Tutorials for Beginners: Davinci Resolve 10 Lite

[vickersdc]

Hi everyone,

I've been asked some questions about using Davinci Resolve to grade raw footage from the raw recording of Canon + ML, so I've started to create some tutorials about how to get it working.

Resolve is just amazing, but if you are a first-time user of it, it can be completely overwhelming and you can spend hours looking for information on how to complete the most basic of things - like finding your media files to include in your project, or setting up the project defaults.

There will be odd little snippets of useful information too - like using the BMD Film colour space to get a good starting point for grading the raw image, etc.

The tutorials are / will be based on Davinci Resolve 10 Lite, and clips shot with a Canon 600D running a nightly build of ML.

You can find them at http://www.davidvickers.co.uk, and more specifically the first four are up...

Davinci Resolve Part 01: Creating a project (link - http://www.davidvickers.co.uk/2013/12/davinci-resolve-part-01.html)
Davinci Resolve Part 02: Configuring master project settings (link - http://www.davidvickers.co.uk/2013/12/davinci-resolve-part-02.html)
Davinci Resolve Part 03: Configuring camera raw settings (link - http://www.davidvickers.co.uk/2013/12/davinci-resolve-part-03-configuring.html)
Davinci Resolve Part 04: Renaming a project (link - http://www.davidvickers.co.uk/2013/12/davinci-resolve-part-04-renaming.html)

Hope these, and the future tutorials will be useful to someone!

All the best,
David.

[godweeno]

Awesome!  I'm sure this will help a lot those people out there just starting with Davinci Resolve.  I've been using a Resolve for 6 months now and a couple of these steps I did not know about.

Thanks!

[vickersdc]

No worries, I'm glad you found it useful

Further to my earlier post, Part 5: Finding Your Media is now available at http://www.davidvickers.co.uk/2013/12/davinci-resolve-part-05-finding-your.html. This takes a look at how to add new libraries that contain your media files into Resolve.

[vickersdc]

I've now added a further group of tutorials to help beginners to Davinci Resolve; they are:

Davinci Resolve: Part 06. Media window basics. http://www.davidvickers.co.uk/2013/12/davinci-resolve-part-06-media-window.html
Davinci Resolve: Part 07. The Edit window. http://www.davidvickers.co.uk/2013/12/davinci-resolve-part-07-edit-window.html
Davinci Resolve: Part 08. Adding to the timeline. http://www.davidvickers.co.uk/2013/12/davinci-resolve-part-08-adding-to.html

At the time of writing the tutorials get you to a point where you have setup your libraries, added clips to the media pool, created a timeline and added clips to it. The next series of tutorials will be looking at the Color window where you can start colour correction and grading.

Let me know if there is anything you would like me to add, or if there is something that you want to make sure I cover.

Good luck,
David.

[godweeno]

Cool I'm looking forward to your color correction and grading tutorials!

[Canon eos m]

Awesome. Have my bearings now. Had abandoned Da10 and moved on to Speedgrade CC. Reading your tuts, want to give it another shot. Thanks!

[vickersdc]

I so pleased that people are finding it useful - Resolve is an amazing tool, and so powerful. I'm amazed that the Lite version is free! Anyway, been busy again and added some more tutorials that start moving us towards colour correction and grading.

Davinci Resolve: Part 09: The Color window (preview pane) - http://www.davidvickers.co.uk/2014/01/davinci-resolve-part-09-color-window.html
Davinci Resolve: Part 10: The Color window (waveforms) - http://www.davidvickers.co.uk/2014/01/davinci-resolve-10-color-window.html
Davinci Resolve: Part 11: The Color window continued - http://www.davidvickers.co.uk/2014/01/davinci-resolve-part-11-color-window.html

Happy New Year to all of you!

David.

[vickersdc]

If you are new to Davinci Resolve, then this might interest you - just to show the sort of thing you can do with it...

Although this is somewhat jumping ahead in the Davinci Resolve tutorials, I'm adding this one in as I was asked how to deal with a problem one videographer had had when shooting a differential focus. The foreground object had been lit properly and resulted in a well-exposed subject, but when shifting focus to the background subject it was found that it was under-exposed.

What was needed was a solution that allowed the exposure to be brought up on the background object, without over-exposing the foreground. The easiest way would be to set up a qualifier to only affect the background object, but I thought that a nicer solution might be to have the exposure increased on the background, and brought down on the foreground, as the focus shifted. This would have the effect of supporting the focus shift.

To find out how it was done, read on...

In order to provide a solution, we were going to need qualifiers and keyframes - how would you solve this problem?

Watch the video to find out how I did it...

Find more tutorials at http://www.davidvickers.co.uk

[vickersdc]

To make things a bit easier on finding the tutorials, I've now added a dropdown list on the right-hand side of the website at http://www.davidvickers.co.uk - I've also written a few more and these will be coming out over the next few day. They are looking at the color wheels and we start making some basic corrections to the clips.

If you use the tutorials, please do drop me a quick line to let me know how you are getting on with them or if there's something you want covered in this beginners series.

All the best,
David.

[sebble]

Thanks David for writing those Tutorials.
This is a huge help for me.

What I'm really interested in is how to work with all the different node types in Resolve.

[vickersdc]

Okay - nodes can be confusing - serial, parallel, outside and so on. I'll be taking a look at those in due course, next week we finish off on our tour around the Color window (making some adjustments as we go), then the following week I'm hoping to start colour correction and grading (and that means adding nodes).

It may help to think of serial nodes as layers, as you would find in other photo / video editing packages, so you might want to do your basic colour corrections in Node 1, then apply some grading in a new serial node (Node 2), then add another serial node (Node 3) and an outside node (Node 4).

Select Node 3, add in a power window to select part of the image and make your adjustments - they will only affect what's inside the power window.

Now go to Node 4 and make some more changes... Node 4 is an outside node, so it will only affect anything outside of the power window you set in Node 3.

Does that help a little bit?

Parallel nodes are also really useful, and I sometimes use them for dealing with skies - but more on that later

[sebble]

Does that help a little bit?

That does help a lot.
Thank you very much.

Can't wait for you to go into more detail though.

[vickersdc]

That does help a lot.
Thank you very much.

Can't wait for you to go into more detail though.

Great! Don't forget the shortcuts too...

Alt+C adds in a serial node and a circular power window at the same time.
Alt+Q does the same, but gives you a rectangular window, and...
Alt+B does the same but allows you to build your own shape by adding points.

[vickersdc]

So, to accompany the tutorials over at http://www.davidvickers.co.uk, I've just created the first of the training videos - see what you think...

[Canon eos m]

The extreme top left end of the Color screen in DVR10 is showing a variable fps ranging from 19-29fps. What can I do to keep the rate steady?

[Canon eos m]

The extreme top left end of the Color screen in DVR10 is showing a variable fps ranging from 19-29fps. What can I do to keep the rate steady?

I also do not see the "timeline frame rate" box in the first screen.

[vickersdc]

The extreme top left end of the Color screen in DVR10 is showing a variable fps ranging from 19-29fps. What can I do to keep the rate steady?

That change in variable frame rate is when you play back your footage - it is showing you what rate the frames are being played. The only way to up this and get a good frame rate is a bigger, more powerful, machine!

[vickersdc]

I've put up another video tutorial on Vimeo - it's out of sequence, but as I was asked about it specifically, I've put it up - it covers synchronising audio and video within Davinci Resolve...

[kgv5]

Thank you, it is a great stuff  I have problem with outputting files with sound (48kzh wavs from snd_rec). Sound is on the timeline, i can playback wavs and dngs with sound in resolve but cannot properly export. When i import those outputted clips to premiere there is sound on the timeline but its kind of "empty", flat line. I checked "render sound" option in resolve, it is supposed to output 2 channels in 16bit (but tried different settings), i tried also to change volume - nothing. Is it something i missed? (resolve 10.0.2, win7 64bit).
Waiting for your exporting tutorial.

[vickersdc]

I've been putting the tutorial videos up on a new Vimeo channel at https://vimeo.com/channels/653502 - there's a couple more videos that haven't appeared here and a couple to go up...

Video tutorial 2:

Video tutorial 3:

[Danne]

Thanks for all the contribution. I,m about to dig in and learn the program so this is hopefully spot on. About the videos. Are the numbering corresponding to the steps on your page?
 

[vickersdc]

Thanks for all the contribution. I,m about to dig in and learn the program so this is hopefully spot on. About the videos. Are the numbering corresponding to the steps on your page?

Good luck - and I hope the videos and written tutorials over at http://www.davidvickers.co.uk help you find your way around. There are more tutorials planned, but I have to fit them in around my work schedule (which is pretty hectic at the moment). The video tutorials roughly follow the overall sequence of the written stuff, and you can read the tutorials then get a slightly more in-depth view from the the videos.

Video tutorial 5 is complete, but I need to finish off video 4 still - then I can post both of them up. So keep posted - I've currently got 12 video tutorials planned...

[Danne]

Awesome

[vickersdc]

The next two video tutorials are up and ready to view...

Tutorial #4 introduces the lift, gamma and gain colour wheels for primary colour correction... and how to reset them (as there are three different ways to reset these controls, and each has a different effect, it's worth knowing which one to use!).

Tutorial #5 introduces the camera raw settings.

[thehadgi]

thank you so much!