NODES For Beginners in DaVinci Resolve: EASY AND FAST

Dec. 30

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NODES For Beginners in DaVinci Resolve: EASY AND FAST - In this video Alli teaches you how to think about and how to work with Nodes for Beginners in DaVinci Resolve. If you're an absolute beginner when it comes to working with Nodes this video will help you out. Alli sticks to the basics when it comes to Nodes, focusing on Serial Nodes.

GENERATED CAPTIONS:

If you're completely confused by nodes and don't know where to start, this video is for you. I'm going to be super beginner-friendly in explaining nodes so that by the end of this video, you'll understand them and be comfortable working with them. I'm also going to share some beginner troubleshooting tips so if you accidentally disconnect one node from another or you delete one, you'll know what to do.

We'll be working with nodes in the color page today, not Fusion, because the color page is an easier place to learn them. If you're new here, I'm Ally and Will, and I release weekly videos all about working in DaVinci Resolve, videography tips and tricks, as well as gear reviews. To stay in the loop, subscribe to our Channel. Now, let's hop into Resolve and get started.

As you may or may not know, all of these pages in Resolve work together to allow you to perform different steps of the editing process on your footage and other media assets. So, if you have no footage on your timeline here in the edit page, when we go to the color page and look at our node graph, no nodes exist. Let's go back to the edit page. For a node to exist, you have to have footage on your timeline. I'll just add a few clips here.

Another thing to be aware of is whichever clip your playhead is over is the clip that will show in your program window when you pop over to the color page, and you can tell your clip is selected because it's highlighted in red here. If you want to view a different part of the clip, maybe to reference adding effects or color adjustments, you can use this slider here. If, for some reason, you can't see your node graph, click on nodes. I'll click again, and there it is.

I have my effects Library open, which we're going to be using soon, but just to show you, if you want more space, you can click on effects to close it. I also find it super helpful to see these little thumbnails of each of my clips that are on my timeline here. To make sure you can see them, go up to Clips here and click on it. If you want to work on a different clip, you can select it here, and by default, a node just exists for each clip, which you can think of like a blank placeholder for you to add an effect or color adjustment to.

Okay, so let's talk about how to think about working with nodes. First off, you can think of working on your video project as going through a series of steps to achieve the final look, similar to an assembly line. When you work with nodes, each step represents a specific image processing task. This could be something like adjusting contrast, color balance, or adding special effects. A node is like a single step in that assembly line, and this makes it easier to manage and fine-tune different aspects of your grade.

The next thing to know is nodes are connected in a sequence to create a workflow. The output of one node becomes the input for the next node. As I said earlier, there are a ton of different types of nodes, many that are quite advanced, and truly, in my opinion, unless you intend on becoming a pro colorist, for example, I wouldn't worry about learning them at this stage. And even if you do intend to become a pro colorist, you still need to learn the most simple type of node, which is a Serial node.

A Serial node is the most basic and very commonly used type of node. In a Serial node structure, each node processes the image one after another in a linear fashion. I know this might sound a bit confusing now, but as we continue on, you'll get it more. This sequential flow is what lets you organize and control the adjustments you make to your footage. Nodes can easily be reordered or turned off and back on again, which is really handy if you want to toggle on and off certain effects or color adjustments that you've made to see their impact.

So first, we're going to get nice and acquainted with nodes by throwing some effects on them. And then afterward, we're going to build a node tree. Sounds more intimidating than it is. By working with color in Effects Library, scroll down, and let's grab vignettes. Drag this effect right onto our node, and as you can see, it automatically shows. Now, depending on the effect, it may auto-show like this, or you may have to make adjustments in the settings here to see what that effect can do.

I'll just use this slider to increase the size of my node a bit. Oops, and oh no, I can't see my node anymore. Well, that's okay because you can grab this hand tool here, click on an empty part of your node graph, and drag up to show your node again. I made this node bigger because I wanted to show you that when I added my vignette, a little effects icon now shows to indicate there is an effect on this node. And if you hover over your node, it will show you the name of whichever effect or color adjustments are on it.

This little green dot here represents our original image. This connects to our first node containing a vignette effect and is connected to this little green dot on the end, which is our output. If you accidentally click on this connecting line here, you may disconnect it, and now, look, even though we know a vignette is on our node, we can't see it at this stage. When it comes to reconnecting nodes, what you should know is that you can click and hold on this green dot and drag it to this green triangle, and there we go, we can see our effect again.

Now, a good workflow when it comes to nodes is to add new nodes as you want to add additional effects or color adjustments to your clip. Since we already have the vignette effect on our first node, if we were to try and put another effect on it, it would just replace the first effect. The vignette would have been replaced by camera shake. Okay, just going to undo that. So just keep in mind if you want to add multiple effects to one clip, you're going to have to create a second node to put your second effect on, and so forth.

To add another node, you can right-click on your current node and choose Add Node > Add Serial. This will add a second node in a sequential order. Whichever effect we have on our first node will show on this second empty placeholder. So now, when we drag the camera shake effect onto our second node, we see the vignette as well as the camera shake on this clip.

As you start working more and more with nodes, it's really helpful to stay nice and organized by labeling them. So let's right-click on the first node, choose Node Label, and I'll call this one Vignette. Very creative, I know. Right-click on the second node, label, call this Camera Shake. If you want to delete a node, you can select it and press delete on your keyboard. Just undo that. Or if you want to keep the node but remove the effect on it so it's a blank placeholder again, you can right-click on it and choose Reset Node Grade, and now camera shake is gone, and it's just a blank node. I'll just undo that.

If you want to turn off these effects quickly, we can select both nodes and hit Command D or Control D to turn them off and on again. Another nice way to add new effects is by grabbing one from the Effect Library here and dragging it over this connection line, dropping it, and now our third node with the film grain effect is created. And what I like about this is a node label has been created for that specific effect. I'm just going to close this to get more screen real estate on our node graph here.

Let's say, for some wild reason, you've deleted all of your nodes so your node graph is completely blank. You can either use the keyboard shortcut Option + S. There we go, we have a node again. Or I'll just undo that. Or you could right-click and choose Reset All Grades and Nodes.

Now, I'd like to show you the wrong way to work with nodes when it comes to doing a simple color grade. And then, after, I'm going to show you the right way to do it. So if you were going to do what I'm going to show you, yes, technically, you could get away with it, but it just basically defeats the purpose of working with nodes at all. And it makes it a lot harder to fine-tune adjustments. You'll see what I mean.

Okay, so we've got our clip. Let's say that we want to adjust some of our primary color wheels and then adjust our color temperature. Oh, and then maybe you want to go into curves and make some more adjustments. Okay, this isn't the look you're going for. So you want to determine which adjustments you may have pushed too far or too little. But because you've made multiple color adjustments all on one node, you can't just turn off the specific color adjustment that you made to see how that's specifically affecting the look of your image. It's messy, it's disorganized, it's just not the best way to do things.

So let's undo that, and now we're going to create a node tree, which is the best practice when you're working with color and nodes. So on our first node, we can name it Exposure, and in our primary color wheels, we could adjust the gamma to work on the brightness of our midtones. And that's all I'm going to do on this node. Let's press Option + S on our keyboard to create a second node. Name it Temperature. With that second node selected, we can adjust the temperature, and if you want to check out the difference you've made with that adjustment, you can click on the number two to turn it off, click again to turn it back on.

Option + S to add a third node. Let's call this one Contrast. Make some adjustments in our curves graph. Okay, I want to turn off our contrast node only to see the difference. Okay, you've just created your first node tree. Congratulations.

Let's say as you're working with your nodes, you've moved them around, and they're just looking messed up and cluttered. If you need to reset your node structure, all you've got to do is right-click on the Node graph and select Clean Up Node Graph. Awesome, there you go.

So those are my beginner tips, tricks, and troubleshooting must-knows when it comes to working with nodes. If you want to know our absolute favorite hard drive or the gear that we recommend and use, check out the description below. For weekly DaVinci Resolve editing tutorials, gear reviews, and videography tips and tricks, subscribe to our channel. I hope you have a lovely day. Thank you so much for checking this video out, and we will see you in another one.

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Alli and Will https://alliandwill.com

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