More great DaVinci Resolve Tutorials

With the recent release of DaVinci Resolve 9.1 there have been a few more great tutorials popping up on the web. Here is a round up of some of the best on offer.

How to add a matte in Resolve 9.1

Coloristo’s colorist Juan Salvo has posted this quick tip on how to add a matte in DaVinci Resolve 9.1 which now allows you to add matte’s to multiple clips simultaneously.

Using Limiters to focus your grade

The chap from Presynkt Productions, walks through how to grade your images to create a teal and orange blockbuster look (using a reference from Gangster Squad). Through a careful use of qualifiers he applies the tonal shifts without introducing a blatant color cast to the whole image. He also applies a film print LUT as part of the grade. If you like this tutorial you should definitely check out these other Presynkt tutorials I’ve blogged about previously.

Grading Skin – Creating Natural Looking Grades

Natural looking skin is key to selling in a grade as its one of the things that we humans recognise any oddities in very quickly as we are so overly familiar with it. (Just ask any animator creating CG humans how difficult it is!) In the tutorial above the chap from Presynkt mentions a technique for grading skin, to avoid getting a plastic looking person, that Australian colorist Juan Melara details in this great post on his blog. It is very much worth a read.

To avoid plastic looking skin I do two things:

1. I make sure there is colour variation within the skin tone.

2. I respect the specular highlights.

Setting Your Mid-tones Correctly

With so many cameras recording a high dynamic range it is important to ensure that you’re making the most of it in post. In this post from Art Adams over on the Pro Video Coalition, you can learn how to hit your ‘exposure sweet spot’ by stretching your contrast in the right places when grading LOG footage for REC 709 delivery.

“In between 20 IRE and 80 IRE the one-stop steps are pulled apart so they are spaced the same distance apart as if they were captured by a camera with a six-stop dynamic range. This is where most important detail in an image falls, such as flesh tone highlights (50-70 IRE). Flesh tone above 80 IRE looks good on some cameras and not so good on others, so when shooting in situations with extreme highlights its good to know how well your camera handles them. The Arri Alexa handles hot skin tone brilliantly. The Sony F3 does not, although the FS700 does. The Canon C300 does well using some gamma curves, but not others.”