Finding innovative new ways to simplify your workflow while editing and colour grading is always a welcomed approach. This way you will be able to deliver not only the same quality but you will also reduce significantly the time and effort to complete a certain editing or colour grading task. One way to speed up your workflow is by utilizing keyboard shortcuts that unambiguously have proven to be a huge time-saver, especially when editing.
Colour grading, on the other hand, requires more resources and sometimes using the keyboard shortcuts isn’t enough. So, if you really want to improve your workflow in those terms you should definitely try to drop the unnecessary steps that generally make your workflow more cluttered and overwhelming. For instance, if you repeatedly apply identical settings to each shot, probably the best way to simplify this is by doing those tweaks to all of your clips at once before you start the primary colour grading.
As Alex Jordan points out, there is an extremely simple way to enhance your colour grading in DaVinci Resolve 12 by applying the same settings to all of your clips instead of modifying each clip individually. To do this, you simply need to toggle the Timeline mode in the top right corner of DaVinci Resolve 12. Once you’ve accessed this mode, add a new Node and modify all the basic changes that you want to apply to each of your clips.
For instance, Alex desaturates the shadows of all of his images, tweaks the contrast and adds a vignette. This is the starting point for his initial colour grading, however, you can approach your images differently depending on the type of footage you need to deal with. To make you workflow simpler, you can add multiple Nodes, where each Node corresponds to a certain modification.
Furthermore, you can always toggle between the Timeline and Clip mode and tweak each shot individually and disable any of the “general” nodes applied to all your images. The important takeaway here is that you will no longer need to apply the same Node over and over again. Remember that when you are adding Nodes in Timeline mode they will affect every single clip on your timeline, so be aware of this.
For instance, if you have some titles or other visual elements in your edit they also will be affected. One of the possible workarounds would be to create a separate timeline for those clips or you can simply disable certain nodes when you colour grade your shots in a Clip mode.
Kudos to Alex Jordan for bringing another great tutorial to the community. If you want to learn more, make sure you check out his insightful courses DaVinci Resolve – Simplified (discounted to $99) and Editing with Davinci Resolve – Simplified ($129). You can also try out the Resolve Grading & Editing Bundle that is currently 58% off and will set you back $149 only.
[source: Learn Color Grading]
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