Transcripts
1. Introduction: You're a filmmaker and you just finished editing your
awesome new project, you're super excited to
submit it to film festivals. So you reach out to a colorist and you find out how
much their rate is. $5,000 10,000 more. That's more than you spent
to shoot the entire thing. Hi, my name is Dean Peterson, and I'm a filmmaker
in Los Angeles. Over the course of my career, I've made three low
budget feature films, which have played at dozens of festivals around the world. I ped another film
that premiered at Tribecca and edited another that premiered at
South by Southwest. I know the sense of
panic that you're feeling because I felt it too. Getting a professional
colorist to grade your film can be amazing. But let's be honest. You can't always afford it. So what are you supposed to do? Only color one project a year. Just accept boring,
ungraded footage. Today, I'm going to walk you
through the process of color correcting your own footage
from start to finish. We're going to go over
nodes matching clips, fixing problems, applying luts and much more to follow along. You'll need a copy of resolve, which you can download
for free and you'll need some footage to work with as well if you don't
have any of your own. There are some
examples you can also download in the
resources section. This class is for
the filmmaker or video producer who
loves to shoot stuff, but doesn't always want to hire a colorist or can't afford to. By the end of this class, you'll have a firm grasp on the multitude of tools
at your disposal in resolve and you'll have
the confidence to be able to use them to make
your footage look great. So let's dive in
and get started.
2. Finding Your Way Around Resolve: I firmly believe that we
as filmmakers need to make ourselves as self
sufficient as we possibly can. And that means,
among other things, empowering ourselves to
color our own footage. Don't get me wrong, working
with a colorist is amazing. I love having a
professional work on my big projects where I want
a more complicated look. But sometimes you want to
just shoot a film with your friends and you don't want to have to pay
to get it colored. You shouldn't allow
the destiny of your films to be at
the mercy of others. And you don't want to shoot
a film and then be stuck in limbo because you can't
afford to hire a colorist. This class isn't
going to make you a full blown colorist who uses huge complicated grades to create dramatic Michael
Bay esque looks. But you will learn enough to know your way
around, resolve, fix any problems with
your footage and get it to a place where you're excited
about how it looks. And if you really love coloring and think you want
to get into it more, I'll link to some
other resources to continue diving deeper. If you haven't already,
go ahead and download, resolve, and grab some footage. The footage I'll be using
today is some that I shot earlier and it's
also available to download in the class
resources section. So enough talk already. Let's dive into resolve. So first things first, let's take a look
inside of resolve. I know that when you open
it for the first time, it seems overwhelming, but we're going to go
through it altogether. And I've also included
a cheat sheet in the class resources section, which will help remind
you where everything is. So don't feel like you need
to memorize everything now. So the first thing
that you'll want to note is on the bottom here. These are all of
your work spaces. You've got media,
which is where you can import and organize
all of your files. You've got the cut page,
which is a great place to edit when you need to finish
a video really quickly. We won't be using this
one today though. Then you've got the
edit page which is resolves full featured non
linear editing program. We'll briefly touch
on this today, but to learn it in depth
is an entire other class. Then you've got Fusion,
which is where you can do visual effects
and motion graphics. We're not even going to
go near this one today. Color, which is where we'll be spending most of our
time in this class. And finally, delivery,
which is where you can export all of your final
files when we're done. Down here is where
you can switch between all these workspaces. And if you want to save a little bit of space
on your screen, you can write, click and
select Show Icons only. And if you want, you can always turn the text back on later. So like I said, we're going to mostly be in the
color tab today, so let's click into it and get acquainted a
little bit more. When you open it up,
you're going to see your main work spaces
on the top left, you're going to
have a space where you can view your stills and power grids more on
what those are later. You can also view
your folders of Lutz, your media pool of all the
media in your project, and you can toggle the view of your clips on the
timeline on and off. We'll leave it on for now. Moving to the right again,
we've got our node area. If you don't know what a
node is yet, don't panic. We'll get there. You can click this button to hide
the node section. You can also click this button, which will bring
up all the effects that you have
available and resolve. Moving down to the
bottom left corner, now we've got your
primary color wheels. There are a bunch of
really powerful tools that you can use here
to adjust the image, including the
temperature, the tint, the contrast, et cetera. We'll be talking about
these a lot today. To the right of that, you have another
area that's full of tools to help you
click the buttons. Here it opens the tool page
with things like curves, windows tracking,
masking, and more. Finally, in the bottom right, we have some monitoring tools that will really come in handy. The ones we're really
going to focus on today are the Waveform and
the Vectorscope. These can all break
out if you click this button that can
be moved around, you can show multiple
monitors at once. They all have a bunch
of granular options that we'll talk
more about later. For now, I'm going to it out and it will return to its
place in the bottom right. I know that was a lot,
but we're going to circle back and talk about all those
sections in more detail, so don't feel like you
need to remember at all. I do recommend printing out the layout sheet sheet though and keeping it on hand for you. I know that when you
first open resolve, it might freak you out and
you might get overwhelmed. Don't worry that
happened to me too. But the truth is that we don't need to know how to
use every single tool. We aren't trying to
become master colorists, we just need to know
enough to get on our feet. And once you play around
and resolve more, all the other tools will
start to come naturally. So take a little time to
click around the program. Open Windows, move
dials, get lost. Just familiarize
yourself and get a little more comfortable
with the lay of the land. In the next lesson, we're
going to go over how to bring your footage into resolve
so we can start coloring.
3. Getting Your Footage Into Resolve: Let's say that you
got a short film that you made and now you
want to color it. There are a few ways you
can bring it in to resolve, but let's just go over
the easiest way in premiere or Avid or whatever program you
used to edit the film, export a full res version
of the film that's clean, which just means without any effects or titles
over the picture. If you have cool effects
or overlays or titles, disable them before you export. Ideally, you want to use
a format like Prores 4444 or Prores 422. If you don't understand
what those mean exactly, you don't need to worry
about it too much. I'm going to spare
you the boredom of a full lesson on video
format wrappers. Just know that you want
the highest quality and resolution you can. Prores is usually a safe bet. So we're going to click
on the Media tab. And we're not going to
go into a full lesson on everything you can do here
because there's a lot. We'll go into the
media storage section, find where the files
located on your computer, and then you're going
to right click and select Add Into Media Pool, or we're just going to drag
it down into this box here. This is the media pool, this is where all of your
clips and timelines will live. If you're doing a huge
complicated project, you might want to organize
things by creating bins. And for this I'll create one and name it Films, just to show you. So now that we've got
our film in resolved, we're going to right click
on the clip and select Create New Timeline
using selected clips. This will create a
timeline for you with all the settings based
on what your film is. So then all we have
to do is double click the timeline and it will magically bring us up to the edit page with
our film right there. The film that I provided as
an example is pretty short, so yours might be longer. Now, the film is already edited, so we don't have much we
need to do in this tab. But we've got a problem because even though the film is edited, because of the way
we exported it, it's all in just one clip. So if we color it, it's going
to color everything instead of each individual shot,
which is not what we want. So to solve this problem, we're going to go to
timeline and then select Detect Scene Cuts. This is going to
perform some AI magic and automatically find where the cuts are in the
film and then slice it up into a bunch
of individual shots. As you can see, it usually
does a really great job. In the event that it doesn't get it exactly right for your film, you can go through
and clean it up, manually adding cuts
where necessary, or adjusting the heads and tails of the clip,
so it's correct. Again, this is
partly why it's so important that our
exports be clean. So we had some fun
in the edit tab, but we're not going
to stay here long. It's time to move on to
the color tab and get started coloring our
film. Now it's your turn. Import either your own film
that you're working on or the example film
that you downloaded from the class
resources section. In the next lesson, we're
going to talk about nodes and how we use
them to color our film.
4. Understanding Nodes: In the color tab. Now we've
reached the promised land. It's now time to talk a
little bit about nodes. You can essentially
think of nodes as a color grading flow chart. Each node represents a
different adjustment. You can do all of your
adjustments on one node, but I find it easier to use separate ones
for each adjustment. That way we can
toggle them on and off and see what each one does. Another quick thing to note, The order that you
put your nodes in does matter for our
intents and purposes. We'll remember to put lets
at the end of our node tree. But again, don't worry about remembering that because
we'll circle back. Okay, so we've got
our first node here. We'll right click on it
and select Add Cereal. And a new node will pop up
right after the first one. You can click them and move them around and order them
however you like. You can also right click
outside of a node and select Clean up node graph and resolve will space them
out nice and evenly. Let's say that we want to add a node before the first one. In that case, you right
click the first node, Select Add node, and
choose add cereal, Before everybody has
their own flavor of combinations of nodes, But I'll show you the one
that I typically use. I do five nodes. I usually try to keep them
in some sort of order and I name them by right clicking
and select node label. My labels are exposure casts, saturation contrast, and lut. Let's go through what
each one of those means. Exposure is where I'll set
the brightness levels. Making the image brighter or darker casts is where we correct any unwanted color tints and make our color
nice, accurate. And neutral saturation
is where we adjust the saturation of
the colors in our image. Contrast is where we can raise or lower the contrast
of our image. And lut is at the end, because remember we said our lut should always go near the
end of our node tree. You want it this way
because if you put a lut before your exposure node, you won't be able to
access all the information in your shot since the
Lut node limits it. So this is the node tree that I use and the one that we're
going to be using today. Okay. So now it's your turn. Go mess around with the nodes, add some change the
labels, move them around. It's important to get a feel
for how this page works. It can feel
intimidating at first, but the more that you use it, the more it'll become
second nature to you. In the next lesson, we're going to start correcting our footage.
5. Adjusting Brightness and Contrast: The first thing that I
like to do is adjust the brightness and
contrast of my image. We don't want to exclusively rely on how things
look on our monitor, because every monitor
is different. So what looks good on my monitor might look weird on
your phone screen. We'll use the help
of some tools and resolve for brightness
and contrast. We're going to use
the wave form. It may look a little
confusing at first glance, but basically it just shows you the brightness levels
of your image. The area here is the highlights. These are the midtones, and these are the shadows. The white part is where your
image lies in those areas. You can see when we make
the image super bright, all the values go to the top, and when we make the
image super dark, they all go way
down to the bottom. The waveform is super helpful
because it shows us when our footage is
getting too bright when it goes past
this line at the top, it means that our footage is clipping and the whites
will be blown out. And at the bottom, when
it goes past this line, then that part of the image is pure black and there's
no information there. As a general rule of thumb, you want to avoid hitting
either of those lines. Sometimes it's okay
if you're shooting indoors and there's a
bright window in the back, for instance, we might be
okay with that blowing out. But overall, it's a
good rule to follow. So there are a number
of ways that you can adjust the brightness
of your image. The first is with the
primary color wheels. There are four of
them, and each of them affect a different
part of the image. The lift controls the shadows and dark parts of your image. The gamma controls the
mid tones of your image, and the gain controls the
highlights of your image. The offset wheel is like
a universal control affecting all areas
of the image. So if I go to the
gain, which again is the highlights and move
the wheel towards magenta, you'll see that
the highlights of the image will turn magenta. Similarly, if I go to the
lift, which is the shadows, and move the wheel
towards green, the shadows will
shift towards green. Clicking this circle
button next to each one, we'll reset the grade of
that particular wheel. The gray bars below those affect the brightness of
each part of the image. Again, going to
the gain section, which is the highlights, we can move the wheel
towards the right, which raises the brightness. And you can see that
on our waveform that the top goes up. When we do that, meaning that our high lights
are getting brighter, then I'll go to the
lift or the shadows and lower those to just above the bottom line where
they're clipped. We can already see that
just by doing that, our image has a
little bit more life. In addition to using
our monitoring tools, we also have to trust
our eyes a little bit. We can play around
with the gamma, which is the midtones
of our image, and see if that does
anything to help. And remember that
each adjustment affects the other
adjustments as well. If you raise the highlights, you might have to go back and
lower the midtones later. Now we can get a preview
for what we've done by toggling this
node on and off. Click the little number one and the node will be disabled. It's helpful to turn it
on and off to get a feel for how it looks and what
still needs to be done. You can also do command D on
a Mac or control D on a PC. We're turning it
on and off and it looks pretty good
doing the exposure. The contrast goes hand in hand. An easy way to adjust that is to remember to select
our contrast node in the node tree so
that we can keep our adjustment separate and
go to the contrast slider. With this slider, we can
simply drag it to the right to increase the contrast and
drag to the left to decrease. You can look at the
waveform and see how it stretches the image out
when it adds more contrast. Since it pulls the
high lights up and the shadows down at the
same time, this is great. But say that when you
increase the contrast, your image gets too dark. Next to the contrast is
a slider called pivot. The pivot basically
allows you to keep the amount of
contrast you want, but to shift it either
brighter or darker. So if you want it to
be super contrasty, but you want to make
it not so bright, you can pivot the contrast to get it to sit where you like. And if you don't
like what you've done with a particular node, you can always
write, click it and select Reset Node Grade. And it will wipe that
particular node clean so you can start from scratch. That was a lot, but exposure and contrast are the building
blocks of your grade. Spend a little bit of time working with those two nodes and see if you can get your shot to a starting place that
you're happy with. In the next lesson,
we're going to talk about saturation
and color casts.
6. Working With Saturation and Fixing Casts: The next aspect of our
footage that we're going to address is color casts. The monitoring tool
that we're going to use for this is called
a vector scope. But first you'll notice that
our image is really flat, meaning it looks washed out
and almost black and white. Many cameras shoot
in what's called a log profile, which
is what this shot is. It's beneficial because it
gives you the most latitude to make changes in post with
our exposure notes selected. We can get it looking
more natural by going to our primary color wheels here and dragging
down the shadows, making sure to not go past
that bottom line if we can. Raising our highlights
a little bit. Again, being careful of
the line on the top there. And then tweaking
the lift Gamma and Gain until we got it at
a place where we like. We can also go to our
saturation node and bump the saturation level
up until it looks nice. We're not trying to get
it perfect right now, we're just trying
to make it so we can see our image
a little better. Next we're going to go down to our scope section here
in the bottom right. Just a reminder,
this is a section of monitoring tools which help
us to evaluate the exposure, color, and other
parts of our image. Choose vector scope, we
can hit the button with the four arrows to break
it out and make it bigger. Basically, what we have
here is a tool that shows us the color
casts of our image. You can see the different colors in the different directions, Yellow, red, magenta,
blue, et cetera. The white blob is your image. For instance, ours here is skewing slightly red and yellow. And if you look at our image, you might be able to tell that a little bit with
your eye as well. Click this button
with the sliders, and you can select the low, mid or high, which corresponds to our
lift gamma and gain. When we click low, we're seeing the color casts of just
our blacks and shadows. And we use the lift
color wheel to adjust that the mid corresponds to the gamma and the high
corresponds to the game. You'll also notice
that the vectorscope lines up with our primary
color wheels over here, yellow, red, magenta,
blue, et cetera. So if I pull our
wheels towards green, the vectorscope reflects that. As does our image up here. Our goal is to get the
white blob in the middle to line up with the middle of our vectorscope as much as we can. And to do that we just
adjust our color wheels. So let's start with
the high section and we'll use the gain
wheel to adjust that. You can see that our image
is pretty balanced as it is. I think it's skewing a little bit to the blue and the magenta. Over this way all we
want to do is take the gain wheel and bring it
down more towards the green, just a little bit, not too much. It's not going to be a perfect white
circle in the middle. You'll just have to
use your judgment and trust your eye a little
bit in the process. So we're going to
click the slider button switch to the mids, and we'll use the gamma
wheel to adjust that. This one is also pretty
balanced but maybe going up a little bit towards
the top left a little bit. So we just bring it
down the opposite way, just a touch, always referencing
the monitoring tools, but trusting our eye
at the same time. So that one looks pretty good. Once again, don't worry about memorizing all this
stuff right now. It's all covered in the
resolved cheat sheet that's in the class
resources section. The more that you do this, the more it'll become second nature. So we'll just keep going
through and making adjustments. You might also have
to go back and readjust certain parts
throughout this process. We're using our
monitoring tools, but we're also
trusting our eyes. You might want to go
to your contrast node and bump the contrast
up a little bit. Maybe tweak the
exposure a little. Just work through the image, turning nodes on and off and
see what looks good to you. Another tool that
you can use are the temperature and
the tint sliders. These work by either making
your image cooler or warmer, and then also changing the
green and the magenta shift. To do that, all
you need to do is drag it one way or the other. And to reset one of these, you just double click on
the name of the slider. Double click temp, and
it'll go back to zero. I think that this image is
looking a little bit cool. So I'm going to drag it just
a little bit warm and we can toggle the node on and
off to check our progress. I think it's also looking
a little bit green, so I'm going to bump up
the magenta, just a touch. That first clip was pretty balanced right out
of the camera. But what happens if it's not
in this shot right here, the white balance was set completely wrong and our
image is totally blue. What do we do about
that? To start with, we're going to go to
the exposure node and we're going to
choose the wave form. We're just going to
get our contrast and our brightness to where
we want it to be. We just adjust the
gain a little bit. Then we're going to go
to the contrast node and bump up the contrast
just a little bit. You just play around with
it where you want it to be. You'll start to see that our
shot is entirely too blue. Whoever shot this set the
white balance totally wrong. But not all hope is lost. We can salvage this. We're going to go to the color cast node. And we're going to bring up the vectorscope when
you break it out. You can see right here our image is way down in the
blue in the cyan, that's the mids are
also down there. You can see the lows are
skewing that way too. In order to fix this,
we're going to go to the high section
of the vectorscope, and that corresponds with our gain wheel looking
at our vectorscope. We're just going to move this
more towards the center, and you can already see it's
looking a little bit better. We're going to do the same
thing with the mid tones, which is the gamma wheel. We're going to move that
up to the upper left. We're going to go
down to the lows. Move that around a little bit. Once you start
adjusting the color, you're probably going
to have to go back and adjust the exposure and the
contrasts a little bit. And the saturation as well. I'm going to bump
up the contrast, raise the pivot so that
it's a little bit brighter. Let's, let's put
our saturation at 75% then you just keep going back and forth
looking at the high, making adjustments, going
down to the midtones, Adjusting it, same
with the lows. Throughout this whole process, we really want to just
be going up here, toggling the entire
grade on and off, so that we get an
objective viewpoint of it. We can go down to our nodes and toggle just the
casts on and off, and you can see we're already
in a much better place. In addition to looking
at our monitoring tools, we also have to
trust our eye just looking at the image
without the scopes. I can see it's still
a little bit blue. It's a little bit cool
and it's a little green. I'm going to just use
the temperature slider. I'm going to warm
that up a little bit. Then again, just
going back and forth, toggling it on and off. We can also right click
on a different clip. Do wipe timeline clip. Then we can see how it looks compared to
our previous shot. Can tell the hand
is not matching. So we have to go into
the casts and try to get that to be a little bit closer. There is a certain amount of Voodoo that's
involved in this. This isn't chemistry. There's not a precise,
exact answer. You really just have
to play around, see what looks good to you, and get it to a place that you feel good about wiping
back and forth. You can see that the light coming from the window
is pretty cool. If you look at the
table right here, this is a blue light
hitting the wood. And it matches right here
in this image as well. And then looking at the pages, you can see that the color of the paper looks
about the same. I think that my image is feeling pretty good to me. But
now it's your turn. Work on the color in
your color cast node and try to get the footage to a place where it
looks good to you. In the next lesson, I'm going to discuss a few tools
that will help you monitor how the grade looks and how to
make adjustments.
7. Comparing Clips: So you're going along coloring
and everything seems fine. But you want to make sure that your shot not only looks great, but that it matches
with your other shots. Earlier we looked
at how to toggle certain nodes on and off to
check and see how they look. But we can also toggle the entire grade on and off to check all
the nodes at once. This button right here, the kind of sparkly rainbow button, toggles all the nodes your
entire grade on and off. Turning it on and off can help you have fresh eyes on what you've done so far and see
what you still need to do. Say that we want to
compare this shot to another shot and make
sure that they match. Yeah, we can click this clip, then click the other clip, and then click back,
but that's annoying. Instead, click on
the clip that you're working on and then
right click on the clip that you
want to compare it to and select Wipe Time Line clip. That will bring up this
little split screen. You can select the line and
drag it around or switch to horizontal corner to corner picture and picture or any
other number of views. This way you can
adjust your clip making sure that it will
match another clip. And you can do this
with any clip on your timeline. Just
do it the same way. Highlight the clip that
you're working on and then right click on the
clip you want to reference. This is a great way to make
sure that your entire project is consistent and uniform in
the way you're grading it. To get out of this view, simply
click on this button here and you'll go back to
the normal viewfinder. Give it a shot. Compare two of the
clips that you've been working on to make sure
that they're lined up. If not, use this view
to make adjustments. In the next lesson, we'll
talk about using windows to make changes to a
specific part of the image.
8. Working With Power Windows: Everything that we've
been working on so far has been about changing
the entire image. When we boost the Ian, it changes the entire frame. But what if we want to change just a specific
part of the image? That's where we use Windows. If you use Photoshop before, think of Windows as using the lasso tool to select and work on a specific
part of the photo. So down here in the middle, we click the window
button and it'll bring up a new window workspace.
Let's create a window. What do you say? In keeping
with our neat organization, we're going to create a
new node for our window. I'm going to do it at
the very beginning. So I write, click on the
first node, go to Add Node, add cereal before, and
then you can just organize your nodes however you want to keep the node
window nice and neat. I'm going to right
click on the new node, select node label,
and put in window. So when I click on the
square linear button, a box pops up. Everything inside this
box or window will be affected by the grade on
this node labeled window. So if I turn up the exposure, only the box is affected. We can move the box around. Clicking the blue
dots on the window. We'll change the position of the window and adjusting
the pink dots, changes the feathering of
the box, making it wider. We'll create a gentle, gradual edge on the window,
pushing it all the way in. We'll create a sharp
edge on the window. We can hit this button to
turn that window on and off, and this button here
will invert the window. Now instead, we are adjusting everything outside of the box. It still works the exact
same way, just inverted. We can also create
circular windows, windows with no feather,
just hard edges. We can also use a pentool to draw whatever
shape that we want. We can create a gradient mask, which emanates the window from this line out in the direction
that the arrow points. This is really great for say, a sky where we want to
have an adjustment, gradually drape over an image. Let's say that we want to
create a mask round her face. To brighten it up a little bit, I'm going to create a new
node at the beginning of my tree by right clicking
on the first node, clicking Add, Add, Serial Before then I'm going to
click and change the node label to face. Then on that node I'm going to click on a new circle mask. Then you just mold the
window so it fits around the face and makes whatever
adjustments you want. For this one, I'm going to
bump up the exposure a little bit and maybe add a
touch of contrast. Making sure to feather it enough so that the edges
aren't noticeable. To preview what a window is doing without all
the lines over it, simply click on a
different node and they'll disappear to toggle that
node on and off again. We click the number
here and to me it looks pretty good in this shot, she stays pretty static. She's not moving around
in the chair very much, but if she was, then the node wouldn't
move around with her face as it is.
What do we do? Because we don't
want the adjustment to just floating
around in space there. So what we can do is go to the tracker workspace at
the bottom right here. Then with that node selected, the one that has the
face window on it, you'll want to make
sure that the window is where you want
it in the frame. And then you're going to
push this button here. The back and forth
tracking button, like magic resolve,
automatically tracks the face, keeping the window over
at the entire time. In this example, she doesn't
move around very much, so it's not that impressive. But if she was turning her head or moving her head
around the frame more, I think you'll be
surprised by what an amazing job resolve
does by tracking it. When you play it back here,
you'll see that the window does follow the tiny little micro movements her face makes. And if she was
moving around more, it would be a lot
more noticeable. So now when we play it back, we have a perfect little window adding just a papa
brightness to her face. Which again, if you want to see it without the lines on top, just click on another node
and you can play it back. You can use masks for anything
to adjust the window, to change the color
of a person's eyes. The possibilities are
literally endless. Now it's your turn, create a
mask on one of your shots, make some adjustments, and
play around with the tracker. In the next lesson, we're
going to go over lots.
9. Using LUTs: You've probably heard
a lot about Lutz. It seems like every tuber
has a Lut for sale. But there are a ton
of misconceptions for how Lutz should be
used in your grade. In my opinion, Lutz can be a great starting place
for coloring your image. They can offer a
nice jumping off point and can often
save you a bit of time. But you should never just throw on a lut and call it a day. You still want to
grade each clip making sure it looks good. To see why, let's jump in. So to add a lut, let's
go to our note tree. In my note tree, I
always put the lut last and then make the other
adjustments before it. That's because when
you start out with this beautiful flat log image
and then put a lut on it, it clamps down on
the information, so you have less
latitude when you say want to make the
image brighter or darker. Change the exposure change the saturation change the
contrast, et cetera. So highlight the let node
and then click over here to the Lut gallery resolve comes with a lot of really
great lets built in. And I've got some extra ones
that I've installed myself. But don't worry, I'm not
going to try to sell you any. You can click around
and hover over a lot to preview what
it'll look like. Some luts are more for
converting the color space of your image and some are for adding more of
a heavy duty look. Let's choose one that has a little bit more of a look to it, since a lot of you are
probably wondering about that. These Phantom lets by Juan Mala are really nice and
have a good range of neutral conversion looks mixed with some more
heavy duty grades. Always make sure that the lut that you're working with matches the picture profile
that you shot in these clips are
all log three, which is what the lut pack was
specifically designed for. If you mix your
footage with a Lut that's meant for a
different camera, things can get pretty funky. Let's choose this one
and see what happens. As you can see, the
image does change a lot, but it's still way
too overexposed, Which is one of the
reasons why you never want to just slap a
lut on something. You need to tailor it
and make sure that the image looks good
underneath the lut. It's still going to
require the same process that we did before to
get it where we like it. I'm going to switch
to the waveform view, break it out, then I'm going
to go to the exposure node. Just move things around until we get it to
where we want it to be. And you can see what I mean by the lut clamping down
on the information. So if we raise the
gain all the way up, it hits a certain ceiling
that's imposed by the lut. And the same is
true at the bottom. You can see the line where it limits what we can
do to the image. So we added a cool lut to this clip and we colored
it to our liking. I want to make another clip in my project have the same look, but I don't want to have to
do all those steps again. Well, that's where
the gallery comes in. So click up here on
the Gallery button. If you don't see the stills
and power grade sections, just click this button. Stills basically
allow you to copy the adjustments you did for one clip and put them on another. It takes the whole grade, your entire node
structure in all and transfers it over to another clip within the same project. The power grade section
is the same thing, but this folder spans
across all projects. So if you have a node tree structure that you like to reuse or a grade that you find yourself using over
many projects, this is where you
would keep them. Try to make sure
that you're saving stills into the right folder. If you're doing a specific
grade for this film, you don't necessarily
need those stills to transfer to the next project.
So how do we do this? Let's go back to that clip.
We just added the lot to making sure that we have
the still section selected. We go to the viewer, right click on it and
select Grab Still. This will put a little
thumbnail here in the window to keep
things organized. I'm going to right click it, select changed label, and call it something
like short film Look. Let's go back to our timeline
and select another clip. I'll go to Color Reset, and choose all grade and nodes to start fresh
from the beginning. Then we go over to
the stills gallery. Right click our short film, Look still, and
choose Apply Grade. You can see that it pastes the
entire look all our nodes. The let that we
selected everything, the only problem is
it's way too dark. We have to go back and adjust our nodes to this clip
to make it look good. Remember, we can highlight
the clip we're working on. Right click the shot
we're trying to match and select Wipe Timeline clip to bring up the
side by side view. It even allows us to
compare the wave form so that we can be sure that
things are matching perfectly. One other little tip
that I have for using the stills gallery is setting up a universal node tree
the way you like it. That way you don't have
to create it every time for every clip
in a new project. The way you do that
is go to a clip. It doesn't matter which one. Reset all nodes and grades so that it's
clean and neutral. Add all the nodes
you normally would. Mine again are exposure casts, saturation, contrast, and lut. Don't make any adjustments to the nodes because we
want them to be blank. Go to your power grade window, right Click the image
and select Grab still. Then rename it something like Node Tree or
whatever you want. This will create
a still that will transfer across
all your projects. You'll be able to
go into a project. Click on any clip,
right click on Dean Node tree and
it will give you a nice clean note tree all
ready for you to start. That way you can jump right in and start making adjustments. Everything is right there
for you to start working. It's okay if you don't
have an idea of what your ideal node tree
would look like yet. You can start with
the example I gave, or some version of
it at the beginning, and after a while,
you can adjust it based on your preferences. Now it's your turn to
create some stills and transfer a grade
to a new clip. In the next lesson,
we'll go over how to take your newly colored
footage and export it.
10. Exporting Your Footage: Okay, we're feeling pumped. We've got our short film colored and now we want
to export it app. So we're going to
leave the color tab, go down here and click
the Deliver tab. This is the work
space where we're going to export our project. So let's dive in up here. Resolve has some common
presets available to you, but we're going to
adjust the settings ourselves so that
we can learn how. So let's just say that this is a short film that we're going
to send to a film festival, so we want it to be as
high quality as possible. So first we're going
to click here and choose where we want
this file to export to. I'm going to create a new folder on my desktop and
have it go there. Next, we're going to
give it a file name. I trust that you know how
to do something like this. Okay, so next we have
the option of exporting as a single clip or
individual clips. This is our short film, so we definitely want to
select single clip. Individual would be if
you still wanted to make tweaks to the edit,
but we're done now. Next we choose which
format we want. There are lots of options but for us we're going to
select quick time. Again, we don't have time to
go into Codex and the like. So with our example of
delivering to a film festival, they're probably going to
want some flavor of Pros. Either Prores 422 HQ or
Pros 4444, most likely. So let's just choose 422 HQ. Next we have to choose
our resolution. Our film was shot in four K, so let's choose ultra HD. We can click in the audio tab, and if you want to adjust
these settings, you could. But these are fine for me. The file selection allows you to make adjustments
to the file name, but for me, this
is fine as well. Once we have all
of our selections, we click Add to Render Cue. And then you can
see that it goes up to this window here
in the top right. This is the render que where all the projects you
want to render are. If you had multiple projects or multiple versions
of the same video, they would all be here. But since we only have one, we can click Render All and sit back and relax while
resolve sends it out. And with that we are all done.
11. Final Thoughts: Congratulations, you have now colored your first project
from start to finish. Even if you had never
opened resolve before, you now have all the
tools and knowledge to get started coloring
your own projects. So keep playing
around and resolve. Go shoot some projects with your friends and work
on the color grade. The more that you use it,
the better that you'll get. And once you conquer the basics, you'll be able to add more advanced tools to
your repertoire. I would love to hear about your progress and resolve and to answer any other questions
you may have about coloring. So please leave them in the discussion section and
I'll be sure to respond. Also, upload some screen
grabs to the project gallery. I would love to see
what you worked on. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.
Dean Peterson, Writer/director/producer
