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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1401427
Getting the Look Working with the color wheels one usually associates with grading is not the easiest place to start. They can be difficult to manipulate with a mouse, which is why people who do this for a living use physical control surfaces. Blackmagic Design’s are among the best. They go from the Micro ($1,025) to Mini ($3,079) to Advanced ($30K+). Fortunately for us newbies, Resolve has a much more accessible way to get started, an optional sliding bar interface in place of the wheels, which provide much finer control with a mouse (they respond to a scroll wheel by default). The wheels and bars provide individual control for each color channel, red, green, blue, and luminance (Y). A master slider underneath gangs them together to adjust the tonal ranges of the image. Surrounding these are other more global controls for things like color temperature, saturation, and detail. For grading, the bottom right part of the screen is dedicated to your scopes. This section doubles as the keyframe interface, which let you easily change grades or modify and move masks within a shot. Like Fairlight Audio, how deeply you want to dive in to color grading is up to you, however Resolve makes the basics reasonably easy to master, particularly with the training that Blackmagic provides. Nodes and Effects With an idea of how color grading works with nodes, using the same principle for effects becomes a little clearer. But effects often involve compositing multiple sources and this is where a node-based workflow really shines. Unlike DaVinci Color, Resolve Effects can have as many input sources as you need. And those sources can be fed by their own sources. This comes about through Merge nodes: a “stream” that feeds into the main video “river” or another stream. Where they appear in the stack of elements is determined by the order they appear in the stream, from left to right. The big payoff with using nodes for compositing effects comes when you need to add an effect to a source, like simply recoloring it or adding a shadow to the 3D monster walking through the scene. They change things when the video source flows through them. This makes it quite easy to add an effect to just one element joining the composite or all the elements brought in afterward, but none before. It quickly becomes clear where things belong and what effect affects which source. And, at the risk of getting too “meta,” effects can be layered on to affect other effects. Even a relative rookie like myself was less often surprised by unexpected consequences downstream of the element I was working on. The Fusion effects interface starts out, anyway, as one of the least cluttered of all the pages. The two viewer at the top can be assigned to anything you like. Drag a node in the direction of the viewer and you will see what it’s doing. The viewer at the right is most often the media output at the end of the network of nodes and the left can be assigned to whatever component your working on. The right column is the Inspector panel. Your toolbar runs horizontally mid-screen to cover the operations you’ll be doing the most. The rest are under the Effects Library tab at top. The layout is ideal for focusing on exactly the element you’re working on, while keeping an eye on the final result. Setting keyframes is as easy as turning them on in the Info panel. There are a few different enlarged views that are easily opened up in the timeline area to fine-tune them, adding, removing, or adjusting their velocity, where there is an abundance of room for adjusting the splines to control motion.