Using the Gallery - DaVinci Resolve Tutorial

- In digital color correction, when we're telling stories, it's very rare that we only have a one shot story. We have multiple shots strung together, and that means we need to consider the context and the flow of shots. And that means we need to be able to compare shots to each other, so that when we're working on one shot, we can make it very easy to compare earlier shots to make sure they flow together. And that's what the gallery's about. So let's take a look at how the gallery works. I'll open up the gallery palette here. And there are no stills created. So the gallery is a collection of stills, not of moving images. And let's imagine, for some reason, I want to save this for some crazy reason. How do I do that? Well, we've already mentioned it briefly, previously, which is grab still. And so I've grabbed this still. Now, you'll notice that it's named it 1.3.1. What does that mean? Well, there's one video track. If I open up our timeline, our mini timeline, you'll see that it's on video track one. So that's what the first one is, video track one. You also notice that it's shot number three. So 1.3. And it's also the first still from shot three on track one that we've pulled. So if we were to go ahead and delete this entire node tree, and do something else with it. So I'll do Command or Control + Home in order to reset this node tree. And now I'll do a quick autocorrection here on the first node, Option + S onto a second node, and then I'll make a mid-tone adjustment on the third node, Option + S. I'll adjust the warmth of this shot. And I want to now save this off as a reference. Well, I can go ahead and save that still. How do you do that? What's a shortcut for that? Still, grab still. That would be Option + Command + G. Let's do it that way. Now I've grabbed the still. Notice it's named 1.3.2. Video track one shot, number three, still number two. And I could grab it from any particular frame that I want, but once I grab it in there, I can't really scrub it, although I could hover over it. So if I go to shot number four, I could then hover over and see what shot number four looks like with the grade from this still in the gallery applied to it. If you don't like the live preview, which can get pretty annoying sometimes, especially if you have a lot of stills and every time you run your mouse over, the image keeps jumping around on you, you can turn off live preview. You can also control how the hover scrub preview works. So you can restrict it just to the thumbnail, so that the thumbnail will show you the shot that you're on, with its look applied, but the viewer isn't updating with the scrub, although it does update to show you the preview. But this behavior, I tend to find a lot less objectionable, and sometimes kind of useful. But let's go ahead and just turn off live preview for now. Now you can, in the gallery, organize your stills in the gallery. So I can add more still albums. So perhaps some of these are previs. So if maybe the director gives me a bunch of JPEGs, I can go ahead, and I can pull this into my previs folder. And then I can right click and choose to import. And when I choose import, I can go ahead and import still images, and then use those as references that I can pull up. Now, if I'm shot number four, and I want to compare that to this gallery image, how do I do that? There are a couple ways. One is to double click on the gallery image, and then it pulls it up here. And then you have a bunch of controls up top that control how this gets viewed. So do you want it as a box wipe? Do you want it as a horizontal wipe, a vertical wipe, a diagonal wipe? You can also do it as a 50% dissolve. You can do a checkerboard. (laughs) There are a lot of different options that I'm sure some people have reasons to use this way. I tend to keep it with the vertical wipe. What you sometimes want to do is maybe swap these around. So you want to take what's in the right, and move it to the left. What you can do there is come up to view. And then, this series of commands is all about reference wipes and pulling up your gallery stills and wiping to them. What I'm looking for is invert wipe, and then that switches their positions. Let's go ahead, invert wipe again. And if I want to close out of it, it's a simple Command + W or Control + W on a PC, toggles that on and off. Typically what I like to do is do full frame wipes. So you just click and drag in the viewer in order to adjust the wipe exactly where you want it, or whatever size you want it. So I'm going to go ahead and make this full screen. And now I've toggled Command + W on and off to get a quick look at my reference image. Now the galleries have one more secret about them. That isn't just about, they don't just save off still images. They save off our corrections that created that still image. And we'll talk about that in our next movie.