As I mentioned in my previous post, I spent a little time playing with DaVinci Resolve as a possible replacement for HitFilm. During that time, I managed to recreate one of my old HitFilm tutorial effects in a more dynamic way than the original, and I figured that I’d share it here. (Just to be clear, I haven’t touched Resolve in the better part of a year, so this info is being provided as-is. If you get some benefit from it, awesome, but I won’t answer detailed questions, provide updates, etc.)
Old to New
For reference, here’s the original tutorial where I walked through the creation of the effect in HitFilm:
The short explanation is that I created and exported images that were arrays of die faces, re-imported and layered them in a composite shot, then used the luminosity of a separate video layer to drive mattes that exposed specific parts of these image layers.
Because of the limitations of HitFilm, this was pretty much the only way to pull it off (that I could figure out, anyway), specifically referring to the need to pre-generate the images of the die-face arrays. In DaVinci Resolve, though, I was pretty sure that the arrays could be generated procedurally.
After a lot of trial and error, I got it to work. It can be CPU-intensive, especially when it comes to the higher density arrays, but it’s completely procedural. I exported it as a macro and created an effect from it, so that it can be dropped onto any media in the timeline and customized as desired.
Settings
Here’s a rundown of the available settings:
- Center and Size: these control the placement and scaling of the source material fed to the main effect.
- Contrast and Brightness: Because the visibility of each die face is driven by the brightness of the source (1 = darkest, 5 = brightest), these controls let you fine-tune that behavior.
- Die Size: This has three options to control the size of each die face in the array: Large, Medium, and Small. Large is a 16×9 array, Medium (the default) is a 48×27 array, and Small is a 96×54 array.
- Dot Size and Color—These let you play with the properties of the die face dots. They’re in order from 5 to 1, top to bottom; i.e. the top dot size and color controls change the 5-dot faces, the next group changes the 4-dot faces, and so on. The default dot size is 0.2 for all dots, and the default colors are a simple progression from white for the 5-dot faces to dark grey for the 1-dot faces.
Here’s a quick demo video showing some tests that I ran after creating the effect (if you came to this post from the link in the video, you’ve already seen it):
Download the file and have fun! Just be aware of a few things:
- The file is being provided as-is. Other than verifying that the effect works prior to writing this post, I pretty much haven’t touched Resolve since the effect was made last December. In that light, I’m not providing any official support for the effect.
- This was created in DaVinci Resolve 19. It should work in later versions, but I haven’t updated it in almost a year, so that theory hasn’t been tested.
- You’ll need to add this file as an effect to Resolve so that it’s available from the timeline. In this video from Casey Faris, he walks through the basics of turning macros (which this is) into edit page effects. In his example he drops it into “Generators,” but you can drop it into “Effects” and it works just fine. The effect can then be dragged directly onto a clip.