External Mattes in DaVinci Resolve

Lately I’ve been having to utilize external mattes a lot in commercial work.  If you’re not familiar with them, they’re extremely handy and you’ll wonder how life ever existed without them.  Although the workflow is fairly simple, it was recently brought to my attention that not many people are aware of the external matte capabilities in Resolve.  They can help you completely transform a shot that would otherwise be unfixable.  While it involves some glorified rotoscoping behind the scenes, you’ll be extremely happy with the newfound flexibility.  I made this quick video to showcase external matte workflow.  I hope you find it useful!

7 Comments

  1. J.Reed

    I hope you can help me. I’ve not been able to get external mattes to work properly in resolve. I get to the point where everything is connected properly but the clip simply does not play.
    Any ideas?

    Reply
    • Rob Bessette

      Could you clarify a little? Was there a particular part in the video where you got lost?

      Reply
      • Kristy

        Hi there!

        Im a few months late to this thread but i’m having an issue where the mattes in my node tree are consistently crashing resolve. Any idea why this would happen?

        Im running Mac yosemite and resolve studio 12.5

        Any other information i can give?

        Thank you!

        Reply
  2. kristy

    Hi there!

    Im a few months late to this thread but i’m having an issue where the mattes in my node tree are consistently crashing resolve. Any idea why this would happen?

    Im running Mac yosemite and resolve studio 12.5

    Any other information i can give?

    Thank you!

    Reply
  3. muhammad

    hi,
    is there any tutorial out on how i cam make my own mattes from scratch or if i could get any that are free to download.
    thanks

    Reply
    • Rob Bessette

      You can make mattes in After Effects by rotoscoping the image. I’m sure there are some tutorials online if you just search on YouTube. You can’t download mattes specific to your footage since everyone has different footage.

      Reply

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