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Well, hello everybody. Welcome into yet another DaVinci Resolve tutorial.
My name is Nathaniel Dodson from tutvid.com, and today we're going to break
down nodes. The what, why, when, where, how, who - the five w's of journalism,
as I've recently learned. We're going to learn all about nodes, that's what I'm
trying to say. We're going to have a bunch of fun while we're do it. Let's jump
into DaVinci Resolve, and check this thing out right now. Alrighty, here we are
in DaVinci Resolve, and I want to talk about nodes. Nodes are - they're just an
essential part of DaVinci Resolve, you can see them up here. These are your
nodes right here, we only have one node. It's just our first shot that we've
brought in. Nodes are like what Photoshop layers are; they allow you to layer
on effect after effect after effect. I like to use one node for any little thing I'm
going to do. So, really, any time I want to make some kind of change to my
footage, I think I need to add a node. In this particular shot, what I want to do
is add a vignette. I want to change the blue to more of a tealish/green color.
And then I want to change his pants to orange. We're going to use a series of
nodes, in order to do this. So, let's begin with the vignette first. Now, in order to
create a vignette, we're first going to throw a mask onto this node. So, I'm going
to use this window here, you can think of it like a mask. And I'm going to click
the circular mask, and then I'm just going to drag it out, nice and wide. Then I'll
make it a bit taller too. And then down here, on softness, I'll hover over that,
and I'll just increase softness. You can see here, for our nodes, we get a little
preview of what exactly is taking place on that sort of layer. So I can see here,
exactly what my mask is revealing. Now, that's the exact opposite of what
I want. I want that nice, soft edge, but I want to select the bits on the outside.
So, I can hit this little button right here, this is going to invert my mask, you can
see now we're just selecting the stuff on the outside. Now, note, it doesn't
punch a hole in my footage. It still knows that all the footage to be there, it just
knows that whatever effect that is going to be carried with this node, is just
going to attack those areas that we've selected. Now, I'll come over here to my
curves, I'll simply darken up that area, you can see how we're creating this
vignette. Not too, too strong. but you know, we still want it to be noticeable.
Maybe I'll spike the whites a little bit, and just drag the white point down a little
bit to flatten out those dark areas. Now, once you have a node, you can do a
number of things with it. Number one, you can drag it and move it around.
I can select any one of these selecting lines, and delete those lines. But the
problem with that is, then you can see our footage returns to normal, because
what we've got here is -this little, green tab, this is the footage coming in from
our editing area, or our media delivery section, into this editing bay where
we're going to do all of our color editing. So, I want to make sure I drag a line
out of that, and say, yeah, link my footage to this first effect. But you can see,
still, it's not showing me anything, because I need to also link my footage to the
output. So, this is the footage as it's being shipped out and ready for delivery,
so I want to just make sure I link that, as well. So, you always want to make sure
that you've connected all of your nodes. Sometimes, if you right click and choose
"add a new node," these basic, serial nodes is what they're considered, here
they're called correctors; which might be a little confusing, cause I just told you
they're serial nodes. But, here for some reason, we call them correctors. We're
going to add a corrector. And you can see, that there's nothing here on this
corrector. In fact, it's not even in amongst our footage. It's just showing us this
gray. If you create a node this way, which, there's a much easier way to create
them, I'm going to show you in a second. You can always drag it, and when
you see the little plus icon, boom! add it, and it's going to be added within the
context of your node graph. Now, I don't want to use this, so I'm going to right
click. And I'm going to choose delete node, and you can see, it just snaps me
back as I wish. And, as you may well imagine, you read your node graph from
left to right. So, over here, is our first effect that's going to happen, and if I add
more nodes, they're going to kind of pile out to the right. Now, I don't know if
you notice, right there, when I right click, and choose add node, there're a bunch
of different nodes, parallel, and layer, and key mixers, splitters, and combiners.
I'm not going to get into all those here, this is just a very basic - just, how do I think
about nodes? How do I use nodes? There's some really cool stuff you can do with
some of this stuff, but that, we can save for another tutorial. For now, we've
created our vignette. And what I want to do, is create a new node. But I'm going
to use my super special hotkey. Which is not super special, everyone's got it.
It's OPT+S, that would ALT+S on the PC, it just throws a new node in there. It's
beautifully lined up, it looks nice and straight. And, it's all connected the way we
need it to be. Now, just another aside, see this orange outline around the node?
That's the selected node. If we want to get back to the vignette for any reason,
double click it. You'll reselect that, and you can see, we can come in here, and say,
you know what? I actually want to lift the black point to make the vignette really
low contrast in the shadows. I don't want to do that, but I'm just showing you,
giving you an example. You can also hit CMD/CTRL+D to temporarily disable
that node, or you can press the name of the node, which is just this number, right?
So, it just temporarily disables that node. And you can also move nodes around,
so if we decide we want this node to come first, we can do that. But you can see,
these lines get all mixed up, and muddled up, it's kind of a pain in the neck. But,
what you would do, just kind of the quick and dirty way, is select all of these lines
and start deleting them. And then move the number two around, and you would
reconnect it, and, you know, basically drag all these lines together. I'm just going
to undo a bunch of times though, because I don't want to do that. I want my
vignette to come first. And the next thing I'm going to do is do my color treatment.
We've spent enough time talking about the node graph, haven't we? Let's
get onto some color correcting. So I'm going to double click here, on number two,
and I want to, basically, select the blueish area. And change it to more of a teal/
green. So, here in my curves, I'm going to come over here, and I don't want
hue vs. luminance, I want the hue vs. hue. And I'm going to click right around here
to add a point. And I'm going to click right out here to add a point. And now,
in here, I'm going to be affecting everything from like the teals to the - heading
into the magenta range. And if I push up, you can see we're getting all that color
green. If I pull it down, we're getting more of a purple into like a red territory.
I want to push this up into the greens, and then I'm going to come over here to
hue vs. saturation, and we're going to roughly target the same area. And what
I'll do here, is I will - I think I'm going to pull down on the saturation a little bit.
Just kind of something like that. And again, here's an area where we might
want to just preview this. CMD/CTRL+D, there's before; there's after. We've
changed the color of our background there, just like that. Something else I should
mention about the node graft - graph, not graft, it is a graph. You can zoom in on
your node graph and take a closer look, or zoom out if you've got things going
on all over the place. And if you realize your node graph is a huge mess, you
can right click in an empty area, and you can choose clean node graph. And
it'll just give you a nice, evenly spaced area, which I'm going to promptly
mess up. But, if things are a real mess, that can be nice way to quickly go in
and clean things up for you. Now, I want to add yet another node, I'm going to
hit OPT+S, that would be ALT+S on the PC. And the goal is going to be to target
his little pants here, and change the color of them. You can see, because of
the way we're changing the background color, we're getting a bit of a fringe
around the pants. Again, this isn't meant to be perfect, we're just having some
fun here. So, the color change of the pants isn't going to be perfect, but I still
think we can do a pretty decent job. So, I do have node number three selected.
You can see the little orange border around it. I'm going to select the eyedropper
here, which is going to allow me to set what's called a qualifier. Basically, it's
going to say, look, just apply whatever effect we're about to apply to stuff that's
similar to the color, and hue, and saturation, brightness values, found in his pants.
Now, we can always spread, and change where the color is; the width of the color.
Say, you know what? Take into account more of these yellow and orange tones,
and we can soften that to allow it to be gently influenced by the colors around.
I think I will increase the saturation value, and I will change the fade on both ends of
this, as well. And also, I think I will extend to allow it to select more in terms of
the brights and darks, and I will also soften this up, as well. There we go.
Something like that. Now, we can't see anything. We can see up here on our
node, we have selected something that's looking rather pant-ish. But until we
begin really shifting the colors, and whatnot, it's going to be difficult
to see what we've done. Now, we could go back to curves and adjust the colors
there. But I think I'm going to try coming over here and hitting the number two,
and adjusting the temperature. If I crank the temperature up, what do I get?
You can see, the pants are getting noticeably more orange. If I hit CMD/CTRL+D
to shut that off, the pants look almost completely desaturated. So, we're getting
very orange pants. I may try to boost the shadow, see what that looks like.
Yeah, I think that kind of looks cool. Something like that. And what I may need
to do, is come back to the node before it. And try just settling down some of these
colors. Reigning these in a little bit. Something like this. Reign these in, just so
I'm not completely, completely cranking the color that's wrapping around the pant
legs. And see if that can help our pants look a little bit nicer. I'm going to come
back to node number three here, let's go back to our qualifier. Let's extend the
saturation, see if that can help us at all. You can see here, eh, it's helping a little
bit. But not as much as I would like. Maybe I'll try lowering the shadow amount,
and boost the highlight amount here, so we can really just extend what we're
getting. So, again, it's not perfect. But we're getting a decent job - we're doing a
decent job getting it, and you can see, as I cycle through the footage. It is
doing a nice job of tracking it. The problem is, we're also catching stuff on his
face and making that quite orange, as well. So, let's apply a mask, as well,
to this node. This is why nodes are super valuable, because we can isolate the
pants, and this effect just for the pants up on this node, all by itself. But,
that's not enough, because obviously, we are getting a little bit of the skin
on his face that is turning orange. So, let's add a mask here, as well. I think
I'm just going to go with a normal square. And I'm going to begin at his waist
level, cause he just walked straight forward. And I'm going to extend out to the
side here, and then I'll extend down to the front. Whoop! I want to extend
down to the front this way, and then I will just increase the softness, kind of
on all sides here. Just to make a nice, soft transition. Something like that. And
what this is doing, is it's saying, yeah, first use our qualifier to select all the
orange stuff. But then, oh, by the way, only select the orange stuff that's going
to be within this little mask square that we're going to be using. And you're
going to see now, his face is back to it's normal color. And the pants always
stay within that masked area, so we never have to worry about them getting
messed up. So, this is really the power of the nodes. We were able to build
out this effect, and you know, quickly change the way this footage looks. Now,
I can hit this little slash icon, this is going to shut off all - see that bypass all
grades? That's basically going to cancel out all the nodes - not cancel them
out, but just get us to the point where it's like, here was the footage right when
you brought it into DaVinci. And if I uncut the bypass, we're going to see
exactly what we've done. Now, maybe you get to this point, and you realize,
I've completely fouled this up. You can come up to color, and you can do
a number of things. You can reset the selected nodes grade, and that just
takes the selected node, like this. If I go back, and choose reset it - it's going
to reset it to exactly the way it was. Which, in this case, is going to get rid of
our vignette. I'm going to undo that. You can also go reset grades, but
keep the nodes. This is going to undo all of our work, but keep those three
nodes, right? Also, not really what we want to do. And the final option, is just
getting rid of the entire thing. Reset all grades and nodes, which just takes
us back to where we were with one node. So, that is the very basics of working
with nodes in DaVinci Resolve. That's a good way to think about them, there's
a whole lot more you can do with them. Don't be fooled into thinking this is
all you can do with nodes. There is so much you can do with them, because it
is a foundational element of color grading and color correction here in DaVinci
Resolve. The, oh-so, powerful node! And there you have it! That covers the
basics of nodes. There's a lot more time that could be spent talking about nodes,
how they work, what they are, when you should use them, and give examples
of all that stuff. But if you did enjoy this tutorial on the basics of nodes, and how
you can get started using them today, make sure you subscribe to this channel
so you never miss any other video editing tutorials in the future. Also, make sure
you follow me on Instagram. And if Discord is more your thing, you can check
us out over at discord.me/tutvid, where the conversation continues on and on
beyond the end of this video. For checking out nodes, particularly serial nodes,
and previewing, and shutting them off, and layering on effects, and color
grades, and just everything that you do with nodes here in DaVinci Resolve.
Guys, for this one, that's it!
Get it? Got it? Good!
Nathaniel Dodson, tutvid.com, I'll catch you in the next one!
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