﻿So you chose DaVinci Resolve, good choice!
In this video, I'll get you up and running with it in 10 minutes.
Start by downloading the latest version of the DaVinci Resolve software from
the Blackmagic website, which I'll link below. While there is a paid version, you can get 90% of
functionality from the free version. Once you've downloaded and installed it, this window will pop up.
This is where we're going to create a new project. Give it a name and click "create".
Now, the main software will open up. And while DaVinci is a very advanced software, if you want
it to be, it can also be a simple one. So, down at the bottom, you'll notice from left to right,
there are different workspaces, all designed to do something different.
There's Media for importing your shots,
Cut for doing basic edits, Edit for doing more complex edits,
Fusion for visual effects,
Color for color grading, Fairlight for audio editing, and Deliver for exporting.
If you're working on a simple video though and you want to keep your workflow super short,
then you can head straight to the Edit page, where we can import our media directly into here.
Before we do that though, head down to the bottom right and click the gear icon to open
the project settings. Here we're going to set our project resolution and frame rate. Personally,
I like shooting in 4k at 50 FPS, so I'm going to set my project to that. However, many of you will
also be using HD, in which case you'd choose 1920 x 1080 with whichever frame rate you personally prefer.
If you're not sure, I'd recommend choosing 30 to keep things simple. I'm not going to touch
anything else except for proxy media format. Just make sure it's not selected as ProRes
422 since that format is total overkill for basic video previews. So, I'm going with H264 instead.
Now click "save" to save your preferences. Next, we're going to import our video clips into
the project. To do that, we're going to go to the Media Pool on the left-hand side. If it doesn't
show up automatically, just click it here and it will show up. This is where we're going to drag
and drop our files directly into the project, and that's as simple as drag and drop.
Now, this box may appear when you do this, and what it's suggesting is that you change
the project frame rate to the same frame rate as your footage. So, you will want
to click "change" so your frame rates are consistent. At any point throughout your edit,
you can drag more videos, photos, music, or audio files into the Media Pool.
Okay, now the clips we've imported are available here on the left-hand side.
Just double click one to have it shown in the viewer where you can easily scrub
over the timeline to preview the shot. Down the bottom, we've got the project timeline,
which is where we'll be editing the clips. And you can zoom in and out of the timeline through
the plus and minus here. At the top, we've got our previews, and there's an option to create either
a single or a double preview. Double preview will allow you to view both shots from your media pool
on the left as well as your timeline preview here on the right. However, I would recommend
using one only so you can have more screen real estate for your main timeline.
Alright, now let's edit. To do so, drag your first clip from the Media Pool onto the timeline, and
you can drop it anywhere really. It doesn't have to be at the very start. I like to leave a little
bit of space in case I want to add something in front later. And as for the timeline, the blue
track is video and the green track is audio, as you can see by the waveforms of this clip.
To watch back, you can simply move the playhead along the timeline or tap the space bar, and it
will play in real time. You can make your audio and video tracks bigger or smaller by dragging
this bar at the top and bottom, and this helps increase the preview size. You can also adjust
other aspects of the workspace, like the size of the viewer; you can drag that up or down, as well
as the Media Pool size and other menus. To make a cut, to a dialogue-heavy edit like
the one I'm editing here, I'd recommend selecting linked selection. What this does is it combines
the audio and video tracks together as one, so any changes you make will automatically
be applied to both. So now when we choose the blade over here or press 'B' on your keyboard,
by clicking at this point in the timeline, it cuts both the audio and video at the same time.
Then when I press delete, it deletes both. Whereas without the link selection, it only
cuts the track that you clicked. Now, you will want to be careful when you're using the blade
tool not to have it selected while navigating the timeline because sometimes you can accidentally
cut up your footage when you meant to just move across. So whenever you're not cutting, make sure
you switch back to the arrow. Command or control Z will also undo anything you do in Resolve.
Another way to make a cut is selecting the arrow and hovering it over the start or end
of your clip and simply dragging it to the left or right. And you can see there's that
white outline that indicates how long the total clip is and how much space you have to work with.
If you have a secondary clip like the one I just put on the timeline, if you hover the arrow over
the transition between the two clips, you can drag it left and right, and it will adjust the
length of each clip simultaneously. Now you can also move clips around on your timeline.
So if you just select a clip, you can drag it left and right, as well as on top of the other
track. And this is what you do if you're using a b-roll shot on top of a talking head without
deleting what's underneath here because you never know, you might decide to use this later.
So what if you want to get rid of the audio track from one of the clips? As you can see here,
the 'A' camera has captured my voice, but the b-roll shot is just empty and shots of
me actually getting the shot, which will create extra background noise that we don't want.
This is where you want to make sure link selection is off so we can select just the audio without it
being attached to the video and hit delete. If you want to add music to your edit, it works
the exact same way as importing video clips. So I've got my track here that I've downloaded from
Epidemic Sound, and I'm going to drag it over to the Media Pool. You can double click it to preview
it or listen to it back. However, you can also just import your music track directly into the
timeline, and it will automatically import the file into the Media Pool, which is a lazy way
of doing it, AKA my way. I'm going to drag it across to the start of this video edit, and I
want it to start right when the camera starts. So now we'll press play and see how well this track
suits the video. It's a bit loud. Now, just like with our first audio track, which is the dialogue,
with the second audio track, you can also expand the size so you can see the waveforms better.
And you'll notice that there's a faint white line here. This represents the decibel level.
If you click that and drag it up, everything will go much louder, which you definitely don't
want unless you want to go deaf. You can also make it much quieter,
which I'd absolutely recommend when using any kind of music over talking. I like to go with a maximum
of around -20 dB, even sometimes up to -25, so it's really nice and faint. So that's how you
adjust the audio levels as a whole, but sometimes you need individualized adjustments based on how
loud or quiet your audio track or music is. If you want your music to fade in or out,
you'll notice the white keyframe marker here. Just drag that across, and as you can see,
it's fading the music in over 6 seconds. You'll see one at the very end as well. You can get a
sense of how well your overall audio is balanced by checking the waveforms on the right-hand side.
So when you play the clip back, you can see the waveforms rising and falling, and ideally,
you want everything around the minus 10 zone. So I'm going to raise up my audio track until it's
consistently hitting around -10 at the loudest. You want to go to Min -5 but never anywhere near
zero as that means it's clipping and it's going to be distorted. Now playing that back and those
are looking good. You will notice especially from a zoomed-out perspective that sometimes
certain parts of your clip appear much louder than others, which is usually because you're talking
louder at those parts. And if we turn the volume down universally, it lowers everything too much,
which is why we want to pinpoint just this one bit and turn just that down but nothing else.
So, to do that, down at the bottom of your waveform clip, you'll notice this keyframe icon.
If you click that, up will come our volume keyframe timeline, and I'm going to start by
navigating to a part of the timeline where the audio levels are normal. Then, I'm going
to click this diamond icon to add a keyframe. As you can see, there it is. Then, I'm going to go
to the other side where the dialogue levels are normal, hit the keyframe again. Now, I'm going
to go around about where the louder parts start and end, then I'll add two more keyframes.
So, as you can see by this audio timeline, this is the loud part of this clip, and to lower the volume,
simply click and drag it down, and there it goes. Now, the audio waveforms look the same
as the others. You can minimize the keyframe timeline by again clicking this icon.
There is an automatic audio setting, which you can find up here in the Audio menu on the right-hand side,
and that is Dialog Leveler. If you turn that on, DaVinci will do its best to lower the loud parts
and raise the quieter parts. However, I found this to be a bit hit-and-miss and not quite as
targeted as doing it manually. However, there's no harm in turning it on.
Now, if you want to add text and titles to your video, you can do so in the Effects tab,
then choosing Titles on the left-hand side. There are a few different options here, and
by hovering over them and moving your arrow from left to right, you can preview the text animations
before you drag them over. Once you find a text effect you like, drag it over to the timeline and
place it above your clip. Let's zoom in so we can see better, and when we play that, we can see the
text animation over our video. To customize it, just click on it and enter your own text.
Then, you can adjust the font, the color, the size, as well as a few other things. And there we go.
Now, it's also super easy to add transitions to your video, that is if you want to use them
and not just go with hard cuts. To choose one, go back to the Effects tab and choose
Video Transitions. Here, there's a whole bunch of preset transitions. To add one,
drag it across and drop it at either the start or end of one of your video tracks.
Then, it will apply the effect automatically. If you're working with two clips on the same timeline,
just drag it and drop it between the two. The next tab is Fusion, and this is for more
advanced effects, which I won't be able to cover in this tutorial. If you're a beginner
just starting out, I would recommend that you use the inbuilt effects here on the Edit page.
The next phase of the edit is color correction, and this is what Da Vinci Resolve first became
known for as the world's best color correction software. So obviously, there's a lot of menus
here and so much you can do with your color correction. If you're just starting out though,
I would recommend keeping things as simple as possible. So, select the clip you want to color
correct, come down here to the color wheels, and the ones I'd recommend most are Color Temperature.
Sometimes your shot is either too blue or too orange, so move that across until your colors
look normal. Contrast, as you can see, this shot is very contrasty, so I'm going to reduce that.
I'm going to bring up my Shadows to get my shirt in the background a bit brighter. I'm
going to reduce the highlights to get the window a bit under control. And Color Boost is a great
one for enhancing colors to be a bit brighter and more vivid. If you look at the before and after,
that is already a massive difference after just 60 seconds of color correction. If you
have multiple clips that you want to color correct at once, just hold down command or control on your
keyboard to select multiple clips and follow the same process to color correct them all at once,
which I'd recommend if it's exactly the same shot but not for different shots.
The next tab across is Fairlight, and this is an audio editor. Lots of great features here
but again, this is a bit on the advanced side and not needed if you're a beginner just starting out
since we've already done some super helpful audio editing in the Edit tab. So, we're going to leave
that for now and head over to the Deliver tab. This is where we'll be exporting the video.
So, the first step is setting in and out points, which means I want the video to start here and
end here, since sometimes you can have random clips on your timeline that you just had there as
backup but you didn't end up using them because they just weren't good. To set the in point,
navigate to the start of your video and press 'I' on the keyboard, and 'O' on the keyboard to adjust
the out point. I recommend keeping it simple here. You can export at the H.264 codec. It is important
that you check these settings here to make sure the resolution is the one you want as well as
the frame rate. Give your file a name, choose a location to save, and then add to render queue.
Finally, hit 'Render All', and you're done. So, there you have it. Those are the basics of
The DaVinci Resolve editor. This is a fantastic program that can be, like I said, as beginner or
advanced as you like. And the best part is it's completely free. While you can pay for it, you
don't need to upfront, and this is an editor that can totally be used professionally for paid jobs
as well as content creation. I recently switched from Premiere Pro to DaVinci, and I haven't looked
back so far. I was using Premiere Pro for years, but it was taking so much time and causing me to
totally burn out as a creator due to the much slower and more cumbersome workflow. So, if you
want to hear some insights from 20 years of video editing and why I'm starting fresh, check it out.