(lively electronic music)
- [Ben] Hello and welcome back to part four
of "Pulling the Perfect Key in DaVinci Resolve"
with me, Ben Brownlee from Boris FX.
And this is where we left our hero in the last video.
So we pulled a good key,
we've got a hold in and hold out matte sorted out,
and we've got our spill suppression sorted out as well.
So, all in all, this is looking pretty good,
so the next thing to do is to start the actual work
of compositing this against our background.
(soft electronic music)
The first thing we want to do
is to try and get my background
and my foreground plate a little bit more matched up.
So, at this stage, I probably want to turn on my scopes
if I don't have them on already,
and I've got them just down here.
And the nice thing about our scopes is,
they are actually showing our composite
rather than just showing whatever active clip
that we're working on,
so we can start to use these
to make creative decisions as well.
And at this point, I could add color correction
just using the regular color wheels,
but I do have some basic color correction tools
directly within the Primatte studio.
So I can turn on color correction in the effect,
and I have simple stuff that I might need like temperature,
so I could make the shot warmer or slightly cooler.
I can change tint, so I can push this
towards the magenta, or a bit further towards the green.
It's a little bit too far.
And I have things like saturation,
so I can push the saturation up or down,
and change brightness, contrast, and gamma.
So maybe I, yeah, touch the gamma up a little bit,
and touch the contrast up a little bit as well.
I'm gonna be very careful, looking at the scopes here,
that I don't push the contrast too far
and take this below zero on my parade.
So I just want a tiny bit of contrast.
Any big changes, I can make those
with Resolve's normal color correction tools.
Likewise, I can pop into the vectorscope here,
and I'll go into the options,
and show this is the two-times zoom,
and I can just check to see
if things like my saturation here is well out
of where I expect it to be.
It's not really.
We got quite a cool desaturated look in the skin.
I'm actually quite fine with that.
Before, and after.
I've not made too many big changes here,
just getting things in sort of the right general direction.
The next thing I can do now is start looking
at what I'm doing with the background,
and at this point, I'm gonna turn my timeline back on,
and come into my background clip, which is V1.
So, with the background clip, I want to composite this
in a slightly different way as well.
So, at the moment, everything is in focus,
and that sort of feels a bit wrong.
I kinda want to blur stuff out a little bit more.
So let's open up my nodes,
and as before, I don't really want
to add an open effect to my first clip.
I always keep that saved
if I want to do any color correction to it
at a later date, so I am gonna come in,
up to Nodes, an add another serial node.
And I've got my choice of blurs.
So I could use Resolve's built-in blur.
Probably the lens blur would look quite nice.
Probably not do it too much.
Be a bit more subtle about it.
I want to have a little bit more control
about where I apply this blur,
so instead of using Resolve's lens blur,
I'm gonna have a little search here,
just type in lens at the top.
I'm gonna use the Continuum fast lens blur,
and just apply that over the top instead,
and that'll replace the blur I already had on that node.
In fact, I definitely don't need the iris scale
being that high, I can take that down a lot lower.
I might even come into sizing,
and just see if flipping that is gonna give me
a more interesting result.
Yeah, and I quite like that flipped.
And something that's available
with all the filters is the PixelChooser,
and what the PixelChooser allows us to do is,
it allows us to decide where
in the image we're going to apply our effect,
and if I turn this on,
I can now choose to come down
to my mattes here, and create a selection based
off alpha, or a key, or create a quick luma or channel key,
or I can come into the PixelChooser mask,
and choose one of the shapes that we have here.
So something like a linear gradient.
If I click on View Matte Mask,
we can see where that gradient's going to be.
If I change my rotation up, probably the other way,
minus 90, I think, and change my distance,
and change the gradient start as well.
And the cool thing about the PixelChooser is
that we still have the ability
to interactively work with it in the viewer
using the effects overlays.
So if I turn off my View Matte Mask,
we can now see that we've got our gradient blur
going on in the background.
I'll just update the rotation a little bit here,
change the gradient distance.
Actually, let's turn the matte mask on.
That's gonna make it easier for everyone to see it.
Yeah, change the gradient distance,
and I can even zoom out using the middle mouse,
and just bring that over there.
Alternatively, if I don't want to do
just a simple gradient, because that's obviously something
that we can do directly within the Resolve interface,
I could use a double edge gradient instead,
and this gives me even more flexibility.
Let's just turn the open effects overlay on,
so I can choose where that line
of blurring is gonna be most prevalent.
So something a little bit like that.
And I'll turn the nodes off
so we get a little bit more space for the viewer.
And I'll come up,
and I'll make a few more adjustments to my lens blur.
Add slightly more interesting bokeh there,
touch up the type of blur a little bit.
There we go, and maybe even bring up the highlights,
and take the threshold down.
Not too much, I want to sort of still keep a little bit
of mystery to it.
And make the last, final tweaks,
and let's just play that back, see what's going on.
Cool, and that's starting to look
like a slightly better composite.
What I can even do, at this stage,
because we've got a little bit
of focus shift here,
if we look at the start, I'll zoom in a little bit,
we've got our hero slightly out of focus at the start,
and then he moves into focus,
so I'm gonna just quickly add keyframes
to my iris scale, one where he's properly in focus,
and one at the beginning,
and just kind of take that back a little bit,
just touch that down.
Probably gone a little bit too far there.
We actually don't need a lot to change it.
We just want to make it look
as if that rack focus is happening.
It's a small thing,
but it makes quite a nice difference.
Cool, so now we got the primary color balance sorted,
and we've added an effect to the background
so that that's starting
to match in a little bit more as well.
What we're gonna do in the next exercise is,
we're gonna start to tie things together even more
by creating effects behind our subject
and in front of our subject,
and it's at that point where we can start
to look at the colors of the hair a little bit more,
and actually start to look at those small details
that are gonna make this composite look right.
My name's Ben Brownlee from Boris FX,
and I look forward to seeing you in part five
of "Pulling the Perfect Key in DaVinci Resolve."
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For the latest news and tutorials,
remember to go to borisfx.com.
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