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 say 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 summarize 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, but 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 is there.
It's going to cost you about 300 pounds.
I don't want it 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 DaRins 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 then call it.
So I normally have the year first and then the month.
And my project library is going to be called DaRins library.
So create.
And so that has created a brand new project library.
Here it is, DaRins 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, 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 into 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 like 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 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've 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.
Okay.
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 detailed 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 let'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 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 which everyone 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 edits.
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.
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 can 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 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 of 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 a cross dissolve on that.
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 obviously want to render it out.
So this would be the equivalent in Adobe of the media encoder, or you go file export in
here, go 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.
And 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 H.264.
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 Faris.
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 Yedlovski 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.