Better Blurring In Davinci Resolve: Part 1

On the blue car I seems like you would get a better result by simply using node spacing to slide the blue from the right of the license over the license.

Definitely a good way to go as well – thats another technique i employ sometimes, and can help a lot with lighting changes.

Hey! I didn’t know about the Color Generator, so I learned something. Here I’ve been doing it the hard way for 10 years…

Yea i use it for all kinds of utility stuff in the node tree. I’ve even used it to make drop shadows for green-screen keys by pulling out the matte and corner pinning it then filling it with a translucent solid.

I feel like it hasn’t always been there, but i dont remember exactly when they added it.

I am going to watch these this week but wondering if any of these techniques could be used for achieving a realistic DoF blur (lens falloff and even a light Bokeh) from Mavic Air 2? I have this idea which could only be done with a drone but I don’t want that “infinity focus” that built in cams give.

In theory – yes depending on what you want to do. Faking DoF cleanly is going to depend on getting really good tracked masks to lens blur specific regions, so some of these techniques may help

I’m a bit of a drone guy myself – what are you thinking of doing?

I didn’t neither. Thanks Joey!

Sorry for the slow reply I somehow missed your response 🙂 Actually, what I want to do is quite simple, I would like to use my drone very sparingly for a very cinematic observational doc I am shooting abroad and am unfortunately acting as a one man band. So I would like to use the drone at medium high angles that would be impossible w/ a tripod and at time (when nat sound wont be needed). From those “basic tripod-esue” types of shots I would also like to mix in subtle pans, tilts and possibly some tracking shot BUT I want it to match as well as possible my vintage Angie lenses on my BMP6k sensor to the point where the viewer isn’t taken out of the scene when mixing camera and drone shots. (which I know is going to be difficult to get too close) but any tips at some starting points for testing would be greatly appreciated 🙂

oh sounds cool! Yea if you have a DJI style drone that does GPS lock, you should be able to just sort of park it where you want it and shoot without worrying too much about it. I fly racing/freestyle drones so they don’t exactly hold still or stay in one place ;).

As for subtle moves my only recommendation is to slow down the control settings, and start the move a bit before you would want it – give it some lead in that way you don’t get that little bump of when the move starts. If you haven’t learned to pinch the controls instead of using thumbs – practice that, it gives you WAY better control.

One thing for drone footage is i think its often oversharpened in the camera (especially if your mixing it with vintage lenses). I use a pretty cool technique for reducing that a bit that I go over here:

Handling Over-Sharpening: How to Soften Footage Without Losing Detail

but another thing i would do is really think about your framing when you shoot – and maybe leave some negative space for a windowed lens blur or a tilt shift blur to fake some depth of field. That should work a lot better if you are actually planning it in how you frame though.

If you use the ofx plugin you better create a serial node with alpha translation after mask node. Otherwise, you have a chance to get a problem with the keyframe of animation. After applying animation you can’t correct your mask. For example, you can’t animate transparent of the mask because of bugs.