From the course: DaVinci Resolve 12 Essential Training

Compound nodes - DaVinci Resolve Tutorial

From the course: DaVinci Resolve 12 Essential Training

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Compound nodes

- Here's a feature that Resolve callers have been asking for almost since Resolve was first released for the Mac about five years ago, which is the ability to organize our nodes. To group our nodes together and then collapse them. So one node could represent a whole mess of other nodes that we just want to clean up and get out of the way. In DaVinci Resolve 12 we now have that opportunity and it's called Compound Nodes. I've got set up here a color correction and I've got a sky grade I'm pulling here in node number five, followed by a bunch of windows that are tracked to different individuals and then I've got a node reserved for noise reduction. Noise reduction isn't active right now but I've got it there just to prove a point. And what I want to do is clean this up. I've done my work here in the various windows. I want to get them out of the way and simplify my node tree. Here's how you do it. I'm going to command click on each node that I want to collapse into a compound node. Once I've got these three selected I'll right click and select "Create Compound Node" and boom there we go. We've now taken that entire node tree and cleaned it up, made it nice and neat. I'll right click, change the label, call this "window tracks" and we're done, right? But what if we have to edit whats inside of these? Can we? Yes we can. We right click, show compound node and now we're seeing just that node tree. And notice we have a crumb trail taking us from the overall node tree down into the specific compound node. To get back to the top level, I'll just double click and there we are. We're back at the top level. Now sometimes we might want to do something like take the key from outside of this compound node and maybe we want to take the key signal from the sky grade and use it to help us control what we're doing inside this compound node. Can we do that? Well if I right click I can add one alpha input. I can hook this up now. Now when I open the compound node I've got this key signal that I can then feed in here to use however I want. And of course I can do the same thing on output, generate key signals in this tree and feed them outside of the compound node by right clicking and add alpha output. When I jump back out this node tree now has an alpha output that I can hook up to another node. Highlight, click it and delete it. What if I want to do something like we can do in the edit page? Where if I have a nested timeline can we decompose in place and re-reveal these nodes out here fully back on our main node tree? The answer is, not right now, no. Once we've collapsed this down into a compound node it stays a compound node. About the best I can do is go ahead and delete the actual node itself.

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