31 Essential DaVinci Resolve 16 Tips

today we're gonna go over 31 essential tips for DaVinci Resolve 16 these are efficiency tips and proficiency tips okay first thing if you're editing 4k footage or you don't have a super-powerful machine you're probably gonna want to run optimize media so well on the bottom right hand corner here there's a little gear icon that's your project settings so I'm gonna run progress 42 proxy I'm gonna Mac I can do that if you're on a PC it's probably going to be some form of dnx HD is probably the choice for you so that's it for that I want to make sure that your playback up here uses optimized media if available if that's unselected then even when you create optimized media it's not actually gonna use that but we still don't have optimized media what you need to do is we'll go into the media tab so we go into a folder and we select everything and right click and choose generate optimized media now unfortunately I can only do one folder at a time there is a trick however so let's cancel this there's a trick to doing all of your footage when they're in separate folders everything's all in one folder you're fine you can just do it the way I just showed you otherwise what you want to use is smart bins so if you've not used smart Ben's before let me show you how what you do here go into the smart bins area right click and click add smart pin and it's going to ask us for some criteria let's call this all footage and we're gonna choose under this section here we're gonna choose start frame and is this fine and then we just want to put zero because I just happen to know that pretty much all the footage I have it has that in common has that field in common in the in the metadata so we create smart Ben and now when I click all footage I am seeing all the footage that's in each of these bins so see we see some Cuba footage we see some New York City footage some of the Bubba's thumbs stake out and BTS see all that footage is represented here in the old footage so now I can just select all right click and select generate optimized media okay so that's that and I'll show you in a little bit one of the reasons why this is actually gonna be quite helpful okay tip number two is actually not even in DaVinci Resolve is just about and it has to be said keeping the same kind of folder structure on every project that should create a quick project here top tips we'll call it what I normally would do is I would always create like a footage folder music folder sound effects you know if I have stills associated to my project anyway I try to keep the same structure all the time and all my projects and that way I'm not guessing as to where things go anyway it's it's it does save time in the long run tip number three actually tip number three we actually did that was smart bins I kind of skipped over that and added that into what we were doing with our generate optimized media tip number four metadata let's just show you quickly it will go to the edit tab here or edit page as they call it if I double click on a file I can go into the metadata over here I click on the top right here now you notice I can't edit it or anything if you just click over here you can go to all groups and then you can edit so your main information you would normally be looking for what codec the audio codec frames per second so on it's all right here you can put in camera info all that now here's here's the tip you don't have to just do one file at a time notice these have a bunch of cars in these shots so let's say I want to select all the files that I see a car in let's just say those are the files I want I can go over here and in the keywords I can add car which as you saw with smart Benz later I could use it for smart Benz a number of ways you could use this but this is how you would add to multiple files at once so now see I apply that I select something different I come back to one of the ones with a car I see it has a car in the metadata this one has a car in the metadata but this one we didn't see it doesn't have car in the metadata that's how that works and now that we're in the edit page I can show you this which is tip number five live media preview so if we double click on a file and I click up in here and click live media preview what that does is it gives me the preview as I scroll left to right over the clip and then without even having to click on the next clip if I just hover over the next clip watch what happens any clip I do and the cool thing about this is to mark it in and out on a clip you probably already know just it's I for in Oh for out on your keyboard if I wanted to just quickly scroll through here and I thought oh that's where I want it my endpoint continued to scroll out point there let's just jump to the next clip it's kind of shaky there let's find okay there's some movement in out and I can create all these in and out points on my Clips without having to double click to each one bring it into the viewer and so on so that's your live media preview by again top right corner live me to preview make sure that's selected now one of the things that might throw you off is if you double-click if you have a timeline let's I take I'm gonna take one of these clips just so I've got a timeline just go back to New York City footage in and out here just so I've got a bit of a timeline okay so I've got a timeline now if I go back to my footage and I try to scroll over see it's not doing it now there's nothing wrong with it it's just I haven't double clicked on one of the clips to start with you at least have to initiate that process by double clicking on one of the clips and then from there see I don't have to click on this next clip or this one ain't anymore so that's how that works but sometimes it throws you off because you're saying it's not working and that's just because you're probably on your timeline and you haven't initiated the the clips again so that's how you get that moving now one of the things I said is that your optimized media is gonna benefit you in in other areas and this is one of the areas right away so see how smooth the playback is with all of these and how quick it pops up unfortunately if you especially have 4k footage if you're running at full resolution and your computer is not you know super powerful you might find that it stutters so much and then when you switch from clip to clip it feels like the next clips not even loading so just be aware it is actually gonna work it's gonna load but if you're running huge files you're gonna see that and it's going feel like it's not actually working so it's best bet just to run your optimized media and you'll be you'll be happy okay so the next item um so here's a good example so this is New York City and we're at one World Trade Center but from this shot from the beginning of the thumbnail you can't tell that that's what this shot is so I think it would be helpful if just the thumbnail represented what the key point of the shot is so a way of doing that is just scroll to where it makes sense the picture that you want to see right click and say set poster frame and now you can double click these other ones come on these other screens but see now that keeps I can even bring it back to the beginning there but then if I take my mouse off of that it pops back to that poster frame okay and tip number seven let's go back to the cut page this is only available on the cut page and that is this new feature called source tape so within the folder that I'm in I can treat this if this is day 1 day 2 day 3 of a shoot I can treat this entire thing like as if it was tape instead of separate clips and by clicking this button here and see it's the entire day and it's sequential - this would be the beginning of when I started shooting this would be in the middle this would be at the end so at any point you could just kind of scroll through everything instead of having to bring up into the viewer every single clip individually and edit that way so then I can just create my in and out points drag that bit down continue on for the day so it can be time-saving unfortunately that feature is not available in the edit page but and there's some other advantages to using the edit page but that's fine there's huge advantages to using the cut page so just knowing that it's there you can figure out whether it's gonna be useful to you or not ok so let's do this let's say I just zoom that up reposition it a little bit let's say that's the way I wanted a bunch of footage a bunch of clips to to be modified well I can just copy and then come over to the next clip that I want to have that same foot not just not just the transformation things that I changed but anything that changed on that clip I can now paste down on to this next clip and it will apply so I would right click and and that you don't want to do paste because then you'll actually play paste over that with the clip that you just copied you want to paste the attributes and then it gives you options of what you want to do so you can just choose all the video attributes like that or let's say you have modified the volume you can apply that as well to multiple Clips not just one clip you can paste it down to multiple Clips if you like so I hit that and see that now that's reframed that shot as well so that's how that works I'm gonna just undo these things here number nine it's quite easy to do this one you just want to disable a clip select it head D on the keyboard it's disabled so you know it's not playing head D again when it's selected and every enables that clip okay so number ten to duplicate a clip select the clip you want to duplicate a hit option or alt and drag it any direction as long as this a space available 11 is - let's say we want to cut this up I select the clip and command B we'll split it wherever the play heads at zooms command + command - I'm sure everyone uses that but you might not know about Chef Z you completely zoom out to whatever you have in your entire timeline you will see that if you hit shift C hit chef C again and you're zoomed back into where you were 13 cropping and transformation clip versus output blanking so you can do it on a clip select a clip and I double click cropping there and see I can crop it it's usually when you're gonna do this letterbox concept here you could do it like this but then you come up to this clip now this clip doesn't have it right and that's fine because every clip you might need to treat differently for whatever reason but if you want the whole project to have it you don't have to go to every single clip or copy and paste those attributes on everything just go back and undo this you can do it without put blanking and that you would do it on the color page click there and where it says sizing click that and and we choose output sizing and then you get this blanking option I see oh no even back in the Edit Page we can still see - we've got that on every clip now ok and this is how you actually have to undo it you have to come back to the color page go to out by sizing again and just click this little wheel here to reset things ok okay number 14 you can actually copy from one project to another project so this might save you time I just demonstrate that real quick go to project manager actually before we do that say we're gonna copy from this project to another project so I've got cabs in here let me just add crossfade at the beginning of that just so I'll show you that the cross face and everything come over so we'll copy that command see and we go over to the project manager and let's say go over near the Cuba um at the end over here I'm just gonna right click and hit paste and see what I got got that New York footage and my Cuba project and if we zoom in you'll see even how's that crossfade number 15 it took me a while to actually find out how to do this so hopefully this is news to you as well [Music] from an in and out point you can actually playback and I used to do this on premiere all the time but I couldn't find for the life of me a way to do that in in DaVinci Resolve here I want this to just play back from the end point it is option /u can also loop just your in and out points so let's shorten this um and you see I clicked on this little loop here and then I play it it just keeps looping that section which is great when you're trying to work on audio effects actually that's where I find it the most useful but you can use it anywhere just hit X on our keyboard to remove this in and outpoint to get your blade tools just beyond your keyboard these are real simple you may already know these but I'll just quickly hit them a on your keyboard gets you back your arrow T on your keyboard gives you the trim tool that's a couple the main ones besides those let's talk about markers you might not be using them and you might find them useful em on your keyboard will give you a marker if you double click on the actual marker then you can get into more details that you put keywords or notes on there which is kind of useful the first time I started using markers I didn't realize how easy was to put notes there there's also something if you have the clip selected if I have the clip selected over here and not just playing on the timeline actually have a specific clip selected if I am I'm actually putting the marker on the clip which is useful if you're moving the clip around but not so useful if you actually wanted it to be on the timelines anyway that's that's how you do that you also just select it you can see this little white outline on it and you hit delete on your keyboard to get rid of it there's also an option I should add a couple markers here you can right click and remove selective markers remove all markers ok next let's jump over to the color tab great so let's just say I just modified this a little bit just so we can see that I've done something here looks terrible though it's made sure we can see it okay so if I wanted that grade to be on this clip there's a few different ways I would do it you could just a copy and paste command C select that next one command V C and this is not replacing the clip like it does in an edit mode is just actually replacing the grade so that's one way if you just want to do it once I suppose that will be helpful let me just delete this okay the other way is by creating a still in your gallery so you would do that by clicking view Stills grab still so actually let's do something else with say this clip warm up the whole thing like that now if you still grab still and it creates a little preset there for me so that if I want to apply that preset to the New York footage I can just do that grab this drag it BAM no it has that warm color on it if I undo that goes back to the cool color again another way we can do this is by joining things in groups so let me just that back to what it was so you know you have New York footage in here and we have kuba footage so let's select keep a footage and right-click and we say add into new group call this one Cuba select all this continue a group NYC so here's the thing the trick cuz there's a bit of a trick to it because the way it works is if I color great this and then I select the other footage like they're in the same group so they're all supposed to actually change color right but it's not gonna work because it's only up here where it says clip I have to drop this down to Group one of the group options pre or post clip so let me just undo the change that I did there so I'm starting with a clean clip switch from clip to pre clip in this case let's just say I want to reduce my gain and put a blue hue over in the shadows anyway looks terrible but let's let's just say that's what I want now any of the clips there see they all have that treatment on it now but let's say this one I thought I want to do something a little different then I just go back to the clip itself and I can still do adjustments to further add color adjustments beyond what the whole group has that works like that okay and tip number 21 is working with lots so up here on the top left here well here's the way I used to right click here and click Lots I selected a lot that you want issue there is now if I want to audition the next one I gotta go through this menu again so that can be cumbersome but if I just go over here I can even hover overall these lots and get a sense of what its gonna do and then I'm gonna plot drag and drop the other thing is if you already have a lot you can right click and say reveal selected Lutton no that won't be there if there's no letter already selected but if it is then what it does is it opens up this tab over here on the top left and it selects the let that you had it applied and the other thing that's really important here is to me you always need to dial in a lot I don't like to put in necessarily a hundred percent of the luck and the way you control that it would be nice if it's just tools right here to do that but you can do it if you go into this button here where it says key and then where it says key output you can drag this because this is the lot that's on that node and then you can drag this down you can you can punch in like 50% basically so you can dial in exactly the amount of that that you want 23 is about how you can quickly find all of your ungraded clips for example there's a few different ways you can look at what you're seeing in this timeline here if you go up to here you can get clips and it's it defaults to all clips but you can also just do ungraded Clips okay and you can see the other options here to could just you want to just look at your graded clips alone anyway so there's some options there this one actually has to do just with a look is just kind of a bonus one here I'm going to throw in for something I like to do on most of my footage let's say here over here luminous versus saturation I do this all the time what's kind of cool and DaVinci Resolve 16 is you can now see your histogram here your your your shadows here and your highlights over here so you you know that this where you start to get into your blacks if I want to click here in this particular image and I want to make sure that my blacks are true black I could just do this so what I'm doing is based on luminance based on the darkest parts I'm removing color information so it's virtually black and white in those areas which you know like a lot of good cameras one of the things people talk about is how clean the blacks are well this is one way of cleaning up your blacks which is kind of nice and same thing with the highlights you see how much highlight information you get so this is probably where it's gonna start mattering for me on this particular shot so I'll just bring this so now I know that when and when there's white there it's pure white and when it's black it is pure black there is no color information in there if you want to really push the limits here we can see this a little easier it's not necessarily the best image to prove this point but if you look at the shadow details in here now watch what happens when I I'm gonna toggle off both my command D I'm gonna I'm gonna turn this node off but keep an eye on here I'm gonna turn it off now see how it fills full color information in the shadows and I do it again it stays dark it just gives you a kind of a filmic cinematic kind of look to your footage so you can go too far and certain file types that will really give it that bleach bypass look maybe that's what you're after anyway it's kind of a side note tip there I digress now some of you may be familiar with getting a full screen unfortunately you can't do any color grading when it's full screen that's like command F you can see it a little bit better but it's only scaling up kind of a low res version especially if you're working in proxies or optimized media so but if you can get a little more real estate here if you just use option or alt F right as long as you've already select you can just toggle that back go back here make sure you're on the node that you want to make your adjustments with and option F and you can get quite a bit more screen real estate for for your color grades so you can see a little bit easier what you're doing here okay the next tip is related to audio very very simple just make sure you name your tracks what they're supposed to be so you can find them okay this is related to adding tracks so you want to make sure that you're specifically adding audio tracks that are stereo or mono or depending on what you're needing I noticed this when I was trying to add a music track to an edit that I was doing and then I noticed later that it sounded very mono and then I realized that I dropped a stereo mix onto a mono track so you want to make sure that when you right click here and you either add tracks this way that you're choosing the right track type there or hit add track and specifically choose stereo or whatever it is that you're trying to do and then like I said before make sure you name your track properly so that when you're dragging especially stereo files that they're going to go onto stereo tracks because you can't really tell just from the interface here whether this is a mono or a stereo track that would be a nice feature number 28 is using templates or presets in you can do this in Fairlight you can do this kind of I do this in my other audio program I use the logic for a lot of things as well and especially as you get a good dialogue mix you've really eacute supposed to be a youtuber and you're doing your own voice you're doing using the same microphone kind of in the same environment all the time you'll you can actually build on every edit like every edit you get a little bit better get a little bit better you realize all that you know it wasn't loud enough for a wasn't punchy enough I needed more compression or there was some frequencies there that were causing me problems on certain speakers well you could just fix those and then save that out as a template and that way you bring that template in for your next project and you don't have to do any of that work then it doesn't it doesn't help you if you're using different audio sources different voices in different locations you can still you can still create templates for each of those if there is some consistency with going back to the same places who are using the same people anyway so let's say we have say this was what our EQ was and and I could put in a bunch of plugins as well but let's just throw in okay so let's just say these are the settings I got that compressor plug-in and an EQ on there so what we do is we'll go up to the Fairlight and go to presets library and we select a track that's why I said it's important to name the tracks and this is the track the dialogue track and we could just use a equalizer presets and we can save it and we can name that but if I wanted the entire track I could just say global track presets and then select the dialog and save new and just say Jamie desk now any other project I have I can just pull that up so let's say I wanted to apply it to this track we hit presets library I select a preset I select the track that I want to put it on I hit apply and now you'll see those have been added to that track okay so delivery tab and this is simple and kind of obvious but just make use of these presets not the presets they give you necessarily but once you create yourself so if if my projects are always like this and I always bump up my bitrate from my 1080p files and I use the multi passing code then I can click on this right here and say save as new preset 1080p YouTube good quality okay I can just pull that up real quick on the next project I don't have to redo that every time okay so this one is about in and out points on your renders as well so if you just want a little bit of the clip you can just do in I on your keyboard out Oh in your keyboard and just render just that section if you're testing things and then you just right-click on this little gray area here and hit entire timeline to get that back and finally number 31 related to the massive amount of space that gets chewed up on your hard drive from your cache files and there's two ways you can deal with that one is from within the project and the other is from within the file system I'll show you both first within the project you go to playback and click on delete optimized media that will that will do it for that one project but I guess the problem is if you have a whole bunch of projects you don't have the project anymore if you deleted the project out of the interface I mean here your project manager so if i deleted the cuba project from here then the files are still the cache files are still gonna be on on the hard drive so you want to make sure that those are cleaned off that's all i'm gonna show you that next okay so first we want to find out where your cache folder is so if you go into the project settings down here bottom right corner we go down here where it says cache files location cache clip is the name of the folder if you want it to redirect us to another drive you click browse another driver another spot on your hard drive you would go through here and you could you could do that now the issue is where is that folder because it's not telling me here right the answer to that is in your DaVinci Resolve preferences it's going to take the first mount location here in your media storage locations just automatically you have to ask Blackmagic why that is but that that's how it is so mine is volumes data movies so I'm going to find the cache clip folder in this location so I'll go back to my operating system and data movies cache clip and the folders are named these weird things but there is a quick way to find out there's an info text in each of these folders and then see it can tell me this is a Cuba folder see so that gives you information on each one of the projects that you have so then you know this is only a cache folder so you can effectively delete the entire folder you can delete that like that and it's fine because it'll just rebuild itself now that's also I'm gonna undo that which one am I in now see this one has an optimized medium so that's the other thing you can do you can leave the rest of the project there and just get rid of all your proxy files and it still has your original files in whatever folder location that you have set up for your project but these are all the the optimized media files here so and look if we can take a look at how much space is being used it is 4.6 this is just the demo that I'm giving you right now which you saw there's not that many clips but we've got almost 5 gig of cache files on here so if I don't need this which I won't after this tutorial is done I'm gonna delete that because I regain 5 gig of data and most projects are 45 100 gig whatever a lot more than 5 gig so you could see how your hard drive can be chewed up by using optimized me but it's only temporary it's for the use of editing to speed things up once you're done editing the project you're not losing anything by deleting the cash box except that if you do need to bring a backup it's gonna be slow running until you generate new optimized media again to get that speed anyway those are the 31 tips I hope this was helpful if it was please give it a thumbs up I really appreciate it it helps out the channel and I will see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: surefirepictures

Views: 49,793

Keywords: Davinci Resolve, Blackmagic, Tips and Tricks, Editing Tutorial, Color Grading Tutorial, Filmmaking, Essential Editing Tips, Editing Tips, Color Grading Tips

Id: QsOFkqUkyT8

Length: 33min 42sec (2022 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 29 2020