Reframe and Zoom in DaVinci Resolve
Full disclosure: I have used DaVinci Resolve for the last 15 years, and only recently did I discover that some methods are better than others when enlarging footage. In fact, most of what is taught online ignores the importance of timeline resolution, so this brief tutorial will hopefully help you use the full resolution that your camera captured.
Order of Operations
Soft, artifacty, and mushy images result from poorly scaled image operations. They usually come from excessive pixel filtering (inventing new pixels by averaging neighboring pixels). And more often than ever, we tend to work with footage from high-resolution cameras like the Pyxis 6k, Red Komodo X, or even the new Blackmagic 12k. However, we rarely deliver a project at those resolutions, so we work with a 1080 or 4k timeline to match our delivery specs.
So the question is, why does my footage sometimes not look as sharp as I think it should when I scale up and zoom in? The answer comes from understanding the image process pipeline of DaVinci Resolve. In general, pixels get processed from Fusion to Edit to Color and not the page navigation that runs from Edit to Fusion to Color (that is for the workflow, not the pixel pipeline).
But more specifically, the issue boils down to timeline resolution and everything that follows when it “kicks in.” You can think of timeline resolution as the moment you rasterize a layer in Photoshop or export a video at a specific size and then reimport it into another video. Operations in red text in the following image happen AFTER the pixels are “locked in” to a specific timeline resolution.
5 notable exceptions to the rule that Fusion has access to the start of this pipeline are:
Compound Clips (inherit timeline resolution at the moment created)
Fusion Clips (inherit timeline resolution at the moment created) - these are the nested variety of Fusion “clips”
Multicam Clips
Super Scale
Lens Corrections from Inspector to correct distortion
The Right Way to Zoom In
Since we only have access to the original pixel data in Fusion and the Inspector zoom controls when placed on a master clip, that is the solution!
Click on a clip on the timeline and use the inspector zoom controls
Create a Fusion composition by placing the playhead over the clip and clicking the fusion page button and use the transform tool.
Create a Fusion referenced composition by right click on the clip and using a transform tool.
Wrong Ways to Zoom
The most common “wrong way” to zoom into an image I have done for a long time was to use an adjustment clip and change the inspector transform zoom parameters on that. This was a common way to add effects in Premiere and Avid. The issue is that adjustment clips are always locked to the timeline resolution. So, if you scale an adjustment clip to x10, you are just scaling up the result of the timeline to x10. There is a workaround if you have a single layer of video, which is to compound clip the adjustment layer, and the footage gets the full quality of the original pixel data. This can be useful if you want to scale smoothly across multiple photographs.
Compound clips can also be a point of confusion or frustration when enlarging footage on a timeline. At the moment a compound clip is created, it takes on the current timeline resolution. If the footage inside the compound clip is a single layer of footage, or just footage with and adjustment clip on top - you’re fine. But the moment you stack a 2nd layer of pixels in the compound clip, it’s fully rasterized and you will lose the detail zooming in on the low resolution compound clip.
One annoying, but possible workflow option is to change your timeline resolution to the full size original footage resolution before creating the compound clip.
The last couple of methods that lock you into the timeline resolution are any edit page effects and presets because they all act after the timeline resolution has been set. I still love and use Magic Zoom from Mr. Alex Tech, but it’s essential to understand that you are locked into the timeline resolution. If your footage matches your timeline resolution, this won’t matter at all, but when you start using much higher-resolution elements than the timeline, you will lose detail.
