everyone knows davinci resolve is great for color grading but did you also know
that it could be used as a super fast way to format videos for instagram and facebook
today i'm going to show you how you can use the new smart reframe feature in davinci
resolve studio 17 plus a few more tips to help you repurpose those old videos let's dive in
so what is smart reframe well remember those old vhs tapes we check out from Blockbuster on
friday nights they all started with this little green screen warning it says this film has been
modified from its original version the point is panning and scanning or reframing video content
for new screens is nothing new in fact adobe premiere has had auto reframe and final cut
pro has had smart conform for a little while now but the smart reframe that's what they're calling
it in resolve 17 it is new and it's pretty freaking awesome because it works great most
of the time so basically smart reframe is a way to use the internal neural engine ai within the
paid version of resolve to automatically detect a face or action in the shot for new screen sizes
it'll move the position for you and the reason you'd want to use it is to not have to do that
work manually which you still can do but this can save a lot of time and could make you more money
by being able to offer more deliverables on any video project so let me show you how to use it and
the best and quickest ways to get great video quality over to your phone to use for posting
we're over here in resolve 17 in the cut page and we can see i have a 1920x1080 timeline the
first few clips are dci 4k so they don't fill the full frame they have black bars top and
bottom and then other clips right here do fill the full frame and that's important because of
a setting i'm about to show you so you edit in the wide screen format that's your main video
then you're going to go to duplicate it we're going to right click and say duplicate timeline
and we'll call this one our um instead of 16x9 we're going to the opposite so i'm going to go
9x16 and then we'll double click it to open it up the reason we're in the cut page is because
they have a nice little preset over here if you click right in this section we have an option
for portrait choose portrait and oh it's the right vertical video that we need for our instagram and
social post but it doesn't fill the full frame so here is how you change that you you click up here
again you say custom timeline settings and we're going to be changing the mismatched resolution
instead of saying scale entire image to fit we're going to be changing this to say
scale full frame with crop okay do that and boom everything fills up the frame and we don't have
those black bars so everyone gets to make use of the whole image next up we are going to actually
be going over here to the edit page to do our smart reframing just know you can do it here
in the cut page it's right under here i just like to do it in the edit page because it gives you a
little more control over looking at the keyframes that we're working with so why don't we start by
just selecting the clips we want to reframe we'll choose these ones here from this harvest we'll
select those we'll go to inspector and then under the inspector we have this new option called smart
reframe and it's set to automatic we'll click reframe and it's using that neural engine ai
that's built in right now to analyze them and try to find the best spots for the middle of the clip
and just like that we saw it added keyframes to them so we can go through here and check things we
can also make adjustments to them because they're just keyframes the way you would make adjustments
is actually super super simple so you can click on this little keyframe right here and then this
guy right here will expand it and then if we zoom in on the timeline command plus to do that
and take a look we can drop this thing down and say transform position x and we can see
these are all the keyframes that resolve had automatically dropped on our timeline
to try to make the best decision on what should be in the center of the frame for the for the
panning scanning so and if you look up here in the inspector you can see under transform position
this thing is going crazy so it's trying to maintain a specific
position that it thought was great and what not what if we want more control of that what if we
want to say i want you to track this specific spot we can actually do that with smart reframe there's
an option in here called reference point and that's what i'm going to show you next
now to show you how to use the reference point with smart reframe we're going to go
to another clip on the timeline one that we haven't done with the automatic mode
we've got these clips right here this guy's walking through the snow with the chainsaw and
we don't even see him here in this second shot so why don't we say we'll let that first one do it
automatically we'll just say auto reframe and boom look at that it did a great job right off the bat
and like i said before if you click these right here and then go into say transform position x if
you wanted to you can easily take these keyframes here and adjust them as you see fit okay we're not
going to do that because it did a good job but we are going to the next one here and we're going to
choose object of interest and instead of saying auto we're going to be using reference point but
to set it up so we can actually see where he is in the frame because he's so far off the screen
to the right we're going to first set it up so we can see him so we're going to go to position
here on the transform controls we're not setting a keyframe we're just kind of moving him to the
middle of the frame we're going to do that and then we're going to choose reference point right
now and choose this little object over here this is this little drop down here gives us access to
the basically it's like a tracking box that goes on your viewer so we'll choose smart reframe there
and there it goes and we got to just choose something of high contrast it's kind of like
any other tracker so we've got lots of orange in the scene it should do a decent job we'll click
this then we'll say reframe and just like that it should have done a pretty damn good excuse
my french it did a great job of centering him up in the frame and we can take a look and it it's
got the keyframes just like the others did down here on the timeline below so of course that's
a great way to use smart reframe on new content that you're shooting and you have all your clips
that are all cut up they're shot by shot but what if it's an old video and you want to repurpose it
or maybe it's a live cut from a weekend event that's something i do on an every single week
basis i learned a little trick and i'm going to show you that next i'm super excited about it
so next i want to show you i have this reebok spec spot that we had done a while back i'd done the
color grade on it and it's all one single video file but what if i want to use this for social
media the first thing i want to do to use smart reframe is to cut it up into individual shots
this is using another feature that's in resolve if you select it and you go to timeline detect
scene cuts click that guy right there and this is automatically detecting when does the scene
change from one to the next so it's going to show you all the different clips and that way smart
reframe can only be working on the individual shots at a time as far as how it keyframes
those rather than trying to keyframe between the shots which would not give us the best results
also a little bonus tip here if you wanted to go back and color grade it you can see now we
have controlled shot by shot of a single video clip that's not what this video is about i'm
sure i'll have another one but now that we have it all chopped up let's get it sized for social media
way we do that is we're gonna go to these the spot here in the cut page we'll duplicate our timeline
and i'm gonna do this one at four by five so those of you that do a lot of instagram realize four by
five ratio is like the perfect size to get the most screen real estate so you can stop someone
scroll as they're going through because you're taking up the most of the screen that you can
in the main feed so four by five is right there now resolve does not have a preset for four by
five so we're going to go over going over here and choosing custom timeline settings
and we'll choose 1080 by 1350 is the size that we want to be doing this so 1080 by 1350 and then
just like before we're going to choose scale full frame with crop under the mismatched resolution
and now a sudden we have a perfectly formatted video for instagram except it's not smart reframed
yet so what the smart reframe this time why don't we do this over here in the cut page so you can
see that it works in both spots so we can over here we'll just select all of our clips which if
you're new to the cut page this top timeline is the same as the bottom it's just it's zoomed out
all the way we can click smart reframe and choose automatic and reframe and it starts analyzing so
here's where the ai magic happens so it's going through it just finished up all 31 clips and we
can take a look and see how it did either in here or or in the edit page if you prefer that you can
see the inspector and you know it looks like it picked out a lot of the stuff that we wanted it to
look at let's mute this we don't need to hear the audio i can hit scroll on the speed dial and just
kind of shuttle through and oh here's a shot i know we he has a reebok shirt on if i zoom in here
this is not the frame the section of frame i want to see so i'm going to select this to reset it
and i'm going to kind of you can see right there in the center is actually the reebok now we're
going to choose instead of object of interest we'll choose reference point so this is an intro
a time when you would want to go in and do that we'll put the little tracker right over his chest
right there the nipple reebok location we'll hit reframe and then i just had that selected so it
kind of just locked on to the logo so reebok would be very happy that we had just done that for them
so those are all good but how do we get it out of here next up i'm going to be showing you how
to use the quick export and actually how to make custom quick exports using the deliver page hold
up i want to take a real quick timeout and say welcome if you're new here to this channel i'm
chadwick this is creative video tips which is all about helping you create videos that make
a difference and stand out if that's something you're into please consider subscribing right
down below right now if you haven't already done so so you don't miss out on the new tip next week
now let's keep cranking away because i have some great tricks that you probably haven't
seen before to get those videos rendered and exported real fast with custom quick exports
so quick export is this little button here in the cut page and it gives you all these little
presets there's h264 which we're probably going to use most of the time there's h.265 which is
more compressed there's prores which is actually prores hq and then there's these social media
ones which are actually the h.264 preset here so i wouldn't bother with those they just have
the ability that you can sign into your account to automatically upload
so that being said quick export is not just here in the cut page if you go to the edit page it
also exists but there's no button for it if you're working in the edit page and you're an edit page
kind of person you can go to file quick export it exists there in fact if you're just the colorist
not not just the colors if you are the colorist which is super important
you can go to file quick export from there as well and you get that same pop-up with those options
but there's only like three options here what if i need more options and i want to get stuff out
quickly that's what i'm going to show you here so if you go to the deliver page you have the
option to create your own custom quick export and the way you create a custom quick export is
by creating a preset first so like i mentioned the prores in the quick export is prores hq pros hq is
big file sizes you probably don't need those for social media posts so one thing you could
do over here is create a custom preset for prores lt so under custom we can choose apple quicktime
prores prores lt that's going to give you a file size that's about half the size as hq but it's
still going to be lte is still it's around 100 megabits per second it's a broadcast quality codec
like that's better than what you would see on most television programs and then under here is
the one thing to take note of is the resolution so we are at 1080 by 1350 so this is our 4x5
instagram post ratio when you create a custom preset it's going to lock in that resolution
so this is going to be our 4x5 version to save it we're going to go to these little
little three dots here and we'll say save as new preset and just name it what it is so you
can find it later so this is pro res lt 4x5 for instance okay maybe we want to also do a prores lt
for portrait or the straight up vertical videos we would just go over here and change this to
1920 and we the rest of the settings are going to be the same and we can say save as new preset
and we'll call this prores lt vertical you know or probably better than that would be to be
more specific like we did before 9x16 and now that we've done that we can actually make those a quick
export by clicking here quick export and we have the option to make little check boxes for those
so now you can see that i have check boxes by both of those we can use those to export our video
so let's jump back to the cut page and kick this thing out so this 4x5 video we had reframed we
just go to quick export and now you'll see instead of just these six export settings we
actually have a sixth one over here or i guess i can't count that's seven and under here we have
our custom ones that we made so this is a four by five sequence so we'll choose prores lt four
by five we'll click export and it's as simple as saying where do i want to send this you hit save
and it starts exporting that's that's it like i said before there's a little bit of a difference
between making these custom ones and that's regarding the resolution so when you use a custom
export it's going to be sticking to whatever resolution you had set it to for instance if i
go back to this other sequence that was 9x16 and i choose quick export and choose this 4x5 setting
it's actually going to put bars on it because it doesn't the aspect ratio is not matching
that 1080 by 1920. so that's something to note that your timeline that you set over here is
it needs to match what your export is unless you use one of the built-in ones so that's the
advantage to using these built-in presets is they automatically see what your timeline resolution is
and they match it so if i choose h264 here it's automatically saying oh this is 1080 by 1920. we
click export and choose our spot and it will also come out really nice and fast using quick export
so what's the best way to get it to our phone to post to instagram without losing quality well if
you're on a mac the easiest thing to do is go over to your finder you can right click on it
and say share apple airdrop or it's it's airdrop and then as long as you're on the
same wi-fi with your phone nearby you can just choose your phone there's my phone right there
and as we speak it is getting blasted over and just like that it is on my phone
so it goes straight into the photos app that's built into there which you can then
find easily in instagram to post with now if you're a windows person
there's definitely options there as well the one i'd probably recommend is everyone has google
accounts these days google drive gives you 15 gigs of free storage if you drag your file into google
drive and then you can have the drive app on your phone that's another way you can get it on there
so you're not trying to text message or email you know sometimes these videos can be a little
large to do that you can just use google drive as well hopefully you found some great new tips
you can use with the new smart reframe and quick export features but if you're looking to dive even
further into learning the ins and outs no pun intended there of editing with davinci resolve
especially using the new speed editor i have a great playlist popping up for you right now
it'll get you up to speed quickly there's so much to learn so i'll see you over in that next video