From the course: DaVinci Resolve: Color Page

“Dialing down” a serial node using the Key Mixer - DaVinci Resolve Tutorial

From the course: DaVinci Resolve: Color Page

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“Dialing down” a serial node using the Key Mixer

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- [Instructor] Picking up from our previous movie, let's Option-F out of this. So now we've got this little door action going on, and then another adjustment that my client decides to make is, let's go ahead and maybe add a nice, strong, blue gel in here, because we want to add some more color separation between her skin tones and the rest of the image. I'm going to loop through this, see what that means for us. Yeah, okay, we can do that. Let's go ahead and go into node number 11 and CMD+D. You'll see that I already have a power window set up here. In fact, these three nodes have power windows set up in kind of common places. I always find that I either need to put a power window on the left side of the image, the center of the image, or the right of the image. These are already set up for me. I just have to turn them on. They're ready to go. I'm going to actually turn on the one on the right. That's the one we actually want; that one there. Grab these controls. Let's shrink this down. Grab these controls and get this coming from the right-hand side. We're going to give it a bit of a blue look. There we go, kind of like that. Once again, let's go ahead and track it since the shot does move and the camera does move on us. I'm going to track this forward. We'll go back to the beginning, first frame, by pressing semi-colon. Now I'm going to work on the look of it. This time what I'm going to do is come to the HDR palette 'cause I don't have to key-frame this. What I'm going to do is push the blue look in through the HDR palette. I'm using the global control to do that. And then I'll also use exposure. Maybe I'll darken this down a little bit more and then I'll adjust my saturation to taste. Then let's push this just a little too far because our client's like, "More, more, more." We keep going more and more and more, and we're thinking, "Wow, wow, that's gone pretty far," but that's what they like, so that's what they're going to get. Now let's go ahead and play this and loop this through. Now we've got this bright light coming in from the left. We've got this bit of a blue gel happening on the right. Then the next day, the client shows up in the room and says, "You know, Patrick, I think you were right. I think I pushed you too far. I like what we did with the blue. We just need a little less of it, a split-the-difference." Is there a split-the-difference button here in DaVinci Resolve? The answer's yes, it's just not called that, and you kind of have to dig for it. Let's dig and figure out where it is. Luckily I know where it is, which is over here in the key menu. If I click on key, remember that every serial node has a key output here. The key output gain is set to one. But if I click and drag this down, I'm backing off the effect of that particular serial node so I can dial it down to taste. I bring it down til my client says, "Yeah, right about there," and now I've split the difference. Then I just hit play, and now we've set that down. This is tremendously useful whenever a client starts re-considering a decision they make, or you re-considering a decision you make. You can just use this to back it off without actually affecting any of the colors or exposure adjustments that you made.

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