Best Way to BLUR BACKGROUND in DaVinci Resolve Free & Studio
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Best Way to BLUR BACKGROUND in DaVinci Resolve Free & Studio - In this video editing tutorial, Alli shows you how to blur the background of a clip, to give it a shallow depth of field, bokeh look. Alli shows you how to do this using the free version of DaVinci Resolve as well as the Studio version! We'll be working in the Color Page and looking at how to mask, track, use Lens Blur, Blur Radius and Depth Map!
GENERATED CAPTIONS:
In this video, I'm going to show you how to blur the background of your footage to create that shallow depth bokeh look. There are several different ways that you can do this. I'm going to show you the techniques that I use.
If you're new here, I'm Ali, and I release weekly videos all about editing, gear reviews, as well as videography tips and tricks. If you're into that sort of thing, subscribe to our Channel, and now let's hop into Resolve and get started.
We're working in the color page today, and the first way to blur the background I'll show you works in both the free and Studio paid version of Resolve. First, we can press "P" on the keyboard to make this clip full screen.
To me, these leaves are just so beautiful that they're almost distracting a bit from the subject. For the look I'm going for, I'd actually like to draw more focus onto her. So, let's first create a mask by opening our power window tab and grabbing the pen tool.
Drag your playhead to the beginning of the clip. Let's draw our mask around her by clicking and creating these points to create this outline. For the sake of not boring you to death, I'm going to speed this up a bit. Okay, and I'll connect my last point to the first one here, just drag it a bit so it's covering her. If you need to move any of your points, you can just click on them and drag them where you'd like them to be. Let's go back to fit screen. Awesome.
Okay, so now that we've created a mask around our subject, we have to track it to remain over her as the camera or she moves around in this clip. So let's open up our tracker window, and since our playhead is at the beginning of our shot, we can press on this forward arrow. But if your playhead were somewhere in the middle of your shot, you could choose this double arrow icon to track forward and backward. I'll track forward. Okay, great.
Next, right-click on your node and choose "Add node" -> "Add outside," and you can see here that this shows everything outside of your masked subject. Open up effects, and in the library under Resolve Effects -> Blur, I'll grab "Lens Blur" and drag this effect onto our outside node, and look at that - now our background's blurred. We can use this blur slider to make it a little less blurry or more blurry depending on the look that you're going for. And we can adjust the harshness of the edge of our mask by selecting the first node with the mask on it, and in The Mask window, you can adjust the softness of your mask. I'm going to make mine a little bit softer, and you can also adjust the softness from the inside. You can see as I do this, the inner points show how far into the subject will be affected. I'll just turn off the power window so we can see how this is looking.
Oh, okay, so that's way too much inner softening - the coat and her hat and hair are being softened to a point that it just doesn't look natural. So, turn the power window back on, bring that back to zero. Now let's really push the outside softness to give you an idea of what that does.
Okay, the blurring starts too far away from the subject. So overall, I do like adjusting my inside and outside softness, but I want both to be subtle, so in this case, I'm going to set them to between one and two. Let's check that out. Okay, great, so that did a good job.
Next, I'm going to show you one of my favorite tools in the Studio version of Resolve. It's actually one of the many reasons I recently decided to switch from the free version, and it's called "Depth Map." This tool is great because it lets you isolate the background from the foreground and vice versa. It basically replaces the need to create masks and track them, which is awesome because masking can be time-consuming.
Let's go back to the edit page for a sec. Click on the clip, hold down Alt or Option on your keyboard, and drag it over to create a duplicate. And this duplicate currently has the lens blur effect on it. We want to start from scratch, so right-click, choose "Remove attributes," checkmark "Video attributes" at the top here, which will remove all attributes on the video clip, and press apply.
Let's go back to the color page. Making sure this fresh duplicate clip is selected, go up to the effects library search bar, type in "Depth Map," drop it down to this line, and it will make its own node. Make sure it's selected so we're going to be making adjustments to this effect, but I'll just explain what's going on visually.
By default here, the white or opaque part of our clip shows the foreground, which happens to be our subject in this case. The background is black, and anything black will be transparent and unaffected. When we add our blur effect, the gray areas will be somewhat affected - they're somewhat transparent. And in the effects settings, we're going to adjust these parameters to separate our subject from the background as best we can.
I typically change quality to "Better," but it does use more of your computer's processing power and slow things down. Under "Resulting map adjustment," checkmark "Adjust map levels." First, we'll work with "Far limit," which is the farther background part of our clip, and I want to drag this "Far limit" slider to try and make as much of the background separate from the opaque subject as possible.
Adjusting "Near limit" will affect the foreground white part of this clip. Currently, it's more gray than white, so I'm going to just adjust it a bit. Okay, that should be good. And "Gamma" affects the fade or transition between the foreground and background.
Every clip is different, so you want to work between these three adjustments until you have your subject as separated from the background as possible. If I were to put the blur effect on this clip now, the lady would be blurred out, and the background would be unaffected. We want the opposite; we want the background to be blurred. So let's next checkmark "Invert." That makes our background opaque. I'm not gonna get into isolating specific depth in this tutorial because it selects different depths more harshly, and overall, I prefer working with far and near limits like you just saw.
Great! So next, let's right-click, add node -> add serial. I'll just move this over and connect this blue to this blue. With our second node selected, let's turn this depth map preview off so we can see how our clip's affected. Okay, select our new node and click on the blur icon. And I'm going to show you "Blur Radius." If you were to drag the radius slider up, it increases the blur, and dragging it down makes things look sharper. I'm happy with around 67. Let's check this out.
For now, it looks decent, but I'd like the transition from the edge of her coat and her hat and hair to the background to blur more gradually. We can select our depth map node, and I'm going to zoom way in here so you can see what this does. Go up to the map finesse, checkmark "Post Processing," which will make that fade more smooth and visually appealing. This is it off, on, off, on.
And you could further adjust these parameters. "Post Filter" considers details like hair. By default, it's set to 0.5. I'll adjust the slider all the way to the left and now to the right. Okay, let's just move over so we can see more of her hat.
"Contract/Expand" by default is set to zero. Let's bring this slider to the left. You can see how that's affecting the rim of her hat. Expanded all the way to the right. Okay, that's showing more detail in the hat but also around the edges of the background. I'm liking somewhere around 0.37.
And let's check out what the blur slider does. Okay, I'm liking around 0.48. I'm happy with this. So let's check it out for the background of your footage in Resolve.
I hope you found this video helpful. If you did, I'd love to hear from you. Let me know in the comments below. If you want to know the gear that we use and recommend or the music that you're hearing throughout this video, check out the description. Thanks for being here. I hope you have a lovely rest your day, and we'll see you in another video.
SUBSCRIBE ON YOUTUBE FOR MORE! (200+ FILMMAKING TUTORIALS):
➜ https://youtube.com/alliandwill
🎵MUSIC & SOUND FX WE USE IN OUR VIDEOS🎵
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👉GET 50% OFF OUR PRODUCTS:
➜ https://alliandwill.com/featuredproducts
👉VISIT OUR AMAZON STOREFRONTS:
➜FOR VIDEO EDITING: https://amzn.to/3XSlIHj
➜FOR FILMING: https://amzn.to/3EB8DuZ
OUR VIDEOS ARE EDITED IN ADOBE PREMIERE PRO. GET IT HERE:
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