Introduction to DaVinci Resolve - [Full Course] for Beginners (2025)

I designed this video from the ground up

to be the greatest video ever created on

Da Vinci Resolve. This is an entire

introduction course. This is a course

that we used to charge hundreds of

dollars for. We've helped millions of

people learn Resolve. And I'm excited

for you to learn Resolve, too. By the

end of this video, you're going to be

able to use Da Vinci Resolve to start

creating the videos that you want to

create. Everything from media management

to laying out your clips in the timeline

to color grading to compositing to audio

mixing all the way to final delivery so

that you can upload your footage to

YouTube or output it for whatever

purpose you need. We're going to go over

all the essential need to know stuff,

everything about Resolve that you'll

need to know to get started. You can

download footage and follow along.

There's the top link in the description

there. And yeah, this is just a

massively amazing course that we're

giving out for free. Why are we doing

that? Well, because at ground control,

we actually have quite a few courses on

Da Vinci Resolve. A little bit more

advanced stuff, pretty much all of the

next steps that you would want to take

right after this course. And so, if you

want to dive a little bit deeper, we're

hoping you might buy a course. That

said, you can just watch this video and

be off to the races. Man, you're about

to go from somebody who doesn't know

anything about Resolve to being able to

use Resolve to make videos that you want

to make and even make videos that you

can charge for and get clients. I

absolutely love being able to empower

people to be creative and Resolve is one

of the coolest tools available to be

able to be creative with uh digital

media. You ready to go? Let's do it. So,

what do we need to get started here? The

first thing that you'll need is a good

system. Now, you can use Resolve on a

pretty basic computer, but once you

start getting a little bit deeper,

especially into compositing and things

that uh take a little bit more system

resources, if you don't have a good

graphics card and kind of a good uh like

a mid-range gaming PC or maybe like a

Mac M2 or later, you're probably going

to have a hard time. Resolve is really

resource hungry. So, I want to make sure

that if you're following along, you're

doing that on a good system, or else uh

it's not going to be very much fun. So,

that's number one. You got to have a

good system. Okay. Two, you need a copy

of Resolve. Resolve has a free version

that's amazing. Pretty much everything I

show you in this video, you can do in

the free version. Okay. I'll let you

know if there's a paid version thing.

Something that would be helpful in this

video is a little bit of knowledge on

kind of how video editing works and

stuff. It's not totally essential. If

you've taken videos with your phone

camera and you've kind of scrubbed

through a video before, that's a really

good start. But learning Resolve is

going to be especially easy for you if

you've used something like iMovie or Cap

Cut or Premiere or something like that.

All of those editing skills transfer

nicely into Resolve. The other big thing

I'd recommend is that you actually

dedicate some time to this. Learning any

new skill takes time and Resolve is a

great big deep program that can do all

kinds of stuff and it's really easy to

feel lost and frustrated especially when

you start looking at the interface like

we're going to look at in a few minutes.

But I want you to take some time and

have some patience. Be kind to yourself

because learning this kind of thing,

especially if you're brand new to it, is

not easy. That said, I'm going to do my

very best to move slowly and to give you

just the need to know knowledge in

little bite-sized chunks so it doesn't

take quite as much time and you don't

need quite as much experience. You can

use the free version. And a lot of this

stuff you can do on a system that maybe

isn't the highest spec system ever,

especially the media that we link down

below, that should all run on just about

any system without lots of trouble. So,

let's start with the very basics. What

the heck is Resolve? Resolve is a piece

of video editing software and what makes

it unique is that not only can you do

video editing like in the traditional

sense of putting clips together in a

story and kind of lining that out and

cutting out the parts you don't want and

that kind of thing. But it can also do

fancy things like adding explosions and

lightsabers and duplicating people and

cloning things out. things that you

would maybe think of using Photoshop

for, but for video. Da Vinci Resolve is

also really, really great at color

correction. And it can also mix audio

really well. And so all of these things

kind of come together as sort of a

one-stop shop for what we call

post-prouction. That's everything that

happens after you shoot. So managing

your media, putting it together in a

timeline, graphics and effects, and all

kinds of stuff. That all can happen

inside of Resolve. And Resolve is a very

high quality program. It's a

professional program. This is the kind

of app that Hollywood uses and they use

on great big movies and TV shows and all

kinds of stuff. Like here on the

Blackmagic website, you can see clips

from movies that have used Resolve. I

mean, from Marvel and from Disney and

things that you would see in the

theaters. This is the kind of production

quality that we can do with Resolve. I

mean, it's nuts. So the fact that we

have such a high quality piece of

software available, you know, in the

free version for free is just nuts.

And the thing that's really cool about

Resolve is it's really like several

programs all in one. And they split

these different programs up into pages.

And so here we can see the kind of

different pages in Resolve. And they

each have a different job. So there's

the cut page and the edit page which is

focused on putting your clips together

in a story on a story line. We have the

color page which is all about color. We

have the fusion page which does the

effects and graphics and things like

that. We have the Fairlite page which is

all about audiom mixing. And so this is

the kind of thing that you would

traditionally need to use several

different apps for but it's all built

inside of Resolve. And so here we have

the pages of Resolve. They're actually

represented by these buttons that are

down below on the interface of Resolve.

So here, if I bring up Resolve, we see

these buttons right here. And this is

how you switch in between those

different apps to do the different parts

of your video editing. And there is a

lot to go over for every page here. I

mean, every page is its own huge

monster. And we're going to go over the

basics of each of them so that you

aren't lost. And you'll be able to use

each page at least in its basic form by

the end of this video. Resolve has a

bunch of different effects and I mean

things that you would think about like

Instagram filters. It has stuff like

that. It has blurs and film looks and

different filters to stylize your video.

It has a whole bunch of AI stuff built

in. A lot of that is only available in

the paid version, but I'll show you a

couple really uh interesting unique

things as we go along. It works with

other plugins and all kinds of third

party tools and stuff. There's even

specialized hardware that it works with.

They have these unique editing keyboards

as well as color grading panels which

are really fun. And I mean you can just

go crazy. You can get this huge mixing

board for Fairlite. Look at this. That's

nuts. Or you can just use the free

version on your laptop. That's the

amazing thing about Resolve is it scales

to your ability and your needs. You can

use the free version on a laptop on a

plane or you can use the paid version

with all kinds of hardware in a huge

studio. and it's all using the same

piece of software with just, you know,

little different features. So, let's

talk about the free version versus the

studio version. People always ask me

what's the difference. The long story

short is if you are watching this video,

you can probably use the free version. I

would recommend that you get the free

version, you download it, you open it

up, and you start making stuff with it.

If you get into some corner of Resolve

where something is only available in the

paid version, it will pop up and tell

you. And I always recommend that you

only upgrade if you keep running into

that. It can do nearly everything I show

you in this video. You can work with

just about any kind of video. You can

even collaborate with other editors

online with the free version. You can

render up to UHD, so that's a little

smaller than 4K. That's like the

consumer 4K. It has color grading. It

has Fusion compositing. It has Fair

Light. You can use it for commercial

work. There's no demo period. There's no

watermark. It's just a ridiculously good

deal. It's free. There's no catch. It's

just awesome. Now, for the studio

version, you do get a bunch of really

cool stuff. Most notably, Resolve

effects, which are just a lot more

effects to stylize your video, as well

as all the AI stuff. There are a lot of

new AI features that will do things like

sweeten your audio or cut out a person

walking across your video so you can put

graphics behind them. And there's a lot

of really nice little features that just

make Resolve even better. Resolve

Studio, you buy it once for $295. It's a

smoking deal. There's no subscription.

You just buy it for 295 and you get it

forever. And so far, they have not been

charging for upgrades. It's very

possible they'll charge something for

upgrades in the future, but even if they

do, this is a smoking deal because there

are a lot of really cool things in the

paid version of Resolve that I would

highly recommend getting the paid

version for. But again, if you're just

starting out, and even if you're not

starting out, but you just don't need

some of those features, use the free

version. It's amazing, and there's just

no reason not to do that. So, my answer

is get the free version and see how it

goes. Consider getting the paid version

when you have some extra money or if you

need some of the really specific things

that Resolve Studio will give you. But

the free version is perfect for I mean,

90% of people can totally use the free

version. And this is really the reason

why we teach Resolve at Ground Control

is because our mission is to encourage

and empower creativity. We want people

to be able to create the things that

they want to make. And right now, Da

Vinci Resolve is like the greatest tool

for that. So, I'm really excited that

you're looking into it. Let's get into

the actual software, shall we? By the

way, I'm using Da Vinci Resolve 20 for

this video. In the future, whether

you're using Da Vinci Resolve 20 or 20.5

or 21 or whatever comes out next, 99% of

what we're going over is going to apply

perfectly. But if you're on Resolve 21

or something, probably not a big deal.

Another thing to mention is that I am

using the studio version of Resolve, but

everything that I'm going to show you is

in the free version. Okay? So, don't be

asking me in the comments, is this all

in the free version? Do you even listen?

So, when you open Resolve, this is the

first thing that comes up. Now, this

panel right here, this is called your

project manager. This is how you

navigate to your different project

files. You can see I have some of these

older projects here. Yours might look

more like this, and that's totally fine.

But here is where we open past projects

and make new projects. And all of the

projects here, these live in our project

library. We can browse our project

libraries over here. And by default,

you'll be working on your local

libraries. Now, what the heck does that

mean? So, a library is just a database

of your projects that lives on your

system. It's basically just a folder

that has your projects in it. Resolve is

kind of picky about where that folder

goes. It always wants to have access to

just that folder. You can't just put

projects willy-nilly all over the

landscape. So, by default, it's probably

on your system drive. You can hit this

little I and then click on open file

location. And so, for me, it's under C

users Casey documents resolve disc

library. And if you go through a whole

bunch of subfolders, you'll find all of

your projects. Now, I wouldn't worry

about this too much. Here's why. The

only time you're going to need to open

up a project is in Resolve. And Resolve

knows where that is. If you want to save

a project that's not in that library,

maybe you want to save it and give it to

somebody else or you want to save it as

a backup or something like this, all you

have to do is rightclick on your project

and go down to export project. that will

let you save a copy of your project to

your desktop or to an external drive or

to cloud storage or whatever you want to

do. That's going to make a DRP file.

That's short for Da Vinci Resolve

project. This is a great way to do

things, but just know by default all of

your projects live in your library,

which is a folder that Resolve knows

about on your system. You can have

multiple libraries and multiple folders.

We'll get into that some other time.

Now, you also have network libraries and

cloud libraries. A network library is

for a studio that has kind of a server

and all that stuff. You probably don't

need to worry about that. Cloud

libraries are shared projects. These are

projects that you can actually share

with other editors that have access to

your cloud account. And so just like we

have this folder on our local library on

our system, we can have a folder that

lives on the Blackmagic website

basically that you can all kind of share

and access and it's really slick. If you

want a video about that, let me know and

we'll talk more about it. But for now,

all we really have to do is go down here

to where it says new project. And let's

make a new project. And we're going to

call this intro to Resolve

to Resolve like this. And we'll just say

2025 cuz that's the year that I'm

recording this. And it's going to ask

you for a media location. For now, let's

just not worry about that. Let's just

leave it at default and hit create. Once

you do that, it's going to open up the

Resolve interface. This is where we

actually have to start doing things.

But first, a little tour. Most of this

interface, like everything within the

red box, is actually going to switch out

depending on what page you're on in

Resolve. Here we have the pages. And as

I click on the different pages, that's

going to switch out my interface.

And kind of like we were talking about

earlier, it switches it to kind of like

a different app, but it's not a

different app. This is all Resolve. And

it all kind of shares the same project,

which is really slick. And we'll get

into that here in a little bit. But

that's the first thing I want you to do

is go down here and just switch these

pages and get used to switching out that

interface. But where we're going to

start is this far left page, the media

page. All the way over here. Click on

media for me. And now all of our panels

have switched out for the panels for the

media page. Now, something to mention

here is that this isn't just switching a

layout. This is actually switching into

kind of a different mode. Even though

there are common panels in between the

pages, it's not just a different

workspace. It's actually like a

different mode of creating. So, let's

start talking about what the heck the

media page is. Well, each page has a

really a specific job. The media pages

job is to manage media. And so, this is

a perfect mode to put Resolve in when

you don't have any media in your project

and you're looking to put some in there.

So, a little tour of the interface. In

the upper left, we have this panel,

which is our media storage panel. This

is a way to navigate on your system to

any media that you want to bring into

Resolve. So, I'll just navigate to some

media here. And once you find the folder

up here, then you can actually preview

the media just by mousing over any of

these thumbnails. This is what we call

hover scrub because you hover over this

thumbnail and it scrubs the video. That

means it just moves that playhead back

and forth so you can see what's going

on. This is a great way to be able to

preview the footage that you have before

you bring it into your project. Now,

what do I mean by that? Well, even

though we're looking at this media here,

the media isn't actually imported into

the project. We haven't told Resolve to

use the media. We're really just kind of

using Resolve to go and find it. But, we

haven't said anything about wanting to

edit anything or combine clips together

or change them. So, in order to change

anything or work with this media, we

need to import it into Resolve. To do

that, real simply, we can just grab a

piece of media here from our media

storage and drag it down to this panel

down here, which is called our media

pool. It's going to ask if we want to

change the project frame rate. We'll

explain this a little bit later. I'll

hit change right now. Okay. What that's

going to do is put this piece of media

down here in the media pool. Anything

that's down here in the media pool

actually lives in our project. So, we've

told Resolve that, hey, there is a piece

of media called A54191

blah blah blah. And it lives on our

system. Here it is. I want to actually

work on this. And so, we've told Resolve

that we're actually going to use this

and play with it and work with it and

edit it with other videos and all the

fun stuff that Resolve does. All the

media up here in this panel is not in

our project yet. It's just on our

system. So, as far as Resolve is

concerned, it only really knows about

this one clip. In fact, I would consider

using this panel a little bit optional.

It is a nice way to be able to hover

scrub and kind of find the media that

you want. But you could also just close

this media storage and bring things

directly into the media pool. You could

do that a couple ways. You could

rightclick here and say import media.

You could go up to file and go down to

import media. Or you can just drag media

into the media pool from your system.

And so here I have a bunch of footage. I

can grab any of these and just drag them

into the media pool. And again, now it

knows about this footage because I put

it in the media pool. It lives in the

project. So now we have two clips that

we can work with. What if we had a bunch

of clips? So I'll just grab a bunch of

this and drag this in here. Now we have

a bunch of clips here in the media pool.

We have all these clips that we can work

with for our movie. But it would

actually help to start getting organized

here. That's one thing that the media

page is really good for. And especially

working here in the media pool. You can

rightclick anywhere here in this empty

space and you could go up and say new

bin. That makes a little folder inside

of the Resolve project where you can put

different pieces of media. So we can put

whatever piece of media we want here.

Just anything with the girl. Let's say

great. We just say girl. Sure. Can

double click and open this. And we have

our media here. We also have a list of

bins over here on the left which we can

kind of navigate to. And it's kind of a

little folder structure here. And so if

we have another bin here, we could say

wide shots. Sure. Let's pick all the

wide shots here and put them in wide.

Sure. And now we have these different

bins here. We can organize this. We

could also right click here in the bin

list and say new bin. That works too.

Bin three. Sure. And we can put those

into bin three. We can also drag them

like this. There are different views in

the media pool. You can zoom these

thumbnails in and out with this slider.

You can switch it to list view if you

want to see a little bit more

information about your clips.

You can switch this to metadata view,

which is kind of a mix of the thumbnail

view and there's also a little bit more

data on them. Most of the time I either

use the thumbnail view or the list view.

And this is really how we get organized

when it comes to our media here in

Resolve. All about the media pool. So,

I'm actually going to get rid of all of

these just so we have no clips here. And

I want you to do this with me. If you

downloaded the media to follow along,

you should have a folder called drag

these folders into media pool bin list.

Now, this is going to be absolutely

shocking, but here's what I want you to

do. I want you to select all of these

folders and I want you to drag them into

the media pool bin list right here. Just

like this, right under here where it

says master and drop them.

That's going to take Resolve a second.

And then it's going to make bins out of

each of those folders. So, that's going

to be organized just like it is in our

Finder or Explorer window in these

different folders. If you drag these

into the media pool itself and not the

bin list, it's just going to throw all

of the media in there without the

folders. So, make sure to drag them

here. All right. So, now we have all of

the media that we're going to use for

the rest of this video. and feel free to

open up the bins, go through it, and

take a look at some of this footage. We

have all kinds of fun stuff. We have a

production meeting here with multiple

cameras. We have footage that we're

going to color grade later. We have

footage that needs some compositing and

some effects. And we have some clips

that we're going to edit together into a

story in the edit page. Now, I don't

want to spend tons and tons of time on

this, but I do want to show you a couple

little extra things about the media

pool. One thing that can be really

helpful in the media page is the

metadata. Now over here we have a

metadata panel which has nothing to

inspect right now. But if I select the

clip that's going to show us metadata on

this clip. Now what is that? It's just

basically information that is recorded

with the clip. We can make this panel

bigger by going up here and clicking

where it says audio. That's going to

close our audio panel here. In fact, any

panel in Resolve pretty much has some

kind of header like this, usually at the

top. And when it's bright white, that

panel is open. And when it's gray, it's

closed. And so, this is how we can open

and close different panels in Resolve.

And this is common to all of the pages.

We're going to be doing a lot of that.

So, we have our metadata panel open

here. And I can see all kinds of

information about this, but there's

actually even more information. If I go

up here to the upper right, this little

button right here, I can click this and

say all groups. And that gives us just a

ton of stuff. Most of this is stuff that

we can fill in later. And so if you're

the kind of person that really likes to

be organized and really, you know, you

write notes about stuff and you tag

things and you have labels all over your

house and you have spreadsheets, this is

the best place for you. You can write

all kinds of notes about every single

thing that you want for your piece of

media here. You can write a description,

comments, the shot, scene, take, angle.

All of this stuff you can do right here

in the metadata panel of the media page.

It's probably way more detailed than you

ever really need to be. But here's

what's really cool about that. Let's

select this uh clip 24. I'm just going

to double click on this clip 24 here.

That'll load it up in this viewer. So,

if I double click on it, then I don't

have to be hover scrubbing it. I can

just scrub this up here in the viewer.

And what I can do is zoom in by just

rolling with the scroll wheel here to

this slate. This is the reason why we

shoot with slates is because then we can

easily tell what scene and take a clip

is. And we could if we wanted to go here

into the metadata and kind of record

that. So scene 4.5

take five. So now we have that here in

the metadata because we kind of read it

off of here and just typed it in. We can

do the same thing for other clips here.

Let's find it. So this is 4.6.

4.6 take two.

4.7 take 3. And you could go through and

tag all of your clips with this. What's

neat about this is I can switch this to

list view and I can rightclick up here

in this header and I can pick any kind

of metadata that I want to show. In

fact, I'll uncheck a bunch of this stuff

cuz I don't care about most of it. Just

uncheck all the stuff I don't care about

and then just check the stuff I do care

about. So, for instance, scene, take,

and then I can organize this by scene

and take, and I can quickly see where my

scenes and takes are, match that up to

my script if I want to, whatever I want

to do here. And so, this is a really

nice way to get organized. I could also

rightclick here and select keyword. And

here I could do something like, all

right, this is an over- the-shoulder

shot. So, we could go into keywords here

in my metadata, and type OTS. That's

short for over the shoulder. Just like

that. That's going to add that keyword

here. And anything that I have that's an

over-the-shoulder shot, I can just kind

of page through here and see if there's

anything else that's an OTS. This is

sort of an over- the-shoulder shot.

Sure, let's call it that. OTS like that.

Boop. Now, we have these listed as OTS.

So, I could sort them by keyword, but I

can also go to something called a smart

bin. Smart bins are like a live filter.

It's sort of like a folder that it puts

a copy of things into based on whatever

you set the smart bin to. And by

default, if you click on keywords, it

makes a smart bin for every keyword. So,

I can click on OTS, and that's going to

show me just the OTS shots. And you can

make keywords for absolutely anything

you want. It can be completely custom,

which is really neat. There's also these

collections here, which will give you

some quick things to sort by. for

instance, video clips, audio only, and

it even has a way with AI where it can

kind of sort and categorize things. In

fact, let's do that. Let's grab our

audio only stuff. Let's just grab all of

this here. I'm going to just shiftclick

the end of that, right click, and go

down to AI tools, audio classification,

analyze. This is something that's only

available in the paid version. I

promised I'd tell you when there's paid

version stuff. Any kind of AI stuff is

pretty much in the paid version. All

right. But what's neat about this is

once it analyzes all of that, then I can

go and look for clips just with

dialogue, clips with just music, clips

that are more for effects, and there's

also subcategories, and it will try and

figure out clips that have things like

effects in them, things like a door,

things like a dog barking, things like

laughter or liquid. Sometimes it does

all kinds of weird things, like it

thinks they're sheep or pig. There's a

toilet flushing sound. It nailed that

one. And so that's kind of fun. If you

have lots and lots of clips that you

want to organize a little bit better,

you can use that AI to do that. But

again, that's in the paid version and

you don't need to do that. You can

always make your own keywords and kind

of organize this yourself. You can even

rightclick here and say add smart bin

and you can do kind of a live filter

based on all kinds of stuff. So media

pool properties. You could even do like

things from a certain scene. If the

scene contains, you know, scene four,

then that's going to only show scene

four. And if we hit create, then we have

the smart bin one, which we could rename

scene 4. And you could have one for each

scene. All kinds of stuff you can do

with this. This is especially helpful

for documentaries and things where you

have lots and lots and lots of footage

that you need to stay organized with.

Things where you have, you know, 20

hours of B-roll. It's great to spend

some time before you edit to kind of get

this all organized here. And there are a

few more things that you could do in the

media page, but this is really what I

use this for most of the time is going

through and getting organized, logging

footage, putting putting metadata in,

and just kind of getting our head around

all of the media that's in our project.

And I'm going to show you one more cool

thing before we get into the edit page.

And this is something that you can

actually do in the other pages, but is a

great thing to do in the media page as

well. And that is syncing audio. If we

open up our clip and play this back, we

have the audio from the camera.

The kids are talking, but you can't

really hear them very well because the

camera is really far away. Now, we had a

boom mic here where we were recording

some audio so that we can actually hear

them, but that recorded to a separate

recorder. In fact, if we open up our

audio here, this clip 108,

scene four, shot 18, take three.

He said, "Scene four, shot 18, take

three."

Scene four, shot 18, take three.

Scene four, shot 18, take three.

So, how do we get this audio and this

video to sync up? Well, you could

actually put them together on a

timeline, which I'll show you a little

bit on how to do something like that

later. But one thing that Resolve can do

that's really great is we can take this

audio. Let's actually just take grab all

this audio and throw this into that

folder. So, we have all of the audio and

video together. I can take this clip and

this clip. I'm just holding control and

selecting both of these. And I can

rightclick and go up to audio sync,

autosync audio. This is something that

is still available in the free version.

and we're going to select synchronize

using waveform like this and hit sync.

What that's going to do it you just

about miss it. What that's going to do

is replace the audio in our video clip

with the audio from that mic. So here

camera audio

scene four shot 18 take three.

That still works but now go check it

out.

No, you go check it out. we can actually

hear them because we have that good

audio switched out. What's cool about

this is we can actually select all of

our clips. Just shift select all of

this, right click, audio sync, autosync

audio, and that's going to go through

all of our clips and sync them together.

So, anything that matches with the other

one, it's going to replace that audio.

Now, some of the clips it didn't really

work for, and that's okay. We can worry

about those later, but for most of them,

it worked. So, it says clip 20 and clip

19. Let's look at clip 20 and clip 19.

And there's not really any audio that we

need to hear. There's not not any

dialogue. So, it's really not that big

of a deal. But from now on in our

project, we'll hear the good audio fine

instead of the on camera audio. And

that's going to make editing a lot

easier. In fact, if we want to double

check and make sure that things are

synced up, we can rightclick here in

this header and find synced audio. And

that's going to list the audio right

here that it synced up with that clip.

Isn't that nice? Such a great feature.

Next, let's talk about editing. And for

that, I'm going to go into the edit

page. I'm actually going to skip over

the cut page for just a minute. But to

switch to the edit page, all I have to

do is click on edit. And that'll switch

to the edit page, and we're ready to

start working on our story. Now, a lot

of what you do in Resolve is going to be

in the edit page because you can kind of

think of it as like the hub for all of

the things that happen in your video.

The edit page is where we take all of

these clips that we have in our project

and we actually put them together in a

timeline. The timeline is where we

figure out the order of the clips and

how long they take and which parts we

use. And we're basically building our

new edited video with the timeline.

It's really all about building a story.

And so if we're shooting a scene in a

movie about Bill getting into his car,

we can shoot all of the different pieces

of this. Bill walking to his car, Bill

getting in the car, Bill getting a phone

call, Bill opening the door, Bill waving

to the neighbor. We can shoot all of

these things happening in any order we

want and then choose to change the order

in our edit. So, Bill opens the door.

That's the fourth thing that we shoot,

but we're going to put it first in our

edit. Bill waving to the neighbor comes

next.

Bill getting a phone call, Bill walking

to the car, and then Bill getting in the

car. And so even though we shot this out

of order, the order that we're building

in our edit is Bill opens the door, Bill

waves to the neighbor, Bill gets a phone

call, Bill walks to his car, Bill gets

in the car. This is the kind of thing

that I'm so excited about when it comes

to editing is because what we're doing

is we're building a story here. So

everything in the edit page is about

building that story. And that timeline

is going to be where everything in our

video lives. And we're going to make

more tweaks to it later in these other

pages. But for now, kind of keep that in

mind that that's our goal with the edit

page. So, let's talk about the

interface. We are going to have some

familiar stuff here. Actually, we have

these little buttons up here. When we

click these and they're white, they open

up different panels. And the panel

that's open by default over here on the

left is our media pool. Now, this is

exactly like the media pool in the media

page. The only difference is instead of

it being down here,

it's over here to the left. But you can

still do all the same things. This is

all the media that lives in your

project. We still have our bins. We

still have our smart bins. We can still

look at our media in various different

ways. But you can sort of think of this

as like your cabinet of ingredients that

we're going to use to make our video.

Here we also have a couple of viewers.

This left viewer is called our source

viewer.

And this right viewer here is called the

timeline viewer.

What the source viewer is for is if I

open up one of these pieces of media,

double click on it, I can preview this

piece of media. So I can scrub through

this and preview this and look all

through any kind of media that I have.

And you do that just by double clicking

on any of these pieces of media. And you

can sort of think of this as like

picking up something and looking at it.

So if you have a snack in your cabinet,

you pick it up and you look at it like

this, but you haven't actually added it

to your plate yet. All you're doing is

just kind of previewing it, looking at

it. So that's cool. You can double click

on any piece of media to load it up here

in the viewer. You can also switch this

to this second mode right here with this

little button. And this is called source

tape mode. And what this is is it

basically takes all of your footage and

it loads it all into this source viewer

all at once and it just kind of puts

them all together. And so if I scrub

through this, I'm scrubbing through this

first clip. And if I go to this second

part after this little tick mark, I'm

scrubbing through the second clip and

the third clip and so on. And so I can

scrub through all of my clips in my

media pool, at least in the bin that I

have up here, all at once in one motion.

This is great if you're looking for a

specific shot visually that you want to

lay over something. Makes it really,

really quick to be able to find what you

need to find. But you might find it less

confusing, maybe a little bit easier

just to use this first icon here, this

first mode where you double click on a

piece of media and load it up here in

the viewer. Now, once we have a piece of

media selected that we like and we

actually want to add that to our video,

we want to put that into our edit, what

we have to do is add it to a timeline.

If the media pool is like our cabinet

and our viewer is like picking up a

ingredient from that cabinet, then the

timeline down here, this is kind of like

our plate.

So, if we want to actually eat

something, we're going to put it on our

plate. So, if we want to add this to our

video, I can grab this clip just in the

middle. I'm just grabbing it and

dragging it down here to our timeline.

And that's going to add this clip to our

timeline, which is like, you know,

putting an apple on our plate. So now we

have an active timeline. We have this

playhead that goes back and forth. And

this is actually going to make the story

of our video. Right now our story is

this. If we go all the way to the left

and I hit spacebar to play, we have a

bunch of black space here. We have an

empty space. And then eventually our

clip starts. And this is our full clip,

not edited. We haven't done anything

with this. It's just literally the clip

thrown into the timeline. We still have

people moving around. We still have the

slate, all of that kind of stuff. And so

if we were going to export this movie

right now and we were going to put this

on YouTube or something, this is exactly

what people would see is 6 seconds of

black followed by just this unedited

footage. That doesn't really make a

whole lot of sense. But we've done

something really exciting already. We've

put this clip down onto our timeline,

which means that we actually have a

video in progress. Now, we could render

this out and it will be a video that's

different than this clip. So, we've done

a little bit of magic already. We've

created something. Now, it's not very

good. It's not very interesting. So, we

can change that. But all of the magic of

building our story happens down here in

the timeline. So, let's change our story

to be a little bit better here. The

first thing I want to do is I don't want

this black right here. I don't want to

watch 6 seconds of black before anything

happens. So, we can take this and just

drag it to the left. And we always want

this kind of pushed all the way to the

left at the very start of our clip

because then we start with an actual

video, right? We can zoom into this

timeline by clicking this little plus

right here. That's kind of our zoom bar.

We can zoom in and out. And I can adjust

this middle bar here. And I can move

this up and down. And by default, we

have a video track and an audio track

added here. If I take the bottom edge of

this audio track and I drag it down,

that'll make these waveforms a little

bit bigger. And so we can see a visual

representation of what's happening in

the audio. So the bigger the spike, the

more the louder the audio. So we can see

where the slate is right here. We zoom

in here. We have these little spikes.

Teen take one.

That's where that slate made that spike.

And so we're going to start sometime

after this.

What was that?

So her saying, "What was that?" So

that's a good place to start this clip.

That's where it actually gets

interesting. That's the part that we're

supposed to show. And so what we can do

is we can trim this and kind of cut out

all of this part and just start the clip

there. The way that we do that is we

just mouse over the edge of this. And

you'll see how my mouse kind of turns

into this left bracket. I can grab this

and then just slide this over like this.

And I'll have that clip kind of start

right there. This is called trimming a

clip. So just like you would trim a

hedge or something like that or trim a

piece of paper, you kind of cut off all

the excess. Right? So, we're cutting off

this first part. Let's play this back.

I'll just hit spacebar.

What was that?

Great. I like that. Let's stop right

after that. And I'll take the edge of

this and drag this over here.

And we can see the outline of the full

clip. And we're just going to use that

little part. There we go. So, now this

is a lot shorter, but we have all this

black here. So, we can take this and

slide it all the way to the left. Just

like that. Okay. I'll zoom in here so we

can see what's going on.

What was that?

Great. This literally this literally

what I just showed you. Picking a clip

here,

dragging it down, and then deciding

where you want to start that clip. So

maybe starting it right here.

Go check it out.

And trimming it to just be that part

that you like.

Check it out.

Um, no. You go check it out.

Trimming off all the excess. This is

like the bread and butter of editing.

This is like 90% of it. You can make so

many amazing videos literally with what

I just showed you. That's all you need.

That's all you need for so much stuff.

We're just bringing those clips in,

trimming them, and then putting them

here in the timeline. And ideally, there

wouldn't be any empty spaces in between

them. So, we cut from one video.

Go check it out.

Next video.

All right. We're putting these clips

together. And that makes a new story.

Just like in our example of Bill walking

to his car, we're taking all these

separate clips and then putting them

together here in an order that we like

in the timeline. Okay. And what's cool

is that we have control over this. We

can do something like completely cut out

the phone call. Bill opens the door.

Bill waves to his neighbor. Bill walks

to his car. Bill gets in the car. We can

cut out this this whole first part and

just say Bill walks to his car and then

Bill gets in the car. We are in complete

control of this story and it's all about

where these clips go in the timeline and

what order they go in. So this is so

great. Let's let's get our hands dirty

here a little bit. Let's let's make a

story. So if we were to go to this

second icon here, this source tape, and

scrub through this, we can kind of get a

good idea of the story here. These kids

arrive and they see this crashed UFO.

They're a little bit scared about it, so

they kind of argue who should go check

it out. The girl finally convinces her

brother to go and check it out. So he

walks towards the UFO. So he walks up to

the UFO. They're both really nervous.

And then as he walks up there, something

moves. So this is just a few clips from

a scene from our movie called Tuesday on

Earth. And so what's great is we have

all these clips and we can choose to

tell this story however we want. So a

good way to start oftent times is with a

wide shot. And we want the wide shot

that shows the first thing that happens,

right? So, we have the kids kind of

riding up on their bikes, putting their

bikes down.

And so, let's use that for our first

clip. So, that's clip 10. I'll just

double click on that. That'll switch to

our source viewer. I'll grab this and

drag this down into our timeline.

For this first clip, let's scrub through

until we're ready, until something

interesting starts happening. So, right

as they kind of get off their bikes,

that's probably a good place to trim

this beginning. Move this down. Let's

play this back.

I can hit control F to play this full

screen like this.

Whoa.

Great. That's about all we need right

there. And so we could use that and trim

it this way. We also have other takes

here. And so let's scrub through this

and see how this works.

And you'll notice now when we scrub

through things, the video changes on the

right viewer. That's because again, this

is the timeline viewer. This is the

preview of what your actual movie is

going to be. This is just picking up

footage from over here and looking at

it. Nothing that happens over here is

necessarily going to happen in your

video. It's all about this viewer right

here, the timeline viewer. If you forget

which one is which, just scrub your

timeline and see which one moves. We can

scrub through this and figure out what

we like for our different tanks.

Great. I like that. Let's trim the end

and let's trim the beginning

right after they start moving.

Okay, something like that. And move this

all the way to the left. So, we have our

first shot of our

movie. Them getting off their bikes and

walking up.

Let's maybe go back into our source tape

here. Kind of scroll around and try and

figure out what what we should do next.

Again, we're in control of this. That's

what's so nice. So, they end this shot

by kind of standing there like this. So,

let's cut to them standing together.

I think probably this shot right here,

shot 31. But this time, instead of

dragging this entire clip down here to

the timeline and trimming it, we're

going to do a little bit of work before

we add it to the timeline. We're going

to do that by setting ins and outs. See,

in our source viewer, we're viewing the

entire clip, right? The whole thing. And

everything that might happen in that

clip is not necessarily stuff we want to

keep. Saying action, the actor having to

sneeze, Bill waving to the neighbor,

Bill waves to the neighbor again.

awkward ending and cut. Most of that

stuff we don't need. What we really want

is Bill waving to the neighbor, right?

So, what we can do is kind of trim out

the extra stuff in the source viewer

before we take this and we put it down

into the timeline. And so, what we'll do

is we'll set what's called an in and an

out. An in is like the start of the clip

that you want and the out is the end of

the clip you want. You can think of this

like swimming. When you get in the pool,

you start swimming and when you end

swimming, you get out of the pool. So an

in is the beginning of your clip and out

is the end of your clip. So we're going

to scrub through and try and find the

beginning of our clip, which is probably

going to be right before he starts

talking.

Kind of scrub through this. And then

let's just play.

Go check it out.

Great. So yeah, right about there. And

we want that to start there. So we're

going to set an in. There's a few ways

to do that. One of them is you can click

this button right here, which is our set

in button. Like that. No way. You

The other thing you could do would be to

hit I on the keyboard. I for in

go check it out.

Let's play this back and see what it

looks like.

No way. You go check it out.

Fine.

Okay,

I'll go check it out.

Good. Now, let's end the clip there. And

we can either click this set out button

or we can hit O for out. Just like that.

Now, we have these little gray

indicators here. And what that means is

that our clip is this long, but we're

only going to use this part of the clip.

This is what we're actually going to

use. And if I click and drag from the

middle of this clip down here, we'll see

it's much shorter than it would have

been, and it's already pre-trimmed. Now,

that doesn't mean that we can't change

it. We can grab this, and we can take

the edge of this and trim this. And you

can see how big the original clip is

with this little gray outline that shows

up. It's just like we were to put this

down and trim it. We just don't have to

move things around in the timeline to do

that. We could just kind of trim this

beforehand and bring this in. And so

what some people will do is go through

all their footage and pick the part that

they like. They'll kind of do some

pre-edits.

Like this I for in. And I can also use

the J, K, and L keys on the keyboard as

these buttons right here. J plays

backwards. K starts and stops. and L

plays forwards. So you can kind of move

things back and forth with J and L.

Go check it out.

Um, no, you go check it out.

Fine.

Okay,

I'll go check it out.

Good. That looks good. I'll hit O for

out. And I've just grabbed the part that

I want and I can drag it down into the

timeline. Just like that. And so a great

way to start getting things here on the

timeline is just to go through all of

your clips and pick the parts you like.

Go check it out.

Um, no. You go check it out.

Fine.

Reset. We don't want you to move.

Right.

Okay. Needs to back up a little bit. So,

we're going to use the second take. I

can scrub through this faster by hitting

L twice. That's going to go through this

at 2x speed. And then I can hit K to

stop and then L to play back normal

speed.

Go check it out. Right. I guess

J to kind of reverse. I for in.

Go check it out.

Um, no, you go check it out.

Fine.

And again, I can just drag this down.

So, you can do this for all of your

footage. And a good way to do this is

just kind of throw all the footage into

a timeline. And then remember, you can

always move things around,

change the order, and play around with

things, and you can always trim it more

or less. You really can't ruin it too

badly. And so, this is the fun part

about editing is creating this story.

So, let's just maybe cut to this second

shot here. And I'll just trim this back

a little bit to where they're kind of

just looking dumb at this thing. And

we'll cut from this wide shot into this

closeup like this

action.

We got to cut out that action though.

Go check it out.

No way. You go check it out.

Fine.

Okay,

I'll go check it out.

Great. So, we have the basic actions

happening where they come up, they see

something,

they start arguing, and eventually the

guy starts walking towards the craft.

But we want to show this in a more

creative way. And so, we actually have

these other shots that we can cut in

between them and make it look a little

bit more interesting. So, for instance,

when the girl's talking, we want to see

the girl's face a little bit closer. So,

let's see if this take works.

Go check it out.

Um, no, you go check it out.

And I like that little Wait, what? Like

this? This right here. So, let's trim

that. And let's see if we can put this

in there somewhere right after he says

go check it out.

Go check it out.

Right there. That's probably a good

place to cut. Now, we haven't done this

yet, but we have this clip, and this

shouldn't go before or after. It should

go right in the middle here. So, what we

can do is we can split this clip a

couple of different ways. One way we

could do it would be to go and click on

this little icon here, this little razor

blade, and that's going to turn our

mouse into a razor blade tool. And

whenever we click on this clip, that's

going to split the clip right there

wherever we click. So, we can just chop

this up if we want to. I'll hit

control-z a few times to undo that. What

I like to do is figure out where I want

to cut by moving this playhead back and

forth and then use a keyboard shortcut

to split it. The default keyboard

shortcut for Resolve is control

backslash. That's the backslash that's

right above enter, like the return key,

kind of in the middle of the keyboard.

If you hit that, that will split this

clip right where that playhead is. And

then you can move the clips around and

put this clip here in between them like

this. So now, let's see what this looks

like.

Go check it out.

Um, no, you go check it out.

See how that kind of works. Fine.

Now we want to see him say fine. And so

really this is kind of the same process.

So we split it right there. Controll

backslash.

And we might not use the rest of this.

But we'll just bring it down there kind

of out of the way for now. Have him

saying fine. Let's see. Where's another

one? There we go. Him saying fine.

No, you go check it out.

Right there. I like that. Let's trim

that here. Bring this in like this.

Oh, check it out.

Fine.

Great.

So, he says fine here.

Fine.

Let's trim this.

Put this in order. So, now we're putting

clips in the order for the story, but

we're also choosing clips that show the

story the very best. This is where it

starts to get really fun.

Go check it out.

Um, no. You go check it out.

Fine.

Okay,

I'll go check it out.

Great. So, we'll maybe cut right there.

And now we have a sequence of a few

different shots that really start to

tell our story. And then it's up to you

as the editor to go in and think about,

okay, how fast should one clip cut to

another clip?

Go check it out.

So, he kind of pushes her. I feel like

this should happen a little bit quicker.

go to that other shot. Anytime that you

cut in between one shot and another, you

can decide to show more or less time.

And so you can kind of control time a

little bit. This is the one part of the

world where you can control time. That's

what's really neat.

Um, no, you go check it out.

Good.

Let's cut that a little bit tighter,

too. Move this down.

Fine.

Okay.

You notice how this cut works really

well.

Fine. The reason for that is because he

starts to turn his head back in this

shot and he finishes turning his head on

this shot. This is called cutting on

action. That means that there's one

action that happens in one shot that's

continued in the other shot. And so our

mind accepts the little differences in

between the shots and it makes it feel

like they're continuous. Just like I

start waving my hand in this shot and

then we cut to this shot, it feels like

it's continuous, right? And that's

because it is. I mean, this is kind of

recorded live, but that's what really

helps

is that little tiny movement. And so,

looking for those opportunities to make

those cuts a little bit easier. For

instance, when he pushes her, she kind

of moves a little bit.

Maybe

this happens in this shot, too. Does he

push her? Yeah, she moves forward a

little bit. So, maybe as she moves

forward just a touch, maybe that'll work

a little better. I can select this empty

part and hit delete. And that's going to

get rid of that gap.

See how there's like that little

movement? She's moving forward. Kind of

moving forward a little bit there, too.

That might be a good cut. It might just

take too long, and we don't want to do

that. We'll see. But that's all up to

you. Now, a couple other things about

adding clips. Let's go through here and

let's add this shot right here. Shot 24.

This is what we would call their POV,

sort of. It's actually an

overthe-shoulder shot, but it's what

they see. And so, anytime that you're

editing, especially when somebody's

looking off screen and they have some

kind of reaction, just like what's

happening here where they're walking

towards and they go, "Wo

then that sparks a question in the

viewer's mind. What are they looking

at?" And so, a lot of the time it's a

good idea to show what they're looking

at in the next shot. Now, the next shot

in the timeline right here is actually

them standing. And it's sort of a

problem because they're actually

standing farther apart here than they

are in this shot. And that's something

you'll probably notice. Like it looks

weird. So, we can kind of feed two birds

with one scone here. We can answer the

question, what are they looking at off

screen? And we can bridge this gap to

not be distracting by adding this shot

in here. Couple ways that we could do

this would be to zoom out, select all of

our shots to the right, and move it down

so that we have some space to put this

shot. And we can drag this shot in here.

And we could set the in and the out on

this shot, and we can drag it in here

like that. And then kind of delete the

gaps, and that would work. What's a

little bit faster is to put our playhead

right on that edge. You can tell it to

snap to the edges by clicking this

button right here. If this magnet is

white, it'll snap to the edges like

this. If it's not, then it won't really

snap. It'll You can kind of put this

wherever you want. But I like have

snapping on for this kind of thing. Put

this right on that edit, that edge in

between the two clips. And what we can

do is click one of these buttons right

here. These are our edit buttons. This

one is insert clip. And what we'll do is

we can set an in and out like the

beginning and the end of this clip.

Something like that. And we can hit this

insert button. And look what happens

when I click this. It inserts this clip

right where that playhead was and it

moves all the other clips this way down

the timeline. So if I hit control +- Z,

we can kind of see what happens. Control

shift Z to redo it. It's just putting

that clip in there. So now we have in

our story, they show up and say, whoa.

And then we see what they see. Ooh yeah,

baby. That looks good. And now we've

forgotten how far apart they were in

that first shot. And so now we cut here

and nobody cares. Works great.

Go check it out.

That's how we build a story here in the

edit page. So cool. And this basic

process works for any kind of video

you're making. Whether you're making a

film like this, or whether you're just

doing a YouTube video, documentary

commercial, it's all about finding the

clips you want, setting the in and out,

and putting it on the timeline in some

way. Whether it's dragging it to the

timeline, or whether it's using an edit

button like this insert. There's also a

couple other edit modes. for instance,

overwrite, which just kind of pastes

this over everything. There's replace,

which will swap out the clip here for

the clip that we're over here in the

timeline. And you can click and drag

here and drag this viewer onto this

viewer. And you have a few more options,

too. For instance, place on top puts

that clip on top and on the next layer.

We're always going to be looking at the

top layer in our viewer,

but we can decide to turn this off and

move this around without overwriting

this clip. One handy edit button here

would be append.

If you drop it on this append, it's

going to throw this clip, whatever we

have selected here, at the end of our

timeline, which is great if you're just

kind of gathering the clips that you

want. You can just double click, set

your in and out. Okay, drag it over

here. Append it end. You don't have to

worry about where you are in your story.

You can just kind of go through here.

Pick the parts you like.

Append. You don't really have to worry

about it.

Great. Append at end. And you can throw

those all in the timeline. And then you

can move them around and adjust them and

trim them and split them and all the

stuff that you need to do. So, if you

want to get really used to how the edit

page works, I would highly recommend

grabbing this footage, dragging it down

into the timeline and just trying to

make a story out of these clips. Now, a

couple quick tips that I think are

pretty helpful for actually putting

together a story here is I like to use

what I call the anchor technique. This

is something that we go into a little

bit more in our end toend editing

course, which I'll tell you more about

in a little while. But the big idea here

is that you start with one shot where

multiple things are happening. So, we

have this wide shot of him walking

towards the craft. We have her kind of

looking around. And so, we can kind of

start with this as our anchor for this

part of the edit. And then we can use

these other shots to enhance it. So, we

have her kind of looking back and forth

right here. We also have this shot of

her kind of looking as he walks forward.

We have the shot of her looking back and

forth right here. And so, we can take

this shot and we'll just kind of trim

this

And we can drag this up to a new track

and kind of put this over our shot like

this. So we have our wide shot here and

then we have the close-up here. And we

can kind of move this back and forth

without overwriting this just because

it's in that top layer. And we can kind

of just play around with this

until we feel like it works.

Maybe we want to cut to a closeup of

him, which we have right here.

Yeah, maybe this one. Sure. And again,

we'll just drag that up like this.

Maybe we'll just cut to this first and

then cut to her. So, we have him

walking forward.

And we can kind of mix these in however

we want

to make this scene not only have all of

the actions that happen in the scene,

but also make it look exciting and have

a bunch of dynamic shots, right? And we

can choose whether to use shots or not.

I mean, we have this shot right here,

which I really like of her kind of

thinking things over a little bit.

Check it out.

We could decide to put this right here

if we want to, but we're using the shots

that are already here down in the

timeline to figure out where to put our

other shots. So, that's the anchor

technique. Now, for a couple of

shortcuts, these are really, really

important. Let's go ahead and put this

right here. And let's say I want to trim

this about this much. I can do that with

my normal selection mode, my normal tool

here, which is activated right here in

the toolbar. Or I can use the trim mode.

That's this one right here. And what

this does is it does similar things, but

if I grab the edge like this and I bring

it this way, it actually kind of sucks

the clips down. And so I can grab the

edge here and I can trim this, but it

doesn't leave a gap. And so it's just a

little bit quicker way to trim things.

It's the exact same thing as trimming

this with our normal selection mode,

selecting this emptiness, and moving it

down like that. It just does this all in

one little thing. The other thing this

tool will do, this this trim tool, is if

you click and drag in the middle of a

clip towards the top, what this will do

is slip this clip. And that means that

it's going to keep the same in and out,

but it's going to use a different part

of the clip. And so if I want to move it

down like this and use this part

just what happened

then that works. I can also slide the

clip if I click and drag in the middle

towards kind of the bottom of the clip

like this. And that moves this back and

forth and it kind of trims the other

clips around it. And this makes more

sense if we have these all on one line.

I'll just drop these in real quick. If

I'm in the trim mode here and I grab

this lower part, I can move this back

and forth and it trims the other clips

there with it. So, I can trim the other

clips or I can move this kind of clip

back and forth. And so, this is a nice

way if you don't quite have your clip

settled in just right. You can use the

trim tools to really kind of move things

back and forth. And so, it really,

really helps, especially if you're

trying to make an edit just right. And

when you grab this and you move it back

and forth, it shows this multiple view.

And so we have the first frame and the

last frame of this clip. Then we have

the last frame of this clip and the

first frame of this clip. And so you can

see all of the transition points all on

one view here. So trim tool is really

useful, especially if you're trying to

edit a little bit quicker. And speaking

of editing quicker, keyboard shortcuts

are very, very important. You can hit T

to select your trim tool and A for your

normal selection mode. Remember, A just

kind of moves things around like this.

Overwrites things, but T will do the

slip and slide and that kind of thing.

You can hit B to go to your blade tool

to chop this up however much you want.

But again, I would highly recommend

learning the keyboard shortcut just to

split this at the playhead. Controll

backslash like that because that's a

nice way to do that. The other major

keyboard shortcut I'd highly recommend

learning is the ripple trim shortcut.

Let's say I want to chop this part of

the clip off either by doing this and

then deleting it and moving it down or I

could use the trim tool and move it down

like this.

Well, I can do that with a keyboard

shortcut by aiming my playhead right

where I want the clip to start and

hitting control shift left bracket.

That's going to do all of that all at

once. is just going to trim this and

ripple everything down this way. Ripple

is the fancy word for moving clips down

so that there's no gaps. And so we can

ripple trim control shift left bracket

for the beginning. And then if we want

to trim the end, control shift right

bracket like that. Now you may notice

that both control backslash and control

shift left and right bracket take two

hands on the keyboard. And so if you

have one hand on the mouse, it's kind of

awkward to remove your hand from the

mouse and then hit a keyboard shortcut.

It's slightly faster actually to

probably just grab it with the mouse.

And so to actually save time, I'd highly

recommend customizing your keyboard

shortcuts. So how do you do that? Up

here in our Da Vinci Resolve menu, we

can go down to keyboard customization.

And this is a whole big panel

dedicated to keyboard shortcuts. And all

you have to do is click on whatever

modifiers you want and then whatever you

would press after that modifier. So

control shift left bracket. And this

will show you the command. So this is

start to playhead. If I click on this,

that'll open up start to playhead right

here. And if you want, you can change

the keyboard shortcut for this. So I

have mine set to Q for start to playhead

and W for end to playhead. Let me kind

of walk you through this because it's

kind of annoying. So I'm going to switch

back to my Da Vinci Resolve shortcuts

here.

By the way, they have presets for

shortcuts that are kind of like Adobe

Premiere Pro and Apple Final Cut, Avid

Pro Tools. What I usually do is I set

this to Da Vinci Resolve. And I'll do

this, this control shift left bracket,

this is start to play head. If I click

on this command right here, that'll

bring that up right here. If I click on

this little plus, that will make a

little box here, and I can type whatever

keyboard shortcut I want. So, start to

playhead, I'm going to select as Q.

Great. Now, it's going to come up and

say Q is already assigned to something,

which is fine with me because I'm never

going to use this view source timeline

viewer. You might use it, but I'm not

going to. So, whatever you assign to it,

it's going to tell you if that's already

a keyboard shortcut. So, I'm just going

to say assign. Now, it gives you a

little warning here. The reason there's

a warning is because neither of these

keyboard shortcuts are going to work

anymore because one keyboard shortcut is

assigned to two things, which you would

think it would just do both things, but

it actually does neither. So, I'm going

to go out of here, go back to my just

vanilla keyboard here, and click on Q.

Then, it's going to list all the

commands that are under Q. So, we have

start to play head, which is what I

want, and then source timeline view.

Let's click on source timeline view

here, and let's just get rid of the Q

shortcut right there. Great. We're going

to do the same thing with W. So, let's

go ahead and open up W, dynamic trim

mode. Let's take that off. Okay. And

then we're going to look up control

shift right bracket, which is end of

playhead. Let's make this W. Great. So,

now we have Q and W set to start and end

of playhead. The other thing that I like

to do is set this S key to split clip,

which is control backslashplit clips

right here. So, I'm going to actually

set this to S. It's going to say, "Hey,

S is already something." I'll say,

"Okay, assign." Then let's go back to S

and take away toggle slip slide. Boom.

Like that. Now I have Q and W and S. And

those are really the only keyboard

shortcuts that I change for Resolve.

Everything else seems to make pretty

good sense to me. But those are the ones

that are really nice because I can use

three fingers to do a lot of editing.

And I'll show you the power of that here

in just a second. But this looks good. I

want to make sure to save this. So, I'll

go up to these three dots and say save

as new preset. We'll call this intro

intro shortcuts. Hit okay. Great. So,

now this is saved. I can close this. And

now we should be able to hit Q and

that's going to trim the edge. And W.

That should trim the edge. And S should

split this. So, I have three fingers

that can do a lot of these editing

tasks. So, check this out. Especially if

you're editing something where you have

a lot of footage or whether you're just

trying to cut down maybe a podcast or

something like that.

You can go through here and just look at

the waveforms like this and see when

somebody's talking, right? And so you

can split it with S. And then you can

get rid of this

part with a ripple trim to start. So Q

like that. See how this works? S Q

just like that. And I can do this by

just aiming with my playhead

and then Q.

Right.

Just like that. And I can trim this

whole thing and cut out all of the

silence

really, really quickly

just by looking at the waveforms and

trimming it to

those waveforms. So, that's a great way

to cut down things that have a lot of

talking and just keep the talking. In

fact, that's how my editor Sam is

cutting this tutorial. Pretty much same

thing. QWS. What I would recommend

doing, especially if you haven't edited

before, is I would double click on each

of these clips, set the in and out for

whatever part looks interesting and drag

it down here into the timeline. Add

these all to the timeline, and then kind

of mix them together and put together a

story in the edit page. Now, I'm going

to cheat a little bit and use a timeline

that I've already worked on just so I

can show you some more cool stuff. And

to show you this kind of stuff, I'm

going to import a bin. So, just like you

can open a project or export a project,

you can export just a bin or a timeline

in Resolve. It's really helpful. I can

rightclick here in the empty space in my

media pool and go down to import bin.

And I'm going to select a bin that says

Casey only. You will not have this bin.

Okay, say it with me. I will not have

this bin. This is Casey only. All right.

It's not included in the files. This is

just for my demo purposes. Okay. So,

we're gonna hit open. And that's how you

import a bin. Inside of this bin, I'm

going to have a couple of timelines that

are going to help us learn some stuff.

Just double click on my edit demo thing

here. And here we have an edit that I

made using this footage here on the edit

page. Let's take a look.

Whoa.

Whoa.

Mhm.

Go check it out.

Um, no. You go check it out.

Fine.

Okay.

Check it out.

What was that?

So, it's a cohesive story. It has a

beginning, a middle, and an end. The

kids show up, drop their bikes. This is

what they see. They argue. The guy

starts to walk forward. He's nervous.

She's nervous.

it moves. They kind of panic and they go

in to investigate. Now, a couple of

things to point out here about this edit

that I made.

One clip here has a split,

but there's no cut. We're not really

cutting to a different clip. It's just

split here for essentially no reason.

What we can do is we can actually repair

this by right-clicking here on this edit

point and saying delete through edit.

And that's going to make this into one

clip, which is going to be helpful later

when we're doing color. There's no

reason to have a clip split if you're

not going to cut to a different clip or

severely change that clip. By the way, a

great way to move up and down the

timeline when you're zoomed in is to

click and hold the middle button on your

mouse and drag. And what that will do is

let you kind of grab this timeline and

move it back and forth. And that

actually works for just about everything

in Resolve. I can move this preview

around by clicking and dragging on my

middle button, on my scroll wheel

button. That's kind of the click and

drag and pan sort of shortcut for most

things here in Resolve. So, I can move

this over here. And it doesn't look like

we have any more through edits. Oh,

wait, there's one. Let's right click on

this, delete throughit. There we go.

Good.

But actually, I had this split over here

for my audio. And the reason for that is

because this audio is really loud. So,

if we play this back,

those are just really loud bike sounds.

And so, the cool thing about the edit

page is not only can you organize your

video tracks and kind of change their

order and everything, but you can also

mess with your audio. And so, what we

really want to do is take the volume

down on this clip. We actually have the

volume turned way up here in our edit,

but normally there's a little line right

here, and you can click and drag this up

and down to change the volume of your

audio. And so I had this turned way up

because I want to hear kind of the quiet

parts, but it's way too loud for when

the bikes fall down. And so what we can

do is just split this right here. And I

just want to split the audio. And when I

select this, it's going to select both

the video track and the audio track. And

I can just select the audio by going up

here and unlinking this chain link here.

And then I can just select the audio and

move that separately. I can also hold

alt and click on this track just to

select it by itself. But either way, I

want to select just the audio and then I

can split it with control backslash or

whatever you set your keyboard shortcut

to. I can just split that right there.

And then I can have a separate volume

line for this part and this part.

And that lets you change the volume of

your audio. Now, we don't want there to

be a really harsh difference in our

audio where the ambient noise is really

loud and then it turns it down

immediately. See, if I bring this back,

we'll have this kind of sound

where it turns it down immediately. And

so, what we might want to do is

crossfade this. I can rightclick on this

edit and go down and I can pick one of

these crossfade options. It doesn't

really matter. You can pick the 12

frame, let's say. And what that's going

to do is crossfade these clips together,

which if you have two different clips,

it's going to fade out the first clip

and then fade in the second clip kind of

gradually so that you don't notice a cut

there. But when you have the same clip

at different volumes, what it

essentially does is it kind of just

turns down the volume over this amount

of time. So, it's a lot more gradual

and you don't notice that difference.

We could do the same thing here.

Yeah, that's nice. And I find this is a

really nice way to adjust your audio

over time. The other way that you can do

that, I'll just take this volume line

down a little bit. The other way you can

do that is hold alt and click on this

line and that will give you these little

control points and you can move one up

and one down and you can kind of adjust

the level of volume over time here. So

you can get really detailed with how you

want to change your audio in your clip.

And so if you have one really loud part,

you could just kind of squish that down.

So we could do this. I'll just kind of

get rid of this and bring that out like

this. We could

hold alt and add a couple of control

points here.

I can bring this control point down and

just bring down that little part. And

that's good, too.

It's really kind of dependent on what

you want to do. The reason I tend not to

do this so much is because it's kind of

a pain to grab these little points and

move them around. And it's easy to kind

of mess this up or get too many points

or, you know, if I have to move one,

then I have to move the other one. It

just kind of is annoying. And so what

I'll usually do is just select this

audio,

turn this clip down, and crossfade these

because then I can do stuff like roll

these edits back and forth.

And that's going to change where that

adjustment is really easily. It's really

up to you. Here you'll notice this

little triangle. This is from bringing

this little white handle over. And what

this does is this makes a fade, like a

fade out. And so anytime that you have a

clip where you want it to fade in or

out, you can take these little white

handles and bring them in, and that's

going to adjust a fade. That works for

both audio as well as video. We have

these little white handles in this

video, too. And so we have this fade up

from black.

Go figure it out.

And then fade down, right? So, if you're

making a movie trailer where you have

stuff fade in and out all the time,

that's a good way to do it. And oh my

gosh, there's so much more to get into

with adjusting stuff on the edit page.

But we're already going to have a long

enough YouTube video here. So, I want to

show you just a couple other things in

the edit page before we move on. Let's

talk about the inspector. So, the

inspector is a panel that you can open

up over here on the right. And what this

is is a list of properties for whatever

we have selected. Now, this is a

universal thing in Resolve. There is

some version of an inspector on just

about every page. And so, this is an

essential concept for you to understand.

When you select something, this clip has

certain properties. And when we have

this selected, what it does is it opens

up those properties here in the

inspector. So, we select something and

we adjust its details and its properties

in the inspector. Now I can hit this

little button to expand the inspector so

that it's the full height of the screen

and we can see all these different

properties. So every clip has a bunch of

properties. So I'll select this clip

here and we'll just see what these all

do. There are tabs up here and these are

different categories of properties. So a

clip by default is going to have video

and audio tab. And depending on what

other fancy things you do, these other

tabs might be available. But the video,

we start with the transform properties.

These are ways that you can move and

scale and rotate your video. And these

controls, some of them have sliders,

which makes sense. You slide this back

and forth. And some of them just have

numbers, which you can double click in

and replace with a number. Or you can

click and drag left and right on any of

these numbers to control it, sort of

like a slider. You can doubleclick on

any of these properties to reset them.

You can also hit this little reset

button. And so now if we want to zoom in

on her face, we can zoom like this. And

we can adjust the position to be right

there on her face. We can adjust the

rotation if we want to. And that's how

we would do that for this clip. Now,

it's only adjusting this clip because

this is the clip that we have selected.

If we go to this clip, it is unaffected.

In fact, if we're over this clip and

we're looking at it, we're adjusting the

zoom and nothing's happening. That's

because we have this clip selected. And

so that's loaded into the inspector. So,

we zoom this way far up.

We go back to this one and it's zoomed

in really far, right? So, let's go ahead

and reset everything in our transform.

We also have cropping where we can crop

the image. We can adjust the softness of

that crop.

This is great if you want to mix kind of

one side of one shot and the other side

of another shot, something like that. Or

if you want to do kind of a pictureand

picture thing, you could do some

cropping.

on your image and then position it down

into the corner. Something like that.

And at that point, if you wanted to put

this clip over something else, you could

just put this over other clips here in

the timeline, and those would be layered

like that.

You can adjust the composite mode, which

is kind of the transparency of things.

If I put this image over this image, we

could take the opacity down and kind of

fade this. So, it's kind of ghosted over

it. We could also change the composite

mode to different things like add or

multiply and all different kinds of

composite modes. This works a lot like

an image editing program like Photoshop

or something like that. Same kind of

idea. And there's just so much more to

go over, but basically if you want to

adjust how a clip is treated, its

position, its rotation, how it interacts

with other clips, the volume of the

audio, the pan of the audio, the pitch,

there's equalizer, there's all kinds of

stuff that we'll get into a little bit

more when we talk about Fairlite, but

this is where the properties for

anything that you have selected lives.

Okay, so again, if we want to make this

small, we can zoom it out like that

just by selecting it and adjusting it in

the inspector. One thing that's cool is

that we can stabilize clips here right

in the edit page. I can just select the

clip, go over to stabilization, and hit

stabilize.

And what that's going to do is take out

all of the little jitters and everything

for the clip. And it works pretty darn

well. Works pretty darn well. The

stabilization here is excellent. And

there are a bunch of different options

here for the stabilization, which you

can play around with. You'll get various

different results, but just know that

that's kind of where that happens. We

can correct a lens. So you can distort

or undistort your lens. Here where it

says rettime and scaling, these are just

kind of the processes for retiming. If

you actually want to do a time remap on

something, you can right click on it and

go up to rettime controls. And you can

grab the edges like this and make it

play back faster

or slower.

You can even kind of stop in the middle

of this clip and click on this little

arrow and that'll bring up a little menu

and you can add a speed point. And what

this will do is let you change part of

the clip's speed

to one value and the other part to

another value. So, we can go from slow

motion into fast motion. This is great

for drone shots and punchy edits and

things like that. That's how that's

done. And when you're done with your

speed changes, you can just hit this

little X button right here, and it'll

give you a little indicator that there's

a speed change on it. But the idea that

you select something and adjust its

properties in the inspector is really,

really, really important. Now, sort of

related to that is there is a whole

section of the edit page called effects.

So, if I switch to effects, that's going

to bring up my effects panel. And this

has I mean, just so much stuff in it.

This is where you get a little bit more

fancy in the edit page. There are all

kinds of tools here, including

transitions, which you just grab one of

these transitions and put it in between

two clips like this. Just drag it in

between on this edit. That will make a

little transition like that. You can

even select this transition and switch

to a different transition here in the

inspector.

Okay.

If you go down to open effects, there

are all kinds of effects here that you

can apply to your shots. So, if you want

your shot to be blurry, you can grab

something like directional blur. Drag

this on here and then you select this

clip. And because this clip has effects

on it, it has a little indicator right

here. And it also has the effects tab

enabled where you can find the effect

that you applied to it and you can

adjust the properties of the effect.

Right? See why this is so important is

because anything that happens in this

clip, you pretty much adjust here in the

inspector. And so we can adjust the

blurriness and all of that. All of the

controls for this effect right here in

the inspector. We can turn the effect on

or off or we can delete it by hitting

this garbage can like that. And that's

how we would apply any kind of effect

you would want to apply to a clip. So

sharpen stylized kind of stuff like a

mirror effect.

do all kinds of cool stuff.

That's cool.

And the free version of Resolve comes

with a lot of effects and the paid

version has a lot more. So, there's

still quite a bit of effects in the free

version, but there are certain more

intense effects that only come with the

paid version. We've been working with

just clips here in the timeline, but in

the effects panel, there are also things

like titles and generators. So, a

generator just generates video. So, I

can grab something like this fourcolor

gradient, and I can drag this down into

the timeline just like I would drag a

clip from the media pool into the

timeline. So, now we have this fourcolor

gradient. Again, I select it and go up

here to the inspector and I can adjust

the colors.

So, I can make a nice background with

that. And there's all kinds of different

generators. There's even some really

fancy ones that use the power of the

fusion page. So, I could do this hexagon

glow. That thing's pretty crazy. One of

my favorites is this honeycomb.

There's all kinds of controls here to

change how this looks. There's also

transitions and all kinds of stuff here.

So, we can drag this in. This will be

kind of some graphics. There we go. And

you can select this and adjust your

text, you know,

intro right?

That's cool.

You can use a custom logo. You can do

all kinds of stuff with this. And each

effect is slightly different because

it's just kind of built for different

purposes, right? So, this one has

different color controls and things to

be able to customize this template. Now,

if you want to make your own text that's

maybe just a little bit less specific

that isn't this kind of specific looking

effect, you can go up to titles and

there are kind of two sections of titles

here. There are just the normal titles

and then there are fusion titles. Fusion

titles are just fancier titles that use

the power of the fusion page. We'll get

into that in a little bit, how Fusion

works and all that, but we have some

basic stuff here that's actually really

great. So, for instance, text. If I just

grab normal text, I can put this over my

fourcolor gradient. And I can select the

title controls here in the video in the

inspector with the text title selected.

You know, my title and I can change the

font and the size and the tracking and

all of that kind of stuff to design this

title to be exactly how I want. And

there are quite a bit of controls here

to make this look how I want for my

project. Let's go and kind of make a

title here. I could just take this text

and drag this down. And we'll call this

uh Tuesday on Earth. That's the name of

the movie. Pick a different font. Let's

just say Poppins Black. Push up that

tracking a little bit. There we go. It's

nice and tasteful. Let's change the

color. Maybe make this kind of a

slightly kind of teal color. Something

like that. Great. There we have our

title. Now, let's say that we want to

animate something. we want to change a

property of a clip or a property of this

title over time. Here's how we can do

that. We have this text which is

actually just generating a video. If I

go over here to the inspector, it says

title and settings. If I switch to

settings, this is going to give us the

same transform controls that we have

with any of these clips. Pretty much the

same transform controls. And so what we

can do is change the position of this

text just by taking the video that the

text generator generates and moving that

video around. There are these little

diamonds right here. These diamonds are

what we call key frame diamonds. I don't

actually know the real name for it, but

I call it key frame diamonds because

what you do is you click on this diamond

and that will set a key frame. Now, if

you don't know what a key frame is, a

key frame is basically a way to tell

your software that you want a property

to be a certain value at a certain time.

So, when we click this key frame

diamond, we're telling Resolve that at

49 seconds and 11 frames, so right here

on this clip, that we want the position

to be at 0 0. if we move to a different

time. So, let's move to kind of the

start of the clip. We can adjust this

position again and you'll see there's

this little tiny greater than indicator,

this little arrow. That means that there

is a key frame on this track and it's

that way. And what that also means is

that if I change this position right

now, that's going to add a new key

frame. You can see that it turned this

key frame red.

And what it's going to do is animate in

between those two key frames

over time. And so we've just made an

animated title. Isn't that cool? Now, is

this really the only indicator that

something is animated? No. If we go up

here to these buttons right here, and we

click on this one, this one that looks

like some diamonds, we click on that,

that's going to open up our key frames

panel for our timeline. And here we have

these familiar little diamonds

and we can see the properties that these

are animating. So we have a diamond on

this track for position X and a diamond

on this track for position Y. And then

we also have diamonds here for transform

which is kind of like the group of those

properties. So I can take this diamond

for the transform and I can move this

back and forth and that's going to

change where that key frame is on my

track. And so I can take this first key

frame and move this up at the start and

the last key frame and move this at the

end. And throughout the entire

length of the clip,

it's going to move from down here to up

here. If I want this to go faster, I can

push these key frames together because

it'll take less time to go from one key

frame to the other, which means this

goes faster. And so that's generally how

you'll animate stuff in Resolve. and and

really that same kind of way of

animating things by setting a key frame

and adjusting the distance between the

two key frames. That's pretty much how

you animate anything in most software.

In fact, as you use Fusion, key frames

are all over the place. But just know

for now that you can animate stuff by

using those key frames and adjusting the

distance between them. Now, when

something moves and comes to a stop on a

video, it actually looks a lot nicer if

it kind of slows down before it stops.

That is called easing. Easing a key

frame. like you easily just stop, right?

You ease into it. And so what we really

want to do would be to ease this key

frame, this last key frame, so that it

slows down before it stops. So it

doesn't just kind of jerk to a stop like

this. It doesn't look good. And so

here's how you ease those key frames.

Right now in this version of Resolve,

there is another key frame panel which I

can click and that will open up here

kind of where the media pool and the

effects go and it will give you another

graph just like is down here. But you

can click on this little button right

here and that will switch to your curves

view. And this will give you a graph of

the values over time. And you can select

this last key frame and click on this

button right here which will let you

flatten the handles on this key frame.

So you can grab this little handle.

Let's just zoom this in a little bit.

You can grab this handle and kind of

adjust the graph. And so if you grab

this handle and kind of push it out like

this so it's flat, you have this nice

easy curve as we go into the key frame.

And so as this comes in, it kind of

slows down before it stops. Isn't that

nice? Comes in fast, slows down before

it stops. And so this is the interface

that you can use to get really detailed

with your key frames. Now, it's possible

that this panel is going to change in

the future. I've recommended that they

actually put all of this down here

because it makes a lot more sense to be

able to move this based on our timeline

rather than moving things back and forth

on this grid where you don't really have

any idea of the actual timing of things.

And so if you're watching this video in

the future and you're like, there is no

key frames panel here or it looks

different or something, just look

around. Some of these buttons up here

might be down here. We'll see. You

should be able to click on this expand

button and that will give you a undocked

key frame editor here that gives you a

really nice interface for working with

your key frames. Again, that button

might be down here in the future. Who

knows? The key frames panels, this one

and this one are brand new to Resolve

when I'm recording this. So, if it's

slightly different on your version, that

might be a thing. But either way, it

should pretty much work the same. You

move your key frames back and forth to

change the timing, and you adjust the

curve to ease the key frames. There are

similar tools to this in the Fusion

page, which we'll go over in a little

while, but that's how you animate things

here on the edit page.

There are so many more things that I

want to tell you about the edit page,

but we have to move on. This should be

plenty to get you started grabbing the

footage and putting it into a timeline

and creating a story. This is the magic

of video editing is that you're in

control of that story. H so good. Next,

let's jump into the cut page, which is

just a little bit of a different angle

on the same kind of idea of creating a

story in a timeline. So, the cut page,

the cut page is kind of like the edit

page, but it's built for a slightly

different application. You can think of

the cut page as sort of like a version

of the edit page, but designed with one

value in mind, speed. Speed of editing.

Everything in this page is designed to

help you edit faster. Now, it has some

pretty familiar elements. We have our

media pool up here, which works pretty

much exactly like the media pool does in

the other pages. The only difference is

that instead of a bin list, you have a

little drop down here, but pretty much

the same idea. We have a viewer.

You can double click on a clip and you

can hover scrub. You can scrub through

it here in the source viewer. You can

switch to source tape and bring up all

of the different clips one after

another. You can also switch to the

timeline viewer.

So, there aren't two viewers in the edit

page. There's only one that kind of

switches out like this. But other than

that, it pretty much works the same. We

do have an inspector. Same idea. But we

also have kind of this slightly

different style of inspector, which if

you click on this button right here,

will bring up a bunch of controls that

are the same as the inspector controls,

but they're kind of just on a different

interface.

The idea being that this would be a

little bit faster.

We also have effects and titles and even

a key frames editor like we do on the

edit page.

There's transitions, that kind of thing.

But really the big difference here in

the cut page versus the edit page is

that we have two timelines.

We have this upper timeline here and we

have the lower timeline down here. Now,

this can be a little bit confusing, but

these are the same timeline at different

zoom levels. So, this upper timeline is

your entire movie from beginning to end.

So, it's zoomed all the way out. The

lower timeline is the zoomedin version

of that same sequence. And so, if I want

to adjust this part where we have a

transition, I can quickly move to that

part using this top timeline. And then I

can adjust the details of the clips here

in the lower timeline. And so the idea

here is that you can quickly move from

one side of the world to the other

without having to zoom in and out a

whole bunch because that does take some

time to zoom in and out and kind of get

the right view for what you're working

on. The other thing you might notice is

these little indicators here where if we

have a clip, let's say, let's just open

a clip like this. We have this little

animation here that's kind of shooting

little arrows down here. And we also

have this green highlight. This is our

edit indicator. And what that means is

that if we use some of these edit

buttons, which are very similar to the

edit buttons you get over here in the

edit page, but if we use one of these

edit buttons, some of these have to do

with a specific edit point. So, for

instance, this insert button, this smart

insert, what it's going to do is look

for the nearest edit point, which is

going to be highlighted in green, and

that's where it's going to insert the

clip. Normally, on the edit page, if I

were to be right over this title, and I

were to insert this like this, that's

going to throw that right in the middle

of that clip, exactly where my playhead

is, just like that. in the cut page

because it takes time to completely line

this up exactly where you want it to be.

It's just going to put this on the

nearest edit point. So, if I grab this

right here and I say smart insert,

that's going to put that right there in

between those two clips. It's not going

to put it exactly where the playhead is.

If I have that playhead less than 50%

through this clip, we're going to

highlight this edit point and that's

where whatever clip I have selected is

going to be inserted.

So, this is the kind of thing that can

get you in trouble, but if you're aware

of it and kind of the thinking behind

why this is built this way, then it can

actually be really helpful and speed you

up. Sort of a similar thing with this

edit point is with our transitions.

There's these three buttons right here,

and this will allow you to quickly

select the type of transition that you

want for this edit point. And so, by

default, it's a cut, but with one click,

I can add a crossfade here. And so I

could just go to the nearest edit point

and go, okay, I want a crossfade here. I

want one here. I want one here. And you

can really easily just add these kind of

things. And you can see how quickly you

can go through and do stuff. And so

there are a lot of cool things about

just editing a normal project in the cut

page. It's a little bit of a different

feel. You have to get used to it, but

for certain applications, it can really

speed you up. Something like putting

together a narrative film is maybe not

something that I would do in the cut

page. The cut page would be really great

for a vlog or a news story where you're

trying to one move really fast and

probably get it out as quickly as you

can. And two, you generally just have a

bunch of clips one after another and you

don't have complicated sound design and

you know all kinds of different layers

and and stuff like that. It's just one

clip after another. And so because

that's kind of such a specific

application, we're not going to spend

lots and lots of time on the cut page.

It's sort of a divisive page. Honestly,

some people really like it and some

people don't see a point in having the

cut page at all. Me, I use this for some

things. It's nice for quickly putting a

whole bunch of clips down into the

timeline and creating kind of a rough

edit, but I'll generally move over to

the edit page to kind of refine my edits

and make sure that my audio tracks are

good and everything like that because

the cut page, while there are audio

tracks, kind of get rid of our extra

tracks here, move my camera here. I can

click on this button right here and

expand those tracks a little bit and I

can see the audio a little bit better.

And I can hold alt and adjust just the

audio like this. And so it's certainly

doable, but because of the way the cut

page is made where you don't really have

a normal selection tool, you only have

the trim tools, it can sort of feel

awkward and you can kind of trim your

audio when you don't really mean to

sometimes. And it's just it's a little

bit awkward sometimes. And so generally,

if you're going to do something quick

where you have your audio and your video

in the same clips and you're just going

to put one right after another, that's

what I would use the cut page for. And

like I said, it it kind of comes down to

personal preference. You might find that

you really like the way the cut page

does things and not having to zoom in or

out. And you might find that cutting

your videos together in the cut page is

really enjoyable. However, especially if

you're coming from a different editor

like Premiere or something like that,

the edit page is going to feel a lot

more familiar. Now, the one thing that's

really, really great about the cut page

is surprisingly it's multicam editing.

The way it handles multicam is actually

really interesting. If you want to

follow along, you can go to the master

bin right here and open cut. And we have

some footage that we're going to cut

together on the cut page. Let's make a

new timeline. I'll just right click and

say create new timeline like this. And

we'll say cut page multicam

like that. And here we have several

different shots of the same production

meeting. And so we have two kind of

medium shot cameras. We have one

overhead camera and we have a wide

camera. So, this is a 4 camera multi-cam

shoot. We also have our audio. This is

just an example with multiple cameras,

but if you have a multi- camera shoot

for, say, a cooking video or a live

event or something, this is all going to

work the same way. When we have all of

these different cameras that happen at

the same time, what we can do is we can

sync them up with each other and then

cut from one camera to the other just to

get a kind of a different angle. And

there are ways to do this in the edit

page. For instance, I can open up this

cut page multicam and I can start

bringing some of these cameras in here

and I can sync these up with each other

just by kind of lining up these audio

waveforms.

And I could cut from one camera to the

other

and make my edit that way just by kind

of stacking these cameras and kind of

turning one layer off and kind of

trimming it and that kind of thing to

cut in between the cameras. But in the

edit page, I could also select all of

these, rightclick, and say new multicam

clip using selected clips. I'll just

uncheck move source clips to original

clips bin and hit create. And so there

are ways to kind of sync these up and

then select the different cameras and

kind of cut in between them on the edit

page, but it is kind of a pain to set

that up. It's a little bit tricky. Let

me know in the comments if you want a

video on setting up multicam in the edit

page. But in the cut page, it kind of

simplifies this and that we can select

all of these clips and we can click this

button right here, which is the sync

button. I can select those all and I can

sync these by audio and then hit

autosync.

And that will sync up all of my clips on

this kind of preview timeline. And then

we can hit save sync.

And what that's going to do is give us a

little blue indicator on each of these

clips to show that it syncs with some

other clip. Once we have that done,

we've kind of tagged all of those clips

to say, "Hey, these sync with each

other, and here's exactly the time that

they should sync with." Once we have

that, we can drag any of these clips.

Let's just drag this wide clip in. We

can drag any of these clips in and just

kind of go through it. Sort of like the

anchor method like we were talking

about. We just have this wide shot and

we can look around for something

interesting happening. We have Dan

reaching for some candy. That's

something interesting right here. And so

what we can do is go up to our sync bin

and this is going to show live the clips

that sync up with this place in our

timeline. So right here when he starts

to reach, we can see all of our

different angles for what we want. I can

hit three and that's going to bring up a

clip and set an in and out to start

right there. I can just drag this down

like this and then it's going to be a

perfect cut

from one shot to another. Let's go back

to our timeline viewer here. So, here's

one shot. There we go. We can cut back,

trim this just like that. And so it's

sort of like a hybrid of a multicam and

kind of the traditional way of stacking

a bunch of clips together.

And so what's great about something like

this is we can just cut to whatever we

think is interesting from this wide

shot. And so Sam's talking right here.

Again, we can just open up the sync bin.

Let's use the shot of Sam talking here.

Great. And we can either drag it down or

we can use our edit buttons like this

place on top. And that's going to put

that exactly where it's supposed to be.

Switch back to our timeline. Here we

have him talking.

Great.

So, this is a nice way to be able to use

multiple cameras without having to set

up a multicam and play through and

switch your cameras in real time. You

can kind of just scrub through and find

the interesting parts. So, there's Sam

talking again. Sync bin. Let's switch to

Sam talking.

Put that in as a place on top. And now

we can cut to Sam as he's talking. Isn't

that great? And so if you're doing a lot

of multicam stuff, especially if it's

something like a live event where you're

mostly on a wide shot and then you just

want to cut to the interesting parts,

this is a really nice way to handle

that. There are a lot more features in

the cut page, things that we just don't

have time to get into. This is kind of

the main stuff. But if you're looking to

move a lot faster and you're kind of

working on a deadline, the cut page

might be something to really look into

and learn a little bit more about,

especially if you're doing these certain

kinds of multicam edits. This can be

really helpful. But a lot of the basics

here are pretty much like the edit page.

We're still putting clips together into

a timeline. We're cutting them. We're

trimming them. We're moving things

around. We're adjusting the order. And

we're building our story here on the

timeline. This timeline, whatever we

make for our video, this is going to be

the bones of our video. It's the main

place where all of the clips live. And

then everything else that we do in

Fusion Color in Fairlite are going to be

based on this timeline right here. So

after you organize your media, you can

switch to the edit page or the cut page

depending on what you feel like doing.

and you place your clips here on the

timeline to create a story. Once you're

happy with the story, then you can move

on and get fancier with the Fusion Color

and Fairlite pages, which we're going to

dive into next. So, let's take a step

back and talk about some kind of general

workflow here. When you're making a

video of some kind, you will record

stuff or get footage from a client or

online or whatever. And the very first

thing that you have to do is manage your

media. So, it's get it organized, make

sure it's renamed if you're going to

rename it, put it in folders, tag it,

get familiar with it, that kind of

thing. From there, it's building a

story, which is the strict definition of

editing. A lot of people when they say

editing, they pretty much mean this

entire workflow. But strictly speaking,

editing is adjusting clips in a

timeline. So, it's actually creating

what your movie is going to be. Once you

have that, then you can move on to get a

little bit fancier and a little bit more

detailed. For most videos, that would

include things like visual effects.

Whether it's doing simple things like

replacing a screen on a TV digitally or

cloning out a car that's driving through

the background of your medieval epic

movie or adding lightsabers and

explosions and portals and things like

that. That's all visual effects. It

would be adding graphics, things like

titles and credits and little pop-up

icons and things like that. And then

generally you'll work on color

correction, color grading, making sure

that your colors look good, working on

your audio, making sure your audio

sounds good, things are loud enough but

not too loud, things sound like they

belong there, things that should make

noise actually make noise. And then

finally, we get into rendering, which is

saving out your video in a format that

other people can watch. It's making a

video file and uploading it to YouTube

or giving it to your client, putting it

on a website, that kind of thing. So

this is the whole workflow from start to

finish on making a video. And it kind of

flows in this general order. And this is

really why the buttons at the bottom of

the Resolve interface, the pages are in

this order because we start with media,

then we do our editing, then we do our

effects and our graphics in Fusion. We

do our color grading and color. We do

our audio mixing in Fairite, and then we

render it out. So, for the rest of this

video, we're going to get fancy. We're

going to do the fancy stuff. Starting

out with Fusion here in a minute. So, I

can do my graphics, effects, color, and

audio right here in Resolve. And all of

these different apps, which are actually

just pages and Resolve, all share the

same timeline.

And it's instantly available to do our

really detailed, fancy stuff in those

pages. You build your story here on the

edit page. and the other pages let you

make it even better. So, let's dive into

Fusion. Go ahead and do this with me. Go

over to your media pool in the edit page

and open the Fusion bin. So, you should

have VFX alien plate, house, exterior

ship plate, etc. Right click anywhere in

there and say timelines, create new

timeline. And we're just going to call

this fusion timeline. And we'll hit

create. You don't have to make a new

timeline to work in Fusion. We're just

doing this because this is going to kind

of be the Fusion demo thing. But take

all of these clips. I'll just shift

select those and just drag those into

the timeline like this. So, we have four

main clips here. We have a little

puppet. We have a house. We have the top

of the spaceship. And we have a wide

shot with kids riding their bikes across

this mountain vista. These are the shots

that we're going to use to kind of learn

a little bit more about Fusion. So, make

sure that you have these shots added to

a new timeline. And we're going to do

one special thing. We're going to take

this VFX alien plate. We're going to put

this up on the second video track and

put this right over our VFX ship plate

like that. And then we'll just drag this

down. So we should have our VFX house

exterior, our alien plate, and our ship

plate stacked and our wideshot like

this. Let's just open up our widesot in

Fusion. The way that we do that is we're

just over it here on the edit page. And

then we go down and just click on the

fusion page. That's going to open up

this clip here in Fusion. And now we're

ready to work with this clip right on

our timeline. Now, if you've never used

Fusion before, you're probably already a

little bit, "Oh gosh, what is this? This

looks completely different than the edit

page. What the heck are these things?"

There's no way I'm ever going to

understand this. And believe me, I get

it. Fusion can be really intimidating

because it's a very different interface

than a lot of other apps. The edit page

at least sort of looks like something

you're familiar with. you know, there's

kind of like layers. There's a timeline.

You know, you've scrubbed through videos

on YouTube. It's sort of familiar, so

you can kind of pick it up. But the

Fusion page, you're like, "What? Why are

there little boxes?" Don't worry, I'm

going to explain everything and move

really slow. And pretty soon, you're

going to say, "Okay, that's pretty

cool." So, let's start with the easy

stuff. Up here, we have our familiar

buttons that open and close panels. And

we have the inspector. Look at that.

Remember the inspector is going to show

properties of whatever we have selected.

More on that in a little bit. Over here

we can open up our media pool which is

exactly how it's been in the other

pages. And also our effects which is

very similar as well. We have a list of

effects that we can drag down and apply

to things. We have a viewer right here.

And we have a viewer over here. And

these for now, let's just say these work

pretty much like the viewers in the edit

page where on the left you can open up a

clip and kind of preview it. And on the

right, this is what the person who

watches your video is going to see. By

default, it works in a similar way on

the Fusion page. There's a viewer over

here where we're going to use to pick up

little pieces and look at them. And on

the right, this is what the person who

watches our movie is actually going to

see. Down below here, we have sort of a

little bit of a different style of a

timeline, but it still works. It has a

playhead, which is this little red line,

and you can drag it back and forth. We

have our playback controls. So, we can

play this, stop it, go backwards. J, K,

and L still work. And you can play this

back and forth. Really, the only big

difference here is that we're looking at

one clip. We're not looking at our

entire timeline. We're just looking at

one clip from our timeline. And so, by

default, we'll have this loop. And so

this will play all the way through and

then loop back to the beginning and play

again. Here we have our current frame

that we're on. And as we scrub this kind

of changes. We also have our beginning

and end frames for our composition. And

below that we have a panel which we call

our toolbar. Now this is a little bit

different than our toolbar in the edit

page where when you click a tool it kind

of changes how your mouse reacts to

things.

This toolbar actually creates tools down

here in the notes. Now, if you don't

know what that means yet, that's okay.

Basically, here's how it works. You grab

an icon and you drag it down here, and

it will make a little box.

Okay, don't worry about that. Below our

toolbar, we have our nodes. This is

where the action happens in Fusion.

Fusion is all about the nodes. What the

heck are nodes? Basically, it's a

flowchart of little boxes that you run

images through to create whatever you

want to make. Now, I know that sounds

really generic and doesn't really

explain it. So, I want to back up for

just a minute. Fusion is a compositing

tool. Now, what the heck is compositing?

Compositing, real strictly speaking, is

basically putting images over other

images. It's combining elements. So, you

can think of this kind of like what you

would typically use Photoshop for,

right? If we're going to make an image

with some mountains and a cow and a

saucer abducting the cow, we would have

different elements here. We would have

possibly a shot that looks like this.

And then we would add this saucer

digitally. Or maybe we just have a shot

of some mountains and we put in the cow

digitally and we put in the saucer and

then we maybe add a little bit of fancy

clouds to the sky. It's putting all of

these pieces together to make a really

cool visual thing. And something like

this where you're combining photos and

you want to make it look real, that's

something that we would call like visual

effects. Whereas, if you're making a

title, you know, with 3D text that comes

in and flashes, that would be more like

a graphic. But visual effects and

graphics are Fusion's bread and butter.

That's what Fusion does. So, if you're

wanting to change an image so that it

looks different and has different

elements in it than it did when you shot

it, you're probably going to be

compositing in some way, just like you

would take a photo and clone out your

weird uncle because you don't want him

in the family picture. You can do that

kind of thing with video and Fusion is

the place to do it in Resolve. If you've

heard of After Effects, Fusion is kind

of like Blackmagic's answer to After

Effects inside of Resolve. It can do

pretty much all the same stuff. So, the

reason we might take a shot like this

into Fusion is if we want to change

something about it. Let's just get rid

of these nodes for a minute because

they're they're scary. Maybe we want to

erase one of these people riding their

bike. Maybe we want to add crazy clouds

to the sky. Maybe we want to add a

flying saucer.

Maybe we want to duplicate some trees

and fill in these trees a little more.

Anything that has to do with kind of

changing the actual pixels of the image,

that's stuff we would use Fusion for. In

our other shots, if we want to make this

image look like it was shot at night, we

could do a lot of that probably in the

color page, but we can do some fancy

things in the fusion page as well, like

brighten up these windows or replace

them with different windows that have

lights in them. We could add a big

statue here. Really, the thing that I

love about Fusion is that there are no

limits to what you can do in a little

bit. One thing that we're going to do in

Fusion is take this image and kind of

cut a hole in it and then put our little

alien guy into the hole of the image so

it looks like he's hanging out in this

seat smiling and happy. That's the kind

of stuff that you can do in Fusion. So,

let's go back to our wide shot here. And

to make all these kind of things happen,

we are going to use nodes. So, what is a

node? A node is a little box in the

Fusion interface that does one job. And

what we do is we link all of these boxes

together to do a bunch of fancy stuff to

our image. So, this is basically what a

node looks like. The node has one job

and it's generally called whatever its

job is. So, this node's job is to blur

things. And there are a couple of

different inputs on each node. This is

where you would attach other nodes. And

the colors of the inputs matter a lot.

Generally, most nodes, you would attach

a node to a yellow input. But there are

also green and blue and other inputs

that we'll talk about in a little bit.

Once the node does its job, for

instance, if you hook up an image to

this yellow input, it's going to take

that image and blur it. And then you can

connect this node to other nodes by

taking this little white square and

connecting that to the next node. After

the image runs through this node, it's

going to change the image. And so this

image that I connect to the next node is

going to be a blurry image because it's

already gone through this node. If this

is already confusing, that's okay. All

you really have to know is that a node

is a box with one job. A lot of the

students that we work with that are

learning Fusion find it's a lot easier

to think about nodes like a flowchart.

And when you're just starting out, it

helps to think of a flowchart for

something fun. Like for instance, a

recipe. A recipe is nice because there

are a series of steps. So if you were

going to write out a recipe for

lemonade, let's say. Number one might be

get lemons. Step two might be squeeze

them. Squeeze the juice. Three would be

add the juice to water. Four would be

add sugar. Five might be mix. And so we

can kind of split what we want to do

into steps. And we can do this like a

flowchart like get lemons, squeeze

juice, add juice to water, add sugar,

mix. And these are going to happen in a

certain order and they're going to flow

from one to the other.

This is pretty much how nodes work in

Fusion. So if we were going to make a

node chart for getting lemonade, it

might look something like this. The

difference is that Fusion you have to

tell Fusion everything. It's kind of

like you need to give it really specific

instructions on exactly what you want it

to do because it can't read your mind.

So for instance, we have a node here

called get lemons. Okay, so I have some

lemons. Squeeze the juice. Okay, so I'm

squeezing it. Then I add the juice to

the water. What water? Where's the

water? This is the first time I've ever

heard about water.

And so what we really need to do is make

another node that says uh get water. So

we get lemons and we get water. We

squeeze the juice for the lemons and we

add the juice to the water. So we need

to actually combine these two things. So

both of those things happen. We get

juice and we get water. Then we need

sugar. What sugar? Well, we need to get

some sugar. We need to add those. Right?

So we're mixing two things together. So

this is more of a node graph that you

would see in Fusion. You get some lemons

and you change those lemons by squeezing

them. You get some water and you combine

it with that squeezed juice. You get

this watery juice. You get some sugar

and you add those together. Then you

stir it. You mix it up. And at the end,

you have lemonade. One of the first

things I ask our students to do when

they're learning fusion is to make a

flowchart for a recipe that they like.

So, here is a flowchart from one of our

students named Ryan that I think is

especially great for how to make ramen

noodles. And we'll take a look at this

and then we're going to come back to it

in a little bit because I want to show

you something really cool about this.

But it's the idea of doing one step at a

time. We get a pot. We get 20 ounces of

water. We add the water to the pot. We

boil the water. We get noodles. We add

the noodles to the boiling water for 5

minutes. We drain the water from the

pot. We get sauce. We add the sauce to

the noodles. We stir fry for 30 seconds.

We get flakes. We add the flakes to the

noodles. We stir it all up and we serve

it. Right? So, it's thinking about

things in steps. That's what's really,

really important here. If you can get

your mind to start thinking in these

little steps, nodes are going to be

easy. Let's jump into Fusion and take a

look at this. By default, we have a

couple of nodes here. And this should

already make a little bit more sense.

That's what's so great about this is

that once it kind of clicks in your

mind, you go, "Oh, okay. I love seeing

that moment with our students. It's

awesome. By default, when you open up a

clip inside of Fusion from the edit

page, you'll have two nodes. You have a

very simple flowchart here. And you can

think of these nodes as kind of the

beginning and the end. Media in has one

job, just like all nodes have one job.

And that is to take this footage, this

clip from the edit page, and bring it

into Fusion. All right. So, that's all

it's doing is just importing the

footage. So, it's kind of bringing that

footage in. And then we have a line that

connects media in to media out. So, it's

flowing from left to right. So, the next

step is media out. Media out. What that

does is that takes an image, whatever

image you plug into this yellow input,

and then it puts it out to the edit

page. So, really what we're doing here

is we're taking an image from the edit

page, we're doing nothing with it, and

then we're putting it back in the edit

page, which is why when we go to the

edit page, nothing's changed. Okay? But

if we were to add another step here,

fancy things right here, then that's

going to change this image and we're

going to be putting a different image

into the edit page. So if I were to grab

maybe this icon right here that looks

like a teardrop and drag this down,

that's going to make a new node. That's

going to make a blur node. All right,

I'll get rid of that for a second

because I can grab this and drag this

down onto this line. And when this line

turns blue, I can let go. And what

that's going to do is run this image

through this blur node. And that's going

to change this image. Now, it just

changes it a little bit because we're

only blurring it a little bit. The

reason I know is because when I select

this blur node and I go to the

inspector, I can see the properties of

that blur node. And this blur size is at

only at one pixel. So, if I push this

blur size up, look, we get a blurry

image. Okay. So, what we're doing is

we're bringing a image into Fusion. Then

we're blurring it 31.5 pixels

and then we're putting it into the media

out which puts this back into the edit

page. Now if we switch over to the edit

page, look what happens. We have a

blurry image. So what's really cool

about this is that we've brought a clip

into Fusion. We've changed it in Fusion

and now it's already in our timeline. We

don't have to render it out. We don't

have to convert it or anything like

that. It's just already living there.

Now, Fusion can do a lot more fancy

things than just blur things, but just

go with this for now. We're building a

really simple flowchart. Grab an image,

blur it, put the image back into the

edit page. And this is essentially how

you build all the effects inside of

Fusion. So, take a second and just kind

of start to think about, okay, if I want

to change an image, I'm going to start

running it through certain nodes. I'm

going to get rid of this blur node. What

kind of node would we use if we wanted

to make this whole image pink? We would

probably use some kind of color

correction or tint node or something

like that. And there actually is a node

called color corrector which is right

here. And we can grab this and just drag

this down. Make sure that line turns

blue. Grab this color corrector and

wiggle it and make sure that those

connections are actually connected. And

then we can select this color corrector

and push this little dot towards pink.

And look at what happens. We have a pink

image. We can switch over to the edit

page. We have a pink image. And if you

can do that, if you can do just that,

you can use Fusion. Even though Fusion

can do all this really, really crazy

complicated stuff, it can be as simple

as that. Now, let's take a look at how

nodes work together. Here's a little

diagram of how we would make a foggy

shot. So, a shot where we're adding fog.

Maybe we have a shot of a house and we

have an image of fog. We're going to put

those together with a node called merge.

That puts one image over another image.

Then maybe we want to do some color

correction to that whole image where

that's already combined. Then maybe we

want to zoom it in a little bit. And

then we put this into the media out

which is going to put it into the edit

page. That's how we would add fog to a

shot. And really you don't even need the

color correction or zoom. If you're just

going to add fog, you could just put fog

over the house shot in Fusion. Call it

good. So, let's get to work here in

Fusion. In the context of the movie,

there's actually supposed to be some

smoke, kind of a smoke trail that goes

across this sky. And so, we're adding a

really simple visual effect of some

smoke. And we're going to do this

together in Fusion. But before we do

that, I want to set up our color

management. This is something that we're

going to talk about a little bit more in

the color page. But for now, I want you

to do this with me. Go to the media pool

and to the Fusion folder. Right click on

our Fusion timeline. We can go to

timelines, timeline settings. This is

going to allow us to change the settings

for our timeline. And let's uncheck use

project settings like this. And this is

where you can change the timeline

resolution and all kinds of stuff here.

But we're going to go over to where it

says color. And here where it says color

science, I'm going to switch this from

Da Vinci YGB to Da Vinci Y RGB color

managed like this. I'm also going to

uncheck automatic color management and

take this color processing mode and

switch this to HDR Da Vinci wide gamut

intermediate. Now, you probably don't

know what any of that means. We'll talk

about that in a little while, but for

now, set your settings for your timeline

to this and then hit okay. And that made

our viewer flash a little bit. And

that's because what it's doing is

putting this timeline into color managed

mode, which for our purposes means that

it's going to do a little bit of color

correction to make our log footage not

look like log footage. If you're like,

"What the heck is log footage?" We'll

talk about it in a little bit. But for

now, what we're going to do is shift

select all of these clips right here.

So, our alien plate, our ship plate, our

house exterior, and our wide shot. And

we're going to rightclick and go down to

input color space and select Blackmagic

Design. Blackmagic Design Pocket 4K film

Gen 4 right here. That's what we want.

Boom. This makes our colors look a

little bit better because we're doing a

little bit of initial color correction

to our footage. And that's just going to

make everything in Fusion work a little

bit nicer. Like I said, we'll talk about

this a little bit more when we get to

the color page. For now, your clip

should look like this. And we're going

to add some smoke to the sky here. The

first thing that we need to do is get

some smoke. And you can do this a lot of

different ways. You could get an image

of a smoke trail. You could render one

in 3D. You can do all different kinds of

things. What we can actually do here in

Fusion is generate something that looks

sort of like smoke using this little

icon right here. I can click this and

drag this in. This is called fast noise.

And to take a look at what this does,

remember I said we're going to talk

about these two viewers here. I'll make

sure to select this button right here.

And that's going to make sure that we

have two viewers. You can kind of switch

between one viewer and two viewers with

this button. There's similar buttons on

the other pages. They're kind of like

this actually. But if we have two

viewers here, I can take this fast noise

node and I can just drag it into my left

viewer and that'll let me see what this

fast noise node is doing. So this fast

noise node is creating this kind of

foggy cloud texture. And if I select

this and go to my inspector, I can push

up the detail. I can push up the scale.

And that's going to make these clouds.

So, we're going to make some kind of

clouds here. We'll just I don't know,

make it about that size. Sure. You don't

have to get it exactly like me. I'll go

ahead and close our media pool, too, so

we have a little room. And we're going

to change the color of this fog. We're

going to go to the color tab of our fast

noise here. And here for color two,

instead of white, I'm going to take the

blue, green, and red down so that it's

black. So, it's basically just black

clouds over transparent. You can see

it's transparent by the checkerboard

here. And so, this is just black clouds

over transparent. And now, we're going

to put these black clouds over this

image. Now, you might think that what

you do is you run this image through

this image because you're applying these

black clouds to it. Really, what's

happening here is we have one image,

which is our original footage, and then

we have this other image, which is our

fast noise, and we're going to combine

them together. To combine two images

together, you use a very specific node

called a merge node. Here's how it

works. This little icon right here, if

we grab this and drag this down, this

will make a merge node. And it has three

inputs: yellow, green, and blue. The

yellow input is the background for our

merge. So, we can take the output of

this media in one. I can actually just

click on this line once to get rid of

it. I can take the output, which is that

little gray square, drag this into merge

one, like this.

into the yellow input. And then I can

take my fast noise and put that into the

green input and take the output of my

merge and put that into my media out.

And I'll make sure to drag this media

out to the right viewer so that I'm

always looking at that media out. And

now we have our black clouds over our

image. So we put two images together,

our black clouds and our original image.

And don't miss this. Either of these

viewers can view any node at any time.

All you have to do is take the node and

drag it into the viewer. You can also

hit one or two on the keyboard with the

node selected to load it into either

viewer. What I like to do is have my

media out on the right viewer and then

just view various nodes on the left

viewer so that I can see what's

happening with little pieces of my

composite. A lot like you would grab a

piece of media here on the source viewer

and you'd have your timeline on the

right viewer. Kind of the same thing. We

look at pieces of it on the left viewer

and our media out on the right viewer.

So now, just as a reminder, if we go

over to the edit page, this clip is

going to have those black clouds over

it.

That's really cool. We can select this

fast noise and adjust the detail

and the scale and everything of those

clouds. We can adjust the se to kind of

move these around. That's going to give

us those dark clouds. But we don't want

those clouds to be everywhere. We only

want it to be kind of in one place. We

really want this to be kind of a streak

across the sky like this. So what we can

do is mask this fast noise and limit

this image so that it only exists right

there inside of this little shape. So we

can do that with a mask node. So there

are quite a few little mask nodes here

in Fusion. And we can grab whichever one

of these that we think is the best.

There are a few. There's a ellipse node

which draws a circle,

a rectangle which draws a rectangle.

This is pretty This is pretty intense

stuff.

We also have a polygon node which lets

you kind of use a pen tool to make a

custom shape. And that's the kind of

shape that we're actually going to use.

So, let's grab a polygon node. That's

this middle one here. Drag this down.

And then we're going to make the shape.

I'm going to just kind of make like a

triangle thing here that's sort of going

off the screen like that. There we go.

It's actually kind of a rectangle, I

guess, but it's really skewed. And so

the idea here is that we're only

highlighting this part of the image and

this is where we want to draw those

clouds. So we can take the output of

this and we can plug this output into

the blue input of this fast noise. And

what's going to happen? Check this out.

Take this, plug this into the blue

input. That's going to limit this fast

noise to only exist inside of that

shape. So now if I double click off of

this, we can see that those clouds are

only inside of that shape. You can think

of a mask this way. If a node has one

job, like this fast noise has a job of

making these black clouds. You can use a

polygon to draw a shape and say whatever

your job is node, I want you to only do

that job right here inside of this

shape. When we connect this to the blue

input, we're limiting it to that shape.

If we had a different shape like a

ellipse and we put that into the blue

input, it would limit it to that

ellipse. All right? So, it's sort of

like we're cropping what that node is

doing.

So, we put that into the vast noise. And

then let's view our media out. And now

it looks like the edges here are just

too sharp. So, something we could do

would be to select our polygon and go

over here to soft edge. We can push that

soft edge up. We could really soften

this. And look, now we have just kind of

a trail of dark clouds here. And it

doesn't look like we cut that out with a

mask. It just looks like a nice little

trail. So that works really, really

well. So if you can do this, this is

like your first visual effect inside of

Fusion. What an exciting thing. And so

now when we play this back, we have the

bikes going across and we have the smoke

trail. The other thing we can do is we

can go to our fast noise and we can push

up the sea rate. Can push that up a

little bit. I'm going to push it up way

too much right now just so we can see

what's going on. But this see rate will

animate those clouds just continuously.

So when we play this back, we can see

how the clouds are kind of like

wobbling, right? We don't want it this

fast. So I can take this down a lot. I

just want it just just ever so slight.

Just so it has a little bit of movement.

Just so it isn't totally static.

Yeah, maybe something like that where

it's just almost imperceptibly moving so

it doesn't look like just a still. There

we go. Now we have this smoke trail from

the crashed UFO going across the screen.

I love that. And anytime we want, we can

change this polygon and kind of change

this shape to change where our smoke

trail goes. Now, the one thing that

you'll run into when you're adjusting a

polygon mask is that it automatically

animates. And so, if we were to look at

this and play this back, see how that

mask is animating? When I go back and

forth, it animates. That's because I

have a key frame on this mask, that

first frame where I drew this mask. And

when I changed it just now, we were

actually at a different place in time.

So, if we're doing this on purpose, it's

great. But one thing that I always do

with masks that I'm not going to animate

is I go over here to the inspector. I

select the polygon mask. Go over here to

the inspector. Right here where it says

right click here for shape animation, I

rightclick and then go down and I say

remove polygon one polyline. like that.

Boop. Like that. What that's going to do

is get rid of the key frames, which are

the little white ticks that were on

here. It's not going to have a red key

frame diamond. It's just going to stay

where it's at. And no matter where I

change this mask, it's always going to

stay like that because there is no

animation. All right, that has got me in

trouble so many times. That's why I'm

telling you about it now. If your mask

is animating, it's because it's

automatically key framed. You got to

right click and get rid of that

animation. So, now we have a little bit

of movement there. We have a nice

looking shot. We have this kind of

streak across the sky. How do we get it

back into the edit page? I'm testing

you. All you do is switch back to the

edit page and boom, there it is. That's

our finished visual effects shot. Isn't

that awesome? We did that all right here

inside of Resolve, inside of Fusion.

Beautiful. Let's go to our first shot,

this house exterior. I'll switch back

over to Fusion. Again, I'm moving this

around by clicking and dragging with my

middle button on my mouse, my scroll

wheel button. And you can kind of move

this around. Same thing here for the

viewers. But now, what we're going to do

is we're going to turn this into a

nighttime shot. So, this is going to

involve a couple things. One is we need

to make it darker. Two is we need to

make it blue. Three is we need to kind

of keep some of the light that's here so

that it doesn't look weird and it

doesn't look too dark. So, we're

darkening everything except for these

lights basically. How do we do this? In

Fusion, we can run an image through an

effect. So, for instance, this color

correction effect. We could grab this

and drag that down like this. And we can

select the color corrector. Maybe we'll

push this a little bit blue. Maybe push

up a little bit of contrast. Maybe take

this gain down. That's just the

brightness of the brightest parts of the

image. Maybe something like that. Now,

we're really darkening that kind of

thing down. That's one way that we could

do it. We could also use a curves node.

And this, if we uncheck alpha, we can

add a little bit of a contrast curve

like that. But the tool that I really

like for this kind of thing inside of

Fusion is our brightness and contrast

node. That's this node right here.

We can take this and drag this in. I

like this because it's a little bit more

simple. I could just take maybe this

gamma down. Push this down like this.

Take the saturation down a little bit.

And now we're just making this a little

bit darker. Like that. Yes. And we're

pretty quickly going to figure out that

the color here is going to be too dark

here and not dark enough up here. So,

what we're going to have to do is do

this in a couple different parts. So, I

could take this brightness and contrast

down. And I'm just going to pick one of

these. I can either pick the sky or I

can pick the ground and the building and

stuff. So, I'll just pick the building

first. Maybe just kind of take that

down. Something like that. Great. The

other thing I want to do is clip black

and clip white. This makes sure that no

craziness happens with our color.

Sometimes you can make things that are

blacker than black or whiter than white

and that kind of messes with things and

gives you weird results sometimes. So

you always want to clip that black and

white unless you're doing something

really specific. I also tend to click

pre-ivide post multiply. This makes sure

that if you're color correcting

something that has transparency, like an

alpha channel, maybe it's a logo or

something like that that has

transparency, that when you adjust the

colors that it only adjusts the colors

on the pixels that aren't transparent.

Sometimes you can color correct

transparent pixels and weird stuff

happens too. So basically you tick all

of these boxes to make sure weird stuff

doesn't happen. Okay, so we have this a

little bit darker. Let's darken the sky

too. So what I could do would just be to

copy and paste this just by hitting C,

double clicking, hitting Ctrl +V. And

let's do another version of this. Let's

take our original footage and we'll run

it through brightness and contrast like

this. Take this brightness and contrast.

Make sure we're looking at that. Just

dragging it up here. And then we'll clip

black and white. Pre-divide, post

multiply. And this time we're going to

take this gain down a lot. We're going

to take the gamma down a lot. We're just

going to make that sky really dark. All

I care about is the sky. Yeah, something

like that. Really, really dark.

Everything else is way too dark, but we

just care about the sky. Also going to

take the saturation down a lot. Maybe

like all the way. Okay. So, we have a

separate color correction for the sky,

and we have a separate color correction

for the bottom part. Now we're going to

combine these images together. So we can

do that with a merge node that always

combines images like this. So we're

going to put this merge node here. And

let's look at our media out. So now we

have this color correction for the

building. And now we're going to take

the output of the color correction for

our sky and put that into the foreground

of this merge. And look what happens. We

only see the foreground. Okay. So here's

the background before the merge. Here's

the foreground before the merge.

And here is the composite after the

merge, but we only wanted it for the

sky. Well, the thing is we didn't tell

Fusion that we only want on the sky. So,

what we got to do is use a mask just

like we did with the black smoke. And

so, I could take something like this

polygon mask. I'll drag this down. And

this time, I'm going to mask the merge

because this merge is doing one job.

What it's doing is it's putting the

foreground over the background. And what

I want to do is tell it to only put that

foreground over the background inside of

this shape that I'm going to draw. So,

actually, let's go ahead and draw this

shape first. And I'm just going to start

kind of up here. I'm going to select

this polygon and start up here and just

kind of draw around where I want the

sky. There we go. Something like that.

Then I can connect this polygon to the

blue input of that merge. And look what

happens. We have the sky color grade

over the building color grade. And

again, just like we did with the black

smoke, I can take this polygon and push

up the soft edge like this. We'll just

push it up a little bit.

Maybe bring this down.

Soften that edge a lot.

And we're just going to kind of move

that around to where we get a good

solid combination of both of those

colors.

Might want to make this even softer.

And now we can select this merge and

turn off on and off this switch. And we

can see the difference, right?

Makes a big big difference. I also want

to take this polygon and maybe move it

up a little bit just so we're not

softening the edges. is we'll take it

way off the canvas here like this. And

now we have essentially two color

corrected images combined together. We

have our sky grade and our building

grade and we're putting those together

in two different layers. Now let's take

this whole thing and turn it blue. I'm

going to take this media out and we're

going to take some color correction.

We're going to run this through our

color corrector and we're going to push

this a little bit blue. All right. Let's

make sure we're looking at our media

out. Oh yeah, that's too blue. We just

want it a little bit blue. Something

like that. Maybe take the saturation

down a little bit.

And we can really start to dial this in

and make this look like it's nighttime.

Okay. Now, a lot of this is stuff that

we could probably do in the color page,

honestly. But I like this exercise

because it gets us used to working with

nodes. And this will also help us with

color here in a little bit. If anytime

you get lost in a node tree, you can

just grab the nodes on the left and just

start dragging each one into this left

viewer and kind of think about it in

steps. The first step we have is our

original footage. Then we're adjusting

it with the brightness and contrast.

Then we're taking our original footage

again and we're adjusting it differently

with our brightness and contrast. So we

have two versions of this color

corrected image. One that's sort of dark

and one that's really dark. Then we're

merging our really dark one over our

sort of dark one, but we're only doing

it inside of this polygon mask. So just

on the sky part. Then we're taking that

whole thing and we're color correcting

it to tint it blue. And that gives us

our composite where we have multiple

images put over one another. Now we

could go even crazier here. What really

sells a day fornight shot is when we

have these bright yellow lights kind of

lighting things up. And so we could copy

this media in again. I'll just copy and

paste. Now we have our original footage

again. And we can put this over our blue

kind of nighttime shot like this. We can

do that by adding a merge node and

putting it into the foreground. And if

we look at our media out, we have our

original footage with nothing over it,

right? But we're only going to merge

this where the bright parts are here. So

we could do something like grab a

ellipse and plug this into the blue

input here.

And I can make this ellipse really small

and move it like this. And then soften

that edge like this. See what we're

doing here?

Soften that edge. And now we have that

yellow that looks like the light is

emitting light. Right. We could copy and

paste this ellipse mask. I'll just drag

this down. Hit Ctrl + C and then Ctrl

+V. It's going to copy and paste that.

And it's going to run that mask through

that mask, which is basically just going

to combine them. So I can add another

mask over here. Create. I'll move these

down. Grab this one. Copy paste. Crl +

Crl + V. Move this over here for this

one. Maybe make this one a little bit

bigger. So we have a little bit more

light over here. Something like that.

And now we have that light showing up

here and it looks more like a night

shot. Isn't that cool? This is the kind

of stuff that you can do in Fusion

really easily. Maybe we want to add some

fog to this. Remember, we kind of know

how to do that already. We can take this

second icon, which again makes fog. It's

a fast noise. push up the detail. Maybe

maybe push down the scale a little bit.

And let's merge this over everything. By

the way, there is a quick trick to merge

something over something else. So you

don't have to grab this merge node and

then plug it into the foreground. What

you can do is just take the output, this

little gray square, and drop it on the

white square here like this. Boop. And

that will automatically put it in the

foreground of a merge right after this

node. So now we have our fast noise over

everything just like we did before. And

again, we can grab a polygon

and let's just kind of make a little

mask around here. I'm just clicking and

dragging to make it soft. Pushing this

soft edge.

Selecting these

and just

messing with this shape that I can get a

little bit of fog.

Isn't that cool?

Now, this fog is a little bit strong.

So, I want to take this merge and I'm

going to turn down the opacity of the

foreground. I'm going to make it more

transparent. With this merge, I can take

this blend and push the blend down like

this. And so, I can kind of fade this on

or off. So, if I want to split the

difference, I can take this blend to

0.5.

And I'll actually just push this in just

a little bit, maybe like 20% or so. And

now we have this fog in our shot.

And it really adds a lot. Makes it feel

like it's a nighttime kind of foggy

shot. Look at that big difference.

Here's our original footage

and here's after. That's a big big

difference. Isn't that cool? The other

thing we can do with this fog is we can

grab this fast noise and look at this.

We can move the center of the fast noise

around and that just kind of moves this

texture. And we can start this here at

the beginning of our shot. And just like

we can animate stuff in the edit page,

we can animate stuff here in the fusion

page. So I could take this fog. I'll

take the center and just start it there.

You can really start it anywhere. It's

just going to be easier to animate from

one side to the other rather than

starting here and then animating it off

screen. We're going to start right here.

And I'm going to animate the center.

I'll just click this key frame diamond.

And then at the end, we'll move this

over a little bit. I don't know, maybe

halfway or so. So now as

we play this back, we see the fog kind

of rolling across a little bit. Oh,

that's so cool. We could also adjust the

seed rate and push that up just a little

bit so that this kind of changes over

time. Maybe a little bit stronger than

that. There we go. So now we have the

fog kind of rolling in across this. I'm

going to turn this up so you can see it

a little better. We have that fog going

from left to right.

I always want to keep things subtle, but

it's a little bit easier to see on the

recording here. So, let's just push this

up

just so it's nice and subtle. Little bit

of fog. Ah, it's so cool. Movie magic in

Fusion. And remember, once we have this

all built out, we can switch to the edit

page. And look, here's our shot in the

edit page. We don't have to render it.

We don't have to do anything crazy. It's

just already in the timeline. Isn't that

awesome? Now, here's kind of one of the

dirty little secrets about Fusion. You

kind of take one look at this node tree

and you're like, gosh, that's a lot of

little boxes and everything, but it

wasn't that hard when we were building

it because we're just building it one

step at a time. Okay? And really, we're

just starting with this media in and

we're color correcting it, which is one

step. We're starting with this media in

again and we're color correcting it.

We're putting it together. We're masking

where it goes together. We're color

correcting it blue. We're taking the

original footage again and we're just

putting it over everything, but only

within these masks. So only where it's

white right here. Then we're taking some

fast noise and we're putting it over our

shot, but only inside of a mask that's

right down here. And so it's pretty

simple, straightforward stuff. It's just

lined out with every single step that we

did. So that's the bad thing and the

good thing about nodes. The bad thing is

that it looks kind of intimidating. But

the good thing is that you can always go

back to any of these steps. All these

steps are modular. And so you can go

back and say, actually, I don't know if

I like the correction here. I can go to

my brightness and contrast here and

adjust that correction on the top part

of our screen, and I can see what it

looks like even after it flows through

all of this stuff. Fusion is the very

most powerful page in Resolve. You can

do absolutely anything with it. Fusion

is what we dive super deep into in our

courses. We have a course called Intro

to Fusion that breaks down all of this

in even more detail and helps you truly

understand how Fusion works and then

puts you through the paces to transform

you from somebody who doesn't really

know anything about Fusion to somebody

who can confidently use Fusion for

visual effects and for graphics and for

creating awesome things in Resolve. Now,

let's go back to our edit page and we

have these two shots and we want to

combine them. Now, to combine a couple

of shots in Fusion, you can do this a

couple different ways. One thing I could

do would be to just be over this bottom

one and switch to Fusion. And then I

could go to my media pool and grab this

other shot and drag this in like this.

And that's going to make another media

in. And so we have this footage and this

footage. And then I can combine them

just like I combined the same footage

over itself. The other way that we can

do it that's sometimes a little bit more

convenient, I'll just rightclick on this

and reset our fusion composition is I

can stack these on the timeline, select

both of them, rightclick and go to new

fusion clip. What that will do is

combine these together and then I can

switch into Fusion and I'll have both of

those clips synced up and lined up with

each other here in the Fusion page. So

here's one of them and here's the other.

It really doesn't matter which one you

use. It's kind of dependent on what you

feel like doing. One advantage that you

have with working with just one piece of

footage though is that when you switch

into Fusion, it's going to open it up in

its native resolution. Okay, so this is

1920 x 800. If you make a Fusion clip,

it's going to make a version of this

that's actually the timeline resolution,

which may or may not be an issue. In

this case, it's not really that much of

an issue other than we have a little bit

of empty space at the top and bottom

because this footage is widescreen and

our timeline settings are HD. But I like

to do it this way. Grab this original

footage. And then I'll just grab this

other footage from the media pool and

drag it in. And I can rename these nodes

by selecting the node and hitting F2. So

we'll call this alien MI for media in.

This one's going to be called ship_mi

for media in. So we have our alien, we

have our ship. And now it's our job to

combine these together so it looks like

this alien is inside of the ship. Now

this might actually be easier if we put

this alien in the background and the

ship in the foreground. So let's go

ahead and disconnect our ship and we're

going to start with our alien. We're

going to take him and put him into the

media out. This is going to be our

original footage. In this case, they're

both the same resolution, so it doesn't

really matter. And then we're going to

take our ship and we're going to put

this over our alien like that. So, we're

just going to be able to see the ship

and the aliens underneath it. So, if we

move this over, we can see the aliens

underneath it. But the first thing we

have to do is cut a hole in our clip of

the ship. In visual effects land, this

would be called a plate. Think of if

you're stacking two plates in the

kitchen. Your foreground plate is on top

of your background plate. All right? So,

this foreground plate, this ship, we're

going to cut a hole right here in the

cockpit and see if we can put our little

alien shot in there. To do that, we can

grab a polygon mask. And if we connect

it to the ship right now, everything's

going to disappear and we're not going

to be able to see what we're working on.

So, it's actually a little better idea

to not connect this yet. We're just

going to put this kind of nearby where

we want to connect it. select this

polygon and I'm just going to start

drawing

a mask right around here where I want

this to be cut out. Now, drawing masks

is kind of its own art. Let's just look

at this polygon here for a minute. In

fact, I'll grab all these and kind of

reset it. If you click once, that's

going to add a point to your polygon.

So, if I click once several times,

that's going to build a shape. Once I

connect that shape to itself and close

that path, that's going to make a

selection. That's this white part right

here. I can also add points to this by

just clicking and dragging. It's going

to add points. But there's also these

little handles on the line. And if I

click and drag that, that's going to

make these points softer. Like it's

going to make them not as pointy. And so

I can adjust my path using these little

handles. And I can make soft curves or I

can make them pointy depending on where

those handles are. When I'm drawing, if

I click once, that makes a sharp point.

If I click and drag, that drags out

those handles so that I can make a soft

shape like that. Generally, when you're

drawing with a mask, you want to have

the least amount of points possible. And

so if you're going to draw a curve, you

don't want to draw a ton of little

points like that to make your shape,

what's better is just to use one point

here in the middle and drag those

handles out like this.

Then you can kind of adjust it. But you

can get the same shape with three points

instead of 30. And it takes some

practice if you've never drawn these

kinds of paths before. You haven't used

like a pen tool, you haven't drawn

vector shapes, things like that. It does

take some getting used to, but with a

little practice, you'll get the hang of

it. All right, so let's go back to our

ship, and we're going to use our polygon

mask. And I'm going to click once here,

and then click and drag here for this

curve. Click once here. Click once here

because there's a little bit of curve.

There we go. I'm clicking and dragging.

Click once. Click and drag. Click once

to close the path. I can hold control

and grab this little handle. That's

really hard to see. Let me adjust my

viewer here. I'm just turning the gain

down in our viewer. It's just the colors

of the viewer. It doesn't actually

change the image. It's just like your

preview of it. Those three dots. You can

click on gain and gamma. And you can

kind of adjust the brightness of your

viewer just so you can do things like

this a little bit easier. I can hold

control and grab this handle and move

this down into line cuz I want a good

selection of this right here. I think

that looks pretty good. I can reset my

gain and gamma by clicking these little

dots here. Or I can also just go up to

the three dots and turn off gain and

gamma. And now I have this selection

that looks like this. And if I apply

this to the ship like this, look what

happens. That does cut out the ship, but

it only leaves the center. And what I

really want is the center to be gone and

everything else to stay there. So what I

can do is select my polygon mask and

right here where it says invert, I'm

going to invert that selection. Boop.

Like that. And now look, we have a

little hole cut out in our footage. And

we can see this checkerboard behind it.

That means that it's transparent. So I

can put this over our alien footage. And

look, there he is. He's peeking out. So

we have this kind of partially done. We

have this cut out. And we have our alien

in there, but he's not really the right

size. And so what we need to do is

resize this footage to fit right about

here. We're going to do that with a

transform node. So a transform node is

like taking an image and adjusting its

size, its rotation, and its scale. It's

a lot like the transform controls right

here in the edit page, but it all lives

in one node. And so we can take this

alien, this original footage right here,

and we're going to run it through a

transform node. Transform nodes are

right here. Can grab this and drag this

in like this. Make sure this is

connected. And then with the transform

node selected, I have my transform tools

up here. And I can push the size down.

And look, it kind of gives us a little

outline. And I can put this guy right

where I want him to be. Look at that.

And so we're combining those images

together and we're making one new image.

That's movie magic. Isn't that cool?

Again, this node tree looks complicated,

but it's our original footage of our

alien. We're transforming him, making

him smaller like this. We're taking our

ship footage, we're cutting out the

middle, and we're just pasting it on top

of this image. Those combine together.

And they make our shot here. And now we

can call this good or we can change it

around a little bit. One thing is maybe

this polygon mask needs a little bit of

softness. So I'll push up the softness

just a little bit. Something like that.

Adjust this a little bit. Make sure that

we right click and remove our polygon

one polyline or else we'll have moving

masks.

Just going to kind of adjust this and

make sure this looks good.

Always a good idea.

Maybe we want to color correct right

here and kind of put a little shadow so

it looks like he's really inside of that

craft. We could run this transformed

alien, this right here through something

like a brightness and contrast.

And let's view this here on the left

viewer. And we're going to take the gain

down a little bit. Maybe maybe take the

gamma down touch. Maybe take the

saturation down. Just going to make it a

little bit darker. But we're only going

to do it right here. Okay. So, we could

take a polygon mask or even maybe a

rectangle mask and we can apply that to

our color correction. And as we change

this mask, look, it's only going to do

that color correction. That one node's

job, this brightness and contrast job is

only going to happen inside of this

rectangle. And so, I can take this

rectangle and let's we can either move

it on this viewer or the other viewer,

doesn't matter. We'll rotate this a

little bit. I'll just move this right

there. And then maybe soften that edge

just so we have a little bit of our

color correction here. Just like that.

Adds a little bit of interactive

lighting there. So here's before and

here's after. And that's only happening

on this image because we're running it

through this brightness and contrast

before we put it under the ship. If we

did a color correction on this side,

then what we're doing is we're taking

this image and we're color correcting

it. Right? So, if I did some kind of

color correction here, we'll just I

don't know, make this

really yellow, right? And then we put

that inside of a ellipse. That's going

to color correct everything at least

inside of that ellipse. But if we were

to put this here before we put it under

the ship, I can hold shift and drag this

out like this and just drop it back in

like that. Then that's going to color

correct this image before it goes under

the ship. And so we're only color

correcting this image. So the order of

the nodes is really important. Let's get

rid of that. And now we have our nice

composite. We can switch back over to

the edit page. H. So beautiful. There's

our little guy. We can get rid of this

alien plate. And now we have three

finished VFX shots right here in our

timeline. And we can do this on any

timeline. If we switch back to our edit

timeline, I can quickly go into Fusion.

And maybe I'll do something like add

fog.

push up the detail like this. And we'll

just mask it to be

like right here.

Soften that. Soften that edge a lot.

Now we have a lot more fog than we did.

Really makes a big difference.

There are infinitely more things to go

over in Fusion. Man, I could spend so

much time on this. In fact, we have

several courses on Fusion. We have

hundreds of students that have learned

how to use Fusion, this part of Resolve

that is the most powerful, inspiring,

amazing part of Resolve. You can also

use Fusion to make motion graphics and

animations and all kinds of cool stuff

like that. In fact, you know what? I

don't care if this is a million hour

video. We're going to uh I need to show

you some of this stuff, too. Let's

switch back to our wide shot here. And

imagine imagine if we made this into

kind of like a sort of like predator

vision kind of shot where it's all kind

of washed with some color and maybe

there's like a little targeting system

or something that tracks one of these

bikes and maybe there's like heat vision

or something like that. You can do all

this kind of stuff in Fusion. And so

let's let's just walk through and play

around and have a little bit of fun

here.

So, after all of these nodes that we're

using, let's kind of do some color

correction here. And let's just maybe

turn it blue, maybe push up the contrast

a little bit, take the saturation down,

so we have this kind of like bluish gray

wash on everything. Let's make a little

graphic that kind of follows her. And

you can do this in a bunch of different

ways. One way that'd be pretty easy

would be to grab a background. So, this

just generates a background color of any

color you want. Maybe we'll make this

kind of a greenish cyan kind of thing.

Let's put this over our color

correction. And let's take a mask and

we're just going to put a rectangle mask

on this like this.

And then we can kind of put a box around

our girl here. And then let's uncheck

solid and push up border width for our

mask. And now we have a little border,

like a little picture frame here. Push

up the corner radius. Now we have this

little mask that's masking this colored

background and creating this little

picture frame. I'll take that border

width down a little bit. Something like

that. And I think I'll just work on a

little bit of this shot. Let's just go

to the edit page and just trim this real

quick just because we're playing around

with it. Let's make it easy on

ourselves. Just do a little bit of this.

That's going to adjust the trim points

here. And I can zoom in this little bar

so that we're only looking at the part

in between the yellow markers in and out

of this comp. And one thing we could do

would be to key frame the rectangle mask

here. And so I could end it right here

and adjust the center. And I could kind

of just key frame this

so that it sort of follows her sort of

in the middle here. I'm going to add

another key frame. Just move this over.

Sort of in the middle of that. move that

over like this. So now we have this kind

of following her as she rides. And that

works fine. The other way that we could

do this would be to track the motion. So

depending on what you're doing, this

could be more or less work. I'm going to

double click here in the empty space.

And you can hit shift and spacebar and

that's going to bring up a menu that

will let you select all of the 37ome

nodes inside of Fusion. There are a ton.

Look at that. It's crazy. But I'm going

to type tracker. That's going to bring

up this tracker node. I'll select that

and hit add. And you can take your

original footage here. I can just copy

and paste this. Crl + C. Double click

off. Ctrl +V. I'll just move this up

here and put this into the tracker.

Let's just look at this here on the

right. And this tracker, what that does

is it will lock on to a feature in your

image and it will follow it. And so we

can grab this little target thing here.

Let's just go to the beginning of our

clip here. Let's take this Intelllet

track and put that right on top of our

leading lady here. And let's track that

forward using this button right here.

What that's going to do is stick that

tracker to her as she rides by. It's

going to track that motion. It's

basically doing some key frames for us

here. And once we have that, then we can

do a bunch of different things with this

tracker. One thing we could do would be

to maybe take some text or something and

plug that into the green foreground

input of this tracker and say, you know,

text like this, select this tracker, go

over to operation, and here where it

says operation none, switch it to match

move. And what that's going to do is put

some text here. And I can select the

text, put this right where it's supposed

to be, and watch what happens here. This

text will follow her as she rides her

bike. Isn't that awesome? And so if you

need to stick something to something,

you can use a tracker to do it. So we're

kind of using this tracker like a merge

node, but it will animate the

foreground. Now, we don't have to

include the background here. We can

select this tracker, go to operation,

mesh move, and then merge. Instead of

foreground over background, let's just

say foreground only. That's going to

give us just the text in its own kind of

isolated layer, but it has the same

movement. So we could put this into the

foreground as a separate thing. Then we

have the tracker as a separate thing and

then the merge as a separate thing,

right? So it kind of gives us the same

idea, but there's the text. Now, what's

cool about this cool about nodes here is

that we don't have any effects applied

to anything specifically. We're just

running it through this effect, so it's

always modular. So I could take this

text out and I could take my rectangle

background, plug that into the green

input right there, and I'll adjust this

rectangle here. Let's actually reset our

center. I'm just double clicking on that

center here. I'm going to put this

around her. Look at this. Now it follows

her because it's running through that

tracker. Okay, so we're tracking the

bike and we're moving along with it.

Now, here's what's really cool. This is

where things just get so awesome. Let's

take all of this and move it to the

right here a little bit. Just make a

little bit of room. We could take this

same kind of tracker, which is really

just giving us an image that looks like

this, and we could make sort of a

different version of it, and we can use

it as a mask. So, we could do something

like I could just copy and paste this.

Ctrl + C, double click off, Ctrl +V. All

right. So, this is going to be our

frame, our cyan frame. But this one,

let's just drag this up here. Instead of

a cyan frame, let's go to this rectangle

mask and let's check solid and take down

our border width. And that's going to

give us just a solid mask. And we don't

even need the background anymore. We can

get rid of the background here and plug

this into the foreground input of the

tracker. Not the blue input, the

foreground input. And what this will do

is give us a animated mask that we can

use by plugging into the blue input of

something. So, I could take this output

of this tracker, plug this into the blue

input of the color correction, and look

what happens. It's only color correcting

inside of that mask. Isn't that magical?

We could grab this color corrector, go

over to settings, and here we have some

mask settings, and we can select apply

mask inverted like this. And look at

that. Now, it's going to be everywhere

except for in that mask.

And we can connect this to multiple

things. Check this out. I could grab a

blur and make this really blurry

everywhere except for inside of that

mask. So, I could take the same thing. I

could take the output and plug that into

the blue input of the blur. And again,

go to settings, apply mask inverted, and

everything's blurry except for inside of

this.

We can do so much cool stuff.

I could get rid of this color corrector

thing like this. And now it's just sharp

inside of here and blurry everywhere

else. So many cool things you can do.

But don't miss this. You can take the

output of a node and run it into

multiple different nodes. You can use

one node or one mask to mask like 50

different things if you want to. That's

what's so powerful about nodes. I love

it. This is a cool effect. Let's add a

little bit of graphics to it. We can

just grab a text node and just drag this

in here. And we'll call this uh sector

45B

North America.

Sure. And we'll take the output of this

and put this over the output like that.

Just like this. Let's take this text,

switch this maybe to aerial. Let's take

the size down. There we go. We can kind

of put this down here like this. And we

can start making our graphics. We could

animate this right on property like

this. So it looks like it's typed in. So

we could have this come in like right

here. I could animate this right on

property just by clicking that key frame

diamond and have this come up.

Just animate this like this. And now we

have this really cool effect

like that. Now we have like this

predator vision kind of thing. Isn't

that cool? I want to show you something

that's just in the paid version of

Resolve called Magic Mask. Magic Mask is

ridiculous. It is a way that you can

trace out things and animate that trace

without a whole lot of work. So, we can

take this original footage. I'm just

dragging this in here. And I can double

click off and hit shift spacebar and

type magic. Again, this is only in the

paid version of Resolve. And I'll just

hit enter. That's going to make a magic

mask node. I'll drag this over here. And

what I could do is either copy and paste

this media in like I've been doing. Or I

can even take the output of this and

just plug this in like this. All right.

So, it's the same thing as copying and

pasting this media and putting it in

here like that. I could even take this

one over here. Doesn't matter. But I'll

take this one like this. And let's drag

the magic mask in here. And what this

will let us do is you can draw a line

on whatever you want to select. So, I'm

just going to draw a line over her. And

what that's going to do is automatically

try and trace her out. I can hold alt

and get rid of the extra parts. So,

we'll just do kind of a soft mask around

her like this. And then we'll track this

back and forth. So, I'll click this

track back and forth. And it's going to

do a pretty good job of at least kind of

making a blob around her. There isn't a

lot of resolution here. There's a lot of

reasons why this would have a lot of

trouble, but this is actually going to

work out perfectly for what we're trying

to do. I can take the output of this

magic mask and put it on top of this

merge two like this. Let's look at our

media out. And now we have the original

footage layered on top, but only where

that magic mask is tracing it out. So we

could take this magic mask, go to matt,

push up this blur a little bit, and

that's going to make this a little bit

more of kind of a blurry little blob on

top of her. Okay. We could take that and

color correct it like this. Color

corrector like this. And we could maybe

make that bright orange like this. And

now look, we have this kind of

sort of looks like a heat signature kind

of thing where she's going. Isn't that

cool? So cool. Now, this isn't actually

the greatest use for magic mask. This is

just going to kind of work great in this

circumstance. Let's uh let's grab one of

our color clips. I'll just grab clip

106. Maybe put this into Fusion. Make

sure the clip 106 is tagged with our

input color space. Blackmagic Design

6K film Gen 4. Okay. We could run this

through magic mask and we'll just draw

on top of him like this. What that's

going to do is cut him out pretty darn

well. We can track this back and forth.

And now we'll completely cut him out

from the background.

And we can adjust this mat by blurring

it a little bit, maybe eroding it. But

then we can take this and maybe we'll

take this same media and color correct

it. I don't know, we'll color it blue or

something. put this into our media out

and take our magic mask and put it over

everything. And now it'll do a really

good job of separating that subject from

the background. Not only that, but you

can put stuff behind him, you know? So,

if you want to put some text behind him,

let's say,

we can have this behind him because

we're separating those layers. And you

can do this yourself with masks, but it

takes a lot more time and effort to

trace him out. And for certain things,

Magic Mask works really, really well. It

doesn't work perfectly with everything,

but it can really help you save some

time when you're doing things like this.

That said, if you do want to get into

Fusion, I have a whole bunch of videos

for free here on YouTube on how to learn

Fusion, as well as a bunch of courses

that are designed to take you from

somebody who has no idea how Fusion

works to being really comfortable and

using Fusion amazingly. But hopefully

you see the potential of what is

possible in the fusion page of Resolve.

Now let's get into the next fancy page

color. To follow along with this part,

if you have the media, there should be a

folder called color. And what we're

going to do is select and shift select

all of these color clips. Right click on

the first one and say create new

timeline using selected clips. Just like

that. We'll call this color timeline and

hit create.

That's going to put all of these clips

here in order. And this is pretty much

to simulate if you had an edit where you

had all kinds of different clips.

They're all put together in a timeline,

but now you want to make your colors

look good. We'll walk through all the

need to know stuff on the color page in

this timeline. Again, to bring it into

the color page, all you have to do is

click into color and it will bring that

timeline here into the color page. Very

exciting. So, a general overview. The

color page of Resolve is obviously made

for doing color correction. And this is

another one of those interfaces that I

mean there's so much stuff here. It

looks like the helm of a spaceship. And

you could pretty easily just look at it

and be overwhelmed by all the little

buttons and panels and everything. And

this isn't even all of them when you

switch through. I mean, look at this.

It's crazy. Not only can I switch out

these panels, but each panel has several

different panels. It's crazy. The great

news is that you really only need to

know a couple of these little panels.

And we're going to walk through all of

this. And by the end of this section,

you're going to be really familiar with

the color page. If you've ever used a

different editing app before, you might

be used to, you know, having a bunch of

shots in your timeline and then you have

some kind of effect like a color

corrector or color correction effect and

you drag it onto the shots and change

your color. Sort of like you would do

with an effect in the edit page. You

have all these shots. You drag it to the

shot. You click on the shot and then you

have some kind of properties panel or

something where you adjust your color

for the shot. And that would totally

make sense. And there are some color

effects in Resolve that sort of work

that way. But the idea of the color page

in Resolve actually kind of simplifies

the color correction process. You have

multiple shots in your timeline. And

whatever shot you're looking at in the

viewer, whatever shot your playhead is

over, that's the shot that you're

working on, and you're automatically in

color mode. You don't have to drag any

effects to the shot or anything like

that. You're just going to adjust the

colors of each clip as you look at them.

And so even though this looks like a

really complicated interface, the basics

of it are actually really simple. We

have a viewer up here where we can see

the shot that we're working on. We click

on whatever shot we want. Each one of

these thumbnails represents a single

shot in our timeline. And so if we want

to adjust the shot of our actor here, we

just click on his face. And we can play

this back and even loop it like this. So

we have that shot. And as long as we're

looking at it here in the viewer, we can

mess with our color controls. And we're

going to change the colors of that shot

and that shot only. If we want to adjust

another shot, we can switch to that

shot. And now we're adjusting that shot

only. You can really think of this in a

couple main sections. We have our viewer

up here. We have a way to select our

shots. And then we have all of the color

controls. So, this actually is kind of

like the inspector sort of for whatever

shot we want to do our color on. Each of

these little panels down here is called

a color palette. And we use the color

palettes to adjust the color on whatever

shot we're working on. We also have a

graph up here. And this is also a node

graph. Although the nodes in the color

page are slightly more simple. They're

the same in that they're little boxes

and they connect to each other and one

box comes after another box and the

nodes flow in order. So if I were to in

this first node make this black and

white and then in the second node make

it pink. In the third node we're

starting with a pinkish purple image. If

I were to do this the other way and make

this really pink and then turn it black

and white, we have a black and white

image because the order matters. The big

difference with these nodes compared to

the fusion nodes is that while fusion

nodes really only have one job and if

you want to do something different you

have to use a different kind of node,

each color node is really like a group

of corrections. So this first node I can

do a bunch of stuff down here in my

color palettes and it all lives in this

one node. So I could make a curve like

this. I could turn it green. I can mess

with all kinds of crazy stuff here. And

this all lives in this one node. If I

rightclick and say add node, add serial,

that's going to make another node in a

series after this node. And so I'm

starting with the image that this node

gave me. So if I desaturate it, and then

maybe I add a little bit more contrast,

then that correction is going to happen

after this first correction. I can click

on the number of the node to turn it off

and on. And so I can quickly see what my

image looks like with or without certain

corrections. That's a really nice way to

work. And so all of the corrections and

all of the work that I'm doing down here

lives in a node of some kind. And we can

have as many nodes as we want. And it's

really up to us to figure out how we

want to group those corrections. For

instance, some people like to adjust the

brightness in the first node. And I can

hit Alt S to add another node here. And

maybe in this second one, they like to

adjust the contrast.

Alt S. Maybe in this third one they want

to adjust the temperature or the tint or

whatever and make something warmer or

darker. And even though you could do all

of this in one node, it's nice to split

it up into three different parts so that

you can see what it looks like without

the exposure or without the contrast or

without the warmness. You can rightclick

and select node label to rename this. So

this could be warm, this could be

contrast, and this could be exposure.

And you can kind of split this up into

different jobs. There's no right or

wrong way to do this. It's really up to

you to stay organized and to do things

how you want. You can always reset a

clip's color by right-clicking in the

empty space and saying reset all grades

and nodes. That's going to reset

everything. And when a clip doesn't have

any color adjustments on it, its number

is gray. As soon as we touch something,

its number turns rainbow. That's how we

know that we've changed some kind of

color in this clip. So, it's really easy

to see the clips that you haven't

changed and the clips that you have. So,

the color page, just like the other

pages, uses the edit timeline. So, this

is the same timeline from our edit page.

It's our current timeline that we have

up. And any color that we do in the

color page happens by looking at the

image that we want to adjust, which

automatically selects it down here on

our thumbnail timeline. We can do any

kind of adjustments we want down here

with the color palettes. All of those

adjustments live in the nodes. And then

whatever our image looks like here in

the color page, it will also look that

way in the edit page. Again, without any

kind of roundt tripping or rendering or

converting things or anything like that.

So the idea is that we can quickly go

through our entire edit and we can make

all the colors look exactly how we want,

make everything look really good, and

that all lives on our timeline, and we

can export our edit with our color

applied. Now, we're going to get into

the major color palettes down here. The

stuff that you really need to know here

in just a minute. But first, we got to

build a little bit of foundation here.

We got to talk about it. Color

management. Let's take a look at this

shot here. I'll just bring this up full

screen. And there's a couple things to

notice about this shot. This was shot on

a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K. If

you don't know what the heck that camera

is or you don't care, it's no big deal.

But the way this camera shoots, and much

like a lot of professional cameras these

days, this shoots in a log format. Now,

what the heck does that mean? Log is

basically a way for a camera to capture

more colors and more ranges of

brightness by kind of desaturating and

decontrasting the image. There's a lot

of technical mumbo jumbo here that I'll

cover in another video at some point,

but basically what happens is to get the

very most data packed into the video

signal, what the camera does is it makes

the blacks not as black, it makes the

whites not as white, and it makes the

colors not as colorful. And we end up

with this kind of gray nasty looking

image. And so this image has a lot of

potential. It could look really good,

but right now it doesn't look very good.

It's sort of like if you're going

camping and you buy the world's greatest

tent. It comes in a box and the tent is

all rolled up in a bag and it's all kind

of crushed in. It could be the best tent

in the world, but right now it kind of

looks like a box with a bunch of fabric

stuffed in it. So, in order to actually

go camping and have a good time, you

have to take that tent out of the box

and spread it out and based on the

instructions, set up the tent so that it

looks right. That's kind of the same

thing that we need to do with this

image. All the information that the

camera saw is kind of crushed down into

this gray nasty looking image. And what

we need to do is follow the right

instructions from the camera to unpack

this image and make it look nice again.

That process is called color management.

It's pretty much for any kind of image

format that isn't Rex 709. What does Rex

709 mean? REX 709 is the color space,

the kind of image colors that look good

on your screen. So, for instance, this

video that you're watching right here is

in Rex 709. My skin is saturated.

There's good contrast and everything

like that, but without any color

management, it looks a little bit more

like this, which is kind of desaturated.

The colors aren't as bright. And so,

there needs to be this step. Takes our

image from gray nasty looking to

actually looking good. And so, this

image right now is Rex 709. and it

doesn't need any color management. It

doesn't need to be changed into a format

that looks good on your screen. It

already looks good. Whereas this footage

doesn't look good out of the box. We

need to convert it. Now, what some

people will do and what has been done

for a long time is somebody will look at

this shot and say, you know, I know what

this shot needs. It needs a little bit

more contrast and it needs a little bit

of saturation. If I add that to this

image, then that's going to look really

good. And so, they might use some color

tools. I'm just going to kind of do this

quickly because we're going to get into

these tools here in just a second. And

they'll up some contrast and they'll up

some saturation. And so they've taken

this image that looks gray and nasty and

made it look good on the screen. But

there's one important part that we

missed here. And that is we didn't

follow the instructions. So this is like

taking our tent that's all packed up and

then just kind of spreading it out and

trying to put it together just

willy-nilly. It might work and it might

be a good tent, but a couple things are

going to happen. Is one, it's probably

not going to be exactly right. And two,

it's going to take a lot of time. And

also, I'm sort of just guessing how

bright things should be. I'm just kind

of looking on my screen and saying, "Oh,

yeah. Okay, this white should be about

that white, and this black should be

about that black, and these colors

should be about that bright." And if I'm

being honest, I don't really have any

idea of if they are supposed to be that

bright, if this wall is supposed to be

bright white or not. I can guess, but

I'm not really going to know. And so,

basically, I'm taking a bunch of time to

kind of guess how the color should look.

And so, what we do instead of manually

color correcting this is we use color

management. Color management takes the

instructions from the camera that

recorded this image and made it look

gray and it kind of reverses those

instructions to sort of unpack that tent

and set it up perfectly so that it looks

exactly how it was intended to look. So,

how the heck does that work? Well, we

kind of touched on this earlier in the

Fusion portion of this video, but what

we got to do is go to our media pool and

let's right click on our color timeline

and go to timelines, timeline settings.

I'm going to uncheck use project

settings and go over to color. For this

color science, the default color

science, which is basically just how

Resolve thinks about colors is called Da

Vinci YGB. What that basically means is

that it's not going to mess with your

colors in any way. All of it's going to

be manual. Anything that you do is going

to be manual adjusting sliders and

buttons and things like that. So,

instead of that, we're going to switch

this from Da Vinci YGB to Da Vinci YGB

color managed. What that's going to do

is do its best to look up the

instructions that cameras use to make

those log images and it's going to apply

kind of reverse math to those

instructions to make the images look

good. Now, if you're not that into this,

you can absolutely just say Da Vinci RGB

color managed and then hit okay. What's

going to actually be slightly better is

if you go to Da Vinci RGB color manage,

uncheck automatic color management.

Right here where it says color

processing mode, switch this to HDR, Da

Vinci widegamut intermediate. This is

going to basically do the same thing as

automatic color management. It's just

going to be a little higher quality. If

you have questions about that, if you

want me to dive into it, let me know.

But we can switch it to this. All you

have to do is make your settings look

like this and then hit okay. Now,

nothing is going to happen by default.

All we've done is just told Resolve,

"Hey, we're going to use some color

management." And it said, "Okay, these

images still look gray and washed out

because we haven't told Resolve how we

shot these images. We haven't told it

what camera we used. So, what we can do

is go up to our media pool and we can

shift select all of our images that are

from the same camera. And I can right

click on any of them and go down to

input color space. This is where we tell

it what camera we used. So there are a

whole list of different cameras. If

you're shooting on an iPhone like a 15

or 16 Pro, something like that, you can

select Apple log. There's Blackmagic

Design cameras. There's Canon cameras,

Nikon, Leica, Samsung, Sony, all kinds

of different cameras here. This was shot

on a Blackmagic Design camera. We shot

this on Blackmagic Design Pocket 6K and

the color science was film Gen 4. Now,

how the heck do I know that? Well, we

wrote it down when we shot it. Odds are,

if you have a professional camera of

some kind, there is a way to look up the

color science. You can Google, "How do I

look up the color science for whatever

your camera is?" It's usually in your

menus under picture styles or something

like that. And chances are, if you have

a professional camera, you probably

bought it for that reason anyway. So,

however you shot this footage, that's

what you tag this as. If you don't know

how you shot the footage, you should go

and try and figure it out because the

only way to do this the right way is to

actually know. All right, Blackmagic

Design Pocket 6K Gen Film Gen 4. And

look what happens when I click this.

Boom.

Now we have footage that looks correct.

So this has good contrast, good

saturation. The images don't look

perfect. We can still make them look

better. There's still some style we want

to add, but it doesn't look halfway

black and white like it did. This

actually looks as scientifically close

as it can possibly be to how the colors

looked in real life when we shot this

footage. And you'll notice that I didn't

tweak any sliders. I didn't move

anything up and down. I didn't change

anything around. All I did was enable

color management and then go to my

footage and tell Resolve what color

science I used. Blackmagic Design Pocket

6K film Gen 4. And that gives us a great

starting point for our color correction.

It really kind of gives us the best of

both worlds. We have all this

information that we packed in when we

recorded the footage and we're unpacking

it scientifically so that we can have

the most information and work in the

highest quality possible when it comes

to adjusting our colors. Color

management is a just a massively huge

topic, but it's honestly not that much

more complicated than this. In Resolve

20, they've made color management a lot

easier. You just enable it in your

timeline settings under color. Make sure

you have these settings. Any footage

that you have that's log, you rightclick

input color space and select the color

space that you used. If you don't know

the color space or it's footage that

wasn't shot in log, then you can just

set your input color space to same as

timeline or project Rexto9 and it's not

really going to do any tweaks to your

colors. It's just going to try and leave

them alone. But do yourself a favor and

don't skip this step. Color management

is essential for getting good color

grades. It gives you a higher quality

image at the end and it saves you a

bunch of time because I don't have to go

through and make all of these look

normal before I even start thinking

about how to make them look really

great. I can just start with the normal

image and be on my way. So, now that we

have our color management set up and

everything is ready for us, let's jump

into what the heck we do in the color

page. Let's just pick a shot. Maybe this

shot number eight here. And let's just

have a look at how we would adjust an

image just so we have a little bit more

room. I'm going to close my clips and my

timeline panels just so we have some

room here. Maybe even close my effects.

Sure. I'll even zoom in and crop this a

little bit. And let's talk about how we

would actually adjust an image. Again,

because we're looking at this image in

our viewer, that's the image that we're

going to be adjusting with the color

palette, all of the windows that live

down here. And there are a lot of

different color palettes. Look at this.

We can really just go through a whole

bunch of these things. And the good news

is that you don't need to know all of

them. Really, you only need to know a

couple to do most of the work that you

need to do here in color. And the one

we're going to start with is right here,

this lower left panel called the

primaries. And I'm actually going to

make sure that I'm on this little button

right here. Up here, this should say

primaries color wheels. That's the one.

By the way, if you don't have three

panels here, like one,

two, three, and it's two panels or even

one, and maybe these little icons are

squished together, don't worry about it.

you have the same panels. Almost all of

these panels are in the free version as

well. Again, if something is just in the

paid version, I'm going to tell you, but

sometimes what it will do is squish one

or two of these panels together for

different resolutions on your screen.

So, if you have your scaling or your

resolution set to something different

than mine, it might not quite look like

mine, but you should have the same

panel. So, this primary color wheels

palette, this, I'd say, is where you do

most of the work when you're adjusting

your colors. And even though it looks

like there are a lot of controls,

there's really only three kind of main

controls down here. One is the color

wheel. The other is this little slider

here. The other kind of control are

these little number boxes. And if you've

never used anything like this before, I

want you to do me a favor and just

follow along with me. Open up this image

and grab the center of this color wheel

and just push it around. Just grab it

and drag it. And you can see as you drag

your mouse around, it's going to move

that little dot in the middle of the

wheel away from the center. And the

farther it gets away from that center,

the more color it's going to push into

your image. And the direction that it

pushes is going to be the hue, the color

that is pushed into the image. And so if

I want to make this look very blue, I

take this and move this down to the

lower right a lot. And that makes this

very blue. And so that's like a third of

what you need to know as far as actual

controls down here in the primaries. The

second one, this little slider, this is

called the master wheel. And if you grab

the master wheel and you move your mouse

to the right or to the left, that makes

things brighter to the right or darker

to the left. You can also mouse over

this and scroll with your scroll wheel.

Adjust that. And so just with these two

controls, we can adjust the tint of the

image as well as the brightness. And

this color wheel master wheel combo,

this is just duplicated three more

times. And so it's the same basic kind

of control, but why is this split up

into four parts? Well, what's happening

here is if you move the offset, that's

going to adjust the colors of the entire

image. Same thing for the offset master

wheel. The brightness is going to go up

or down for the entire image. But lift,

gamma, and gain splits the image up into

kind of the darker part, the midtones,

and the brighter parts. And so, which

one you grab depends on what you want to

adjust in the image. And so, if I want

the brighter parts to be more yellow, I

select the gain because that's the

brighter parts. And I push this a little

bit more towards yellow. Now, this is

going to make the entire image a little

bit more yellow, but it's going to be

strongest in the bright parts. So, we

can see how it's really yellow right

here and in here in the brighter parts.

And the parts that are black are maybe

just a little yellow, but not super

yellow like these brights. If I were to

do the same thing, take the lift, which

is the darkest parts, and push those

towards yellow. We'll see we're starting

to really tint the darker parts of the

image, but the brighter parts right here

stay white. That's because this is

strongest in the darker parts of the

image. And then, as you might imagine,

the gamma, these are the midtones, and

this is going to be strongest in the

medium brightness kind of parts of the

image. So, depending on what you're

going for here, you might choose to

adjust the offset, lift, gamma, or gain

of your image and adjust the color or

the brightness of that part. So, for

instance, if I want to make the bright

parts brighter, I can go to the gain and

take this master wheel and drag it to

the right, and that's going to make the

brighter parts brighter. The darker

parts are pretty much going to stay kind

of where they are. If I want to make the

darker parts darker, I can go to lift

and take that master wheel and take it

to the left. And that's going to make

the darker parts darker. And I can go

really, really crazy on this. And that's

going to darken the darker parts. But

look, the bright parts stay the same. So

if I want to do something like give this

image more contrast, one thing I can do

is take the bright parts and push them

to the right to brighten that up and the

dark parts and push it to the left.

That's going to give this more contrast.

And again, all of these adjustments,

anything that I do down here lives in

this node. So I could turn this node off

and on to see what's happening. So I'm

just upping that contrast by pushing the

gain up and the lift down in their

master wheels. If I want to reset

anything that's happening in the

primaries, I can click this little reset

button. I can also rightclick on this

node and say reset node grade. That will

reset anything that is done in this

node. If I want to boost up the

brightness of kind of medium tones right

here, I can take the gamma and push that

up. That's going to leave the bright

parts about where they are and the dark

parts about where they are and push up

the midtones. So, what we've gone over

here pretty much covers all of this

panel. These little numbers, these

little controls here, these are called

the primary controls. And the primary

controls are other kind of little

specific things about the image. So, for

instance, there is a contrast control.

So, this is another way that I can put

some contrast into the image. I can take

this contrast and drag it to the right.

And that again is going to make the

darker parts dark and the brighter parts

brighter. The pivot adjusts kind of the

split between what it thinks is dark

versus light. So if I push this pivot to

the left, it's going to think more

things are bright. If I push it to the

right, it's going to think more things

are dark. And so I can use this contrast

and pivot to dial in the contrast of my

image to be exactly how I want. And that

might be a little bit more easy than

pushing up the gain and the pushing down

the lift. We also have temperature and

tint, which is an easy way to adjust

something like white balance. Or if I

want this whole thing to feel a little

bit more cool, I can take the

temperature and just grab that and push

that to the left. And now kind of a blue

tone. And I can balance it between green

and magenta like this. I can warm it up

by bringing the temperature to the

right. And I can double click on any of

these to reset them. Down below I have

some more controls. Shadows are the

darker midtones of the image. Highlights

are the brighter midtones of the image.

So it's almost like you have a master

wheel kind of between the lift and gamma

and the gamma and gain. That's what goes

right here. We have the saturation of

the whole image. So that's how strong

the colors are. If I take this and drag

it all the way to the right, we have

very punchy colors. Hue is what actual

color things are. Pretty rarely use that

unless you're trying to actually change

the color of something. Color boost is

like saturation except for it targets

the things that are less saturated. And

so if you want to saturate the things

that are less saturated, you could push

up the color boost a little bit. And

there are a few other buttons and

sliders here that you can learn at some

point, but these are the main ones.

lift gamma gain offset saturation

temp, tint, contrast, color boost. Those

are the big ones. And the cool thing is

that just understanding this part of

this panel, you can do so much. You can

really make your colors look good for

your movie. I mean, this is seriously,

this is all you need. This combined with

color management, there's no reason why

you can't correct your shots and make

them look really nice. So, here's what I

want you to do right now. Find this clip

and I want you to play around with the

primaries. make this shot look as good

as you can just using the primaries

palette. So, one thing that I might do

is just push a little bit of contrast in

here. I might maybe push up the offset a

little bit. Maybe I'll take the

temperature a little bit more blue. I

can push and pull this contrast, adjust

the pivot a little bit. Maybe push up

some saturation. Maybe we'll push some

color boost instead. Something like

that. Maybe take that offset up just a

little bit. And so now we have a really

nice looking image here. Has some

contrast. We have some blue coming in

from the windows. We have some warm on

her face. overall looks pretty nice.

This really is the Swiss Army knife of

the color page. If you learn just the

primary color wheels, I'm telling you,

it's so powerful cuz check this out. We

can go to any shot. I'm just hitting

down on the keyboard. Sure. Let's grab

this shot here where he's zipping up the

backpack. We can adjust this. Maybe

we'll take the gain down a little bit.

Push the gamma up. Put a little contrast

in there. Maybe a little saturation just

to make this look really nice. Maybe

it's a little bit too warm. We could

take the temperature down. Make that

temperature a little bit more blue.

Yeah, something like that. And we can

have a nice looking shot. Here's before,

which was just way too bright. After

looks good. Here's this shot right here,

which kind of feels gray and a little

bit dark and maybe a little bit green.

Maybe we'll take this offset up a little

bit. Push some saturation in there.

Maybe take this away from green a little

bit. Just push this tint a little bit.

Maybe take the temperature a little bit

blue just to balance out those whites a

little bit. Maybe add a little contrast.

Play with the pivot a little bit. And

here is before and here's after. See

that difference? Isn't that amazing what

we can do just with this one panel?

Isn't that nuts? This is the kind of

thing that is available to you for free

in Resolve. This is why Resolve is the

king of the color correction apps. It's

the best app in the world for color

correction because all of that power is

right here. Isn't that nuts? You already

know enough to color grade like a whole

movie. Now, is there more that you can

do? Are there more techniques? Are there

more tools? Absolutely. But this primary

color wheel panel, this is the bee's

knees. So, take some time, go through

these shots and see what you can do.

Here's our outside shot again. Maybe we

want to just take the exposure down a

little bit. Maybe add a little contrast.

Maybe brighten this up. I can push the

gain a little bit more orange. We can

have kind of a more of a sunset look

here. Just push this pivot down. Maybe

take this saturation down a touch. And

we can make a really cool look compared

to what we had just using those

primaries. Ah, so cool. Now, I'm going

to rightclick and reset all grades and

nodes right here. Let's talk about the

second most useful palette here on the

color page. And that is the custom

curves. The custom curves right here.

This, if you've used an image editing

app that has curves like this, is going

to feel very familiar. If you haven't,

pretty much how this works is this is a

graph. A graph of the brightnesses of an

image. So, the bottom part here, this is

the input. That's the input

brightnesses. This axis is the output.

down here is black and up here is white

and in the middle is like gray. And so

if I were to find a point from left to

right that's maybe in the middle right

here, this would be the input gray. So

that would be right there on that line.

If I want to make the gray parts

brighter, I would push this line up

because right now it's gray equals gray.

And if I want the gray to be light gray,

I could say gray equals light gray like

that. So I'll just take this and push

this up. And what that will do is push

up the midtones basically. That's maybe

a little strong. So I can push this up

like this. The black parts are down

here. And so I can push the black parts

up. That's going to essentially do the

same thing as my master wheel and my

lift. This upper part is like the master

wheel of my gain. So if I take my gain

up and to the left, that's going to make

more things bright. I can also take this

down and take the brightness of the

bright parts down like that. I can take

this black point and move it to the

right and keep it on the floor. And that

just makes more things black. And so you

have a lot of control over your image

with this curve. So if I want to make

the brighter parts of the image a little

brighter and the darker parts of the

image a little darker, well, I can make

what we call an S-curve. Kind of looks

like an S. And that's going to add a

nice bit of contrast to my image. This

S-curve is pretty much how you get kind

of a filmic contrast. There's always

some kind of version of this curve built

in. And usually you can add a few

different things. You could push up

these blacks a little bit, crush the

lower mid tones down, maybe take

highlights down a little bit, but push

up the upper mid tones. And you have

this nice kind of highlight roll off

there. Maybe even want to crush the

shadows in a little bit more. And so now

we have this nice feeling that's nice

and rich just from this curve. I tell

you what, getting used to using this

curve, oh man, you can make such nice

images. And especially when you combine

this curve with these primary color

wheels, chef's kiss. There are a lot of

controls over here that honestly I don't

use that often, so I'm going to skip

them. This is the important part right

here. You can also use this button right

here to make big old curves. So if you

want to get really detailed with your

curve here, you could totally do that.

But there are also some other kinds of

curves here. Selecting this second

little icon, this will bring us our hue

versus hue curves. Just like this curve

is the input brightnesses versus the

output brightnesses. These other curves

are kind of just other graphs. So this

one is the input hue. So that's the

actual color of the light versus the

output hue. Okay. So if I want to take

stuff that is kind of this reddish part,

I can select the red and maybe I can add

a couple other little control points

here. And if I push the red around, I

can kind of move this back and forth and

just change the reds. So this is great

if you need to change specific color.

You can just kind of target that

specific color here on the chart. And

boom, we have a purple house. It's very

selective. Similarly, we have hue versus

saturation. So you pick the hue that you

want to adjust the saturation for. Maybe

this green. By the way, you can click on

the image when you have these curves up

and it's going to add a control point

for you. So I could click and drag and

just color over where I want to select.

That's going to select all the kind of

yellowish green. And I can take the

saturation down. And so now we have all

of these trees just black and white.

See, here's the difference. It's not

affecting the house too much. It's

mostly this kind of green stuff. We also

have hue versus luminance. So that's

just the brightness of certain hues. So

if I want to darken this backpack, I can

select this backpack and maybe take that

down a little bit in our hue versus

luminance. That can be kind of nice

sometimes. We also have luminance versus

saturation. And so depending on how

bright something is, you can adjust how

saturated it is. And so a little trick

some people use is just to desaturate

anything that's getting close to white

and desaturate anything that's close to

black. And so really we only have

saturation in the midtones. And oftent

times you can add a pretty harsh curve

on this and it doesn't make that big of

a difference unless you have a really

harsh push on it. So if I push this

offset really blue, you can see that

with this curve on it, we don't add too

much blue to the shadows or the

highlights. These are still black and

these are still white. So if I were to

take this out, everything would be blue.

We also have saturation versus

saturation. So if something is more

saturated, we can remap it to be less

saturated and so on. This kind of helps

us kind of keep our saturation problems

under control. We have something that's

just way too bright. Then we have

saturation versus luminance. So if

something's more saturated or less

saturated, you can turn its brightness

up or down. So yeah, if I could only

teach you one panel, it would be the

primaries. If I could only teach you two

panels, it would be the curves and the

primary. And now before we go any

further, I want to stop and talk about

the scopes. This is pretty darn

important when it comes to color

grading. And I don't want you to watch

through the color part of this video and

not know how to read scopes cuz that

would be sad. Down in the lower right,

we have a panel called color scopes. And

you can select the kind of scopes with

this little drop down here. There are a

few different kind of scopes. Parade

waveform, vector scope, histogram, and

CIE chromaticity. We're going to start

with the waveform. And I'm going to put

this into big mode. That'll bring up our

big scopes here. And I'll switch this to

a single scope. And I'll go to this

little menu here. And I'm going to turn

off colorize and switch this to Y mode

just because it's easier for me to

explain some things. This is called a

waveform scope. And the idea of this

scope is that it is a graph of all of

the colors in your image. So every pixel

in your image has a little dot on this

graph somewhere. And on this graph on

the x-axis here, we have the horizontal

position of each pixel. All right? So

that means that a pixel that's over here

on the left is going to be somewhere

here on the left of our scope. A pixel

that's going to be in the middle of our

image is going to be somewhere here in

the middle of our scope. But we really

only care about the horizontal position

here. Why is that? Because the up and

down is the graph of the brightness. So

it's the horizontal position and the

brightness. So, what that means is that

if we had something really bright, let's

actually let's go to a different shot

that's a little bit easier to figure out

here. If we had something that's a

little bit brighter on the left side of

our image, it's going to be on the left

side of our graph and it's going to be

towards the top. So, this bit right

here, this is going to be this kind of

bluish part. It's a little bit towards

the top. It's at about 10% into the

image and it's brighter. So, that is

right here. If we look at our scope, we

also have something on the right side of

the image that's a little bit brighter

than this blue. And it's especially

bright, right? There's like something

really bright right here. Something like

that. And so, let's look at this. Yeah,

there we go. We have this lamp right

here. So, it's really bright right

there. We also have the second lamp,

which is this spike right here. This

lamp is right here. We have something

bright right here. So, that's going to

be this part of his arm. And so we can

kind of tell what the brightness of

things are from this waveform scope.

This graph is from 1023 to 0. What the

heck does that mean? There's technical

reasons. Basically, 1023 is pure white

and 0 is pure black. So if you have an

image with things that should look

bright and things that should look pure

black, you're going to have a signal

that stretches from 0 to 1023. A lot of

things in the real world aren't actually

pure white and pure black. And so oftent

times you'll have stuff that's almost a

zero and maybe somewhere up in here. And

that's in fact what we have right here.

Right here. That's kind of where our

image lives. Let's look at another image

here. Here's one that's a little

brighter. You'll see we have this big

kind of purple blanket here that's

somewhat darker. That's right here in

our signal. We have brighter parts. This

little edge right here. This kind of

bright part. This bright part. That's

right here. We have his shirt, which is

going to be hereish. And once you go

through a few different shots, you can

start to be able to read the scope a

little better. Here in this shot, we

have this really bright part here.

That's this. This waveform scope is

great for knowing the brightnesses of

things. But what's even more helpful is

the parade. So, we can switch from

waveform to parade. And what that is is

basically three waveform scopes next to

each other. One for the red channel, one

for the green channel, and one for the

blue channel. All images are made up of

a combination of red, green, and blue

light. And the percentage of light in

each channel determines what color

things are going to be. If you have

equal parts red, green, and blue light,

that makes a neutral color like gray or

white or black. So, what's cool about

this is if we can find something that's

supposed to be relatively neutral, let's

say this pavement right here, we can

find that on the scope, which is going

to be right here, and we can balance

that using our color wheels to kind of

fix the white balance. So, if this came

in like this, we would know that this is

a little bit tinted blue because if this

is assuming this is supposed to be gray,

which you honestly don't know, but it's

probably going to be pretty close to

gray, this signal should be equal across

these channels. And so, if I can adjust

this offset and make that signal equal,

then the image is going to look

balanced. Like here, let's try another

shot. If we wanted to white balance to

this wall, we can pick the wall here in

our signals and we can balance that out.

Right now, the red channel is a little

bit higher than the green channel, and

the blue channel is a little bit higher

than the green channel. So, what this

means is this is going to look just a

little bit pink. Now, it's hard to tell

just by looking at that image, which is

honestly why we have the scopes, but I

can take this offset and I can push this

around until, and I just need to do it a

little bit until these are right about

equal. And now this is going to be a

neutral color. That's going to be a

gray. We could also do this for the

window, which we can tell just by

looking at it is a little bit blue, but

we can confirm it with this signal right

here. Red, green, blue. If you have blue

higher than red and green, it's going to

have more blue light, which means it's

going to be tinted blue. Actually, a

little bit more cyan because the green

is high, too. So, again, we can take

this offset and we can move this around

like this. And if we move this around

and just balance those signals, then we

can balance those out. And now this is

like a neutral white. Okay, it's like a

neutral bright gray. Everything else is

thrown off though because this is more

of a blue light that's coming into the

window and the white neutral light is

more on our subject. And so when we

balance this to white, everything else

kind of turns yellow. So I'll just reset

that. We can look at this again. We have

this is blue. This is maybe just

slightly magenta. So depending on if we

think either of these should be white,

then we can balance to that if we want

to. I can also use my temperature and

tint to kind of balance it a little bit.

Sure, something like that might be a

little bit more accurate to an actual

balance here. Kind of depends on how you

want it to look. By the way, it's not

totally essential that you get

everything perfectly neutally balanced.

What's important is that the image looks

how you want it to look. Okay, that's

kind of the bottom line when it comes to

color correction. If anybody tells you

that you need to balance everything and

that everything should have pure bright

whites, completely neutral whites,

that's not necessarily true. Sometimes

the style that you're going for or the

feeling that you might want to go for in

your movie or something that your client

might want would be pure neutral whites.

Then in that case, yes, you should make

everything pure neutral white. But

that's not like a universal thing that

you need to do for every video. In fact,

pretty much look at any movie and you'll

see there's usually some kind of tint to

it. It's not always purely beautifully

white balanced. There's a little bit of

style there. The other major scope that

we can talk about here is the vector

scope. You can think of this like a big

color wheel. The closer this signal is

to the middle, the less saturated it is.

The farther it goes out, the more

saturated it is. And the direction is

the hue. So if we had stuff kind of

coming over here towards this B, that's

going to be really saturated blue.

Something up here towards this red is

going to be really saturated red. So you

can really tell what colors are in your

image just by looking at this vector

scope. So just looking at this, we can

see we have a little bit of orange and a

little bit of red. And guess what? Skin

is basically light orange. And then we

have this red. We also have just a

little bit of this kind of cyan blue,

which is obviously right here.

Everything else is somewhat neutral. If

we push the saturation up a lot, we can

see that this image kind of grows and

now we have really saturated stuff.

Generally, you have this invisible line

in between these targets. This right

here is like pure magenta, pure blue,

pure cyan, pure green, pure yellow, and

pure red. And usually, you don't want

your signal even touching these things

because it's going to be way too bright

and it's not going to look natural. You

usually want your signal like something

like that. That's what tends to look

natural. You don't usually want it too

small like this or it's going to look

desaturated and black and white unless

you're going for it. But if you're

looking for just like a normal amount of

saturation, you know, maybe somewhere in

there. But the reason that we have

scopes is so that we have some data on

what our colors actually look like. The

reason we need that is because it's very

easy for your eyes to get used to an

image. You can look at an image and

after a while, even if it's kind of

crazy, like I could take this offset and

just push this pretty orangish red and

it won't take long just staring at this

image for your eyes to sort of get used

to it. And they say it usually takes

like 10 seconds for your eyes to just

kind of accept the colors and it sort of

just doesn't seem so bad anymore. Like

right now, I'm looking at this image and

I go, you know, it's a little warm. It's

not crazy. It's not unreasonable, but

this is where we were. It's a huge huge

difference this warmth that we're

putting into that image. But after a

while, your eyes don't really notice it.

But when we look at the scope, the scope

always notices it. It says this thing is

warm. If we look at the parade, this red

channel is huge compared to the green

and blue channels. It is a warm image

objectively. And so the scopes are a way

for you to tell the tint of an image,

the brightness of an image without your

eyes playing tricks on you because they

do really quickly. In fact, it's usually

advised like once you switch to a shot

to figure out what you think of that

shot in the first like few seconds

because if you look at it longer than

that, your eyes start to play tricks on

you. Okay? So, you'll see a lot of

people that are into colorists and

people that are good to color kind of

switching in between shots like this.

I'm just hitting up and down on the

keyboard. And when you do that, it lets

your eyes kind of reset. All right. So,

I go from this one to this one and I go,

I feel like this needs a little bit of

saturation. I can push that up. I feel

like it needs a little bit of contrast.

Right? And so we could push that in

there and then maybe look at something

else for a while. Maybe literally just

look away from your screen and then look

back and then yeah, I mean that looks

looks pretty good. Maybe it's a little

bit cool. Could maybe add a little bit

of warmth there. Something like that.

Maybe take away that green just a touch.

And so color is part of the way making

decisions on your image, but also part

of the way resetting your eyes and kind

of keeping moving because that's the way

that you can really make good decisions

with your colors. If you're just spend

all your time looking at one image and

you never kind of reset your eyes, your

eyes will play tricks on you and you'll

end up with all kinds of weird stuff.

So, for a lot of what I do in the color

page, I'm pretty much just using these

three palettes, the primary color

wheels, the curves, and looking at the

scopes, usually on the parade, because I

can go through a whole movie and do a

lot of work and make things look really

good just using these tools. And yeah,

those are kind of the basic controls for

actually adjusting an image as a whole.

Okay, so we have a good idea of how to

adjust a single image here in the color

page. But color grading is more than

just adjusting a single shot. It's all

about adjusting all of the shots so that

they work together in the context of the

movie. So, one of the first things that

you're probably thinking is, "Okay, if I

make an adjustment to one shot and I

want to do the same thing on another

shot that's very similar, do I have to

do all that work again?" And of course,

no. That would be terrible. You can

easily copy a color grade from one shot

to another one just by selecting the

shot that you want to copy it to and

then mousing over the shot you want to

copy it from and then clicking down on

your scroll wheel. That's this button

right here. clicking down on this scroll

wheel and that will instantly copy the

color grades from the shot that you

clicked on to the shot that was

selected. And you can do this with

multiple different shots, too. If I hold

shift and select all of these, middle

button, mouse click here. If I have a

couple grades selected, it's going to

ask me, do you want to replace the

existing active grade? I'll say, and now

it will put that blue over everything.

All right, so that's how you quickly

just copy one grade to another. Anytime

you want to reset a node, you can

rightclick here in the empty space and

say reset all grades and nodes. You can

also shift select everything and then do

the same thing. Just right click in the

empty space, reset all grades and nodes,

and that will reset it for everything

that's been selected. So, this is great

because then you don't have to duplicate

work that you need to do on every single

shot. So, we can just color grade this

shot. That looks good. And then anything

that's similar, just middle button,

mouse click right there. This one's

probably pretty similar. This one's

probably pretty similar. We can at least

start with that. Here's similar. And we

can go through and very quickly work

through our entire timeline. When I have

my mouse over these thumbnails, I can

also hit control A on the keyboard to

select everything. And then I can copy a

grade from a shot like this. Just

clicking down on that scroll wheel. And

I can copy that. And I can also

rightclick reset all grades to reset

everything. Now, there are a lot of

different ways to copy grades and parts

of grades and and group shots and use

parts of the grades and all of that

stuff and we just don't have time. This

is a multiple hour tutorial and we still

just don't have time to get into that.

But there are ways to do that. If you

want more info on that, let me know in

the comments and we'll make a follow-up

video. But right now, the need to know

stuff is that middle button mouse click

copies those grades. And anytime that

I'm adjusting the colors on a shot,

we'll just make this really pink just so

we can see that happens to just this

clip. And that adjustment I made lives

in this first node of the clip. Now

these nodes live in what we call the

clip grade. See there are different kind

of layers of our color grades. You can

think of these sort of like different

groupings. So each clip can be adjusted

by itself. So I can make this one green.

I can make this one orange. I can make

this one blue. And these can all look

different, right? That's because they

all have their own node tree that lives

in each clip. But there is also a node

tree for the timeline. If I go up here

to these little dots and I click on this

right dot that you can just barely see

right here, that's going to switch to a

new node graph here. And if I right

click and say add node corrector and

then link this up like this is going to

be a node that applies to the entire

timeline. That means all of these shots.

So, if I have 186,000 shots in our

timeline, this is going to apply to

186,000 shots. If I have three shots,

it's going to apply to three shots. All

right. And you'll notice as I switch in

between these, I'm still looking at the

same timeline node. So, let's take this

and maybe let's take the saturation and

turn the saturation all the way down.

So, we're making this black and white.

Now, when I switch through this, look,

everything's black and white. What the

heck is going on? Every single clip in

here has its own color grade. So, its

own set of nodes. And then those nodes

are being put through these nodes, the

timeline nodes. Okay. So, we're going to

turn this bright blue. And then we're

going to put it into this node right

here, which turns it black and white.

And all of these clips have their own

nodes. And I'll just move some of these

around so we can see the difference when

I switch in between. These are all

different nodes. If I have several

different nodes here on each one, right?

If I switch in between the clips, they

all have separate trees for their nodes,

but they all share the same timeline.

So, anything that I put in this timeline

is going to happen to all of the clips.

So, if I make it black and white,

they're all black and white. If I give

it a little bit of contrast like this,

they're all going to have that intense

contrast. So, this is a great way to

make a style that goes over every single

clip in your timeline. It's the perfect

place for establishing a creative look

for your project or for something like

this, making it making it all black and

white, making it all look like old film

or whatever. Whatever you put here is

going to be applied to each of these

nodes. But after the clip, that's why

all of these look black and white. Even

though they're super tinted, all these

different colors, the result is black

and white because we're tinting them

like crazy and then desaturating. So

again, just this level of understanding.

Oh my goodness, you can do so much cool

stuff with this. Let's right click on

these timeline nodes and reset. And I

can hit alt s to add a serial node, a

new corrector here. Then I'll switch

back to my clip nodes. Crl+ A,

rightclick, and reset all grades and

nodes. And what I can do is make a

common look here in the timeline. And so

let's just make something that's pretty

extreme just so we can see it. Okay,

normally you wouldn't probably go quite

this extreme. We're getting crazy. We're

having fun. So, let's say that we have

some bright orange kind of highlights

and some kind of cool blue shadows. All

right. And we'll just really push this.

And I'm going to right click and label

this. And we'll call this teal orange.

Now, this isn't the best looking grade

in the world. There are much more

tasteful ways to do this, but just

pretend that this is whatever style you

want to add. Okay, I'll make another

node by hitting Alt S, and then I'll

make a little S curve like we were

talking about earlier. Great. And maybe

I'll make another node. And let's go to

our luminance versus saturation. And I'm

just going to saturate things in the

middle. And then take anything that's a

little bit brighter and desaturate the

bright parts and the dark parts like

this. So now we have this very intense

look. If I hit control and D, I can

disable these nodes. And so we're really

putting a lot of style into this. Okay.

Again, this may or may not be what you

like, but the principle here is that we

have one creative look that we're going

to put over our entire movie. And we

call this, surprisingly, the look. It's

a really technical term. And we're not

only going to have this look on this

shot because we're working in the

timeline nodes. As I switch to the other

shots, we're going to have this same

kind of teal and orange look. Now, when

you add this kind of look, especially

one that's really extreme like this,

your other shots aren't necessarily

going to look good, because that's

really only going to happen if you have

an image that has similar colors and

saturation and exposure and everything

to the clip that you designed this look

on. So, for instance, I could switch

over to shot six and it looks as

expected, but I switch to shot five and

what the heck is going on? It looks, as

my daughter would say, poopy. It looks

like poopy. So, in order to make this

less poopy, let's switch over to our

clip nodes. And here's where we can

adjust our colors really before it goes

into that creative look. And for

instance, maybe this needs to be a

little bit brighter. I can push up the

offset and that's going to help a lot

because now we're pushing a little bit

more colors into the highlights and

those highlights get tinted orange. And

so, we have a lot less that is tinted

teal and we actually have something that

like sort of looks like it belongs in

this world. Okay, maybe the dark parts

need to be a little bit darker. I can

take the lift and push that down. Can

add a little bit of contrast like that.

And now we have two shots that sort of

look like they belong together, right?

But the idea here is that the more

extreme your creative look is, the more

you might have to tweak all of the shots

and make sure they match together in

order to have that kind of cohesive look

actually work. So for instance, shot

seven, that's it's not good. So we can

take that offset up. Maybe maybe push

this lift up a little bit and kind of

really push this around a little bit so

we get a nice looking image with that

look on it. If we're planning on doing

this extreme look like this and we

didn't set this look first, then we

might look at these different shots and

they might look like they match

relatively well. But what happens when

you have this extreme look is it can

sometimes amplify the differences in

between these clips. And so we always

want to make our look first, especially

if it's an extreme look like this. That

way we can view our shots with that look

applied and make some adjustments here

in the clip nodes so that the shots

actually look somewhat reasonable. Okay.

And we can go through and make our

adjustments however we see fit to

hopefully get these things matching and

looking decent and get a good result.

So, that's the big bird's eyee view of a

workflow is you want to figure out what

your creative look really is before you

do tons and tons of work on everything

else because the work you do in this

creative look may make some problems in

your shots worse and it might make some

problems completely irrelevant. So, it's

a good idea to make sure you put that on

first. So, this is the smartest

workflow. Make sure you have that

creative look and then go back and match

your shots together. Now, I'm not really

a fan of this creative look. It's a

little bit too extreme for me. And it

also brings up one little pet peeve that

I have about color grading. A lot of

people, they'll see a tutorial on the

internet and they'll say, "Oh, look at

all of these controls I have over color.

I can just go crazy and I can make all

kinds of wild color looks." And so, they

end up making something that sort of

looks like this. Because they watched

The Matrix 5 years ago, and they

remember it being green, which was

really cool. And so, now they want their

movie to look green. Here's a great big

colorist secret. The reason a movie

looks good is often not because of the

color grading, but because of how it was

shot and the lighting and the set design

and the costumes and things like that.

That's what gets a movie 80 90% there.

The color grading is just like the spice

on top. It's like the salt on something

that already tastes good. It just

enhances the flavor. And so putting this

heavy style on this image that wasn't

designed for this kind of style is going

to look bad. You just can't change the

character of the image too much or else

it just doesn't look natural. It just

doesn't look good. And so a quick hack

that will save you years of pain, years

of torture, years of unhappy clients is

just this. Look at the footage before

you start adding style to it. Just look

at your color managed footage and think

about the style that's already there

because that's where the best color

grade is going to live. It's going to be

a enhancement of that existing style of

that existing tone. So in this shoot we

have these kind of cooler toned windows.

We have the warmer toned lamps. We have

these kind of red and maroon and blue

tones. We have just a little bit of

green. We have white walls. That's the

kind of set design that we have. It's

not really dark and moody. It's not

super bright and clean. And so our color

grade needs to be somewhere in that

feeling. And so if I were creating a

look for this shot, a creative look, the

first thing I would do is just make sure

that we have decent exposure on this

clip because this is what we're going to

design our look on. And I think the

exposure looks pretty good. I could

maybe just bring it up just a touch.

Maybe I'll just push the offset up just

a little bit with this master wheel.

Okay, maybe just a little bit of

contrast just to take some of the fog

out of it. So, here's before and here's

after. Very subtle adjustment because

this is shot pretty well. Okay, there

aren't any major white balance issues.

There aren't any major exposure issues.

It looks pretty good. Now, if we want to

enhance it, I can switch to the timeline

nodes. I'll hit Alt S to add a serial

node. And this is where I'm going to

start to build my look. And if you've

never built a look before, if you've

never really tried to stylize something

before, I would really highly recommend

that you stay with something like this.

take this curve and make just a slight

scurve. All right. What that's going to

do is give us a little bit of contrast.

It's going to take away some of the

muddiness here. So, here's before and

here's after. It's just going to clarify

things a little bit. Let's rightclick

and just let's just call this S curve.

Let's make a new serial node. Alt S. And

then let's take that image and maybe

let's play around with the temperature.

So, I can go here to where it says

temperature and tint. And maybe just

push this, push it a little to the left

and see how we like it. Push it a little

to the right and see how we like it. And

I think just pushing this a little to

the left a little bit cooler feels nice.

That starts to feel cleaner. It starts

to feel like it's at night time. Like

here's before. We have this gray gray

green kind of look. And here's after. It

just feels like it's clarified a little

bit. That feels nice. Okay. And even

though this look isn't extreme, it's

still a nice look. It still looks good.

If I select both of these and hit Ctrl +

D to disable. Here's before. Here's with

no style. And here's with the style

added. It's very subtle, but it feels

natural for the image. We're not

fighting against the production here.

We're just taking what already looks

good and enhancing it. Maybe we want a

little bit brighter colors here. Maybe

we can make another node. This second

one is a temperature. Maybe this third

one will do some saturation. So, let's

just push up our saturation knob a

little bit. We don't want to go too

crazy. Once we go up here, that's just

too bright. Okay, we can always check

this on our vector scope. I'll make this

a little bit bigger so we can see it.

Here's our vector scope. We can even go

to the little controls here. And I like

to turn on extents. That'll show the

very most extreme parts of our image

here. And see here, when we push the

saturation up, these extents are almost

all the way out here. And some of the

blue is even beyond like it's way too

blue. Remember, we don't want things

that saturated. We really want stuff to

stop like hereish. All right. We want

this graph to be like here. All right.

So, we can take the saturation down.

Let's just put it somewhere in there.

There. Our extensor like here for the

red. The blue is maybe still a little

bit hardcore, which we could fix with a

curve maybe. But we're still putting

quite a bit of saturation in here.

Here's before and here's after. We're

really brightening stuff up without it

being way too bright. Okay. Also, your

saturation and everything is going to

depend on your lighting and the

exposure. the colors of the things that

you're shooting, the context, the tone,

all of that stuff. Maybe let's work on

these blues. Let's go to the hue versus

saturation. And we see we have this

spike here in the blues, which is

certainly going to be right here. I can

take my color picker and just draw over

this. And that's going to make a couple

little control points here and a control

point in the center. I can take this

control point here. And look at this

vector scope while I do this. Here's our

blues. And what we're really trying to

do is bring this little cloud this way.

All right. So, if we take this curve and

I push this down, look what happens.

That squishes that cloud down to

something that's reasonable. And again,

I don't want this that far beyond just

like halfway out. So, somewhere in

there. That's where that's going to look

actually reasonable. All right. And so

now we still have our saturation getting

pushed up, but our blue isn't out of

control here. It doesn't look neon blue.

And so now we have a look that looks

really nice and it isn't just completely

wild compared to what we shot. So again,

here is before and here's after. Still

looks nice, not too different. The other

advantage to doing it this way is that

your shots are going to match a little

bit easier than if you're doing some

insane thing where you turn all the skin

purple or something like that. So I'll

just open up our clips again and we'll

go through here, go back to our clip

nodes, and I'll just select everything

and reset all the grades, everything

except for that shot I was working on.

Okay. And now we have this look applied

to all of our shots. And it'll be a lot

less tweaking to make this look good

under this look. Maybe take the gain

down on this one. And flipping back and

forth, we have a little bit closer

match. Now, there are some problems

where this shot maybe looks a little bit

too blue. This one maybe looks a little

less blue. We could do things like

highlight this window and turn it more

blue and that kind of thing, but we'll

get to that in a minute. The idea is

that we want all these shots to feel

like they live in the same world. When

we're matching shots, that's really our

main goal. Shots might not match 100%

completely, especially when you're just

starting and especially when you've just

started a project and you haven't done

lots of work on all the shots yet. But

you want them to feel like they could

live in the same world, right? So, they

should have similar saturation. One

shouldn't be way too bright. We could

take this one down and just adjust this

to where they all feel like they could

live in this world. This one maybe looks

a little too yellow. And you can go

through and just use your first

impression when you switch to the shot.

This one maybe looks a little bit too

green to try and match this the best you

can. Okay. Same thing here. Let's take

this down. It's a little bit too

saturated. Sure. And we can turn that

into a night shot with some work, but

we'll just leave it like a daytime shot

for now. And now we have these all

matched. This one maybe looks a little

purple now that I look at it again.

Okay. Adjust this to look good. But now

we've done a couple things all at once.

We picked a style for our scene and

we've started matching these shots to

sort of look like each other. And that's

going to help this scene not be

distracting when we play it back. You

don't want people thinking about why do

the colors look like that or why doesn't

one shot look like another one. You want

them to be invested in the moment. And

so there shouldn't be any shots that

kind of just stand out. They should all

just feel like they live together. And I

think we're pretty much at that point

here. It's not a perfect match, but it

works. That's a great place to be in

your color grade. So now, if you want to

get a little bit more picky, I want to

show you a technique that is so helpful

for matching your shots. What we can do

is we can find a shot that we like.

Let's say we like this one, and we can

rightclick here on the viewer and select

grab still. What this will do is grab a

still shot of this image, and it will

save it to our gallery. So our gallery

is a panel that lives up here in the

upper left. Click on gallery and that

comes up here. And they call these

stills, but it's really more like a

saved preset, a saved color grade that

also includes a still image. It's like a

color grading preset with a thumbnail.

And so what's cool about that is if I

were to reset this and I don't know,

let's just do something really

different. I'll just desaturate it and

make it really dark or something so that

we can see this difference is that if I

have one grade on this shot, I can

middle button mouse click on this still,

boop, like that, and apply that color

grade right here from the still just

like I can from a different shot. So,

you can easily save your color presets

up here in the gallery. But what's also

great is that you can rightclick and say

play still right here. And what that'll

do is give you a still frame of that

color graded image that you can compare

with the other shots in your timeline.

And so now I have a really nice kind of

split screen where I can compare one

shot to another. And so if I have a

couple shots that were maybe shot at a

little different time, I can compare

these with a split screen and I can do

some work to match these and make these

feel like they live in the same world

again. And so that's great if you're

trying to get an exact match on a setup

like this. But it also works if you're

comparing similar subjects. So for

instance, this guy's face both here and

here. See here? This looks a little bit

more pink. This one looks a little bit

more kind of yellow. And so maybe it's

going to help this shot if we push it a

little bit of green in there. Maybe a

little less blue. And maybe that's going

to feel a little bit better. So yeah,

already that feels like it's matching a

little bit better. Maybe the

saturation's up just a touch. And now we

can match these together using this

still. Same thing here for this other

shot. We want all of these to feel the

same. And that looks pretty good. That's

a pretty good match, I would say. Same

thing here. Let's take a look at this.

That's also a pretty good match, I would

say. You can really drive yourself crazy

second guessing your match. The best

idea is to immediately decide whether it

matches or not, and if it's close

enough, move on. If it bothers you

later, you can come back and adjust it.

But you can go through your whole movie

and you can compare it to this one shot.

And this is a really good idea because

this one shot is like your constant. You

can always see how bright or dark or

saturated or blue or yellow or green

something compares to this. The shot

that you initially graded this saved

still right here. This is what we call

our hero shot. It's our hero that we

always compare all of the shots to. This

is how you get a consistent look from

beginning to end in your color grade.

Because what can happen is you can say,

"Okay, I want this shot and this shot to

match because they're next to each

other, right?" And you can maybe make

those match, right? You'll say, "Okay,

this one needs a little bit more

offset." Then you go to this shot and

you go, "Okay, I need these to match."

And so you try and figure out like, "Oh,

actually this one needs to be a little

bit more pink, right, to match with

that. And then this one and this one

should match. And now this one doesn't

match at all. And so this one should

really be more pink." And what ends up

happening is you get this shot matches

good. These shots match well. These

shots match well. And you get a slow

drift from one shot to the other. And

then the first shot and the last shot

don't look anything alike. That's why we

always compare all of our shots to this

one constant shot so we can easily tell,

oh, this one's way off or this one's way

off or this one's a lot closer. Then

you're comparing your last shot and your

first shot to the exact same thing. So

take some time and try that right now. I

want you to open up maybe shot five and

adjust it. Go into the timeline nodes

and make a look that you like. It can be

subtle like this or you can go ahead and

make something that's a little bit more

extreme. Play around. Have fun. That's

what this is for. But just know that the

more extreme your look is, the harder

it's going to be to match your shots.

But do that. Make a creative look for

this shot. Right click, grab still. And

then you can rightclick and play still

here. and then match all of your shots

to it using this split screen technique.

Again, make sure that you go to your

clip nodes to do those adjustments

because you're only going to want to

adjust that one shot and not all of them

in the timeline. This kind of thing,

just practicing this over and over again

is going to be so helpful for you. There

is so much more to go over and to say

just about workflow here, but I want to

show you a couple of my favorite tools

here in the color page. The things that

really feel exciting about color. We're

going to dive into a concept called

secondaries. Now that we have our shots

relatively matched and our creative look

made and everything, it's a good time to

get into my favorite part of color

grading, which is secondary corrections.

I'm just going to close my clips and

just focus on this one shot for this.

Now, what is a secondary correction? A

secondary correction is basically a

correction that happens to one part of

the image. And that can either be like a

physical area on the image or it can be

something that targets a specific color

or saturation or hue or something like

that. Basically, what we've been doing

so far are primary corrections. A

primary correction is a correction that

applies to the entire image. Whereas a

secondary correction is a little part of

the image. Okay. So to do that, what

I'll often do is hit alt s and make a

serial node. Okay. This is a node that

comes after this node. And so we're

going to take this image and we're going

to refine it further. And some of this

we've already learned about with these

curves. And so I could do something like

select just these reds and adjust the

saturation of them. That would be a

secondary correction. So we have our

original footage, we have our primary

correction, and then we have our

secondary correction which adjusts these

reds. But I can also do a correction to

just a part of the image using a mask

which in the color page is called a

window. So, I'm going to go to the

Windows palette right here. It looks

like this little ellipse with the little

control points on it. And here in this

palette, it lets us make masks for

whatever is happening in this node. So,

if this node turns everything pink and

then I apply a window just by clicking

on one of these shapes, like this

ellipse shape, that's going to apply

that correction just inside of that

window. So, it's a mask that's applied

to this node. Now, something to notice,

we're not cutting out the image. All

we're doing is limiting the corrections

that happen in this node to only happen

inside of this mask. So just this

absolutely like exponentially increases

the amount of freedom that you have

adjusting your images. So I'll just

reset the primary color wheels here and

let's move this around and let's do

something like just brighten his face.

I'm going to adjust this circle mask and

yeah, maybe I will actually turn this

purple here for a second so that we can

see what's going on. I can adjust the

size and the shape and everything of

this mask by grabbing this bounding box.

But we also have these little red dots

here that I can pull. And what that does

is it softens the mask. And so if you

get into any color grading tutorials and

you watch a colorist that's been doing

it for a while, they almost always just

use a big circle mask. A big soft circle

mask. The reason is because you can do

so much stuff with just a soft circle.

Look at this. I don't have to roto his

face or anything. And I have, look at

this. I'm doing a really extreme

correction to his face. And I just have

this soft circle mask. And I can go down

here to this little button and turn off

our overlays. And it honestly doesn't

look terrible as far as the actual mask

goes. It's hard to tell where the mask

starts and stops. And this is like the

most extreme possible example of doing a

localized secondary color correction.

And so this is a great way to isolate

any kind of adjustment that you just

want to happen to part of your image. So

we have our face selection here. And

maybe I'll just make this a little bit

smaller. Maybe just adjust one side of

his face a little bit. Then I'll reset

my correction here. And one thing I'll

often do just to quickly turn off this

overlay is just switch to a different

palette here. So I can switch to the

curves and any adjustments we make are

still going to apply to that mask

because it's applied to this node and we

have this node selected. So anything

that we do is going to happen just

within the mask because we're masking

that node. So what I like to do is

switch over to the curve and let's say I

want to brighten this side of his face.

I can just push up the brightness there

like this. Maybe more the darker parts.

Yeah, just add a little bit of fill

there. So here's before and here's

after. Here we go. We can add a little

bit of brightness to his face if we want

to. We could also do the opposite. I can

move this over here. Let's reset this

again. Let's reset our curves here. And

we can take it down a little bit. And

again, big soft circle window is magic,

man. Telling you. Just going to put that

right there. And now we can darken that

side of the window. Here is before. And

here's after. So now we can shape the

light using these controls that we

already know, but just combining it with

a mask. Now, let's say that I want to do

multiple things, like I want to darken

this part, and I want to maybe brighten

his eyes a little bit, maybe change the

color of his lips, whatever I want to

do, and I want to do all of those things

to this shot. What I would recommend is

that you do those in parallel nodes.

Now, there are some reasons for this

that are honestly a little bit hard to

explain. If you're really interested in

learning the different kinds of nodes in

the color page, let me know. But it's

honestly not like super super important.

Here's just a good general rule to go

by. If you're doing a primary correction

where you're adjusting the entire image,

a lot of the time I'll just use a serial

node. If you're going to do multiple

different things, adjust a bunch of

different parts of the image like this.

I would do those all in parallel nodes.

To make a parallel node, rightclick and

go to add node, add parallel. You can

also hit alt p. And what this is going

to do is basically take this original

image and that's going to feed it to all

of these different corrections. So each

one of them have the same starting

point. And so this node right here isn't

looking at this image. It's actually

looking at an image that looks like

this, which can be convenient if you're

doing things like selecting stuff by

color or brightness. Then you don't have

the other nodes kind of messing with

that. And so let's just rightclick and

say node label here. We'll just say

darken window. For this one, let's

brighten his eyes. So maybe we'll make

another kind of soft circle here. I'll

just put maybe on this eye just to

brighten it up a little bit. Maybe we'll

just take this curve and just push that

up just a touch just to brighten it. I

don't know if I like that. Maybe I'll

take the offset up a little. Yeah, I

like that a little better. Take the

offset up. Then I can also add another

window just by going here and clicking

this plus circle like this. That'll add

another circle window. And those are

both going to be applied by default,

just added together for our node. And

you can see in the little preview here

that it's only affecting the eyes. You

can also go here to this tab, which is

the key tab, and we can look at the

selection that we're making. So, we're

brightening his eyes. And then over

here, maybe we'll adjust his lips. So,

let's do that curves trick here. Hue

versus hue. I'll just select his lips

like that. And maybe we don't want those

quite as pink. I'll just push that down

a little bit. Widen out these here a

little. It's going to just tone those

red lips down a little bit. And we're

also going to limit this with a window.

That's the cool thing is you can do

multiple things in one node. I can put

curves and stuff with our primaries and

sharpening and all kinds of stuff into

this. And then I can limit it with this

window. So I'll take circle window and

just limit it to the lips right there.

So now I'll just disable these by

hitting Ctrl + D. Now we have our

original footage. We have our primary

correction. Then we darkening this side

of the screen, brightening up his eyes a

little bit, and changing the color of

his lips. And because these are all in

parallel nodes, these nodes are going to

interact with each other in a way that's

expected. If that's too much for you,

it's really okay. Just do your big wide

corrections in serial nodes and your

little localized corrections in parallel

nodes. You'll be fine. Now, we have our

masks set up here, and we have some

specific masks like right on his eyes,

which is cool, and it looks good for

this frame. But as soon as we play this

back, there's some problems. Now, it's

not so obvious on this shot, but if we

look with the overlay, we'll notice that

we're not really selecting his eyes. His

head is moving around. And so, this

brightness on his eyes should really

follow his eyes, right? So, how do we do

that? Well, we can use a tracker right

here in the color page that is

absolutely mindblowingly fantastic.

Check this out. I'm going to start at

the beginning of my clip, just cuz

that's where we set this up. And I'm

just going to put my windows where I

want them to be. And I'm going to select

this window and go over to this next tab

here. This is our tracker tab. And I'll

just hit this track back and forth

button. And look what happens. Watch

this. It just locks onto his eye and

tracks it in 1 second. Okay. Same thing

for this one. Tracks it. Crazy. So now

look at that. They perfectly follow his

eyes. Isn't that nuts? It's like no

effort to track stuff in the color page.

And again, it's very forgiving because

really a lot of the time you're using

pretty soft masks. And so it's amazing

how quickly you can refine an image,

even an image that's moving and zooming

and doing all kinds of stuff and people

turning their heads and all of that. You

can get really fine on these details. Do

the same thing on the lips. We'll just

make sure we select this window and then

track this back and forth. No problem.

And it completely follows his face.

Isn't that nuts? That's just wild. There

are so many other things you can do in

the color page. I'm trying to keep it to

just the essentials, but man, it's hard.

Let's hit alt P and make another node.

And in this one, I want to soften kind

of the details in his face. Now, there

are a lot of ways to do this, but one

way that works pretty darn well is to

take this mid detail slider here and

just push this to the left. And look at

what that does. That kind of gives us

that kind of Instagram kind of gloss

filter. Look at that. That really starts

to soften his skin. All right. Now, it

makes everything else look really bad.

And so again, this is one of those times

where we're going to want to combine

this with a selection of some kind. So

one thing that we could do would be to

just again grab a soft circle window. We

can just put this in here like this. And

that's probably going to give us a

pretty good result, honestly. So here's

before. Here's after. But there are a

few problems here. We're blurring a

little bit of the background here. It's

going into his eyes a little bit,

blurring his hair. And so it would be

nice if we could just select his skin.

And there are automated, a little bit

fancier ways to do this in the paid

version of Resolve, but I want to show

you just an old school trick. All right,

we're going to keep this window on here.

We're going to just limit it to

something like this. But then we're

going to make another selection just by

selecting his skin here. Now, how do we

do that? We can go to this fourth tab

right here and select this little

eyropper. What this will do is this will

make a selection kind of like we select

with our windows, but it's doing it kind

of like the way that you will select a

color for a green screen. And so I'll

actually turn off our window here and

probably turn off our midtone detail

too, just so we can see just what this

is doing. And I can take my eyropper and

just drag over his skin like this. And

that's going to set these sliders to

certain values. What this is basically

doing is keying our image and setting

the mask for this node to be whatever

colors are included. It's selecting by

the color. And I can see this a little

bit better if I go up here to this icon,

which is our highlight icon, which will

turn on our highlight mode. And that

will pretty much put this on this gray,

and just show you the colors that it's

selecting. So, we can go back to our

qualifier here. By the way, this is

called a qualifier. And we can adjust

these sliders back and forth and the

softness of this selection to only

select his skin color. All right. Maybe

turn off the saturation. Probably turn

off the luminance because it doesn't

help too much. And we can get a good

selection here using this key because

what we really want is just the skin.

Once we have a pretty good selection

here, we can go to these matte finesse

controls. And this will let us adjust

our selection a little bit. One thing

that's going to help is if we push up

this pre-f filter just a touch, that's

going to get rid of some of those blocky

things. We can also clean the black and

clean the white. That's going to fill in

some of those holes. We also might just

want to play with this center until we

get mostly just his skin. We don't

really want his eyes or anything. So

maybe we do want to adjust the luminance

here. Just push this around. There we

go. We're mostly just wanting his skin.

Something like that. And this process is

very tricky to make this work. And so

you really only want to do these kind of

things with subtle adjustments. And so

maybe we'll do something like that. And

then limit it with the window even more.

So I can take this and just select his

skin like this. And now we have mostly

just his skin being selected. Then I can

switch out of highlight mode and I'll

take this midtone detail down. And

that's going to soften his skin in a way

that's a little more subtle. So we

aren't messing with the rest of the

image so much. We're just dealing with

some of the details on his skin. That

gives him just a little bit more

softness. You can really overdo this,

too. So we're just going to push this up

just a little bit just to take the edge

off. And so that's how you can do a

little bit of beauty refinement and

everything. Again, what this qualifier

is doing is it's making a selection. And

in that selection, we can do anything

that we would do to this node, just like

we can with a window. But you can get

yourself in trouble here because if you

do some kind of really extreme

correction, so if I take this gamma and

push it blue, you can really easily see

this selection. All right? And usually

it doesn't even look as good as this.

You can really get yourself in trouble

with this kind of thing. And so if

you're going to do something like change

a color, I'd highly recommend that you

do that with something like this hue

versus hue curve because it's just a lot

harder to get yourself in trouble. But

these are all things that we can do to

just refine each image even more. Let's

do another shot. Again, I'll hit alt s

for a new serial and then a couple of

parallels. Alt P like that. And we can

use these kind of circle windows to

really darken down parts of our frame. A

lot of the time I'll just grab the

offset and push that down. And you can

really make a big difference in your

shot just with these little windows. And

you can add multiple windows to each

node. And remember, you can always add

more windows to each node. And they

don't have to be the same kind either.

This window is one that I use a lot.

This is a gradient. And what it does, if

I were to make this pink, this does the

correction and then fades it out over

this line. And so I could do something

like push this here on the side. And

then let's not make this pink. Let's

just have that darken stuff a little

bit. And we can just darken one side of

our frame pretty easily. Okay. Really

gives that a lot more impact. Maybe we

want to darken this part because there's

just too much light here. Same thing.

Probably just a soft circle would do

fine. Put it here. Take that offset down

a touch just so it's not so distracting.

So here's before and here's after. And

you can go absolutely crazy on this and

do this for every single shot if you

want to. I'd recommend that you wait to

get this detailed on stuff until you

have time. The very first thing that you

should do when color grading your shots

is get a creative look and then match

them all together. Once you have that,

then if you have time, you can go

through and make things look prettier

and prettier. But don't start with that

even though it's fun. You can't always

start with the most fun thing,

unfortunately. Last thing I want to

touch on in the color page are there are

a couple other color wheel palettes that

you'll see used on a regular basis if

you watch color grading tutorials. One

is the log wheels. The other one is the

HDR wheels. Now, what the heck? Why are

there so many wheels? Here's the short

answer. These primaries, if I were to

Let's go to a different shot here so we

can see what's going on. These

primaries, if I were to grab this gain,

let's look at our waveform here. If I

were to take the gain and push that up,

what that's going to do is adjust the

entire image, but it's going to adjust

the brighter parts stronger. All right?

It's like in the curves when you take

the top part and you move it like this.

In fact, that's pretty much what gain

is. All right. The gamma adjusts the

middle, but it leaves the white point

and black point where they are. So, it's

basically doing this. The lift adjusts

the black point, which is doing this.

So, it affects the entire image, but

it's a lot stronger in the darker parts.

Okay. Now, if we go to our log wheel, we

have a similar layout here, but look

what happens when I adjust the

highlights. As I push this up, actually,

not a lot's happening. And that's

because adjusting these highlights is

like putting a dot here and then

adjusting the white point from there. It

sort of limits the adjustment to the

upper part of the image. And really, you

don't see a whole lot going on because

we don't have that brightest stuff. Same

thing for the shadows. As I move those

around, it only affects the lower part

of the image like this. There's an

anchor right here. So, to see that

difference, lift does this. Shadow in

the log wheels does this. So, it's

limited to just the dark parts. And you

can adjust where that little cut off

point is with these sliders right here,

the range sliders. And so, as I push up

the shadows, see, I'm pushing those up,

and it's really only affecting this part

of the image. But as I adjust the range,

then I can have it adjust more or less

of the image. And so, I could do

something like push my highlights really

yellow, and it doesn't really affect

anything until I bring this highlight

range down and start to tell it that

more things are highlights. So, there we

go. Now we're considering this part and

these parts of the image as highlights.

And now things are getting yellow,

right? So it's basically just splitting

up the image into kind of thresholds.

Highlights adjusts this, shadows adjust

this, mid tones adjust this. Instead of

adjusting the entire image, it splits it

up. Okay. So what the heck do you do

with these kind of things? This is if

you're trying to adjust something really

specific. Like for instance, if I want

just this window to be darker, but I

don't want to adjust anything else, I

could take my highlights down a little

bit and then adjust this range to where

it starts affecting the window. And so

now I'm mostly just adjusting the

highlights without even touching the

shadows and the mid tones so much. And

so again, this is for secondary

corrections for the most part. Something

that's confusing about calling these log

wheels is a lot of people think that if

you have log footage, you should use the

log wheels or that log wheels only work

in log space or that by using it, it

turns it into log or anything. None of

that's a thing. Where this starts and

stops is this is called log wheels.

That's it. Just ignore everything else.

This is what they call the adjustments

that split up the image into these tonal

areas. Okay. The HDR pallet is basically

a big boy version of that. Instead of

splitting it up into three parts, it

splits it up into six parts. That's it.

And so we have the range control for

each one and the softness for the

threshold of each one. And it's split up

into six parts. If you click on the

little sunshine for any of these, you

can see what it's affecting. So

specular, basically nothing. Highlights,

things that are a little bit darker.

Light is that range. Shadow is this

range. Dark is this range. and black is

this range. And so it splits it up into

these tonal ranges and you can adjust

each one to your liking. Basically, if

you want to get really detailed with

things, my advice, if you're brand new

to color, don't even worry about the HDR

wheels. Don't even touch them. Sometimes

maybe you'll get into the log wheels,

but honestly, just stay with primaries

because that is going to be able to do

99% of what you ever need to do, and

it's much, much simpler. Now, something

about color. This is one of the most fun

things about color. They have these

color surfaces that are really cool.

It's basically a way for you to be able

to touch all of the controls with

hardware knobs and sliders and

everything and it makes it go a lot

faster and it's more fun, more tactile.

There's all kinds of good reasons to use

a color panel. They have multiple

different versions. The most affordable

one being this Da Vinci Resolve micro

color panel, which actually works with

an iPad, which is really neat. There are

three track balls here and those

correspond to lift, gamma, and gain. And

there's these rings that rotate around

the track balls, which correspond to the

master wheels. And then a lot of these

knobs and buttons and everything are

basically these things. All right, so

there isn't really anything that you can

only do on a color surface. It just

makes things a little bit easier and a

little bit faster. They have a bigger

version of the color surface called the

mini panel and an absolute crazy

spaceship version which is called the

advanced panel which has a million

different buttons and things. And like I

said, this is really fun and it gives

you the tactile control that is there's

just really nothing like it. And these

color panels are a little bit expensive.

The micro color panel starts at $559.

The mini panel is about $2,300 and the

advanced panel is $30,000. But the

question is, do you actually need one to

do color? No. No. You don't need one to

do color. In fact, I would recommend

that unless you plan on doing a lot of

color. And when I mean a lot of color,

color grading more than a thousand shots

a week. I think that's when it really

gets useful to have a color surface. If

you're doing that kind of volume of

color work, it's absolutely worth the

investment and it makes it more fun. If

you're making a video every couple weeks

and it has 80 shots, honestly, it's

probably not going to be that big of a

deal that you get a color surface or

not. So, do you actually need it? Not

really. If you're really into gear and

you want your desk to look really cool

and you really want to practice getting

quick at color, maybe you're wanting to

be a colorist and maybe eventually do

1,000 shots a day. If you're really

hardcore on that, then yeah, you should

totally get one. Or if you have the

money and can responsibly spend it and

you need to justify something like this

to your boss or spouse, you can show

them this part of the video. They

absolutely need a color surface. It's

imperative. If you don't have a color

surface, what are you doing? Do you even

video? Go ahead and make that

investment.

Are they gone? Okay. So, there's about

11 billion other things that I want to

show you on the color page. If you want

to learn more about color, let me know

in the comments. We'll talk more about

it. But we got to move on. We got to

keep going. The porcels who edit this

video are going to have my hide if I

don't keep moving. So, let's go. All

right. Let's talk about the Fairlite

page. So, this is the audio world of Da

Vinci Resolve. You can think of this as

like the main dedicated audio app. In

the Adobe world, this would be like

Adobe Audition or something, or for

those of us who've been around for a

little bit, something like ProTools.

This is the dedicated audio part of

Resolve. Now, you can do a lot of audio

stuff in the edit page of Resolve, but

you can think of this as there's two

separate apps here. There's your editing

app which has general effects and it has

some audio tools and you can add clips

and you can move them around and you can

fade things and you can adjust volume

and that kind of thing. So, it's like

the basic version of adjusting audio.

Whereas an audio app, the idea is that

you can get super detailed with your

audio. You can have lots and lots of

tracks. There are specialized audio

effects, plugins, all kinds of things.

And it's just really tuned into making

good audio. And that's exactly what's

happening here in Fairlite page. Just

like the other pages of Resolve, your

timeline here in the edit page can just

be opened in Fairlite just by clicking

on the Fairlite page. So here we are.

Here's our color timeline that we've

been working on. And this part down here

is a similar interface where we have our

timeline and we can adjust the height of

our audio tracks. But look how big we

can make these audio tracks. And look

how much we can zoom in here. So I'll

just put this in here and just hit

control plus a bunch. We can really zoom

in here crazy, even down to the sample

level of audio. So, Fairlite can get

just as crazy as you want to get when it

comes to getting detailed with your

audio. One of the first things you might

be thinking is, okay, I can do a lot of

this in the edit page, right? I can zoom

in and I can get crazy with audio here

in the edit page. When should I move to

the fairlight page? What's the point of

doing Fairlite stuff over the edit page?

And the honest truth is that you can

move back and forth. It's not really

that essential that you're like ready to

do audio before you go into the

Fairlight page. A lot of the time what I

do is I'll jump into Fairlite and I'll

adjust some things that Fairlight's good

at and then switch back to the edit and

kind of keep editing. And then if I want

to mess with the clip, maybe I'll go

over to Fairlite and adjust the clip and

everything. What's really cool is that

this whole timeline on the Fairite page

is the same as the edit page. And so if

I add a fade on the fairlight page and

switch over to the edit page, we have

that same fade right here on the edit

page. If I were to write click and

change the clip color here on the

fairlight page, guess what? That clip

color is on the edit page. And so it's

nice because you can really just go back

and forth. And this is huge because in

basically every other app ever, you

can't do that. you would have to do

something like export your timeline as

an XML or some kind of format that an

audio app can open, which means that you

should have things pretty well dialed in

and pretty much finalized before you go

into the audio app. And you don't even

have to worry about that with Fairlite.

We're so spoiled. You can just switch

over to Fairlite and do some

adjustments, switch back to edit, no

problem. Okay, so we can switch into

Fairlite and back if we want to get a

little bit more fancy with our audio.

But let's take a second and look at the

interface here. So right here we have

our timeline. And this acts pretty much

like it does in the edit page. There are

tracks, there are clips, you move around

in time, all of that. Now, it's possible

that on your system you don't have the

video tracks. If you go up here to this

little icon, there are all kinds of

options for viewing our timeline. And

there's actually a similar button to

this in the edit page right here and the

cut page, right? So, anytime you want to

adjust how your timeline looks, there's

some kind of version of this. But here,

this top menu item is display video

tracks. And so, if you're just working

on audio, sometimes you don't really

need the video tracks. But, I don't

know, for me, it's comfortable to be

able to see the video tracks just so

that this looks a little bit more

familiar to the edit page cuz sometimes

I'll have clips colored a certain way or

arranged a certain way that kind of

helps me navigate where things are on

the timeline and I don't want to lose

that in Fairlight. Over here on our

track headers, we have our mute and our

solo. So, we can mute tracks and solo

tracks. Solo basically just mutes

everything except for that track. We

have meters for the tracks. And I'll

tell you something in Fairlite, tracks

are your best friend, okay? You need to

be good friends with tracks. Don't be

afraid to add lots and lots of tracks.

Get familiar with how tracks work

because tracks are the magic when it

comes to audio. We'll talk about that

more in a little bit. Over here to the

right, we have our mixer. And this is

where we adjust controls for our mix as

well as each track. This is where we can

set inputs for recording. We can add

effects. We can adjust dynamics, which

we'll get into in a little bit. We can

adjust EQ. We can route each track to a

separate bus, which is like a group of

tracks, like a submix. We have pan

controls and our volume here for each

track. Up here in the middle, we have

our tools, which are very similar to the

edit page. Playback controls. Again,

very similar. And we have a big bunch of

audio meters here. This is going to show

you the volume of every single track in

your mix. We have a loudness meter here,

which helps monitor how loud things are

perceived, which can be good if you're

doing broadcast things and even somewhat

useful if you're making mixes for

YouTube. And then we have our viewer

here. It's a lot smaller, but we can

actually pop this out and make a little

bit bigger viewer if we want to. I'll

just pop that back in. But really, we

have a lot of space here in the timeline

because this is where we're going to do

most of our work. We're going to be

adding sound effects and mixing things

and moving them around. A lot of that

happens in the timeline and the mixer.

Up along the top, we have some familiar

windows, our media pool and our effects.

Those work just like the other ones. We

have our metadata and our inspector.

Again, same thing as the other pages.

And some other panels that we might get

into here in a little bit. So, let's

work on something, shall we? Let's

switch back to the edit page here for a

second. And in the Fairlight folder, if

you imported it with me at the beginning

of this video, you should have several

different files here. I'm just going to

rightclick here in the empty space and

hit timelines, create new timeline. And

we'll call this Fairlite timeline. Hit

create. And let's build our quick time

that we can work through together. You

should have a movie here called

Fairlight Page Video Track. Drag this in

like this. And then there's also

Fairlight Dia. That's short for

dialogue. We'll drag this down here. And

this is going to be the audio for our

scene. And we're going to make sure this

came through just right here in a

second. But this is a different scene

from the same movie that lends itself to

some sound design, some mixing, some

fun. So, let's switch over to the

Fairlite page and take a look at what

we've got in the Verite page. By

default, it shows you a little bit more

about the audio channels. This dialogue

is coming in as a mono track. The reason

I know that is because this track is a

stereo track. I can tell by this little

2.0 right here. What that's going to do

is have a list of channels within this

track. So, this dialogue is actually

just one track that comes in on the left

channel. Hold up, I got to get my

headphones. There we go. So, if we play

this back, we're just going to hear that

on the left speaker. And there are

actually more tracks in this wave file.

So, let's open this up in the media

pool. Rightclick and go to clip

attributes. We're going to go to audio.

And we're going to make sure that our

format is set right. We should set it

like this. format mono audio one mix

mono audio 2 mix. You can pick which

track you want on each of these. That

looks good. And I'll hit okay. And let's

take this dialogue and let's drag this

down. And look at this. This is actually

adding it in two different tracks. So

why don't we instead why don't we

rightclick on this track here and say

change track type to mono. And then we

have our audio 2. This is mono as well.

So let's get rid of this and just move

this down. So that's what we should have

is two separate tracks like this.

Sometimes things just don't come in

right for whatever reason on the edit

page. Sometimes when you have fancy

audio tracks, you might need to jump

into fair light to get that working. But

this is what we should have is our

dialogue wave should have one channel on

this track and one channel on this

track. And both of these tracks should

be mono. Okay. So now if we play this

back, because these are mono, they're

both going to come out of both speakers,

but they are going to be separate tracks

here.

Where is he?

I had him and then you pushed me.

Great. So, this is just the dialogue for

our sequence and probably 75% of what

we're going to be doing here in Fairlite

is stuff that you've really already

learned in the edit page. So, this

section of this video is going to be a

little bit shorter, but I do want to

show you some specific stuff in Fairlite

that's really neat. One thing that we

can do is split each of these up into

little clips, which again happens like

you would on the edit page. But you'll

notice when I click on this, it actually

selects both of these tracks. So, I'm

going to select this, rightclick, and go

down to where it says link clips and

uncheck that. Now, I can move each of

these separately, which is probably

going to be really good for what we're

doing. And I can use the same shortcuts

that I was using. I can split each

track. I can just select it like this. I

can grab and trim it very similar just

like we would on the edit page. Just

splitting and trimming like this. And

it's silent here. So, we don't really

have to trim this, but I like to do that

just to keep organized a little bit. A

little bit easier to think of these in

little chunks. And it also feels like

it's empty here, which it is. There's no

sound at all here. And so that kind of

reminds us that hey, we need to actually

add some sound to this in order for this

to feel like a finished professional

kind of product. Now, something that's

really unique to the Fairlite page is

its way of selecting pieces of clips.

So, let's zoom in here a little bit.

I'll go ahead and close my media pool

just so we have a little bit of space.

Make this a little bigger. And let's say

that I want to select and adjust this

waveform right here. In the edit page,

what I would have to do would be to go

here and split this and then I have this

as a separate thing. But what I can

actually do in the fairlight page is I

can select regions. So I can grab this

second tool here, which is range mode,

and I can click and drag. And that's

going to set an in and an out, and

that's going to let me go in and be a

little bit more detailed with the actual

sounds itself. So I can make this

selection and hit backspace, and that'll

just get rid of that part of the audio.

I can also grab this line and push it

up. And that's going to add little key

frames to this volume line. And so I can

push that up like that. And then if I

want to select a different part, I can

do it like this. And so that makes it

really easy to be able to select a piece

and kind of adjust it without having to

do a bunch of manual key framing and

stuff. Now the thing that's not great

about this is that if I want to say move

this clip around, I can't. I'm just

selecting parts of it. I would have to

switch to this other mode. But what I

can do is switch to this focus mode and

that's a combination of these tools. So

if I'm on the top part of the clip, I

can do my range mode just like before.

But if I'm on the bottom part of the

clip, I can grab the clip and move it

back and forth. And so this is a really

nice way to work inside of Fairlite,

especially if you're going in and

adjusting pieces of your clips. Just

remember to be on the top part of the

clip if you want to adjust a range and

the bottom part if you want to move

things around. So yeah, just like the

edit page, I can hit alt and add little

key frames here to the volume. But

what's cool is I can animate a whole

bunch of stuff in the same way. And to

select what I want to animate, I can go

over here to this little drop down where

it says none. And there are all kinds of

things that I can key frame here. So by

default, it's the clip volume right

here. But I can also adjust the fader

level. It kind of does the same thing,

but for the track. And so what this is

going to do is automate this slider. And

watch what happens when I play this

back. It turns it down. And so you can

key frame anything in the mixer for the

track. Just like that. And this is the

kind of thing that you just can't do on

the edit page. And now if I want to

remove that automation, I can hold

control and alt and just click on these

little points and get rid of it. Yay. So

we have our dialogue here in our movie.

But what's really going to help here is

to add a little bit of room tone, a

little bit of ambience. And so let's go

over to our media pool here in our sound

effects folder. We should have a clip

called GC ambience interior bathroom,

which is going to be really helpful. And

so this is just kind of like the sound

of the air, sound of the environment,

the room tone here. And that's going to

kind of fill in some of these little

gaps that are just completely silent.

You pretty much never want that. That's

called dead air. We don't want that. And

before I play this back, I'm actually

going to take the volume down here for

our preview because these ambients are

very, very loud. So, there we go. That's

kind of what we're looking for is that

little that little bit of just kind of

ambient noise. And in this preview, this

is where we can set our in andout just

like we would normally do in the viewer

in the edit page. But I'm just going to

use this whole thing. I can grab it and

drag it down here. And I can either drag

it to an existing track or I can make a

new track just by dragging it down like

this. So, let's put that in. And this is

going to be our ambience. Now, before

long, our tracks are going to get crazy,

and so it's probably a good idea to

start renaming these. All you do is

click on the track name. And so, we'll

call this dialogue dash guy, and we'll

say uh dialogue dia/girl.

And this is going to be our ambience

amb. You can name these however you want

as long as you recognize it. And the

first thing I'm going to do on this

ambience is I'm going to take the volume

down on this track. So, to do that,

that's going to be in our mixer. And

it's a little bit confusing because the

mixer is right here on the side. And

what we're going to do is look for track

three. So there's A1, audio one, audio

2, and audio 3. Here we have audio one,

audio 2, and where's audio 3? Well,

there is a little scroll here that we

can scroll over. Or we can even move

this out a little bit to see more

tracks. And so here on track three,

we're going to take this fader all the

way down. Let's take this to like, I

don't know, -20, something like that,

and just see how that sounds compared to

our audio. There we go. That's a little

better. push this up so we can hear it.

So, that ambience is still a little bit

hot. We'll take this down a lot lot

more. And what's nice is I can play this

back while I'm adjusting the volume in

this track, which is a little bit harder

to do here on the interface or in the

inspector. So, I can just take this down

and just bring it up just to where I

start to notice it. I don't even know on

your on your speakers, but it definitely

like it sounds like there is air in the

environment now. So, that's great. Let's

go ahead and close our media pool and

we'll just work with this again. Let's

just grab the edge of this and I'll just

split this just like we would on the

edit page and get rid of this edge.

There we go. And now we have our

ambience. We can also colorize a track

just by right-clicking and going down to

change track color. And this can be

really helpful for organizing your

different types of sounds. And so maybe

we'll have our dialogue apricot. Sure.

Right click track color apricot. That'll

also colorize them here in the mixer.

It'll be a little bit easier. Ambience,

let's turn green. Sounds good. Now,

let's add a little bit of music. So,

same thing, media pool. We're going to

go up to our fair light directory

because we have our music right here.

Same thing, just drag it in. We'll just

butt this up here. And so, we have our

music that's a little bit long for our

scene. Now, if we want to make this

music fit the length of the clip, there

are ways to do that in the studio

version of Resolve. That's pretty fancy.

So, I'll show you that. I'll just kind

of move this over here for a second.

This whole clip is about 17, 18 seconds,

something like that. So, what we could

do is trim this and then select it and

go to the inspector. And there are some

really cool AI adjustments that we can

make to clips here in the fairlight

page. This one is going to be AI music

editor. And so, what we can do is we can

select a target length. So, let's say 17

seconds. So, just 1700. And then hit

adjust. It's going to analyze that clip.

It's going to go through and figure out

where all the beats are and all that

kind of stuff. And it's going to try and

make it shorter. and it will do a decent

job. It's going to actually make this

about 20 seconds. So, let's actually

maybe see if we can get this to maybe

we'll target like 15 seconds and then

hit adjust. There we go. Yeah, it's

going to want to do 12 seconds or

something. So, you can get it close, but

it should do a pretty good job of making

everything happen on beat. So, let's

listen.

[Music]

[Music]

and that works. But if you don't like

what it's doing here, or if you don't

have the paid version of Resolve, here's

a really easy way that you can shorten

your music. I'm just going to reset this

AI music editor and look at this full

length. And let's just align this where

we want it to be. Just get rid of our

inspector here. Let's take a look at

this. I think we want this to come to a

head right when that toilet happens.

Yeah. So, let's actually just trim the

front of this here. And let's have this

end right about where that toilet

happens.

And then you push me.

Let's have that just end right about

there.

I had him and then you pushed me.

Yeah, that's nice. So, we have that kind

of awkward empty feeling there. Maybe

we'll just fade this up like this.

[Music]

Where is he?

I had him and then you pushed me.

Yeah. So, that actually works without

having to do a bunch of edits. But I'll

just alt drag this out so I can show you

this. If you want to shorten a clip and

have it on beat, this is the easiest way

to do it. And you don't need any AI

stuff. You can just do this yourself. A

lot of music you can listen to and count

on the beats. And then you want to cut

it and splice it on the beat. This one

is a little bit harder to count, at

least for me. And so really what we want

to do is just split this right here. And

we'll just kind of trim this to be

shorter. And really a great way to do

this is just to look at the waveform and

look for similar waveforms. So this and

this look similar. And so what I'll do

is just trim this to be right on that

peak here. And move this down. Let's

just see how this sounds.

Decent. And what we could do is

rightclick and say 24 frame crossfade

like that. Pretty good. And now we have

a shorter version of the song. So that's

a great way you can splice a song. But

we don't even need to do that right

here. We can just have it fade in. And

then right there we'll also have this

fade out. Great. Now this is going to

actually be masked a little bit with a

toilet flushing sound. So that's going

to be in our effects that we add to

this. And really a great way to go about

adding your sound effects and everything

is to do it in passes. Just like we edit

in passes and do our color and passes

and everything, doing this audio in

passes is really helpful. We're

basically looking for the big obvious

things, the things that are going to

take somebody out of the experience if

they don't hear it. And we want to add

those effects. So, anything that should

be making a sound that should be really

obvious, boy, that better be in it.

Okay, so let's go through here. And what

I'm just going to do is just hit M on

the keyboard for a marker. That's going

to add a marker to our sequence, and

that'll help us remember to add the

effects there. Okay. So, we need So,

right as we go, we need this closing

door sound

in the story, she falls down from inside

the door. So, we definitely need

something like that.

[Music]

Probably opening the door might be good.

And then you push me.

We need the toilet flushing sound right

there for sure.

Oh no.

Moving the book. We need some kind of

audio for that. Opening the lid. Yeah.

So, all of that kind of needs to happen.

By the way, this scene, if it's

confusing, out of context. So, the kid,

he just shoved her in the bathroom

holding the alien and she fell down and

accidentally flushed the little blue

alien down the toilet. So, this is where

things really get bad. So, let's just go

through this. So, this first effect we

need is the door closing. And we can

open up the media pool and look for our

door closing stuff. But I want to show

you a really cool thing about Fairlite.

So let's say that you have a whole bunch

of sounds, like we're just giving you

like 20 sounds or something. But if you

have 700 sounds, it can be really hard

to go through and listen to every sound

and try and figure out the exact sound

that you want. And so this sound

library, this is a way that you can tell

Resolve where all your sounds are and it

can index them and make it really easy

to find the sounds that you need. All

you have to do is go to these three dots

and say add library. And we're going to

navigate to our files and our sound

effects folder that we downloaded and

hit select folder. But you can select

any folder on your system, anything that

has all of your sounds. And then it's

going to go through and scan all of the

sounds and index them so that it can

quickly find them. And if you have lots

and lots of sounds, it might take a

little bit, but this is going to be

really quick. Sound library sounds. Scan

successful. Hit okay. And now we can

search here and it will quickly bring up

anything. So if I type in toilet, here

are all of the toilet sounds. Toilet

sounds. So we have toilet flush, toilet

lid open. And we can just double click

this to play it back. So there's our

flush,

toilet, dropping the book on the toilet,

opening the lid, all of that. We can

find the toilet stuff really easily. So

let's type in door. Now we have all of

our door sounds. So doorork knob sound.

Yeah, that's good. We need the door

closing.

Yeah, good. So, here we can set our in

and our out just like this. I

And we can drag this into a new track.

And I can take off snapping so that I

can move this back and forth really

easily. Good. And we'll get rid of this

marker here. We need the kind of falling

down sounds. Let's type in body. That'll

bring up. We have our body drops.

There we go. And we can use JK and L to

play this back. So, these are all

different sounds that we can layer to

make it seem like there's body hitting

the floor. So, to do that, let's make a

few more tracks here. I can add tracks

by right clicking on any track and just

going to add tracks. And let's add a few

mono tracks. Let's do five mono tracks.

We'll add those. We'll do below audio 5.

Sounds good. Make sure we rename this.

And generally, like it's okay to add a

million tracks. All right. There is a

limit to the tracks, but it's a really

big limit. So just add a new track for

every new sound. What I would do is

group similar sounds that are in a

similar environment at the similar time

on a track, but otherwise pretty much

make everything else a separate track

just because then you have control over

all of those tracks with the faders. And

it's really easy to kind of mix things

later. So this one will be called a

door. This one is music. And let's just

make these really tiny. And all these

tracks, we're going to call this body

one, body two, body three, and so on. So

now we have five tracks here. I can hold

shift and scroll up to give us a little

bit of room here. Let's just grab some

of these body drops. Just set an in and

out. Something like that. Drag this into

body one. Let's go a little further. Get

some other ones like that. Drag this in.

Good. We'll use the knuckles body hit.

Sure. Just like that. Throw that in

here, too. So now we have five different

tracks of all of these different sounds.

And I can quickly trim these using my

arrange selection here. Just grabbing

the empty spaces and getting rid of it

like that. It's really nice way to trim

this stuff if I need to. Good. And now

we can just layer these on. So, we'll

just shove these all together like this

and just see what it sounds like. Let's

just see how it goes.

Yeah. And click solo just on these.

There we go. Maybe I'll just kind of

move these around and maybe spread them

out a little.

Good. So now we have something

definitely falling down, crashing, that

kind of thing. And if we want to control

all of these tracks together, we can

group them. I can select body one and

shift select body five and hit CtrlG.

And this is going to make a group. And

we'll just call this body drop. And

we're going to link all of these

controls here. Let's just go ahead and

link all of them and then hit save. And

now what's going to happen is if I

adjust the controls for any of these, it

actually adjusts them all. And so I can

link all of these different parameters

for my tracks. And even though they're

on different tracks, they're working as

one track. So that's a nice way to do

it. So if I want this to be quieter,

can bring that down. So that kind of

works. And I can link these together

like that. The other thing I could do

would be to put these into a bus. A bus

is sort of like a group of tracks, but

it's really more like a separate mix

that each track goes into. What a bus

will do is route the output of all of

these tracks into one track and then you

can control it like we were doing with

these sliders, but you can also add

effects to all of the tracks all at

once. And it's actually really nice. And

so to do that, we can go here to our bus

outputs and select a different bus. But

we need to have another bus first. So we

can go up to Fairlite and go to bus

format. This is going to be a list of

all of our buses. By default, there's

something called bus one, which is a

stereo bus, and that is the main output.

So, the thing that our audience is going

to hear. Anything that we want our

audience to hear, it goes into bus one.

Let's make another bus. That'll add

that. And let's uh let's call this a

body bus. And heck, let's make it a

different color. How about blue? Great.

And then we'll hit okay. That's going to

add another bus here. And we can tell

our tracks to go into a different bus.

So, right here where it says bus

outputs, take this little drop down and

switch this to body bus for each of

these tracks. All right. And now

something interesting is going to

happen. I'll close our sound library.

Give us a little room here. When I play

this back, listen.

Those tracks are playing back. There's

audio happening here in the meters, but

we don't hear it. Why is that? It's

because we're sending these to that body

bus. So, this bus right here, but we

don't hear the body bus. The body bus

doesn't have any output. Our bus one is

automatically our main mix, so it

doesn't need a bus output. But body bus

doesn't have anywhere to go. So what we

should do is hit this plus and say bus

one. And now what's going to happen is

all of these tracks are going to go into

bus 2, our body bus. And then everything

that happens in body bus is going to go

into bus one. All right. So we're

routing it all through this one little

pipe before we put it into the mix. So

now when we play this back, there it is.

No problem. The advantage here is that

we could set our volume back to zero on

our tracks and then just turn it down in

the bus.

Okay, in this case it doesn't really

matter whether you turn it up in the

tracks or the bus, but the real

advantage to having a bus is that you

can add effects. Now, we haven't gotten

much into effects, at least here in the

Fairlite page. Probably the most

familiar version of effects would be to

go into the effects panel here, and we

have all kinds of audio effects that we

can drag onto a clip. And so real quick,

let's just solo the girls dialogue.

We'll just play this back here. I'll

just loop this part by hitting I and O.

You pushed me. I had him and then you

pushed me.

And so any of these effects I can grab

and put onto a clip. So sure, let's grab

this flanger. Let's get crazy. And when

I drag on an effect, that's going to

come up with this little dialogue here

where we can select presets and adjust

all the different crazy things about

these effects.

you push me.

Okay, I can turn an effect off or on

with this little switch. This is like a

broken out version of what's in the

inspector. In fact, if I went over to

the inspector and under effects, just

like in the edit page, we have our

controls for our effects. And we can

change those around or delete it or

click on this little icon here to bring

up our fancy interface again. So, this

is an effect that's applied to a clip,

but we can also apply it to a track. And

so, let's grab delay and put this on the

track. We can drag that right on the

track header and that will apply to the

track itself.