NEW AI Tools in DaVinci Resolve 21
DaVinci Resolve 21 introduces new AI TOOLS, to assist our efficiency so we can be more creative. Unlike other online services that aim at replacing and stealing individual creative work. These Blackmagic design tools work offline - to be honest, some are more useful than others. But this video shows you where to find the tools, and how to use them in your next project.
AI Speech Generator
This is built in, text to speech. Go to the top menu bar. Timeline, down to AI tools and select Speech Generator. A new window pops up where you can type in any short text to generate an audio file directly to your timeline.
I’ll enter “Welcome to Creative Video Tips”. I could use the voice models included with DaVinci Resolve Studio, or better yet… Click the Voice model dropdown menu to choose a custom voice.
Click load, and then choose any short audio file of a voice you have permission to use. I have a short 15 second chadwick 01 clip of me reading another voice over. I’ll click open, and generate.
Additionally the speech generator has settings to change speed, pitch, and variation - which is how close to match the rhythm and intonation from the reference voice sample. The new audio file is stored in your project media location setup in the master settings - working folders.
AI IntellliSearch
New in Resolve 21, Intellisearch uses machine learning to run 3 types of searches across an entire project. You can run a new visual search to locate objects, or people - this actually scans all the pixels of all the frames of your footage. There’s also a new transcription search to locate soundbytes, and a traditional metadata search.
To first run IntelliSearch, you first index the clips with what is called “AI Analysis”. I suggest select the clips you would like to index. Then go to the top of the media pool toolbar, click the dropdown to the right of the new AI analysis tool to choose the option to run on selected clips to start. Now click the new analysis icon to open the new AI clip analysis window.
You’ll see Intellisearch, the new slate tool I’ll mention toward the end of this video, transcription for text based editing, and audio classification to organize different types of audio files.
To quickly anlyze only for visual objects and faces, I’ll turn everything except for intellisearch. Click analzye. And Resolve indexes every frame for a fast visual search afterward. Identifying faces is a second step, so if you want to run the search faster, and don’t need that feature you can turn it off.
The intellisearch is run by clicking the familiar magnifying glass icon in the media pool, and then type in what you’re looking for. Before running the search with return, you’ll notice options to search only the visuals, only the transcribed audio, or metadata.
There’s also the option to display the results as segments or full clips. The segments act like a subclip ready to quickly edit to your timeline. You’ll notice in list view, if you twirl down the arrow, for my dog search - it only displays the frames the dog is visible and recognized - saving you time from hunting around in a long source clip.
In addition, you can save the results of an intellisearch into a smart bin with the new icon to the right of text field. Smart bins are dynamic metadata driven bins that appear at the bottom of the media pool. It’s like a persistant clip filter for clips in the project.
Also in the 3 dot option menu - Intellisearch mode has a faster and better mode. If you feel the need for better results, you would need to reanalyze in better mode. Please let me know if you try this down in the comments, because I’m curious if it’s worth the extra time.
For photos on the new photo page this is extremely useful for large collections.
AI CineFocus
The AI cinefocus creates photo-realistic lens blur. You can the effect to a color page node by typing shift-space and typing cinefocus. It can take an iphone shot of my stomping grounds in New York City to make it more premium looking, separate my dog from a busy in background matching colored trees, or emulate rack focus shots of the best video editing snack. Are you a crunchy or smooth peanut butter person? I’m partial to the blue lid.
Why do we need another blur tool? Well - this one handles edges better then any I’ve seen before. There’s even denoise and re-grain tools built in! Let me show you how I’d setup this up with an external depth map for fast timeline playback.
Start with a shot with a lot of area in focus.
Right-click to add a new corrector node connected to a branch of the source and add the AI depth map. Then right click and go down to node cache to turn node cache on. Also, go up to the top playback menu bar, down to render cache and select user. This renders out computational expensive AI tools like depth map and cinefocus so you can get realtime playback.
Add the new cinefocus effect to a node after your balance nodes, twirl down the depth map settings and choose source to be “from alpha input”. Now connect the green output from the rendered depth map node to the blue alpha input of the cinefocus node. This saves time from, too much calculated at once in the cinefocus node.
Click the focus button to preview what will remain sharp. Adjust the distance and depth of filed slider controls to taste. To rack focus just click the diamond to set a start keyframe with distance set appropriately, move the playead to when you want focus to shift and slide the property to get that peanut butter logo in focus. Click Result and you’re done.
AI UltraSharpen
Imagine production missed focus on that all important logo, there’s no time for a replacement or a reshoot. Add the new AI Ultrasharpen effect on a node in the color page, adjust the sharpen amount to taste. And then because you might only want to sharpen this car badge, draw a quick power window shapen and track it in just seconds.
AI Face Reshaper
The beauty, no pun intended - of face reshaper, is this new tool will warp facial features over time without knowing a thing about visual effects.
It’s loaded up on the color page under the Resolve FX Refine set of tools. Drag it onto a node, click to detect faces in the frame and click to track forward and backward. Similar to other beauty tools in Resolve, machine learning has identified and tracked the motion of the face.
Disable the overlay checkbox to better see the adjustments. I’ll adjust the face shape to make it a little less wide. And another classic beauty trick is to make the eyes larger. Open the eyes section and increase the eyes a bit.
If I turn off and on a few times, it’s like dang - this is incredible!
AI Blemish Removal
The new blemish removal tool is a simple effect to add on the color page to remove zits, or even this blotch of red under my eye. It’s a subtle fix, but what is great is that it does not appear to blur out the texture of the skin. This works best within your timeline colorspace.
AI Face Age Transformer
The face age transformer is also found on the color page that uses the same face recognition machine learning to make a person appear older or younger.
After you drop the effect on a node and track it. Set the person’s current age. And then adjust how you want them to appear with the age offset. Positive numbers are adding years, so what I’ll look like in the future. And Negative offsets can take a few years off the talent on screen. This one is going to be a lot of fun and used in moderation, actually really useful for beauty requests.
AI Slate Detector
The new AI Slate tool will recognize when a slate appears on screen and place duration markers. To run the AI Slate detector, go to the either use the AI clip analysis tool we covered in the intellsearch chapter, or right click from the media pool, go to AI tools and choose “analyze for slate”.
AI Motion Deblur
The new motion deblur feature is found on the edit page by right clicking on a clip that needs motion blur removed, going to AI Tools, and selecting “remove motion blur”. This is essentially a render in place to generate a new clip that removes motion blur artifacts. I see this potentially very useful to pull a high res, still image from one hundred and eighty degree motion blurred moving footage. If you’ve hunted for that sharp frame, you know what I mean here.
I haven’t found a great example for this feature yet, but I’m excited to see how the tool develops in this public beta.
AI Magic Mask
Last but certainly not least. AI Magic Mask can now be saved. Blackmagic Design has saved Magic Mask on the color page. After running magic mask, in the 3 dot option menu, choose “render magic mask in place.” And you’ll never retrack a magic mask again.
