27 DaVinci Resolve Editing Tips That Will Save You Days

all right so over the years I have made a bunch of videos talking about different editing tips and tricks that you can use in DiVinci resolve to save yourself a lot of time now in this one I want to try to go over as many of them as I can possibly think of so that they're grouped into one big video that people can save and come back to whenever they need to like I said some of the things that I'll mention I've already covered in previous videos but others I haven't so I would recommend watching through the whole video because you might be able to learn something new okay first thing is making your own custom project templates I've talked about this before but it is very useful so I'll go over it again this is going to save you time by giving you a consistent starting point for folders and timelines for all of your videos when you open up resolve you can make a new project and name it template open up the settings in the bottom right and then set everything up however you need it then go and make as many bins as you need for every sort of media that you typically import into all of your projects and you can also make one or more timelines for your footage to go in depending on how many timelines you usually need for example you can have one as your main working timeline and one for your b-roll selects and within each of those timelines you can set up extra video and audio tracks depending on what you need then you can also start applying track level effects to those tracks for example if you want your background music to always be atus 18 DB you can do that or if you always want your voice over track to have voice isolation enabled once you've set up your project template with everything you need inside of it save it next time when you open up resolve to start a new project right click on the template that you created and hit open in read only mode when it opens save it as its own project and now your new project has the exact same structure and everything else from the template but the template itself is still saved in your project Library all right next thing is dynamic project switching when you open up resolve right click in the empty space in your project library and enable Dynamic project switching now when you have one project open you can click on the house icon at the bottom to see your project library and open up a different project at the same time as the first one then you can use the drop down at the top to switch between which project is active and this lets you copy pretty much anything across the projects without having to always close one of them to open up the other one just keep in mind that the more projects you have open the slower things are going to run so if you want to close any of the currently open projects you go into the library right click and hit close on the ones that you don't need to be using my next piece of advice is about using power bins and power bins essentially let you share media across every project that you create instead of having to always import the same stuff into every new project so if you if you use the same exact Graphics overlays music sound effects or anything else across a lot of your projects you should just import them straight into the power bins that way anytime whenever you create a new project they're ready for use and you don't have to go looking for them you can drag any asset that you want right into the power bins but keep in mind that if you delete or move an asset from whatever folder it's in it's also going to show up is missing in the power bins and to add on to this tip once you've imported stuff you can change different settings of an asset directly within the power bins so for example if you Chang like the size and position of a logo within the power bins anytime when you drag it those changes will be applied right away to it on the timeline and this goes for pretty much every setting that you can change in the inspector that way if you always apply the same settings to an asset you can save yourself a lot of time by just doing it once next tip Builds on the last two and it's that you can drag certain things directly from the timeline into your power bins so you might want to do this when you've got like the perfect size position and any other settings dialed in for an asset and then you decide that you want to save it as kind of a custom preset to use later for example I often use a specific title from the M hype plugin from motion VFX to show my discount code on screen and instead of always dragging in the default title and then customizing it to how I want want it I can drag it onto the timeline customize it once and then drag it over into the power bins and then anytime I want to use that exact same title customized in that exact same way I can just grab it from the power bins and drag it onto the timeline and speaking of motion V effects they are actually the sponsor of this video If you followed me for any amount of time you've probably heard me talking about their products a bunch of times before whether it's in a sponsored video or not I genuinely like their stuff and I feel completely comfortable recommending them their plugins offer a ton of really high quality assets which are Super customizable and that makes them really versatile you can use Motion Graphics effects or transitions from pretty much any plug-in in any type of project and as long as you spend a little bit of time to tweak it it can easily match the theme of your video I use their stuff all of the time for pretty much anything that I edit and I only have nice things to say about them so if you're looking for highquality editing assets that save you time and effort I absolutely recommend checking out motion VFX you can do that at the link in the description and you can also use code George 10 for 10% off if you decide to pick anything up so a huge thank you to motion VFX for supporting the Channel all right next tip is kind of like the last one but the thing is there are certain things that you can't save into Power bins unless it's a standalone clip you won't be able to drag it over a good example of that are transitions that you would drop straight in between Clips however you can still save your own customized transitions so if I grab one from a a motion VFX plugin and drop it in between these two clips I can go ahead and customize whatever settings I want on it like different sliders and the length and then I can rightclick on it and hit save custom transition preset and give it a name now if I search for it in the effects Library it should be there and whenever I drag this one onto the timeline it's going to be my customized version that's based on the original transition the next one is pretty simple but it also saves a bit of time in the color tab in the lot Library you can Mark Lots as favorites by hitting the Little Star on them and after that whenever you want to apply a l that you really like onto a node instead of having to look for it in the library or scrolling through a bunch of others it's going to show up in the favorite Lots section next one is kind of like power bins except for color grading and it's about using power grades these save you a lot of time by letting you quickly reuse color grades that you like without having to always build them from zero again like with power bins any color grade that you put into Power grades becomes available in every project that you work on so to create one you can color grade your clip however you like it and then right click on the preview and hit grab still then when you open up your gallery that still is going to be in there and you can grab it and drop it into the power grade and now it's available in any project the next time when you need to use it if you just drag it from the power grades onto your clip it's going to apply all of the adjustments and the same node tree to whatever clip you you put it on you can also use power grades to just save a node tree structure that you like without actually doing any color grading in the nodes themselves and it works the exact same way as if you were saving a color grade and you can create new power grade albums to keep things organized so you can have a power grade album for actual color grades and one for just the node trees that you like using so these next two are going to be from the most popular video on my channel and the first one is using stacked timelines you enable will stack timelines from the button in the top left of the timeline and then you click the new button in the top right of the timeline to open up a second timeline that's stacked on the first one then you can use the little dropdown to select which timeline is being displayed where and if the timeline that you want to open isn't showing up in the drop- down menu it's probably already opened up in the other timeline and you just need to close it there this lets you easily copy things over from one timeline to another without having to constantly swap back and forth and that should save you a lot of time the next tip are going to be my fast cut keybinds and I've got them on my number keys from 1 to four one adds a new cut wherever the playhead is two deletes everything between where the playhead is currently and the closest cut before it and it closes any gaps three deletes everything between where the playhead is currently and the closest cut after it and closes any gaps and four just Ripple deletes whatever Clips I've selected using these Keys is is much faster for me personally than using the default keybinds for adding cuts and ripple deleting clips and it's definitely much faster than using the default blade tool with the mouse some people have asked me why I even use Ripple delete when I have start to playhead and end to playhead and it's because sometimes I don't want to just like Ripple trim a clip but I want to completely get rid of it and as for why I've rebound Ripple delete to my number four key it's it's just because it brings all of the keys that I use for cutting together and I like it next one I made a video about not too long ago and it's color grading versions this essentially lets you have multiple color grades on the same clip that you can flip between and tweak independently without overwriting any of them after you've reached a point with your color grade that you like you can rightclick on the clip and add a new version that's going to copy all of the stuff that you've done so far so that you can keep experimenting with the color grade further but but you can always load the previous version that you liked at any point if you need to honestly you can go and check out the full video that I made about these which explains how they work and why you might want to use them a bit better next up is saving presets for different effects in the fair light tab so for example if you want to save The Equalizer settings that you always use on the audio coming off of a specific microphone you can go and do it by clicking the plus icon at the top and adding a new preset this is is especially useful if you often record with the same microphone in the same environment and you always apply the exact same adjustments to clean up the audio and by saving them as a preset you don't have to always spend the time doing it from scratch and the exact same thing applies for the Dynamics again set everything up hit the plus to make it a preset and you're good to go the next thing is kind of similar but you can even save a combined preset of all of the effects that have been applied to a specific specific audio track so you can do that by going up to the fair light menu at the top preset library and then up here where it says filter by you go to Global track presets and then you pick which audio track you want to save the adjustments for and hit save new then the next time you want to use it you can go into the preset Library again Global track presets select the preset that you've created select the audio track that you want to apply it to and hit apply that's going to take all of the plugins equalizer and dynamic settings and anything else you've done in that preset and it's going to apply it to whatever track you need it on so that way you don't have to do everything manually every single time huge timesaver next tip is going to be about using the timeline proxy resolution if your playback is starting to slow down and drop frames you can go up to the playback menu at the top and then under timeline proxy resolution you can drop it down to half or quarter this isn't going to affect your timeline or your final export resolution it only changes the resolution of the preview and it makes it lower quality so that it can actually run better next one can also help with slow playback and it's using footage proxies proxy Clips are basically a lower quality version of your original footage and they're only used for editing to speed up playback but when you go to export resolve is automatically going to replace them with the original higher quality versions of those same Clips some cameras have the option to record proxies internally and if yours is like that I highly recommend using that setting it makes everything quicker because you just import your footage select it and then link the original clips and the proxies if you don't have in camera proxies available you can't generate them within resolve you want to open up your settings and in the master settings scroll down until you see this section these settings generally give you a good mix of low file sizes for the proxies and a low enough quality where the playback should be better but where the preview won't look like mashed potatoes hit save and then select the footage that you want to generate proxies for right click and go to generate proxy media when you've got proxies available you turn them on and off either from the button above the preview window or from the playback menu at the top and proxy handling you only want to have proxies turned on while you're editing when you start color grading turn them off so that you can see the highest possible quality version of each clip next one is going to be exporting the current frame that your playhead is on as a still image you can do it by either going to the file menu at the top and then export and Export current frame is still or you can just go ahead and set up a keybind for it and save yourself a few clicks this actually helps a lot when you want to pull images from your video for something like thumbnails or just to like send them off to someone the next one is using the history window and this basically shows you a history of all of the actions that you've done in your current editing session and you can go back and forth between different ones without having to constantly spam control z a bunch of times you can find it in the edit menu at the top in history and open history window or you can set up a keybind for it I personally have mine set to be the next tip is using the smart render cache when you're working with a lot of effects that are slowing down your playback you find it in the playback menu and you set render cache to Smart this is going to render out any effects that you've got on your timeline and make it easier for your computer to play them back but keep in mind that you have to set the folder for the cache somewhere where you have enough space because when you start rendering out the effect effect it's going to generate extra files that can end up actually taking a lot of space and of course you could always hit shift d to just completely bypass all of the color grading and effects together which should help a lot with smoother playback also if your Motion Graphics are scattered across different tracks you can disable them individually you can select the clip that you want to disable go to the clip menu at the top and uncheck enable clip or set up a keybind for it to do it a little bit faster and I've set mine to shift e then you can turn off the clips that are slowing down your playback while you're editing and turn them on only when you need to adjust them or right before you export next one is to set a keybind for the selection follows playhead setting this lets you make it so whatever clip you have the playhead on currently gets selected and it can help whenever you're using the tip that I mentioned earlier about the quick cut keybinds but sometimes it's just annoying to have the clip be selected so by having this function on a keybind you can turn it on and off when you need it next tip is pretty simple but you should really learn to color code your footage based on the frame rate so you want to sort your footage in the media pool by frame rate select all of the clips that are in like 24 FPS give them one color then do the same for 60 and 120 FPS you want to do it before you interpret your footage into your working frame rate though makes it a lot easier to keep track of what Clips you need to be using at any given time next one is using a keybind for Zoom to fit to navigate the timeline quicker in your keyboard customization search for Zoom to fit and set it to whatever key you like then when you're very zoomed in to a part of your timeline while you're editing and you need to quickly see the entire thing instead of scrolling all the way out you hit the keybind that's going to fit your entire timeline on the screen and when you move your playhead to a different part and hit the keybind again it's going to zoom into that same amount as before just in the new spot the next tip is to set up keybinds to add Audio Only or video only Transitions and it makes it a lot quicker to add transitions to your Clips by just selecting all of the ones that you need to do it to and hitting one button instead of having to rightclick each cut and adding transitions manually I use this for Crossfade audio transitions to make my audio Cuts flow better and be more seamless or to occasionally add cross dissolves to video clips or Stills that I'm showing on screen and also when it comes to Transitions you can choose which audio and video transitions are your defaults by right clicking on them in the effects library and clicking set as standard transition another tip is exporting project archives whenever you need to transfer projects between different computers to do it you want to open up resolve and then right click on a project and hit export project archive and this is going to export the project itself along with any of the media that's been imported into it keep in mind that depending on everything that's in the project it could create a really really big file but then you can throw it on an external drive and move it to a different computer or like hand it off to someone else to work on and after that all you have to do is hit import select that project archive and everything is going to be up and running quickly all right so I think that's all I've got like seriously across this video and all of the other ones I've made so far about different editing tips and tricks I think that I've pretty much shared all of the time-saving advice that I've learned and have actually been using over my years of using resolve so I genuinely hope this helps all right I'm out

Channel: George Kamenov

Views: 24,216

Keywords: UCl1kCtZgfMu84qoANgMgpPw, davinci resolve, davinci resolve tips, davinci resolve tricks, davinci resolve editing, video editing, filmmaking, resolve tips to save hours, color grading, resolve color grading, audio editing, making youtube videos, color grading for youtube, clever editing tricks, time saving resolve tips, become a better editor, resolve beginner tutorial

Id: Qegq8wRyWx8

Length: 18min 10sec (1090 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 11 2024