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Going Nodal We’ve now arrived at that strange land we alluded to earlier. If you’re like me and only caught a glimpse of them on the screens of Hollywood-level effects editors and colorists, the idea of working in nodes rather than layers can be really intimidating. It is a completely different paradigm, but with good reason. Layers can only take you so far and then things quickly get complicated, like when you have to make changes to something with lots of precompositions. On the other hand, the more complicated things get, the more useful nodes become. As with Resolve effects, you can do a lot of your work right in the Edit page, so knowing nodes is not essential right off the bat. But once familiar with the basics, layers, whether for color adjustments or effects, can start to feel somewhat clumsy. We’ll start with using nodes in DaVinci Color for the basics and then go a bit deeper with Fusion Effects. Every node layout starts with two boxes: the image coming in and the image going out. The video stream flows from left to right. (Mentally rotate your monitor to the right if you want to imagine it flowing downhill.) Now, when you right click on the line linking the two nodes, you’ll create a Serial node, which appears midstream. In that node, we’ll do our basic luminance corrections, working in the waveform monitor to bring the blacks, peaks and mid-ranges into reasonable places. Next, we’ll insert another serial node for basic color correction, doing what we need to do to make the picture look normal. If you’re working with raw or other 10-bit video codecs, both these nodes are needed to make the video on your screen match what your videographer saw. From that point, you can add additional serial nodes to give the image a certain look. The benefit here is that you’re starting with a well-corrected image and then making changes in a fresh node. Your baseline corrections are never touched. When you get the look you want, grab a still of it for your library. This is more than just a reference, it is a lookup table (LUT) that you can apply to any other clip, much easier than copying and pasting discreet settings from the layers of a shot. Adding additional serial nodes is how you develop specific looks for a scene. You may need to normalize each shot separately, but then you can apply the look to a group of them. At this point, we’re still pretty linear and not too far beyond the realm of layers. But let’s say that in the shot is the image of a white clock face that’s way out of the contrast range displays can handle. For this, you can create a parallel node that streams into another node, rather than being in line with it. For example, if you have a white clock face that gets blown out when you brought up your shadow detail, DaVinci Color has masking tools that make it easy to give it its own color grade. With the new codecs, the detail is still here, it’s just out of display range. We can use the same trick to bring more detail out of the shadows. But this is video and there’s a camera move. No problem. DaVinci Color makes smart tracking super-easy and super-fast. As with the other pages we’ve seen, the Color interface is easy to manipulate, letting you expand and contract the areas your working with without having to switch to a different predefined workspace view. You can pull things apart onto multiple monitors, but if you’re squeezed onto a laptop (taking advantage of the fact that Resolve performs surprisingly well on one), you’ll always be making best use of your precious screen real estate. A big part of learning Resolve’s color grading is following a regular workflow and organization scheme, giving useful names to the nodes. Resolve Color has some useful tools for untangling the node display if things start looking too convoluted.