to do is go to the bottom right hand corner and look for the home icon. Go ahead and click it. That'll bring up our project manager. Now, depending on how you split up your projects, it'll probably look pretty similar to mine. Just go ahead and open up any other project. I'm going to go back to the first one we worked on, which is the talking head video. Well, now what I can do is go over to my Power Bins. And if they're not open for whatever reason, remember three dots, show Power Bins. We're gonna go over and click over here, and there we go. We've got our adjustment clip all set up. So now if I wanted to, I could add a handheld effect to our talking end video. How sweet is that? Now, Power Bins don't only apply to adjustment clips. Again, anything we can put in our media pool with one or two exceptions we can put into the Power Bins. So if I wanted to, in this project here, I'm going to go to the Master Power Bins folder. I can drag the sound effects that we used here into our Master Power Bins. You'll see it adds sound effects folder, which has all those sound effects we used. So if I were to now swap back to that short from project, Oh, MiconPject manager, tech short, I go to my Power Bins. Sound effects. We have all those sound effects. Where this can become useful is if you have a particular set of overlays, video files you like to use, animations you normally use, music you like to include in certain projects, we can begin to set up our Power Bins folders to include those things so that way we have access to them very, very quickly, and you no longer need to sort through your file explorer to locate them. Now, quick note to see how this works. If I go to my sound effects folder, and let's say I just bring in this ding sound effect, wherever. When I go back to my master Media pool, you'll see it adds it to the master folder. So if you start using your power bins a lot, be aware of how you're adding them because it'll just drag and drop it to the most folder. If I want to add these sound effects from my Power Bins to the sound effects folder in the master Media pool, all I need to do is make sure I can see this folder over here on the left column. Go to my Power Bins folder, colect these sound effects and drag and drop them in there. And now we have that ding, long riser, and swoosh. You might have know that I added an extra copy of that handheld camera shake to the master Media pool. That's because I brought in one from the Power Bins, as well as the one that was already working on the timeline. So Power Bins are one way of many that we can save presets. It's one of those things that we can set up one time and speed up our workflow forever and ever and ever. And it'll probably be an ongoing thing that you continue to update the more you edit projects. So let's go ahead and set up something that is actually super useful to have. So it doesn't matter what project you're on or what timeline we're looking at. We're just going to want to make sure we have our Power Bins open, and we're in our master folder here. And you don't need to delete these things. We can leave them as it is. But what I would like you to do is to right click and create a new bin. And this one we're going to call Project presets. Actually, let me go ahead and change the display style, so it's a little bit more legible for you guys. And I'm going to go ahead and open up our project presets folder. Now, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to set up this folder structure on the left here so that we already have our folder structure set up anytime we go to start a new project. And this is kind of why I say, depending on you and your workflow, these folders might change. You might need more than one project preset as you go along because you might not need an assets folder or you don't like the timelines folder. So customize these to fit your need. What I'm going to do, though, is in our project presets folder in our Power Bins, I'm going to right click and hit New Bin again. And this one I'm just going to call default cause this will probably be the one that I use the most often. I'm going to open up this, and I'm just going to go ahead and go through and set up the exact same naming convention. So right click New Bin, Oh one recordings. Right, click New Bin, 02, Audio. Ooh. Now, within this audio folder, I'm going to go ahead and add my music and sound effects folder. I'm going to go inside audio, right click New Bin Music. Right click New Bin Soundeffects. I'm going to click uptop here to go back to the default folder. So that way I'm seeing recordings and audio. Again, right click New Bin. Oops. Oh three. Assets. Right click New Bin, timelines and VFX. I'm going to add one more folder. WoRight click New Bin Oh six FX. This folder, I typically like to save my adjustment clips. So if I have adjustment clips for camera shakes, gloves, zooms, I'll save them in here. What we can also do is set up our color coding as well in our power bins. So I'm going to do that again real quick. I'm going to go over right click on recordings, Color tag. We'll leave this as red. And at a glance, this might seem kind of like a tedious process, but once we set this up once, we never have to do the tedious ever again. And for the VX and affx folders, we'll go with a nice orange. Now, check this out. So if I go back to my Master Power Bins folder, what I can do is I can take this handheld camera shake. And I'll put it in my effects folder down here. If you don't see it, you might need to expand some of the tabs. I'll drop it in here. And then for the sound effects, what I'm going to do is I'm gonna expand this. Just go to drag and drop these into sound effects folder. Here. So now I can delete this one. And now in my Sant affix tab, I have these sound effects safe. So anytime I start up a new project, they'll be there. If you don't like using these sound effects, don't include them. Alright, so let's take a quick set back and see what we've got going on here. Project presets, we got our default project, and inside there, we have our starting folder structure. These will change and expand as you move along. And if you start working on different projects that require different structures, so short form, wedding videos, music videos, you can add those project preset folders in here. You can add as many different folders that you'd like in your Power Bins. So if you have a sound effects, I like folder for sound effects you like to use on a lot of different projects, go crazy. The only thing I would suggest is just making use of your Power Bins. I am one of the biggest offenders of finishing a project and not saving any of the things that I set up. So anytime you create a look, create an effect, find a group of audio or video that you enjoy using, just drag and drop it into your Power Bins. Remember, if you set it up once, there shouldn't be a need to ever set it up again. 40. Intro to Fusion: Alrighty, everyone, we finally get to talk about Fusion, and I am so excited because Fusion is the best. It is my favorite part of DaVinci Resolve, and I am so excited to spend a little bit of time in the Fusion page. Question is, what is fusion? Well, Fusion is on the surface, simply put a compositor, which means it's built to combine things to make them look like they fit together. So if I wanted to bring in visual effects and make it look like it fit into my editing scene, we would use Fusion to do. And if I wanted to create visual effects, we can do that in fusion. Fusion can be used for text animation, and it can be also used for simple things like moving a ball across the screen. It's so broad. There's so much that we can do in the program, which unfortunately, means that we're not going to be able to cover everything. We're going to cover a lot, and I'm going to make sure we're hitting the ground running and that you're going to be comfortable inside the Fusion page. But if you do want a more advanced course on the possibilities that you can unlock, using the Fusion tab, please let us know. I would love to spend weeks. Well, maybe not weeks, but I would love to spend a few days talking fusion with you guys on some more advanced toolsets. Bless precursor that I'd like to add before we start getting our hands dirty, is that Fusion is probably the most intimidating part of DaVinci Resolve, and it's primarily for one reason and one reason only, and it's the node system. Some of you guys might know what I'm talking about, and for a lot of you, that might be the first time you've heard the word node. Four. So what is the node system? How do we use it in fusion? And how does it work? These are things that I'm going to tackle and make sure that we are so comfortable with. So if I do my job well, you will be comfortable and confident clicking that magic wand icon to do things in fusion and using Nodes. So with all that said, let's go ahead and start creating a new project and learning the Fusion page. I'm excited. Alright, Gain. So depending on where you left off in the course, what I would like us all to do is to start at the same place, go and open up DaVinci Resolve or bring up the project manager, go into your essentials course folder. And what I'd like us all to do is to create a new project. We'll call this five Fusion. And just like all of our projects, let's make sure our media location is set to our Fusion folder here. Go ahead and hit Select Folder. Let's go ahead and create that new project. Now, for this go around, we're not going to be working with a lot of footage initially, but it is still going to be important for us to set up our project settings just like we've done in the past. So go down to the bottom right hand corner, open up that cog wheel to bring up your project settings. In a previous video, we set up our default settings to be ten ADP and 30 FPS. So I'm going to leave this as is. I think this will be perfectly fine for a project. If yours doesn't look like this, go ahead and update your project settings now to be 1920 by 1080 and 30 FPS. Now, what I'd like us all to do if you followed along correctly in the last section with the stuff I wish I knew in our Power Bins, we've already set up a project bin structure or a folder structure that we can use in our projects. So let's go ahead and locate that. Go to your Power Bins. Go to your project presets. Go to that default folder, and we have all of our folders here. One thing that I do like to double check is that it's sorting it by the clip name because we added the number prefixes. When we sort by the clip name, it'll sort it in the order that we like, so I can drag and drop that into our Master Media Pull folder. Give it a second to do some thinking. And now if I click on my Master Media Pull folder, we have our structure all set up. Before we can click our handy dandy wan down here, we need to create a timeline to work on. Let's go to our timelines folder. I'm going to right click timelines, Create New timeline. And for this go around the timeline name doesn't matter too much. So I'm just going to call this Fusion one oh one. Now, because we set up our project settings correctly, I can go ahead and hit Create, and we're going to have a 30 FPS 1920 by 1080 timeline. Now, there's one final thing we need to do before we can start talking about how to get into Fusion correctly. And what I'm going to do is I'm gonna go over to the recordings folder in our media pool. And in your course material, there should be two video files outside of the class project folders. One is the green screen cat, and one is the starry background. Go ahead and drag and drop those in place. Now, fusion is a compositing tool. It's a visual effects tool. It's not an editing tool. So we're not going to be using fusion to edit and cut up our footage. We're going to be using it to apply change to specific clips and moments. I really want to make sure that syncs in with you all. Fusion is not used for editing. It's used to make changes on individual clips and moments. So let me show you what I mean. Go ahead and grab our green screen cat here and drag and drop them onto the timeline. And it looks like we've got about 13 seconds and 13 frames of footage here from our Cat superstar. So what we're gonna do is we're going to hop into the Fusion page for this specific clip to demonstrate the point that I'm trying to make. And then we're going to take a set back and answer the question, What's the best way to get in and use the Fusion page? Now, there's two direct ways to actually open up the Fusion page. One is to just click the wand icon down here. And the other option is to right click on any clip on the timeline. Scroll on up in that menu until you see Open infusion page. Now, because I do this so much, I have mine mapped to the key. By default, there will not be a shortcut mapped for this option. We can go ahead and hit Okay. And, uh oh, so, look at that. We've got a whole brand new layout and oh, these things Nodes. Now, for right now, we're not going to do anything about fusion. So don't stress about these nodes over here or like, how I'm navigating this system. Don't worry about that. The thing that I'd like you guys to take note of is this little bar right here. Now, if I were to hop back to the Edit page, remember, our clip is 13 seconds and 13 frames long. If I were to pull up my handy dandy calculator real quick, 30 frames per second. Times 13 seconds equals 390 frames. And we have 13 frames at the very end. If I were to add on another 13, the total clip length is 403 frames. I do some quick algebra just to show you that when I hop into the Fusion page for this clip, we also have a little mini playhead scrubber right over here where we can see what frame we're currently on. And if I were to scrub this all the way to the end, you'll see we land on 402, but that's because our starting frame is zero. So instead of starting at one and going to four oh three, we're starting at zero. And we're going to four oh two. So when we're inside the Fusion page, the only thing that we're seeing is one individual clip. We are editing one sequence in our timeline. Alright, so let's take a couple steps back. Go ahead and go down to the bottom and hit the Edit icon. So that we're all looking at the Edit page together with our cat here. So that's one way to get into the Fusion page is anytime you bring in footage on your timeline, you can right click and hit Open Effusion. Now, there's a couple other tools that we can use that involve using fusion. One of them we learned about in the last section. We go up top to the Effects tab up here. Let me expand this out just a little bit so it's a little easier to see. And if I go underneath our toolbox option to the Effects tab, we can also use Fusion with an adjustment clip. And this might help illustrate exactly what an adjustment clip does. So if I bring down our adjustment clip, onto our timeline here. We can make it the entire length of the clip so that we can see it. Just a quick reminder. The adjustment clip changes everything underneath it. So if I disable and enable our adjustment clips, we can see that change, right? Adjustment clip. Super cool Universal tool of the editor. But we can also use fusion for an adjustment clip. So this time, I'm just going to hit the X key. So I'm not going to right click and hit Open infusion. I'm just going to hit the X button to open up our adjustment clip in the Fusion page. And just like before, we're going to be able to go 0-402, and our adjustment clip is seeing everything underneath it. So anytime we make a change in fusion for an adjustment clip, it'll apply that change to the footage underneath it. So just like we applied to glow on the Edit page, when we start learning about how to do visual things in fusion, same concept applies for an adjustment clip. Let's go back to the Edit page. I'm going to bring my playhead off of our footage here just for a second. The last and final option, one of the most important tools that we are going to talk about is right next to the Adjustment clip. Remember, affects tab, effetsR next to Adjustment clip fusion composition. So when we talked about adjustment clips, being the universal tool belt of an editor, a fusion composition is the blank slate for any animator or visual effects artist. It's the starting point. You can almost think of this as kind of creating a brand new blank timeline that we use just in fusion. And let me show you what I mean by blank slate. And again, I understand that we haven't talked about Nodes or what we can do in fusion yet. I'm just trying to make it abundantly clear what this page does and some of the ways that we can get inside the Fusion page. So what I'd like us all to do is go ahead and drag and drop in a fusion composition. Last section, I talked about some of the default lengths for clips, and my default length for a fusion composition is 2 seconds. By default, DaVinci Resolve, I believe it's five. So I will go ahead and extend mine out to be 5 seconds to match you guys. So I'll go one, two, three, four, five, and I'm doing that by holding Shift and the write key, and I will drag my composition out to be 5 seconds long. Now, So, you guys might have jumped the gun and already hopped into the fusion composition. But if you haven't already, let me show you something. Whenever I go and click on a clip and I'm going to hit X, I'm not going to right click and open up our footage in the Fusion page, you can see that we start with a Media in node. The Media in node connects to the Media out node. In essence, what we're looking at is media being fed in, AKA video being fed in and the media out seeing that footage and feeding it out or sending Media out. So we're starting with footage in and it's getting sent out. Okay. What about if I go into Fusion on our adjustment clip? Oh, okay, so, same thing. Media being fed in and it's getting sent out. This time, though, the media that's being fed in is what it's seeing on the timeline. So it's kind of looking down and going, Oh, that's the media being fed in. Let's go ahead and feed that out. When I go into our fusion composition, Nothing. It's a blank slate. The only thing that we have here is our media out node. So what I mean by a fusion composition being a blank slate for editors and animators and motion artists is that it's a clean starting point for us to work with. And this is where we're going to start to talk about the basics of fusion. 41. What the Heck is a Node?: Alright, Gang. So let's talk Nodes inside Fusion. Quick reminder, I'm back on the Edit page here. We all created a brand new Fusion Composition, and I'm in the Fusion page on this blank Fusion Composition. So let's cover the interface quickly, and then we'll start to talk about Nodes. So kind of similar to the Edit page, we start with two screens here. For simplicity's sake and just like the way I like the Edit page, I prefer to have one. And specifically, I like to have just the right window, and I'll show you why in just a little bit. But what I'm going to do is in the upper right hand corner, I'm going to click this rectangle so that we just have one preview window. And again, kind of analogous to the editing page, we've got a lot of similar options. Over here in the right, we have our Inspector tab, which we can use to access properties for whatever we have selected. We do have a couple new options. For one, we have a keyframe menu. Oh, that's kind of intibidating. We'll get back to that later. And the other option we have here is a spline menu. And again, we will cover Splines and just a little bit. But these two menus we are going to talk about, so put a pin there. Her left hand corner, just like the old editing page. We have our Media pool and an Effects tab. And by default, yours might have started with a Clips tab down below. This shows you all the available clips that you can hop swap to in the Fusion page. So if I wanted to, I could hop over to our original footage. I can hop over to the adjustment clip and our Fusion Composition. But again, we're going to work on our side, our Fusion Composition, and to save some real estate, I normally have the Clips tab closed down below. So I'm going to go ahead and click that icon here. And the last item to note is we have a pre built in toolbar. These display some of the most common nodes or tools that we're going to use inside the Fusion page. So we have a Text plus node here. We've got a background node. We have a brightness and contrast node, merge nodes, et cetera, et cetera. So what the heck is a node? Well, you're looking at one right here. The Media out node. This is our node workspace down here, this checkered board area. This is where we're going to apply and make any changes inside the Fusion page. And inside this workspace, we have our Nodes. Right here. Now, to navigate this workspace, what you can do is click the Middle mouse button to pan around we can use control in the middle mouse button to zoom in and out. And I've already been doing it. You can drag and select to select multiple nodes. And this is what we're looking at right here, our Media out node. Now, Nodes on the surface can definitely feel overwhelming. But in essence, a node represents one thing. It could represent one input, one change, one effect, one combination, et cetera. So let me show you what I mean, and let's start making some things in the Fusion page. I'm going to use my middle mouse button to pan and push the Media out node over here, and I'm going to go up to our node toolbar here and bring in a background node. It's this farthest left icon over here. If your mouse hovers over it, it should say background. Go ahead and drag and drop that down to the Fusion page. I'm going to pull our background node to be a little bit closer to the media out by just dragging and pulling it over, and then I'm going to zoom in a little bit just for a little bit more legibility. Now, all a background node represents is a color. So with our background node selected, if I look on the upper right hand corner over here door inspector tab, you can see that we have a color option. In fact, if I click this little dropdown menu, we have more than one option. So, matter of fact, we can create some gradients with our background node. But as is, I don't see anything. Well, why? Why didn't we get our background to appear on screen? The way I like to describe Nodes and node trees is what sees what? What is getting what information from what thing and what is seeing what node? At the end of our fusion composition, all rods are going to lead to our Media One. And right now, our Media Onde is what's being displayed into our preview window. You'll know it's the one being displayed because there's this little white dot underneath it. And as is, the media outnde does not see our background node. There's no information being sent from our background node to the media out node. 99% of the nodes in fusion will have an input and an output. All of the outputs will look like this little bit right over here, this little square knob. And the inputs will all be indicated by triangles. There's different color triangles, and we'll talk about what those different colors represent. But if I want to feed out information from my background node, well, I need to take the output node, hold and select it, and connect it to the yellow input here. So I'm feeding the output of the background node to the yellow input of our Media Onde. And would you look at that? Now we can see our black background. Again, all I did there was take our background node, grab the little output knob and feed it into the media out input. It is important that you're clicking the little knob itself. So you're not grabbing the outside or it's got to be the little ego knob looking thing, grab that in. And now with my background node selected, if I were to go over to the Inspector tab and start changing the color, we can see that reflected in our Media out node. Now, a question you might be asking is one, why does my node kind of snap around? It almost looks like it's lining up with the grid. Well, that's because it is. If you right click anywhere in your Fusion workspace, there's an option here that says arrange all tools to grid. When you turn that on, all your nodes will snap in place. Some people don't like that. They kind of like their notes to free float around. For me, I tend to find this is a lot more cleanly. And if you right click again, there are a lot of other fusion customization options, and I will let you change those at your own discretion. Okay, so this is great. We did it. We connected two Nodes together. We're going to hit Control and the scroll wheel to zoom out on our node workspace here. This kind of node, our background node, you can think of as a source node or a generator or a media node. Similar to how when we were looking at our original green screen cat footage, we had a Media in connecting to the media out. Well, the media I was feeding in the information to the media out. It's providing information for us to look at. There's another category of nodes that apply effects or changes. So let's go ahead and take a look at what those look like. I'm going to go ahead and pull my background note out just a little bit, because we're going to use this space right here. I'm going to re center my nodes by holding down the middle mouse button and panning it over, and I'm about to blow some of your minds. We are not going to use this Middle toolbar up here. What we are going to do is call our Select Tool Menu, and you can do it as so. Click anywhere in your node workspace. So you don't need to select anything. Just click somewhere in your node Workspace and hit Shift in space. And that's going to bring up this tool menu. Now, from this tool menu, we can call any macro or tool that we have saved infusion. Macros are not going to be something we cover in the scope of this course, but it is a good term to kind of put in your knowledge bank to look up later. But the takeaway here is that we can call any node that we'd like. And this is going to be our preferred method moving forward to access tools in the Fusion page. So what I'd like you to do is this, again, that was Shift plus space. An alternative to that is to hit Control plus Space or Command plus space if you're on Mac. And I'd like you to search for the transform node. So, I'm going to start typing TRANSFORM, and that's going to pull up a lot of transforms. By default, it should put you on the transform with the parentheses XF next to it. This is the one that we're going to want to call. There is a difference between this transform and this transform, which you'll probably discover down the road. But as it is, we would like transform parentheses XF, which is normally the shorthand for transform or X form. So go ahead and select that and hit add. Now, the transform node does exactly what it sounds like. It transforms things just like we might do on the Edit page. So if we peer our eyes over to the upper right hand corner, we have a center property, a pivot property, a size, angle, et cetera, et cetera. These are how we can change the position and sizing of any object in the fusion page. So let's try it. Let's try making our size a little bit smaller. So I'm going to go over to the size property. I'm going to hold down the left mouse button and drag to the left and Huh. Nothing is changing. What did I say about 3 minutes ago? In fusion, we need to know what sees what? Our background node does not see our transformed node, right? There's nothing connected to the transformed node so that it's being fed this information. So how do we get our background to see the transform node? Well, we can do two things. One, hover your mouse over the right end of our fusion pipeline over here and disconnect it. It doesn't need to be the right half of that fusion pipeline, and you'll know if you've done it right when your mouse hovers over it, and it turns a nice blue. Now you can either click that to unconnect it, or you can click and hold that and pull it up to the transform node. If you accidentally just disconnected it, go back to your output here. And connect it to the yellow input. It's very important that it's the yellow input of the transform node. The blue inputs, which we haven't covered yet, are masking inputs, and I'll show you what that means just a little bit. So great. Now our transform node is seeing information from the background node, but we lost our preview. Well, some of you guys might be already made that connection. Well, now our Media out node doesn't see anything. So what we can do is take the output from our transform node and connect it to the media out. And there we go. Now, any change we make in our transformed node, the media out node is seeing. Background is being fed into the transformed node, which is then feeding the change to the media out node. This structure or system is typically called our Fusion pipeline. We're creating a water flow or a fusion flow that goes from beginning to end. And if you're ever curious as to what is affecting what, follow the ios. Go back upstream. Media out. Seeing transform one, transform one, seeing background one. There's two really difficult concepts in fusion that restrict a lot of people from making the most out of this workspace, and that's one of them is just understanding how things are connected. If you can begin to get comfortable with this setup, you are about 50% of the way there to becoming a fusion expert. So that begs the question, What is the other 50%? And that is the merge system, which is what we're going to talk about next. 42. Merging and Masking Nodes: So we left off last time by setting up a background node, transforming it, making it smaller or maybe you shouldn't change its position, and we connected to the Media Out node. Just like the Edit page, if you ever want to reset a property on one of your nodes, all you need to do is go over to that property and double click. So I could do the same thing with the center position. I could double click to reset the node. Now, all Nodes will also have a little reset icon in the upper right hand corner. But if you don't want to reset every property, it's a very easy way to do it. A lot of times some of these sliders will also have a little dot right here. That's the default setting. So if I click that, again, it resets it to its default setting. With that said, let's talk about merging because as is, it might be hard to see what's the point of doing this? You know, if I needed to transform something, I could just do that in the inspector tab on the Edit page. Well, as I mentioned, it's the first video to this section, fusion is a compositor, meaning it's built to combine things and build out effects. So let me show you what I mean. What I'd like us to do is to add another background node. So I'm going to click above our node pipeline here. Wherever you click, your mouse is where a new node is added. So if I click over here, my node is going to be added over there. If I click here and then hit Shift plus Space, I'm going to look for a background node. And add it. Now, on this background note, what I'd like us to do is change the color, so it's something different. Normally, I like to go with a nice green, but if you don't like the color green, I pick whatever other color you would like. Now, just like last time, we don't see our background note. We don't see the green anywhere. Not even a little sliver on the edge, right? That doesn't mean that this information doesn't exist. Here's a really cool feature of fusion that we'll begin to use more and more as our compositions begin to get a bit more advanced. Before we can merge these two things on top of each other, let's preview both of them. So what I'd like you to do is up in the preview window, if yours isn't already split, so you've got a single viewer like me, go ahead and locate the side by side rectangles here. This will split our viewer into a left and right viewer. Now, you shouldn't see anything on this left viewer unless you accidentally sent something to preview. But what we can do in fusion is we can preview any node that we would like at any time in the pipeline. We looked down our Media Onote here. You can see that it's got a white dot on the second little circle over. Because it's previewing the Media out node on Window two. Well, if I wanted to, I could take our background one underscore one node, our new background node, and drag it up into this window here. And would you look at that, there's our green background. You'll notice that when I do that, we get a little.in the first tab here. So check this out. We can do that even faster. If I select my background one node here, I can hit the one key to preview it on the left. And if I go back up here to this note here, I can hit two to preview it on the right. So one and two, swap our previews around. And just to fully illustrate this point, I'm going to preview our background one node on the left here, and our Media out is previewed on the right. Again, you'll know which node is being sent to be previewed by the little white dots underneath it. This background one node does not see anything that's happening over here, right? We're just sending out information. So if I were to select our transform one node here and bring down the size, you'll see that it only changes on the right side because we're seeing the media out to node. This split window mode or the ability to cycle between our different nodes becomes extremely powerful when we're trying to debug and figure out what the heck is going on in our fusion compositions. But for now, what I'm going to do is with our new green background, I'm going to send that over to the left preview by hitting one. And I'm going to have a Media out too, preview it over here by hitting two, and I'm going to go ahead and reset our transform node. And, you know, just for clarity's sake, let's go ahead and rename these nodes real quick. You can either right click and hit rename, or you can see the shortcut right here is F two. Now, I'm not sure if this is the same on Max or not. Somebody might have to let me know. But regardless, you should be able to right click on a node and hit rename. And I'm going to name this first one background, underscore Green, right click over here, rename background, underscore blue. So the question becomes, how do I get green and blue to both be sent to the media out? Well, to help illustrate this point, there's two things we need to talk about. One, these blue arrows and two, the merged note. The blue arrows are mask inputs. The official title is the effect mask for that node, and 99% of all the nodes in fusion will have this. Now, a mask node hides information. It tells Fusion, don't show it. We don't need it. So what I'd like us to do is to mask our green background. You can either go over to your toolbar and select the rectangle node or hit Control in space or shift in space and look for rectangle. And with this rectangle note, I can take the output and feed it into the blue input of our green background. And you'll see that it hides everything not inside the confines of our rectangle. This is what we call a mask. It's a very basic mask, but now we're hiding information. Alright, so this is great. So now we have a green rectangle and a blue background. What if I want the green rectangle to be on top of the blue background and then seeing on the media out? Well, I can't just take the output from this green background. And feed that to the media out because then we just get their grain rectangle. And again, if I were to try to squeeze both of them in there on top of each other, that doesn't work. So we have to find out a way to combine these two backgrounds. And the way that we do that is with a merge node. 43. How the Merge Node Works: So there's two ways to set up a merge node. I'll show you the long way and then the short way. One, we can search for it. So I can hit Controls plus space, start type in merge. And there's going to be a lot of merges that pop up. We want the standard merge with no suffix or prefix, merge parentheses RG and add. And that I'll add in a merge node. Now, merge node is a combining node. It merges two sets of inputs on top of each other. If you can master the merge node, you will be fully sufficient inside DaVinci Resolve. It's a very funky thing to figure out and get used to, but all I want you to think about is yellow input is background Green input is foreground. Yellow is bottom, green on top. And we talked about blue, blue is the mass, so we don't need to worry about that. Again, yellow background, green, foreground. So if I want the blue to be behind the green, well, what I could do is unconnect the output from the blue and feed it into the yellow input of our merge node and then take the output from our green background and put it into the green input of our merge node, the foreground input, the top input. And then I can take the combined output and feed it back into our transform node. And there you go. Green, foreground, yellow background. And if you can master this, you'll have mastered fusion. And you might scoff at that idea, but this, in essence, is fusion. There's a couple little workarounds to this and hacks that make this a little bit faster, and I'll show them to you real quick. I can hold down the Shift key to insert and remove nodes in a pipeline. So if I hold down the Shift button, click my merge node and move it out, you'll see it disconnects from our node pipeline. So if I want to reinsert my merge node, well, what I can do is select the node and again, hold down the Shift key, and you need to move your mouse so that it's on the pipeline. It can't just be visually the node. Your mouse needs to hover over the pipeline itself to where it highlights and then release. And that will connect it. You'll know it's connected when you can grab the node and slide it around and all the little pipelines follow it. Then again, just like before I can take the output from the green background and feed it in here. There we go. But there's an even slicker way of doing that, and it's for real pros and fusion. I'm going to drag and select our merge note here and hit Vax bas to delete it. You can technically connect the two outputs to merge them together. What I mean by that is I can take the foreground output that I would like, so our green background. And connect it to the bottom output that I would like the background output, so our blue background and release, and that'll create a new merge node, which is pretty slick. So for me, whenever I'm trying to merge something, what I'll do is this. I'll just go, Okay, I want this to be on top. So take that output connect it to the other output. Bang. There we go. Now, the merge node has a lot of properties on it that are similar, actually the transform node. So we have a center position that we can move our foreground, left and right, as well as size and angle, and then a few other ones here. I'm not going to spend too long on them, but one of the big ones to note is a blend slide they'll change the opacity of the foreground. And then we have an apply mode, which is similar to the composite mode on the Edit page, so we can change how the foreground interacts with the background. So I go to something like Color Dodge, and you can see how it changes the display of the foreground on the background. Go and reset that to normal. Let me reset all these properties. Now, for some of you, this might not seem too confusing. And if you are one of those people, my hat's off to you because you are smarter than I. But what might be a bit confusing is this next step, and this is where the merge system can be a bit cumbersome. 44. Controlling Results with Node Order: By adding a new node so that we can demonstrate what I'm talking about. What I'd like you to do is drag and select the Transform ImmediaOnde Media and bring them out to the right because we're going to insert a new node in here. I'm going to click on our merged node. Now, if you have a node selected and you add a new node, guess what? It adds it after that node. So with my merge one node selected, I can hit control space or shift space or command space, and we're going to look for a color corrector node. Color corrector. If you've done it right, you'll see this guy right here, Color corrector CC. Hit add. Now, because we have the merge nodes selected, it's going to insert it directly into our pipeline. Now, the color corrector node does exactly what it says. It changes the saturation. It can change the hue. Contrast, et cetera, et cetera, it changes the color of whatever you're feeding into it. Now, it's got a few different inputs here. But by default, whenever you're adding a new node, the yellow input is the primary input. Blue is always going to be mask. Green is normally the secondary output, and anything else is specific to that node. If you're ever curious about what input is for what, you can always hover your mouse over the arrow or the output. And if you hold it long enough, it'll display a sole pop up. But if you take a look over the bottom left hand corner, it also says what that input is. So if I were to go over to the blue, you'll see that it says affect mask, green, is a match reference input, which we're not going to worry about. And this gray one is a match mask. Ooh, that sounds confusing. Well, good thing for us. We're not going to worry about those. So if you're ever confused in fusion, just go ahead and hover your mouse over one of the inputs or outputs, and it'll tell you what it's for. Let me go ahead and reset our color corrector, note real quick. Now the question I have for you is, what if I only want to desaturate the blue background or the green background? Because as is, if I were to pull the saturation down, we're losing color in both. But that's because the color corrector node is seeing the output of the merged backgrounds. So again, what node is getting what information in its input and output? Now, some of you guys who are pretty quick are already going, Well, we just need to move this node, and you'd be correct. If I just want to desaturate our blue background, well, all you need to do is pull this off to the side. And if you want to do it slowly, you can drag and unconnect here, drag it unconnect here, and then pull it over or if I hold down the shift key to unconnect it, and I'm going to hold down the shift key the entire time and move my mouse over here and release it so that I'm highlighting this pipeline here, that'll connect it in this new area. And as soon as I do that, we lose the saturation in our blue background. This might seem so simple to some of you guys, but it is paramount. With an extra pu to the success of your time infusion. What we're going to begin to do is introduce image animations and text animations and some visual tools, and you're going to want to change something without it affecting another part of your composition. So what I want you to start being more conscious of is how you're setting up your nodes. This will be something that improves with experience, but it's a good thing to be very conscious of now. And I could do the same thing with the green foreground here, if I were to hold down the Shift key and insert our color corrector here, see it desaturates it there. So the next step for us here is to begin applying these techniques and animating them, which is another big aspect of fusion. So let's go ahead and learn how to animate a ball. 45. Creating Shapes and Masks: Alright, how is everybody feeling? That was a lot of fusion information thrown your way very quickly. But it's important that we cover a lot of these fundamentals so that we can start using the Fusion page properly, which is what we're going to start doing. One thing I do want to call out is that when we pull up our node menu, the amount of nodes and tools that we can choose from can feel a bit overwhelming. If you're looking for another spot to organize and look at all the nodes and tools inside fusion, we can go up top to the effects menu, and then there's two menus that we can look in. One is the tools menu, which will contain all of the built in tools in fusion. So if I expand this little sidebar over here, we can see all the different categories. And there's things like the particle system. I scroll up. There's the whole three D system because one of the most difficult things to learn infusion is just Nodes. It's just expanding your knowledge base with what does what. So this is a good reference point for. Let's go ahead and close that. And let's start completely from scratch. Let's get some more practice in here. So I'm going to drag and select and delete all of our nodes except for our Media out over here. Go ahead and drag and select, hit Backspace to delete. If you accidentally grab the Media Out node, you can always hit Control Z to undo that. Or you can always just go into your tool menu and look for a Media Onde. Either way, we just want one media out node here. And a habit I'd like you to get into is anytime you start with a blank fusion composition, start with a background node. There's a few reasons for doing this that I'll try to expand on later. But for now, what I'd like you to just know is that a background node kind of sets the canvas for us to work on. So I'm going to go ahead and take our background node and feed it to the media out. Now, by default, mine comes in transparent because I've set up mine that way, but yours will come in solid black. The Alpha slider is linked to our transparency. So when I bring that down, it makes our black background more transparent, but I would like us to have a fully solid black background. And for now, I'm also going to collapse our preview menu to be just one. You don't have to. If you like having two screens up at once, go crazy. And something I might not have called out yet is that when I want to zoom in and out of our window here, I'm hitting Control or command and the scroll wheel. And if I want to pin around, I'm holding down the middle mouse button. So again, control the scroll wheel zooms in and out. I can then pan around. And then we have the same options as we do on the Edit page where if I go to the upper left hand corner, I can change the magnifying view to fit. Now, adding a circle might be a little weird for some of you guys out there, because if I were to go to my tool menu and look for ball, you're not going to find anything. So how do we add a circle? Well, it's going to be very similar to how we added our rectangular square. But what we're going to do is we're going to cut out a circle. We're going to mask a circular shape. To do that, let's go ahead and add another background note. And go ahead and make this whatever color floats your fancy. If you like purple, go purple, pink, go pink. I am a fan of blue. I like blues. I don't know. Something about a nice blue makes me pretty happy. So I'm gonna go with a nice light blue. Let's go ahead and merge our blue background over our black one. To do that, again, we can go ahead and search for a merge note and combine the two or we can do our little trick and go output one output two. There we go. Now, there's going to be two ways for us to cut out our circle. Either way we go about it, we're going to need our ellipse node right here. Now, you can just drag and drop it from the toolbar there, or we can go ahead and look for ellipse and add her in. Now, the ellipse node, similar to the rectangle node is set up to mask objects or hide objects. I don't like to call it a shape because there is a shape system. But if I hit two on our Ellipse node here to preview it, we can see that we have our circle right here. We hit two on the Media out node. And there's two ways that we can create our circle. We can either do what we did before and plug it right into the background here, or you'll notice that there's a mask input on our merge note. So sometimes what makes sense is to connect the output of our lips. To the merge note here. The key difference between the two is that when we plug in our mask here, we're masking anything and everything that's connected to the merge input. So if we had multiple backgrounds or multiple effects up top here and we wanted to mask all of them, we would plug our mask in here. Something that's good to keep an eye on for the future. But for now, I'm going to hold down the Shift key to undo that, and I'm going to connect it to our background. L let's go ahead and bring down the size of our circle real quick. You can always go over to the inspector property and enter in values or using your onscreen preview, you can grab one of the corners and bring it in. Be conscious of where you're dragging and selecting because if you grab one of the sides or top portions, you will transform it non uniformly. So if you would like to keep the shape of the circle, make sure you're grabbing one of the diagonals. The size itself really doesn't matter. I'm going to go with a nice 0.2, and I'm actually going to type it in for both the width and the height of the circle. Next thing that we're going to introduce is key framing, which will let us animate this object. Now, a lot of times when people think of the word animate, they think of, like, cartoon animation or character animation or something that involves handrawn elements. That's not what I'm talking about. Key framing and animating are extremely important subjects, and that's what we're going to talk about next. 46. Animating with Keyframes: Alright, everybody. This is one video in particular I do need you to pay extra attention on. If you're a coffee drinker, go fill up your cup. Ready go do some jumping jacks so that we're all locked in and ready to go. So what we're going to do is we're going to move our ball from the left to right over the course of our composition. As of right now, the only thing that we've done is we've figured out how to move things left and right. We've been able to change the position. So if I wanted to and do go ahead and follow along here, I'm going to click on this blue background note up top and hit Control space, and then I'm going to look for that transform note again. Because I had this upper note selected, it introduces it in this chain, and we can change the position. How cool is that? But if I were to play this video, nothing happens. So if I at the beginning of our composition moved our circle to the left and then went to the end and then moved it to the right, and then I were to hit the spacebar to play it, well, little lackluster. Nothing happens. That's because we haven't told Fusion, move this thing over time. That is animation, and more specifically, that is key framing inside the Fusion page. I'm gonna direct our eyes to the upper right hand corner, and I'm gonna reset our node by hitting the reset icon. You might have already noticed that on a lot of properties inside both Fusion and the Edit page, there's this little diamond off to the right. And up until now, we've turned a blind eye to this. We've just said, Hey, that's kind of fun. Well, we will be blind no more. This is the key frame indicator. Keyframe indicates change. It means change this property over time. So if I want to change the position or I want to change the size, the angle, we need to keyframe that property. So let me show you what I mean. What I'm going to do is I'm going to drag our playhead all the way to the beginning. So I'm on frame zero over here, and I do want you to be conscious of which frame that you're starting your keyframe on, okay? I'm going to take our center property and the exposition in particular, and I'm going to type in zero. So we're sitting on the left border over here. And the next thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to go up right on that property and set a key frame. And what we've just said is we said, Hey, DaVinci, fusion. L right here. I need you to take note of this property I'm going to change something. But again, if I were to hit space and play this, well, nothing happens. Well, that's because we haven't told DaVinci Resolve how to change this property. We've just said, Hey, look here, we're changing the center position, but it doesn't know how to change it. It can't read your mind, so we need to tell it, I need you to change this property over this length of time. So no matter how long your composition is, it could be 5 seconds. It could be 2 seconds. It doesn't matter. Go ahead and bring your playhead all the way to the end. Now, again, nothing's happening yet because we have not indicated what that change is. Once you reach the end of the composition, go ahead and check on another Keyframes. We've now told DaVinci Resolve, I want our property to change on frame 149 and frame zero. And as we scrub through, nothing is changing still, but that's because we haven't changed the property. We've said, Alright, at frame zero, I want the center position to be zero and 0.5. And you know what? Actually, on frame 149, I'd still like you to be zero and 0.5. Well, as soon as I go to that position and I type in one, a bunch of magic has just happened. Now, when I grab this playhead and move all the way to the back to the beginning, you see our circle moves across the screen. And when I hit play, you'll see it moves from left to right. And in fact, it's not only moving left to right, it's moving left to right linearly or at the exact same speed. A question I had when I was first learning how to keyframe and animate is, when I make this change, how fast does it make it? Well, if you're comfortable with math and algebra, this is a linear change. And if you're not comfortable with that, this is a constant change. So it's going to be moving at the same speed at a center position of 00.5 all the way to the end of our composition at. If you follow along correctly, you have just created your first animation and you are officially an animator inside the Fusion page. Now, let's talk about a few things that are important to know. For one, direct your eyes again up to the upper right hand corner. When we introduce our Keyframes, there's this little carat or arrow that appears next to it. If I click that, it'll hop my playhead back to wherever the last keyframe was so I can quickly bounce back and forth between my two keyframes. This is important because when you change a property, so I'm going to just scrub randomly. Let's go frame 80. If you were to change this property on a location that is not already keyframed, it will automatically introduce a keyframe. When I go to this exposition and I'll just randomly bring it over to the left here, you'll see it introduces a new keyframe on frame 80. So now I have a keyframe on frame zero. Frame 80 and frame 149. It can be easy to run into issues down the road where you feel like you're on frame 149, but in fact, you're on frame 148, and you change the property. So now when I go to hit Play, you can see I've got a keyframe on 81 48 and 149, and it's going to look very janky. So just give it a sec. Ooh. But, see how it cutters like that? That's because we're making a very quick change over the span of one frame. To get rid of a keyframe, all you need to do is go to wherever that property is key framed and toggle it off. And in fact, I can use these arrows to bounce over to frame 80 and turn it off. And if I've done my job correctly, we've returned back to this same place where our ball or our circle is moving across the screen. Nicely done, team. Now, what we've done is pretty spectacular, so pat yourself on the back, but it doesn't look very natural, right? It's very rare that you'll see an object move at one speed for the entire duration of time. So a follow up question and one that I had was, how do I change the speed? So what if I wanted to accelerate in and then kind of decelerate out? So, it has a little bit more of a parabolic motion or an elastic motion to it, some kind of motion that's not just constant left and right. Well, you might be tempted to go and try to set a lot of key frames in between. So I'll go to maybe, like, frame 20 and then bring it closer to the middle, and then maybe I'll go to frame 120 and then bring it a little less to the left. So that way, we move faster at the end and faster at the beginning. But that still is going to look very chunky. Let me hit Control si a couple of times. There's a much better and convenient solution to this, and it involves easing, which is what we're going to cover next. 47. Smoothing Animation with Splines: So hopefully we're all starting at the same point where our ball is moving left and right. Just a quick recap, a keyframe indicates change, meaning that we're changing our property over time. We can do this with any property, but if it's not keyframed, it's not going to change over time. Another example of this would be I could keyframe the size. So I could go to frame, let's say, 40, set a keyframe and then go to frame 100 and set a keyframe. Now, in 40-100, nothing's happening because, again, we haven't changed anything on the side. So all I've said is, Hey, look here, look at the size property. It's going, Okay, but you haven't said anything to change. But if I go over to frame 100 and let's say I bring down the size to let's go with like 0.75. Now from frame 40 to frame 100, our size property changes. Not before and not after, in this range. And if I select my transform node, we can see where I've set those key frames up. So the next step is to learn how to ease these properties smooth them out, so it feels a little bit more natural and easier on the eyes. To do that, we're going to introduce a new menu in the Fusion page, and it's the spine menu. So all the way up in the upper right hand corner, I'd like you to go ahead and check on your spline menu. Now, Fusion sometimes is a hard time placing and sizing the spies menu, so you'll probably have to grab an edge or two and resize this so that it fits somewhere on screen. I kind of like mine to occupy the lower fourth here, and the spline menu is going to show our properties changing over time. Now, as is for me right now, we're not seeing anything. So if you're like me, as well, what we need to do is check on which properties we would like to see. So I'm going to check on the size. And the displacement. The displacement is the change in our center property. It's how the center property displaces over time. There we go. Now we've got a couple of lines here. There's a couple of things that are important to be aware of in the spline menu. One is up in the upper right hand corner of our spline menu, there's these two expanding arrows, and this is our Zoom to fit option. This will put anything we've checked on into frame. The other option that's kind of important to know about is in the three dots over here in that same upper corner or mid corner, there's a menu, and I want you to make sure you have show only selected tool on. This makes sure that we're only seeing whatever node that we have selected in our spline menu. When you start messing with a lot of different properties, over time, you can get pretty busy pretty quick. So it's a nice one that I like to have turned on. Again, these two little arrows zoom to fit so that we can see both of our properties that we changed. Now, you don't have to have changed the size property if you were just watching along there, so don't stress if you don't have these all set up. But we are going to learn how to do is to ease our displacement. Now to navigate our spine menu, we can use Control in the scroll wheel to zoom in and out. Middle mouse button pans us around. If you want to change the scale of the axises, we can left click while our mouse is on the axis itself to either expand or zoom in, vice versa. Let's go ahead and zoom to fit. And for now, I'm going to uncheck the size property so that we just look at displacement. To do that, we click it twice. So that way, we're looking just at our displacement. This is what I meant by a constant or a linear change when we first keyframe our property. Because what we're looking at right now is the change in our displacement or our center position over time. And we're starting at zero change, so 00. And at frame 149, we go to one or our final change. And this line is a straight line. There's no variation. We're going straight from A to B. This is a linear change or a straight line change. What we can begin to do is ease the change in our property so that it feels smoother. And there are so many different ways to ease a graph or change the motion of a graph that some people end up spending their whole careers animating objects. And that field is motion graphics or motion design. We probably won't become experts in the time we have together, but we can definitely learn how to ease our property. Now, when I drag and select a point on graph, you'll see there's this little green stem right here. This is the handle for our keyframe. Remember to go over here and click the end and you do have to be precise, you'll notice that if I click anywhere else, I get a little plus icon and then adds a new keyframe. I'm going to take control Z. When I select this point, we have this little handle over here. And when I grab it, it changes the shape of our line. So if I were to zoom to fit on our graph again and I pull this handle all the way out and down to the right, what I've just done is I eased out our animation. Now, it's pretty easy to confuse easing in and easing out, but you can think about it like this. We're easing out into the rest of the motion, and at the end, we would be easing in to the endpoint. Again, it's kind of confusing. I won't be mad if you swap the terms around. But if we look at the shape of our graph now, what do you expect to happen? Before you hit plate, like, give it a think. What did we just do by selecting this point and pulling the handle down and away? Well, we've said, Okay, I want you to start changing slowly. Then as time goes on, accelerate till we get to the endpoint. So when I hit play, we should move a little bit slower into frame and then gradually speed up towards the end. Which is exactly what we see. So what I'd like you to do is start with this. Either drag and select your two Keyframes on your splang graph or hit Control A to select both points. And then instead of grabbing the handles, try this. Hit the F key. F is flattened. It flattens the handles out horizontally. And what we've done is created a simple S curve. We're easing out and easing in at both points of our animation. So when I hit Play, what we're going to see is it starts out slow, speeds up through the middle, and ends slowly, as well. So we're going to accelerate in and decelerate out. And from here, we can start having fun with our spine graph and experimenting with how we like our motion setup. So if I want to, I could grab this handle. If you hold down the Alt key, it'll lock its angle, so that way it's not you don't have free will to kind of move it down and around. So if I hold down the Alt or option key, I can pull this out even all the way to the end of our animation here. I got to do the same thing with the top point, so I can hold down the Alt key and pull it all the way in. And now we've got a really dramatic S and watch how that changes our animation. M. Really accelerates and whips off screen. So depending on you and the style of motion that you like and how aggressive you like it to feel, you can play around with these handles to achieve that. A common question is, well, what's the right one to use? I don't know. I don't have the answer to that. There isn't a correct animation. It depends on you and what you're trying to animate. What I will say is this, there are a lot of different ways that we can move objects, images, or properties over the course of time. So, for example, one of the things that we haven't done yet is moved our handle vertically. So I can do that. I can take this handle and pull it up. Now, what is that going to do? Well, that's going to have things change very quickly and then slow down for the bulk of our animation. So if I were to hit play, this sucker is going to move very quickly, all the way to the right. And in fact, it almost overshoots our final point and then comes back into rest. So I can do things like decrease the length of this and even decrease the length of the right side to still have it accelerate in but it's much more gradual. I highly, highly encourage you to start playing with these Splines to see what you like, what works best for you, and what feels weird. If something feels weird, begin to ask yourself the question. Why? Why is this feeling weird? Depending on how curious you are and how good you want to get at this, you might need to study a little bit. But if you're not curious and you don't want to study, let me show you one final thing. With these two points selected, one of the other options that we can do if you don't want to really stress too much about how to set up these handles is this. Right click anywhere in your spine menu. And again, it's important that these two points are selected. All the way up in the middle here, there's an option that says Es. When we look here, we've got a bunch of preset options. So we have linear, which is what we started with where we're moving from A to B in a straight line. Can is a right click and I can go to something like in quadratic. This is going to be our smooth acceleration. So start slow, and then we eventually speed up to the end. I go to something like out cubic which will be very fast in, slow out. And they've got ones like the outback options, where we overshoot our endpoint and then come back to rest. The last thing that I'd like to show you guys before we begin to move on and apply our knowledge now to working footage is this. In the bottom corner here, there are some spline tools. So one of them is the linear option, which makes our straight line. We also have a smooth option, which will smooth out the handles. Stair step in here. Smooth that out real quick. We can reverse it. By zoom out, we can start to set loops. And one of the most useful ones that I wish I had learned when I was first starting out is this guy right here where there's the two parallel bars. This is the time stretch option. So as you're animating, if you ever want to retime things, so this is going from beginning to end. If this is too slow and I'd like it to stop some point here, well, with my two points selected, I can go over to these two parallel bars, the time stretch, turn that on. Pull this in, uncheck it. And now we're going to animate and stop here. Very nice work, everybody. As an additional challenge, I'd like you to animate your own ball. It's not something that you need to turn in, but try key framing a different path with different timings and different Splines. It'll only take you a couple minutes, but it'll really help cement some of the ideas that we've just covered. And once you've done that, then we can move on to our next lesson. 48. Class Project 5 - Animating a Logo: Alright, everybody. We're on to our first Fusion project, which is very exciting. So this is a pretty common request that you'll get when working with different people or even for yourself. We've been provided with a logo, and we've been asked to animate it on an off frame or on and off screen. We're going to continue to use a horizontal timeline. We're going to create this inside a fusion composition, and we're going to use two different styles of motion that we'll go ahead and talk about in just a moment. The key note here being that they're both Es, meaning that there's some kind of fluid motion to our animation. It is not linear. It is not rigid. Just like the previous projects we're going to go ahead and render this out and provide a sharable link. And at the end, as well, if you would like, you can take a screenshot of your node tree and share it. This is totally optional, but it can help us provide some feedback to you as well if we spot anything that seems out of place or if we notice something that could be done a little bit better inside a Fusion. With all that said, let's go hop back into DaVinci Resolve. 49. Setting the Frame of Your Composition: All righty, everybody. So let's take all of these little tidbits of knowledge we've just learned about fusion and start to apply them. Let's go ahead and venture on back to the Edit page. And what we've been asked to do is animate a logo from a client that you're working with. So go ahead and look at your course materials folder. And in our Fusion folder, in class Project five, there should be a nice, happy whale logo right here. Go ahead and drag and drop this into our assets folder here in the Media. Were to double click on that image, you can see our happy little well, I don't actually, maybe he's not super happy, but we had our whale logo right here that we're tasked with animating in and out of our composition. Now, there are two problems that we need to troubleshoot here. One is that the client has asked that we remove this orange background. They just want the blue whale. So we need to figure out how we get rid of the orange. And the second is that if I go over to my Media pool, you can see that the resolution of our whale isn't the exact same resolution of our timeline. It says 12 80 by 12 80. So let's learn how to address both of those things. Just like the ball animation, let's go ahead and start from scratch. Go to the Effects tab. Go to the effects and drag and drop in a Fusion Composition. Now, as I mentioned, by default, mine comes in at 2 seconds long, but I'll go ahead and meet you guys over in the five second land. So I'm going to go one, two, three, four, five, drag this over. Let's go and hop into our Fusion Composition. And here we go. Blank Slate, guys, it's GT. Now, we've already been doing this, but I haven't specifically called out why we've been doing it until now. But the first step that I'd like everybody to start taking anytime you create a new Fusion Composition is to start with a background node. So go ahead and hit Control Space or command space. Bring up that background node, enter it in, let's go ahead and connect that to our media out. So the question is, Brandon, why? Well, we connect a background node to the media out, and it's the very bottom node, right? So it's the background of our fusion composition. Well, it sets the frame of our composition. Now, it might be a little hard to see, but up in the upper right hand corner here, it says 1920 by 1080, which is the resolution of our timeline. See, the background node, if I were to go over to the image tab, it's got this handy dandy little checked icon here that says auto resolution. And what that means is that it will automatically fit the resolution of the timeline. So by setting our background as the first node that connects the media out, we're basically setting the resolution or the term that I like to use is setting the frame. I don't know if that's technically correct, but it's just what makes sense for me. As we progress through this particular video, I'll show you why this is important. But as is, we don't need a black background, right? We just need a background to work with. So I'm going to go back over to the Color tab, and the slider I'd like us to drag down is the Alpha slider. Now, Alpha, you can think of as the opacity of our colors. It's not necessarily one to one opacity, but for the purpose of this video, you can think of it as opacity or the transparency. You might have caught that when I added in the background node and actually already starts with the Alpha slider at zero because I just end up doing this so much. So when I go in and add a background node and I select this background node, you'll see that the Alpha slider is all the way at zero. If down the road, you'd like to set up your background node to be the same way, you can change the default settings of your node. Just right click on the node, go to settings, and then hit save default. And that'll say, whatever your current settings are as the default settings. And if you mess up, you can always go to that same menu and hit Reset Default. I'm going to hold down the middle mouse button and pull our Nodes down so we have a little real estate to work with. Go over to the Media pool, and let's find our whale logo over here. Drag and Drop it into place. Now, anytime we bring in an image or an outside video or any outside asset, it'll normally be imported as a Media in node because it is Media coming in. I wish DaVinci Resolve would name these Nodes to be the same as the file name because it can be a bit confusing when you're looking at Media in Nodes. But if we look up in the upper right hand corner, you can see our clip name right there, Wale logo dot JPEG. For clarity's sake, let's go ahead and rename this node. So I'm going to hit F two and type in Wale Logo. When you rename Nodes and DaVinci Resolve, it doesn't like spaces, so if you want to space, underscore normally will work and hit okay. Now, hopefully, at this point, you've already taken the next step and taken the output of this Wal logo. And connect it to the output of the background node so that we can see our logo here. And look at that. Now, I'm going to spend the next 60 seconds explaining why it is so important that we start with a background node, as opposed to just starting with our logo here and connecting it to the media out. And before you doze off, I highly, highly recommend just tuning in for this brief explanation. When I connect the Wale logo directly to the Media Ap, you can see that our resolution is 12 80 by 12 80. Now, there's nothing wrong with having square resolutions, but the bigger issue comes in the fact that we have no real estate to work with. Now, this can be a problem for a few reasons. But generally speaking, if you're going to be working with mismatch resolutions, you're kind of inviting problems. And one of them looks like this. If I were to go and add a transform note and you can either follow along or just watch and listen, into our pipeline here and insert it in here. Well, if I were to take our transform node and slide it out of frame, well, our timeline resolution is 1920 by 1080. So this overhanging area should technically display. But if I were to go back to the Edit page, you can see it's cut off kind of in the middle of space. Where this continues to be an issue is when we start to look to add effects. So one of the most common effects that we'll introduce in effusion is a drop shadow. So if I hit control space, look for our drop shadow node and add it in there. Well, you can see our drop shadow here, it's being cut off here. So if I were to bring up my transform node and pull this up, you're going to see it cut off down here at the end. And where this becomes a bigger issue is when we start to merge things together. And this is what I mean. If I were to unconnect these, right? So I get rid of these for now, and I reset up our merge, how we already had it set up. What I'd like to do is highlight our order of operations and why we need to start with a background node. So on our merge node, what I can actually do is I can decrease the size of our whale so that it's sitting in frame. But if I were to reinsert these nodes here and reinsert the drop shadow, well, what's happening? I merge it over the background node. So we should have more real estate to work with, right? But it looks like our whale is still being cut off and the drop shadow is being cut off. Well, that's because these nodes don't see our background node. So if I were to hit two on our whale logo, we're starting with a square frame here. I were to then go to the transform node. That square frame is still being cut off. And then hit two on the dropshadow again, same idea. It's not until we merge on top of the background node that we set our frame properly. So if I were to instead hold Shift on the drop shadow and insert it over here and hold Shift on the transform node and insert it over here. And now I hit two on the Media out node to preview our entire composition. And let me go ahead and dial back our transform a little bit. Now, our entire image is sitting in place, and we have the entire drop shadow, and that's because, again, these nodes are seeing the combined background and logo. I know it's a bit long winded with the explanation, but hopefully, it makes sense as to why I think this is so important. For now, though, I'm gonna go ahead and delete these two notes so that we just have our we logo merge on top of our blank background. Let me preview the media out. And I'm gonna go ahead and set the size on our merge note here to be 0.5, so it's about half the size. So now let's address the big problem, this orange background. 50. Keying Green Screen Footage: In order for us to remove this background, we need to introduce the idea of king. Practice King, let's go back to the Edit page and let's go to our cat superstar here. Now, some of you guys might be already familiar with the concept, but a lot of you guys who aren't maybe as familiar with what King is, have definitely seen green screen videos like this. Or you might see behind the scenes of blue screen giant studios for major motion pictures. Well, that's because the color green and blue are very nice when it comes to king. Now, King attempts to isolate our particular color, luminosity, range of colors, and hide. So let's go ahead and go to the Fusion page on our cat video here. Right click it open infusion, middle mouse button to kind of recenter our nodes here. And what I'd like you to do is control space and then start to type in the word keying. You'll see we have a lot of options when it comes to keying or we have the Keyframes stretcher note as well. Depending on your composition, one might be more applicable than the rest. With that said, the one I would always recommend defaulting to is the ultra Keer because it is ultra awesome. Well, I mean, it's pretty awesome. I don't know about Ultra. Gohead and select that node and hit? A. That's the ultra Keer I'm going to hold down the Shift key and insert it into our effusion pipeline. Now, if we were to gander on up to our inspector tab, we have a lot of new options that we can play with. But we're going to keep things very simple. What the ultra Keer node does is look for whatever color you tell to and hide it. All the other settings and properties kind of help fine tune that selection. But let's start with just picking a color. In order to do that, what I highly recommend doing is splitting your window into two, I'm going to collapse my media pool for now. And again, to split that window, that's that upper right hand corner option over here. And I'm going to hit one on our Media end node. Now, why might I do that? Well, when I click the ultra here, when we attempt to pick a color to hide, what it's going to attempt to do is hide it in real time. And you'll see why this can sometimes be an issue. Go over to the Inspector tab and click the background Color. And what you could do is just hover over the green here, which would work fantastic. Or there's this handy little option here that says, pick screen Color, and this will isolate whatever color your mouse is hovering over. So I can click that, and I can hover over our screen. You can see it does a pretty darn good job of hiding that green. You'll notice, though, that I went over to the first window or the left window where our media in is previewing and not the media out. The reason for that is because when I attempt to hover over Ooh. I'm just gonna pause my mouse there. If we try to key things in real time, DaVinci Resolve struggles with what to do because it's hiding the green and then it sees the checkered background. So then it's highlighting the checkered background, and then it goes back to the green, and that's why you get that crazy flickering. So oftentimes I'm gonna move my mouse, guys. Be prepared. Oftentimes, ooh, it's better to just preview the media in before seeing that Keer node and selecting the background there. Hit. Okay. Now, if I were to zoom in by hitting control and the scroll wheel, it might be a bit hard to see, but there's a little bit of artifacting, and it's almost this orangy, fuzzy, kind of artifacting. So we did a pretty good job, but it's not perfect. To correct that, what we can do is go over to the Matt tab and not your friend Matt MA TTE. This lets us fine tune what we've keyed out. A lot of these settings are self explanatory, but the one that we're going to use is our threshold. And this basically tells DaVinci Resolve, Hey, this is how much wiggle room you have to isolate the color that I've selected. So I can bring up the bottom threshold, and as I do that slowly, look at how it affects not only the fuzzy area, but kind of this curtained area down at the bottom. So that's cutting off a lot of information. If I were to bring down the high point, watch the edge of our cat here. That'll attempt to restore some of that information. So bottom cuts off, top looks to restore and push out. But I ended up stopping on around 0.5, so I'll make that nice and even for you guys. 0.5. And now we have a really nice little key. So if I were to go back to the Edit page, I can now see my transparent background. And I can't remember if I've already called this out before, but if you don't see the checkered background, you can go over to your timeline view options. You go to Viewer Background, and you have a couple of default choices. Alert red seems a little psychotic. So I would either go with black or checkerboard, and I like checkerboard because it indicates transparency. Now, if I wanted to, I could pull up our cat one level, go back to our media pool, go to those recordings. Remember that sorry background recording? I could drag and drop that underneath her cat. And look at that. And look at that you guys have just done. Some visual effects. Congratulations. You're ready to be hired. So let's take what we just learned and apply it to our actual working example and Mr. Or misses Whale over here. Let's go back into the Fusion page on this Fusion Composition, and let's go ahead and add in our ultra Kier. Now, question where do we add it? Well, for this particular example, it doesn't matter because no matter where we put it, we're looking to isolate just the orange. If we had more things on screen, we might need to make sure we put it in this branch here. So that way, it's only seeing our whale logo. So just for good practice, let's go ahead and do that. Let's go ahead and hold Shift and insert it on this upper branch here. And just like last time, I'm going to hit one on our whale logo to just preview that image. I'm going to click on the ultra kee. We're gonna do the exact same thing. I'm gonna go to the background color. Pick screen color, and I'm going to highlight this orange, and you can already see how stink and effective this guy is. Now, if I were to zoom in here, it looks like it did a pretty good job this go around. And that's because orange and blue are opposite colors. So it makes masking out the orange pretty easy. It's almost like somebody set it up to be fairly manageable. And whoever that is probably deserves a raise. Just to be safe, I'm gonna go over to the MATTAb and I'm gonna play around the threshold just a little bit. We'll bring up that bottom threshold just to clip off any rogue information that we might have. And if I play with that upper threshold, doesn't seem like it's changing too much, so I'll leave that alone. Before we move on, there's one more king note that I want to call out. Using the ultra Keer works great when we're working with solid colors, but an issue you might run down in the road is when you're not working with colors and areas where you're just needing to adjust the brightness. And in doing so, and me zooming in, I kind of see that checkered background. So I might bring down that upper threshold, and oh, good catch, everybody. There we go. If you miss that, I'm going to pull that upper threshold back on the ultra queer. And again, it might be hard to see in the video recording, but there's a checkered background coming through. So I'm going to pull that threshold in until we no longer see that background. But again, how would we get rid of, let's say, the dark area for the eyeball here? As always, there's more than one way to address this, but one of the most helpful is a luma keer. So control space and look for the luma kuer just like the ultra cheer, it attempts to hide information, but it specifically is looking at the luminance, or you can kind of correlate it to the brightness of the image. And if I mess with our thresholds here and pull that upper end all the way down, we can get rid of that dark area. So just wanted to call that all real quick. I'm going to delete the luma ce node because we don't need it for this example. Refit our window here. And now we can animate the whale. 51. Animating In: So it's at this stage of the project that I actually give you free reign to how you'd like to animate this. I'm going to walk through an example. But if you want to get creative with how you go ahead and animate the whale, Hey, go for it. You can also bring in your own logo and animate that. I don't think there's anything wrong with doing that and getting some practice. So if you want to get creative, I give you permission moving forward. I'm going to go ahead and collapse our image preview over here so that we're just working with one screen. And to do our animation, we're going to use a transform node. So I'm gonna control space, look for the transform node. And I like to recommend the transform with the XF in parentheses. Anytime you see a node with parentheses next to it, it means it's a fusion specific node. The transform node without it was developed for the Edit page. So typically, the Fusion versions tend to work a bit better in fusions. So let's go ahead and insert our transform node, and we are going to insert it after the merge node. We need to be able to see our entire frame composition. So hold down the Shift key and insert it after the merge node. And the animation I like us to practice is a simple pop in animation and a slide out animation. These are going to be quote unquote very simple animations, but they're very common when it comes to animating most static objects. So we're going to do is we're gonna go to the very beginning of our composition. With our transform Nodes selected, I would like you to set a key frame on the size position. Now, we're operating on a 30 FPS timeline. Anytime I look to set up an animation, I like to scale things in terms of tenths of that animation. So for 30 FPS, a tenth of that would be three frames. So for our pop animation, I'd like us to do three multiples of three and just go over to frame nine. So I'm going to use the right arrow key and go one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and we're going to set another keyframe. Now, remember, as is just because I set a keyframe there doesn't mean anything's changing because we haven't changed our size property. But if I were to go to frame zero, which is what I'm on and decrease the size to, let's go zero. Now it animates into frame. Now, as is, it's pretty pretty uninspiring. So how can we spice this up? Let's go ahead and do two things. Go and open up your spy menu if it's not already open, and let's bring it over here. I'm going to resize this just so we got a little bit more real estate to work with. And again, if I would like to resize this window, I go to the upper right hand corner and hit Zoom to fit. Now we can see R, spline. And what I'd like to do is this hit Control A to select your two Keyframes, and then we're going to make use of that easing menu that we mentioned earlier. I'd like you to right click, go to ease and out back Cubic. Again, that was Ease out back cubic. And if I hold control in the scroll wheel to zoom out a little bit, look at what that does to our animation. We're going to accelerate very quickly and overshoot our final resting point and then slow down and come to rest. And that's going to look something like this. Oh, yeah, W. Look at that. That's not bad. We got a nice little. Pop. If I were to hit Control A to select our Keyframes, I'd like you to make a note of how the handles are positioned. The bottom one is close to vertical, and it is extended a very long ways, and the ending animation is horizontal and pulled to the left. So something that might be worth experimenting with is how adjusting these handles changes the shape of our curve. So I could even go all the way up in vertical, and let's try playing that. And that comes in so fast and aggressive and really overshoots our final resting point. Another really useful tool when it comes to the sply menu is the time stretcher function. So, let's say, for instance, you like the animation, but it either feels too slow or too fast. Well, instead of manually going over and clicking your Keyframes or, you know, grabbing this keyframe here and dragging it around and trying to get it to fit appropriately, what you can do is this hit Control A to select your two Keyframes, and then look down here at this bottom row of tool options, and I want you to find the one with two parallel bars. Go ahead and select that one. This is the time stretcher function. And if you've done it correctly, you'll get these two white vertical bars at the beginning and end of your selected Keyframes. And what I can do is if I hit control and the scroll wheel to zoom out, I can grab one of these handles and extend our animation. So if I wanted this to be a second long, well, I go over to frame 30 and pull this all the way to frame 30, and it's going to keep the values of the keyframe and the relationship that the two of them have in terms of the spine animation. So now if I hit play, we got a much slower pop in animation. To get rid of these little white vertical lines, just uncheck the time stretcher option and then it'll bring you back to the normal spline editing functions. Now, which of these two versions is best. 30 frames or nine frames. I don't know. You tell me what feels better to you? You might like something that's a little more long and drawn out, or you might want the aggressiveness that comes with just having this thing come in on nine frames. To be non confrontational and avoid any decision making, I'm going to go halfway in between, and I'm going to go to frame 15. I'm going to control to select are two frames, go to the time stretcher button and pull this in. And then I'll uncheck that. And now we got a nice halfway point between the two. The next step will be our out animation and then applying a final look. 52. Animating Out: Hi, everybody. So we have our animation where we're popping in. The next thing we're going to do is have it animate, meaning that at the end of our composition, it will leave the screen here. So no matter the composition link, what I'd like you to do is go to that end of the composition. Then bring it in. Let's do ten frames. So minus 149. I'm going to go in ten frames to 139. Does the exactness of this frame matter? No, of course not. But if you want to match me, go ahead and go there. With the same transform notes selected, what I'd like you to do is go up to the center property, set a keyframe. Go to the end of the composition, and I'd like you to drag it out of frame, however you would like. You can do it right. You can do it left, do up, you could down. You can even go diagonal. You can use the onscreen controls here and pull it off diagonal. Doesn't matter to me. Just get it out here. Pull out a frame somehow. I'm going to go to the right slightly slightly to the right. Now, I'm gonna go over to our spline menu and hit Zoom to fit. And this is the first time we've got more than one thing going on over here. We're seeing the change in the size and the displacement or the change in position that we key framed for the center property. Well, I don't want to mess with the size right now. I would like to just mess with the displacement. So I'm going to go over to the properties over here and just uncheck size. You'll normally have to click it twice. Cooking it once just removes the editability of it, meaning you can't Edit it, but you can still see it. Clicking it again, hides it. And now, if I go Zoom to fit, now, we have our displacement curve here. I would like our animation to ease out out of frame. So as is, because our motion is linear, it's a pretty abrupt change in the scene. So if I were to hit Play, I kind of just lurches. I kind of just lurches out of frame. So I'm going to do is hit Zoom to fit. Control A on these two Keyframes. I'm going to hit F to flatten the curves, and then I'm going to go up to this ending key frame and pull the handle down and I'm extending it. So I'm not only just pulling it down, I'm pulling it down and extending it. What this is saying is start slow. Start with a low slope and gradually accelerate out of frame, so we're easing out of the animation. Now if I hit play, that's going to look like that. Now, just like last time, if you feel this is too fast, change it. Change the duration of the animation. They Control A, go to the time stretcher node, and then instead of grabbing the ending vertical line, grab the beginning one and pull it in. So now I'm on frame 130, and that's going to look something like that. More gradual, a little slower. These choices you make depend on the timing, the pace, the mood, whatever you're trying to achieve with this animation. Either way, we now have a animation and not animation. So we're going to do a couple final things to make this look just a little bit better. 53. Adding Motion Blur and Finishing Touches: Alright, let's add some final touches to this. I'm going to pull and condense our spl menu for now because I don't think we're gonna need it. Resize our window just a little bit so we can see our whale in action. And I'm going to scrub our played back to the beginning of our animation. Now, something that makes the Fusion page really nice is that we can turn on motion blur. If I were to go frame by frame in our composition, and I'm doing that after clicking off the transform note, you do have to be careful because if you have the transform note selected and you use the left and right arrow, sometimes it'll move the center property, so just be aware of what you're doing. I'm going to click off the transform note and I'm going to use the right arrow. As the whale animates in, there's no blending of the frames. With real camera recordings, when the motion is faster than the shutter speed, there's almost a blurry frame like blend between frames. And for visual effects and the animation world, adding motion blur is a way to smooth out our animation and make it look just a little bit more believable. So I'm going to click on the Transform though, and we're going to go over to the settings tab. And the option we're looking for is right in the middle here, and it's motion blur. Go ahead and check that on. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go to frame Let's go frame one. And here's where you can really see that blur effect. Now, with our motion blur, we've got a couple of options here, but the two that you need to worry about are the quality and the shutter angle. The quality changes the number of copies that are used to sell that motion blur. And like a lot of settings in fusion, we can actually type a number past this default slider. So if I wanted to, I could type in a number like 20 now it'll add 20 copies that are being blurred. The shutter angle is the amount of motion blur that you see. So if I were to decrease this, you'll see it decreases the motion blur and vice versa. So when I increase this, it extends that zooming blur effect. I normally like the default shutter angle, and I'll normally just increase the quality to help smoothen out the blur. Let me refit our window real quick. But now if I were to scrub through, you can see on some of these more dramatic motion pieces that we get some fringing on the edge to help blur the different frames. I scrub at the end, you'll really see at the end of our animation there. And if I were to play this from beginning to end the animation should hopefully feel a little bit smoother. The next thing that we can do is add some visual flare to this. And there are so many ways that you can go about doing this. I'm just going to show you two of some of the more common effects. One is what we mentioned earlier, and that's a drop shadow. So after the transform node, I'm going to control space and add in a drop shadow node. There's a lot of ways that we can create separation from foreground and background images, including the amount of focus that something has or the colors being used. And one of the other ways that we can do that is with things like drop shadows or back glows. It just helps create a little separation from the foreground and background. That's going to look something like this and you might be noticing that my playback is slowing down just a little bit. Depending on you and your PC, the more nodes you add, the slower things might begin to play. Some other really common looks and effects that you might see in the Fusion page would be glows. I'm gonna delete the drop shadow for now. I'm gonna look for the soft glow node. And I'm going to hit Add. Go ahead. I'm going to scrub to the middle here, hold shift, and insert the glow. And Ooh, that's pretty fun. Look at that. We got a nice glowy whale here. Which of these settings are best? I will leave that for you to discover and find. The one thing I will say is that a lot of times glows are best built in layers. So instead of just using one soft glow, use three. Use one that has a small glow size and a lot of gain, add another that has a little less gain but a little bigger glow size. And then add another that's got no gain at all, but a really big glow size. In doing so, you can add a lot of depth to your gloves by layering the amount of nodes that you use. So what I would like you to do is add at least one visual node. If you don't want to experiment, you're totally okay with just adding in a drop shadow or just using a glow. It doesn't matter to me, but play around. But take this opportunity to start looking through the different nodes in fusion and some of the things that you can create with some of the tools here. So, in order to go ahead and submit this project, we can do one, if not two things. First, go ahead and go back to the Edit page, and then we're going to set our render in and out points on the timeline. Fusion composition for the loco animation is this last clip, so I'm going to hit I to set an endpoint at the beginning, go to the end, and then remember when it comes to out points, we need to go in one frame. So I'm going to hit the left arrow one time and then hit O. Again, the reason that we do that is because the playhead looks to the right. So if I hit my playhead here and hit O, you'll see it overhangs one frame. So we go in one frame by hitting the left arrow one time and then hitting O. It's kind of a funky thing to do, but just and go ahead and go to the Deliver page. Make sure I zoom in here. And then I'm going to locate our YouTube ten ADP preset. We're going to talk about render settings in a future video. So just for now, go ahead and use YouTube ten ADP. And just like the previous videos, go ahead and choose wherever you like to save it and name it the appropriate name. Now, there is an optimal step for this class project, and that is to go ahead and upload your Notree. So if I go ahead and hop back into Fusion here, both Windows and Mac have different systems for taking screenshots. But what I like to use is this program called Light Shot. It's this guy right here. Light shot. It runs in the background, and I always have it open whenever I start up my computer. And then what I can do is I can hit Print Screen, and it'll allow me to drag and select something that I'd like to take a screenshot of. Again, you don't have to do this. You can use whatever Windows or Mac default screenshot system is. But then I have this little save icon here where I can save it to my desktop or my photos folder. Once that's all said and done, go ahead and upload it to the appropriate location on the website, and you are officially done with your first Fusion project. 54. Class Project 6 - Tracking a Callout: Everybody. So as of now, we've mostly been in the realm of motion graphics. We've taken an image or a graphic or even a shape and made it move. But now we're going to work with some real footage. We've been provided a scene from an upcoming documentary where we're introducing our subject. We've been asked to create a callout that follows our subject across the screen from frame right to frame left. There should also be a lower third that indicates the time of day that this was filmed. And we're going to go ahead and expand on what a callout is and a lower third as we move into future lessons. So for this project, we've been asked to do really two things, and one of them is to create a lower third. Now, oftentimes you'll see this abbreviated as L three, or if it's an upper third, U three. The lower 30s to indicate the time of day, and in particular, we also need to include an animated board, and we'll go ahead and again, discuss that in just a moment. The second aspect to this is to create a callout, and this is going to involve us using a tracker in the tracking system in cytofusion. Now, tracking is a very powerful tool. It's going to make our life a lot easier, but we do need to learn how to operate within that system. And similar to our previous fusion project, we're going to go ahead and render out the final video at the end, and it is completely optional, but I would encourage you to upload a PNG of your fusion note tree. This time around, because we're creating two separate things, there will be two no trees that you can go ahead and upload if you would like. So let's go ahead and get this project underway. 55. Building a Lower Third in Fusion: Now that we've mastered the basics of fusion, we can begin to move on to some more practical use cases. And one of those use cases is something that you'll probably have to do down the road, and it's tracking a lower third. Now, what is a lower third? And what do you mean by tracking? Well, let's go ahead and get started. I'm going to keep us within the same fusion project. But what I would like us to do is to start on a new timeline. So in your timelines folder in the media pool, right click. Timeline, create new timeline. And I'm going to call this timeline tracker space VFX and hit Create. Next thing that we need to do is pull in our footage that we're going to work with. So I'm going to go over to the recordings folder. Go ahead and locate your course materials, and in the fusion folder, locate Class Project six and drag and drop in the man walking in the field. Let's go ahead and bring this footage onto our timeline. And what we're going to attempt to do is two things. For one, we're going to develop a lower third that's going to sit in this corner here that will call out this specific scene. And the next thing that we'll do is we're going to track the gentlemen here walking in the field. And what I mean by tracking is that we're going to follow this person in fusion and track a call out to them. With that, said, let's go ahead and get started. First thing I'd like us all to do is go up to the Effects tab, and we're going to start with building out our lower third. Now, if you didn't already know, in the Titles menu in our Effects tab, we actually have some preset titles. Now, depending on what version of DaVinci Resolve you are, some of these, I believe, may or may not be in the studio only version, but we do have some preset tax animations. And one of those, if I scroll and find it is called Jitter Lower Third, and you'll find some lower third options like the fade on Lower third. Scattered throughout here. Lower thirds are just text call outs that tend to sit in one of the thirds of the frame. So what we're going to do is we're going to make our own version. If you're short on time, it is always totally viable to try to figure out and use one of these preset fusion titles. But just like anything that's preset, you're not going to have a lot of control in how it functions. With all of that out of the way, let's go over to the effect tab and let's drag and drop in a fusion composition. And I'm going to extend our composition to sit over the entire length of our footage here. Do we necessarily have to have it be that length? No, we can always adjust this later, but just for now, we're gonna have it be the entire length of the footage. Let's go ahead and hop into the fusion page on the fusion composition. Now, again, because our fusion comp is the upmost track, I can just hit the magic wand and it'll hop in to the fusion page. If I go back to the Edit page, if I were to swap the order for whatever reason, and now I were to hit the magic wand, well, now we're gonna go into the fusion page for our footage. So just be conscious of the order of your timeline here. But to be safe, again, I normally just right click and hit Open infusion or hit the X button. The middle mouse button to pan on over. I'm going to condense our viewer to one window. And what should we start every fusion composition with? You said background note, give yourself 20 brownie points. I'm going to go ahead and connect the background node to the media out. And if you haven't already, take your Alpha slider here and bring it all the way down. Remember, we always start with a background node on a blank fusion composition to set our frame, to set the resolution of this composition. Now, we've been working with shapes and a little bit of masking and a little bit of motion, but the one thing we've avoided so far is text. You can either go up to this toolbar here to bring in a text node or, like always hit Control Space or command space and search for Tex plus. Go ahead and add that in. Do merge our text onto our background. We're going to go output to output. And merge them in together. Now, as is, we're not seeing anything from our text node, but that's because there's nothing in the text entry field. Now, for the purpose of this example, you could really type whatever you'd like. But for us, I'm going to type the final text that we're going to use, and it's going to be 9:00 A.M. Sunday. We're going to use this text to call out the specific time of our scene. Now that we've got this all set up, let's move on to talking about the text. 56. Creating Write-On Text Animations: Now the Text plus node DaVinci Resolve is a special one. Not to say that not all nodes are special, but this one in particular has got a lot of fun features and options. And what I mean by that is if we peer on over to the inspector tab, we have a lot of tabs. And in fact, I think this is the most tabs you'll have on any node in Resolve. So what that means for us is that when we work with text Nodes, we have complete control of ever possible setting. It's probably not worth covering every single setting, but we'll do a brief overview. On the first page, we have our general text setting. So we have the entry field for what text we'd like to be displayed. We have our font, our font options, the text color, how big we would like to make the text, some tracking options, and how we would like this anchored. So if you're thinking in terms of, like, a Word document, we can left a line, center line, write a line, et cetera. There's this really fun slider that we're going to come back to down here called right on that allows you to change how much text is displayed. On the next tab is our layout tab. And just like it says, This is how the text is positioned on screen. So we have a center property. We've got different forms of rotation, so we can actually rotate in three dimensional space. The next tab over is the transform tab, which you might think is similar to the layout tab, but it's typically used for specific operations that I don't want to cover in depth here because I think it might get confusing quickly. So just know that if you're trying to move the text around, I would default to the layout tab and messing with the center property here. The last tab I'd like to cover is the shading tab, and this is one of the most important ones in the text node because this is how we create different looks. The way the text node does this is it splits up the different design elements into well elements. So what I mean by that is as is we have a solid white fill, which is what we're seeing in element one. If I were to go over to element two and enable that, well, here we can add some border, and I can increase the thickness to add some text border. I'm going to toggle that off for now. If I go over to element three. Well, now we can add some drop shadow. So as you go along in your fusion and editing journeys, when it's time to create specific looks for your text, I would start to venture over here into the shadings tab and get comfortable with manipulating some of the different elements. For now, though, I went ahead and turned off element three, and we're just going to stick with the default solid fill. The image tab sets the resolution of the text node. And just like the background node, it has an auto resolution checkbox, and then over here in the settings tab, just like the transform tab, we can turn on Motion blur if we were to animate the text. I'm gonna go all the way back to the TextEM. And we're going to do two things here. One, let's pick a font. Now, my font menu is probably going to be more fleshed out than yours. Or it could not, if you're in the design field and you're just learning how to edit. But fonts and font size and positioning is a whole science in itself, and you could probably spend the rest of your life discovering and learning more about fonts and the way that they are designed. What I'd like you to do is to do a quick scrub through and pick one that you want to work with. What I would suggest is working with something that feels a bit more professional. So something like this that's very script heavy is probably not going to be a good idea or something like this with a lot of energy and slanty motion. Again, not a good idea. I try to find a Sans font or a Sands sera font that look somewhat decent. I've downloaded this font that I love using called Josephine Sands, and it is a Google font. Once you have a font selected, we're going to go ahead and animate our font in. And to do that, we could animate a bunch of different properties. So we can go to something like the shading tab and animate the opacity. We could go to that layout tab and do something with the position again. But for this go around, we're going to do something that's text specific and text note specific specifically. And on our first tab up here on the Text tab on our Text plus node, I'd like you to scroll down back to that right on property. And what I'd like you to do is set a keyframe at frame zero. And let's go over 30 frames or 1 second, because again, we're on a 30 FPS timeline, and set another keyframe. Now I'm going to go back to the beginning. And I'm going to drag in the end slider. You could do it the opposite way and go to the start slider. But depending on what you do, it'll either animate in left to right or right to left. So I'm going to go with the end slider. And now, if I were to hit play, our text writes on to frame. Now, moving forward, I'm not going to repeat this as much. But for you, if you don't like the timing or the feel of the animation, please feel free to customize the spline here and either use the time stretcher or mess around with the curvature of the Splines. You have full creative control here. This is going to be one of those situations, though, where I am not going to spline our animation curve because I like it animating in one letter at a time. If we were to spline it, some letters are going to jump on screen faster than the others. So I like it animating in linearly. There we go. We have a simple text write on animation. 57. Finishing and Animating Your Lower Third: Now the last step that we're going to take to complete our Lower Third callout is we're going to highlight it with a rectangle. To do that, let's go ahead and bring some space to add this in. And this will be one of the first time we merge multiple objects onto our fusion pipeline here. I'm going to drag and select our nodes that we have here and slide them over to the left. Now, to create a rectangle, it's going to be very similar to how we cut out our ball. So the way that we're going to do this is we're going to add in a background node. This go around, we don't want that background to be transparent. I'm going to go ahead and merge this background into our fusion pipeline. So I'm gonna go output to output and merge it in. Now, as is because we've just added in a solid background, it completely covers our screen. Well, to fix that, we can mask out the rectangular shape. So I'm going to go ahead and click the rectangle icon on our toolbar here to add that in. I'm going to drag it above our background node, and I'm going to take the output of the rectangle node and connect it to the background node. And what we've done is cut out that rectangular shape from the background node. What I'd like you to do is to select that rectangle node. And we're going to change a couple properties on it. Go over to the inspector tab and uncheck solid. This will remove the fill of the rectangle, and then go ahead and go to the border width and drag and push it to the right. Now, you can use the slider, but it'll be pretty aggressive with the change in the border width. So typically, I like to go over to the property itself and drag and move it left and right. And here's another secret tip when it comes to changing properties. You can also hold down the control or the command key to hyper fine tune the change in that property. So by holding down control, selecting the property, and moving my mouse left and right, we have very fine motor control with this property. So if I release control, changes faster, if I click control, much slower. To start out, I'm going to set our border with as 0.01. And let's go ahead and resize it so that it fits right around our text here, and it doesn't have to be exact. Get a general ballpark of that. Now, we'd like our rectangle to be the same color as our text. I'm gonna go to that background note and change the color to White. You know, now that I'm looking at it, I think it's going to be better to make our border width just a bit thinner, so I'm going to go to that property and decrease it a bit more. So now I'm at 0.005. I think that looks a little cleaner. If you're looking to get close to the width and height settings, the width is about 0.58, and the height is around 0.32. If I were to scribe my playhead back to the beginning, it is a bit strange to have just a rectangle sit in frame, so let's go ahead and animate our rectangle in. And there are so many different ways that we can do that. We could animate the width, height, the position. But let's mess around with some of the other properties that we can change, and one of them is the length. If I were to slide the length down, you'll see that it almost writes off the rectangle. So what I'm going to have do is animate the length. So I'm going to go over to frame 30, set a keyframe, go back to frame zero, and I'm going to drag the length all the way down. You notice I'm not going to check on the keyframe, but by changing the property, it toggles on that keyframe for the length now if I were to scrub Ford, a rectangle writes on along with the text. Now, this go around, I am going to smooth out the rectangle length animation. And all I'm going to do for this is I'm going to hit Control A to select an F to flatten to just smooth out the starting and ending points of that animation. And that's going to look something like this. Not bad. The one thing I am going to do for the rectangle node is I am going to toggle on motion blur. So with the rectangle node selected, I'm going to the settings tab, toggle on motion blur and increase the quality. So now, as the rectangle animates in, you can see it blurs that leading edge of the write on animation. The last thing I'm going to do is I'm going to add some drop shadow here. So I'm going to look for the drop shadow node. Gonna decrease the distance just a little bit. And now if we were to go back to the Edit page, this is great. We have our lower third here. It is occupying a little bit of real estate here. So, how should we fix this? Well, there's two ways that we can go about it. One is that we can go over into the video properties of the fusion composition and decrease the size to, let's go half, so 0.5 and then change the position, so it sits in this lower third here. So my Y position is negative 300 and my position is minus 560. And now it's looking like it's in a much more appropriate space. The alternative would be to reposition it in fusion. So I get X to go into fusion. I'm going to pull over the drop shadow node so that I can insert a transform node here. So I can control space, look for our transform node. Old shift to insert it. And here I could go 0.5 to change the size. Then reposition it to sit somewhere closer to our lower third. Be aware when you do this because what we've done is we've changed the size and position inside fusion. If we go back to the Edit page, we've also changed the size and position on the Edit page. So it's stacking the changes, meaning that we've readjusted it inside a fusion, but we're also readjusting it here on the Edit page. So if I were to reset those options here on the Edit page, that's going to position it more appropriately. I tend to find with fusion compositions like this, so I'm going to delete that transform node. I tend to have better results when I build it out big inside a fusion. And then if I need to readjust it, I can always do that on the Edit page, which is one of the perks of DaVinci Resolve. We're able to interact with all aspects of the Edit in one software. I don't remember the size of position I was at, but there we go. And now if I were to hit Play, we've got a very lovely lower third here in the corner. 58. Building a Tracked Callout: So the final task for us here on this journey is to track a callout to our subject here. Let me resize this real quick. In order to do so, it's going to involve two primary things. One is going to be to track our subject. The second involves building out our call out. So let's go ahead and get started, which begs the question, how do we start? Well, you might be inclined to build out another fusion composition. So you might go up to your Fex tab, ex, drag and drop in another fusion composition. But the problem with doing so is that if we were to hop into this fusion page for our new fusion composition, we've got no info here. So how would we attempt to track our subject if we can't see them in fusion? So that's not gonna work. So what we're going to need to do is going into the fusion page with our footage. Now, technically, you could do this with an adjustment clip, but anytime you're trying to work with the footage directly, nine times out of ten, it's going to be better to do it in the Fusion page with the footage itself. So let's go and hop into the Fusion page. Now, this time around, we can't just hit the magic wand icon because the Fusion clip is above our footage. So we would go into the Fusion page with our fusion composition. So what you're going to need to do is right click and hit open infusion or the X key. And here we go. We can see our Media in, which represents the footage that we put on the timeline being fed to the media out. From here, we could go about doing this one of two ways. One is we start with the tracker and track our subject, and two is to start with building out our call out. For the purpose of this course, I think it's going to make more sense to actually build our call out first and then attempt to track it to our subject. So let's go and start there. What I'm going to do is I'm going to use the middle mouse button to push these nodes down a little ways. Give us a little bit more real estate in our node workspace. And what we're going to do is we're going to build a separate set of nodes above our existing nodes down here. In this area that will end up connecting down below. And the method we'll use to connect them is our tracker. So let's go ahead and start with a blank background node. And what I would like you to do is hit the two button to preview our background node. Remember, this is one of the cool features of fusion is that we can hot swap two different nodes to preview what they're displaying. And now let's go ahead and build our call out. The way we're going to do it is ETO. First, let's add a text node. Go ahead and add the Text plus node and merge it here. And I'm thinking, our subject here looks kind of like a Frank. I like Frank. Makes sense to me. And as is, we're not seeing our text node. That's because we're previewing the background node. So if I were to hit two on the merge, now I'm previewing the background and the merge text. Now the next step that we're going to take is we're going to create a line that animates in. This line we'll use to point to our subject, Frank here. And it's going to follow a very similar methodology that we've done in the past where we've masked out background nodes. And this is going to consist of two elements a line and a circle. So let's start with the line. Control space to add in a background node. And just like our rectangular outline from the lower third, I'm going to increase the Alpha and change this to white, and I'll go ahead and merge this into our pipeline. Now, this time, I'm not going to preview the merge as is because if I do so, well, we just got a solid white screen. So I'm going to preview the previous merge node. And the question now is, how do we create a line? It's a pretty simple thing to make. So how do we do it? Well, we're gonna need to incorporate a new fusion node. We look to our toolbar. We got the rectangle. We've got the ellipse, and right next to it is the polygon node, and this is how we can draw shapes. So I'm going to add a polygon node. Because I had the merge node selected down here, it attempted to connect it to it, which we don't need, so I'm going to hold down the Shift key and drag it above our background node. Now, the polygon node is a very special tool, and it's very powerful with lots of nooks and crannies that you can discover to create a lot of really interesting things. Now, we're going to keep it pretty basic for this example, but you might have noticed in the upper left hand corner of our preview window, we have a whole new slew of tools that we can use with this. One thing I would like to call out with this node is that it attempts to animate any shape that you draw in just by adding it. And what I mean by that is, if we look in the inspector tab on our polygon node, over here in the bottom here, it says, right click here to animate shape. And by default, it will come in with this keyframe checked on. So go ahead and uncheck it. It's a useful feature, but we're not going to need it for now. And what I'd like you guys to do is watch my mouse motion, and then we're going to attempt to draw on our line. We're going to click to the right. We're going to click to the left, and then we're going to click diagonally down. Before I click, what I'm going to do is after I click this first point, it doesn't have to be exact on screen because we can always adjust it later. I'm going to hold the shift key to lock in the horizontal line. So that way, this line underneath will be perfectly horizontal. So I'm going to click, hold down the Shift key click again, release the shift key. And for our third point, the exactness doesn't matter too much, but I would just draw it diagonally to the left somewhere. And now we have a polygon shape. Something that you might have done on accident is when you clicked, you held down and clicked, and this will attempt to create some curvature. So when you do click, just click and release. If for whatever reason you mess up, you can always hit Control or Command and Z to undo. Now, I haven't connected it yet to our background node, so we're not seeing anything at the moment. But if I were to connect it to the background node, any mask input, preview the merge node. Again, nothing yet. That's because on our polygon node, it's looking to create a solid shape, which is not what we have. So if I uncheck solid and increase the border width, would you look at that? Now we have a nice line. Now, without diving down a rabbit hole and getting into too many details, I do want to show off a couple of helpful features with this node for those who do want to learn more about masking in the polygon node. In the upper left hand corner, we have a couple of modes for how we use the polygon tool. As is the default one is to add points. If I didn't want to add a point and I just wanted to modify existing points, I can go over to the modify only mode. So then I can drag and select and move points around. And this will let you adjust the handles as well. And for those of you who would like to be very exact with the positioning of your points, check this out. With the modify only mode selected, I can drag and select our polygon. Right click anywhere in our preview window. There'll be two options down here at the bottom. It says, polygon one effect mask and polygon one Poly Line. Well, in the polygon one polyline menu, I can scrub all the way down. And there's another menu within the menu that pops out another menu, and it says, publish, publish points. And what that'll do is it'll give you coordinates to work with for your points. Publishing your points is never a requirement. It's just for anybody out there who would like to be a little bit more specific with the coordinates that they use. I'm going to control Z for now, though, because we don't need to worry about that, and we can readjust our line by pulling up the center property. And I'd like this to fit pretty snug underneath. Frank. Now, again, the exactness of this doesn't matter, but hopefully you have a line here. And the next step will be to animate in our callout. 59. Animating a Callout: Alright, so we're going to go ahead and do some animation, but we're missing one piece. Let's go ahead and add a point at the end of our line. To do that, we're going to go ahead and add another white background node. So you could go ahead and search for that background node or just take the one that you already have here to control C to copy. Click here. So remember, wherever your mouse clicks is where the node attempts to be inserted the Control V. I'm go to go output to output to merge it in. And this time, I'd like to add an ellipse. I'm going to go ahead and take the center of our ellips, line it up to the endpoint here and I'm going to decrease the size to be pretty dang small. So it looks like I'm right around 0.02 and 0.02 for the width and height. Go ahead and connect the ellipse node to the mass note of our background. Now I'm going to preview that. And look at that. We have a nice, simple call out. Now it's time to animate this call out in. As always, there are so many options and ways that we can do this. Could animate in the letters individually. We could then write on the line. We could then pop in the circle by key framing the width and the height. But I'd like to show off a pretty cool feature in fusion that hopefully can spark some imagination for some of you out there down the road. What I'd like us all to do is to go and grab a rectangle node and drag and drop it down below here. And before we connect a rectangle anywhere, let's go ahead and kind of resize and reposition it so that the outline encompasses our callout. And what we're going to do is we're going to use our rectangle to mask out every single element, and then we will have it move from left to write. If you're a little bit confused, just bear with me. One of the most powerful features of fusion is that we can use one output for more than one input. So I can take my rectangle node output here and feed it into the mask input of merge one. The mask input of merge two and the mask input of merge three. And now with one node, I can control the visibility of our entire call out. How sweet is that? And this is just one example of many that make the node system very, very powerful. But for now, let's keep it pretty simple. And what I'd like us to do is to animate our rectangle sliding into frame. So I'm going to go over to frame. Let's do 45. Let's go a second and a half. I'm going to set a key frame on the center property of our rectangle node, go back to the beginning. And I'm going to slide it off. And I'm doing it with our on screen controls here because I can just grab the horizontal arrow and pull it off to the left. If I hit play, now it writes on. Let's go and select our rectangle node, expand our spine menu, Zoom to fit, Control A to select the two points, and then I'm going to hit F to flatten. Again, this just helps with smoothing the out and in animation. The final step I'll take is go to the settings tab in our Rectangle one node and turn on Motion blur. Dig the quality all the way to ten. And now if I hit Play, there we go. So now we have a working call out. How do we get it onto our footage? Well, that'll be the next step. 60. Tracking Motion in Fusion: Okay, so now it's time to track Frank here walking across the screen. If you didn't catch it at the end of the last video, I re previewed our media out by hitting two on this node so that we can see our media out here. And the next step that we're going to take is we're going to add a tracker node. So I dragged and moved our call out Nodes over to the upper left hand corner here. For now, I'm going to select our Media in node. I'm going to hit Control Space and look up Tracker. That's TRACKER tracker. There's four primary trackers in fusion. There's the camera tracker, planar surface, and the tracker tracker. While all of these serve a nice purpose, the one that we're going to want is the tracker tracker. So go in, select that and hit Add. And if yours insert into your pipeline, make sure you hold down Shift and insert it on in here. Now, when you add a tracker node, you might not see it at first, but it should introduce this little point on screen that you can drag and move around. Now, there will be a key difference between you and me if you are on the free version of DaVinci Resolve. This is one area where the Studio version has a different feature. If you're on Studio, yours will start by saying Intel track. This is DaVinci Resolve's smart tracking function. It uses their neural engine, which is their AI engine to help enhance the tracking function. If you are on the free version, you will be working with a point tracker. And the interface will look something like this. And to move that around, you'll need to click that little square in the upper left hand corner of the on screen display to drag and move that around. If we look over here in the upper right hand corner in the inspector tab, the tracker node has four tabs associated with it. Three, if you don't count the settings tab that's included with every single node. The first is the trackers tab. And in this tab is where we set up and track our trackers. The next tab over is the operation, which will tell our tracker what to do. As is, we have none selected, so we don't see any settings. The last one are some fine tuning options, which we're not going to worry about. So it's all go back to the trackers tab. And so that I can follow along with the free version, I'm going to go ahead and use the normal point tracker. If you're on the Studio version and you want to use Intel track, go crazy. There's nothing wrong with doing so. But for me, I'm going to go over to our tracker list and delete that point. To add a new tracker to add a new tracker below our tracker list, there's two options. If you're on Studio, you can add Iteltrak or another point tracker. So you can track multiple things at once at the same time. But again, I am just going to use one point tracker. Now, the way a tracker node works is that we're going to place it in a center point somewhere on our subject here. So let's go right here. I can see this little sliver of gold on the color here that I'm going to hover over. And what our point tracker is going to do here is to try to find this set of pixels on every single frame and keep the center right dead center on those set of pixels. So this middle window here is the group of pixels that it's going to try to keep in frame throughout the course of the track. And this outer window here is the region in which it looks for those pixels. So when I use my left arrow, when I change frames, the outer window is the region in which the tracker looks to refine these points. And now, tracking could be an art form in itself. It can be very difficult to get good tracks depending on your footage. So what should we look for when it comes time to track footage? Normally, what you'd like to find is points of high contrast. So if I were tracking this tree over here, this would be a relatively easy thing to track because we have clear distinctions in shapes and sizes based off the color and the background brightness. This is why sometimes you'll see footage that's being used where they'll have white Xs on screen or dots on screen because you can track the dot as it moves. So, where should we try to track our subject? Well, I'm going to scrub through here and find a point that I feel like we can track. My eye is drawn to this pocket here where maybe he's got a wallet that we can track or the gold handle on his backpack. DaVinci is going to do its best to try to isolate these things and move it all the way across, but we might not get a perfect, clean track. So let's just go ahead and try. I'm on frame 55. I'm going to grab our point here and pull it to the backpack handle here. And now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over to the inspector tab with our tracker notes selected, and there's a few buttons that we can choose from. When you highlight your mouse over each, it'll tell you what it does so we can track one frame forward. We can track all the way forward. We can track forward and then reverse and vice versa. So if I were to click Track reverse one frame, now, when I look at our timeline here, you can see we now have a keyframe. When I look at our timeline, you can see I have a keyframe, and on our spline menu, it's begun to track that point. And I can continue to go backwards and backwards. And I can even click Track all the way in reverse. And ooh, it looks like it did. Okay. When I use my mouse to scrub forward, you can see an obvious point where there is a big jump. So if I were to scrub forward, it looks like right here, there is a pretty big jump in the track. So we'll talk how we can address that in just a little bit. What I'm going to do is I'm going to scrub forward back to frame 55, and this time, I'm going to track forward. Oh, that's looking Oh. That looks like it did a pretty good job all the way to the end there. I'm going to stop it early because it looks like we lost our tracked point. And now, if I were to scrub through, you can kind of see how and where the tracker is working well and when it loses its track. So what I'm going to suggest we do is animate our call out right in here. It looks like for me, it's right around frame 35, all the way through here right around frame 120. And that'll be the point where we track in our call out. Now, if you did want to troubleshoot this, so let's go all the way back to the beginning to where there's this jump in our track. So right in here. But what you can do is you can go to your spline menu, Zoom to fit, scrub in here, and you can actually delete all of those points. So I can go in here and delete all those keyframe points. And now what I can do is hit my left arrow to go to frame 34, which is the next untracked frame. Readjust my center point here and hit track and reverse. And that looks like it did pretty good again up until we're just about out of frame. So it's a much smoother curve up until the very end. But at this stage, I don't know if we need to track the backpack because he's walking out of frame. So I'll go to my spine menu, zoom in with Control and the scroll wheel. I'll adjust the X axis by clicking the left mouse button and pulling that out and then dragging and selecting those points. And hitting delete. And the points I'm looking for are to the left of my playhead because this is where I can see we begin to jump and lose the track. There we go. Do not stress too much if you didn't really follow along with that point. That's kind of an advanced technique in fusion, but I will say that troubleshooting tracking is a pretty common thing that you might have to do as an editor. Re zoom to fit. And so if we wanted to, we could do the same thing for the tail end of the animation. We can go ahead and do the same thing for the tail end of our track here if we wanted to, and I don't want to. I think we'll be perfectly fine showing off this example from what was it again? I think frame 352, we'll do frame 120. So the next step will be to attach our tracker nodes and set it up to be track. So the next step will be to attach our callout nodes here and set it up to be tracked. 61. Applying Tracked Callouts: Alright, so now it's time to track our callout. And the way that we're going to do that is we're going to take the output the final output of our merge node over here. So for me, it's merge three. Take the output and feed it into the green input of our tracker node. The green input is our tracker foreground, and it indicates the object that you would like tracked on top of the background tracked footage. Now when I do that? We don't see anything as is. So okay. Did we do something wrong? No. What we need to do now is go over to the operations tab of the tracker node and change the operation from none to match move. This will match the movement of the tracker. And there we go. We see it. It's a little off, but we do see it. So as I scrub my playhead forward now, you can see that it's following the movement. It's just not quite lined up correctly. So how do we fix that? Well, all we need to do is transform it. We just need to move it over. So I'm going to hit Control space and add in a transform node with the XF in the parentheses. And I'm going to insert it in between the merge and our tracker node. For cleanliness, I'm going to go ahead and pull it up here, so we've got some nice 90 degree angles. And now I can move the tracker point to be wherever I would like it, and I can decrease the size so that it fits right where it's supposed to. And now, when we scrub forward, our subject is being called out appropriately and the callout is following them. Couple issues that we need to address. For one, I don't know if you guys remember, but we had an in animation for our call out. Ready to preview our merge three note here. Remember, it writes on with the rectangle note. Well, I would like that write on animation to start on frame 35, because that's when I like our tracker animation to appear. So with the rectangle note selected, what I'm going to go ahead and do is increase the spline menu Hit Zoom to fit. I'm going to control the scroll wheel to zoom out just a little bit. Select our two points. And there's two options from here. One, you could hold down the Shift key and drag and move it over to the right so that it starts on frame 35. The other options, I'm going to Control Z would be to go down to the bottom right corner of our spline menu and change this menu from time to time offset. With our two points selected, now I can enter in a value for the Keyframes to be offset. So I can enter in the number 35 here. To shift it 35 frames. And now again, it starts on frame 35. So now if I were to preview the media out note again, now our callout writes on right on frame 35. Not too bad, crew. We've got two more steps here to make this perfect. The next is to have it animate off. Cause if you remember, I'd like it to stop right around frame 120. So I'm going to go forward to frame 90. I'm going to preview the merge three note here. You don't have to, but it just for me is going to make a little bit more sense, we're going to do the opposite animation for a rectangle, so we're going to animate it out. I'm gonna select the rectangle node. Go to the controls. We'll set a keyframe on frame 90. Scrub over to 120, and now we'll slide this back off to the left. Just like last time, I'm going to select the two Keyframes in our slide menu and hit F to flatten. A to preview the Media out node that's gonna look something like this. Very nice. Now, it is a bit difficult to read our call out because it's kind of matching the sky background. So there's two steps we could take here. One is we could introduce a drop shadow. So between the merge and our transform node, I could add a drop shadow node. Decrease the distance here. Decrease the amount of blur, and maybe I'll increase the strength just a little bit. That's one option, or we could just change the colors. We go to the text, make this a nice. I don't know. What kind of color would Frank like? A light blue and go to the line and change that background color to also be a nice light blue. And now if we were to go back to the Edit page and give our footage a play through, got a nice lower third, our callout animates in. Now, like I mentioned previously, our playback gets a little jumpy right in here. We're going to discuss some methods to smooth out our playback in a future section. But for now, if there is a little slow that is totally normal and okay, feel free to play around with the animation timings or the style or even the fonts and the colors, make it look and feel how you would like. But when you are all ready to go, go ahead and head on over to the Deliver page. And again, we will discuss render settings in the following section. So for now, go ahead and use the YouTube ten ADP preset, choose the appropriate location, give it the appropriate file name, go ahead and render it on out. And similar to the previous project, if you would like, go ahead and hop into Fusion for both the Lower Third animation and the tracker animation. Grab a screenshot of your notes and upload that picture to the appropriate location on the website. Just a quick reminder, I use a program called ight shot. I really like using it. It's completely free. It's lightweight, and it gets the job done very quickly. Either way you go about doing it, congrats on finishing your Fusion project. 62. Class Project 7 - Famous Landmarks: Class Project seven, our final Project Insight effusion. And I am once again asking you to leave the nest and become adventurous inside DaVinci Resolve. So this project will be very analogous to Project six and that. I'm asking you to track a call out again. This time, you'll be on your own, and you will have some more creative liberties for how you go about doing this. The purpose of this project is not to make you guys uncomfortable and to ask you to do things that you don't know how to do, but I'm going to ask you to get more practice as well as taking some more creative freedoms. This go around inside your course material folder, there will be a class Project seven folder. And inside that folder, there will be four pieces of media. I'm going to let you go ahead and choose whichever video file that you want to, but you only need to choose one. We're not going to work with all four. Just pick one that you think might work best for you. Each of these videos will contain a famous landmark. And if you don't know the name of the landmark, it will be in the file name. So we have the Broadway Tower, the Eiffel Tower, the statue of Liberty, and the Taj Mahal. So a big aspect of this project will be just tracking the callout. Like we explored in the previous video, sometimes getting a really good clean track can be difficult. So do your best with getting a good track on whatever landmark you decide to work with. The big thing I'm asking for here on this project is to take some creative liberty. Now, you are not going to be getting a letter grade for this course, right? So if you want to follow the exact same steps that we took in the previous project, I'm not going to be mad at you, but I will say that you probably won't get as much out of this project as you could. In the previous project, our tracker looked something like this, right, where we had a circle in the middle. Then we had a line that jetted out like that. Well, you could also go ahead and create a marker that looks something like this, something like you might see on Google Maps. You could choose to do something where you have a square that outlines the entire location, and then you have a callout here. You have complete control with how this looks and animates on. There are an unlimited number of ways that you could choose to animate this. And if you need some help with inspiration, you can go to a website like Behance search for callout. And snoop around to see how different people might animate their call outs in. So we've got something like this where you've got a couple of circles, and then we have a similar line indicator with a couple of lines of text top and bottom. It looks like this one's got some squiggly lines that follow along with Ooh, some animated neon lights. That's pretty fun. Another website that I really like referring to when it comes to motion graphics and animation is a website called Dribble. It's spilt with three B. Lot of times the animations are geared more for, like, user interfaces. But you can find cool things like this here, where, again, we've got a pretty fun square callout. Again, do you have to use something like this? No, but I would encourage trying to see if you can't emulate it on your own. Inside of Fusion, do you know how you would go about making something like this? Take note of the size, the position, the kind of font that's used. What colors are being incorporated? All of these things are important for you to take note of when it's your turn to make your own. This project will ask you to do a similar thing where we go ahead and render it out and upload it and take some scrancho of your no trees. This one in particular, I would really encourage you to take some screenshots so we can give you some feedback if you need it. Good luck, and I will see you on the other side. 63. Class Project 8 - Dirt Bike Trailer: I am very excited for this project. Up to this point, I would consider a lot of what we've been doing fairly basic editing. We might have pushed the boundaries of what feels comfortable and uncomfortable as we move throughout, especially when we hop into fusion. But for the most part, our goal is just to become familiar with DaVinci Resolve. And this go around, we're going to make use of all the tools that we've had, and I think we're going to create something that you're going to be really proud to show off at the end of the project. So we've been asked to create a high energy trailer for a dirt bike documentary. Our job is to make it exciting and, in fact, so exciting that at the end, somebody wants to watch the full film. Our director has asked us to make use of speed ramping, some visuals and sound design to elevate the trailer. We're going to explore what speed ramping is as we move through the course. Our video length is going to be a ride around 30 seconds, and we're keeping it horizontal. And the big requirement is to make use of speed ramping, which again, we will cover. Now, this is going to be our biggest project to date, but do not be alarmed. I will be here through the whole process. So with that said, it's time to hop into DaVinci Resolve. 64. Setting Up Your Trailer Project: Alright, everybody. So let's go ahead and get started on our first trailer Edit. And I'm excited for this one. I think you guys are going to enjoy working on this kind of video. If you don't already have it open, let's make sure we got DaVinci Resolve open, and we are going to create a new project. So I'm going to right click New Project. This go around. We're going to name it six Trailer. You could say trailer Edit, as well. It doesn't matter too much. And just like all the other projects, we're going to change our media location to wherever the course material is. So I'm going to go up one level. Go to the trailer folder. We'll go ahead and keep it within the trailer folder. So go ahead and hit Select Folder and hit Create. Now, I know it's been a little bit since we've seen this page. We've been spending a lot of time here in fusion. But hopefully you remember how we get started. Let's double check our project settings. I'm gonna go over to the cogwheel here. Double check to make sure all these settings look okay. Yes, ten ADP. This time, I would like us to use a 24 FPS timeline. We're gonna be working with some IRL camera footage. So some footage shot in person on cameras that is natively recorded in 23.976 FPS, but we're going to go ahead and round up to 24. Again, typically, you're going to work in timelines with frame rates at either 24 FPS or 30 FPS. Rarely, very rarely 60 FPS. When in doubt, go ahead and default to 24 FPS when working with real camera footage, footage shot in person. Everything else looks good to me. Let's go ahead and hit Save. Now let's go ahead and bring in the stuff we're going to be working with. Go ahead up to the upper left hand corner, find your Media pool. Before you drag and drop in footage, remember, we have that folder structure all set up in our Power Bins. So if your Power Bins aren't open, upper right hand corner in the Media pool, Show Power Bins. Go ahead and click on our Power Bins. Go to the project presets folder, default. We're gonna drag in select this and bring it into our master Media pool. See how handy Power Bins are. Makes life so much easier every go around. Okay, let's go ahead and bring in the footage. So I'm gonna go to our recordings folder. Go to the course material, and I'm in the class Project eight folder. I'm going to go to the dirt and Determination folder, which is the name of this project. Go ahead and drag and select everything in here and pull it on over to the media pool, and I'm making sure I'm highlighting that recordings sub option over here. Give it a second to think there we go. We've got recordings. We've got three subclasses of footage and our master interview file. We're going to hold off on exploring these just for a second until we get the audio imported. So I'm going to go back to the course material. Class Project eight, go to that audio folder. We've got music and sound effects like always. I'm going to go ahead and go to the music folder. Drag that in. Go to the sound effects folder and drag in the sound effects. Nothing new here. We're just importing everything that's been provided for us. The main difference this go around is we're working with more, a lot more footage in particular. We've definitely got some more sound effects that we'll talk about in a little bit. But if I go back to our recordings folder, we've got four separate items for us to look at. If I were to double click the Master interview file, so if I didn't mention it already, the footage that we're going to be working with is pulled from a real documentary on the subject here, and what I've gone ahead and done is pulled a snippet of the interview that we can use for our trailer. Let me go ahead and change the icon size so it's a little bit more legible. I'm doing that by clicking these three buttons in the upper header, I guess you would say in the media pool. We've got three folders here in our recording section. We have the action folder, a close shot folder and an establishing shot or maybe a wide angle folder. Now, like I mentioned in the previous video, a lot of times when footage is handed to you, it's handed and sorted by the day it's shot and the camera was shot on. I've gone ahead and already pregroup these to make it a little bit easier for us to sort through and find the footage that we need, but we are still going to need to sort through and organize our footage. Before we do that, let's take a quick step back and provide some structure so that we know what to look for, generally speaking, in our Edit. This is a trailer for this documentary. It's going to be about 30 seconds long, and we're going to want a lot of high energy and building moments and tension, and we're going to want to get to the point quickly. So what should be the backbone of our trailer? Well, for us, it's going to be the music. So if I go over to the audio tab, go to music, we have one track. This go round, I've only provided one music track, and I'm going to recommend we all follow along here because I think it'll make it easier to follow the beats that we're going to go along with the Edit. You are more than welcome to introduce your own music if you would like to. But for simplicity's sake, again, I recommend we all stick with this one music track. So let's go ahead and set that up. Let's go over to our timelines folder, and let's create our main working timeline. So I'm going to right click timelines, create new timeline. Now I'm going to go ahead and name this dirt trailer. So it's dirt underscore trailer. Underscore V one, V one indicating version one, because we might need to have multiple versions of this Edit. Let's go ahead and hit Create. And for some reason, Resolve always autotggles off the little tabbed setting over here. So let's go over to our timeline view options and turn on the stacked timeline viewer. Let's go over to the music option in our media pool and drag and drop in our song. 65. Music Placement and Planning: On projects like these, decisiveness becomes an ever more important factor. It'll become easier and easier to replay sections and over analyze things and become very picky with the choices that you want to make. So something that I like to train while working through this trailer Edit is decisiveness. Make quick, bold, motivated choices. And if we need to go back and correct, we can. But time is always working against us, so it's going to be paramount for us to continue to improve our decision making and our decisiveness. So let's go ahead and give this track a little bit of a play. Now, the total song length is sitting around a minute and 10 seconds. So we need to look to find a 32nd snippet that we can work with. And I'm thinking I want to kind of end here. This is a natural closing the song. It was produced to end at this moment. So I'm going to go ahead and make a cut here. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to hold down the Alt key to make a duplicate of our song over here to the right just in case I need to go back and access it. So now what we need to do is find a good starting point. So our options are to either go 30 seconds in and make a cut, so that would be right around 38 seconds, and hopefully it lines up or find two moments in the song that we can splice together. What I mean by that is if we play our song back, There's that ringing impact hick that gets used more than once. You'll see it used here and used here. Right? So on these reused elements, sometimes there's an opportunity for us to splice these two moments together. So if I were to make a cut here on the highest point and make another cut here on the highest point, well, I can ripple delate this moment. And ideally, what we've done is make a match cut that matches the left side of the audio and the right. Not bad, right? So again, the thought here is we're looking to grab 30 seconds of audio. This back half is kind of the climactic portion of the audio. So if there's any opportunity for us to bring in some of the introduction building tension, we should look to do it. So what I did is I looked for these two impacts that are exactly the same and cut out the fluff in between them. Will this work every time? No, it's a case by case basis, but when it works, it can save you a little bit of real estate. So now if I bring my play to the end, we're looking at right at a minute. So if I were to go 30 seconds in, and what I'm looking for is a nice point to where maybe we could start the audio. And on first play through that feels a little bit aggressive. So I'm gonna go back to the beginning. Now, I feel like this opening portion is going to work a little bit better. It's a little bit softer. It's not so much in your face so that we can get somebody involved in the Edit before blaring them with loud music. So what I'm gonna do is look to play through these opening snippets and see if there's not a way that we can merge this to the ending portion. Right here, this riser to where we get to that very similar base drop, I'm curious if there's an opportunity for us to make a cut on this impact and blend it with the first one over here. I'm gonna go ahead and ripple delete and just see what this sounds like. That's not too bad. That's not too bad. I scribe my play to the end. We're looking at right at 32 seconds, which I think is totally doable for us. If needed, we can always go and cut off a little bit at the end and maybe fine tune the beginning. Editing is equal portions video plus audio. So we need to get comfortable manipulating the music just as we are manipulating the visual effects, things infusion, the Edit. For somebody like myself, this might feel a little bit more natural I've been able to experiment with this, and I kind of have an intuition for what will work and what won't work. If doing something like this and looking to match beginning and ending portions of music doesn't feel comfortable, it is okay to pick a 32nd snippet of the song and work with that. So another option could be to go to the beginning and just go one, two, three, four, five, six, 78. 32nd sin and cut that off. And now, this would be your closer. Could totally still work. Different ending, a little less climactic, but could totally fit the description for what you're going for. So if you didn't like this, don't have to use it. Go ahead and use just the first 30 seconds of this song. That's totally fine. Either way, let's go ahead and start sorting through our footage. 66. Creating Stringout Timelines: Alrighty crew. We get to do the funnest part of every single video edit, and that is sorting footage. Look. On the bright side, when you do get good at this, this is where you'll get paid the big bucks because this is a not so fun part of the process, and those who can do it well, can also get paid well. Now, we're going to follow a very similar structure to how we approach the short form Edit. This go round, we've just got more stuff. So what I like us all to do is go to the media pool, go to the recordings bin, go to the action folder. I'm going to change my preview to the list so I can drag and select everything. And I'm going to drag and select all this footage. Right click create new timeline using selected clips. And we're going to call this our action Stringout. You don't have to use an underscore. You can use a space. It's just a bad habit from my coding days. Let's go ahead and hit Create. Now, everything in this folder should ideally be shots of our character, our subject, doing something on the motorcycle. So what I'm going to do is just a quick scrub through. I'm just taking some mental notes to see what kind of shots we might be able to work with. How things are framed. I'm not making any decisions right now. I'm just looking to see what we got here. Ooh, this is kind of cool. Now, depending on how your media pool is sorted in here, you might import your footage differently. So I have mine currently sorted by the type, and you'll notice that it's not sorted alphabetically. But if I were to take Control A and F to delete the footage on the timeline as is and instead sort by the clip name. Well, now I can drag and select everything. And drop it in, and now it'll come in alphabetically. So if you're gonna want to fall along with me one to one, go ahead and sort your media pool by the clipname and then drag and drop in your footage. And then I'm going to go ahead and drag this timeline from the media pool into our timelines folder. Again, all I did there was take the timeline in the media pool and put it in our timelines Bn. I'm sorry. I have a bad habit of using the word folder and Bn interchangeably. The official term is Bin in DaVinci Resolve. So go ahead and do the same thing for other recording types. So I'm going to go to the close or the close shot folder. We either drag and select or hit Control A, right click Create New timeline using selected Clips. Let's go and call this close. Stringout. We create. Quick reminder, Stringout is the verbiage we use for a timeline that strings out all the video files in that particular bin. And these should hopefully all be close ups of our subject here. Yeah, and I'm just going to do a very similar thing. I'm just trying to get familiar with the footage. We will go back and pull out our selects that we want to work with. But for you, this is probably your first time seeing any of this. So let's get a little bit more familiar with what we're looking at. This is kind of cool. It looks like we've got a GP Cam attached to the bike. Look at that shot. I'm actually going to make a cut in the footage right there and pull this up that is that might be the money shot right there. Keep scrubbing forward. And I have my audio scrubbing turned off. Remember, the shortcut for that is Shift plus S. If I were to hit Shift plus S again, Then we can scrub with the audio on. But I'm going to go ahead turn that off by pressing Shift pluss. Perfect. This looks great. No oddities. Another reason why we would do something like this is to see if we're getting any errors, anything that looks wonky that we can delete or address early on. Once that's all done, I'm going to drag that timeline into the timelines bin. One more time. The establishing shot folder. Control A selects all of our footage. Right click Create new timeline using selected clips. Establishing Stringout. Hopefully you're getting the hang of it at this point. Let's go ahead and hit Create. Now, establishing shots might also be considered wide angles or ultra wide angles, but they're usually used to establish the scene where things are taking place, it gives a grander scope of what's happening. And it looks like we've got some really cool drone footage that we're working with here. Got an overhead shot. Kind of tracking the biker. Oh, this is very pretty. I believe this is all shot in Utah. Very cool. And again, once you're happy with that, drag that timeline into the timelines folder. Now that we have our Stringout set up, if we look in the upper left hand corner of the preview window, you can see the total length of our footage. So on our establishing shot, we've got a little over 6 minutes to work with. Close Stringout, we've got 11 minutes that we can work with. And the action Stringout we've got around 7.5 minutes to work with. Now, if this is one of the first videos that you've edited, that might seem like a lot because we've only been wor working with short form video and shorter cuts. But the reality is that depending on who you work with, you could be working with hours upon hours upon hours of footage. I say that just to let you know that you don't have to be intimidated. Remember, we're not looking to put together a two hour video or half hour video. All we're looking to do is make a 32nd trailer. So the next step for us will be to find some selects and some footage that we might be able to work with. Before we do I'd like us all to venture over to the media pool. Go to the timelines Bn. And here we have all of our timelines. Now, this next step is optional, but I do recommend it when working on video projects. And what I recommend doing is mirroring the folder structure in your recordings tab. Again, on bigger projects, you might be handed multiple folders and bins worth of footage. So your timelines folder can get crowded pretty quickly, unless you also provide some structure to the timelines bin. So that's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to go ahead and recreate the three folders here. So right click New Bin. To create an action bin. Again, new Bin, close. Right click New Bin Establishing. You could also choose to add number prefixes to these. It's totally up to you and your own workflow. And let's go ahead and drag the timelines into the appropriate folders. So the next step for us will be to find our selects. 67. Making Selects: Now what we need to do is find our selects or the usable footage that we want to work with. So I'm going to go over to the action string outuTline. To start, let's go over to the action folder and our timeline folder. Remember, we're no longer in the recordings folder. We're not working with individual clips, so to avoid confusion, I'm going to go ahead and collapse that folder. And what I'd like us all to do is to make a duplicate of our string out timeline. So I'm going to right click duplicate timeline. Let this go around, I'm going to name this action Select. I'm gonna go ahead and double click it to open it. And now we have this new Select timeline. It's shifting the scroll wheel to readjust and reposition some stuff, drag my playhead back to the beginning. So now where do we start? Well, if you remember from the shortfm section, what we're looking for are usable moments. What does usable mean? Well, there's not a right answer. Usable could mean whatever you'd like. So, let's say, for instance, on this opening portion where our writer is rolling down the hill. And as I play this, you might not have noticed originally, but you'll see our footage is actually playing in SlomoT is footage that was recorded at a higher frame rate that we're now playing at 24 FPS. We'll talk about how we can address this if you'd like it to go faster in just a little bit. But to get back to what is usable, well, you might think that if I scrub four on this first clip and to be specific, I'm on r06 underscore 01. The only thing I might want are shots like this where our biker is in the air. You know what? That is probably a good usable shot. So I'll make a cut before he goes off the ramp and a cut after and drag it up one level. But you know what else might be good? Is this setup to that moment where he's riding down the hill? This could be a great moment to build some tension going into the jump. So how do we know whether I have to include a jump like this or setup moments like this? Well, I don't know. How do you know? What is motivating these decisions? Outside of your editing tuition, which might still be a little green, go back to the music. Play your trailer music. As you play through the song, what can you envision being used in those moments? And it might not be super clear which is totally okay. For you, then, as you're going through your selects, you might be a little less cutthroat with what sections you choose to use. So instead of cutting here and here, you might choose to use all of this, and that is totally okay. What I will say is that the more decisive you become through this process, the easier your workflow will be later down the road. Because essentially what we're looking for here are little nuggets of gold that we can string along. If you're a little looser with the selex that you choose to work with, that's totally okay. You might just have to do more sorting down the road later in the final edit. Let me on do that real quick. All that to say that this is why the selects and familiarization process are so important as editors. So let's go ahead and move on to the next clip. And you'll notice that I tend to drag my plate along because I feel like I have more control of the speed. Or if you prefer, you can always use the l key to play forward. Hit the l key again to fast forward, again to fast forward, again to fast forward. If you need to stop, is to stop. J goes in reverse, and has the same functions. So it looks like on r06, underscore 07, there's a little bit of setup here where they're getting ready to go down the jump. I'm going to cut a moment there while they're doing the setup. I'm going to look for where he begins to go down the hill right in here. We'll make a cut. And I'm going to go ahead and include all of this in here. I think this is all pretty cool. Oh, yeah, especially there at the end. That's great. So I'm going to go ahead and drag this up, and then at the end here, where we hit this big jump, I'm going to drag it up one more track as a part of the footage that I really want to use. Now, something else that we haven't done yet that I believe we did use in last workflow was we color coded our footage. And the reason we did this was to give us a quick visual representation of what kind of footage that we're working with. Now, again, I've already grouped our footage into the appropriate bins for the kind of footage it is. So an action shot, establishing close up, et cetera. But if you're working with raw footage from a particular day, you might need to color code each clip as you go along. Just wanted to throw that out there because you're not always going to want to bulk color code your timeline. But I'm going to go ahead and do that for our selects footage. Now, the color code, you can do it one of two ways. You can either drag and select everything. You can hit Control A to select everything. Right click, go to Clip Color. And let's do Let's see what nice orange. Orange feels action or Apricon. Orange might be a little aggressive. Oh, yeah, it is a little aggressive. I'm going to go to the clip color. Go to Apricot or an alternative. So if I hit Control Z, would be I could hold down the Alt key to just drag and select the video portion. Right click. Click color. Apricot. So now I have just the video tracks color coded. It's totally up to you just another option. I'm going to go ahead for simplicity's sake and keep everything a nice apricot. Fact, let's go ahead and backtrack real quick and do the same for other string out timelines. Drag and select the action string out. I want this to be apricot. The close shot string out. Control A, selects everything. Right click, clip Color. Let's go a teal. The establishing footage, patrol A, right click, clip color, and let's go a nice blue. Let's leave these a nice blue. Normally with the club colors, I will say the two colors I tend to avoid are Navy, because this is what gets used for adjustment clips and fusion compositions. And the green color is the default audio color. So sometimes it can be a bit confusing. Anything else in this range is pretty nice. Let's go back to our action Selex. I'm going to go ahead and scrub forward and continue to grab our selex. So I'm on R zero a underscore 15. It looks like we have a cool setup shot of our biker pulling the bike up the mountain or cyclist, Bm xist. Let's go ahead and scrub forward, and we go, Oh, here we go. This is a pretty cool shot. Whipping in the air. Grab that. Continue to scrub forward. And at this point, I'm just looking for some moments where we've got some aerials going on. Oh, this is pretty. We'll go ahead and include all that, as well. None of the decisions we're making here are final, okay? We're just getting a rough ballpark. It's okay to backtrack later on. We've got the weeds in the foreground, biker in the background. I'm gonna go ahead and cut out that segment. And there, that's pretty cool. Continue to scrub four. We've only got a couple more clips to do. And you know what? I kind of like all of this. This looks really, really good. So make a cut here, drag up. Yeah, this is great. I'm going to go ahead and hit the Alt and up arrow to push it up one track, I really like that. This feels like something we already have, so I might I'm at the tail end of that same clip. I'm not sure if I need that. Then I'll go ahead and go. The final clip here. Here we go. Looks like it starts right here. Yeah, that's great, as well. I want to pull that up to that third track. Great. Nice work, everybody. So now what we can do is we can drag and select the first row here. I'm going to hit the backspace key to delete it. Again, all I did was drag and select the first tracks here for video and audio and hit the backspace key not ripple delete, not F. Hit Control A to select all of our clips. And now mine is Map two Control Shift plus F. But if you're not using that combination, you go up to Edit. Delete gaps. And now if I hit Alt plus the down arrow, it'll push it down one track. And now we have our selects. From here, the last step that we're going to take is we're going to Control C to copy that footage, go to the action string out. Hit Control V to pace it at the end. And the final thing we'll do is go up top to the view option and hit Show duplicate frames. And now we can see where we've pulled out our clips on our string timeline. So now what? Well, time to give you guys a little bit of homework. We're going to do the exact same workflow for the other two groups of footage so the close shots and the establishing slash Wit Shots. I'll go ahead and get you started on the close shots. So what we're going to go ahead and do is I'm going to click on the Closed String Out timeline. We can either go up to the Media Pool and locate it in the band or on the timeline tab itself, you can right click and hit Fine Timeline and Media Pool. And that'll put you right in that folder. Go and right click duplicate that string out timeline, click on the name twice and rename this to selects. Open up that SelexTline. I'm going to actually drag this string out to be next to it and reorganize the selex to be right next to each other. And on this Selex timeline, we're not looking to be perfect. We are just looking to find some usable footage. So I like this close up of the bike here. Go and make a cut, pull that up. I like this moment where he's putting on the helmet. I think that's great. And we don't have to worry about the audio because we're more than likely not going to need to use any of this audio here. We're going to rely on the trailer music and the voiceover dialogue that we're going to look at in just a little bit. Go and scrub forward. But when I kind of like this moment where he's pushing the bike up the hill, I think that's pretty fun. Drag that up. Once you're all done, drag and select the first video and audio track, Backspace to delete. Control A to select all your footage. Control Shift plus F, deletes the gaps, pull it down, slide it over, copy and paste it over to the string out timeline so that you can see where you pull your footage from. We go ahead and hit Control Z a couple of times to get back to where we were at. And the next time we meet, I'd like us to all have our select timelines ready to go. 68. Setting Up Your Audio Tracks: Alright, class, time to check in on your homework. Who did their assignments? We should all be at a point where we have a Selex timeline with some picked out and cropped out footage that we think we can use. And then this isn't a have to, but after you've figured out your selects, go ahead and copy and paste it back into the string out timeline so you can match where you pick that footage. Something I think I forgot to mention before I let you guys to go do your homework was that you don't have to use every single clip. So you can see here in our establishing timeline, I didn't use this footage here, and it is also totally okay to use an entire clip and not cut out a chunk of it. So I believe in the close clips, there's this moment right here where I just pulled the entire clip because I liked it. So now what? Where do we go from here? Another optional step that you could take is to continue to refine this process. So for now, I'm going to go ahead and close out our string out timeline. So we just have the selects open. So I have our action selexEestablishing shot selects and our close selects. At this moment in time, you might not have an exact idea for how this trailer is going to play out. So as we begin to move forward, if you feel like you want to continue to whittle down your selects into particular scenes or become even more specific with the shots that you'd like. So if I go to the close select, and maybe I only want shots that are close ups of the writer's face. Well, I might even create another timeline for that? It all really depends on you, your workflow, and what you feel is going to be the most efficient for you getting the editing done. Either way, though, hopefully, we're all at a place where we have footage that we can use for our edit. So let's go ahead and cycle back to our dirt trailer V one timeline. If you are following along in the previous video, we have two current versions of the song that we're going to use. Moving forward, I'm going to use the one where we splice together the intro and the outtro of our track here. So I'm going to delete this right half. At this stage, I think it's safe to say that we're set up. We have our footage. We have the music that we're going to use, and we've got a rough idea of what footage we can use. So now what? Where do we go from here? Well, I'm going to say we're going to take the following steps. One, we're going to add in our voiceover. You might have forgotten that we do have some voiceover audio that we can include in here to help with the trailer. Two, we're going to come up with a rough cut where we'll introduce some footage on our timeline and get a basic layout of the flow and feel of our video. Three, we're going to introduce speed ramping, and this will involve using our ret control. So that'll be fast forward, slowing down, et cetera. And last but not least number four will be some polish. And this will probably come in the form of sound effects. And visual effects. Is this a definitive order for every edit? Say it with me now? No. Is it a good idea to do a little brainstorming so that you have a path forward? Yeah, probably not a bad idea. So let's get started with laying out our voiceover. I'm going to go over to the recordings folder in our media pool, and we have our Master interview file right here. Now before we drag and drop this in, what I'd like us to do is set up our tracks on the timeline. So I'm going to right click on the audio track here and I'm going to add some tracks beneath it. I think for now, let's go ahead and introduce. Let's start with five below audio one. And there's nothing wrong with adding another video track. Let's hit Add Tracks. Now, I'm going to do a similar structure to what we've done in the past except flipped around a little bit. So I'm going to leave Track one, and track two as music tracks. I'm going to name the music one and music two. Audio three, I'm going to make our Voiceover one and Audio four voiceover two. The bottom two, we're going to leave as sound effects. And as we go along, we can always reorganize and change these. I'm going to leave the coloring alone for music one and two. But for the voiceover tracks, I like to make those a nice purple. And we're also going to change that track type to mono. If you've forgotten or hopefully I haven't forgotten to mention nine times out of ten, when we're working with human voices, they will sound more full and present when working on a mono track. So let's go ahead and do the same thing for voice over two, change track type two, mono, change the color to purple. And for the two sound effect tracks, I'm going to go ahead and make those orange because I like orange for sound effects. Now, this is the second time we've gone ahead and set up audio tracks in this fashion. So a question might be forming in your head, is there a way to save this as a preset? Yes, there definitely is, and we're going to cover that in a future video. But for the purpose of brevity, we will press forward. And now we have permission to go into our media pool and bring in that master interview file, and I'm going to go ahead and bring it onto Track three, our voice over track. You know, you've done it right if it turns purple. Now, something that I would personally do here to make this a little bit easier for you to work with is I would use the Alt key to drag and select the video of the interview. And hit Alt plus the down arrow once twice to bring the video to the first track while leaving our audio on the third. So that way, when I drag and s this around, we solve our video on Track one, but our audio stays on this third track over here. Before we start to play this and look for a segment that we can use, I hit Shift and the scroll wheel to preview our audio waveforms. You can see they're pretty low here. And if I were to start to play it over here in our mixer, it looks like it's sitting around -23 DB. Which is pretty quiet. Now, there's a few ways that we can increase the volume to sit at a better level, and you might be thinking, why wouldn't we just grab this and pull it up? Well, that's totally a viable option. We can go ahead and manually either go to the audio inspector property and manually increase the volume until we're a little bit closer to that minus five DB range. Remember, when we're working with audio, anywhere around minus five is a good, happy level for our primary audio. Yeah, so the moment when you drop in is honestly one of the most So, again, I probably need to increase that even more. Moments of biking. You sit there. You prep yourself. And it looks like if I go to about plus 18. Yeah, so the moment when you drop in is honestly one of the most special. We're looking pretty good there. The other thing that we can do is we can begin to make use of our mixer over here. Now, hopefully, it's been open for the majority of our editing experience, but if yours isn't, go up to the upper right hand corner and toggle on your mixer. And we've been using it just to look at the audio levels. Me drop in is honestly one of the most special. Which it is very good at. But if I were to expand the mixer, you'll see that we have volume meters for every single track. So now if I were to hit Play, Wine drop in is honestly one of the most special moments of we can see where our volume is sitting just on track three. Now, if you don't see your mixer in this form up in the upper right hand corner, there's a little toggle that goes between the meter, which is the overall volume meter and the mixer, which mixes all of our track volume levels. So option two here is we can actually reset the volume on the individual audio file and increase it on the mixer. So I can bring up the volume on the mixer to go all the way to plus ten. And now what we've done is we've increased the volume of the entire track. Now, for this particular example, it's probably still going to be a bit low. Drop in is honestly one of the most special Yeah, so you can see it's still sitting right underneath minus ten, so we'd probably have to bring up the volume. But the nice thing about using the mixer is as your timelines begin to get longer and longer and longer and longer, you have more and more footage, instead of just one audio recording, you have five, ten, 15, hundreds of audio recordings. Instead of manually adjusting each of them, just increase the overall volume level on that track. You've got more than one mic recording. We'll just add another audio track and mix the volume on that new track. It is just another tool to put in your tool belt. You have to use it, you're not required to use it. Sometimes it makes more sense. Other times, it doesn't. For our particular example, I'm going to go ahead and reset the mixer volume level by double clicking on the slider here. So, again, if I increase it or decrease it, I can just double click. And instead, I'm going to go ahead and re bring up the volume to I believe it was at plus 18. The moment when you drop in Yep, and there we are. Where this begins to get more powerful is when we start to integrate Fairlight, which is DaVinci Resolves audio mixer tool more and more into our workflow. And that'll be really handy for mixing and mastering music and sound effects. Before now, plus 18 on the speakers volume level, let's go ahead and pick out some audio snippets. 69. Introducing Voiceover: So there's two moments in here I think might work well for voiceover, and they look almost like pockets in the audio. We can see visible drops where we can fill with our speaker coming in. But let's go ahead and play the audio one more time. And as is, this is coming in very loud. So I think this is an area where we can make use of our mixer. So what I'm going to go ahead and do is just pull down the volume level of our music track. Let's start with minus three DBs. I'm going to go ahead and play it again. So, right through here and through here, I'm going to look to introduce two audio snippets. So let's go ahead and begin to play our interview through here and see if we can't find some moments that we can use. Yeah, so the moment when you drop in is honestly one of the most special moments of biking. You sit there. You prep. Right here, I think is great. Dropping in? Yeah, so the moment when you drop in is honestly one of the most special moments of biking. You Right before he begins the next thought, I'm going to make a cut. So the moment when you drop in is honestly one of the most special moments of biking. You sit there, you prep yourself. And then the second, usually, you're waiting on, you know, Mother Nature, some wind. There's always different elements or different, like, voices in your head or, like, little thought processes that you have. And the moment that you just shut it all out and you like, just commit. This sounds like it's start of a new thought, so I want to make a cut here. And the moment that you just shut it all out and, like, just commit, that's when it's like, Okay, game on, and then you just go into a different state of mind of, like, Okay, I like the ending of this line here. Come on, and then you just go into it. The thing I'm listening for here are quick, concise sentences. Anything that begins to feel like it's running on probably isn't going to work well in our 32nd trailer. Different state of mind of, like, Okay, this is happening. It's on. There is no second thoughts. You don't try and correct anything. You literally just drop in knowing exactly what you're doing, and it is what it is by the end. Yeah. And what is he saying here? This is happening. It's on. This is happening. It's on. I think this might be our closer right here. So let's go back to the beginning. Yeah, so the moment when you drop in is honestly one of the most special moments of biking. When you drop in, it's one of the most special moments in biking. I think this will be a good line to use right in here. So I'm gonna drag and pull it in here. The other thing that we could do is just like the SelexTline is I could hold down the lp key with this first snippet selected to make a duplicate. So that way, we know we've already pulled this footage. Totally up to you? When we go ahead and introduce that in here, yeah, so the moment. That sounds like it's coming in too soon. Yeah, so the moment when you drop in is honestly one of the most special moments of biking. Okay, I think that works for now. Let's look for another snippet that we can put in here. So I'm going to go back to our voice over recordings. And the moment that you just shut it all out and it off and then the second, usually, you're waiting on, you know, Mother Nature, some. You sit there, you prep yourself. And then this You sit there, you prep yourself. I think this is good. Prep yourself. Pull that. Make a cut, pull it up. And then the second, usually, you're waiting on, you know, Mother Nature, some wind. There's always different elements or different, like, voices in your head or, like, little thought processes that you have. And the moment that you just shut it all out and you like, just commit, that's when it's like, Okay, game on, and then you just go into a game on, and then you just go into it. Game on and then you just go into it. I like this section a good bit. You sit there, you prep yourself, and then the second, usually, you're waiting on. So let's just try pulling this over and seeing how it plays out. And the moment that you just shut it all out and you like, just commit, that's when it's like, Okay, game on. And we just. That's when it's like, Okay. Game on. I'm wondering if we can't end on this game online. And the moment that you just shut it all out and you like, just commit, that's when it's like, Okay, game on. Yeah, so the moment when you drop in is honestly one of the most special moments of biking. And the moment that you just shut it all out and you, like, just commit, that's. So I've played this back a couple of times, and I really like the first half of this. And the moment that you just shut it all out and you, like, just commit. But the bad calf feels a little weak. That's when it's like, Okay, game on. So I think what we can do is introduce that line I really like towards the end here that I called our closer. This is happening. It's on. And introduce that and swap this one out. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit Control Shift D to disable this clip so that we don't delete it, but we're not going to use it for now and drag this one on top. That was, again, Control Shift D to enable and disable. Otherwise, you can always right click and go to Enable disable clip. And now that's going to sound something like this. And the moment that you just shut it all out and you like, just commit, This is happening, it's won. And I really like that. The audio mix is a little off. And what I'm throwing out mix, I meaning the overall balance of volumes between tracks one, two, three, four, et cetera. It's a little hard to hear our speaker speak at this end portion. And the moment that you just shut it all out and you like, just commit, this is happening, it hat. So the last step I'm going to take is I'm going to lower the volume of our music in this section so that we can hear our speaker coming through. So what I'm going to do is I'm gonna make a cut here, and I'm just going to bring the volume down. We'll go right around -60 Bs. Remember, when you're working with volumes, it's a good idea to work in increments of three because volume operates on the decibel scale. I'll go up to the Effects tab, audio transitions, and I'll introduce those audio cross fades on the cut here. Now, let's go ahead and play that. And the moment that you just shut it all out and, like, just commit. This is happening. It's on. Sounds like I need to move this cut point over here a little bit so that we get the full impact of that drop. Like, just commit. This is happening. It on. Not bad team. Not bad. Feel free to fine tune this. Feel free to even make a cut on our speaker and bring up the volume of just that tail portion. But either way, our next step is to build out our rough cut. 70. Building the Rough Cut: So now we're at a stage where our volume is completely laid out and now we can introduce some of the visual portions of our Edit. I hope you notice that throughout this, I did not call out specific frames. I didn't call it specific time stamps because this isn't an exact science. It is totally okay if yours moves at a different pace, if you use a different audio segment. We're not looking to copy each other one to one. We're looking to understand why things are working and why things aren't working. With that said, though, I am very happy with our audio here. So what I'm going to do is delete the portions of our interview that we're not working with. Needed, we could always put this in a separate timeline and have it for reference. But I don't foresee us needing that, so I'm just going to get the backspace key to delete it. So, rough cut time. How do we start it? Well, there's a couple ways that we can go about doing this. One is to do what we've done in the past and go to our Selects Timeline, take our selects, copy, and paste them on over to the end of our main working Edit. And we could do that for the action shots, the establishing shots, and the close ups here. So now we have all of our footage here that we can quickly scrub through to grab what we need. This is the method I prefer, because even though it might be a little bit messy, I tend to find that it just gets the job done quickly. The alternative would be to do something like this. I'm gonna go ahead and close our Selects timelines for now. And over the upper right hand corner of our timeline viewer, there's this little plus tab icon. If you click that, it's going to split our viewer into two timelines. I'm going to go ahead and readjust here so we can see both. If you're on laptop, this is going to get crowded very quickly. But if you're on desktop and you've got a nice big 32 inch ultrawide monitor, this is going to feel very nice. What we've done is split our timeline editor so that we can have two timelines open at once. So if I go to our bottom viewer here and go to the Selects Timeline menu, click this dropdown. And choose, let's say, our action select. Well, now I have our action select. Down here. The navigation is exactly the same up as above. You'll know which timeline is your active one by the orange playhead. So I can click up top here, zoom in, and bounce back and forth between our two timelines. Now, I operate on relatively combined screen space. So for me, this tends not to be a great solution, but it is a solution for those of you who want to experiment. And you can actually add as many timelines as you'd like. You can keep adding and subtracting. But just be careful because the more you add, the slower your playback and PC performance will be. To close them up in that upper right corner, there's an X icon that you can use to close any of these split timeline views. So now, let me go ahead and readjust our interface a little bit. Let's build out our rough cut. And this is another area where we can look to practice decisiveness. So what we're gonna do is play back our audio here and look to line up visuals, just like we did with the Shore form Edit. This go round, we just have more to work with. So let's go ahead and play the opening seconds. Yes. So within these opening seconds, let's find an engaging shot that we can use. We want something that is visually interesting immediately. So for me, that is probably going to be an action shot. And in particular, I'm going to go over to our action shots and look for those moments that we pulled up another level because these were moments that I thought were pretty stinking good. And I like the idea of opening with our subject here floating in air. I think this might be a pretty cool way to stage our footage. Now, depending on your preview window, you might have some cropped out bars top and bottom. That's because this footage was shot at a different aspect ratio than our 19 by 16 aspect ratio. And we can always address that later if we need to. I'm gonna go ahead. I like this right in here where he's floating in the air. I think that's pretty fun. I'm going to make a cut here, and then I'm going to make a duplicate by holding down the Alt or option key, pulling it up. Then you can either drag this over with your mouse or just hit Control X to cut it. Zoom on out, pull our playhead all the way back to the beginning, D to zoom in, Control V to paste. Let's pull this out just a little bit. Yeah, so the moment when you and I think Yeah, so the moment when you drop in is honestly one of the most special I think I wanted to hit on the impact. So I'm going to leave the black screen alone right here. It looks like our timing's off, so I'm going to hit Shift in the scroll wheel to expand our viewer here. I'm going to go back to that trim mode. Do you guys remember this? This is how we can slip and slide our footage without changing the position. It's Map two Shift plus W, and when I'm in that mode, I can change the timings here in our preview window in the upper left hand corner, that is the first frame on the clip length. In the upper right hand corner, it's the last frame for this particular segment. The bottom left is the frame preceding the Edit, and the bottom right is the frame after the Edit. So as I scrub this around, I'm going to look for this moment right wherein he's leaving the ramp. Let's try that. Yeah, so the moment when you drop in is honestly one of the I think we need to extend it out to here. Yeah, so the moment when you drop in is honestly one of the most special moments of Perfect. I think that's a good starting point for our footage. We need to. We can always go back and adjust, but let's move forward. I between talking points, you've seen videos on different track levels, do not worry. I'm not changing or hiding anything. For me, sometimes I just like to have a little bit of space for cleanliness, but I promise I'm not sneaking in things without telling you guys. So what is the next thing that our speaker says? Yeah, so the moment when you drop in is honestly one of the most special moments of biking. The moments when you drop in I think this might be a good moment to establish the stage that we're about to set. So I'm going to go to our establishing shots and see if we can't find anything that speaks to the grandiose of this moment. And for me, my sex might be a little bit different from you here, but there is this clip R 23 underscore 19, where we are staring off at the sunset, and this, to me, is just so stinking cool. Whoever framed and shot this did an amazing job. So I'm gonna hit Alt to make a copy, Control X to cut. And I'm going to go over here and paste it in. Yeah, so the moment when you drop in is, honestly one of the most special moments of biking. We're definitely going to make a cut here, so I'm going to pull the tail end here. Dropping is honestly one of the most special moments of biking. And in our trailer, in this opening section, it almost sounds like something's reloading or putting put in place. I were to solo the track right here, here, and here. This might be a fun moment to play with something. So for now, I'm going to put a marker on our music track by hitting the M key or clicking up top here, M M. We'll come back to that. I'm gonna unsolo our music track so that we hear everything again. Now, where do we go with this? Well, let's see if we can't maybe bounce over to one of our close ups. And maybe there's another heroic shot of our person here. Oh, and guys, as I'm scrubbing over here, I forgot about our GoPro footage where he is soaring in the air. You know what? I think that this might be the opener. Look at this shot right here. That is so cool. So this is R 17 underscore 03, and I'm going to make a cut here, make a duplicate, control to cut, go back to the beginning, paste it on in and extend this out. And I'm layering it on top of that orange track. So the moment when you drop in is honestly one of the most special Oh, I don't know. That's pretty cool. I like that a lot. Yeah, so the moment when you drop in is honestly one of the most special moments of biking. I'm thinking we might be onto something. So the next portion of our trailer is our speaker here, talking about the setup and getting ready and then hitting go. So in this section from about 8 seconds for me to 16, 15 seconds ish, let's look to find some moments that are going to set up our big finale at the end here. So I'm going to go back to those close ups and I have some footage here. It's R ten underscore 07. We've got a close up of the footies walking up the hill. This might be fun. So let's just start here. Again, decisiveness. It's not final. Let's just start working on things. The more decisions you make early on, the more clarity you'll provide down the road. It moments of biking. In the moment. That doesn't feel right to me. So I'm going to go and just pull off to the right for now. Let's try with maybe another establishing shot. So I'm gonna go over to the blue here. And there's this clip here of the drone flying, where it whips up and then looks at the scenery. I think that this transition from pointing down to up could be a good impact point. So this is r01, underscore 02, Air Establish Utah. Alt up, make a copy. Control X to cut it. Paste it over here just to be careful so that I don't write anything and then pull it on over. And the moment that you just shut it all out, and you like? Now, this is still feeling a bit. And the moment. Slow for me. So I think it's time for us to introduce retime controls. 71. Using Retime Controls: Alrighty Gang, it is time to add another tool to our belt, and that is using retime controls. So, up until now, we have had no say in how fast our footage is playing out. So that this impact isn't playing over and over. I'm going to go ahead and mute our audio for just a little bit. But we've been locked in with one singular speed. So how do we change that? As always, there is more than one option. I'm going to show you one that is good for broad stroke changes, and then the other option is what we're going to use moving forward. If I click our footage here and go over to the inspector tab in the upper right hand corner, one of these drop downs menu says speed change. If I double click that to expand it, would you look at that? We have speed controls of our footage, and we can go ahead and change the playback speed. So I could drag this over to let's go like, 800%, and you'll see it decreases our footage here, and it moves, much, much faster. The other way of controlling this, and it's the exact same control as if you were to right click on the clip, go to change clip speed. Same controls, different menu. Either or this can be great if you just need footage to speed up or slow down. But what I'm thinking is, I would like our footage to come in fast like this and then slow down as soon as we pan up to our landscape. In order to do that, we're going to need our footage to be at two different speeds. We'll need it fast on the impact and slow as we descend into the next portion of the Edit. So to do that, I'm going to reset our speed controls over here. I'm going to drag this out, so we're at a similar length. And I'm going to get rid of this guy for just a little bit because we don't need it. It's just going to be in the way. In order to complete our objectives, one thought that you might have would be to, well, can we just split the clip and change the speed on the left and the right? Sure. You could totally do that. That is another option. But doing something like that becomes a bit of a pain to fine tune if you make any kind of a mistake. So instead, what we're going to introduce are the retime controls inside DaVinci Resolve. To access them, right click on your footage and locate Retime Controls. Or the shortcut is Control plus R. And that's going to introduce this whole new menu system. I'm going to hit Shift and the scroll wheel to kind of expand this so we got a little bit more legibility. Now, the redefined controls are a fun one. They're a little funky to get used to it first, but once you get the hang of it, very powerful. The big thing that we're going to use is this little drop dum menu right here in the middle where it says 100%. Now, depending on how big your footage is, when you zoom in, you might not see that control. It will always be in the center of the total clip length. Somebody control Z to bring us back in. Let me zoom in real quick. If I click this dropdown menu, we've got a few options. We're gonna skip over the first one for now, but we can change the global speed of our footage, so we can go to something like 800% to really speed it up, which is just like what we were doing over here in the inspector tab. I can also reset that to 100%, and I could even slow us down to something like 25%. For now, let's go ahead and reset to 100%. Some of the cool features are setting a freeze frame, so we've got a freeze frame in the middle of our footage. And we can even rewind certain segments. Now, this rewind feature is a little bit weird, and I'll try to address that in a later section. But for now, we're going to ignore it. The big tool that we're going to want to use is up top here. It says, Add Speed Point. Before you click it, and if you did, it's okay. Maybe just hit Control Z so that we're all at the same starting point. I like to show off a couple of useful things with the retime controls. If I hover my mouse to the upper right hand corner of our clip, you'll notice that our cursor changes icons from the trim to these left and right arrows. When your cursor changes icons, I can grab the edge, and what that'll do is change the speed of our footage. If I go down, we're no longer changing the speed. We're just changing the total clip length. But again, if I go up to that upper right corner, I can easily change and adjust the speed to fit a certain length that I need to. So let's say, for instance, I'd like this B roll to fit perfectly here. Well, I can just go to the upper right hand corner and extend it until it fits perfectly. You can do the same thing on the other end, go the upper left hand corner to trim the end in. And if I go down, I'm just trimming the clip itself. So that takes us to speed points. Now, speed points are what we're going to use to split the retime speed of our clip. Wherever our playhead is at is where it will introduce our speed point. And I would like it to be right on this transition point. So we're no longer looking straight down, and we're not quite yet looking forward. I'd like it to sit right here. I'm going to go to this drop down menu, and this is totally okay if we're not 100%, we will fix that in just a moment add our speed point. If I've moved my playhead off to the left a little bit, we now have this mini playhead on our clip. And this operates exactly the same as these controls on the edges. Now that we have our Speed point located on our clip, you'll notice that there's now two drop down menus on our footage. So I can go to the right menu and reset this to 100%. And now we have two speeds. We have one that's currently at 113% and one that's at 100%. So I hate even go over here, change the speed to 25%, or grab this handle and change the speed of the right half. We reset that to 100%. So this is what we'll use to speed ramp our footage, and we'll play a little bit more with speed ramping in a little bit. Now, this speed point is a pretty special tool because it operates just like the edges of our footage. So if I grab the top handle, it changes the speed of the left half of our footage. So by grabbing and moving the top half of our handle, we can change the speed of the left half. The bottom handle changes where the speed point is located. So let's say I grab the top half and pull it in. So now we're at 200% playback speed. Well, if I were to grab the bottom handle, we're changing the speed point location of the left half here. So we're changing how much fast forwarded footage we have. So if I move it to the left, we're using less fast forwarded footage, which means there's more at a slower speed. So we're kind of extending out our clip. If I pull it to the right, we're fast forwarding more and more of our footage until we have nothing left. Be careful using this bottom half because it can get a little weird quickly. So I highly recommend anytime you'd like to introduce a speed point, Set those points ahead of time before you start changing the speed. Now, I know that's a lot to digest pretty quickly. So just remember, with Retime Controls to get to them, either right click and hit Retime Controls or hit Control R. The top handles changes the speed. The bottom handle changes the total length or whatever speed you're at. And anytime we like to introduce a change in our speed, we need to go to the dropdown menu and add a speed point. If you've been following along with the footage as is, what we've done, remember, is we've set a speed point on this transition location where the drone is panning down and then looking up. I'd like this pan down moment to happen very quickly. I almost want there to be a whip up of our footage as we impact here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring my playhead to be right within this impact here, and I'm going to grab the upper handle of our speed point and pull it in. And you'll notice that the closer I get to that playhead, this speed increases almost exponentially. That's because we're cramming more and more stuff into less and less space. I'm going to unmute now and hit Play. Hiking. And the moment that you just shot. That's not bad. We could even go more aggressive and really pull this in. So I'm at 2,000% and hit play. Biking. And the moment that you just shut it all out, and you That's not bad. How do you guys feel about that? Do you like it? Do you don't like it? If you don't like it, don't worry about it. Don't use the retime controls. Again, just another tool in our tool belt that we can utilize when we need to. I will say, though, that we're gonna come back to using this for some speed ramping down over here. 72. Refining the Rough Cut: Gang, time to finish the rest of our rough cut. You'll notice that when we have our retime controls, it almost looks like we've introduced this in between track. That's because we have our retime header up here. So to close our retime controls, we can either hit Control R or we can hit the X in the upper left hand corner. It's gonna be pretty faint, but it's there to close it. And that'll recondense everything. I hit shift in the scroll wheel. To bring things back into a nice, pretty view. Alright, now what? Well, let's figure out what we need. And the moment that you just shut it all out? And the moment that you just shut it out. And you like, just commit. This is happening it on. And you just commit, just commit? And you just commit? I still feel like we need some close up helmet shots. So I'm gonna leave our walking person here alone for a second. And I'm gonna find some shots. Here we go. Towards the end, we've got him strapping up the helmet. R 24 underscore 03. I want to grab a little bit at the end here. Alt and up to grab that control X, to cut, bring it on over here. And I'm just pacing it randomly, and then I'll place it in a moment. And the moment that you just shut it all out, You just shut it all out. This might be a good point to introduce our footage. You'll notice a lot of times that when I'm bringing in footage, I don't bring it on top of the existing footage. The main reason for that is because, remember, editing is a destructive process. So if I were to hit A in the up herro to push that up one track, we overwrote that retime footage. So in the instance that I don't end up wanting to use this shot, well, I just overwrote the footage, and now I got to drag it all the way back out. So just to be safe, you'll notice you kind of paste things off to the right or pull it up an extra track just, you know, so that I'm not overwriting anything. Let's go and play back this little section. And the moment that you just shut it all out and you like, just commit, this is hiking. And the moment that you just shut it all out and you like, just commit? Now, this is one of those shots that set at a different aspect ratio. So you'll notice something a little weird happening underneath. We've got these bars here. Don't worry. We will correct that in just a little bit. Let's go ahead and increase the pace of the footage that we're gonna introduce. So let's create a little bit of a rhythm in our cuts. The moment that you just shut it all out and you just commit? Let's insert something here. And just commit. Like here. And here, so it's on And you just commit? You like commit. Let me go ahead and trim to that marker, trim to that marker. A term that we've thrown out a few times in this course so far is pacing, and I've probably described it often as a feel thing, right? What feels right, what feels like it's dragging, which feels like it should move a little bit faster. Well, a lot of times, you can also visualize that with the Edit. In these opening moments, thus far, we have one, two, three. I would say, what is this? Two to three second cuts? Well, if we were to continue along with those two to three second cuts, it's very easy to be lulled into a pattern to where you no longer want to pay attention because you know what to expect. Another two to 3 seconds, another two to 3 seconds. Another two to 3 seconds. By changing the rhythm at which we cut at to set up a new pattern, unconsciously, it's inviting somebody to pay attention again. So in my head, when I'm playing this back and forth, I'm thinking, hmm, maybe it's time to increase the rhythm of our cutting. So now I'm going to introduce him walking up the hill. You just shut it all out and, like, you can and we'll cut it at the. And now I'm going to look for a couple more setup shots. I think there'll be one here where we can maybe get a close up of the bike itself. And on this shot where he's saying Commit, we'll probably look for a moment where he's beginning to go down the hill or committing to the jump. So let's see if we can Well, there you go. My close up of the bike. It's R ten underscore 06, Alt drag up, Control X to copy. Roll V to paste. We'll pull it in here. Cut it all out, and you like, just commit. Oh, you know what? I don't know if this works too well, c he's not on the bike anymore. We've got him strapping up walking up the hill. And now all of a sudden he's not on the bike. This doesn't feel very continuous. We might lose a little continuity. Well, let's not use that. Alright. Try again. Maybe there's one over here where he's putting on the helmet. So there we go. Now he's getting on the bike. I like this. Let's work with that. R 24 underscore 04. C. Alt drag up Control X. Da da, da, da. Paste it on over. And you like, just commit. This happen shut it all out and you, like, just commit. This is happening. Just commit. And I think I like the length of it going through commit. That feels pretty good to me. Again, we can always go back and fix this, but we've got three here, three here. That might work pretty well. I am going to trim it to end right before you start speaking again, 'cause I think that'll be another natural cut point. Let's go ahead and play that little moment. And the moment that you just shut it all out and you like, just commit this is happening, I don't know, y'all. That's feeling pretty good to me. Now, we're about halfway into the rough cut, and we're about to approach the drop here. I just want to take a second to pull back and take a macro look at our timeline. As we're editing, it's very easy to get lost in the individual frames. We've made a lot of very rapid, quick cuts here. And again, it's easy to kind of get lost at the scale to where we're only looking at individual words or moments. But when we pull back, we have no idea how this fits into the bigger picture of our trailer. So now that we made a good bit of changes, let's play this scene back. We'll call it our intro scene. From beginning to before the drop. Yeah, so the moment when you drop in is honestly one of the most special moments of biking. And the moment that you just shut it all out and you like, just commit this is happening, it's on. How does that feel to you guys? Does it feel slow? Does it feel fast? Do you feel like you should replace shots? If you want to make any changes, go ahead and do that now. I'm pretty content with where we're at. There are some glaring problems here where we've got these mismatched aspect ratios that we'll address later. But I think overall, I'm really happy with our shot choice. The last thing that I like to do before we get to the back half is find some footage that'll lead into the big drop, where he says, Let me solo that track real quick. It's on it's on. It's on. It's on. It's on. It's on. It's on. I'm curious if there's a close up of our subject here kicking off and launching down the hill. Here we go. Here's a possible candidate. I'm not sure if we'll use this yet because I might want to look at some of the close up shots, but R 16 underscore 06 in the action footage. There's this moment again, where he's launching off into the air. Make a cut here, cut here, we got hands off, Alt drag up, Control X to cut. Let's just paste it over here for now, and I'm gonna look for a couple more candidates before I start placing the footage. This moment right here is kind of like the big impact, right? It's the big hit where we really sell this trailer. So we're still going to be decisive and make some quick, bold decisions. But we don't have to stick with just the very first thing we see. You know what I'm saying? Here's something that's pretty cool where we're launching off the ramp. This is R 16 underscore 12. Gonna grab that. Control X, paste it here. Got some options. And then, oh, there's the hero shot right here. Oh, this might be the one crew, where we kick off and move into motion. R 17 underscore three. Cut, drag up, Control X. Control V. Pace it. And I'm gonna just do one quick scan through to see. Oh, yeah, we've got a lot to work with. Whoever shot this did a fantastic job. R 23 underscore 20. Cut, control vida paste. Now we've got a few options. It's on. And you know what? I might just stick with this first moment right where he's launching the air. I just think this is so sneak and cool. So let's go ahead and bring this over and see if we can play around with the timings a little bit. It's on. Is this happening? Is happening? If this is happening. And I think this could work, but I feel like it's another moment where we might need to retime our footage because this is shot in pretty slow motion. Pretty slow motion being a very technical term. So many control R to go to our retime controls. Let's scrub our play head forward. And I'm going to look for the moment. Let me go and mute this again so we're not blaring each other's ears out right here where the hands go out here. And I'm going to add a speed point. And I'm going to pull in our footage until that speed point lines up exactly with the hit here. Now, remember, the top half of our handle is changing the speed. It's keeping the speed point location the same, but just slowing things down or speeding them up. Let's go ahead and give this a play. Ooh. Volume on. Is happening. Hits on. And I don't know if we're going fast enough here. So what I'm going to do with our retime control still open is I'm going to go to that left drop down menu and change the speed to 400%. And I'll just shift the clip over until the speed point lines up with the impact. And then what I can do is extend out the footage using the left handle on the bottom left corner so it sits at the same length. So again, what I did there is I felt like this is too slow. So I want to speed it up, and we could either just grab the handle, pull it in, or use the dropdown menu and go to some of the preset speeds, changing the speed of the left half. Well, now our speed point shifted over to the left, so we got to pull it back over to the right to the end of our clip here. In doing so, we cut off where the clip began, so I extended it out. And now let's go ahead and give it a play. This is happening. If on. I don't know. That's looking pretty good to me. For me, it just it feels good. I like the pace and the hit of that moment. It might not work for you. Totally okay. I'm gonna just go and extend this clip out for now. And I'm gonna give this a play through one more time. We're gonna try to not play back certain sequences over and over and over in the interest of time, but I just want to double check. And the moment that you just shut it all out and you like, just commit, this is happening, it's on. It sounds like there is a drum hit right here. That's going to be a natural cut point. So I'm going to trim our clip here. This is happening. It's all. Yeah, right in there, looks pretty good to me. Now we have the back half of our Edit left, and we're going to implement speed ramping. 73. Speed Ramping : Everybody, we're going to do a pretty cool effect in editing, and it's called speed ramping. Now, you might have heard the term speed ramping thrown around. But what does it actually mean? Have we been doing speed ramping with our retime controls? Well, kind of. In order to explain it, let's go to our chalkboard for just a little moment. If we were to define speed ramping verbatim, it would be a ramp up or ramp down in our speed. So we are transitioning our playback speed either up or down. We ramping up the speed or ramping down the speed, which technically we have done. So if I were to click our footage here, one of the tools that we haven't explored yet, but we kind of did in the fusion page is right next to our timeline preview options. There's these three diamonds over here, and hopefully they look familiar because it's for our keyframes. So if I click them, the edit page actually has a whole keyframe interface. You don't have to follow long through this portion. This is purely for demonstration. But if you are following along, over in this menu over here, if you've got a lot of options going on, click the three dots next to the parameters and hit display parameters with keyframes only. Now, this is nice because we can change the position of our keyframes, but we don't have our spline, right? We don't see the spline that we had in the fusion page. Well, if I go over to this very small icon, almost so small, it's hidden that when I hover over, it says keyframe curves and I click it well, now we have a spline menu on the edit page, and this is actually a pretty new tool to DaventRsolve at the time recording this, which is very much appreciated. And because I have the retime speed toggled on, we can say the speed of our retime controls. Pretty nifty, right? And as is, it's an immediate change. It's not linear, like we described in the fusion page where we have a gradual change going from A to B. It's a step change. We step down immediately to the other speed. Well, if I were to select our keyframe here, this middle point, and go to the ease in and out option. Well, now we can ramp our speed down, and we can choose the aggressiveness of that ramp down by grabbing our handle here just like we did in fusion. So now if I were to play this. It's on. The change is more gradual, as opposed to being straight up and down vertical. It on. Little more impact here, right? Because the change is so abrupt, we really feel that decrease in momentum. Either way, we can ramp down or ramp up the speed. But this is in itself isn't typically what's associated with the term speed ramping. So again, let's go back to our chalkboard for a second. There's a concept in editing called cutting on the action. Meaning that when you choose to make a cut, it's at a moment where things are happening. Because things might be moving on screen, when we choose to make a cut as that motion is happening, that transition is easier to digest, and it feels more smooth because we're cutting at a moment where things are moving. There are so many great examples of this, but a lot of the more obvious ones you'll see in fighting scenes in movies where there's a giant thrust or kick. Before I play this, as I play this for, you'll notice that when Uma Thurman's character thrusts forward or makes a big swipe or a big flip, that's when the director chooses to cut angles. Swipe and thrust, boom, cut. See that? And cut. That transition is very easy to follow because our eyes are trained to look from left to right. And we cut on that action. This concept can be applied to any form of animation. You will see motion graphics and designers use it all the time to create smooth transitions from one object to the next, and we can use it for speed ramping. So what we're going to do with our clips is we're going to ramp up the speed. And then when we go to cut to the next clip, we're going to start it fast and slow it down. And it's when we're moving the fastest that we make this cut, creating a seamless transition from clip A, to clip B. This is speed ramping. So again, what we're going to look to do is on the back half of the trailer, we're going to start slow when we look to cut, speed it up after the cut, start fast, slow it down, and then repeat this process. Again, the key idea here is to look to cut on the action. So let's go ahead and try to apply this. I'm going to minimize our key frame window for now, and let's find some clips to use. Before we do so I'm going to lay out some markers. So let's go ahead and play our footage back, and I'm gonna try to find some good beats to do some speed ramping. So here we'll make a cut. There's a pretty recognizable drum pattern that looks like it's happening every second. So, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Boom. And on this last little progression section, we've got some in between. So we go, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Boom. Boom, boom. If you're not mouthing out your music and sound effects as you edit, are you really editing. Now the trick for us is to have these beats be the moments of slowdown. Remember, when we had that impactful moment here, we weren't ramping on the impact. We were slowing down and letting that moment sit with the viewer. Right? So we go, It's on boom. So I'm thinking what we're going to want to do is on this hit, we'll start slow in the middle, speed up, cut, speed up, slow down. In the middle, speed up. Slow down. So let's find some footage that we can work with. And we've already got these leftovers here that we could use. So I'm going to hit E to select everything to the right of our playhead and just push it off to the right for a little bit. And I'm going to look for some action moments. So this one's looking pretty good. R08, underscore 15. Make a duplicate. Control X to cut, control V to paste. I like this shot right in here where we've got the weed in the foreground. This is R ten, underscore 16. So I'm going to cut until our subject is in the air or look to cut while our subject is in air to make a copy, Control X to cut. Now, if I haven't already mentioned this before, there's a real handy dandy shortcut for pasting and pushing clips off to the right. So as is, if I were to hit Control V and paste, everything stays in place, but what I can do is instead hit Control Shift in V to paste and ser. And you'll notice when I do that, it pushes everything to the right. Be careful with using this because if I were to paste insert anywhere in the timeline, it'll push everything to the right. So just be aware of what you're doing. But that's a real handy dandy shortcut. And let's look to find one more clip, at least just to start out with. Oh, and there's this moment here where he's taking off the ramp, and it looks like I've already pulled it because it's highlighted here. It's R 16 underscore 12 it's got a yellow highlight, and that's this right here. Okay. Let's pull this over. So now let's start the speed ramping process. So let's pull this first clip on over r08 underscore 15. Play it here. Looks like the timing is off. Let's get him where he's in the air. Make a cut. Pull it over. And right here in the middle, we're going to make some quick changes. We want this to be moving along pretty expeditiously. Is that the right we're I'm going to control to go to our retime controls. So now the question is, where do we choose to ramp it out and speed up the footage? Well, if we were to go back to that example and look at our speed ramp, we're gonna want our impact to be right here on the slowdown. Let me use a different color. Let's go with green, right here. We want to feel the weight of this slowdown. So, for us, we're going to kind of want to ramp through here. So I'm just going to set an arbitrary point to speed things up somewhere halfway in the middle, okay? There's not a science to this. We're just going to feel it out. I'm going to add a speed point by going to that drop down menu, add speed point. And now from here, we could go to the right end, go to the upper right hand corner, pull that in, or we can just go to the dropdown menu. Go to change speed. Change this to 800%. It's going to look something like this. And we might need to adjust the timings a little bit, but let's go ahead and ramp out, and we'll just practice. So let's go to this clip here. Ten, underscore 16. Hold this on over. I'm going to make a cut. Right here. So, again, I'm kind of just I guess what I'm doing is I'm spitting the difference. Now that I'm looking at it and saying it out loud, I'm kind of splitting the difference every time I look to make that change. And now we're going to do the opposite. So at this point, we've covered this region. So we're going slow, sped up. And now we're going to need to speed up and then slow down. To do that, I'm going to start with speeding up the left half. So I'm going to go this drop down menu, change speed, 800%. And when we hit this point of impact here, I'm going to go down to the dropdown menu at speed point, and now we're going to change the right half to 100%. Slow down, speed up, speed up, slow down. And that's going to look something like this. Now, it feels a little bit off, but we have the effect there. Part of the reason why this feels off is because on the previous clip, we're going up. And on this one, we should expect to be landing, but we're still going up. So maybe is there a moment where we're landing that we could pull in? So maybe right in here, this might work a little bit better. So R 14 underscore 12. And again, I'm just looking for a moment that's kind of keeping the continuity of our cuts. Make a copy. Go over here. And to be honest, guys, this is a pretty accurate workflow of editing scenes. It's a lot of trial and error. We can look to make more informed and educated decisions the better we get, but it's okay to make mistakes and try to correct them. So I'm going to look to maybe start that ramp out here, delete that left half with backspace. And I want to make sure our slowdown hits right when the wheel is touching the ground. So I'm going to hit Control R at a speed point right at this moment. And now what I can do is go to the left half, change the speed to 800%. Do our best to line it up. Let's give that a playback. Oh, that's looking a lot better. I'm gonna go and disable our bottom clip for now by hitting Control Shift and deep. Let's play it one more time. It feels better, right? We're expecting our character to continue to move right to left and he's center frame. So when we go to our next clip here, we're continuing at a moment to where the subject is still center frame, moving right to left, and continuing the motion that we expect to see. But because we're ramping through that cut, we're changing the speed and increasing it as we go through this motion. The cut from before to after is pretty smooth. So let's go and play it again. That in a nutshell is speed ramping. Now, something we could look to do is what we talked about a little bit ago. So I'm going to go ahead and just pull this clip off to the side for now because we don't need it. Pull this down. And if I select our footage here, go to the keyframe menu off to the left and pull this up. If you're working on an older version of DaventiRsolve, this menu still exists, but it'll appear as a drop down menu underneath the clips itself. So you'll see a little keyframe icon here that you can click to still access this menu. And newer versions, they've gone ahead and made a whole separate interfaces actually it's kind of nice to you. This is your first time opening it, you're going to start here where we can just see where the speed point is at. If you have a lot of controls here, again, we're going to click these three dots and it display parameters with key frames only. This will only show things that are key framed. To get to the ramp curve, we're going to look at our retime speed, not the frame, the retime speed. Make sure this curved icon is toggled on. And then you'll click this icon all the way to the left. When you hover over it, it'll say keyframe curves, and that'll give you your curve. And from here, we can drag and select our key frame point and click the Es in and out button. It'll be the middle curve option where you've got handles to the left and to the right. And now we can create a ramp. Again, I tend to be a fan of making this ramp pretty aggressive. I tend to feel that the weight of it feels correct when we're pretty aggressive with the ramping motion. Let's go and do the same thing with the right clip. I'm going to select this footage here, drag and selck that keyframed speed point. Click that option here and pull in the handle. And now, if we were to play this It's subtle, but there is a ramped out motion. You can really notice it if you pull out the handle a lot. Right. Much different. Let me go ahead and collapse this curve menu for now. I'm going to select our three clips here and hit Control R and trim this so that it lines up with our marker. And with that said, it's homework time. Once again, Crew, you now have the tools to complete the back half of the trailer. So take some creative liberties to introduce whatever clips you would like up until this point here. And there is one piece of footage that I'd like us all to work with. I'm about 23 seconds into the edit, and we have this song snippet right here. Where you can hear the bass Strom. What I'd like us to do is at this point here, and again, the exactness isn't super important. I'm gonna set a marker. I would like us to all work with this clip right here where he's flying through the air. It's the GoPro shot. R 17 underscore three. Grab a rough snippet of that. Copy and paste it over here all the way until the final impact. So go ahead and meet me back here in just a couple of minutes with whatever you choose to fill in this space here and a closing clip. I will give you full creative freedom to choose whatever your closing shot is. 74. Creating Flicker Cuts: Alright, everybody, time to turn in your homework. Hopefully we'll all have a completed timeline. I will go ahead and play where I got to. Opening it on. So, how did you do? How did it feel? Did you end up experimenting with anything? You could have even gone into fusion and tried a few things out there. I'll say that I kept everything the same except for I did a few speed ramps in here, and I ended up going back and forth between this clip and this clip. I wanted something aerial before I transitioned here. And I ended up leaning on this one because I really liked the composition of the shot. Blue sky, orange landscape, really great contrast, subject stands out in the air, an insane shot here. And the ramps looked just like that. Speed up, slow down, slow down, speed up. Speed up. Slow down. Up, down, down, up, up, down. Okay, gonna hit Control R to hide those real quick. If you did your homework and you have made it this far in the Edit, go ahead and pat yourself on the back. This is the hard part, the rough cut. Getting all the footage onto the timeline, organizing your music, the voiceover, and just getting stuff laid out is hard, and you guys did it. So congratulations. Now we can do some fun stuff. If you remember in the previous video, I wanted us all to have this clip right here where we're flying through the air. It's R 17 underscore three. We're going to use this scene to build out a couple of really cool facts that'll integrate a lot of the things that we've learned in some of the previous sections. What I would like us to do is you'll notice that I've overlaid it on top of the clip before it. So we've got this clip where we've got a wider angle and the biker soaring through the air. And I've lined it up to start right before we have this breakdown into the bass drop. It's gonna play back quickly, but I want you to listen for it. That dent da, da, da. That sequence, that's what we're going to work with. What we're going to do is we're going to flicker on this footage, and we're going to do frame increment cuts, similar to the short form Edit, where we did that hyper sequence, that Hypercut building into the rest of the Edit. So what I'm going to ask us to do is to line up to the peaks of the music track in here and you can kind of see it speed up. So we've got one here, kind of. One here, here, here, right? You get the picture, see where there's peaks in the audio, wherever that moments at. Again, it doesn't have to be perfect. Go over one frame using the right arrow and make a cut. Go to the next peak, make a cut, right arrow to go over one frame, make a cut. Continue to do this and progress along until you have a rapid series of cuts. And I'm going to stop right here. And in these gaps, these areas in between, go ahead and hit the backspace key to delete them. Let's go ahead and give that a play. Pretty cool, man. Pretty cool. If this hyper sequence of cuts is something that is going to bug you, do not stress it. You don't have to use something like this. I would just make sure that you're at least cutting on the base drop. We want to make sure that we're at least cutting there. So now we have Perfect. Let's do some visual effects works now, and this is where things can again become pretty fun. 75. Building a Camera Flash Effect: Let's go and do some visual fax works now. We're going to add in a blur fade on this impact. So right where we hit at the end. Bang, right there. We're going to have a blur fade, which means you are finally going to have permission to use effects. Through this next bit, there are going to be some differences between the free and studio version. Because if I were to go over to the effect tab and go over to our resolve effects, because I'm in studio, I will have access to the lens blur. If you're in the free version, you will not. But you should at least have access to the Gaussian blur. And yes, it is pronounced Gaussian. He was a mathematician, not Gaussian. And S. Always, there's more than one way to do this effect. For instance, what we could do is drag and drop our effect, and I moving forward, I am going to use the lens blur effect. If you are on the free version, go ahead and use the Gaussian blur. Dragon drop that. Onto our clip. And would you look at that? It is blurred. And what I'd like us to do is have this blur fade off. Well, if we need to change a property over time, we have to keyframe it. We need to animate it. So let's go ahead and go to the beginning of our clip here and set a key frame for the blur size. This will change the amount of blur on our footage. And by default, four is a nice and fined value. And go ahead and scrub forward some distance. I don't know, it doesn't matter and pull this all the way to zero. And now when we play this forward, our blur fades off. So on that impact, boom, blur fades off. So that's one way of doing it. The other way of doing this and one that's a little bit more dynamic is to get adjustment clips evolved. So I'm going to go ahead and delete our effect here and go over to the Effects tab. Now, remember, adjustment clips are the universal tool of the editor. They can do whatever we need them to do. So if I were to bring and drag and drop in an adjustment clip, by default, mine comes in at 2 seconds long. Your probably comes in at 5 seconds. It doesn't matter. We could do the same thing. I go over to the resolve effects, drag and drop on a lens blur effect. He frame it at the beginning, go to the end, he frame it off. And now, again, our blur fades off. Why? Why would we do this? We just did it on the clip. So why would I put it on an adjustment clip? Well, silly goose, unlike the clip here, I can duplicate this effect quickly. So if I wanted to apply our blur fade anywhere else on the timeline. So let's say, I'd like to have it hit on this middle impact here. Well, I can just hold down the Alt key to make a duplicate and drag it over here. And now, again, we have that same effect applied. How stinking cool is that? But we can get even better than this. Because we are all now fusion experts and wizards, you bet your buns, we're gonna hop into fusion and make this ten times cooler. So, what I'm going to ask you to do is to go up to the upper right hand corner of that effect on the adjustment clip and remove that effect. There'll be a little trash can icon here. Let's go ahead and hop into the fusion page for our adjustment clip. Remember, you can either right click and hit Open infusion or hit the X key if you were using my keyboard shortcuts. The plop you into fusion. O hand corner, single viewer, give us a little bit more real estate here because the beautiful thing about fusion, remember, is that it's a composite. It's meant to combine things to make it look real good. So not only can we do this with a blur, but we can combine this with a couple other tools to make it really pretty. So I'm going to control space. Let's start with our blur. Again, moving forward, I'm going to be using the lens blur tool. If you're on the free version, go ahead and use the Gaussian Blur. Let's go ahead and add that in. Got the same interface as the Edit page, which is fantastic. I'm going to hold down the Shift key and insert it into our footage. And we're going to do the same thing on the fusion page, beginning of our composition. Key frame the blur size. Go to the end, drag it to zero. With our spine menu open, let's go ahead and expand that. Zoom to fit. Dragon select these two points or hit Control A, F is to flatten, and I'm going to ramp it down. A lot of times when we want to create weight or impact, we need some kind of acceleration out or in. For us, accelerating out is going to sell this flash of blur. And I do mean flash. So what we can do is combine this with other nodes to create a really simple camera flash effect. So, the other thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to take control space, and this time I'm going to look for a brightness contrast node. Let's go ahead and hit Add. Holding down the shift key, I'm going to insert it before our lens blur. Does it have to be? No. I just tend to find the results look a little bit better if we do our flash effect before the blur. And now what we can do is we can go to the beginning of our footage, increase the brightness to I kind of like 0.5, maybe 0.75. I'm not a huge fan of all the way at one. We don't need to completely blind people who are watching this footage. So I might go 0.75. I set a key frame, go all the way to the end. If we drag this all the way to the end, we go completely dark. What we're looking for is zero. So again, it's 0.75 at the beginning, zero at the end. Zoom to fit. Control A, selects all of our key frames. F is flat and grab that top handle, smash it on down. And now we have a very handy flash effect. Now if we go back to the Edit page and give this a play through how fun is that, man? And there's a few instances where we could probably re use this effect, including the very beginning of our clip. Right, right here. So I could hold down the Alt key, make a copy. And now, we've got a really simple, fun way to ease into our footage. Yeah, so the mom. This is the reason why we learn fusion. DavinciRsolve is so stinking, incredibly powerful. But if we only stick to the Edit page, then we lose so many incredible tools that are tucked away in all these other places. Before we move forward, I would be remiss to not show one more thing. Let's save this. Now that we've made it once, there's no need for us to redo this every time. Go to your media Pool and go to the VFX folder. Drag and drop this adjustment clip into that folder, and we can even rename this to camera flash. And now, anytime I'd like to call this effect later in our timeline, I can go to our media Pool and drag and drop this in, and it'll keep the name that we have, so we can see our camera flash effect on the timeline. Even better than that, we can save it forever because when it lives in the media pool, it lives here in this project, which is fantastic. So while we're working on the trailer, we can call this whenever we need. If we would like to use this on any project ever in the future, da da da da Power Bins. If yours aren't already open, upper right hand corner, three dots show Power Bins. Go ahead and expand that. Click on your Power Bins. Let's create a new folder in here. We'll call it VFX Visual eft. Now, all we need to do is go to the media Pool side, oh five VFX and Dragon drop that into your VFX Power Bins. And now, if I click on the Power Bins Bin, we have our adjustment clip ready to go on any project. We've got one more step to take, and then you have officially edited a documentary trailer. 76. Adding Titles and Finishing Touches: Alright, everybody. We got one to two to maybe three more things to do, and then we are done with the trailer edit. Nice work out there so far. We're going to go ahead and add some title cards in here, some text to provide information on our movie. So the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to go to the beginning. To this black screen area before the first hit, and we're going to add some text right in here. So go ahead and head on over to the Effects tab, and in your toolbox, look for the titles menu. Now, we've used text plus nodes in fusion, but we haven't actually used the pre built out titles. And if you scroll down, DaVinci Resolve has a bunch that you can use. Now, again, depending on for or paid version, you might have access to some, you might not have access to others, but there's some preset titles over here. One that we're going to start with is all the way at the top, and it says text plus. Text plus should be your go to for any standard text, meaning anything that's not moving has no effects. You just need text on screen. Why text plus as opposed to text? Well, text plus, if I were to drag and drop it in, we have all the options that we're used to seeing in fusion. So we have the text, all those controls, layout, transform, shading, et cetera. We're going to drag in the text. Effect. Lot more limited. It's a different set of controls. It is very simple, but you'll find it pretty limiting quickly. So text plus, we're going to start with text plus, and I'm going to trim it so that it sits right before our footage comes in. I'm gonna click on that Text plus block, and we're going to type in Coming Soon. As a quick reminder, if your screen isn't showing the checkered background here, it's because you're not previewing transparency on the Edit page. To find that, it's over in the timeline viewer options, viewer background, checkerboard. Yours might be set to black by default. What I'd like you to do is pick a fun font that you want to use for this movie. I'm just going to go ahead and stick with Josephine Sands to not create any more confusion, but I encourage you to pick a font that is fitting for our dirt biking trailer. And I think the size, as is fine. Our graphic designers might scoff at this and say, you need to go smaller, or you might need to occupy the whole frame. But for now, I think this is totally fine. Let's go ahead and give that a play. Yeah, so the moment when you drop. That looks pretty good to me. I can even turn on the black background, so we have a better representation of the final render. Yeah, so the moment when you drop in is honestly one of the most special moments. Oh. Now is the time to deal with the bad aspect ratio. So we've got one more title card we need to introduce at the end for the name of our documentary here, which is dirt and Determination. But we've got mismatched aspect ratios, these are cropped up here. So what are our options? Well, option one, click on the footage. Zoom in. Pretty easy fix. Option two is to crop all of the footage. So we'll introduce some black bars on the top and bottom that you might be used to seeing in cinematic films and productions. One way of doing that is to go ahead and go over to your generators. Go over and drag and drop in a black color generator. Go to the setting time and crop it. This seems a little ridiculous, although it is a solution, you know, it's here for you if you need it. DaVinci Resolve actually has a very handy dandy remedy for this if you go up to the timeline menu, all the way at the top of DaVinci Resolve. So again, all the way at the top timeline, there's a menu here called output blanking. And what we can choose to do here is blank out portions of our video based off of the aspect ratio of the video. So anything past two will crop top and bottom. So if I were to go to something like 2.35, Oh, there we go. Now we have the top and bottom cropped. Unfortunately, as far as I know, these are the only options you can use in DaventiRsolve to mass apply it to your footage. Otherwise, what you are going to have to do is, I'm gonna go ahead and reset. The real quick timeline, output blinking, reset. You're gonna have to drag in a solid black color and crop the bottom, make a duplicate. Flip it around, and then you extend it to go over the entire length of your footage. Completely up to you with what decision you choose to make, you can either just zoom in or apply the output blanking or create some solid black bars that go across the entire timeline. Now that crisis has been averted, we're going to do a final title card here for dirt and determination. So on this final impact, we're going to reveal our final title. So I'm going to go over to the title menu, and we're going to look for a nice, handy preset one that should be available for both free and paid users, and it's called Fade on. It's a nice movie friendly title effect. Go ahead and drag and drop it on, line the left end up with that impact, drag it to the end, and then select this title card. Go to the title menu. We're gonna change our font to be Josephine Sands or whatever you choose to go with. And we're going to call this dirt and determination. Now, that's looking pretty good, but it's kind of blending in here where the sky is blown out. So a way to create some separation would be to add some drop shadow. And we can do that one of two ways. Option one, go over to the Resolve Effects. Go to the magnifying icon right here and look for Drop Shadow. We can drag and drop that into our title. Now we can adjust the strength. I probably the big one is going to be to decrease the distance and amount of blur. So it's really sitting underneath our title here. So my distance is almost at zero, my blur is sitting right around 0.38. And that's a lot more legible. The other alternative to this, if you want to get a little frisky is you can delete this, and you could hop into fusion on this effect. All of the titles built into DaVinci Resolve are built using fusion, right? It's not some random magic. So I can double click this title, and I can see exactly how it was built. It's built using a text node and a blur node. Simple as that. You can go in here and even add your own drop shutter node and fine tune it to fit your needs. Is this necessary for this kind of an effect? Probably not, but any excuse I can get into fusion, I will take. And now, when it's all said and done, this is our final trailer. Yeah, so the moment when you drop in is honestly one of the most special moments of biking. And the moment that you just shut it all out and you, like, just comment, this is happening, it's on. I mean, can we get a round of applause, even if it's silent and nobody can hear you? Nice work, everybody. So, how do you guys feel about this? What things do you think work for you? What things felt uncomfortable? What didn't make sense? What I will say you can do is, if you're motivated right now and you've had a cup of coffee is there's a few things that we didn't touch quite yet. One is, if you remember at the beginning, we had these Click sounds that we never really ended up exploring or trying to edit to. Was it necessary? I don't think so, but you could go ahead and explore and see if there's any ways you can create some effects or mix and match footage in here that could work. And the other big one is we didn't use sound effects. Again, is it necessary? I don't think so for this edit. Could it elevate the edit? Absolutely. Either way, when you're all ready to go, let's go over to the deliver page. In this go around, I am going to talk about some export settings just a little bit. 77. Exporting and Delivery: So up until this point, we've kind of ignored this page and just prayed and hope for the best. Because there's a lot of settings here, which means a lot of options for you and a lot of ways to potentially goof up. Now, for the most part, we're still going to pretend like this is magic, but I think it is important for you if you are learning how to Edit and learning to use to eventually resolve what some of these things mean. So we're going to go ahead and direct our focus over to this left column here where we have our export settings. And the first two options are pretty obvious, file name, location. I don't think we need to cover that. The next choice we have is to either render as a single clip or individual clips. If you toggle this onto individual clips, what DaVinci will do is render out each one of these items as an individual save. For our scenarios, this isn't very useful, but if you were somebody like me who needed to render out individual segments for, say, a DaVinci Resolve editing course for students to look at, well, that's an easy way to save individual clips. The next item is our video audio and file settings. These are tabs that can cycle through our different genres of settings. 99 times out of 100, we're going to want to export the audio with the video. But if you just want the video, there's a toggle option here on the audio tab. Generally speaking, I would leave these settings alone, including the audio normalization. What this drop down menu attempts to do is remaster your audio, meaning readjust the volumes to fit some kind of standards. So if I were to check this on. We've got a bunch of standards that we could try to meet, including Netflix and YouTube and Disney plus. We don't need to worry about that. Go ahead and leave this off. But that is where this lives. Over here in the file tab, there are some cool things you can do here that mostly come in the name of setting up variables for if you were to render out individual clips. So for anybody who's looking to get really nerdy inside dementia Resolve, you can press parentheses to pull up the variable menu, and that'll let you do things like add the clip name after every rendered clip. This is more important when you're working with individual clips than single clips. If what I just did seems like black magic, I promise, do not worry about this. We're going to leave this tab all alone. So file audio tab, generally speaking, we're not going to worry about this. Go and leave these guys alone. Over on the video tap, though, there are a few things that are important. And the big one is going to be your format. When I click this dropdown menu, there are so many options. Me personally, I've never even heard of DCP or I don't know what an MCF OP atom is. So the good news is, we don't have to worry about these. There may be particular projects or scenarios where the client you're working with or whoever you're delivering to has requested a specific format. If that's the case, well, then you can go and turn it on. So if they need AVI, we'll go ahead and turn on AVI. But for us over here in Essentials course and, there's going to be two we're going to work with. One is MP4. You can think of MP4 as the universal container slash format for videos. It's accepted by basically every video hosting platform and can be edited by any video editing tool. When in doubt, MP4 MP4 is going to be our home base for the majority of things that you're going to be editing. Underneath that, we have the Kodak, and for some reason, it defaulted me to APV. You are never going to want to use APV. Well, I shouldn't say never. You're not going to want to use APV. There's two that are going to be comfortable for you. H264, h265. Without getting too much into the weeds here, h264 is an older Kodak, which means it's a little less optimized, so you'll tend to get bigger files, but it's old reliable. You can swap 2h264, and everything is going to work handy dandy. Underneath that, though, is h265. And because it's one more than h264, it's newer. It's a newer Kodak. It tends to generate smaller files while maintaining the same quality. There are some very, very, very subtle differences between the two. Are you and I gonna notice them? No. So what I would say is normally we're going to want to use h265. But either way, you could use 264. You could use 265. They're both gonna work. Fantastic. There's really not that big of a difference between the two. Underneath that, this may change depending on when you view this video and what version of Daventi Resolve you're on. But if you're on the free version, you will not have access to the encoder. Again, this could change, and you could have access now, but this is also a Studio feature. And what this details is what DaVinci Resolve uses to render. So if I go to this dropdown menu, I have access to using my N Video graphics card, which means it's going to render faster than if I use the native encoder, which would be your CPU. You also notice that when I swap to my native encoder, which means the CPU of your computer, we lose some of the settings down here. So if you're on Studio, I would always recommend using your graphics card. There's very, very seldom an instance when you want to be using your CPU over your GPU. We're going to go ahead and cover some of these settings that you need to worry about down here, but there could be one other format that you could be required to use, and that is QuickTime. When we render MP4, the file extension is dot MP4. When we render in QuickTime, our extension is dot MOV. Dot MOV files are generally a larger file format, and they can be higher quality. The only issue with using a dot MOV file is that it's not always supported. I would say eight times out of ten, so it's not a nine out of ten, but eight times out of ten, you can get away with QuickTime. So, for instance, when you're uploading to YouTube, I believe you can still use QuickTime to upload videos. But if you were to upload to a social media platform like Twitter or I'm not sure if TikTok supports it, they won't accept QuickTime file. Just like MP4, we do have h264 and h265. But because this was originally Apple format, we also have access to Apple ProRes as a Kodak. And I'm not going to get into the weeds of this because I don't think it's worth our time here in this course, but just know this is a pretty good one to have. For us, though, for this video, I like us to all go to MP4 and change the Kodak to h265. We want to make sure our resolution is our timeline resolution. Every once in a while, you want to down res for a specific occasion. And we want to make sure our frame rate is our timeline frame rate. Cool. So this far, we haven't changed anything except for making sure our format and Kodak are all set. Now, I'm going to go ahead and switch my encoder to Native for our free users for just a second, and then we'll hop back to the Studio users. But the same concepts are going to apply here. When I go down to the bottom here, we've got a bunch of scary things, and the only thing that we're going to worry about is the rate control. See, there's this concept of bit rate, and all bit rate really means is how much information is stored per frame or per second. So how much stuff can we really fit in per nugget of time? Which means that if I were to go full screen, how much can it save per little snippet? Are we going to get all of the blues? Are we going to get all of the light blues, all of the oranges? How much? Should I limit the number of blues that we save? Depending on what the bit rate is, you might have a sharper image or something that feels a little fuzzy. If you've ever downloaded a twitch clip and played it back and wondered why it doesn't look very good, that's it's saved in a very low bit rate. So to control our bit rate or how much stuff is stored, go over to the rate control. And go to variable bit rate. And this will let us set the bit rate for our footage. If this is something you're curious about, I highly encourage you to do a little bit more deep diving. But as a rule of thumb, I would normally go double the frame rate in megabytes per second, meaning that as of right now, we are at 80 megabytes/second. Because we're at 80,000 kilobytes/second. I know we're throwing out a lot of math here. What I need you to know is that if our frame rate is 24, our bit rate should be 48,000. This will deliver a crisp image. It will take up a little bit more memory if we were to lower this, but this will deliver things at a pretty good quality and a pretty good encoder. This value right here is going to be the biggest determinator of quality. The only other option that we could toggle on is we go over to the Keyframes option, and this is different than key framing the blur size or position and check that to every. To save memory, while we render, what DaVinci Resolve attempts to do is blend information across frames. Instead of starting with a blank slate, every frame we choose to render, well, it tends to look at the previous frame and go, What can I steal from that? When we toggle on this setting, we're saying, Hey, I actually do want you to create a blank slate every 30 frames. The lower you make this, the bigger the file, the more information you store. By default, we can go ahead and leave this though at automatic. Just wanted to go ahead and throw that out there for those that are curious. Now, for our paid users, it's the exact same thing. So if I go over to Invidia, the option we're going to want to make sure we have set is our rate control and make sure it's at variable bit rate. Instead of being below it, it's up top here. See? Says 80 K, we can change that to 48, double the frame rate. If anything, just remember double the frame rate or don't remember this. This kind of stuff is not super important when you're first starting out. If anything, what I should say is MP4 h265 or h264. Now that we've got it set it up, once, though, you best believe we can save this preset. Go to the upper right hand corner to these three dots. And when I click that, we have an option that says, Save as new preset. So I'm gonna click there. Let's name our preset MP4 24 FPS. And this is kind of new and fun. We've got icons now, so I like this one. There's also another checkmark down here to add to Quick Export. We're gonna leave that alone for now, but I'll show you what that is and hit Save. If I were to go back to the Edit page, one of the icons up top here in the upper right is Quick Export. And if I were to click that, we've got some quick export options like the Tik Tok preset and the YouTube preset. Let's go ahead and back to the Deliver page. So now that all of our settings are all set, all we need to do is make sure we set our out point to the end of our footage. And you'll remember it's kind of funky doing this. You got to go in one frame. So left arrow, one, hit Oh. Our playhead always looks one frame to the right. So if we set the outpoint here, we got a hanging frame. So rag that in to the end there. Go ahead and choose the appropriate location to save, so I'll go ahead and save it to my desktop. And we're going to go ahead and name this class project oh eight dirt like promo, and then name. Brandon. It save, add to Render Q. It Render. Nice work, everybody. 78. Class Project 9 - Parkour Promo: It is now time for Class Project nine. We are nine projects in everybody, which is not too shabby. Now, similar to the dirt and determination trailer, this video will be a bit involved. We've got a lot of moving pieces here that we need to figure out how to put together for a trailer following the journey of a Park or athlete. This is now your chance to combine storytelling, pacing, and style and to apply the techniques we've learned thus far. We've been provided the full interview recording to pull soundbtes from along with music and folly for audio. Music and folly. That's a new term that we have not heard before. Well, if we go ahead and locate Class Project nine in our course materials, we've got two main folders here, audio and BOS Park core. By going to the audio folder, we've got three things here. One is the full interview file. Now, unlike last time, I provided the full interview. It's only 10 minutes long, but I'm going to give you the creative freedom to choose any kind of audio bytes or soundbtes from the interview that you'd like to. Have a music folder here as well, where we've got some song tracks to choose from. And this go around, we have a folly folder. Now, folly is a specific type of sound effect that is used for ambience or environmental sounds. So if I were to preview something like the trampoline audio file, you can hear the trampoline bouncing in the background. These can be great to use to accent certain moments in the video or just to help, again, build up the ambience of a scene. I did not provide in this project separate sound effects. What that means for you is that you can pull in sound effects from previous projects or you can begin to practice acquiring assets. You can do that by recording your own on your phone, or you can go to some stock media websites. This is totally optional, but if you want to get practice, finding some sound effects that you can use, go crazy. The other folder we have in here is our actual footage. So we've got two different types of footage. We have indoor footage that was recorded inside, and we have outdoor footage, which was recorded outside. This go around, I did not sort them into different shot types. So there's no close action or establishing you're going to get practice, picking and choosing what you feel works well grouped together. Project says, You have full creative freedom here. There will be a large pool of video and audio to work with, but feel free to download and port your own library to this project. So that's what I was getting at with importing your own sound effects or if you have some overlays or anything else that you like to include, go crazy. We have a loose video length requirement of 30 to 60 seconds. So somewhere around here would be fantastic. Keep the video horizontal at ten ADP, and we would like a 24 FPS timeline. Once it's all said and done, render on out, upload to wherever you plan on streaming the video from and provide that link. There shouldn't be any new surprises, but this will probably be one of the first bigger projects that you're going to do on your own. Take your time. Feel free to revisit past lessons if you need refreshers on steps that you should take. And at the end, just like dirt and determination, I think you're gonna be really proud of the work that you end up producing. Good luck, and I will see you on the other side. 79. Class Project 10 - First Color Correction: It is now time for us to venture into one of the last undiscovered pages in DaVinci Resolve, and that's the Color page. Now, the Color page can be a lot. It can be very intimidating at first. So we're going to talk through what you need to focus on and build a step by step system that'll make your life easier inside the Color page. We've handed footage from a documentary called Donut Dynamite. So for this first project, we've got two clips that we're working with. One is a product shot of all the Donuts. Man, those look so good. The second is with the lady from the shop writing up the menu. Our goal is going to be to correct the footage and then apply a look or a grade at the end. So we're going to start by balancing each shot and then work to create a look that fits the tone of the documentary. Requirements are to work with a structured not tree. That's what we're going to talk through in the following lessons. I'm going to start with exposure, balance, contrast, and then end up with a look or some adjustments. Dissimilar to the previous projects, we are not going to render out a video, although you are, I guess, welcome to. We're just going to export a still. So what I mean by that is when we apply our look and our color grade, what I'm going to ask you to do is to not render out the video, but just instead grab a single image or a still shot of your color correction. In order to receive credit, you will still need to upload it to the class projects and assignment section of the website. I think that's all I've got. Let's go ahead and hop it back into DaVinci Resolve. 80. Intro to the Color Page: Before we can begin our new adventure into the color grading world, I felt it was important to revisit our dirt bike editing trailer for just a moment. And the reason being to highlight why color grading is so important. I've gone ahead and muted our footage for now because we don't really need to hear the audio. And if I were to scrub through our footage here, let me go ahead and readjust window so we can see a little bit better. It might not be apparent to you unless I call it out, but can you see a clear difference between our establishing shot in Utah here and the hero shot behind the bicyclist. This first shot has a lot more exposure, and it feels like it's got a lot more oranges in here, as opposed to this shot here where we're almost sitting in a magenta or violet range. And what can happen is if we don't pay attention to the colors used in our footage, well, these shots don't feel like they belong together. If you're somebody who's done any amount of in person filming, you know how important it is to record around these similar times of day, similar footage, same camera, same lens length, what can happen is you can get disparities between your shots. So even if we go back one clip further, this one feels so much more desaturated. Compared to this one. So our goal moving forward this section is not to master the color page, but to understand it enough to achieve looks that we would like and to correct footage appropriately. To do so, let's go ahead and create a brand new project. I'm going to go down to the home icon in the bottom right corner because I've already got DaVinci Resolve open. We're going to create a new project here. We're gonna call it seven Color page. And just like in the previous projects, we're going to go ahead and locate our course material. And we're going to go ahead and select the Color page folder. Hit that and let's hit Create. Alrighty. Brand new project. Where do we start? Well, we can do one of two things. First, I'm gonna over to the Power Bins. Go to the Master dropdown folder, project presets, default, dragon drop in our folder structure. Next thing that we're going to do is go to our project settings, make sure this all looks okay. And like our previous trailer Edit, I'm going to actually change our timeline frame rate to be 24 FPS. Everything in here looks okay. But this time around, I am going to make a note because for anybody who wants to take coloring a little bit more serious, there is a very important menu in your project settings over here called Color management. Now, through this section of the course, I'm going to do my best to cover what we need to know in terms of using the Color page. But unfortunately, it's not going to allow us enough time to do a deep dive into color science. If there is something that you would like to learn in the future, please let us know. And in the future, there could very well be a Resolve, advance Color page course. But again, we haven't changed anything in here. Let's just go ahead and hit safe. Is letting us know we changed our project frame rate. Yes, that is totally fine. It changed. Let's go ahead and bring in the footage that we're going to be working with today. We go over to the recording section. Go to our course material here. Now, in both Class Project ten and Class Project 11, there's only two pieces of media. And this time I would like us to go ahead and import both folders at the same time. So I'm going to drag and select both Class Project ten and Class Project 11, drag and draw them over to the sidebar. So that we have both sets of clips here. And if I cycle between the two bins in our media poll, you'll notice that there are only two clips in each. And the footage that we're going to be working with today is footage taken from a Bakery documentary. Specifically, a doughnut Bakery documentary, it's called Donut Dynamite. And, wow, do those look so good right now? The next step we need to take is to make our timeline. So I'm gonna drag and select both these clips. I want to make sure I right click on the footage name. Create new timeline using selected clips. And this time, I'm going to call this class project ten. We're going to use all the project settings and hit, create. And now we have both of our pieces of media on the timeline. We're going to actually work with the lined up doughnut sequence first before this chalkboard segment. So if yours is out of order, go ahead and swap those around. I take Control X to cut. Bring my playhead all the way back to the beginning and hit Control Shift plus V. Again, that's Control Shift and V. Paste inserts our footage. Alright, I think we checked off all the boxes we need to to get started. Our next step is to get into the Color page. But unlike Fusion, you cannot right click on a clip and hit Open and Color page. So to hop over to the Color page, we need to click the Color icon, Top into the Color page. I'm going to go back to the Edit page real quick just to call something out that's very important. I mentioned this before when we were swapping to the Fusion page, but just to call it out again, whenever we change pages in DaVinci Resolve, so from Edit to Fusion or Edit to the Color page, we will enter the Color page on the clip, wherever our playhead is located, and whatever clip is on the upmost track. So even though I have this clip selected, if I bring my playhead over here and hit the Color page, we go to the Color page for the second clip. And again, if I have this clip on top of our first clip, I bring my playhead over here and I have the bottom one selected. It doesn't matter. I will go to the Color page on this clip. So just keep that in mind, because if you've got multiple things layered like an adjustment clip, for instance, you might need to disable that adjustment clip or whatever footage is above to get to the Color page on the right piece of Media. With all that out of the way, let me go ahead and enter the Color page. And let me go ahead and reset because this is how you probably entered the Color page. Now, depending on what size screen you're working on, your bottom row may look different than mine. I'm on a 14:40 P.M. Monitor, so I have three sets of panels. Yours could be combined into just two. It's not going to make a difference at all, but just be aware when we cycle through some of these different tools down here, you might need to locate where that is for you if you're on a smaller monitor. So let's get some of the interface stuff out of the way, and then we'll go ahead and hop into the color page. And I'm going to start at kind of a weird spot. I'm going to start right smack dab in the middle here. This row right here will show a giant Stringout of every single clip on your timeline. So if I were to go back to Edit page and copy and paste this over and over and over and then go back to the Color page. Well, now we have a ton of clips lined out here. Let me go ahead and undo that real quick. This can be a useful menu when we're looking to access color correction on another clip. But for now, I'm going to go up to the upper left and minimize that option. We also have this funky little middle bar here, which is a mini timeline preview, which is kind of cute. I like it. And just like you can imagine, when we go left and right, we preview the different clips that are on our timeline. Like fusion, color correction is a clip by clip sequence by sequence process. So if we do need to scrub forward in our timeline to do some color correction, this can be nice to have, but 99% of the time, we don't need this. So if you go up to the upper right corner this time, you can hide the timeline menu. Now, just like the Edit page and infusion, we've got a couple sets of menus that we can toggle between in the upper left and right corners. So in the upper left, we have this gallery option, which we'll cover in a little bit. We have Lutz, which we will also discuss in a minute, our Media pool to look at our footage, that clips menu that we just toggled off, and the upper right, we have Quick Export, which I believe we mentioned a few videos ago, the timeline option. Nodes. Nodes are back. If you didn't like Nodes infusion, oh, man, I've got bad news for you. They have returned here in the Color page. And we also have an Effects tab that is very similar to the effects menu on the Edit page and this Lightbox button. Ooh. And that changes everything a whole bunch. We're going to ignore Lightbox from now. To create a little bit more real estate, I would like us all to collapse whatever your upper left menu is. So if it was the gallery, the Lutz, or the Media pool, go ahead and collapse that. And now we've got a nice big preview window here. Over in the upper right section over here we have our corrector Nodes. One of the reasons why I like to cover fusion before the Color page is that if you can get comfortable operating in fusion, using corrector Nodes in the Color page becomes very, very easy. The color page is a bit different than fusion and that we're not going to call corrector Nodes, meaning I'm not going to hit Control space here to look up a brightness node. All of those tools live down here. What we are going to do is set up nodes to perform specific functions. And again, these things will continue to elaborate on as we use them in this course. So hanging on to Nodes for just a second. We will be back and hanging out with you shortly. Now it's time to call our attention to the massive elephant in the room. This bottom row. Would you look at all of these knobs and graphs and sliders and Keyframes? Keyframes on the Color page. For anybody who's never heard of the terms lift, gamma, gain, and offset, feasting your eyes upon all of these different menus that we can cycle between can look and feel extremely overwhelming. But just like the Edit page, and just like the Fusion page, we don't need to worry about 90% of these tools. I have to remind you all that DaVinci Resolve actually started out as a color correction and color grading software. The Edit page in Fusion didn't get incorporated until years down the road. So when I go back to the Color page, this page is the most fleshed out and developed page inside DaVinci Resolve. If you didn't know, there are actually color grading professionals called colorists that will spend their entire life inside this page, and they love it. They love messing around with the gain knobs and the RGB curves and maybe going and playing with the Color warper tool. So for you, for somebody who's just entering this world, what do we need to worry about? Well, that's my job. So again, don't stress too much about memorizing what every single one of these tools do. We're going to keep things very simple and make sure we are very effective with the tools we do learn. But in order to do so, we need to learn how to use our scopes, which is what we're going to cover next. 81. Using Scopes to Read Color: So let's go ahead and talk about Scopes. If you haven't already swapped to it, go to the bottom right corner over here to these upper tool icons and swap from the Keyframes menu to your Scopes menu. And through this next little bit, you are free to just watch along. You don't necessarily have to click every button that I'm choosing to click. So What is the scope? Well, we've got more than one scope. It is scopes. So if I hit the little expand window right here to pop this out. Oh, my goodness, we've got a bunch of scopes here. I'm going to change our grid pattern to just the single viewer 'cause I like to keep things nice and simple. Scopes, in essence, are a graphical representation of the colors on screen. So right now, we're looking at our parade scope. Which gives us a graphical representation of the red, green, and blue values with respective to this current frame. If I were to change our playhead, you'll notice that the scope changes as well. To help illustrate this point, I'm going to turn on a very handy dandy tool over here in the settings menu, and I'm going to go to the three dots in the upper right corner of this window and turn on the display qualifier focus. When I do that, you'll notice that as I move my mouse onto frame, if you look over at the scopes, there's now a circle highlighting exactly where that pixel is located. And for the parades in particular, it presents the red, green, and blue values moving left to right. So as I move my mouse left to right, watch the qualifier Focus, move across the scope. On this right third here, you'll notice that in our parades, most of the values are pretty close and clustered together. It's not until the doughnuts are on screen that we see a little variation. If you're like me, there's probably some questions now forming in your head. One of them being, which of this is good? Do I need to be up at 100? Do I need to be down at zero? How do I get an A with this graph here? There's no good range for your scopes. These are just presenting information to you. So if we're looking at a scale of zero to 100, all that's saying is that when we're at zero, we have zero red value, zero green value, and zero blue value. If we have an RGB value of zeros, you know what that is? Black. Dark. Darkness. Vce versa, if we're all in the hundreds range, you know what? That would equal White. That's very, very bright. So as we continue to discuss scopes in the color page, the mindset isn't which graph is best. It's Okay. What does the graph look like? What does our scope look like? And what does that mean in terms of how our footage is being presented? Does that make sense? We're not trying to push this cluster of colors all the way to zero all the way to 100. We just now know that, Okay, our background is sitting pretty close to the shadows range, and we're gonna discuss shadows midtones and highlights in just a little bit. As you saw when I first popped open this menu, there's a lot of different kinds of scopes. So if I go to this drop down menu right here, I go to something like the waveform, and the waveform is a combined version of the parades. So instead of having the RGB values split, it's combined into one. So the graphs are very similar. We just have our colors laid on top of each other. So again, I pull my mouse and move left to right. You can see where it's falling on our scope. And if you missed it, the way I was able to do that is I went up to the three dots and I turned on the qualifier focus. We're gonna come back to the scopes soon, but the two that we're probably not going to discuss are the chromaticity the chromaticity. Did I say it right that time? The chromaticity. There we go. The CIE. This involves a little bit more color science. And so I might mention it at one point, but we're going to probably not need to worry about this. The other one is the histograms. Histograms are another way of looking at parades. It's just a little bit more normalized. I don't tend to find it as useful, but if you like histograms, go crazy. But one that we are going to end up using is the vectorscope. And would you look at this? This is pretty fun. The vectorscope is almost a top down view of the colors as presented in our frame. So one of the useful filters here, and again, you don't have to follow along here. We'll cover this in just a little bit. So if I go to the settings or I should say the filter options here, which is below the three dots, I can hit Show two times Zoom, the Zoom in here. And now we can see how much color is being used in our frame, and it's split into a color wheel. So we have red, yellow, green, son, blue, magenta. Just like you would see over here in our color wheels. So if I bring my qualifier focus over here, the vectorscope is often a better representation of the amount of saturation in your scene. So how much color is being used? It's a little hard with our parades to figure out what has a lot of color and what doesn't. When we go to the vectorscope, we can see exactly how splay out all of those colors are. The further away from the center, the more saturation they have. So if I remove my qualifier focus on the background, you'll see, no matter where I move it, it stays pretty don gon close to the center. But as soon as I move onto our pink donut here, now we begin to venture out into color and fun land. So again, which version of our scopes is best? Is it supposed to look a particular way? No. This isn't a game of how far can we push the colors out to the edges of the vectorscope. What we're attempting to do is see a non biased representation of our frame. And I'm being very specific with the word non biased. Now, why might you think that I would use a term like that? Well, when we're editing, your monitor does not look like mine. My monitor isn't going to look like somebody else's, and it's also not going to look like a TV screen. It's not going to look like a movie theater screen. It's not going to look the same as an IMAX display. So what scopes do is give us a non influenced representation of our data. So we know that when we reference our scope, this pink here is going to sit at the exact same region on my vector scope as it is yours. Hopefully, that makes sense because sometimes I have to work remotely from a laptop, and my laptop screen is way over saturated compared to my desktop monitor. So I need to rely on Scopes a lot to make sure I'm in the right ballpark. What I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to hit the X in our pop out window. To pull it back down over here. And if we ever want to bring it back out, we can just hit that expand arrows. And you can actually drag it off screen and have it on second monitor if you would like. Doesn't matter to me. But whether or not you choose to pop out this window or not, what I'd like us all to do is to go to a single preview and change this from vectorscope to waveform. You can also choose to use the parade display. It's totally fine. But between these two, select one of them. But now it's actually time to talk about our set of tools down here. 82. Color Wheels and RGB Curves: Alright, everybody. So now we have a lot of the preliminary information out of the way, and it's time for us to talk about our color wheels and our RGB curve. These are going to be the primary tools that we're going to use for the most part when it comes to color correction and color grading. And in order to show these off properly, I have to bring in a new example. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring in this generator here and our effects tablet's called ten steps, and all it does is break up our brightness scale into ten steps. And real quick, let me backtrack just for a moment. If you are going to follow along and you want to use the ten step generator, make sure you turn it into a compound clip. DaVinci Resolve will not let you go into Color page for generators. These little guys up here have a special set of functions that are not meant to be tampered with, but by turning it into a compound clip, we kind of hide that feature. So I'm going to go to the Color page here. Now on her Scots, we have this stair stepping cascade that goes from zero all the way to 100. And what this is really helpful for is demonstrating just exactly what the heck these guys do. So just like infusion, how we started with the basics, let's do the same here on the Color page. And let's go ahead and tackle this beast over here in the bottom left hand corner, your primary color wheels. Now, again, if you're on laptop, the curves and the color wheels might be combined because these two panes kind of get smooshed together. So if you would like to follow along here, make sure the primary color wheels are open, not the HDR wheels. These are our different set of tools that we'll cover maybe in a little while. We want the color wheels. One of the first questions I had when learning these wheels is, why do we have four of them? What is going on here? Well, to put it very simply, each wheel represents a particular region of brightness inside the color page. Lift represents the shadows. It represents the darker regions on our color spectrum. Color wheel itself has a bunch of different tools that we can play with. But the one underneath it is this overall global slider. And if we grab this wheel and crank it to the right a little bit, you'll see we increase the overall value of our lift. And if we take a look at our waveforms, we've also increased the values of our scopes. So we've pushed it to brighter and brighter regions. And if I continue to increase this up, you'll notice that we change the shadow values proportionally more compared to the brighter regions. On each wheel, there's this little reset arrow that I can click to reset the overall value of this wheel itself. And the last control we have over here is the big fun one, and it's the wheel itself where we can shift the hue and saturation of whatever region we're working with and move it towards a specific color. So when I grab the wheel value and push it down into the right, you'll notice that the darker regions become a pretty saturated scion blue. And if you didn't know, let's do a quick little color science talk. The opposite of red is actually son. The opposite of green is magenta. The opposite of blue is yellow. So if you've never caught this when you're working with old school printers, a lot of times they will print in the scion yellow Magenta region. And the reason for that is because they can subtract magenta to get green. And you can subtract yellow to get blue, subtract scion to get red. Just go in store that little nuget of information in the back of your mind. Color Wheels are important. If you ever want to make something a little bit more blue, well, you can always subtract some yellow. Anyways, back to the Color Wheels. Alright, so lift is the shadow region. Let me go ahead and reset this. Every wheel will have the little reset icon right up next to it. Gamma is the midtones. It covers the middle region. Every single primary wheel has some math associated with it that does influence both ends of the spectrum. But notice how when I grab the value wheel for our Gamma color wheel, and I increase that. Notice how different it is compared to the lift primary wheel or the shadow wheel. We almost begin to form this exponential curve here where we're not even touching the completely black region, right? So if I reset this real quick, instead increase the lift slider, the Gamma region is only affecting this central region primarily. We also don't have to increase. We can decrease as well, and we'll get that inverse exponential function. I reset that, and just like the lift wheel or the shadow wheel, we can influence the colors in the midtones. And you'll notice that our black bar over here is completely left alone. So, lift shadows, Gamma, midtones. Gain highlights. So the gain is going to affect the brighter regions of our graph. So if I grab our value wheel, we begin to blow out or over expose the upper regions of our graph. If I take a look at the scopes, we're really stretching it past the upper bounds here. And just like last time, we can go and try to effect the colors. And now we're actually influencing the most bound here, that white value, right? When we were on the lift slider, if I change the colors, we're not even gonna get close to changing the color on that white bar at the end there. These are structured in a way to make it easy to be remembered. Lift, gamma, gain, shadow, mid tone, highlight. Lift, gamma, gain, shadow, midtone highlight. Offset is the big dog at the end of the line. It controls everything. So it's a global change in every single value. So when I grab and pull this up, it shifts everything up and down uniformly. You know, if I were to reset this, and pull the slider, it changes again, everything you formally. Let me reset that. Now, for those who want to do a deeper dive into this, Lift Gamma game and offset actually have different mathematical operators associated with them. So if you want to learn more about color science, do a deeper dive into the Lift Gamma gain operations. But for us here in Essentials course sland, just remember, if shadows, Gamma midtone gain highlights, offset, everything. If you can remember this, I have fantastic news because you've just basically learned the Color page. I mean, we haven't learned learn the Color page, but these tools just get repurposed in different ways across the Color page. What I mean by that is if we go over one more pane over here to the RGB curves, and it's indicated by this S curve on a grid icon, this is the exact same thing as our lift Gamma gain wheels, but graphically. So what I can do is I can grab the upmost bound to increase the highest values of our frame. So the upper right corner represents the highest valued pixels. Bottom left is the black point. So we can shift the darkest region to either be darker or brighter. And then if we want to effect just the shadows, well, I can click a point here and pull it down. And now we're only affecting the darker regions. If I want to affect the highlights, well, I can do the same thing and just click a point here and pull up the highlights. And you best believe we can even do the exact same thing in the middle here to affect our mid tones. To get rid of a point on your graph, you just right click. And that'll undo it. All that to say that when we look at some of the different tools on the Color page, so our RGB curves or the HDR wheels, this is the exact same thing as our primary wheels, but split up into even finer points. So we have the black point or the farthest down left point. We got a dark point, which is probably sitting here, the shadow region, the light region. Highlights, specular or the white point. There's a little bit more happening behind the scenes here, but again, it's just another set of controls for you on the Color page. So, now that I've labbed your ear off for a little bit, let's actually go and color correct our footage. 83. Exposure: Alright, so we have returned to the Color page on our lined up doughnut shot here, and I've got all three doughnuts in frame, and we're going to begin to color correct this footage. Now, quick reminder, Color correction is a process of rebalancing our footage so that it appears and looks like it did in its natural state. Color grading would be applying a look to that footage. So what that means for us is that we're going to try to create a very full balanced look first. And hopefully that'll make more and more sense as we continue to move forward. What I would like you to do if you haven't already is find a frame with all three doughnuts on screen. This will be called our hero frame. When it comes to color grading, we can't see every single frame at one moment. So what we attempt to do is find one frame in particular that's going to be the best representation of our scene. Once you got all three doughnuts in frame, I'm going to go ahead and close and collapse our Scopes menu for now. Secretly, we've been hiding our corrector nodes over here. We've been kind of ignoring them up until this point. Well, now we're going to actually make use of them. And the way the corrector nodes work is just like infusion, except they don't have functions associated with them. They just represent a particular change we're making down with our tools over here. So if I were to go and mess around with the offset, you'll see that we now get this little graph indicator saying, Hey, you use the primary offset slider. If I wanted to, I could either right click and hit Add node serial or Alt plus S to add another corrector node. And with this corrector node, I could go to the curves here and pull down the shadows. Now we've got a little curve indicator saying, Hey, you're messing with the RGB curves. So what we're going to do is we're going to set up a small chain of nodes that represent changes that we're going to make on the Color page. To reset a node, you can always right click and hit Reset node grade or click on the node itself and find the property that's been changed and reset it. And what we're going to do is we're going to create four nodes. So I have one, two, so to add another one, we can right click Add node, add serial, or we can use that shortcut Alt or Option plus S. And each one of these nodes is going to represent one step we take in our color correction process. Now, each node is going to represent one step that we take in our Color correction grading process. So let's go ahead and label what those are. I'm going to right click on our first node here and hit node label. And we're going to call this first one exposure. The next one, we're going to go over to node two, right click, node label. This one we're going to call balance. Next node over, right click, node label. Contrast. The final one we're going to do is we're going to add a node label and call it adjustments. This four node structure is everything and anything you will ever need for any video moving forward. There may be a point down the road where you're working with camera footage and you need to learn about color space transforms or using DCTLs, it doesn't matter. When it comes to color correction and color grading, these four nodes will be all you will ever need to get started. So let's go ahead and get started. And let's start with exposure. Exposure you can think of as controlling the light balance of our image. So how dark and bright are images overall? If we look over at our scopes over here, you can see that we've definitely got some brighter parts of the image. Most of our values are clustered between this, midtone area and shadows, but we do have some highlights in here. So Oregon attempt to do is to just bring up the brightness using our gain slider ever so slightly. On the Color page, oftentimes, less is more. When you start to increase too much and go past our max point here, this 100 value point, what you've done is you've blown out the image or you overexposed it. What you're really doing by going past this point is now we're losing information. So instead of having some subtle grays in here and some lighter pinks, when I go past that, now everything is just white. And if you'd like to see exactly what those values are, you can right click on your frame and hit Show Picker RGB value. And no matter where I scrub through on here, these values are going to say 255255, 255, because we've blown out our image. So let me go ahead and reset the gain here. Why am I using the gain slider as opposed to Gamma or lift? Well, gain is highlights. So I am trying to increase the brighter values to be a little bit brighter while maintaining some of the darker regions. An alternative to this and one that I tend to actually use more is to use our curves because I can click in the highlights region and just push it up a little bit to increase our exposure. And again, I'm not pushing it way up here. I'm just looking to increase the brightness ever so slightly. The RGB curves are also nice to work with because it gives you a representation of where your values are located on the graph itself. You notice that if I were to click a point here, we're affecting a lot more of our values as opposed to up in the highlights region. So I'm just gonna increase it ever so slightly. Now, I remember when I was learning the Color page that one of the questions I had when I was looking at my waveforms here is, so is the goal to have something touching the hundred value and the zero point at all times? Because when we're looking at our graph, we don't have anything in the Black region. So is that bad? Well, let me ask you this. If you're working with footage shot at night, are you gonna have something that's sitting in the brightest point of your color spectrum? And if you're shooting footage at the beach, are you gonna have stuff down here that's completely crushed out in the Black region? Probably not. We will address this down the road, but for right now, all we're looking at is the exposure and just brightening up our image a little bit. The next step is balance. 84. Balancing Your Image: Now it's time to move on to the balanced node, which is always a fun one to try to communicate. You see, the Color page, probably more than any of the other aspects of the post production process, meaning, you know, we were in the Edit page infusion, really is a feel thing. It's definitely an area where I get to say there's not a right answer over and over and over again, which I know can be frustrating for a lot of you guys out there. So what I'm going to continue to do is try to provide structure to what these terms mean, but just know that if your shot doesn't match mind one to one, again, it's okay. So balance is a big one, and it's what we do to try to recapture the natural colors of the frame. You might have heard the term white balancing before, which is where we attempt to regain the natural whites of a scene. Now, I will say, I'm just going to throw this out there, but I don't recommend using this tool, but you are going to hear about this little dropper over here. Over your Color Wheels, there's this little eye dropper next to this big A, which I have purposely not mentioned, and we're going to continue to ignore it. This is a white bounced dropper, and what it'll do is if I click on it, and I look for an area that should be white, it will attempt to change the temp and tint of the scene to white bounce our image. But again, we're not going to do that. What we are going to do is go over to our scopes and change the drop down from waveform to vectorscope. In general, when we're color bouncing, we're going to bounce back and forth between waveform and vectorscope. These are going to be the primary two that we use over and over and over and over again. And what I'd like us all to do is to pop out that window so we can get a better view of everything. If you weren't following along earlier, there's two settings that I'd like you to turn on. Over the slider icon over here, go ahead and click that. And I want you to make sure you have show two time Zoom on and show skin tone indicator. We're going to come back to this in the next set of footage, but the big one is to have the show two time Zoom on. This will make it much easier to see the overall balance of our image. So, remember, the vectorscope shows the overall distribution of all of the colors on a color wheel spectrum. The further out we go, the more saturated we are. So if I were to hover on this orange and maybe the blues, see, we kind of push away from the middle. But if I go on the white regions, we're pretty doggone close to the middle. So when we talk about balancing, we're going to attempt to push the overall distribution of our colors closer to the middle. And all that means for us is that we're going to go over to the offset color wheel. In the previous node, we use the gain or the RGB curve, but on the balance node, we're going to go to the offset wheel, and it looks like the dead center of our colors, this big white blob is almost directly up. So if I go to the offset slider and pull it down, and I'm not going to go too far. Remember, when we're on the Color page, little changes go a very, very long way. But I'm going to pull it down just a little bit so that we're closer to the center point. And now, if I were to go up to the upper right hand corner, there's this little toggle where we can turn off color grades and fusion effects. We can see our before and after. So we've pulled away from this violet red tint into a more neutral base with our canvas underneath it. Now, if you get to this point and it feels flat to you, well, that's okay. Maybe you don't like it. Maybe you don't want to balance the image, and you like the magenta tint. It's okay. Again, there's not a right answer here, but if we're going to practice balancing our image, we're going to be looking at our vectroscope and attempting to recenter the colors. If you're trying to copy my values exactly, you can go ahead and jot them down to follow long cause like, we're at 21.75, a little over 25, and a little under 24 for the RGB. But there's no need for exactness here. This is the process I'd like you to use for white balancing. Going to have another example here in just a little bit where we're working with some of the in person footage. But when it comes to balancing an image, using the eyedropper here can be a pretty destructive and aggressive tool, meaning that it'll change things very quickly and you'll lose information very quickly. So instead, I'd like you to use your offset slider. Let's go ahead and close our scopes. And now we have a before and after. Seeing in a much more neutral, hopefully balanced place. The next step is contrast. 85. Adding Contrast: So contrast is what makes things feel like it pops. It's what adds a lot of depth to images, and it's where we attempt to push and spread out the darker and lighter regions. So if I were to go to my vectorscope and go to the waveform, scope here, go to my contrast node. So one of the things that we have not mentioned at all are these little sliders up top here. We actually have controls for the temp and tint, which we mentioned in the last video when it came to white balancing. We're not gonna really ever touch those, and right next to it is contrast. So again, contrast is gonna attempt to push out the white values, push down the dark values while keeping the midtone values mm. Relatively the same. So if I were to grab this slider, you can begin to see how it affects the image. There's this really handy one next to it called pivot, where we can choose to move where that spreading location is. And what I mean by that is instead of it choosing to create contrasts in the middle, it'll go from the highlights or the dark shadow region. Now it is a tool for you, but we are not going to use it. The problem with using contrast and pivot, even though you could get away with it is that you lose a lot of fine motor control there. Instead, what I'm going to recommend us do is to use our color wheels. Or the RGB curve. And I personally like using the RGB curve here. So just for an example, we'll start with the color wheels, and then we'll swap over the RGB just a second because, you know, they essentially control very similar things. But this is where we'll attempt to push some of these values into a darker region to create a little bit more contrast. So if you were to take a hunch over here as to what wheel we should use to do that, hopefully you're leaning towards Lift. Lift controls darker regions, shadows. Lift shadows, lift shadows. So I could take that value slider and pull it down. And I'm being very careful not to push this bottom right hand corner past the zero point. I don't want to crush the dark values or crush the shadows. There we go. Now, since we've kind of dragged everything solely down to the shadows, well, to compensate, we can either go to our midtones or the gain here and push those up. Now if I were to just click this node and hit Control D to disable and enable, it's a subtle change, but we have a lot more depth, especially on our background mat here. You can kind of see some of the crevices a little bit more feels a little bit more full. This is totally an option for you. I tend to not use it all that much, and I'll show you why. I'm going to reset the lip wheel and the gain wheel so that we're back at a nice, happy starting place. I like to use our RGB curves, and what we're going to do is create an S curve. This is a pretty common term you'll hear thrown around. And the reason why we call it an S curve is because we're going to make an S on the curve. The reason, in particular, I like using it is because, again, we can kind of visually see how our colors are laid out. So instead of being pretty broad stroke with the lift, gamma, and gain, I can be very specific, and I'm going to create a point right here, right before things ramp up into the mid tones, and I'm going to begin to pull that down. My screen in front of me might look different than the way it's displaying for you. So, again, for me, I'm keeping an eye on the scopes and making sure that I'm not going past anything. And in fact, when I'm using the scopes, I'm purposely making sure that I'm not getting close to that zero point. 'cause if you've forgotten, we've got one more node over here for the adjustment. So if we get to our adjustment node and we start making some changes, well, we have no wiggle room if we're all the way down here at the bottom. So we make some changes over here, and let's say one of those changes influences the darker regions. Well, now we're going to begin to lose information. Do you have to be off the zero point? Again, no. It's just a good idea most of the time. Now that we've brought down some of the shadows, well, we could do the same thing we did over here with the gain wheel. And click a point in the highlights. I am not going to click over here. This is going to create a lot of contrast, and it's going to get very nasty, very quick. What I am going to do is I'm going to click somewhere in the middle over here where we've got all this breathing room to push up our highlights a little bit. And I'm just going to kind of feel it out, and I am not going to do too much. I'm not going to go up here and I'm not going to go up here. I am just going to increase it ever so slightly. And in doing so, and in creating these two points, we've created an S in our curve. This S might be a little bit more dramatic depending on what you're working with. But in general, when we're creating a contrast curve, we create an S curve. To get rid of points, you can right click. Another cool feature about this curve is, let's say I really don't want to adjust the values of the midpoint. Well, I can kind of lock that in by clicking a point here. And now instead of creating a pivot using these sliders over here, I've created a pivot point in my S curve. You could think of it almost as like an anchor point. Before, after. For after? Does it feel too exposed to you? Well, if it does, you can always bring down the white point that upmost bound a little bit. And then try to recapture some of the highlights. Again, I'm making so small changes to the values here. When we're on the Color page. Our job isn't to work with miracles and literally paint on the colors. A lot of the heavy lifting should be done in person. Our job is to just make the best possible version of the frames that we've been given. And that takes us to our last node, the adjustments. 86. Adjustment Nodes and Secondary Curves: We've got one final step, and then we're done with our first example here on the Color page. This is the adjustments node. And a matter of fact, you could have as many of these as you would like. See the adjustment node is set up for you to make any final adjustments that you would like, and that could be applying a look. It could be changing a specific color on a specific part of the image. It doesn't matter. So we're going to talk about some of the adjustments that we can make in our footage. Now, the Color page offers so many incredible tools to really create any kind of look that you're going for here, either by softening the image or creating a split tone look or controlling specific colors. There's so many different ways that we can influence how our frames are being presented. So I'm going to do my very best to cover some of the really cool ones that and a lot of them are going to live right here. For me, it's my center toolbar, but it's where the RGB curve is located. We are not going to worry about the left bottom third here for just a moment. Now, I am not going to be able to cover every single button that we could click, but there are a few that we can click. In our RGB curves, you might have noticed that up in the upper right hand corner of this pane, there's a few options that we can toggle to. So we're not going to worry about this little menu over here for now. Let's go ahead and click this guy, the one right next to the icon that is currently selected where it says custom click Hue versus Hue. And Oh, would you look at that? That's pretty fun. On our Curves menu, we have a series of curves that we can swap to that control and change different properties on our image. So Hue versus Hue looks at the range of colors and attempts to change the hue on that specific value that you select. So, for an example, let's say I want the blue, what do you call these cereal pieces on this doughnut to be green? I don't want any blues in my images. I want these to turn green. Well, what we can do is with our qualifier tool selected, and you'll know you have your qualifier. If you look in what do you call this the mid left region, you got the qualifier option turned on. I can click a point right here. And you'll notice in our Hue versus Hue graph that now we've got three points. We've got one in the middle and two bounding it to the left and right. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna push the left one out a little bit, push the right one out a little bit, to give us a wider range to change the blue values in Would you look on screen? Now we've got rainbow, pebbles, and flakes. How fun is that? Now changing something like this can be very strong and can break your image very quickly. So be careful, but it is an option. So I could even push our blues maybe closer to, you know, a purple down over here. And similarly, I could probably change the color of this pink doughnut, so I could click the pink here. A dot and then pull that up. And you'll notice that it's missing some values in here, which means that I might need to push out the bounds on my hue versus hue graph. And, Oh. And in doing so, I think we might have broken the image. You see now how everything is kind of shifting to more of a purple? Well, that's because our background was probably a little bit more red slash pink than we realized. So what if we only wanted to change the hue of this doughnut. Well, what we could do is we could apply another adjustment, and we could apply a window to look into or a masked region. In our tool bar down here, if I go over a couple of icons, so I go one, two, three, four, there's this circle icon that we could click on, and this is our window icon. And what we can do here is create a power window that will isolate changes in the color page to one specific region. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to click the circle here. Now we can readjust the size, mess with some of the properties. And now we're only changing the pink in this region. All the standard settings that you can think of apply for the power windows with changing the size, the softness of it. And now you'll notice that instead of using the qualifier, we have the Power window icon turned on. So I could click this to go back to the qualifier, and now we can see the changes that we've made. But in doing so, what happened to the blue pebbles? Well, our Power window isn't selecting the blue pebbles over here. Because remember, if I were to toggle this off by clicking it, originally, we wanted to change the color of the blue pebbles as well. Well, if I toggle it on again by clicking the circle icon, I could add another circle Power window. Turn back on my power window controls, go to that second window and come over here. But now the chocolate is still looking purple, so I love. How would we fix that? Well, Crew, this is again, why we split things up into nodes. So if I wanted to make the pink doughnut purple and I wanted to make the blue pebbles green or whatever color we had made it, well, you might need to change one thing on one node and change the other thing on a separate node. Well, you might need to change one property on one node and add a second node to change the other property. This is why nose, again, becomes so powerful so quickly. It gives you complete control of anything you'd like to change. For the purpose of this example, though, this is not super relevant. So what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to delete our Power Windows. To do so, select on whatever Power window you have added here and hit Delete. And for the default tools, we actually can't delete them, so you just toggle it off. Before we move on real quick, I like to call out that you can also invert these Power windows by just clicking this icon over here. Anyways, doesn't matter. I'm going to turn it off. I'm going to go back to the curves over here and I'm going to reset our Hue versus Hue. Ooh, Now we're back into a state of normalcy. So each one of these curves gives you a very set of powerful controls. So I can over the next one hue versus saturation. And now what we're looking at is each color on the spectrum and its relative saturation levels. So again, what if I wanted to increase the saturation of just the blues? Well, I could use the qualifier, or there's a preset color range down here that I could check on. So I could check the blue icon and increase the saturation or decrease it. If it's not quite sitting on your value, well, just shift these points over just a little bit so that we're pinching in the blues. There we go. Now we're really controlling the saturation or the amount of color on that blue. We can do the same thing with the pink, so I can go ahead and click the Magenta icon and look to decrease or increase the saturation. If you'd like to type in a specific value for your saturation, there's also some input options in the bottom right corner. So if I want to return that back to its normal saturation, I could type in one. And now that point is back to its base level. So sometimes what'll happen is when you're trying to pin in some points, you'll accidentally increase the saturation or the hue just a little bit. So you can always just type in one to return it back to its normal value. So I'm not going to go and break down every single one of these curves, but just know that we have things like saturation versus luminance, where we can control the amount of saturation in darker areas or lighter areas. So if there's ever a point in your color correction process and you're trying to really control something specific, turn to the curves. There's probably one that'll work for you. 87. Creative Adjustments and Color Tools: More tool sets we're going to cover quickly. The next one is the color slice. And this is a relatively new tool in DaVinci Resolve. But what this attempts to do is split up each of the color ranges. So red will skip skin yellow, green, ion, blue magenta into individual controls for that value. So again, let's look at the blue pebbles here on our doughnut. Well, now I could go to the Color slice tool. And increase the saturation for those blues. I could also shift the hue of just the blues. This second slider here, this density slider is similar but not to saturation. Saturation is a pretty harsh change in color. You can think of it as an additive change where we're adding more and more stuff. Color density is more of a multiplicative change, meaning that where there's more color, we make it denser and where there's less color, we don't affect it as much. For the purpose of this course, the difference isn't super important, but just know there is a difference. To reset any property, as always, we can double cook it, and that'll reset it to zero. The last one that's pretty fun to mess with is right next to the color slice tool, and it's our color warper. I've talked to a few colors in the past, and they're not a huge fan of this tool, but I think it's pretty cool. So, again, great power, great responsibility. Use this tool with caution. And we're actually not gonna use the chroma warp version of this. I'd like us to go over to the upper right corner of this pane and click the Hue saturation tool. This was the original color warping feature, and I think it's pretty neat. If I go over to our scopes and change the waveform scope back to our vector scope, can you see the parallel between our color warper in our vector scope. Well, what this tool essentially does is change the hue saturation of whatever color range you choose. You can see the distribution of those colors just like you would on the vectorscope on the color warper. So again, let's look at our blues for a second. If I hover my qualifier over it, you can see down in the color warper where those values are lying. And in fact, there's a little yellow square that's giving you a best estimate as to which node will affect it the most. But what I can do is I can grab this blue point and shift it around to change the hue of all of our blue values. If I bring it closer to the middle, we desaturate that value, and if I push it out to the right, we increase the saturation. Similar with our doughnut here, I could grab the reds and pull it around to change the hue and even push it in to desaturate. Remember, there was a lot more reds in our scene. The blue. So be careful when messing with the color warper tool. But the thing that's very cool about this is that we can create looks very, very easy. And I'll show you what I mean. To do that, I'm going to go ahead and reset this node in general because we've been kind of messing with a lot of the different tools. So I'm going to right click on this node and hit Reset node grade. In doing so, we lose our color warping grid over here, so I'm going to go back to that by clicking this icon. And now what we can do is create a look pretty easily. So if I wanted to return back to maybe that purple tint here after we've done our balance, well, I can just use our color warper tool to shift the values closer to that purple and making some ever so slight changes to that. And now, if I disable and enable, again, it's a very subtle change, but you'll notice in the background that we begin to regain some of those reds. And again, I can make that even more dramatic by pushing that red over here. So again, before, after, very subtle change. Another common look, you'll see, so I'm gonna go ahead and reset this real quick is that we'll kind of crush into the orange and blue values and pull these in to kind of condense our color range. Again, now we have before, after. Different look. Again, there's no right answer. This is just another tool to add Dear toolbelt. And there is a ton of options that you can mess with over here with the color warper that I will let you explore yourself. The last set of tools that we're going to cover for this entry into adjustments is this bottom row over here underneath our primary wheels. Similar to the upper row, these are master global settings that are very powerful and change a lot of things quickly. So we can make changes to the shadows, the highlights, our saturation, the global hue. You're a little psychedelic? And the luminous mix is a funky one, but it has to do with the overall brightness changes applied when we make some of these changes on our primary wheels. These are very powerful sliders that will change a lot quickly. The one that I skipped over and that I do think you should incorporate into some of your videos is the color boost. If you're coming from the Adobe Suite or other software, this would be like vibrance. Using the saturation is a very aggressive way of changing the amount of color, which is what we mentioned before, and I would really caution against using this slider. The color boost over here uses a different set of rules, and what it attempts to do is increase the amount of color in areas that already have a little color present, and I'm not going to increase it a lot, so I increase it to ten. Now we have a before. And after. And if I were to drag and select our nose and hit Control D to disable and enable, it's a very subtle change, but hopefully by the end of this process, you have a fuller, more balanced image. When you're satisfied with your version of the doughnuts, go back to the Edit page and scrub through the entire footage. How did your color change affect everything? Did you affect the skin tone of the hand? Remember, we were looking at one frame. So does everything look okay in our image? Next up, we've got one more clip to practice with, and we've got a person in the scene, which makes things a little different. 88. Applying the Full Color Correction Workflow: Alright, everybody. So when we're working with our first piece of footage, relatively simple, right? Uniformly colored background, and we've got three subjects that we're working with. Now we're going to work with a piece of the documentary where we have a person in the frame. This shot is called r05 Underscore 41 Menu adjust. And let's go ahead and hop into the Color page or this clip. Now, I'm gonna take us back to the Curves menu and go back to our RGB Curves. And we can leave this as our vectorscope for now, and let's start out with our four Nodes. So who remembers what they were? Let's go ahead and add four Nodes. So I'm going to hit Alt S, Alts, Alt S, right click on the first one, go to node label, and it was exposure. Onto the next, right click node label balance. Node three, node label, contrast, node four, label adjustments. Now, this is the second time we've set up these nodes. So is there a way to save this preset? You bet your bins there arm. If I go over to the upper left menu and hit the gallery icon, we have two sub menus over here, and if you don't see them, make sure your left column is expanded. We have stills and power grades. Creating a still is the Color page's way of creating a preset. What that means is that we grab the current stills grade, including the Nodes. So if I were to right click anywhere on screen and hit Grab still, it is going to populate a still over into our gallery. And now I can delete these notes here. And drag this still over into our node workspace. And would you look at that? We've got our nodes all ready to go. Now, stills and power grades are analogous to the media pool and the power bin. So if I wanted to save this preset to be accessible on any project, well, I would go over to my power grade. And now I would grab a still here. And now I can access this node structure. Ooh. We don't need two of it on any project that I'm working on. So if you weren't following along there, go ahead and set that up. Go to your gallery, go to your power grades. Right click on the frame, and hit Grab still. And let's go ahead and give this a name. So I'm gonna right click and hit Change label. To simple default. And now, this will give you a very simple starting place to work with whenever you go to grade your images. Later on down the road, when you start figuring out which curves you like working with or you come up with a really cool look that you want to save, well, you can set up your nodes and then save them as a still. With that out of the way, let's go ahead and walk through the steps that we took last time. So I'm going to minimize our gallery for now, so we've got a lot of real estate to work with. I'm going to click on the Exposure node. Must swap our scopes to waveform. And this time around, I think we have the inverse problem. Look at how much light information we have in this video. So what I'm going to do is actually pull the exposure down by grabbing our gain slider and decreasing it so that we have all of our color values back in range. So before, after. Before, after. Small change, but improves the overall image quality. And that's it. We don't need to do anything else with the exposure node. There's no other corrections we need to take here. We're just looking to balance the light values in our image. Next up, Balance. So we're gonna go to the balance node. I guess before we move on to the balance node, you might be wondering, like, how do I know when to stop? How do I know which value to stop at when I'm sliding the gain slider or even messing with the RGB curves? You don't you won't not a green indicator light that says, Okay, you hit it. Color grading is a subjective thing. So do your best, and your best will probably improve over time. With that said, now let's go over to the balance node. And remember, when we're working with our balance corrector here, we're going to want to be using our vectorscope. I'm going to pop this out. And the thing that we're going to attempt to do with our vectorscope is to rebalance our image. And I'm looking to get this cluster of white stuff closer to the middle. Let me close that. And I did that using the offset wheel, not the gain, not the gamma, not the lift, the global offset. Now we have a before and after. For and after. You can really see the difference in the chalkboard here where it kind of returns more to a natural slate gray state. Now we can go over and do the fun part and go to our contrast. I'm going to bounce back over to the waveform here. Feel free at this step to either use the contrast slider in the pivot or lift Gamma gain in adjusting those global values. But this is an area again where I like to make an S curve. So I'm going to click a point in the shadow area and pull that down. Good bit. And you'll notice that when we increase the darkness on our curb, because when we're working on an RGB scale 0-255, by decreasing the brightness, we increase those RGB values and we return a lot of saturation to the frame. So if you're ever working with an image that feels desaturated, well, you might not need to increase the saturation. What you might need to do is increase the contrast. And as is, I don't know if I really want to mess with increasing the highlights. We could experiment with it. And we could try to increase the highlights and see how it looks. But in particular, if we look at the back of this nice lady here, you see how it's really, really bright, especially the highlights on her forearm here. I'm going to right click and undo that point and leave us at a state where we're just decreasing the overall brightness. Do you have to do this? No, you could totally go and try to make an S curve if you feel like it looks better. That's okay. I will say, and if you're kind of droned out at this point, maybe tune in for just this one little snippet, one of my favorite pieces of advice I heard early on when I was learning to color correct is, if your image looks bad, hide it in darkness. It's a lot easier to make darker images look good opposed to when you're blasting everything in sunlight. So just, you know, keep that in mind. But I'm thinking we're at a pretty happy place, if I do before and after, that's looking a lot better. To me, personally, I feel like this is looking a lot stronger. So now we go to talk about skin tones, which is a pretty common problem to deal with in color correction. 89. Correcting Skin Tones: Alright, so go around, we've got a person in frame. We've got this nice lady writing up the doughnuts for the day. And, man, I do want to visit this doughnut shop. These things look so good. And what that means for us is that we need to worry about the skin tones that we're seeing on screen. Now, as is, I don't think we're looking too bad with the skin tones, but what can happen is after you do your exposure, balance and contrast, you can be sitting at a pretty strange place with your skin tones. So I would say there's two things that we can do to correct bad skin tones, and we're going to talk about both of them. What I'd like you to do is go over to your waveform. And open up your vectorscope. I'm going to go and pop this out for just a second. And if you remember, one of the settings that we toggle on over here with our slider option is the skin tone indicator. That adds this diagonal line somewhere between the yellow and red region, kind of pushing closer to the reds over here. This line is an indicator of where the hues of your skin tone should sit at. It doesn't matter if you're white, if you're Black, Hispanic, Asian, Islander. It does not matter. Your skin tones should fall somewhere on this line. Your skin tone might fall a little closer away from the center, or if you're like me and you don't see sunlight, you're probably dead set in the middle. But this hue line is a good indicator of where our skin tone should sit at. Is this an absolute rule? No, but I would say it's a pretty good guideline to follow. If I bring my qualifier over here and I take a look at our skin tones, you'll see that they're a little off to the left. So we're pushing a little into the yellow territory. Now, if you feel like as is, the skin tones aren't a problem, then you don't need to change them. But I think it's important for me to show you some tools that you can use to address this because this could be a very big problem down the road. So there's a couple of things that we can do, and I'm going to go ahead and collapse our vectorscope here. The first is that we balance to skin tone. So back on our balance note, we've been balancing based off of the white balance. We've been trying to push these desaturated regions closer to the middle. Well, the other thing that we could do is we could balance based off of skin tone. So what I could do is let me pop this back out real quick. Again, I'm on my balance corrector here. I can go to the offset and push the skin tones closer to our skin tone indicator. This is a before and after. And try to focus your eyes not on the chalkboard here, but on the lady's arm or her back. You might not have noticed at first how yellow tinted her skin was getting. But in doing so, well, now we've made the whole chalkboard this, like, purple hue, which isn't great. So, hm, I'm not sure if that's going to work. So let me go and it and hit Control Z to reset our balance so that we're at our original place. Let me collapse that window for now. So if this was me working with this footage, I would attempt to correct the skin tone outside of the balance node. And what I'm going to do is we're going to add a node between the contrast and the adjustment. So I'm gonna pull this node down and away for now and add a node after a contrast node by hitting Alt plus S. I'm going to rename this skin tone. So on this new skin tone corrector, what we're going to attempt to do is to isolate her skin tone here and then only adjust these values. Now, your inclination might be to go to one of these graphs here because that's what we've talked about, right? So, okay, do we go to Hue versus Hue? And then maybe we click a point here and then try to Oh, okay, that's getting kind of scary quickly. So that's not what we're gonna do. We're going to introduce a new tool that we haven't talked about yet, and that's our qualifier. Now, we've been using the qualifier icon to hover around and take a look at what are these pixels and what are their values, and how are they looking on the scope? Well, the qualifier tool set we can actually use to isolate colors. So what I'm going to do is with this note selected on the qualifier tab, I am going to drag and select a range of colors and release. Now, at first, you might not think we did anything, but if we look at the corrector note, you can see that, Oh, we're previewing a certain color range. To visualize that preview, I can go up top to the upper left hand corner to this split circle over here, and it says highlight when I hover over it. And if I click that, we can see exactly what values we're selecting with our qualifier. So our goal here is to try and select as best as we can the entire range of her skin tone. So if I drag and select a long, that's doing an okay job. Let me try left shoulder, see if that's any better. That's looking okay. And it looks like we're picking up some of the checker pattern on her dress. So I'm just going to kind of drag and experiment around until we get a pretty good grab. Now, from here, we're going to try to fine tune this so that we're only really affecting the colors that we would like. It's when we use the color page that you can really see the quality of your footage. This was 1920 by ten ADP footage, so it's going to come across pretty blocky. If you're working with higher resolution footage, you're going to get some smoother grabs and poles. If we look at the actual qualifier pane in itself, we've got a bunch of things that we can mess with. All of these tools are used to refine our selection. So when we change things, we're not actually changing any of the values that we've selected. We're just changing what we have selected. Meaning that if I go to the hue curve here and I pull this around, you'll see that we change just exactly what is being selected by our qualifier. Similarly with the saturation and the luminance. So what I'd like us to do is to get rid of some of these dark black regions that we don't necessarily need and smooth out some of these areas that we didn't get before. Let me control Z a couple times. Now, these are some good options to use, but I tend to have more luck over here with the Matt fins. And remember, this isn't our friend Matt. This is our Matt selection. The three that you will primarily use are these three, right here. And I know we've got a ton of things that we could be looking at, and it's probably going to be hard to remember down the road. So, if anything, if you forget down the road, just try to remember the qualifier pane and use that as a starting point to refine your selection. Clean black will attempt to remove some of the darker regions of your selection. So you'll notice it in particular when we're looking at the chalkboard, how we can get rid of those. Clean white will look to restore some of the lighter regions. So you'll notice, particularly on her forearm here when I increase the clean white value, how that restores some of that information. But you'll notice we also begin to grab information outside of what we selected. And the blur radius will be a general smoothing operation. Keep your eyes over here on her elbow and watch how that changes. But if we go too much, then we start to get some of the dress straps. So be careful. Small changes, big difference. I'm going to actually decrease the clean white a good bit here. Do your best in here. It's totally okay if you don't get it right the first time, the second time or even the third time. The goal here is to just practice and get more comfortable using this tool. Before we actually make the change, I want to call out two things. For one, if we now look over at our vectorscope, if you didn't notice it before, now we are only seeing the color that we have selected, which is very, very handy because now we know how much we need to adjust. To pull it closer to our skin tone line. The other question you might have is, what about the board here? Uh, shouldn't we worry about that? Kind of? You don't have to. When we go to change the hue of our skin tone here, if you have any other outside objects selected, nine times out of ten, it's going to be okay if we change those colors as well, because what we're going to be doing is applying a look to our shot here. So any change we make to the skin tone will probably also look good when we change it to this wooden border. If this becomes an issue and you don't want to deal with this, option one to resolve this are what we did before, and we could use a power window. We could try to draw or trace a region around her that is only affecting her skin tone. But because she is moving, throughout our footage here, that power window could change a lot very quickly. So option two would be if you're on the Studio version and to use the magic mask. Now, I'm not going to cover the magic mask in this video because our free users wouldn't be able to follow along. But magic mask is an auto Rotoscoping tool, which means that it'll look to auto select things for you. It's a very powerful tool, but for now, we're going to be okay with living in this area where everything is selected. So now what? How do we fix the skin tone? Well, how do you want to do it? Do you want to use the hue slider and just push these closer to the skin tone line? Do you want to use the offset slider and pull it over to that region? Do you want to use the gamma slider so that you're only really affecting the mid tones while leaving the highlights and shadows alone? Or do you not want to mess with anything outside of the shadow regions and just pull that over? When we make these changes on the individual primary wheels, you can see how it affects the color range. So if I pull my offset slider, you'll see we're moving everything along. I go to Gamma, still pushing everything along. If I were to go to the lift wheel and pull it over the right, you'll see we almost kind of stretch and expand out that color range. The hue wheel down below underneath the offset, again, I'm on the primary color wheels. I'm on this first tab. Sometimes you can accidentally end up on the log wheels. Don't go over there. Stay here. We will rotate down and around our circle. I'm going to use the hue wheel, and just things change the hue ever so slightly. So I'm right at 52, maybe 53, somewhere in there. And if I were to un preview we have selected by going up to that highlight option in the upper left corner, you might not catch it at first, but if I enable and disable this clip, we have some much more natural looking skin tones. Pretty cool, right? It's always kind of crazy me when we use the color page because I was kind of with you if you felt that the skin tones looked fine early on, and you still might feel that way. But when we correct for the skin tone, it's very easy to see how much yellow tint was in it before. And you'll also notice that even though we did change the color of the wood border around these signs, does it sound out as weird to you? I don't think it does. I feel like it fits in. So, now that we've done skin tones and we've done our basic corrections in these first three notes, now we can have a little bit of fun and mess around with some adjustments. 90. Creating a Color Look: Alright, if you've been following along okay, give yourself a pat in the back. I feel like we're looking pretty good with their shot here. Now, just like last time when we cover some of the tools, I'm going to cover some other adjustments that we could make to this footage to give it a particular look or feel. One of them could be to add a vignette. If you've never heard of the term vignette or vignette, what it is, in essence, is a darkening or lightning of the outer corners of your frame. And what this will do is bring focus to the middle. Now, if we were to open up our Effects tab over here, let me pull this over just a little bit. There is a pre built in vignette in DaVinci Resolve. That we could drag and drop on. You see what I mean? We have a darkening of the edges here. This could be a very viable option for you if you'd like something that's drag and drop or I'm gonna delete the effect. What we could do is make use of our power windows. So I can go to the Power Window tool, click on the ellipse or circle tool, increase the size, increase the width, and increase the amount of softness, and then we can pull down the overall offset. And uh oh, we are decreasing the darkness in the middle. Well, that's not what I want. So let me go over to the invert option, which is this little guy right over here. Now, I haven't done a dramatic decrease, right? So we're not making things completely black, but by just subtly decreasing the value of the brightness and the colors over here, if I were to toggle this on and off, it's a very subtle change, but it again, brings focus to our subject over here. The nice thing about using the power window is that we can actually control where that focus is. So our subject actually isn't dead set in the middle. It's over here. So we can bring that power window to the left to really bring focus on the chalkboard over here. Now, typically, the vignette is the last stage in our corrector series. It's kind of how we frame our shot at the end of the correction grading process. Let me go ahead and rename this node to Vignette and that was done by right clicking and hitting node label. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a couple of nodes before this. So we can either click on the skin tone and hit Alts or we can click on our Vignette node and hit Shift S. And that adds a corrector B four. Now I'm going to add two before, so I'm going to right click add node, serial B four. And we'll add those guys in. So now what we're going to do is we're going to apply a look to our image. But before we do that, I just want to really quickly talk about some things that you've probably seen that we haven't clicked on yet. When we write click to add a new node, we've got a bunch of different options over here. We've got parallel. We've got a layer, and we've got an outside node. These are all used to do very specific things inside the color page. They all are very useful and can be used to do great things. But until you get to a point where you go, Hm, I wonder how I can do this, and the solution is a parallel note. Don't worry about these. We're going to stick with serial corrector notes. On this first note here, what we're going to do is we're going to apply a look to our image. Now, the look of our video is typically determined by a colorist or by the pre production team, and it's probably sent to you. So none of us are color is here yet, and we haven't been set a look to work with. So what exactly does that mean? This website is called Frameset. And there's a few inspiration websites out there if you're looking for film and color inspiration or even, like, editing inspiration out there. And as we look at different frames and videos from films, commercials and short films, you'll notice that they all have a particular feel to them. So, for instance, let's look at this Mercedes shot right here. It is completely desaturated. The ground is white, the car is gray, the blues are very subdued. So this would probably be a very exposed, desaturated look. If we scroll up a little bit to our Brisa up top here, you see how red those aprons are. You'll also notice the background is really accented by those greens. These cabinets might have been blue originally, but we'll never know they're desaturated. Same thing with this auditorium shot. Look how orange everything is. If you're ever looking for inspiration or help with your colors, websites like these can be very powerful tools, but we need to look at them with an analytical eye. So, for example, on a shot like this, what sticks out to you? We've got a very vibrant orange camera light over here, and all of the darker areas do they feel like they're perfectly gray? Well, no, I think this chair looks a little blue to me. I almost looks like the highlights are sitting in this orange territory. And you'll also notice that not everything is black. In fact, I don't think anything is hitting that perfect black point unless maybe on the back side of the light here. So this is where the artistic side of color grading can really come to play. And I think for you, this will probably come with experience and practicing and seeing what works and doesn't work well. So let's just play around with something fairly straightforward. One of the most common looks that you'll see in videos is a split tone orange highlight blue shadow look. And what that means is that on this node, if we were to go over the gain, gain highlights, gain highlights, and we push it up into the orange region ever so slightly. I am not pushing that all the way to the edge. I am just moving it a little bit. So let me reset that. I'm just going to push it up into the orange a little bit. And I go to the lift lift shadows, lift shadows. And I pull it down into the right a little bit. Being careful not to again, not to go too far. We just want a small change. Well, now if I do a little before and after, that change may feel subtle at first, but when we toggle to the before, it becomes very apparent how much we actually did change. And again, we could also go over to, like, our Color warperTol. Go to the grid here. We could desaturate some of those purples and pull things a little closer to the blue, desaturate some of the green, pull things a little closer to the orange. And actually, you know what? I might leave this alone so that we're not messing with the skin tone. Too much. In essence, all I've kind of done is crunch down the colors bit, so we're working on a smaller range of colors. Before, after. Ask yourself, does this look good to you? I don't know. I think for me, it looks pretty cool. I feel like in doing so, we've created a different kind of video look. This feels like it could probably work in a commercial, whereas before, this feels like it might go on YouTube. So continue to make conscious motivated decisions. Now, we've got one final note over here that we're going to experiment with, and we're going to cover two things in just a moment. 91. Working with LUTs: All right. So one of the things that I need to make sure I talk about when it comes to color correction is this guy up in the upper left hand corner, Lutz. And make sure you pronounce that correctly. It's Lutz, LUTs. Now, a ut is actually short for L up table. So that is Look up table. Well, what the heck is a look up table? And why do we have so many of them? Generally thinking, and you're gonna probably make some colorists upset if you say it like this. But a ut is a filter. What it does is it looks up whatever colors you've got on screen, applies a conversion table and changes all of those colors to what it says it should be. So if we have a ut that says make all the reds orange, when we apply our ut, it will make all the reds orange. Now, I'm going to have more luts and folders and bins over here than you guys are just because I've acquired some over the years. But if I go over to the standard ut folder, and let me go ahead and expand this so we can see two columns. We have a giant list of, I guess, images. Well, if I scrub my mouse over one of those luts, you can see that it changes all of the colors in the frame. And we could go ahead and look through all of them and see how it changes our image. Now, there's a reason why I've talked about Lutz last, because these are a gateway drug to dangerous decisions. You see, when you're first starting out, and let's say you're working on a YouTube video or you're editing a documentary for somebody or even a short form video, you will be tempted to dip your toes into the Lutz field and drag and drop on any kind of ut because you feel like it looks good. Well, if I were to do this, and let's say I disable all of our corrector nodes ahead of time, we get a very different looking image. So because we've taken the appropriate steps to balance our image in a way that fits appropriately, now, we have permission to experiment with different looks for our shot. But again, why do we need one of these? Because just because you feel like you have to have one? No. You do not have to use these. What I'll say is that oftentimes when you're working on a bigger project, so I'm going to say I'm going to exclude TikToks, short form videos, YouTube talking head videos, even to an extent certain documentaries and short films, you do not need these. Typically, if you're working on a bigger project, a colorist or somebody who has come up with a look for the film will create a lut for you to drag and drop onto the color page. And this will be the global look of the film. So we've talked about color correction and color grading, this is kind of what it boils down to. Oftentimes, we need to correct and balance all of our images so that they sit and feel like they belong together. Hopefully, that makes sense. If you remember the dirt trailer video and how we talked about some of the shots not feeling like they looked and belonged together, well, that's what we're doing here. We're getting all of our footage to a place to where it looks like it was shot on the same day with the same camera and the same people. After we do the hard work and get it to that place, then we can apply our looks to the film. Other thing that's important to know about Lutz is that it assumes a specific color space, which we have not talked about at all. So the standard ones Resolve, I assume Rec seven oh nine, which is what we are working with, and, you know, I'll talk about that in a little bit. So these are going to look and work fine. So if you want, on this note, only if you want. If you find one that looks pretty good, and I do actually kind of like the look of what is this f7150. I do like the fullness that this brings. What about this guy? Yeah, I like this one. I can drag and drop that on. Now, if you like the particular look of a ut, but want to reduce the intensity over in our pains over here, there is a where is it? Dutt to do This guy. The key pain. You can think of this as the overall opacity of a particular corrector node. So if we go to the output settings down here, I can change the gain of the output of that corrector to control the intensity of that node. And this will work for any of the nodes. So I could reduce that down to, like, let's go half 0.5. And now we have I think what's a pretty good looking shot. If we do a little before and after, look at how different that looks. Is different good? Who knows? But I think it is in this instance. With that said, I would say we've done a really good job color grading and correcting this shot. However, if I go back to the Edit page, this shot does not look like this one. They look like they are from two completely different videos. So the question is, how do we get this one to look like this one? So, with that said, we're gonna talk shot matching a little bit, and then a little bit of color science. And then we are officially masters of the Color page. 92. Copying and Reusing Color Grades: Now that we all hopefully have some understanding of the color page and how to operate inside of this page, one of the final steps that we need to attempt to learn or at least try to get better at is matching shots. And this is a callback again to that dirt bike trailer video where we looked at some of the camera footage, and it was pretty obvious that they didn't quite gel together. So this begs two questions. One, how can we take the grade that we applied here and copy and paste it to this clip? And two, if we're able to take the grade here or even if we didn't copy and paste it, how would we fine tune this so that the color profile from one matches the other. So let's address question one first. How would we copy and paste a grade from one clip to the other? Well, for the Color page, there are actually a surprising number of ways that you can do this. The first is through the Edit page, actually. So while we're on the Edit page, if I've gone through and applied a color grade to this clip here, I can hit Control C to copy this clip. And then if I select our first clip, do you guys remember the shortcut for pasting attributes? It's Alt plus V or Option plus V if you're on Mac. And one of the options in our attributes is right here. Color correction. So I can uncheck all these other properties and just check Color correction. And when I hit Apply, well, now we have our grade applied to this footage. Now, be careful when you're doing this, because if I were to hit Control Z, well, nothing happens. Well, that's because we're trying to undo something on the Edit page. If I were to go to the Color page on this clip and now hit Control Z, now we revert to our original color corrector node system. So that's one way of doing things. The other would be to stay in the Color page itself. And in the Color page itself, there are weirdly a lot of ways to copy and paste grades and nodes. The first way is this. What we're going to actually do is re open our clips menu. So up in the upper left hand corner, go ahead and hit Clips. And just a quick little fun fact as your timeline begins to get bigger and bigger and bigger, you'll have a lot of clips here. There's a drop down menu here to where you can filter which clips you choose to display down here. But for now, we'll leave it alone. Just wanted to throw it out there. You were curious? Now, the way copying and pasting and applying grades works in Resolve, is whatever clip you would like to have the grade or the set of notes applied to needs to be currently selected. So, unfortunately, we can't go to this note here. Drag and select these, hit Control C, and then go back to this node and hit Control V. All of a sudden, it looks like I pasted my vignette. Well, that's not what I want it. Let me hit Control Z real quick. When you look to copy and paste correctors, what it'll attempt to do is copy and paste just that corrector node. So when I haven't gone over here, you can see I had my vignette node selected. So when I drag and select these and hit Control C, go back over here and hit Control V. Well, now I'm only pasting the vignette to this currently selected corrector node. So hit Control Z. Let me scrub four just a little bit. So one of the options that we have is with the current clip selected that we would like the grade to be pasted to, right click on whatever clip you're trying to paste from and hit Apply grade. And that'll copy and paste the entire node structure over. If Control Z again, an even faster way of doing this is using the middle mouse button. So click in your scroll wheel on that clip. Pretty cool. Another alternative to this is if I again, hit Control Z, there was another option right there that says a pen grade. So let's say I'm working on some nodes here, and then I want to smack on these nodes at the end. Well, again, what I can do is with this current clip selected, I can right click and hit do a pend grade, and that'll tack on the corrector Nodes from the clip we're pulling from. My Control Z. I cannot reiterate enough how many tools are available here in the Color page, and we are really only scratching the surface with a very dull fingernail. What I mean by that is we can even right click on this node and go to display node graph. And now we can actually see the nodes one by one on that clip so that I could go and specifically copy this node or this node or this node. Let me close them. The other alternative, and this is my preferred option is to grab a still. So if I select the clip that I'm kind of using as my reference master color grade clip, I go over to the gallery. Make sure I'm in the stills option. Power grade are master templates that we can drag and drop across projects stills are project specific grades. So I'm going to go ahead delete the one that we had grabbed earlier to two, two, two Delete Selected. I'm going to right click in the preview window and hit Grab still. And now, if I go back to our doughnut lineup here, I can right click on our still here, and we have the exact same options. We can apply the grade, we can apply an active layer, whatever that means. We can display the no graph, append the node graph, et cetera, et cetera. Now, let's say I went ahead and copy and pasted grades. So I applied the grade here, and now we have the exact same node structure as our other clip. This doesn't feel right, right? If I were to hit Control Z, we've got a very bright vibrant layout here. But when I apply our grade, it almost looks like we transition to nighttime mode. So I don't necessarily know if this is solving our problem, although this is obviously very useful when we need to copy and paste grades across footage. So I'm going to hit Control Z one more time. So what we're going to attempt to do is we're going to keep our color correction here. So we're going to keep the exposure, the balance, the contrast, and our adjustment. But what we're going to do is we're going to append on the last three notes here so that we'll have the same look applied to our clip. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click back on our doughnut clip here. And remember, I've grabbed a still from the aforementioned footage. I'm going to right click and hit append node graph. There's a real handy function here in the node workspace that I wish was infusion, but we can right click here and hit cleanup node graph. And what that'll do is make things all nice and pretty for us. It looks like it almost did a good job. We kind of got a funky order going on, so let me drag and move things around. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to delete the four corrector Nodes that we don't need. So I'm going to delete the duplicate exposure node. I'm going to delete the duplicate balance node. I'm gonna delete the duplicate contrast node and the skin tone node. So now what we're left with is our vignette, the t, and the color warperh split tone effect we made in the primaries. So now, how do we know if we got close? I mean, we could bounce back and forth between the two clips. And go, Well, I feel like this is closer, right? They look similar ish. But what if What if there was a graphical representation of our colors that we could use to perfectly line up the color balance across both clips. Almost like there was a big, pretty scope that we could use to match our shots. I mean, could you just imagine if something like that existed? Well, Frendos, it sure does. 93. Matching Shots with Scopes: What we can do is we can compare the still or the reference clip to our currently selected footage and line up our scope so that they are perfectly matched. How stinking cool is that? Let me show you how we're going to do it. With my clip selected, and with the still selected up here, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go up to the preview window and I'm going to click this middle icon in the upper left corner that says split screen. By default, it's going to say version. But if I go here and go to the dropdown menu that says selected still Image, let me collapse our gallery here so we've got some more real estate, and I can zoom in a bit on our preview window. Well, now we can compare our left shot to our right shot at the exact same time. In this dropdown menu, there's multiple options. So if we wanted to, I can hit the Control key to select this clip. And go to do, do, do, do, do, do do selected clips. And now we're collecting the live clip instead of the still either or works, though. Again, that function was up top here in the upper left hand corner, and it's almost like this *** candy cookie box icon. I got chocolate on my mind. I'm sorry. So this is fantastic. We can now compare shot A to Shot B. And in fact, we can toggle between the two clips. Well, Frendos, what we can do is if I go over to my scopes and I change this to waveform and I expand this window. You'll see that we actually get the waveform preview of both the left and right clip. So now, without doing any guesswork, we can compare our clips left and right and try to balance them the same across all of the changes that we've made. So exposure is kind of a funky one because we're looking at two different scenes here, right? We don't necessarily have to have this doughnut lineup shot exposed exactly the same. But for the purpose of this example, why not give it a go? Now, originally, we had to expose this using the curves. So I'm going to undo that for now, so I'm going to right click that point. And this time, I'm going to use our gain slider because I think we're going to get a little bit more accurate results. So I'm pushing the gain value wheel underneath it until we're seeing a similar edge spread. And we'll come back to address this little portion in a little bit. We'll try to do that in the contrast page. Let's go to the balance. Now, balance, remember we do with vectorscope. And if I look at the bounces, you can see that they're overlaid right on top of each other. How cool is it? I just think this page is so cool. So what I'm going to attempt to do is line up our cluster here with our cluster of the clip underneath it. So I'm gonna go, Woo and try to get it somewhat lined up so that they are matching. So this is before after for after we lose some of the violets of the background in this after go around. Again, subtle change, but it just helps bring some cohesiveness across shots. Now we can go over the contrast, and let's go back to our waveforms. And again, for a shot like this, it's not necessarily required to match the intensity of the shadows. I would say, generally speaking, when we're trying to balance clips, this balance note is the one we're really trying to get close together. We want similar color profiles. We don't necessarily have to have similar brightness profiles. I'm going to go to our RGB curve, and I'm going to really push those values down. And I'm kind of looking at this mid tone hump here and looking at this one, as well. Is that the best way to do it? Who knows? In my head, it makes sense. And that's all you can really ask for. And that's it. You've officially balanced the two shots. So I'm going to collapse our scopes real quick, and I'm gonna go back to the Edit page. If we go and do a quick before and after, you have created a very cool, distinct look for the doughnut shop. And, mind you, these clips aren't four K clips. Working with ten ADP footage. You can see it pretty pixelated when we zoom in. But that is not too shabby. Alrighty. We've got one last video to cover some of the intricacies of the Color page. And then you guys have officially mastered this tool set in DaVinci Resolve. 94. Extra Color Tools and Techniques: So how is this all settling in with you guys? What questions are forming when it comes to using the color page? I would be surprised if you didn't have any because we've covered a lot of information, but we've mostly covered it on the surface. We've said, You can do this. This could work. This could look good. But I'm aware that I haven't given you a lot of definitive do this is. I think do this is a new term we're going to use. One of the reasons I do that is because there is a whole field of color called color science, and it's where you get into the actual mathematics behind saving pixels on screen. So what I'm going to do in this video is we're going to cover actually some just fun tidbits of, like, Hey, you can do this. You can do that with color that can be useful for you down the road. And then at the end, I'm going to cover a little bit more of the color science. It's gonna be advanced, but there are going to be a few of you out there that want to do a deeper dive into actually, if you're somebody who's shooting a lot of high grade camera footage, these will be things that'll be important to look into down the road. At first, let's talk some fun things. Okay, let's keep things light. So something that you can do on the Color page is instead of applying your grade to a clip, what we could also do is use an adjustment clip. See, an adjustment clip affects everything underneath it. So if I were to hit Control C to copy the grade of our footage here and Alt V to paste that color correction to the adjustment clip. Well, if I were to bring in a duplicate version of the lined up doughnuts, as is, this is pre grade, right? Well, I could drag that adjustment clip over and holy guacamole, we have our grade right there. Where can this be useful? Where can this be less useful? Well, this is kind of like a big, sticky band aid approach to doing color grading. Remember, in that last video, we had to make some small adjustments to our doughnut footage here to match the balance of the person writing on the chalkboard. So when we use a single adjustment clip, that's it. This is the color profile that we will be able to use across any footage, but that does mean that we could string this across as many clips as we would like. Where this can become more useful is if we would like to apply an effect in the Color page. So let me delete that adjustment clips, and let's start fresh. Drag in a new adjustment clip. And you can either choose to follow along here or just watch and absorb. I'm going to go into the Color page on the Adjustment clip, and we'll know we're on the Adjustment clip because in our Clips menu, it says Adjustment clip right here. So something that we have not touched at all is this a giant effects library over here. Now, a lot of these are going to be very similar to what you can access on the Edit page, but there are a few alternative options that Studio users will have, and free users might be hit and miss with them. Let me go ahead and claps my clips menu from now, and I'm going to uncheck the Compare option. One of those that I know for sure is a Studio only feature is Halation. Now, halation is normally a in camera effect, but we can look to emulate it inside the color page. So we can mess with the threshold here and increase the strength of our glow. And if I disable and enable it, you can really see it trying to shine through on the highlights of our clips. So let's say I'm trying to apply some halation and I'd like it to go across every piece of footage. Well, I can use an adjustment clip to do so. I go back to the Color page. Another fun option here is to add, like a soft glow. So I believe this is accessible to the free users as well. But if I drag and drop on a glow effect and I bring down our shine threshold, keep an eye on our forearm here, we introduce some glow. This can be used to help create some hazy dream like sequences. And one of the things that we can do is actually change the composite type to go from add to something like soft light. Now if I really increase the gain and the gamma, and we can even change the spread of the glow. And I know I'm moving quickly. This isn't gonna be quizzed on. It's just kind of a fun thing to play with. Can change it so that the lines are a little bit more horizontal than vertical. And I'm gonna really increase the spread a little bit more. And now we have this hazy glow. Across both clips. So again, before, after. So adjustment clips are very fun in that sense. The other thing that we can do is we can create groups. So if I go to the Color page, go to my clips so that I have Oh, actually, let me go back. Let me get rid of this extra. We don't need it for now. Go to my clips. Well, one of the things that we can do is instead of copying and pasting our grade, we can set up a master group that they're all associated with. So what I mean by that is I can right click on this clip. And go to add into a new group. We'll call this doughnut One. Now, nothing happens at first, but all the way up top above our notes here, we now have a couple of new dots, and you might have missed these before. If I were to remove from that group, we only have two. We have one for our clip and one for the timeline. I can toggle back to the clip, right click here, and add it back into this group doughnut one. And now we have group preclip, group post clip. So what we can do is depending on the camera that you use, the time of day that you record, the subject that you're using, you can assign clips into individual groups. And then as long as you apply a grade on one of the group pre or post clip sections, it will be applied to every clip in that group. So let's say I just increase the exposure a little bit. So on this pre group section, I go to this node, and I'm just going to boost up the exposure a little bit. Well, now I could go to our person on the chalkboard here. I could right click group doughnut one, assigned to group. And, we got a little bit more exposure. Any change we make here. So let's say I undo that will be applied here. Yeah, I know I'm moving pretty quickly through these, but just be aware of them. These are tools at your disposal moving forward. 95. Understanding Color Space Transforms: Last thing that I'd like to talk about are color space transforms, and this is where we're going to get a little nerdy and a little bit of more advanced. But even if you're not somebody who plans on working with real camera footage, I think that this information is going to be very, very important to learn. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to the clip section of our grade. We're just going to scrub forward and here a little bit. Now, what I'll say is that I am not a colorist, and this is not an area that I'm an expert in. So take everything I say with a grain of salt. What I'm going to attempt to do is present it in a way that makes sense, some semblance of sense. Unfortunately, every camera that you use to record information, including OBS, if you're doing screen recording, records in a very specific format. If I were to pull up this random, very official Google image of how cameras work, for the most part, we don't need to memorize this, but just know that when a camera is capturing an image, light passes through a lens. It goes through a mirror or maybe it's a mirror less system, that gets fed into some kind of processor, a computer chip, it doesn't matter. We don't need to know how this works, but what you do need to know is that these are different. There's not one uniform processor for each camera. There's not one uniform lens. People shoot and record on different sets of equipment. And what that means is that sometimes when you go out and record and you're not 100% sure how you're recording, you'll get the footage back, and it looks gray. Like, it almost looks flat. Like you didn't you messed up a setting or something. Well, no, you didn't do anything wrong. You just might have recorded in either a log or a raw scale. What the heck is a log or a raw scale? Well, again, we're not gonna dive into the weeds here, but if you enjoyed math in school, you might be familiar with what log scale. Not going to pull up a graph or a definition of log scale because I think we're going to lose people quickly, but what it essentially means is that we can store more information per pixel. So instead of being limited to zero to 255 on the RGB scale, which is what we've been operating in for the most part, we could maybe store numbers 0-1 thousand, zero to 10,000. Zero to 10 billion? Well, maybe not 10 billion. But you see what I'm getting at. So some cameras have the ability to record very dense amounts of information, and then later in posts, we convert it into a readable format. This has to do with the color space we record in. Let me go ahead and close this. What that means for you is if I expand my scopes here, and I change the drop down to the chromaticity scope, what we're looking at here is the color space in which we recorded our information. Nine times out of ten, you're going to be working the Rec 709 color space, which is this triangle here. Rec 709 is able to store as much information as fits in this triangle on that RGB value scale. Well, like I said, there are some cameras that are able to record in bigger gamets or color spaces. So this is Panasonics. And if you look at this triangle, this is how much information that Panasonic space is able to record. So sometimes what happens is, we record in this massively large space, but DaVinci Resolve is only seeing it in here. So it ends up crushing everything and kind of flattening our image so that it doesn't really look how we recorded it. Is this making sense? And it's totally okay if it's not. This is not something you have to memorize. What I'm trying to get at is that depending on how your footage is handed to you, you might be handed footage that's not in Rec seven oh nine. It's not in your default color space. It's in this massively large space, and we're not accessing any of this information. So the reason why DaVinci Resolve is so stinking good when it comes to color correction and color grading is it has this gamut called DaVinci wide gamut. And when I click on it, look how big this triangle is. This is a space exclusive to DaVinci Resolve that allows us to access and manipulate any information we want when it comes to color. So what we can do on the Color page is go from our Panasonic color space to the DaVinci one, where we're sure we're able to capture everything and then go from DaVinci to Rec 709. That process of pinging from one to the other, and then from the other back to our final color space, this reclor space is called Color Space Transforms. And the way it works in DaVinci Resolve is and you don't have to follow along here, what we'll do is we'll add two nodes. We'll add one before, and one after our corrections. So I've kind of sandwiched in the correcting notes, and I've left the look Nodes alone. And then we would add two Color Space Transforms effects. This should be accessible on both the free and paid version of Adventure Resolve. We'll tag that in. Co. Deep end, right? So many decisions to make in here. In order for you to make the right one, you would need to know what the input color space is. So you would need to know what camera was this recorded on and how was it recorded. So, for instance, you could find that Panasonic gamut and look for the Panasonic Vlog. Now, it's gonna break our image quickly cause this isn't how we record it. So we would go to Rec 709. For us, and the gamut for Rec seven oh nine or the gamma, excuse me, is 2.4. But then we could go to that in between color space, that DaVinci wide gamut. So I would look for DaVinci white gamut, DaVinci wide Intermediate. In doing so, we've put ourselves in this massively large color space. To get out of it, we just flip this. So I'll take our color space here. Control C, Control V to paste it, and swap it. And in doing so, hmm. Something doesn't look quite right. Well, again, this is where we get into the deep end of color space. Now, when we do this, it breaks our image as is because we've done our color correction through the Rec seven oh nine color space. But when we do a color space transform, we're now working in DaVinci wide gamut. So when I go to our exposure node, and I preview and highlight just that node, here's where we get into that flat territory, right? So now we're looking at a much different image than if I were to disable these two notes. Through this course and the majority of the videos that you're going to work on early on in your career, you do not need to use these at all. You don't need to worry about them. Don't L, if you blanked out through this section, I'm not even going to be mad at you, but I feel like it's my duty to let the filmmakers out there know that this is a tool, and that's how you access it. This would be something that we would need to cover in an advanced color grading tutorial. And if that is something you're interested in, please let us know. Before now, I'm going to delete those notes and pretend like they were never even there. 96. Submitting Class Project 10: Amazing work, though, everybody. I know this is a lot to cover, and it's a lot to cover quickly. But if you've made it to the end, you've officially survived the boot camp that is the color page. If anything, at the end of this section, the main takeaways that I'd like you to have are this three notes structure, exposure, balance, contrast, that'll take you 90% of the way there. The only other thing that's important to remember are lift gamma gain, shadow midtone highlight, shadow midtone highlight. All of these other tools are at your disposal when you're ready to learn and use them. Let's go back to the Edit page. And what I'd like you to do is to pick a frame from each clip and export it out. So we're going to go to the three Donut lineup, go to File, Export. Current frame is still. We're going to name this class project, ten, underscore one, and then your name. So mi be Brandon Baldovin. We're going to export these as PNGs. Export it to wherever you need to, and we'll do the exact same thing. Grab a frame here. Anything in here will work just fine, DaVinci Resolve. Go up top to File, Export, current frame is still. Again, we're going to do class Project ten. This time, we'll do underscore two and then your name. So am I going to be Brandon Baldovin. Go and save those to an appropriate location and then upload it to the class project slash Assignment section of the website. 97. Class Project 11 - Donut Color Practice: Now that we are all experts inside the Color page and where all colors, it's your turn. So we were provided with a bunch of shots from Dynamite, and we just worked on the first two clips that we were given. This time, I'd like you to venture off into your own and try coloring the footage yourself. So in your course material folder, there was two. We had Class Project ten and Class Project 11. And like Class Project ten, we've got two clips that we're working with here. If I hop on over to our timeline right here, we have analogous shots. We've got one close ups of our doughnut. Then we have another shot of them actually putting together the doughnuts, and it looks like these are already baked. This shot, in particular, I think we can all tone on the surface needs a little bit more help. We're a little overexposed. It looks like there's a lot of yellows that are leaking onto the shot itself, and the camera angle is changing a bunch, right? So we're not just staying in one place. Start with that three node structure of exposure, balance, and contrast, and then look to apply any corrections that you might need to the footage. The end of the project, remember to instead of render out the video, go up top to File Export current frame of still. That'll export one of these stills for you to upload to the class project assignment section. Remember that color correction and grading is a very subjective thing. If at the end of this, you feel like your footage looks good and it looks different than the student next to you, that's okay. There's not one single right answer. So good luck. Take your time, and I'll see you on the other side. 98. Using Render Cache to Improve Playback: Well, hello there, everybody. Congrats on making it through the Color page, the Fusion page, the Edit page. We now get to reward ourselves with stuff I wish I knew part two. This is one of my favorite sections because, again, we get to talk about cool, useful stuff. Up until this point, we've tried balancing technique with theory and kept it mostly practical. So what we're going to attempt to do is add some more tools to our tool belt. In DaVinci Resolve has a lot of tools that we can use. So what we're gonna do is we're going to talk first playback issues. If you're on a slower PC or maybe you're working on a laptop, these will be some tips that can really help smooth things out on your timeline. Well, then talk Fairlight for going to go tune into the weeds with Fairlight because I think you can get pretty confusing quickly, but we'll cover what you might need to know and how to save some presets in there. We'll talk some more retime controls and speed ramping just very briefly. And then at the very end, I'm going to do a quick rundown of just cool things. The first thing that I would like to discuss with you all are some playback techniques, meaning, what are some tips and tricks that we can use to help smooth playback if our timeline is getting a little bit laggy. So with that, let's go ahead and hop into DaVinci Resolve. Alrighty. So like the last stuff I wish I knew section, we're not going to create a new project. Let's hop into an existing one. Our project of choice here is going to be the trailer Edit. Feel free to use whatever project you would like, but if you want to follow along, hop in here. So I'm choosing this project in particular because this is one of the first times we began to incorporate some effects, some texts, and we begin to layer multiple things on top of each other. Now, depending on your PC or your laptop or whatever you're working on, maybe it's an iPad, your playback speed could significantly drop on sections when we're incorporating some visual effects. So I'm going to lower the volume in here because we don't necessarily need to hear the blaring trailer music throughout. Now, because I am not having playback issues, what I'm going to do is introduce do not have to follow along here. I'm going to make my life more difficult on purpose. So I'm going to drag these two generators that we use for the crop bars up a layer. I'm going to drag and drop in an adjustment clip and have it span our entire timeline. And to introduce some playback issues for myself, again, so that I can demonstrate how this works. I'm going to go into the adjustment clip on the Fusion page, and I'm going to add what's called an Optical Flow node. And that's Optical Flow. You really don't have to follow along here unless you kind of want to see exactly how these work. But what an Optical Flow node does is it actually tries to blend frames together at slower speeds, which we are going to revisit in a little bit. Now, when I add this node, keep an eye on our playback speed up top here. Now we have some pretty noticeable lag on our timeline. So how can we address this? Well, there are four ways, and I'm going to cover them in increasing complexity. The first is a really quick fix that's nice to use. If I go all the way up top to my playback menu. There's an option in the first couple of Bros, it says timeline playback resolution. And by default, it's set to full. But we could drop this down to quarter resolution. And if we keep an eye on our footage here, and I toggle back between full and quarter, what Resolve will attempt to do is down rez your footage in real time. So instead of us playing back in 1080 P, it'll look to play it in what would that be? 360 P. So now let's give this a play. Oh, look at that. Not bad. Oh, still got some slowdown in the retime sections. But it definitely seemed to help. So, if you're still having issues here, now what? Well, I'm gonna go back to full on the playback resolution, but just remember this is a pretty good quick fix if you're having slowdown in particular areas. The next option is to turn on our Render Cache. Now, caching is not money case. It's not CASH. It's CACHE Cache. What caching attempts to do is kind of render your footage in place. Now, it's not the same as going to the Deliver page and rendering out at MP4. What DaVinci Resolve will attempt to do is create some temporary files that help smooth out the playback. So what does that mean? Well, again, if I go all the way up top to that playback menu, right underneath our playback resolution, there's an option for Render Cache, and by default, it should be set to none. Go ahead and toggle on Smart. And if you've done it correctly, there should be this red bar that appears on screen. And as this continues to think and progress, what DaVinci Resolve is doing is saving some temporary frames that help with your playback. So let's give it a play before it finishes, and you can really notice the difference. So as I play this, now we've got very smooth playback until we hit this red. And then we slow down, right? Again, it might be a bit hard. Oh, come on. So there's two caching options. Smart is DaVinci Resolves version of kind of rendering where it thinks you want things rendered. So it might skip areas in the beginning and it might skip areas way down at the end of your timeline. It'll look at the location of your playhead and determine, Okay, this is some stuff that we probably need to cache in place, and it'll attempt to cache it. But if we give it a second to do some thinking and let this cache bar turn blue, now we should theoretically have very smooth playback on our timeline. Much better. Now, you could still have issues here, depending on how much stuff you have going on. If we were to think of playback speed problems as an injury, going up to the playback and timeline playback resolution is kind of like putting dirt on it. You're just hoping for the best and you're pushing forward. The Render Cache is putting a band aid on it. So depending on the extent of the injury, a band aid might be a good solution, but it also might not be enough. Now, there's a couple of things to note about using our Render Cache, and one is that as of the time of recording, it is pretty finicky. And what I mean by that is, if I extend our adjustment clip one or two or three frames, it resets the entire cache. Why does it do that? I don't know. But ever since I've been using this program, anytime you make even a single frame change on clips that extend over the course of your timeline, it resets the cache. So a lot of times when I'm doing the rough cut or I'm in the early stages of an edit, I'll typically have the cache off because what ends up happening is I reset the cache over and over and over. And what ends up actually happening is you create a lot of case files quickly. What do I mean by cash files? Because I have thrown out the term temporary files, and we're kind of rendering in place. Well, if we go over to our project settings in the bottom right corner, you might have forgotten it. But one of the settings that we set up early, early on, I believe it was the first section is towards the bottom, and we set up our optimized Media and render Cache settings. So it's here that we determine exactly what kind of format our Cache uses. And we chose ProRes Proxy. So this isn't an MP4. It's not a dot MOV. This is a proxy file. And we're actually going to talk about proxies in just a few moments. So depending on what file you choose to use, you could either have a very big cache. So, if you were to use uncompressed, your cache directory will fill up instantaneously. Those files are massive. A couple of settings underneath here that we did ignore, but these also have to do with caching. One of them that's pretty helpful is the background caching after a certain length of time. I normally like to have this actually at 1 second. What this means is that 1 second after I stop doing anything, it'll begin to cache. If we were to increase this, now DaVinci Resolve will wait 30 seconds before attempting to cache anything after you stop playback. Underneath that, we have some settings that are specific to the user cache mode. We'll revisit those in just a moment. But here in our working folders, we have a location where we are saving all of our cash footage. Wa, go on Windows. You can do it. Would you look at that, I have all of these folders set up here. And inside these folders are all those proxy files that we're setting up and saving in real time. Now, this might seem kind of stressful because it's another thing to worry about, but I promise DaVinci Resolve does a pretty good job of handling it, and we'll talk about that. For now, let's go ahead and close this. Let's talk about the user mode. So the user mode, if I were to close our project settings real quick, and I go to Playback, Render Cache user, the user mode will turn on caching for whatever you tell it to. So on any piece of media, so let's say I go to one of our clips here, I can right click it, and we have some Render Cache options. So when I'm in the user mode, it'll only cache what I tell it to. So this can be helpful if you're working with a big timeline and you don't want it to smart cache the entire timeline. But again, if I go back to those project settings, we can actually have it automatically cache transitions or composites, meaning multiple layers as soon as we turn on the user mode. This is completely personal preference. I normally have mine toggled on, but if you don't want it on, don't worry about it. I'm gonna save that for now, though. And go back to our timeline. So those case files, right? Those can begin to pile up quickly. Well, DaVinci Resolve has a way of removing case footage that you don't need. But go up again to our upper left menu, go to Playback. Underneath Render Cache, there's two very helpful options. We're going to skip over Delete Render Cache for just a moment we're go to manage Render Cache. And it's in here that we can see by project how much cached footage we have. So if I want to delete the cache for our trailer Edit, well, I can select this knit clear selected Cache. And it'll say, Hey, we've deleted all those files, you're good to go. So that's pretty handy. Now, if I close it, you'll see it's reset our Render Cache because we deleted all those files. And I'll begin to re cache with a clean slate. The other really useful setting, this is the one I typically use is throughout the project, if I have my cache turned on, every once in a while, I'll go up to the playback menu and go to delete Render Cache. And I won't click all because that'll delete everything that we've already cached. What I will click is unused. And what this will do is it'll clear out any cache files that aren't currently being used on your timeline. So let's say I have to change the adjustment clips length, bring it back in so it sized correctly. You know, now we've reset our cache, and it's got to think again. Well, just go up to the playback menu. Delete Render Cache. Ooh, unused. And that'll delete any cache that I am not currently using. 99. Editing with Proxy Media: Caching is option two. To continue our injury metaphor, option three will be we'll call stitches or maybe surgery. And what that means is that we're going to use proxies. Now, what the heck is a proxy? Well, we're kind of creating temporary ones when we turn on our Render Cache. Remember, if we go to those project settings, our file format was a proxy format. We cancel that real quick. So what we're doing here is we're creating some temporary proxies to help with our playback speed. Well, instead of creating temporary ones that are specific to the timeline, we can actually create proxies for our footage. And what I mean by that is this. If I go to our media pool, go to the recordings folder. Let's go to a batch of recordings. So I'm going to go to the action folder. I can drag and select this footage, right click. And one of the options that we have here is Proxy Media. When I hit Generate Proxy Media, it'll begin to do a lot of thinking. And what it's doing in the background now is actually creating a duplicate file of our footage. And in fact, it's a low memory version of our file. And this is extremely powerful for two reasons. The first being that instead of DaVinci Resolve, having to process a very high memory, high intensive version of the footage. So let's say, you know, we're working with four K footage and a shot in 1 million FPS, what we've done instead is actually created a much more memory friendly version of it. And if I want to, I can actually find that footage. So I can go to the project settings, go to wherever my proxy generation location is and hit Browse. And if I pull up that folder, would you look at that? We have copies of our footage. And if I play, it might be hard to see in the recording, but on my screen, it is noticeably blurry and fuzzy, and that's because DaVinci Resolve saved a low memory version of that footage. Let me go and close out all of that real quick, hit Cancel. Now, as is, we're not seeing a difference in our quality on the timeline, which is great. So you might think that the proxies maybe didn't work, but we just need to toggle them on. So up in the upper right hand corner of our preview window, there's this little drop down menu that says HQ for me. If I click that knit prefer proxies, couple of things are going to happen. For one, now when I go full screen, we have much lower quality footage, and you'll know if you've done it right, because the clips that are proxied will have this little yellow icon on it, and it says Pxy for proxy. Also, in the media pool, we can see which clips are proxied now and which aren't. Creating proxies is actually a pretty beautiful thing. And remember, the way that we did that is I drag and selected our footage. Right clicked Proxy Media generate Proxy Media, excuse me. Right now, you might not see why proxies are so cool, but in a more professional work environment, one of the things that makes it special is that if you're working in a multiple editor workflow, meaning it's not just you working on a video. Well, in order for you guys to share footage, each editor will need to download the entire repository of footage. So for us, again, it wasn't too bad, but we did have a good bit of footage, right? We've got three folders, including our master interview. Well, if one user creates proxies, instead of sending over gigabytes or potentially terabytes worth of footage, you can just send over the proxies. You can then Edit using just the proxy footage, and at the end of the workflow, send your timeline to the other editor, and then all they need to do is take those proxies, right click Proxy Media Proxy Media. And then once the Pxymdias Media relinked, you're good to go. The other thing that's really cool about using proxy Media is even if, let's say we generate proxies on the timeline for all of our footage and we're editing in some lower quality timelines, well, if you still have access to the original footage and the proxy is linked, when I go to the Deliver page to render, there's an option in our advanced settings down here that says use Proxy Media. So while this is turned off, what DaVinci Resolve will do is it'll render out in the original footage, no matter what your timeline looks like, which is pretty, stinking, cool to me. We've got one final coption to cover, and I know we're talking about playback speed a good bit, but I promise this will be something that plagues you down the road. 100. Rendering Clips in Place: We got one final option cover, and we're going to move relatively quickly through it. If the last option was to perform surgery, the next is to amputate and completely replace. And what that means is this option four is actually rendering in place. It's not caching, it's not generating proxies. It is taking whatever footage you have on your timeline and rendering it. In place, creating a new version with whatever settings you've applied to it. And what I mean by that is this. I'm going to go up to the Media Pool, go to the master folder, and I'm actually going to create a new Bn for our renders. So I'm going to right click New Bin I'm going to call this 07 underscore Renders. Open up that folder? What I would like to do is render this last spit of footage in place. Now, you don't have to do it with an entire chunk of footage. If I wanted to, I can make a copy of this footage over here, right click on it, and then I could look for that render in place option, which we will cover in just a moment. Just for the purpose of this example, I think it's going to make more sense when we work with a lot of footage. So let me hit backspace and delete that. Typically, the way I will use this is I'll get compound clips involved. Now, compound clips made an appearance in the last stuff I wish I knew section. And this is another reason why they are so powerful. What I'm going to do is I'm going to make a global cut on all of our footage here. So I'm going to cut by pressing A, the solid colors, the adjustment clip, and the fade on Text and the other adjustment clips, and the footage itself should already be separated. I'm then going to drag and select all of that footage. I'm going to go over to the Visual Effects folder, and O I think I put the camera flash in the wrong folder. Let me put that in our effects folder. But I'm going to go to the visual effects folder. And hit Control, Shift C, or right click New compound clip. Remember, when we create a compound clips, I'm going to hi Enter, what we're doing is we're kind of creating a mini timeline here. So if I were to hit C or right click and hit Open and timeline, we've essentially composited or combined all of our footage in place, and it lives in this compound clip timeline. Let me close that tab. Well, now instead of having to render five clips in place, we have one compound clip. So I'm now going to cycle over to the renders folder, and it's totally okay if you miss up which folder you're in. Just know that whatever folder you're currently in in the media pool is where this new rendered file is going to go. I'm gonna right click. Render in place. And just like the Deliver page, we now have full render options here. So if I were to click the format, you can see all of the formats that we would have on the Deliver page. So what I'm going to recommend you do if you would like to render in place, is to actually stick with the default. There are a few instances where you might not want to use this. For example, if you're rendering with transparency, but nine times out of ten, QuickTime and using the Apple ProRes Codex is just fine. I'm also going to make sure I'm rendering at the source resolution. If you have footage, that's a bigger resolution than the timeline, if you don't check this on, it'll render it at the timelines resolution. Check that on and hit Render. I'll ask you, Hey, where do you want us to put this? Because we're going to create a new video file for you. If you set up your folders correctly, it should generate a renders folder inside wherever your footage is located. You don't have to save it here. You can save the downloads. You could create a separate folder in your hard drive somewhere just for renders. But this for me, works just fine. Somebody hit Select Folder. And now it is going to render that footage in place. We'll give it just a moment to finish doing some thinking. And as soon as it renders in place, you'll notice that our cache preview goes away a now we have nothing left to cache. We now have a rendered piece of Media. And in fact, I can go to the Media pool, and now we have compound clip one Space Render. I could double click this, and we have a separate rendered out video file. So for you, if you're ever working on the timeline and you have an especially troublesome piece of footage that you can't fix with proxying and you can't fix with caching in place, well, the next best option is to just render it and create a new video file. Couple of things to know about this, though. For one, this is now a new video file. So if I were to go to Deliver this footage, it's no longer a proxy. There's no caching here. Resolve views this as a new video file. So again, if you render this in place and you render in a lower quality or a lower resolution, and then you go to the Deliver page, well, it's not going to up rest and try to figure out what you wanted originally. It is very different than creating proxies or caching. The other thing to know is that this is semi permanent. So I can no longer right click here and hit Open and timeline. So I can't view our compound clip. Again, new video file, but that doesn't mean that we've lost everything. What I can actually do is I can right click on that render, go up top and hit decompose to original. And what that'll do is restore our original compound clip on the timeline. And now I can hit C to open up that compound clip, and we have all of our footage. So typically, the workflow I'll use if I ever need to render footage in place is I will create a duplicate by holding down the Alt key and dragging up. I'll then disable the original by aiding control shift in D and then render the copy. So again, that's right click Render in place. I'll leave it as default, make sure it's at source resolution. Choose my folder and hit Enter. This way, I have an original version pre render that I can go and access if I do need to make any changes. And then if I did make any changes, I could just drag it up, make a duplicate, and re render in place. So, with all that said, there are some smaller tricks here and there to help with playback speed and getting smart with how you size position and, you know, what effects you use on your footage. But generally speaking, the four options we have are 21. Go up to the playback menu and go to the timeline playback resolution. And down rest to ordaRz. Now, I use this so much that I actually map this to a hot key. So I have mine map to Control Shift Q and full Control Shift E. Option two, caching. So again, playback menu, Render Cache, and use either SMRT or user to manage our cache. We have a managed Render Cache footage, and to free up any files that we're not currently using, we go up to Delete Render Cache unused. Option three, proxies. To create a proxy, we go to our footage. We drag and select, right click. Proxy Media, generate Proxy Media. To make sure that your proxies are toggled on, go up to the upper right menu and make sure you have preferred proxies. Quick aside, DaVinci Resolve actually has a separate Proxy generator. When you install Resolve, it will come with what is called the Black Magic Proxy generator. If I open that, this is a separate software that you can use to generate proxies while you're at it. Because you notice that when I go here, right click Proxy Media generate proxies, I cannot access my timeline. So instead, if I were to cancel that go to the proxy generator. Well, now all I need to do is remove this old folder, add whatever folder I would like to use for proxies. I can then add that, start that process. And now I can still access my timeline. And as soon as DaVinci Resolve begins to generate these proxies, so I'll give it just a moment to do some thinking. In real time, you'll notice in the media pool that it is creating proxies. So now I can edit while DaVinci Resolve is creating proxies and helping with my playback speed, and it will update and auto allocate those proxies on your timeline in real time. Option four is to render in place. So with that, we can go to any piece of media, right click at Render and Place. It will then render a new video file with all of your effects and footage baked in. Hopefully, this has been helpful. I know there was a fairly large conversation about playback speeds, but I do feel like this tends to be very helpful as you begin to work on bigger projects. We're going to change pace a little bit and start to talk a little bit more about audio. 101. Using EQ to Shape Audio: So we've got two things to cover in terms of audio. And moving through this video, I am highly encouraging we put on headphones. If you have some around, your AirPods, your Send hiser, whatever they are, go and slap them on your ears because it'll make what I'm saying much more apparent. The first will be some tips and tricks to manipulate your audio and make it sound and feel the way you'd like to. And the second will be Fairlight and how we can operate inside Fairlight. And in particular, I'd like to talk about E Qing. So I'm still on our dirt bike trailer timeline here, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a copy of our music here. We just need some kind of working example. Feel free to experiment with your own music tracks in this section to kind of get a better feel for how E Qing affects your audio. So, EQing. What does EQing mean? Well, what I'm talking about is equalizing your audio. Let me go ahead and zoom in on our music track here. And if I select it over in the inspector tab on the audio tab. If I were to scroll down a little bit, there's this giant scary looking graph right here called equalizer. What the equalizer is is a representation of the volume level of whatever audio is being represented here based on frequency. And what I mean by frequency is high or low pitched. So a low pitched frequency might be a base drop, right? That real deep, reverberated sound. High frequencies might be a little squealy. That might be a balloon whistling through the air. It might be a chipmunk, but every piece of audio will fall somewhere on this frequency scale. And in fact, DaVinci Resolve has a tool to look at the frequency of your audio. If I go up to the Effects tab, go to audio effet. There's this little option right here that says frequency analyzer. If I read drag and drop it on our music, we've got this little pop out window. Ooh. Go and do some thinking. If I hit Play, you can see how the frequencies are distributed based on their volume. So the left scale is volume. So how loud is it? The X axis is our frequency. So it looks like, generally speaking, for our audio here, we have a lot of low frequency sounds, and we almost have this cascading waterfall effect. I wonder what this looks like for a human voice. So let me close this for now. I'm gonna make a copy of our voiceover, which is this first Purple track. Gan you don't have to use this one, but I just want to play with some human voice here. So I'm gonna drag that off to the right, and we'll do the same thing. Let's use our frequency analyzer. We'll go ahead and hit play. And the moment that you just shut it all out and you like, just commit? Kind of looks like the gentleman's voice is sitting right 100-800 DB. And the moment that you just shut it all out and you, like, just commit? So what does this mean for us? And what does this have to do with EQing? Well, let's talk about it. Let me close that for now. I'm gonna delete the frequency analyzer on both pieces of medium. To actually access that pop up window again, there's this little, what you call it slider icon up to the right, and that'll let you pop out that window again. But for now, I'm going to go ahead and delete it. What we can do and what a lot of audio engineers do is make use of the equalizer to deliver a particular experience. To demonstrate that, let's go ahead and turn it on. So I'm going to go up this little toggle with my music selected and toggle on the equalizer. And by default, it's going to enable band two, three, four and five. And what I mean by band is a particular range of frequencies. So if I were to grab up the three here, you see how we're only grabbing a certain set of frequencies? That's what I mean. Let me reset that real quick. Oop. So to experiment with this a little bit, what I'm going to ask you to do is turn on Band six, which is the highest frequency value. Let me go and drag this down and reposition just a little bit. So go ahead and turn on Band six. And by default, it has this cut off band type. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull this six icon. To the left. It's going to be an arbitrary amount to the left. We're going to experiment with this to see exactly how it influences. But what we've done is we've told the equalizer, I want you to cut off all audio after this frequency. So starting at around 700 Hertz, which is the H Z symbol, begin to drop the volume. So if I'm cutting off the higher frequencies, what do you think that's going to do our music track? Before you hit play, do a little thinking. How would that influence the music if we're cutting off higher frequencies? Well, let's give it a play. How interesting. Be cutting off those higher frequencies, it almost sounds like we're muffling our audio, like it could be underwater. Higher frequency sounds tend to be associated with clarity and things that pierce through the quiet. So by turning this off, what we've done is we've said, I don't want any of those piercing sounds. Want only the low rumbly noises. Now, when you use your EQ, there's a few different options for how the band is affected. By default, the six has this cut off option, but I can also toggle that to this O option. And now what we're going to do is we're going to isolate and increase or decrease the volume of a certain frequency. So I'm going to set in and out point on our music here and I'm going to turn on the loop button so that I can loop our track. That's pretty loud for me, so let me turn it down just a little bit. When I play this back, what I'm going to do is I'm going to move this around Were you able to hear how it was influencing the music track? I know the playback got a little laggy there, but by using the EQ, we can really change how our audio is heard. Now, you might be thinking, that's great, Nal Brandon. But when would I need to use this? I mean, I don't need something that sounds like it's stuck in a vacuum. Well, that's a good question. Let's talk about it. So let me go ahead and reset this EQ for now and I'll toggle it back. If you remember a few videos ago, one of the things that we discussed was volume ranges. We had said that, you know, for our primary audio, the thing we want in the foreground, it should realistically be anywhere from minus three to maybe minus ten, not an exact value, but we want it in the upper range. And then for secondary, probably somewhere around the -15 B range, plus or minus maybe 12 to 18. And then for our background audio, we're shooting for that -30 DB range. Well, what if we want our music to be loud and heard, but we also have voiceover at that same volume level? Well, when you do that and you put them on the same place, it's pretty hard to hear one or the other, which is why when we were doing the trailer Edit, our quick fixed solution was to just drop the volume. But if I were to bring in our voiceover dialogue here and try to play it with the music. In the moment that you just shut it all out and you like, just commute it's pretty hard to hear. So what we can do is we can make use of our EQ to carve out a range where our voice comes through. If you remember when we did our frequency analysis of the voice over here, the bulk of the volume sat 100-800 hertz. As a rule of thumb, the majority of female or high pitched male voices will sit between 100 200 Hertz. Male voices or deeper female voices will sit 150-250 Hertz. These aren't exact numbers. It's just a general rule of thumb. So how can we make use of this when it comes to E Qing our music? Well, what we can do is we can go to our music track here if we have voiceover that we want to be heard at the same time as our music playing without adjusting global volumes, what we can do is apply an EQ. So I can select our music track. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take Band three, and I'm going to set it to be at Oh, this is finicky. I'm going to drag and drop it down to be at 200 Hertz. I'm going to change the quality so that it's a little wider. And again, you can always type in a number here, so if you want to be specific, do that. And I'm gonna pull it down right around. We'll go like minus nine DB. Would minus six work? Sure. Would -18 work? Sure, it's gonna be a little bit more aggressive. But I'm gonna go somewhere around minus DB. And the Hertz that I'm setting it at is not exact. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to play our music with audio with the EQ off, and then with the EQ on. So this is before. And the moment that you just shut it all out and you like, just commit. Okay. Trying to make a little mental note of how that sounded. This is the EQ on. And the moment that you just shut it all out and you like, just commit? It might be subtle, but I bet your bottom dollar that you were able to discern what our character was saying with more clarity than before with the EQ off. So what we can do while we're editing is if we have music or if we have voiceover or sound effects that we want to be layered on top of each other, we can carve out space where one shines and the other one doesn't. And in fact, we can do the same thing, but instead of removing volume, we can add volume. So I can click on the Voiceover track, go to the EQ. I go to something like Band five and maybe increase the upper frequencies and cut off some of those really low ones. So band one here. And now it's gonna sound something like this. And the moment that you just shut it all out and you like, just commit? Subtle change. This is before? And the moment that you just shut it all out, and like this is after. And the moment that you just shut it all out and you like, just comment? Yeah, and subtle change, but these subtle changes compounded on top of each other can make a very big difference. The last thing I'll say about EQing is that you can also apply it to sound effects. So I'm gonna clear our in and out points real quick, undo the loop playback, go to the Media pool, and I'm gonna go to our sound effects folder. And I'm going to bring in this one we have here the cinematic Woche reavers. I'm go and drag and drop that. And if I play this when I play this sound, this rising section is very abrasive. Depending on your Edit, that can be a good thing. But if you want this to feel like it's more in the background, well, that moment can be almost deafening piercing. So you could try play around with lowing the volume. But still, it might be too much. So we can select our sound effect, go to the EQ, turn on that six band, and mute some of those higher frequencies. Completely different sound. So the question is, well, okay. So what's the best EQ for everything? Well, just like the Color page, there isn't isn't a correct EQ for every single sound effect or every single voice. There are better decisions that we can make, and you can make those decisions once you begin to understand which frequencies affect what? With that sent, let's talk a couple quick audio tips, and then we'll talk Fairlight for just a moment. 102. Quick Audio Fixes and Enhancements: Alright, so let's talk just a couple of quick audio tips. One of them that's my favorite is pitch shifting. That's PITCH. Pitch shifting. I'm going to delete that cinematic Whoosh sound effect for now. And I'm going to bring in this short fire woosh sound effect, which sounds like this. We've got a left to right pan. It's short and sweet. There will be moments in your editing where you have a rapid sequence of events, and you might need to use your camera flash, your whoosh, or even a pop sound effect. But when you use the same sound effect over and over, it can become a distraction for the viewer, all we hear is the same thing used over and over. So instead of going through your library and finding a unique Wooh for every single transition or every single cut, what we can do is this. For one, you could implement EQs and mess around with the EQ and, you know, change how each wooh sounds through that option. Or what you can do is select one of your duplicates. Scroll up in the audio menu and find the pitch option. We've got two sliders here, semitones and sens. Then to be perfectly blunt, I don't know if I can give you a good definition between the two. The one that we'll normally use is our semitones. And we can change the semitones pitch in increments of three and five and ten, whatever you'd like, either down or up to create variety in our sound effects. So now I'm on that third duplicate. I'm increasing the pitch there, and I'm going to go to the last one and really drop the pitch down. Let's go minus seven. And that's what this sounds like. Subtle difference, but it is different. And sometimes that subtle change is all you need to make your scene feel that much fuller. So pitch shifting, very cool effect. Another common question I get is, how do I improve my voiceover? See, depending on who you're working with, or even if you're just recording for yourself and the equipment that's being used, the voiceover sound could come across flat or muddy or uncrisp. So, generally speaking, what I would say is this, and I'm going to go ahead and reset our Q here because we're not going to use it. Nine times out of ten, the best way to fix audio is through the use of the hardware. It's going to be very hard for you in post, meaning in denture Resolve to completely fix all of the audio that you've recorded. That doesn't mean that we can't improve it, but if you're trying to fix something that sounds like Doodoo, well, the end result is probably just going to be a little bit sharper sounding Dodoo. The one really useful tool that I would recommend you check out is over in the Effects tab. And all I want you to do is locate the multiband compressor. And Drag and Drop that onto your audio. I holy guacamole, would you look at all these knobs? We're almost in a music studio. I am not going to cover what any of these things do to be quite frank, I don't know if I know, and I don't know if it's that important. All you need to do is go up top to the drop down menu and turn on impact and balance. And what that'll attempt to do is compress nasty frequencies and elevate better frequencies. And that sounds something like this. So this is before. And the moment that you just shut it all out and you like, just commit and the moment that you just shut it all out, and This will be after. And the moment that you just shut it all out and you like, just commit and the moment you can see the compressor working here. It's a small change, but it helps. The other tool that I would recommend you look into is called the vocal channel. And this is one that I'll typically use, but I think it tends to invite more questions than answers. What I will do is this, I'll go and drag and drop this on to our audio here, and this brings and combines in a bunch of tools from the Fairlight I kind of combines them into one effect. One of those being our EQ. So this is our EQ right here. You can see we can adjust our frequencies. The other one is a compressor, and what a compressor attempts to do is if we look at our voiceover dialog instead of having a variety of volumes, it attempts to compress them all to sit around the same height. Hopefully, that makes sense. So instead of having variety in how loud or quiet something is, it tries to bring them all to the same level by reducing the high volume levels. Now, I have a couple presets that I unfortunately with this effect, there's no DaVinci Resolve preset. So this is the one that I normally use. In essence, I have the high pass turned on. I've boosted some of the basi frequencies, and I boosted some of the higher frequencies, that clarity. And I've turned on my compressor and tried to mute some of those really high volume levels. If you would like, feel free to take a screenshot, but this is not a master dragon drop fixed solution for all your voices. You might need to experiment and figure out what sounds and works best with your own voice or whatever you're working for voice. So this will be a quick before and after with the compressor and vocal channel off, and then turned on. So this is before? And the moment that you just shut it all out and, like, just commit and the moment. This is after. You just shut it all out and you like, just commit. And the moment that you just shut it all out? Do you hear a difference? Maybe you don't. That's okay. I tend to feel that it sounds fuller and more balanced. But again, nine times out of ten, the better solution is gonna be to work on the actual audio recording process than to try to fix everything inside Dementia Resolve. 103. Using Fairlight for Better Audio: So the last little audio snippet that we are going to cover is Fairlight. Now, I hope this doesn't disappoint too many people, but I am not a Fairlight expert. I'm not an audio engineer. I don't quite understand all the ins and outs of audio mixing and mastering. What I do know are some of the basics, which I will attempt to share with you guys. With that said, let's introduce that new page here all the way at the bottom, where the music icon is, hop over to Fairlight. And even to this day, when I open this page, it gives me the HBe Gees. There's just so much to digest and understand. Now, like all the other pages inside Resolve, there are some similarities to the Edit page. We have our Media pool up in the upper left hand corner that we can open up to preview some of our media. We have an effect SAM. And then we've got new stuff Index. Ooh, nope. Groups? Nope, don't want that. Sound library. Absolutely not. And ADR. Ooh, scary. I'm gonna go back to the Media Pool. And the effects. In the upper row here, we have a full meter readout, which will give us the volume level across all of our tracks. So if I were to hit play in here. In the moment that you just shut it all out and you can see how all the volume levels are sitting for the tire bus. Now, the bus is the final audio output. So all of our tracks are combined and sent to one bus. We're going to go ahead and ignore the control room and the loudness because I don't think they're super important for this essentials course. Don't get mad at me if you are an audio engineer and watching this. I apologize. I just don't think they're that important. And the upper right hand corner, we have our video preview. Now the main difference between the Edit page and Fairlight comes down here in this lower quadrant, kind of similar to the Fusion page. Because unlike the Edit page, we cannot see any of our video tracks. The only thing we're allowed to look at is audio. And over on the right, you should have your mixer open. And we mess with the mixer just a little bit, but this is the full grown up version of the mixers. This is the adult sized version. Now, the thing to remember that's important with the mixer, is that it operates on a track level. Right? So before when we were talking about EQ and pit shifting and stuff, we were doing it on individual clips. When we use the mixer, it applies it to the entire track. So why would that be useful? Why would I want to have just one track be set to a certain volume level or one track to have a certain set of EQ applied to it? Well, if you remember, the majority of audio that you download, if you download or buy it from a reputable source will be set to zero DB, meaning it's going to be super loud. Well, what we can do in Fairlight is we can pre set up tracks to have volume levels ready to go. So if I were to go to my sound effects track here, I could bring the volume down to -15 to have it set to that mid range. And now, anytime I bring in a sound effect, I can drag and drop it to this track. Let's bring it over here, zoom in. The same controls apply on the Fairlight page as the Edit page. So S zooms out, D zooms in. And now what I play this, it's sitting at -15 dB. So again, why would this be useful? Well, when you're editing, you will probably look to add hundreds of sound effects throughout the Edit. That's not an exaggeration. The bigger the video, the better you get it editing, you will probably add hundreds of sound effects on your timeline. If you have to go in and manually adjust the volume on every sound effect, instead of just being able to move it to whatever track it should belong to, you will waste seconds that will compound to minutes that compound to hours that end up compounding to sadness. And we don't want to be. So Fairlight can be used to alleviate our sadness, and we can preset up everything to be ready to go for our Edit. And what that ends up boiling down to is setting up presets that are good to go. If you remember a few videos ago, one of the questions that I brought up was when we set up our audio track here, I said, Well, is there a way to create a preset of this so that we don't have to add audio tracks every single time. And you bet your buns. There is. If we go all the way up to the Fairlight menu at the very top menu bar, there's an option that says presets library. I select that. Wow, would you look at that? We actually have presets ready to go for our equalizer. So I could go to voice over one, and I could apply a male equalizer. Whoa, you look at that. On Audio Track three, I can now double click the EQ. And we now have an EQ set up for a male voice. How sweet. Now, this EQ has got a lot more going on compared to the Edit page, but again, that's we're on Fairlight. This is what it's here for. But, in essence, it's the same controls, right? We choose what frequency we want, and we choose how loud or quiet it needs to be. So that's really handy. What other presets do we have? We have a dynamics preset. Dynamics being the compressor that we mentioned in the last video. But again, this is a more fleshed out version of that compressor. Well, that's pretty handy. And we also have track preset. So this can be extremely powerful if you're working with a microphone or a lab mic, which is what I have set up here or a specific creator or recording Studio, or maybe you have a specific EQ that you want on music tracks, et cetera. Well, you can set up a track preset that will save and apply anything you set up here. And I know we really haven't covered the mixer options here, and I don't want to say it's straightforward because it's not, but there's nothing new. The mixer covers effects that we could add, so we could add some of those reverbs, or one of those tools was the vocal channel, which we covered in the last section. We've got our EQ, we've got our compressor, and then we've got a couple of Studio features, like turning on the vocal isolation. But that's really it. That and the overall volume level. So if you get that set up appropriately for a specific scenario, well, you can save it in the preset library. So I'll go ahead and load in my preset for the lav mic. And over here on track three, now we have some vocal isolation turned on. We've got a couple effects in the form of a DSR and the multiband compressor. We have our compressor itself turned on and an EQ setup. Pretty nifty. And I just want to reiterate one more time that these plug ins and effects and the specific values that they're at are unimportant. These should become solutions to whatever problems that you're having. So if you reach a point in your audio and you're saying, Hmm, this doesn't sound like I wanted to. How should I fix it? Well, that's your cue to go into Fairlight and go, Hmm, let me try a little bit of this a little bit of that. And when you get those little bits of this and that to work, then we can save it. More importantly, though, the one feature that I really wanted to show off is the last drop down menu, and its Fairlight configuration presets. These are global presets for your tracks, meaning that it'll save the track name, the track order, the track color, any EQs you set up, any volumes you have set up, those will all be saved here. So let me go ahead and reset this track three to get rid of that preset real quick. I re change the color so that it matches what we started with. So if you want moving forward, what you can do is save this track layout. You can obviously adjust this for doing so, so if you needed more music tracks or you wanted the voice over to be on top, go and do that. But once you're ready to go, hit Save New. And for me, it's asking if I want to update the existing one I have, I don't want to do that. I'd like to create a new preset. And we'll call this BYOL underscore simple. It, okay? No, I could hit Apply here. And it's not going to change anything because this is the preset we have set up. But where this becomes so cool is if I close this menu, I go back to the Edit page, go to the Media pool, and I'll go to my timelines folder for just a moment. If I right click to create a new timeline, there's this option that we've ignored so far that says use Fairlight Preset. Well, I can click that. And now I can choose to import one of my Fairlight presets that I've set up. So I can use BYOL simple, hit Create. And it'll import with all of our tracks, all of the names. And if I were to go over to the Fairlight page and expand this out, remember how we set up the sound effects volume level? We'll import that in. So what I would recommend doing moving forward from this point is you might not have a good grasp of your workflow, right? You might not quite know how many music tracks you like or the volume levels that you'd like or if you do need EQ or if you don't either way, try to make a note of what things seem important and what don't what order do you like to operate in? And the next time you finish a project where you've had to set up multiple audio tracks, at the end, make a mental note to save it. So that way, anytime you go to create a new timeline, you're not starting from scratch. You're starting at a good working place. And if you need to make changes, you can. So that was Fairlight in a nutshell, and now we're going to talk about some very cool video tricks. 104. Using Optical Flow for Smooth Motion: Everybody. So we're selling the dirt Trailer project. I'm going to delete that adjustment clip now I don't necessarily want our playback to be jumpy, and I'm actually going to turn off proxies so that we have our full footage here. Now, this will be a quick tip but a good one. And we're going to talk about interpolation modes. Now, interpolation is a real fun word to throw out to make you sound smart at parties, but what exactly does it mean? Well, if we were to go to our retime controls here, we didn't run into any issues because we didn't actually go below the frame rate of our footage. And let me dim that cause that is loud. But what if we pull some example footage here? Let me paste it on over. Let's get rid of this random audio. We don't need this. I'm going to hit backspace here. If I were to hit Control R to go to our Retime Controls, I'm going to change the speed to be let's do 25%. When I hit Play, it is very laggy. The reason for that being that we're dropping the speed below the frame rate that it was recorded at. Right? So what I mean is that for a second a footage. If the footage is recorded in 24 FPS, we have one, two, three, four. 24 frames. Well, we change our speed to be 25% of that. Well, now we only have one, two, three, four, five. Eight frames. So this footage up here is 24 frames per second. But down here, we're only at eight frames per second. Well, Resolve going, Hey, man, or well, man, I was supposed to be playing at 24 FPS. So what am I supposed to put in between the gaps? Where nothing's there anymore. Well, the method it uses to fill in these gaps is what we're going to talk about. So with my footage selected, if I go over to the retime and scaling dropdown menu, again, that's in the inspector tab. There's an option here called retime and scaling. It's got two very important menus here, retime process and motion estimation. The default is project settings. So what does that mean? Well, if I go to my project settings and we scroll all the way down to the bottom, it's got this option here that says frame interpolation. And just like our Inspector tab, we have a retime process and motion estimation. So the default we have is nearest. And the nearest mode looks at the nearest frame and repeats it until we move on to the next frame. So every four frames, we get one new one. So one, two, three, four, New frame, one, two, three, four. What we can do, though, is blend the frames together. And the method that we choose to use when blending frames lives here in the retime process. So I go to the project settings. Instead of using nearest, I could use something like frame blend. And this mode operates just like it sounds in that it blends frames together. So play. Ooh, this almost is kind of giving me a headache. But what's happening is, as we move between frames, so this looks like it's one of the original frames, we attempt to cross fade the next frame, and we get this almost ghosting effect with our footage. It's kind of a cool look if that's what you're going for. But DaVinci Resolve has this third option that attempts to really smooth out our footage. So if I go to retime process, this bottom option is Optical Flow. Now, this will be the first time that we actually need to use the motion estimation setting. So by default, I'm going to just go to standard faster. In essence, what Optical Flow attempts to do is warp and blend pixels together the best way that it can. It's a bit weird to describe, so let's just go ahead and play back our footage. Now, that is much smoother, but there are some obvious weirdies. Keep your eye on the wheel spokes over here as I scrub back and forth. So what's happening is that in areas where not a lot is changing, we actually have pretty smooth playback. So if we keep an eye on this, what would you call it upper third diagonal, it looks pretty good. But as soon as there's a lot of motion, a lot of new information coming on the screen, we get some very weird artifacting. So what we can do is play around with the motion estimation and see if there's not one that works a little bit better. So I'm gonna go down the drop down menu. Now, this is an area where free users will be limited. I believe free users will still be able to use Optical Flow and standard faster, standard better. I cannot remember for certain if you'll have the enhanced versions, but I know for certain, you will not have the AI tools. AI tools will use DaVinci Resolves neural engine. It's Smart Engine to do some really heavy thinking to improve that optical flow. So let's try Enhanced Better first and give that a play. And we still when the leg is moving, it almost looks like it's dragging this clip along. It's better than standard faster, but we still get some really weird stuff going on. The other option would be to go to AI, Speed Warp. Now, there's two options here with the AI Speed Warp Speed Warp faster, Speed Warp better. I would only turn on Speed Warp better if you have a super PC. If you're rocking the latest GPU and you've got thousands of gigabytes of RAM, go for it. Otherwise, I would stick with Speed Warp faster. And let's go ahead and give that a play. And that's actually pretty darn good. Now, again, this is a Studio only feature, so you might not have access to this. But again, let's watch that back leg. There's still some artifacting and a little bit of weirdness, but for the most part, that's pretty good. So, when might this be useful for you? Well, when you go to do a trailer Edit or a montage of some kind, you might not get handed footage that was recorded at a high frame rate, 'cause remember, our footage was recorded at a very high frame rate that was slowed down for us to us. So when we needed to slow down, we didn't have to do anything because we could leave it at the default speed. But if you weren't given that kind of footage, so let's say you're working on a 30 FPS timeline and you're handed 30 FPS footage, well, you're going to have to use some kind of retime control if you plan on slowing down that footage at all. Now, where you can get into trouble is a lot of people will default to using Optical Flow, but sometimes it's totally okay to just use nearest. Or frame blend really depends on what you're trying to show off. With that said, though, we could go back to our trailer footage and try toggling on Optical Flow and see how that affects our footage. So I'm going to turn on Optical Flow enhance better for this clip here. I'm going to control C to copy it, and then I'm going to drag and select all of our video files here, hit Alt V, and then I'm going to paste the retime process and motion estimation. Again, that's Alt V to paste attributes and hit Apply. And that'll apply Optical Flow enhance better to all of our footage. Give it a second to do some caching, and now it's hit play. Now, because we're only speeding up footage, you might not notice a difference. But if I were to select one of the clips and toggle off the retime scaling, there is a difference. And in particular, if I zoom in, we can see trace elements from the previous frame. So just another tool to put in your belt. The next thing we'll do is talk some of my favorite cool things in DaVinci. 105. More Awesome Features You Shouldn't Miss: Alrighty. I might have lie to you guys, don't be upset I did it with good reason. We're going to speed run some of my favorite features inside Devint Resolve. But I've kind of shown you most of them. There's really not some secret cave where all of the really cool things are hidden. We've covered a lot of the really powerful and useful tricks Inside DaVinci Resolve, but there are some things that are pretty nice to know about. So, for one, did you know you could have a grid on your frame? Yeah so check that out. You can actually add an on screen grid that you can use for sizing and positioning. If you go all the way up top of the view menu, there's this option here that says guides, and you can turn on guides. There's also a menu in the upper right corner in your preview window where you can toggle on rulers and guides. So now if I wanted to add a new guide, I go up to the ruler and drag and drop one in. Delete that for now? Well, this is extremely helpful because for one, now we can use it as reference. And if you're somebody who's into photography or study compositions a little bit, you're familiar with the rule of thirds, which says that when you split your frame into thirds, Things that tend to fall within one of those quadrants or, I guess, third rents are aesthetically pleasing for the human eye. So I have my third setup, along with a midpoint. So I have a point setup halfway between. Ooh. Now, I made a boo boo and just adjusted one without saying anything out loud, so to adjust a guide, you can right click on it and hit Edit Guide. You have an option to set it in terms of pixels or percentage, and I'm going to move mine back to be 66.6 or two thirds of our frame. There we go. Now my rulers are all set up. You can also change the color as well, which is kind of fun so I can go blue, whatever floats your boat there. The nice thing about guides is that you can snap things to them. So if I were to go do my compound clip here, one of the secret menus that we haven't mentioned at all is actually right over here. Yeah, there's this little drop down menu in our preview window that gives you a bunch of tools, and one of them is the transform tool. And with it, I have an on screen control that I can use to move stuff around. And when you have guides turned on, you can snap your transformation to one of those guides. Some of the other features are the crop feature. To crop your footage. Or if you're working with Fusion effect on the Edit page, you can turn that on or Dynamic Zoom. So what is dynamic Zoom? Well, if you go over to the right over here, one of the options in our inspector tab is dynamic Zoom. If I toggle that on, at first, nothing happens, but what we've done is we've set up our footage to zoom in over time. If I toggle off the overlay, we will now slowly zoom out. You'll know we're zooming out because the crop bars come into frame. You can always swap that around as well, too, so that you're zooming in. So now we start zoomed out. And then we zoom in. Again, I could toggle on that overlay by clicking the button and change exactly how far we zoom in. So now we really zoom in on the text there. Pretty Neto, right? I'm go and turn that off for now. Another thing we haven't talked about are macros in fusion. And this is my final sales piss to you guys to request an advanced fusion course. If I open Fusion on this clip here, this doesn't have to be Media. This could be a fusion composition, but, you know, we're already here. I have macro set up to do cool things. Well, what is a macro? A macro is a pre saved node with settings already applied. So I can control space and look at Pop, and I've got a couple of pop macros. So I'm going to pop in two. I have this transform node ready to go. So I could drag and drop that in, hold Shift. Now if I were to hit Play, our footage pops in and then pops out. Pretty neat, right? You can even set up templates and other macros. So I have fusion template set up here like this three D camera setup. That I can plug my footage into that I can use to set up some three D camera motion. Fusion is pretty stink and incredible this way. There's so many cool things you can do in fusion. Let's go and delete those for now, though. So macros are kind of our way of setting up templates and presets in the Fusion page. We also didn't quite get to some of the smart features on the Color page, and oh, let me get out of this scope. That thing scares me. Let's go back to the parade. So, for instance, I go over here and add a power window to our subject here and try to line it up best I can on their face. I then go to the tracking option and track that circle forward and backwards. By scrub forward. See it tracks right to the noggin. Well, now, not only do we have a nice tracked region, you know, we can make some color changes to increase the brightness, the darkness, whatever, but we can do things like track a blur. So if you're ever wondering how people created those blurred out sequences for things that are inappropriate on screen, there you go. The last two things I'm going to show off are Studio only features. Now, if you're on free, don't click off quite yet because this could be a determining factor on whether or not you consider upgrading or not. Let me go and reset our color corrector node. One of those tools is magic mask. Now, magic mask is DaVinci Resolve's smart Masking tool. Let's go ahead and hide our grid and ruler for just a second. So we talked about masking briefly, and we talked about drawing circles and polygons to try to trace around objects. But what if you're working with something like this? How do you make a circle that fits him? You don't. And if you wanted to try to manually trace around them, you certainly could. But that is going to make your life very, very difficult. So what we can use is magic mask, which is this icon right here. And all you have to do is click a dot here, maybe click a dot here, and click a dot here. And now, if I turn on our overlay, we can see exactly what magic mask is grabbing. So I want to make sure I click another dot on the bike until it grabs the entire bike. And now, if I track this forward and backwards, it's going to take a little bit of time to do it. But we have perfectly traced out our subject. So what we can do now is if, for instance, I want to just have our subject, right? So I'm trying to composite this on top of another scene and do some kind of mask overlay transition. Well, I can right click and add an Alpha output. I go Alpha to Alpha, and remember, Alpha transparency. Whoop. Now when I go back to the Edit page, our subject is cut out. You see it's a little rough, so we would have to do some cleanup work on our magic mask. But this is going to be 400 times easier than trying to trace it with a polygon. Let me go back to the color page for just a moment. Now, this tool, magic mask is also in fusion. So I'm going to connect this and I'm going to reset this node to get rid of that mask. I can also go into fusion on whatever footage I'm working with and add in a magic mask. In fact, we can do something really cool with it where we split out our output to the magic mask here. Use our mask to get a rough ish outline of things. And I'll hit two to swap to that preview. It's like, we need to click here, there we go track that forward and backwards. And once it's finished thinking, not only do we have, again, a clean cutout of our subject that we could just feed out to the media out. So again, have that transparency. Or we could do some cool things like merging it on top of the original footage. So I'm merging the cutout on top of the footage here and adding something like a glow. So now he is illuminated and light, or we can even look to apply special effects to it. So now we have a pixelated, glowy version of him just on the masked out sequence. So magic mask is incredibly powerful. Again, Studio only feature. The last Studio tool, I'll show off. And to be completely blunt, if this was me, this would probably be what would push me over to Studio is the silence remover tool. For the majority of videos you edit, they probably won't be trailers. They'll probably be interviews or documentaries where a lot of people are talking. So if I drag and drop in our master interview here, I'm going to expand that, ring up the volume a little bit, normally what you have to do is go through and clean out any dead space in the recording. So if I were to go actually to the original recording, this is the segment that we pulled out of the entire interview. So the interview itself is an hour and 49 minutes. So there is this really cool tool in Daventure Resolve. I begin Studio only feature where I can go up to Clip Audio operations, ripple delete silence. And we can mess with the thresholds, the minimum amount of frames it has to get rid of, how many frames we want after the cut, how many frames we want before the cut and hit, remove. And it will delete all of that dead space. So I only looked at the back half of our footage here, and we got rid of 20 minutes. Incredible feature. Again, to access that, you go up to clip Audio operations Ripple Delete silence. And with that, I don't know if I have any other secret nuggets of information. You now have all the tools you need at your disposal to begin editing at a higher level, which is going to take us into our final project. 106. Class Project 12 - Mini Documentary: And here we go onto the final project here in our DaVinci Resolve centrals course. Project 12 12 projects into DaVinci. So this go around, as you can imagine, it'll be the biggest project of the course. It'll be the most demanding, but it'll be a great opportunity for you to take everything that we've learned thus far and apply it to one single video. Moving forward after this project, videos you work on aren't going to be segmented like we did throughout the course, right? There's not going to be a use fusion for this or just use text for this. So in reality, when we get into real working projects, this is what it's going to be. We're going to start from scratch and we're going to need to use all the tools in our tool belt to make the best possible version of what we can. So with that said, let's go ahead and take a look at what we're going to be working with for class project 12. This is it, guys. This is the big shebang haboom. It's our final project here, and we're going to be working with footage for a documentary that was called Narl in Pink. Now, similar to the other videos that we've worked on that have been licensed through EditStock, Narln Pink is a documentary that was done by the New York Times. And in fact, their YouTube video on it has over 3 million views. So we're going to be working with footage from a documentary that has been seen by a ton of people, which is a really cool opportunity for us as editors. We're going to be creating a full 60 to 92nd mini documentary slash Explainer for that video that could live on social media or as a standalone trailer. The brief says that social media has changed the landscape of marketing for movies and documentaries. Production studios need to be able to publish videos that can function as trailers, but also exist on their own as standalone posts. So our goal is going to be to create the best story that we can within 60 to 90 seconds. For this project, we're going to keep things horizontal in ten ADP. But if you would like, you can also create a social version or a vertical version of this if you would like some extra challenge. Now, one thing that we are going to practice in the following video is how to deconstruct this brief. We're going to look at who our target audience is, what should be the main takeaway, which would be the focus of the story and also keep in mind where this video might live. We've been asked to use music and sound effects as always to enhance the emotional impact without overwhelming our dialogue in the video. But unlike previous projects, I'm not going to be giving you audio. I'm going to leave this up to you all to figure out what kind of music and sound effects you like to use. And I will revisit this idea in just a moment. If you would like, you are more than welcome to reuse audio or to source your own. And we're also looking to do a little bit of color correction color grading. So I'd like to talk about two things real quick before we move forward. One, the audio issue. So on my personal computer, the stock Media folder, and inside this, I have an audio folder that contains all of the sound effects and all of the music I have acquired throughout the years of my editing. And inside this music folder, I have sourced it from different websites and different people. You might recognize Pixabe in here or Invado or Epidemic. And so if I were to start this project, I would go into one of these folders and then begin to sort through the different genres and types of music I've acquired to figure out what I might want to work with. You might not have that luxury. Some of you in this course will have audio that you can use. You have some similar folders on your own computer, but a lot of you, this is all brand new. So that begs the question. What are your options in here? Well, what I will say, the one option that you cannot do is steal music. If you've heard the term copyrighted music or DMCA music, that is music that is produced and unlicensed from artists. So, for instance, don't go pull a Lady Gaga song or Journey or ACDC or Bryson Tiller. Music from those artists, you would need to pay or figure out a way to license their songs to use in your own projects. So your two options are to either pay for a stock media website like Epidemic or Artlist or anything else that's out there right now, or look for copyright free music. Now, we've been sourcing a lot of our music this go around from Pixabay. Pixabay has a music section. You can go in here and look for different free songs that you can use. This is a totally viable option. Or do some searching around. There's sites like Free Music Archive, as well, where you can enjoy the free music archive, look for music, download it. What I'm really getting at here is that I'm not trying to cosign or recommend one site when it comes to downloading music. But when it comes to acquiring assets, that is a skill that you will need to develop. And for the purpose of this course, I would recommend not paying for a website. Until you're certain that this is going to be something that you're going to do daily or not weekly, or maybe even monthly, there's no need to go out and pay for music. The second thing I want to look at real quick is the course material itself. So in Section nine in the social Explainer folder, if you go to Class Project 12, go to Narlene Pink. We've got, what is this? Oh, six folders in here. And the one folder in particular I like to call out is this interviews folder. This go round, we have three separate interviews. Narlene Pink is the story of this group of young girls who are into skateboarding. Being that they are girls, it's a little counter culture to the norms when it comes to skateboarding. So it's the story of them and their parents supporting them to get into this hobby and bringing a little femininity into the world of skateboarding. So there's two interviews with the parents, along with one of the skateboarding superstars. Miss Reels is her name. It might be a little hard to see in the folder, but what I wanted to call out here is that when we get into the project itself, you'll notice that these are all shot on different days with varying amounts of sunlight. So when it comes to doing the color grade, I would focus more on making the shots look balanced and, like, they're all part of the same video. If you need to, feel free to revisit the color page lessons from the previous section. With all that said, let's move on to learning the art of deconstructing client briefs. 107. Deconstructing a Client Brief: Alright, so this lesson isn't necessarily one to one correlated with DaVinci Resolve, but it is a very good skill set to learn when it comes to editing. DaVinci Resolve at the end of the day is a tool for us to communicate the message that we're trying to share with the world. But if we don't fully understand what that message is, then we can lose it in translation when it actually comes time to hop into the editing bay and use the Edit Fusion and Color page in DaVinci. So what I would like us to do is to take a couple steps back and just do a little bit of planning. If you're like me, a lot of times you're working on videos like this by yourself. You don't have a production team, you don't have a director. So you kind of have to wear all those hats, and I think it's good to talk about what some of those things might look like. Now, for me, I am a pen and paper guy. I have this little legal pad of paper that sits right in front of me right below my keyboard anytime I'm editing, just to take quick notes. I think people have a lot of different systems for what works best. For me, I just like pen and paper. I go through I've got another one right over here. I go through them fairly quickly. So what I'm going to do is it's going to be hard for me to show this on my notepad. So I'm going to pull up paint to kind of sketch out how I would approach this, feel free to follow along or just watch along if you would like. So remember, the goal of this process of just doing a little bit of planning is to help us when we actually get into editing, right? We're trying to provide structure for Edit so that we're not going in there blind and then trying to figure things out on the fly. So I'm just going to take some notes for class project 12 here. As we're looking through our brief here, obviously, things, you know, like keeping things to 60 or 90 seconds are important. But I'm trying to find anything that indicates tone or kind of an idea that the client is looking for in this video. Now, as editors, we each have our own editing voice and language for things that we like to use in our videos. But when we work for somebody or for a video, we should try to make a video that fits that client the best that we can. So for me, one of the only things as I'm reading through this that jumps out for me in terms of expectations is they would like us to create the best story that we can. So when I hear the word story, for me, that means beginning, middle, and end. And in actuality, if we were to put this into literary terms, this would probably be something like setup, conflict, and resolution. Well, this is great Intel, because when we import our footage and begin to sort through it and pick out our selects and, you know, go through that whole workflow, I can now keep my eyes out for areas where we can set up the beginning of the video or some kind of setup that sets up the story that we're going to tell in these 60 to 90 seconds. And then the big thing in here that I'm going to keep an eye out for is conflict. We want to make sure that viewers understand that there is a problem in this video. Conflict is what keeps somebody invested in your story that you're telling, right? It's what makes things important. So this will be a big one that we look out for. Resolution, I'm not sure if we need. Right? This is supposed to be a standalone video that kind of gets people interested in the bigger story. So our resolution might be a maybe. But that's really it. If this was a message that we had received from them or an email, this is all that we've been given. So, if this is the only information that you've been given, well, you might need to do a little homework on your own. So whether you're working for somebody else or just for yourself, I've laid out some questions that might be worth asking. Are these the only questions you should ask? No, are they probably good ones? Yeah, I think so. So who's the target audience here? Well, in an ideal world, everybody, right? It would be great if every video that we made was made for everybody to see and everybody enjoyed it. But the reality is that when you take no stance or don't gear things in a particular way, you make something that tends to be very generic. So for us, who might we gear this video towards? Well, I can think of two groups of people. One might be Parents. This video is going to be the story of parents supporting their daughters to get into a hobby that not a lot of daughters get into, which leads us to our second group, which is probably a younger female audience. This one, in particular, is probably one that we want to respect more than this one. So if we know that young girls or young kids are gonna be watching this video, should we use anything that is vulgar or with profanity or might introduce ideas that are a little mature? No. T should be a video that you can play in front of families, okay? This is something that's important to keep in mind as we move forward. I'm going to skip this second question now and go on to the third, which says, We might this be posted? Now, this question right now might not have a lot of meaning to you, which is totally okay. But there is going to be a big difference on how we put together this video, depending on whether or not we ship it off to a film festival, whether or not we are just posting it on socials. If it's a longer video, it's a short form video, the different social media platforms tend to favor certain styles over the other, or is this just going to be a home video? Is this going to be something that you share to your family and friends, or is this something specifically that you want to put on your portfolio? For us, this will be something that lives on social media. And YouTube is a social media platform. So even if it is on YouTube, this still counts. Your interpretation of this is going to differ from mine. And again, totally okay. For me, when I think of social media, I think of really strong openings, AKA hooks. I also think of no fluff, which probably means we don't have time for a lot of character development. We might be able to show off personalities here and there, but it's going to be pretty hard to have a complete story arc within our 16 to 90 seconds for social media. The last question that I'd like to look at, and the second one on our list here is, what is the main takeaway? This, I think is probably the most important question. And if I were to ask this to a client, one of the things that I might ask is, how would you like somebody to feel after watching this? Or is there one message in particular that you want them to be aware of after watching this video? So do I want somebody to feel inspired? Do I want somebody to feel worried, afraid? What is the feeling that should be behind this video? If you don't have the luxury of talking with the client or, you know, you are just working for yourself on a video, before you go into the video itself, try to figure this out. How would you like somebody to feel after watching your video? If you don't have an idea of what this is, your video will fall flat every single time. The rest of the brief encompasses all things we've talked about before when it comes to formatting and video length. Sometimes when you work with certain groups, they will also hand you something like a brand guideline, which will encompass colors that you're allowed to use, font that you're allowed to use. It's not something that we often have to worry about, but it is important to be aware of when working with certain people or with certain clients. They will have guidelines for yeses and nos in the project. Some of you watching right now are going to have stronger intuitions and gut feelings for directions to go in. If you're like me, though, I need help. I need to take five to 10 minutes to figure out what am I supposed to be doing. So hopefully, going through this exercise is helpful to you. I do have one final thing that I like to show up before I let you loose, and we tackle Class Project 12. 108. Moodboards and Storyboards: So our final lesson that we're going to talk about here in the essentials course is some pre visualization techniques. And in particular, what I'm going to talk about is kind of storyboarding, Fox storyboarding. Let me show you what I mean. So this is an article from miss Brie Castini where she talks about storyboarding. And if you're not familiar, you might have seen it and some behind the scenes things from movies and TV shows. But in essence, it's rough sketches and cutouts of scenes. So before they shot this video, they had some scene cutouts for scene 17. They have some sick figures of the two characters and a note here for the camera movement. In the next scene, it looks like they'd like to cut to the medical briefcase here. And you can see another example that she shows off here where she shows the script and then how it converts to her storyboard, where she sections out scene one. Is this shot right here, Scene two is over here. So what I kind of want to do is just show some different techniques like storyboarding that you can use to help figure out your video. And one of those techniques in itself is storyboarding. So again, I'm a pen and paper guy. You can see that they've also used pen and paper to just quickly sketch out what they'd like to use. There are free tools and softwares that you can go ahead and download online. So this is one called Studio Binder. I don't know how effective this is. I'm sure if you do some searching around, you can find some different resources for you for more classic storyboarding techniques. One of the tools that I like to use is something called Milt. Analogous software to Milne might be something like Canva, or even if you wanted to use, like Power Point. It really doesn't matter. But what I do with this tool is just grab inspiration and pictures that I think makes sense for this video. So for a recent trailer Edit of mine, it was racing themed. So I picked out some stills and graphics that I thought would be good inspiration for the trailer. I also found this really nice color way that came with some RGB codes that I felt like might work good as a color pile if I needed to use text or any motion graphics. A separate video, if you've forgotten, I come from the gaming world. I do a lot of gaming edits. We did a documentary for a war zone creator, and there was a lot of Matrix inspired themes in the video. So again, I pulled some stills and some shots that I thought worked well. I really like the way that they were framed. There are some user interfaces in here that I really like the colors and the layouts of. Is there a structure to the story in here? No. This isn't necessarily a storyboard. But for me, if I ever needed to fall back and look for visuals, well, I can always reference my Milne page. You could very easily set this up with little sticky notes to make a storyboard. This is a website called Mosha dot Graphics, and what it does is it allows you to upload an audio file, and then you are allowed to draw as the audio plays and make notes. So this is a trailer that I recently started editing. I have the music and the voice over lined out, and I'm trying to plan out the shots that I want to use. So this is a snippet of that audio. Ladies and gentlemen, it is officially here. This is the pulse check adder Season one. This is just a really fun website to use because depending on the timestamp, I can add a quick note to make sure I cut back to certain shots or maybe I need more footage. I know I'm being a bit repetitive with this sentiment, but I'm not trying to endorse particular websites. What I'd like you all to be aware of is that there are tools made by people like you and I to help with the planning. So if you ever are approaching a project and you're not really sure where to start, take a couple steps back. Some of the best videos and movies and TV shows in the world have teams of people that do pre production. Their whole job is to provide a North Star for us to follow in the editing bay. So if you don't have a North Star, well, maybe you need to go make your own. If there's any takeaway that I can impart on you all from the past few videos is to plan. If you don't plan, I think you plan to fail, and then you fail to plan, which means you're planning to fail. I think Captain Crunch said that. All that means is that if you have no idea what you're going to do in your video, your video is probably going to reflect that. So I've got one final thing to say to you all before I let you go off into Project 12. 109. Approaching the Final Project: Alrighty, everybody. I give you permission to set sell and begin Class Project 12. Remember, once you open up Daventu Resolve, it's probably a good idea to create a new project. Once you've created that project, get your bins set up and import your footage. Feel free to go about this video in any manner that you would like, but step one will probably be to familiarize yourself with all of the footage that you've been provided. Listen to some of the interviews. Begin and get an idea of how you might attack this video. Next, get your selects. This will be for both voiceover, A role, B role, and probably the music you want to use, as well. Once you've got that figured out, start. Start anywhere. Start with music, start with the voiceover. Get a rough cut of your Edit all sorted. Once you have your rough cut, the last thing you can do is iterate. Continue to make passes looking to improve this video. The iteration process can look like anything you would like it could be for sound design and introducing sound effects. You could begin to work in fusion and introduce some new effects and maybe some motion graphics. Or maybe you spend a lot of time on the color page really perfecting the look of this video. Figure out which of these things and more is the most important to you. The only other thing I would say is that it's okay to do things differently. You don't even have to follow this list. Whatever methodology makes sense to you, I encourage you to pursue it. At the end of the day, our role as an editor here, indivintual Resolve is to tell the best story that we can, not create spectacle. So if you do that in however fashion you do it, congratulations. I wish you luck on Class Project 12, and I will see you on the other side. 110. What's next?: And would you look at that? You have completed the DaVinci Resolve Essentials course. Congratulations. Congratulations, congratulations. It wasn't that bad, right? I mean, maybe it was a little bad. But, you know, we did it. You got through it, and hopefully at this stage, you're maybe if not fully confident, but comfortable inside resolve. So now what? Well, I think that answer to that really depends on you and where you like to go next. Do you want to make more videos for yourself? Do you want to begin doing more client work? Is there a specific niche that you want to get into? I don't know. I I don't know. It's very dependent. So what I think would probably be good for a lot of people out there is to just take two steps back and maybe decompress from the course. It's a lot of information that we covered pretty quickly. So the fact that you made it through it is fantastic. Give yourself a chance to appreciate and digest all that information. What I would suggest is if you are looking to continue this editing journey, one of the best pieces of advice I could probably give you doesn't necessarily have to do with DaVinci Resolve. I would study. And what I mean by study is I would study other great works of media, be it film, TV, or even, like, music videos. Some of you might be familiar with this, but there's a genre of video editing called AMV or Anime music video editing. I love anime, and that's one of the most creative fields that I can find and watching people take stories and animations and edit them in a way that is so impactful and energetic just blows my mind. And it's what I draw a lot of inspiration from. So I think something that you might struggle with down the road is knowing what to do next, you know, like, Well, how do I make this better? How should I improve this? I can't tell you that all at once, but you can learn it very quickly by studying media that you respect and you enjoy watching. If you now go into watching and consuming videos with the technical mind that you now have, you'll begin to piece out, when did they cut there? Why did they cut there? Why did they choose to frame this in this particular way? Are they moving left to right, right to left? Is there a Zoom in Zoom out? Be conscious as you watch things, and you might learn more than you might think. If you do need more resources, don't be afraid to ask more questions here in the community. Or even reach out to me. I promise I am one instant message, one email, one disk or DM away from answering any DaVinci Resolve questions that you might have. So please feel free to ask me if you still have more questions. I promise I don't bite. My final request to you all, and I feel like I'm allowed to make a request since we spent so much time together is, please provide feedback. This is my first time teaching a course at this length. So if there were moments that you enjoyed, great. If there was moments that you felt you were frustrated with, please let me know. I'm always looking to improve. And the team at Bring Your Own Laptop is always looking to improve our educational material to better serve you. So please provide as much feedback as you're willing to, and if you enjoy this, I maybe tell a friend, let him know that Hey, bringing a laptop has got a great Diving Resolve essentials course. And with that said, um, I think the last thing to say is, thank you. Thank you for trusting me with your time. I know there's so many different things going on in everybody's lives. So the fact that you trust me to lead you on this journey is truly humbling. I'll try to keep this short and sweet. So just know that I'm appreciative of you coming along with me to learn DaventiRsolve. So, I wish you luck. Thank you again for spending so much time with me, and until next time, I'll see you all later. Peace, everybody.