What’s going on everyone! Welcome to yet another epic video, which is probably the most exciting video of 2021 on this channel. It is the ultimate crash course on DaVinci Resolve for beginners. This is specifically for colorists. It will be an accelerated course, so check out what we will be covering in this video.

This tutorial assumes that you know nothing about DaVinci Resolve, so we are going to start off by setting up a database, then finish with how to deliver the final video.

        First, when you open DaVinci Resolve, it looks like this.

You need to click on this little guy to open up the side panel that will show all of your databases.

You will only see the local database. Click on new database, then click browse.

It will ask you to select a place to save it. If you have multiple drives inside your PC, you will select your scratch drive. If not, save it on your OS drive. Then name the database. Now right click on the untitled project, save it as DR 17 Film, then open it.

        Once you open DaVinci for the first time, you will probably be inside the media page. It should look like this.

        Now, open up your preferences and we will make some changes.

 Under our user settings, under project save and load, make sure you have the live save and project backups checked. These are two important things.

That’s about it when it comes to preferences. Generally DaVinci is set up pretty well out of the box. So we will hit save in the bottom right corner.

        Now we are going to move onto our project settings. Go ahead and click on that gear icon in the bottom right of your screen. Once you do that, you should see this.

Under the color management tab you will want to change the lookup table interpolation to tetrahedral.

And you will want to check on broadcast safe.

Otherwise, everything can stay as is.

        Now moving to the media page, it’s divided up into three sections. The media storage selection is where you will find all your drives. It will have all of your footage and you can bring it in from there.

You will want to drag and drop the file into the master section at the bottom. Once you have that done, you will right click on the video and say create a new timeline using selected clips.

Now once it’s named, you can double click on it and it’ll open it in the edit page. I’m not going to go through the edit page, but I will show you a very cool technique. If you have a video file that has multiple clips, but it’s one file, you can go up to the top menu options, select timeline and find the “Detect Scene Cuts” option. This will analyze the footage and chop it up based on when the clips change to another clip.

        Now moving into the color page you will have your gallery and LUTs on the left side. You can save references in your gallery tab. You can also save stills by right clicking on the video, and saying grab still.

As you see, those will show up under the stills tab.

        The color page has a lot of features at the top. The timeline brings up blue lines to show where your clip is on the timeline, but I usually leave that off. You can also toggle the clips off and on depending on if you need more screen real estate or not. Once I know what I am doing, I generally turn off the clips for more real estate. The node section you will leave on all the time, since that’s where your grade will be done. Then last is the Open Effects (OFX) which houses a bunch of effects built into Resolve. We will get more into those later.

        Moving now to scopes, I always like to keep my scopes popped open so I can use them when I grade. To do that you will right click on the screen and select show scopes.

This will pop up the scopes, generally in a single scope view, so you will want to click on the four up option.

For the vectorscope, make sure to select “show skin tone indicator” so that you get the skin tone line.

        Now we are going to talk about color space transform. Before we correct all of our shots, I am going to make sure that everything is properly converted to rec.709. Since we know what camera it was shot on, we are going to go into our open effects and input the information for our first shot.

Now we are going to use the CST to convert all the rest of the footage to rec.709, using the camera specs we got from our producer.

        Okay, now we are going to build out our node tree.

This is a bit more in depth than our other shots will be, but I wanted to have a bit more fun with this one.

        Now, starting in our primaries node, I want to add some contrast. Then I want to add a bit of warmth, then take magenta out with my tint. Then I want to pop some color into the image.

        Now under my jacket node, I am going to qualify her jacket. It doesn’t do a great job, so I will have to open the key up.

There we go. We got her jacket selected. But what does this mean?

A layer mixer means that the node above will not mess with anything that was selected in the bottom node, but change anything else.

Now I want to go under my saturation vs saturation and take my saturation down. This creates that Tim Burton effect. I will bring the middle back a bit to keep some saturation.

        Now under my log wheels node, the trick is to crank the highlights up a bit, then use my high range to start selecting her jacket.

        Now my background is a bit too bright, so under our HDR palette node, I am going to use my highlights and lights to darken it.

        Under our midtone detail node, we are going to crank our midtone detail to about 40ish.

        Now under the color warper, what I want to do is grab the green and kill it a bit.

        I want to add another node after the color warper for glow. I am going to go into my OFX and drop in the glow. I am going to change the composite mode to softlight, then bring my spread back and my threshold back a bit. I also want to bring my blend back a bit too.

Then I want to do something more in depth. I want to take the blue square output on my jacket node, and connect it to the blue input on my glow node. Then under the key tab on my glow node, I want to invert the selection so that it doesn’t select my jacket.

        Now we are going to select all our clips and right click on the clips and make them into a group, so that we can apply noise reduction to all of them in a post-group clip.

We will be using the 16mm archival print grain preset. Now the best part about doing the noise reduction in a group post clip is that it is already applied to all three clips. Being able to shave off time in color grading helps immensely.

        So there we go. We finished the first image.

        Alright, now let’s get into the second shot. We are just going to keep it simple. In our second node I am going to use my offset down. Then I am going to add contrast and really push it.

        Now I am going to create another two nodes. The first will be for our HSL (hue, saturation, luminance curves) and the second will be glow. I want to start with our glow. We are going to use our glow OFX and change the composite mode to softlight, then bring back the threshold.

        Then under the HSL node, I am going to dial back the overall saturation.

        Boom. We are done with that. So let’s move onto our next shot. This one is again, properly converted, so we are going to add another node for our primaries. Here we will balance it out by cooling it off in our temperature, then add a bit of magenta in our tint. Then I am going to add some contrast. I will also raise my gamma and gain a bit.

        Now I am going to add another node for our look. Then in my lift, I am going to bring it down towards the teal, then counter that with my gamma and gain and add some warmth.

Then I am going to use my shadow wheel under log wheels to clean up the blacks a bit.

        Now I am going to add another node for glow. I am going to add my glow from my OFX, change the composite mode to softlight and pull back my threshold, add some brightness and then change my spread a bit.

        Now I want to move back to my look node and control the reds in the midtones. I am going to pull down on my gamma and gain a bit to take out some of that red.

Just like that we are done grading all of the images. Now we are going to grab a still of each finished grade. What’s cool is if you somehow reset the whole thing, or try a different grade, you can just reapply the grade from that final still.

        If you want to save the look across the whole database, you can save the still into a powergrade. Stills are for each project, power grades are for the whole database.

        Now if you like the layout you created in DaVinci Resolve, you can go up to the top menu workspace, go to layout presets, and save the layout as a preset so if it resets the layout you can just apply the preset.

        Now we are going to talk about the delivery page. Say you are ready to deliver this to YouTube. There are great presets already loaded at the top which is cool.

Now say we are uploading an H.264 for the web. Under the quality tab, restrict to 40,000 for 1080p. Set it to 80,000 for 4k.

Once you make those changes, click on the three dots at the top and save it as a preset for the next time.

        There you have it guys! Now I know for some this was information overload, so I did take my time creating my masterclass that breaks all of this down into sections. But with that being said, work hard, get obsessed, and stay possessed.

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