From the course: DaVinci Resolve 12 Essential Training

Five don't-miss features in 4 minutes - DaVinci Resolve Tutorial

From the course: DaVinci Resolve 12 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Five don't-miss features in 4 minutes

“

- Now there are a couple features that are so simple that they don't really warrant their movie, but put them together and it's a pretty compelling run-through of some nice, little tweaks to the UI. Let's start now in an empty project. I'm going to go ahead and create a new sequence, so I'm going to shift + 4 into the Edit page. Command + n for New Sequence, and I'll just call this New. Create New Timeline and notice what's changed here in Resolve 12. In our Media Pool, there no longer is a distinction between Media and Timelines. By default, they all get thrown into the same folders. They all get mixed and matched together. If I go into the Edit tab, you'll notice we used to have a separate window here just for timelines. That's gone. Guess what? We can fix that with a brand new feature, but I have to start with no timelines in my project. If I create a timeline, start Color Correcting, I cannot undo this particular behavior, so I'm going to delete this timeline. I'm going to the Project Settings. I'm going to jump into my General Options and select Use Timeline Bin. Hit Save, and when I press Save, look what happens here in our list of Bins. I now have a Timelines Bin. I press command + n, enter in our new timeline, Create, and it automatically gets sorted into this Timelines folder. I love that! This is how I work all the time. Next up is Snap-To Neutral on the Curves. I'm going to go ahead and reset this entire grade. I'm going to do a Curves adjustment, just a little brightening in the mid-tones, and now I want to bring back my shadows and my highlights, back to neutral, right? I want to pull them back here, and it's always been a guessing game. Where precisely is the pure center line, absolute neutral as I put in these control points? Guess what? You don't have to guess any more. I just un-did these two moves. I'm going to click, hold, hold down the option key as I'm dragging, and now it will Snap anywhere onto this central line, this neutral line. I'll add another control point. Click and hold, hold down the option key, and start dragging, and it Snaps back to neutral. Another nifty little trick that I found out on a forum that was mentioned by one of the Blackmagic developers, is we're in the Edit tab here, and imagine that this grayscale is actually a reference movie. Let me turn on this track. It's turned off right now. There it is. So now this is actually a reference movie. I'm checking my timeline against this reference movie, and I want to start navigating the timeline. In the bad old days, in previous versions of Resolve, what would often happen is as I up-arrow, I get back to a point where all of the sudden this top track is made active, this grayscale, when what I really want are the clips on the layer below it. Is there a way to change this behavior? Yes! If I option-click on a track, in this case V2, it will now be ignored. It doesn't show up as a thumbnail, and now I can sit here and view it still in context. I haven't turned off the track. Resolve is simply ignoring the track for navigation purposes and for this thumbnail timeline purpose, but it's still visible. Of course, if I want to turn off the track, I can just click it. The track is now gone, or I can turn it back on, and it's visible again, but it will not be selected by my navigational tools. Let me go ahead, I'm going to turn off this track. Now we took a look at this Snap-To Neutral in Curves. There's been another change in Curves that I really, really like. Let's go ahead, reset, and not only can we now move our Curves in one direction, we can move them in the other direction. So I can now flatten out an image using the bottom point or increased contrast using the top point. Finally, and I love this one, it's an improvement on Markers. So if I'm going through this color grade, and my client is giving me notes, and right here they give me a note that I want to retain, remember, and address, well typically we'd need a piece of pen and paper. Guess what? If I press M to add a Marker on this timeline, and I double-click on this Marker, I can now have notes. So I can type in a note, "More Poppy Clouds" to remind me that I need to go back and get these clouds to pop some more. Done. Now I actually have a notation system here in Resolve when I'm working with my clients in a live client session. The only limitation on this, is the number of characters here. It's a little bit like Twitter. You're going to have to keep it down to under 100 characters or so, otherwise it's going to scroll off and it gets really, really hard to read. So, there you go. Five don't-miss features in DaVinci Resolve 12 that I kind of hit throughout this training course, but are big enough, and I find useful enough, to actually warrant their own movie here in our training.

Contents