Hi, my name is Darren Mostyn. I run a
post-production facility in Brighton in
the UK, and I've been
using DaVinci Resolve for well over 13
years now. And during
the pandemic, work dried up
a little bit. So I started a YouTube
channel, which is what
you're watching now. And I've
done many tutorials on color grading and
editing techniques and
quite advanced stuff. And a
few stuff on beginners, but I realized I
never actually done an
episode on how to literally
start on DaVinci Resolve. Like what is
it? How does it work? So
I'm addressing that in this
episode. This is presuming you've never
seen DaVinci Resolve in
your life. You've literally
just come across from Adobe Premiere or
Final Cut, or it's your first ever
editing application,
and you don't even know where to start.
So I'm going to get you
going in this episode. I'm going
to make it as short as possible. I'm not
going to anything deep. I'm literally
just showing you how
all the different pages talk to each
other. So let's go and take a
look. First thing you need to
know is where to get it from. So you're
going to go onto the
Blackmagic Design website, and you're
going to click up here onto support, and
you're going to click on
DaVinci Resolve and Fusion
Software. And down here, you'll see the
latest downloads, DaVinci
Resolve, and it's currently
18.1.4. And you'll also notice there's
two different versions in there. You've
got DaVinci Resolve,
and you've got DaVinci Resolve Studio. So
depending whether you want
the full version or the free
version will depend on which one you
download. And it works on
Mac, Windows, and Linux. So just
choose which one you've got. So what's
the difference between
the free version and the
paid version is a question I get asked
all the time. I'll
summarise it quickly, but basically
the free version is going to do
everything you need to do to get learning
DaVinci Resolve. You're
going to be restricted to Ultra HD, so
you can't do 6K, 8K. You're
restricted to a single GPU for
processing, Resolve, the bigger the GPU,
the more GPUs, the faster
it goes. So that's a slight
limitation, and a few effects missing,
and there's a few other
things, but it really is fully
working. What's the catch? People always
say, "Why is it free?" When
Adobe is on a subscription
model, Adobe don't make hardware.
Blackmagic Design make a lot
of hardware. They make cameras,
monitors, panels, speed editors, all
sorts of stuff. DaVinci
Resolve is really the glue that
holds a lot of this together. So they're
quite happy for it to be
out there free. If you need
some extra features, the studio version's
there, it's going to cost
you about £300. I don't want
it as in dollars. That's a one-off fee.
That's not a month. That's
a one-off fee. I bought mine
about 10 years ago, and I've never paid
for an update since. So
it's free updates for life,
one-off fee. So that's the beauty of the
model. So just download the
free version, have a go with
it first. You'll know when you need the
full version. All right, so
let's launch DaVinci Resolve.
So once you've installed that installer,
you're going to
double-click down here, and it's going
to open up. And what it's going to do is
it's going to open the
last project library that you
worked in. So I've got one here. It's got
some of my YouTube
episodes in it, and this is what's
called a project library. So what is a
project library? A project
library holds your projects,
and your projects contain your timelines,
your effects, and the
links to your media, all that
sort of stuff. So we need a project
library to be able to create a project.
So how do we do this?
Well, the first thing is you need to
decide where the project
library is going to go. And you have
a choice of a local drive. You could just
put it onto a local attached
drive. You could put it onto
a network drive, and you can even now put
it into the cloud. So last year,
Blackmagic launched the
Blackmagic cloud, which allows me to save
my project in the cloud,
which means I can create a
project here in the studio. I can go
home. I can open it on my iPad, because
DaVinci Resolve works
on the iPad, which is fantastic. And I
can see that project. So as
long as I've got the media
in both places or proxies, I can be
carrying on working on the
train or at home or whatever I
want. So once you've decided where you
want to store it, you're
going to create the project
library. So I'm going to do it locally.
I'm going to add a project
library. And first thing I'll do
is browse to a location. So it needs its
own folder. So I'm going
to create a folder on here.
I'm going to call it DaRinci
DaRinci
project library.
And I'm going to say open. And now it
wants a name. So it's saying
to create a project library,
or you can connect to an existing project
library. So I'm going to create one here,
and they call it. So I normally have the
year first, and then the
month, and my project library
is going to be called DaRinci library. So
create. And so that has
created a brand new project
library. Here it is, Darren's library.
And inside there is a single
blank empty project ready for
me to populate. And I can create as many
projects in here as I wish.
Okay, so let's open up this
project and have a look at how we
literally get started in
DaVinci Resolve. So I'm going to
double click it. And we're into an empty
DaVinci Resolve project. So
first thing to address really
is what is DaVinci Resolve? DaVinci
Resolve was originally a
color grading system. And it's
evolved over the years to become a fully
featured editing system.
It's a compositing system,
and it has audio mixing capability at
very advanced level. And
remember with these things,
you only go as advanced as you want to.
And at the end, you've
got this delivery page,
which allows you to export out in as many
different formats as
you can possibly think of,
including resizing for social media and
all that sort of stuff. So
it is a fully integrated full
post workflow. So this is the equivalent
in Adobe of having Adobe
Premiere, Audition, Media
Encoder, After Effects, as all those
separate applications, but
it's all in one application.
And it's rock solid. This thing is
absolutely stable. So how
does this thing work? So down the
bottom, it's really controlled by these
seven pages. You've got the
media page, which is where
you get your media in to start with.
You've got your cut and edit
page, which are two different
ways of editing, but they work together
as well. You've got the
fusion page. This allows you to
do full compositing. So this is the
equivalent of Adobe After Effects or Nuke
or something like that.
You've got the color page where we do
color grading. This is
the equivalent of Lumetri.
And you've got your Fairlight page, which
allows you to do full
professional audio mixing.
And you've got finally the Deliver page,
which allows you to export
in as many different formats
as you can possibly think of. That's the
pages. They think of these as the
different applications,
but they all talk to each other at the
same time. You'd have to export to one
and import and export
XMLs and all that stuff. It's totally
integrated. So it's a really
brilliant way of working. You
can start an edit. You can then do a
little bit of color grading.
You can then go back and change
the edit, color grade it a bit more, add
a bit of audio post
production, just work however you want.
So I'm going to show you all that in a
second. But before we do
that, let's just have a quick
look at the preferences. So as with any
application, when you first open it,
you're going to just want
to check that the preferences are
familiar. I'm not going to go in detail
here. I'm just going to
show you how to get started. So let's
open up the main settings are down here.
And these are my main
project settings. This is still an
untitled project. We're going to save it
in a moment and give it a
name. But the master settings here is the
main thing you want to
look at. And at the top here,
you've got timeline format. This is the
resolution that my sequence will be
created in. So think of
it like your sequence settings. All
right. The beauty of DaVinci Resolve is I
can start off in HD.
I can be working with 4K footage. I can
edit it in HD. So my system
runs faster. So a little quick
tip for you there. If you run it in HD,
the system runs quicker. And
then at the end, I can switch
that to be ultra HD. Everything gets
remapped at perfect pixel
quality and allows me to export
that in full true ultra HD or 4K or 6K or
whatever you're working in. So the
timeline resolution is
kind of independent and flexible at any
time. The timeline frame
rate, you need to determine
this before you start your edits or
certainly when you first bring in your
media. So it defaults to
24 frames per second. The media that I'm
going to import is in fact
24 frames per second. But if
you're working with 25 or 23.97, it's a
good idea to just change
this before you start importing
media. If you forget to do that, DaVinci
Resolve will prompt you when
you bring in your first clips.
It will say, "Hey, these clips are
running at 25. Do you want to change that
setting?" But once you
set it, it's locked. All right, the rest
of it you can kind of
ignore for now. I'm not going to
go through all these different settings.
This program gets as
deep as you want it to be,
but it doesn't have to be. It works at a
very light level until you
want to go deeper. All right,
so that's the project settings. And the
other place to look at up
here is the DaVinci Resolve
preferences. So over here, the user
preferences, for example, I can set in
here how often I save
my project. It's on live save. As I said
before, DaVinci Resolve is absolutely
rock solid, but I've
got the assurance that it's live saving
all the time, but this thing
just does not crash. It might
crash occasionally, but very rare. All
right, so that's your user
settings. So I'm going to press
save. So how do we get some information
in here? The minute this is
just empty, there's nothing
going on. So there's two ways you can do
this. You can go to the media
page here, which is basically
dedicated to importing media. This is
where you manage your media.
This page is also replicated
in the edit page. So up here, you've got
what's called the media
pool. This is a direct link
to this page. Let me get some media in
first and show you. It
might be a little bit easier.
The bottom half is what Resolve can see.
So the minute you can see
that it can't see anything,
it can't see any media, all we need to do
is link it to media that's on our drives.
So let's have a look. I'm going to go up
to here to my backup drive I've got here,
and I've got some footage in here in a
folder. Okay. And this is
just some interview, a bit of
B-roll. So this would be your camera
rushes, the material that your client
sent to you. It might be
a single clip that you want to just play
with. That is what it's
looking at. But at the minute,
this is not in DaVinci Resolve. So I've
got an image here. If I
guess my edit page, I can't see
it. The reason I can't see it is because
this clip in order to be
seen needs to be down here
in the media pool. Now we can see it. If
I go to the edit page,
there's my single clip
and I can play it, but I've only got one
clip in. So let's go
back to the media page
and we can import a few more. So let's
just drag and drop those in.
So now we've got six or seven
clips to play with. Here's some metadata
information about what the clip
resolution is and its
frame rate and that sort of thing. I'm
not going to show you that
now. This can go as detail as
you want to. You can create folders here.
In fact, what I could do is
actually take the entire folder
and just drag and drop it in here and it
brings the entire contents
down. So many different ways
of bringing it in. And the other way you
can bring media in is
literally you could go to Windows
Explorer or the Finder and you can
literally drag and drop clips in. So I
can just drop them down
there and they're now in DaVinci Resolve.
So that's all good and
well. We've got footage
into the system, but what do we do with
it? So at the minute, we
haven't even got an edit made. This
is an empty sequence. This is our edit
page. This is probably the
easiest page to get started on
to build your program. This is presuming
you want to edit in
Resolve. If you want to edit in a
different application, you could actually
take that timeline and
import it into DaVinci Resolve.
And then you might just want to do audio
mixing and color grading on
that. That's really easy to do,
but I'm going to show you how to do it
from scratch as if you're
bringing in your own footage.
So here's the media pool. Remember this,
these can switch all on
and off by the way. So here's
my effects. I can switch these tabs on
and off. There's the media
pool on and off. Remember the
media pool is literally, there's my bin
structure is talking to this
page. It's an exact replica of
this page. So I never need to go to this
page again. In fact, you don't need to go
there to start with.
You can actually import your clips from
here. I can click in
here and say import media,
or you can drag and drop it as you saw me
doing earlier. All
right. So here's the footage.
So all I need to do now is just start
viewing my clips. So I can
see them here. You can have a
look at it in thumbnail mode or whatever,
whatever you want to
work with. So I'm just
going to double click a clip, press play.
That's playing in my source viewer.
So I can either bring the whole clip
down, just drag and drop
it down to my timeline.
That's the entire clip. That's the,
obviously the video and the
audio there. And this is now the
first clip in my sequence. But what I did
then was bring the whole
clip down. So what I'm going
to do is put my play head at the end.
There's keyboard shortcuts
for doing that as well. So
if I just press up and down on my
keyboard, I can move
that. And wherever this is now
is going to be where the next clip goes.
I'm going to press play.
So just going to take that little bit. I
just pressed I and O on
my keyboard. Then it's mark
in, mark out, which is also here. And
it's just going to take
that small section now,
drag and drop that down to my timeline.
And we're done. There are
many, many tutorials on how to
actually use the edit page. This tutorial
is really about how the
pages talk to each other and
getting a grounding in how DaVinci
Resolve actually works. So
it's just to get you going.
So I'm not going to teach you how to use
the entire edit page
because we'd be here for another
hour at least. Let's do one more just to
make it a little bit more full. So I'm
going to do mark in.
I've got a shot of a cake and I can just
drag and drop that down there. So I've
got three shots here.
First one, second one, and third one. And
if we go to the cut page,
what I want to show you is that
all these pages are looking at that
sequence at the same time.
So they're all sharing that
information. So we go to the cut page.
One, two, three, there's our
three edits. One, two, three,
there's our three edits up here. And it's
just a different view. The
cut page is a different way
of editing. I think people who come from
Final Cut Pro find the cut
page a little bit easier to use
than maybe the edit page. I think if
you're from Adobe Premiere,
you might find the edit page
easier to work with. But watch this. If I
just make an adjustment here,
let's just shorten that clip.
And I guess the edit page, you see that
it's shortened it. And
then I can do the same here.
Oops. In fact, just to show you if I
actually delete that clip,
I'm just going to highlight
it and delete it. Let's go back to the
cut page. And there's the
gap. You can see that it's quite
clearly talking to each other. All right.
So you can edit a bit in the
cut page, edit a bit in the
edit page, and you're going to be happy
with whichever one you
find more comfortable. What
I generally do is I'll start in the cut
page and then I'll fine tune
it in the edit page because
there's a bit more flexibility. But I
suggest if you're just
starting, just go straight to the
edit page and get going in there. All
right. So what else is going
on here? The next page along
is Fusion. Now I don't use Fusion too
much. It's a very powerful advanced
compositing system. This
is the equivalent of After Effects in the
Adobe suite, but it's there
and it's ready to go. So if
I go to this clip here, maybe we want to
do some light rays or some
complex little thing on here.
We can go into Fusion and there's the
clip ready to go. And I can
put all of these different
compositing techniques on there. We could
do some keying and masking,
all that sort of stuff. I'm
definitely not going to show you Fusion
in this one because we'd be here for
definitely more than
an hour. We'd be here for probably the
rest of the day. The big one,
we're going to go from the edit
page and we're going to go to the color
page. Now this is allowing
me to do color grading at any
time I like. You don't have to be color
grading when you finish the
program. You can do it during,
you can do it at the end. And we can take
this shot now and you can
see there's shot one and
there's shot two, but you don't see the
edit. You don't see the
actual timeline. However,
if you click up here on timeline, you can
actually see the timeline. So there's
that gap that we made
and this is the current clip that we're
going to be grading. And
here's all the color tools.
You've got tons of tools in here that
again, I've got episodes on
how to start in the color page,
but I'm really just showing you that
everything just talks to each
other. You don't have to send
things anywhere. Everything updates. So
on here, I could just
literally start grading now. So we
could say, let's just bring down our
shadows a little bit and
let's maybe just cool it off a
little bit. And there we go. There are
tons of different tools to
work with. Let me just reset
that. That wasn't a very good example of
that. Something more like
that. And let's put a bit of
contrast in there, something like that.
Now, if I go back to the edit page,
you'll see that that
clip's now graded. So I can just, I can
now carry on editing. So I could say,
okay, actually, I want
to move that up. Let's just move that
clip up. Nicely snaps to the
right place because there's
snapping tools on. I've got an inspector
up here. So if I open the
inspector in here, I can do
zooming. So maybe I want to make that
shot a little bit more zoomed in. I can
keyframe all this. We
can crop it. We can put dissolves,
transitions, all that sort of stuff. Let
me just show you quickly
where transitions are. Video transitions.
Let's just put cross
dissolve on there. And it's done.
It's as simple as that. Now, if I go back
to the color page, you see
that that gap has been tightened
up. I can even see the dissolve on there.
All right. So everything is
talking to everything. It's
really that simple. Now I do go into
depth on how to use the color page in
many different episodes.
So check out some of my playlists. There
may be a video appearing up here
somewhere. I don't know.
There'll be stuff in the description, but
you want to check it out.
Now Fairlight. What's happening
in Fairlight? Fairlight is your pro audio
mixing area. So you can edit
your audio in the edit page
as you would traditionally. So I can
adjust the volume like so. Fairlight,
you've got much more
control and you can really do very
advanced audio mixing in here. And once
you've done that, it's
done. You don't have to do anything. You
just mix it. It's really that
simple. And then when you're
finished, you also want to render it out.
So this would be the
equivalent in Adobe of the Media
Encoder or you go file export in here, it
goes to the delivery page.
Ton of presets up here for
delivering. So I can deliver straight to
YouTube. In fact, you can
connect your YouTube channel in
the user preferences. And I can literally
upload to my channel here
with chapter markers that get
recognized. It's really fantastic. It
sets all the presets up for
me, or you can go in here and
custom export your own settings. You've
got Netflix settings in here. You can
export back to premiere
or final cut pro if you want. It really
is as deep as you want to
get, but this is just a general
overview to show you how these pages talk
to each other. It really is
that simple to get started on.
So get some media in there. Remember it
just links. You'd have to
copy the media. You're just
literally linking to it and just start
editing. Let me show you
how fast it delivers. So okay,
admittedly, this is a very short clip,
but if I just go to here and
browse, so I'm going to click
on here and let's say on here, I'm going
to say renders to create.
Watch how quick it renders
this. So I'm going to press save. I'm
going to add it to the render queue and
it's going to render
this in H264. I can choose any other
codec that I want. It literally renders
in pretty much anything
you can think of. Press render all and
that has rendered already.
This is super quick. The bigger
the GPU you've got, the faster this thing
goes. So when you want to
take this to the next level,
obviously I've got a ton of tutorials on
my channel, but have a
look at the Blackmagic Design
website. There are free tutorials that
you can download with
footage and it will take you from
beginner to pretty advanced level in all
the different pages.
YouTube has a ton of great
channels on there. So I would look at for
editing, I would be
looking at Mr. Alex Tech,
Alex Cameron, Jay Litman, Casey Ferris. I
hope I don't miss some
people out now. Casey has a
great channel that goes into Fusion as
well. For Fusion, I'd be looking at
Patrick Sterling and
also Daria Fassoon has relaunched her
channel as Davinci Masticki. Audio Jason
Yadlovsky for color,
look at me and Cullen Kelly, if you want
to get into a little
bit deeper color science.
These are all great resources that I
would pretty much trust on YouTube. So I
hope that's helped you
sort of demystify what Davinci Resolve is
and help you get started.
Look after yourselves and I'll
see you in the next episode.