5 HUGE MISTAKES New Resolve Editors Make (And How to Avoid Them) - DaVinci Resolve Tips

huge thanks to Riverside FM for sponsoring this video today we're going to go over the top five mistakes that I see new D Vinci resolve editors make and by the end of this video you're going to be so far above that you're going to be so much better off all you have to do is not these five things number one ignoring audio look at this scene where is he I had him and then you pushed me it feels a little weird that's because there's no sound design there's no real audio mixing everything is just kind of there's a lot of Silence it feels weird and I see this all the time on people's movies they absolute silence or things are too loud or too quiet and it kind of breaks that disbelief that you really want to be in when you're watching a movie let's take a look and listen to this again with some sound design hello you guys left your bik some of steps again where is he I had him and then you pushed me much better right do yourself a favor and if you are going to make a video especially if you new to editing spend half the time on your video and your story and your graphics and all of that and the last half of the time that you're going to spend editing on your audio make it better test it on different speakers listen to it through headphones think about all the things that you can see in the project and should you be able to hear them and if you don't have good recordings it's real easy to put in Ambient sound and stock sounds things like that or even just go and record your own you can record your own with an iPhone there's very little excuse for bad audio these days so spend the time and energy to have good audio because it will make or break your film and by the way if audio makes you nervous nervous and you you don't really feel like taking on the fair Light page in resolve by yourself I want you to check out Jason yovi's Channel he posts all kinds of audio content for fairlight and it's fan freaking tastic if you want to learn audio that's the place to go speaking of audio if you record any kind of interview or podcast or video call with other people the audio can be a nightmare if you're just recording like a screen capture or something you just have all the audio mixed down as one track and what if somebody's louder or quieter than somebody else then you have to go through a ton of work that's why anytime I record a video call or a podcast I use Riverside FM it's super easy to set up you just invite your guest to join your studio and hit record and it'll record your camera and audio separately from their camera and audio and it records each person locally so if you have bad internet or there's some kind of hiccup you don't get those nasty pixelized videos or messed up audio that we're all used to experiencing with other services after you're done recording you can download the tracks separately and bring them into resolve and edit them or you can even use the Riverside editor which will automatically make a transcript and let you edit Parts out that you don't like and it'll even switch cameras to the person who's talking using AI this saves so much time I can't say enough good stuff about Riverside I know this video is supposed to be five mistakes but there's a bonus one you can even get 20% off your subscription using the code kc20 or clicking the link down below mistake number two is not using keyboard shortcuts to go faster so if I want to cut this footage what a lot of people will do is go up to the toolbar here and grab the blade and then you can blade this footage wherever you want and that seems simple enough but even if I'm really fast look at how much time this takes I could to go up here grab it like that and then if I ever want to click anything again to switch over again to my normal selection mode then I can grab things and move them around whatever I want to do and let's compare that with a keyboard shortcut done already back working I can already do stuff just by clicking the keyboard shortcut for cutting at playhead in fact anytime that I cut things for the most part I usually just grab the the play head and I use this to kind of aim my knife and then I can either hit control backs slash on the keyboard or I've reset my keyboard shortcut to S on the keyboard and I can just cut this up wherever I want and just it takes so much less time to do that another tip sort of related to that would be a ripple trim now let's say that I want to cut the end of this clip off what you would normally do would be grab the edge of it like this and roll this in like that select the empty part and hit delete right to move everything down all at once but I can do this with one keyboard shortcut and do all of that at once without having to move things around it's very very slick to set this and other keyboard shortcuts you can go up to the upper leand corner of D Vinci resolve and under the D Vinci resolve menu you can go to keyboard customization and if you select all commands you can go to search and search for anything that you do on a regular basis and it will either tell you the command or let you set your own so for instance Ripple end to playhead if I type end to we can go twirl down Ripple end to playhead by default it's control shift right bracket I map it to W and ripple start to playhead is control shift left bracket or I have it as Q so I have q and W set on my keyboard to cut either the beginning or the end off of a clip then of course contrl z to undo and if you want my advice if you want to get things done at any kind of reasonable speed learn the keyboard shortcuts you could spend an entire day learning and practicing keyboard shortcuts and I would think within a few days you're going to make up for that time and you're going to be a faster editor from there on out so ignoring keyboard shortcuts huge mistake don't do it huge mistake number three is not using proxies so here I have a clip this is from the pocket camera 6K so it's 6K raw and honestly it plays back pretty well okay I have a pretty good computer it plays back pretty decently and so a lot of the time I don't need to use proxies okay but I still do why is that well on a fast computer you could open up One Clip and play it back and even if it's a pretty big clip sometimes you'll be just fine but once you start to put in several different clips and you start to stack them up and you start to really make an edit things tend to slow down just ever so slightly and it might be as simple as just a little tiny pause every time you hit the play button so instead of hitting play it goes play and that can be really frustrating and it can actually add up you know if you're going to be doing an edit over a few days or a couple weeks those little tiny moments add up into big frustration and big delay resolve has an amazing proxy system if you don't know you can go to the media pool right click on any piece of media and select generate proxy media and it'll just take a couple minutes and it'll make a proxy version of your media now those of you who don't know what a proxy is it's a lower res version of your footage that's easier to play back it's less taxing on the system it's like using a little tiny version of the same clip with the same timing same moments and everything and so when you're editing stuff and you're putting together your story you're just making things a lot easier on resolve and you might not always always notice a difference but often times you'll notice at least a slight difference in the performance when you're editing this is especially true if you have a lot of footage or if it's a long timeline or if it's a project that you're going to be working on for multiple days it's not just you know open something up and trim it real quick and Export it if you're going to take a break any point if you're going to take 10 minutes or 15 minutes away if you're going to go to lunch get proxies going because everything switches behind the scenes you don't have to manage files or anything like that it's relatively hands-off and you get much better performance and there's no real reason not to other than you have to wait for the proxies to render the first time now that I have a proxy made for this clip I can go to the upper right hand corner here and I can select prefer proxies and this will switch this out with my proxy footage and look how quickly this plays back look how responsive this is right and so it makes it a lot easier for it to play back and to think about things and when it comes time to render it's going to switch this out with a high resolution version so I don't even need to remember to do that it's just a really smart way to work and so if you're like I'm not going to waste time making proxies because my computer's super good and it can handle 8K raw get over yourself man maybe it can but there's still a little bit of performance that you can get from making proxies don't be prideful be smart mistake number four not using the color page Da Vinci resolve has been a industry standard color grading app for years a few years ago that's all resolve did was pretty much just the color page this tool has been around forever they've color graded tons of Hollywood movies just about every film that you've seen recently has probably been touched by the color page of Da Vinci resolve it's absolutely fantastic and I'll see people jumping through all kinds of Hoops so they don't have to jump into the color page doing things like you know putting a l on in the edit page and trying to use just like the automatic color management and stuff listen the color page can be a little bit intimidating because there's all these different controls and tabs and all this stuff that looks unfamiliar if you're not super into color but what's cool is that you can even just have a really really basic understanding of how color works and you can use a lot of the power of the color page for instance you could do something like open up your media pool here right click on the timeline that you're looking at go to timelines timeline settings switch over to color and switch this from Da Vinci y RGB to Y RGB color managed leave it on automatic and everything and hit okay then you can shift select all of your Clips right click and pick your input color space for me this is Blackmagic design 6K film Gen 4 close the media pool and now we have really nice looking colors a great place to start with our color management and then without learning anything about effects or nodes or any of the other panels I can make sure I'm in my color wheels and I can adjust the brightness of my clip with this wheel down here I can brighten things up I can change the white balance with these temperature and tint sliders so I can cool that down a little bit I can push the saturation up I can push the contrast up and I can get a much nicer looking image just with a couple of controls here in this one panel of the color page and it's just not a whole lot of things to learn if you literally only learn this primary color wheels panel and you set your color management and you know what camera you shot with and you just tag these you can do so much you can make beautiful stuff and you don't need to worry about any of this other stuff unless you want to so don't be afraid to jump into the color page it's so good I have a lot of videos on basic color grading and if that's something you're wanting to get into I definitely recommend colen Kelly's Channel as well as Darren M's Channel they're both exemplary amazing colorists and they're both very gifted teachers as well the fifth mistake that I see editors make is not learning Fusion because let's face it this interface is kind of weird it's a little bit intimidating but Fusion is where you can make Motion Graphics and you can make visual effects and you know composi in explosions and lightsabers and animations and all this cool stuff I mean really the sky the limit with fusion and it's built right into resolve and it makes taking your videos up to the next level so much easier than having to bring them out into a different app let me show you what what I mean so in our movie we have this little puppet alien guy and he was actually too big the puppet was too big to put in the actual spaceship that he drives and so we have to do some movie Magic here and this is the kind of thing that you can do in Fusion so easily check this out I can grab both of these clips right click and select new Fusion clip that's just going to put those together and then I can switch over to fusion and I have both of my Clips here in the fusion page let's go ahead and switch the background and the foreground here of our clips and we're going to lay this clip over over this clip and so I could just select this top clip and drag one of these masks next to it this makes a polygon mask and I can take the output and connect that to the blue input that just tells Fusion that I want to mask this clip with this mask and I'll go up to the inspector and just turn off this little switch so I can see what I'm doing now I can zoom in here and I can draw a shape that I want to use to kind of cut out our cockpit there we go I got my shape cut out and now I'll turn on this polygon and then select invert so now we have a little window where we can see through through our footage then I can take my little guy and add a transform node that just lets me resize and move things and I'll run that background footage this footage right here through that transform node and I can size it down move it over rotate it and boom we have our little guy inside of our spaceship and when I'm done with this I don't have to render it out or anything I just switch back over to the edit page and boom there it is in our edit it's already living in our timeline we can already play it Mac and it looks beautiful let's say I want to make some graphics I can go up to my media pool right click in the empty Bas and say new Fusion composition I'll just hit create and double click on the fusion comp to open up a blank comp I can take a background and throw this in here and I can take some text and I can merge it over my background and I can type the title of my movie and I can animate my text just by clicking the diamond next to any of these properties to set a key frame so we'll set our tracking at 1.3 at frame zero and then towards the end take our tracking down a little bit and now we'll have an animated title let's add a little bit of fog to this I'll just take this fast noise node and drag this in and again I'm going to merge it on top like this change a couple properties and add a rectangle mask that's just going to limit where it draws that fog soften out the mask a little bit bring this down and I can animate this as well so I take this Center set it here at zero and then at 20 frames we'll push this over a little bit also push up the SE rate and now we have some animated fog for our title look at that it just took a couple seconds to make that and now when I switch back over to my edit I can take this title and I can put this wherever I want in my movie and I can read use it and at any time if I want to edit this maybe I want to make this text a little smaller I can just be over it here in the timeline and then just switch to the fusion page select this text make it smaller and there it is smaller in my timeline Fusion is such an underutilized tool for resolve editors and it can be pretty overwhelming to think about all of the nodes and everything that's involved with Fusion that's why I made a free Workshop called the nine nodes that you need to make almost anything in Fusion there's a link to it right here that's my free gift to you if you don't know me my name is Casey and I teach Fusion if you're looking for a place to learn the fusion page learn basic compositing stuff Motion Graphics stuff this this is where you want to be so for color and audio make sure to check out those channels that I mentioned earlier and yeah if you want to learn Fusion nine nodes Workshop that's a great place to start also check out this video this is the crash course on Fusion which is very helpful if you're brand new okay all right what other mistakes do you see people make in resolve let me know in the comments okay

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 49,608

Keywords: blackmagic design, casey faris, how to, free video editor, tutorial, davinci resolve 18, resolve for beginners, davinci tutorials, editing, fusion, casey faris fusion tutorial, fusion tutorial for beginners, beginner video editing tutorial, video editing tutorial for beginners, video editing tutorial for beginners 2023, video editing tutorial casey faris, top 5 mistakes video editors make, 5 mistakes new video editors make, davinci resolve 18 tutorial for beginners

Id: o0SLUHArJAg

Length: 14min 24sec (864 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 22 2023