Doing it all in DaVinci – PART 5: Lighting Effects

Doing It All in DaVinci is a series of editing tutorials instructed by editor Dale Campbell that demonstrates exactly what the title suggests.

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.

Doing It All in DaVinci Tutorials

• Part 1: Introduction to Editing
• Part 2: Adjusting Color Temperature
• Part 3: Patch Replacer and Tracking FX
• Part 4: Power Windows & Tracking
• Part 5: Lighting Effects
• Part 6: Overview of Audio in Fairlight

Part 5: Lighting Effects

By this part, we’ve finished color correction and made additional adjustments. Now is the time to make some lighting effects just to add a little bit of magic.

In the last moving vehicle shot, I really wanted a slightly more striking look than what we ended up with. The clients were okay with a little manipulation. They had enough variation and detail. But on the day we didn’t get those awesome streaks of light cutting through. So for a final touch, I had a lot of fun and added a node with the light rays effect.

WARNING: This can very easily go overboard.

I’m going to take you through a little bit of what it looks like now, but if you’re tasteful with it, it’s a great effect.

If you have enough light in there and enough variation in the sky, it can actually give a really satisfying effect that just finishes everything off.

You see, if I’m bringing this in, it’s very subtle. You probably wouldn’t have even noticed it if I hadn’t disabled it and enabled it. You can see those rays of light just cutting through the clouds. Those are being motivated by the slightly brighter areas is if the sun is kind of behind a bit.

I’m going to take you through a little bit of what’s going on with it:

1. If we up the brightness, you’ll be able to see those streaks a bit more.
2. You can change the position so you can get a more convincing direction for what you’re doing, going up and going down.
3. You can make it so that it’s going sideways. Just position it where you want it.
4. You can have a cavalcade of different things you can manipulate with this. So the link, the streaks, you can pull them right in, you can pull them right out so they go across the whole thing.
5. You can soften them too. But for me, I wanted more defined streaks (less softening).
6. As we’ve seen, we can adjust the brightness.
7. You could also adjust the color. You have got the pinky blueness at the top and then you got the white car in the middle, separated by a row of slightly orange autumnal trees. So you are layering everything up in a nice sandwich. Green is important because it’s so one of those subconscious colors that people will recognize.

Because we’re filming at different times of day, it’s something that we had to be particularly careful about when we come to the grade, because the cloud is coming in, and we’re getting more or less direct sunlight. Sometimes things are backlit, and sometimes things are frontlit. So balancing that out so it’s not all over the place is pretty important.

Make it POP!

Finally, the car in the shot has got to pop. And up until the point that I added some of these final effects, it didn’t really do that.

I had to take it to a much greener green in the above correction. It’s not necessarily realistic, but it certainly feels more like grass because we’ve doubled up the white balance. I’ve taken it up to eleven thousand three hundred forty-seven, which is absolutely crazy, but it gave me what I wanted in the sky, which was what I was worried about at that point. So, I’ve just manipulated the grass to sit where it’s feeling a little bit more vibrant now.

When we do the color grade, you’re drawing the eyes of the customer. If something really stands out as not looking quite right then they might not look at the area that you want them to look at. You can see with the sky just there, it’s pretty simple, I’ve just used a gradient. I have pulled it down so we get a little bit more detail in the sky.

If you start with a completely blank canvas on this and reset everything on that grade – take all of the raw levels down and reset the white balance to 5600, tint, exposure, etc.

That’s what the shot is like before we interpret it, before we interpret the raw, before we interpret how we’re gonna do the creative grade, adding any LUTs, adding any corrections, etc.

Coming Up…

In the final part, we take a very brief look at how we used Fairlight to finish the audio for this project.