Blackmagic Designs davinci resolve 18 lets multiple editors, colorists, fusion artists
and audio engineers all work together in real time on the same project no matter where you
are in the world it works with a new project library that stores the project files that are
hosted on this brand new blackmagic cloud but what is so cool about this new workflow is that
it's dead simple to set up and use i'm going to show you you don't need to know anything about
it so you can keep on editing anywhere even in your underwear we're going to blaze through this
multi-user collaboration tutorial with help from my friend jeff today say hi jeff hi jeff he's
a professional colorist working from home and you're going to get to see the power of getting
rid of the whole conform process and how you can work together to crank out better faster work
create a free user account for blackmagic cloud to get started this is how the system can track
who's making each change to a project and you can sign up and log in directly from
the blackmagicdesign.com webpage in the upper right you can even do this workflow with the
free version of davinci resolve 18. how crazy is that just one person needs to spend five dollars
a month to sort of own the project library this helps cover the hosting fees which i don't mind
paying because this is so much simpler than using the older postgres sql share database
over the internet and you would have had to pay amazon web services for that anyway so
just five bucks for one person however at any time you can click this new copy to button to copy the
entire project back to a local disk database also now known as a local project library and then you
can cancel your monthly five dollar fee if you don't need collaboration anymore and you don't
lose any of your work that's awesome right so blackmagic cloud will store our project files and
in our case today jeff and i we're gonna keep our footage on local hard drives and use dropbox to
sync a folder of proxy footage continuously more on proxies in a second so dropbox is the transfer
tool but we both have copies of footage at our workstations we're not trying to play footage
up in the cloud that would be crazy it's just the tiny project files that are going up there
so if you want to sync a whole post house to the same office there's actually a new cloud store
cloud mini and cloud pod and they share media over a 10 gigabit copper ethernet so it's a super fast
nas basically that's network attached storage it's awesome and hey blackmagic if you want
to send me one to test for the channel i don't think i'd say no anyways but for today i'm gonna
be syncing a dropbox folder with my samsung t7 and uploading across my measly 10meg dsl line to jeff
i've got a project with 6k red raw footage from the komodo and a couple of 4k dji air 2s drone
shots which add up to 80 gigabytes that's a lot of data to send over the internet and this is a small
project so the trick to making this all work is to create proxies and davinci resolve 18 has a new
standalone app called blackmagic proxy generator but you might be like hey what the heck is a proxy
well it's a stand-in it's like a placeholder a stunt double it's a placeholder that's good enough
to see and hear what you need to edit a video even mix a video or start setting a color look
and it's a fraction of the file size of the original footage it's also easier to play
back on older computers so if you've ever heard the term dailies or rushes this is what they're
talking about and this is how everything that you see on tv or in the movies is cut
so here's how it works first you find and open the app it's in the applications folder and it's not
inside the davinci resolve application folder drag to add a folder with your high resolution 4k 6k 8k
and 12k footage and you have new format options they're listed based on the lowest to the highest
quality but the compressed h264 and h265 they're all going to be about the same size because
they're the same data rate which is 6 megabits per second also note prores here is actually prores
proxy and i don't think you're going to have that option on a windows computer click start and let
her run i've been happy to see that all of my m1 max cores get utilized when transcoding the red
raw footage and obviously the dji drone footage is going to process much faster than the komodo stuff
another thing to point out that makes this new proxy generator tool unique and pretty special
is that i can actually continue to edit video in davinci resolve 18 while this is running because
it's a different app now that the proxies are cooked we went from 80 gigabytes down to 600
megabytes for this project that's legit even i can upload and push that quickly over my awful
internet connection the proxies are placed next to our original footage in an obvious folder named
proxy they have the same file names to match the original big clip file name and that's the magic
of offline to online editing and even after doing this for 20 years it's still magic to me
now you're gonna know that you have proxies working behind the scenes in a couple of ways
one there's a new badge icon that if you look at the clips and thumbnail view
it has a camera and a film strip and then two you should also know about the column
view on the media page by right-clicking and checking the box for proxy and proxy media path
this is going to tell you the proxy resolution if it's connected and where it lives if it's
not connected you can right-click to connect to any proxy and choose to relink proxy media
under the playback drop down menu choose proxy handling and then i would roll with preferred
proxies most of the time resolve was going to export the camera originals if they were connected
but use proxies just for easier playback choose one of the two other options to see
higher resolution footage which can be helpful for pixel perfect effects and grading now i want
to get the small proxy files not the camera originals to jeff with a sync dropbox folder
so after you've clicked stop you can click the extract proxies button and send them to a dropbox
sync folder over here in finder i have a whole project with nested folders to stay organized
which i created with a free app called post haste i'll link that down below this is what gets synced
to jeff's computer hey i'm waiting on those files by default the installed dropbox app needs the
sync preferences set to new files to be available offline this makes sure you're not trying to
access files that are living up in the clouds it will always store them locally on a hard drive to
share the dropbox folder just right click and go down to share and then fill in the email address
to create a blackmagic cloud project library click the cloud button in version 18 and add a project
library this sends you over to the website to log in with your new blackmagic username and you're
going to click to create a project library again down in the lower left now pick a server location
close to you i chose california and give it a name just like fight club click create and this is your
prompt to put in your credit card information i've already done this so i don't need to make a second
library at this moment so i'm going to hit cancel you'll see the web interface is the same as the
project manager over in davinci resolve so in the resolve project manager if you don't see a list of
project libraries click this button and it's going to expand out i want to share the creative video
tips library with jeff using his blackmagic id so i'll hit the details button and share enter the
email address and he should get an email in his inbox to join the library okay loading projects
i see all your projects this is an important distinction here i've given access to all of
my projects in this library it's not just a single project inside it and right now this is actually a
single user project so as soon as this loads and opens what you need to do is go up under the file
menu and then down to multiple user collaboration this lets both of us get read and write access and
it also disables dynamic project switching which means you can't hot swap between projects so it's
just like the older shared postgres sql database all right jeff you in the project loading all
right it's open now that it's open is it red are there offline media oh yeah it's all offline it's
all offline okay i kind of expected that the first time so what you're gonna do is hit that orange
you know button that has like the flashers on it say locate media and you're going to point it to
that dropbox sync folder that we had all our media sync across cool i found it dropbox folder now you
can actually see who's in the project in the lower right section there's a little icon that's new and
it's got like two little people if you click on that it says who the project members are so you
can see jeff is in there and i'm in there and it also tells me hey you're on a mac which is great
because i like macs why don't you click on a bin up in the upper left of the media pool over there
in the edit page click on a bin so footage oh sweet you found the footage komodo folder i see
your initials there jw popped up there so the way this works is it's first come first serve if
you're first open a timeline you're the only one with read and write permission on that timeline
the other one can still read it and copy and paste it to their own timeline and this is how
resolve prevents version conflicts so now that you're in the jeff bin if i click into the jeff
bin and try to open a timeline it looks like you have two timelines open maybe if i click on the
all footage timeline double click to open it i can open it and i can see all of the footage there on
that all timeline but the biggest distinction here is that i can't move anything right i only have
read permission i don't have write permission and one way you can tell this is because the
toolbar above where there's you know there's the selection tool the trim tool the blade tool all of
that stuff gets grayed out okay so and if i try to click on a clip and move it with my mouse or you
know the speed editor any of these tools i can't move it at all but i can take a clip or two of
yours and i can say edit copy and then i can go to my bin where i have an empty sequence or something
and then i can paste that in with command v so i'm able to take those clips from one timeline
that you owned and place them into a bin or a timeline that i own why don't you take that empty
timeline and fill it with a couple of the clips that you like and i will be in my uh chadwick bin
while you're doing that do you have a couple clips there on your timeline i should check out now i do
okay so i'm going over to the jeff bin okay by just clicking on it and it's got a little refresh
icon and a little spinny wheel it took just a second there and we can see the refresh icons
are gone but if i click on the empty timeline we in fact have four clips it looks like he put four
clips down on there of this lonely man walking through the desert in new mexico hey if you see
a purple bar above the footage that just means that you only have the proxies you don't have the
originals i can continue to make edit changes while you start to color grade this project
great i'll move over to color page well you're over there working on clips in the color page i'm
just going to play back some of this so we know what we're looking at and and listening to okay
we can see he's made some changes so let's say i'm in the middle of presenting to a client i don't
have to actually take his changes that he's doing to the color grade while i'm in the middle playing
back i get the choice of doing that by clicking this little refresh button that's up in the upper
right there so right now i'm just going to play the beginning of this timeline you can hear how
amazing this video is what is it that you want for yourself and why don't you have it already
in order for your life to become what it was meant to be so it's pretty cool right it's got
some voiceovers got some music everything is playing back seamlessly on my m1 max computer
and even if i jump to the ending clip here i want davinci resolve 18 collaboration that's what i
want that's what i want i want dimension resolve 18 collaboration i know it's cheesy right so on
that first shot i've got that black title that says blackmagic cloud if you could just bring
the sky up so it's a little bit brighter it'll pop against the black title that's on top of it
so here's here's crazy oh geez yeah you really blew that one out maybe we don't need to go
quite that far with it okay okay now that you move to another clip it shows a badge that's
indicated that you're done working on that clip so i can update it on my end so so basically i
get the badge as soon as you move away from that clip all i need to do is click this right here
update and now it looks legit it looks normal i'm happy with that good work jeff
so the other thing to know about bin locking if you're really concerned about someone getting into
your bin is you can go to your bin and you can right click on your bin and then say there's a
new option there that you've probably never seen before it's called lock bins it's in that fourth
section down if you click lock bins basically you're saying hey only i have access to that bin
now just so you know you don't really need to lock bins clips or timelines because if you're the
first into it you've locked it and as soon as you click away from it it's unlocked and someone else
can take ownership of that bin clip or timeline oh another thing you can do if you're going to
be first into a bin but you don't want the full permission is to option and click it alt on a
pc and you're going to open it in read only mode you should see an eyeball icon after doing this
and then to release it you just click it again hey chadwick what if two colorists want to work on the
same timeline at the same time well i'm glad you asked jeff over here on the color page we're both
in the collaboration 3 timeline and i can see you're on shot 5 working on that so
that's locked out i can't make changes on that shot right now because you're on shot five right
yeah um i can do everything i want to do to try to make changes but i can't
but i can work on the shot right after it shot six and this shot right here maybe needs
to have the exposure brought down a little bit maybe you need to pump some saturation into it
uh maybe make the shot a little colder because it looks like a cold day we could do that in the hdr
controls if i click on shot five right now i see you've made this shot super dark and really moody
but like it's almost like day for night i love it so that's basically how that works you could
actually have you know five colorists working on a single timeline at once it's super super powerful
so another really useful tool in davinci resolve is the chat window which is something that's
unique to any nle that i know about it's this little button right down here so i can quickly
type a message to jeff because he's in the project like you know have you subbed to cvt yet you know
and of course he has right but in all reality the way this is really useful is if you need
to make notes about changes and you're not on a zoom call like the two of us are right now or if
you just need access to a specific bin and then i'll just go over here and then to right click i
can say unlock bins the thing about dropbox sync that's super cool with it being bi-directional
is jeff can create a disclaimer over there on his computer cool okay i just dragged it from
the dropbox finder window into the chadwick cuts folder and now i'll bring it into the timeline
all right let's hit refresh a different way this time i'm going to right click and say
refresh bins and that should give me the changes over here and if i go to the end of my timeline
there we go we got a disclaimer i need to change the position of this title so that we can see the
whole disclaimer because this is really important information to read the next thing i want to do
is actually show it the other way this is going to be super quick but i'm going to record a voiceover
to add at the end of this video so that jeff can get the voice over as well and we're going to go
to the fairlight page to record the voiceover this is how easy it is to create a voiceover
in davinci resolve i'm going to close this collaboration chat window because it's in the way
so you always need to check your preferences over here so i've got input set to scarlet solo which
is my microphone and used for screenflow the other thing you need to do is under project settings
make sure underneath the capture and playback section that your save clips is getting set
to your you know your cloud collaboration your dropbox folder because that's a way that he's
going to make sure to be able to get these right after i record okay so now what i'm going to do
is change my input away from airpods and we're going to say input is actually scarlet solo usb
we're going to patch that in we'll hit x and then to record it's really simple you're just going
to hit record and i should see levels but we have this echo thing right the way you get rid of that
is you hit the mute while you hit record and now i can still hear what i'm recording because i've
got direct monitor out of the scarlet solo usb i'm going to hit record and then i'm going to record
this amazing voiceover in a world davinci resolve helped creatives collaborate in their boxers
all right i'm going to stop it right there that was pretty terrible
but i can disarm this and i can go back over here to the edit page and i'm going
to put this at the end of that other timeline by a quick copy go back to my collaboration 3
project and i'm going to just paste this in right here and i need to see the waveform so
i'm going to expand this out i know that it was right around here where the voiceover started
in a world davinci resolve helped creatives collaborate in their boxers alright it's amazing
right the best voiceover you ever heard and it's gonna go right over here on this ending disclaimer
section alright so jeff now on the edit page if you open up that same timeline dropbox should
have just synced that voiceover recording that i just recorded right now on your timeline which is
on your hard drive at your house uh why don't you give that a playback and see how it sounds sure
in a world what do you think of collaboration here in davinci resolve oh it's amazing it's
pretty cool right yeah hey there's one last thing i got to show you it's called timeline comparison
mode okay so the way it works is you select the other timeline you want to compare against by
right-clicking it and then you can go down to compare with current timeline when you check
that and click that box you can drag the slider in the upper right there to drag down and sort of
see the whole thing and you can see the areas that are different right this area that's highlighted
is different you can also click on the left here where it says different index and it'll give you
a whole list of all the differences this only has one and basically there's a legal disclaimer that
we put on version three and i want to put that on version four so the way we get that to happen is
just to right click say accept change and now we have the legal disclaimer that was on three
it's put on four so that's a quick way if you're just gonna update a couple graphics or something
between two projects uh to get them to to all be the same i hope you found this tutorial helpful
and feel comfortable diving into collaborative video editing with davinci resolve 18. hey
i'm chadwick this is creative video tips it's here to help you create videos that make a
difference and stand out i am so thankful for your time as always ask me down in the comments
any questions you have because i love answering them and because there is so much more to learn
i'll see you in that next video there should be something great to learn on screen right
now hey jeff if people need editing or color correction how can they find you jeff wilson.tv