longtime fan of category 5 technology tv
raja harvey supported us in our
kickstarter campaign
in order to get us into this beautiful
space back in early 2020.
along with that came the perk to be able
to choose his very own
topic matter for an episode of category
5
and raja chose to learn about our
workflow
and how we use davinci resolve in order
to color grade our video
now while color grading sounds a little
bit technical it's really
just color correction it's enhancing
your video so that it looks a little bit
nicer coming off the camera
so let's jump right into it let's jump
to the past
hey past robbie hey future me how's this
look
you know it looks pretty good but i'm
noticing that you're
pretty blue like we're definitely seeing
uh
some blue clipping going on there well i
tell you what it's a good thing i
brought this white balance card with me
then right
here pause the video now and sample that
in davinci resolve okay
so i'm going to grab the tool to be able
to dopple that wow
any better yeah it looks fantastic
actually with just two mouse clicks
but you're holding up a pretty fancy
looking
white balance card what if somebody
doesn't have such a thing on hand
you know what that's no problem at all i
encounter this all the time when i'm
doing zoom interviews
all you have to do is get the person to
hold up a white piece of printer paper
next to their face
it's flimsy but it'll do in a bind go
ahead and undo that
last action robbie and sample this
okay
there not bad eh no that looks fantastic
actually
and all you're using is just a standard
piece of printer paper
wow all right well let's dig in just a
little deeper
into color correction in davinci resolve
so that doppler on a white piece of
paper has cleaned that up
really really well so you can see the
blue is no longer clipping it's a little
bit higher than the
red which is inevitable because i'm
wearing a blue shirt and i've got a blue
background so keep that in mind
you don't want this to be level across
the board because yeah there is more
blue in that picture
but what i want to do now is i want to
correct the lighting ever so slightly
it's looking pretty
pretty good right out of the box but i
can bring up the gain
and what i want to watch is that i'm not
going to clip any of these
okay so by clipping i mean it's going to
go off of the scopes here so if i
actually bring that up too high
it's going to be see what happens to the
blue channel there and
it's it's like it's over saturated so i
want to keep these
spectrum analysis analyses
uh within this scope here i don't want
it to clip outside of that
but i want to bring it up so that the
lighting is a little more see if it's
too dark
it's going to look like that and you can
see how that affects those graphs
so i can visually see over there that
bringing up
so watch the blue there how i'm just
letting it touch the edge of the scope
i'm not going to go any further than
that because i don't want to clip it
so now if i wanted to i can see that
there is
very little green compared to blue and i
can experiment with okay if i want to
just grab the green a little bit
and just bring that up but i can see
that's actually skewing
the color but i want to you know see
what that does so
see how the the green and i'm looking
over here at the spectrum analysis
so how that affects that
so i can line things up so that
everything is
just right there we go so that's looking
pretty good
my offset is going to bring those down a
little bit into the darker end of the
spectrum so that i can
expand them a little bit further if i
need to but you don't want to
over kill it because you don't want it
to look
like it's been overly enhanced or
digitized but i can
correct certain aspects of lighting now
lighting
is pretty good in our studio but
you know i get a lot of glare off my
forehead and stuff like that so
i can correct that here okay so next
step
is actually to correct some of the
details
in my flesh so
and this could be not only um my actual
skin
like if i have blemishes for example
pimples or something like that
um you can see there's a little bit of a
red spot on my forehead here
um so i can correct that as well
but it can also be to compensate for
some of the graininess
of your camera you can see that the
actual camera itself
is a little bit pixelated so what i'm
going to do
observe that spot on my forehead in
particular
some of the some of my goatee here you
can see a a red spot there on my chin
which looks like a blemish on my face
there's another one right
on this side here so let's let's see
what we can do to correct that and and
we're not getting into
this is not a de facto um how to color
correct in davinci resolve there are
tons of those
on youtube so consider this more how
we at category 5 technology tv because
that's what this series is
how does category 5 whip out episode
after episode
and how do we make it look as good as we
do and sound as good as we do that's
what this series is covering
so consider this as how robbie
um color corrects and enhances the video
for category five
it's not the de facto this is how you
use davinci resolve so consider that
okay so first of all i want to have a
parallel node which is going to be alt
p and this is going to allow me to now
modify things
on this node without affecting the
actual
the main video note so what i want to do
here
is i'm going to add a circle
window here and so i'm going to drag
this up over my face
i'm going to add some feathering on the
edge see how that works
and then i'm going to bring it in to my
face
there we are now i have a really good
advantage here at category 5 technology
tv
in that i am usually very stationary see
that
i'm just barely leaving the frame
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so what i do need to do though is i do i
do leave the frame and i move over there
so i am gonna have to do some tracking
so let's bring up our tracking tool
and i'm gonna hit play from the
beginning and that's actually going to
track my face
there we go so it's it's following my
face now
i'm not happy with the way that it's
the way that it's tracking there you see
what it's what it actually did is it
kind
of went askew so i'm going to change so
that it
it does not rotate it does not enter 3d
space
and it does not zoom because the camera
is stationary
all i want it to do is uh and let's turn
off
tilt let's just go with pan
and let's try that so i've undone now
i'm gonna hit trace
and see now it's just moving left and
right did you see that
so ignore the fact that it changes to
the computer shot so now
that my tracking is done and i'm just
moving back and forth here and you can
see that it's
following my face so when i go
far to the side there that
tracks my face so uh now that the
tracking is done
so if i go back to my circle tool here
and i want to just make sure that it is
my face that is selected so if i bring
down the gain you can see yes it is
only impacting my face because we don't
want to make any changes to the
background right now because what i'm
actually doing is just
improving blemishes and only on my face
so again observe that red spot on my
forehead
and if i just bring down if you look
here mid slash detail
i'm just going to bring that down a
little bit and watch what happens to my
head
look at that it's just like a nice
subtle air brushing you don't want to go
too far and yet i have
let's bring that up just a little bit
and you can see that the detail
is just a little bit softened
but it looks natural so now with that
tracking happening if i press play
it's actually going to do that
feathering
and it's going to follow my face i can
still see the forehead thing that's
not not too bad of a thing if i wanted
to
because that's a red spot and this is
going to be different for
every single video that i produce but
here yeah i do
have a red spot on my head for some
reason so i could actually create
another
parallel node and i could create another
circle and i could place
that circle on that red spot
keep the feather and just place it like
right there
and let's actually track that red spot
so let's put it right there and
follow
okay so now i've tracked that red spot
so it's following it
and let's see if we can very gently
bring down the red just a little bit
so i'm going to grab here and pull down
the red so if i pull down too far watch
what happens see that
uh so it's actually so now if i play
that
see it's following and it's i'm turning
it green
so you don't want to go down that far
but if you can do it just
subtly enough and yet
strong enough that it makes an impact
it's not going to be perfect i'm not
going all out here and spending hours
and hours retouching a video
no i'm doing really simple touch-ups
really really quickly
so now if we look at that video
and let's select our main node that's a
little bit too pronounced i don't like
that
so i'm going to bring up the red just a
bit let's see if i can find kind of a
happy medium
that looks pretty clean so now if i
press play
you can see it's actually following the
the spot and it's following my face
so that whole track is looking a heck of
a lot better
right out the gate so again if i so
let's turn off
both of those so this is the original
video
and i've only spent a couple of seconds
here so now
turn back on both of these and look at
the difference
fantastic okay so next up here's
something that we're going to do for the
sake of today's demonstration but i want
you to hold off on this if you want to
do multicam
shots from a single camera that's a
feature that we're going to be doing
next time
so hold on the vignettes if you're going
to be doing that because i've got a
trick for you but because this is a
single camera shot
i'm actually going to create a serial
node which is alt
s and that serial node is going to now
have
a vignette so i'm going to click into
my uh window mode and click on a circle
once again we love circles
i got a big round melon of a head so it
works really really well
uh so pretend this is a camera lens so
see i'm doing this proportionally
and i want to bring it out like that and
feather the edge
by grabbing the corner it's going to be
proportional so remember the camera lens
being perfectly
circular we want to do that without
skewing it too much so
now if i bring down the gain
quite a bit look at what it does it
turns down the brightness but now
invert that circle and now we've got
this nice vignette around the edge
so if i turn that off that's what it
looks like without
and that's what it looks like with and
that vignette is now applied
as a serial node so it's going to stay
there through the whole video so now if
i press play
it now looks like that
so that is very basic color grading it
gives you a couple of
tips as far as how to use things like
the windows
the um the doppler in order to get the
white balance i always start with white
balance so have a white balance card
handy
have something that is pure white handy
that you can dopple from
and then you can kind of take it one
step further you saw the red spot on my
head
so i was able to touch that up because
that was something that i wanted to do
you might have a pimple
that you want to remove and you can just
kind of brush that up
nice and clean as well so that's really
really easy you can apply
as many parallel nodes as you want so if
you wanted to kind of feather the face a
little bit
to remove blemishes in general
and then if you had one very pronounced
spot you could create another serial
node uh a parallel node pardon me and
remove that spot so by increasing the
feathering on that
it's all very very simple it's just a
nice little trick
to make our youtube videos look better
than they
would if they were just coming right off
of your editor so make sure you give
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and this is a series where i'm showing
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out if you are a content creator or an
aspiring
content creator i've got some great tips
for you over the next several weeks
so thank you for watching and i will see
you again next time bye for now
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you