How to get the VHS look - DaVinci Resolve 17 Tutorial

What’s going on everyone! Welcome to another awesome tutorial. Today we are going to be creating the VHS look. It is a cool effect, used in specific types of videos.

        The first thing we are going to do is analyze this footage. The first thing you’ll notice is it’s a rec.709 image. Not a log image.

This makes things a bit more challenging. You’ll notice that the highlights are close to clipping, so we will have to control that and find a way to bring them back, but still achieve what we are going for.

        Let’s get the node tree built out.

        The first thing I am going to do is apply a film print emulation LUT, specifically the rec.709 Fujifilm 3513DI D55.

        Now we are going to our CST node and change our output gamma to find Cineon Film Log.

        Moving to the primary node, I am going to drop our gain a bit.

        Now moving to our highlights node, I am going to use my luminance qualifier to select just the highlights.

Then I am going to pull down on my gain.

        Now moving onto our film damage node, we are going to add our film damage OFX. Once you drop it on, it does too much and it’s unrealistic. Let’s go ahead and turn off our dirt and film scratch.

I am using this to just dirty up the image. Nothing more. Now I want to adjust the parameters. I want to bring back the film blur and also the temp shift to bring back some of that color we had.

        Now moving onto our VHS node, we are going to drop on the analog damage OFX. As soon as you drop it on, you may think boom. Done.

But let’s first adjust some parameters. The first thing we are going to do is select the 1990s preset.

Now it’s clean, but not pushed enough. So let’s play around more with the parameters.

        Now you can see that dirtying up the image added too much color into the shadows. So we are going to use our shadow color wheel in our log wheels to pull out that color. We will also control it with our low range.

        Now our highlights are blown out again just a bit so we are going to go back to our highlights node and pull back on our gain just a bit.

        Now our vectorscope shows the skintones a bit too green, so we are going to use our offset wheel in our primaries node, to pull out some of that green.

        Boom, we are done with this look. Just look at how awesome this look is. Let’s check it out in full screen.

         As you can see there are so many ways to creating this look. You can be on a very extreme side, or you can do what we did and keep it tasteful. With that, I will see you in the next tutorial!

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