Doing it all in Davinci – PART 1 – Introduction to Editing

It’s a great pleasure to be able to feature Dale Campbell on HurlbutAcademy.com with his editing tutorials on Davinci Resolve. Dale was a huge hit at our October 2016 Workshop, his company Still Moving Media are doing some incredibly cool stuff (take a look at their Facebook page too) and what Dale doesn’t know about Blackmagic’s Davinci Resolve isn’t worth knowing!

Dale and his team have given away one of the best editing courses online in their Doing It All In Davinci pack. Dale focuses on editing, color grading and a little bit on sound design using a video that his team filmed for the launch of Aston Martin’s latest car.

Here’s some of the key points made in Dale’s first video – Doing It All In Davinci – Introduction To Editing.

For this ad, the team shot in several locations and each had a very different requirement.

1. The Aston Martin factory                                                                                 
2. Working with Aston Martin’s designers where they had more controlled lighting with L.E.D. lights.
3. At an aerodrome capturing the actual car with a black arm stablizer, vehicle rig and chase car.
4. In the studio, they recreated a 70s set for the sequence with the child holding a Concorde model.
5. They also filmed in a modern house with a young girl playing with an Aston Martin car model.
6. At an Aerospace Museum to get a shot of the Concorde and the young actress together.
7. And finally, a few shots with an i-Pad just to show some of the renders of the inside of the car because that wasn’t possible to film.

In each scenario the team used Blackmagic cameras; the URSA PRO, the G2 and the Pocket 6k, shooting Blackmagic raw. 

Dale’s workshop on DaVinci Resolve begins with a rundown of his equipment and how the jog wheel (below) enables him to quickly trim footage, allowing him to keep his eyes on the page not have to worry about clicking with a mouse, grabbing an edit point and dragging it.

He then goes on to show us the Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve Mini Panel and how he can use it for more accurate adjustments in four easy steps:

“Firstly, I’m going to go in and go to the raw settings and that’s going to be an initial pass. That’s really just adjusting everything to make sure that where, for example, we didn’t have time to perfectly white balance the front side, I can come in and I can just set the white balance to what I want it to be within here. I could be looking at scopes, I could be making an accurate judgement on that. We’ve also got access to the ISO settings exposure, tint and a whole cavalcade of other adjustments – like the highlight rolloff and the shadow rolloff.” 

We can just tweak everything to where it’s meant to be and make sure that all the clips are unified (all of the clips that we have access to that have Blackmagic raw that is) we can adjust those right here.

Secondly, I would go in and add a LUT or a plugin such as film convert, perhaps just to get a base to work with.

Thirdly, we’re going to start doing a corrective process. So that could be something as simple as removing an object, a speck of dirt or manipulating something with power windows. We’re also doing exposure adjustments or color adjustments on a more specific level. 

Finally, everything as a whole needs to be checked to see that it’s going to flow from start to finish and that the shots are making sense. 

There are a couple of shots within this project that I would like to just have a look through that involve a couple of the more powerful tools that you’ve got available in the color correction pane within DaVinci.”