compound clips are a great way to apply a single effect and simplify a sequence of clips but
they're also a pain in the butt because you got to click to step into them when you need to make
a quick trim re-arrange them with my favorite swap clips shortcut that's command shift comma
or period control on a pc and adjust the scale you just can't quickly see from a broad bird's
eye view what clips have effects applied to them so today i have five killer creative ways that i
use adjustment clips instead of nested compound clips and if you stick around into the end i'm
going to show you how to save the adjustment layers to reuse them in any future project
what's an adjustment clip well i'm so glad you asked adjustment clips are an empty shell of a
clip that's useful for applying effects changing inspector parameters like transforms and applying
color grades think of them as a clear clip that's super useful because they affect every clip that's
underneath it on the timeline including animations across a whole range of clips you can rename them
color them and store them in your media pool project bins and they're available in
the effects library on the edit page inside the toolbox and under effects punch in have
you ever shot a talking head interview looking directly into the camera in 4k you can use an
adjustment clip to quickly punch in and give the appearance that you've changed to a tighter lens
often this is better than using a second camera angle because your eyes can stay locked into the
lens to connect to your audience just grab a fresh adjustment clip from the effects library toolbox
effects and drag it to a layer above your talking head now select it and open the inspector in the
upper right so you can drag to increase the zoom value higher than one play before the adjustment
clip and you'll see the punch-in effect just like you've cut to a tighter lens this is perfect for
grabbing someone's attention really quickly now let's take this tip to the next level by adding
the grid effect to another adjustment clip to keep our eye line at the same vertical position click
on your open effects and search the word grid the grid effect is a resolve fx that will help us keep
those eyes in the same position after punching into the shot it's davinci resolve's version of
having alignment guides and it's also an excellent tool that you can use to rotate and level out your
horizon line of your shots drag your row cells count down to two and column cells down to one and
finally move the tilt parameter to the location where i want the eyes to be positioned and set
my guide across both clips to match them up tweak the shots until they're perfect and of course turn
the switch off once you're all done so the guide won't render in your final export continuous push
i do a lot of interview style videos that get visual support with photos as b-roll and a cool
way to build some energy or suspense is to push in slowly across multiple photographs in a sequence
think of this as a ken burns push but moving continuously across your cuts it's like ken burns
2.0 now step one is to matte the photos to the same size and i use the transform effect for that
then drag a new adjustment clip on a track above to cover the length of the whole segment of photos
and use the inspector's video transform to set a start keyframe at the first frame and then
move the playhead to the end of the adjustment layer and set a new keyframe just by increasing
the zoom parameter since you already placed an initial keyframe davinci resolve is smart enough
to create a second keyframe automatically it's doing the math for us to get from keyframe a to b
play the timeline down and you'll have a nice subtle push that continues to carry the position
and size from the clip across cuts which is my favorite type of transition but i know everyone
loves a good whip pan transition so that's what's up next whip pans to do a whip pan that looks
realistic we're going to use the fusion page start by dropping your adjustment clip above and across
a cut of two clips on the edit page select the adjustment clip and right click to open in fusion
page now to create the whip pane transition on the adjustment clip tap shift with spacebar to pull up
the tools list type in transform and we want the newer plain jane transform not the xf transform
because the motion blur behaves how we'd like for this specific transition under the advanced
options choose the edge behavior to wrap around this is like the offset effect if you're coming
from adobe and it kind of loops around like a skipping frame in an old projector now set three
keyframes i'll set one four frames before the cut and change the position to negative one then move
to the cut point and set the keyframe here to negative point five this is our midway point
and then set the last keyframe four frames later and set that value to zero so we went
negative one to negative point five on the cut and landing on zero now open the spline editor
select the position check box and click the zoom to fit button so you can see every keyframe easily
and smooth the keyframes by dragging the mouse to select them and tapping s to smooth them out as to
smooth them out if you want to finesse it select the keyframe and tap t for transition and adjust
the curve with ease in and out numbers right here and of course you can click and drag the handles
on the middle keyframe to taste if you haven't used the spline editor in fusion this is one of my
favorite reasons for learning the fusion page it's just much more controllable than edit page splines
for smoother animations it lets the animation start slow get fast and then slow down which
is how physics move in real life and then we're gonna turn on motion blur with the slider all
the way up to one and now check that transition out pretty sweet it's still not as magical to
me as a hard cut but i can get on board with that and if possible try to match the camera direction
on the move to help sell the effect a little bit better hey i'm calling a real quick time out to
welcome you if you're new here i'm chadwick this is creative video tips which is here to help you
create videos that make a difference and stand out i love teaching pro editing tricks that you're not
going to find in the manual for davinci resolve so if you're into that subscribe right now like right
now i'll wait so you don't miss out on next week's tip the cut down trick this tip is so simple
but so powerful you're gonna wonder why you've never used it before now i have a background in
assisting and cutting 15 and 30 second commercial tv spots and a critical aspect of cutting what's
called a lift for making a 15 is actually cutting it down to exactly 15 seconds also a great way to
audition out a few different versions of 15 second spots is to have each of them on the
same timeline at once but to see a bird's eye view of the timeline constraint i'll use an
adjustment clip that's exactly 15 seconds long on a track above and i'll disable auto select control
you could also lock the video track now you can visualize how much time you've got left
to work with on your timeline without marking an in and out every time you make a quick trim
color grade perhaps an obvious creative use for an adjustment layer or clip is to color grade
heck i've been doing that for years in photoshop so let's say you have a series of log encoded
clips that require the same base color correction to make them look you know a little bit more
normal just drop your adjustment clip above go to the color page and start doing your tweaks on the
adjustment clip i'll add a color space transform because it's fast and accurate and there you go
a quick side note here is that i actually rarely use adjustment clips in davinci resolve for color
grades because i prefer a cleaner timeline there's remote grades and group functionality that's so
powerful so that's just how i like to work but that's a tutorial for another day and i know if
you're used to this workflow from premiere or final cut pro just know it's possible here in
resolve too oh and a double side note another great way to convert log encoded footage to rec
709 and start a color grade is using resolve color management which is an incredible and unique super
power of resolve i'm gonna link that tutorial in the description power bin adjustment clips
so now that you've learned five unique ways to use adjustment clips i bet you'd love to save
them right maybe use them in your next project i do that by simply dragging the adjustment clip
from the timeline up to a power bin if your power bins aren't visible in your media pool then go up
under the view menu and check the box for show power bins now anytime you create a new project
in the same project library or even open an older project in that same database you're going to have
access to that saved adjustment clip for your next masterpiece you can also click on the name
to give it something with a little more specific meaning so you'll understand what it does later on
thank you so much for hanging out today i'm working on outlining tons of davinci resolve
18 tutorials for this year so do me a favor and let me know in the comments right now what area of
resolve that you need help with and it might make it into a future tutorial i appreciate you more
than you know and there should be something on screen right now that youtube thinks you're going
to like so check that out and because there's so much more to learn i'll see in that next video