DaVinci Resolve 18 Tutorial | Beginners' Quick-Start Guide

I'm hearing on the street that we need a quick start guide for brand new editors in DaVinci Resolve why don't we make it hey I'm Tom Graham for Enviro touch plus and that's what this is this is the quick start guide for brand new editors in DaVinci Resolve it's a great very powerful program and best of all there's a free version that's pretty powerful as well but that brings a lot of brand new editors to the table and you know you need somewhere to start it's fine we've all been there so I'm going to walk you through everything that you need to know to go from zero to hero and start editing today in the program now this is brought to you by envato Elements which is a super easy to use subscription service that gives you access to millions of creative assets that you can download and use in your projects right away we're going to see some of those assets in this little quick start guide as well so to learn more about envato elements click the little Link in the description down below but without further Ado let's open up DaVinci Resolve well the first thing we've got to do is obviously download DaVinci Resolve so if you haven't done that yet just head to the Blackmagic design website go to DaVinci Resolve 18. Go free download now the one on the left this is your free download DaVinci Resolve 18. it's a fully fleshed out free video editing software DaVinci Resolve studio is the paid version you can see here it adds a few different things like AI region tracking uh resolve effects filters fairlight effects plugins and advanced HDR grading things like that now let's be honest you can get away with probably 90 of the work you need to do if you're just making videos for YouTube and things like that on DaVinci Resolve 18. so go ahead and download it for your Mac your windows or if you're working on Linux go ahead and download it for Linux so pause the video now download that if you haven't already and then and then come back once it's downloaded and installed on your machine all right and we're back now we need to open up DaVinci Resolve so let's do that right now so when you first open up DaVinci Resolve you'll be greeted with a very similar screen uh except your one won't have envato working that's all of the projects that I work on for envirotats plus you'll just have this here that says Untitled project and maybe it'll look like this as well you'll have your project libraries open on the left hand side now project libraries are formerly known in DaVinci Resolve 17 as databases but currently known as project libraries are basically the folder that all of your project files are saved in on your machine when you first install it if you've just done so now it will create a local database for you and for the most part you can go ahead and just leave that local database as is but if you do want to change where your database sits or if you want to create a project that sits on a portable hard drive for instance you can go down here to add project Library this is where you would name it and you would browse the location you'd hit create and you'd be done but I'm happy with where this one is so we're just going to go in and double click on Untitled project to bring open DaVinci Resolve now the very first thing I want to do once this is open is I'm just going to hit command s and save the current project so I'm going to call this DaVinci Resolve QuickStart or DVR quick start I think and you can see that reflected at the top here so now we know what project we're working in now before we go any further I'm going to explain the layout of DaVinci Resolve if you've never seen it before so let's focus down the bottom here we've got these seven little icons and they basically pertain to seven different programs so working from left to right you've got media this is where you bring in all of your footage all of your Clips start to organize your project cut the cut page is basically DaVinci resolve's modern approach to editing it's basically there to go from xero which is you know starting putting all of your raw footage your rushes into the program uh to Hero as quickly as possible now if you're a brand new editor and you're just learning about DaVinci Resolve I'm going to go ahead and say skip the cut page for now and move straight onto the edit page which is a more traditional nle or non-linear editor if you've worked in Premiere Pro or even heard of Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro or Sony Vegas or things like that they are traditional nles or non-linear editors and I think you know if you're a brand new editor it's it's worth it to kind of learn the layout of these programs and the layout of traditional editing before you move into something like the cut page which is where you can kind of change your workflow up a little bit so we're going to look at the edit page and we're going to come back to this in Greater detail very shortly because I'll show you how to start and edit and then kind of get from A to B very quickly forward we've got Fusion now Fusion is the VFX and compositor sort of Motion Graphics tool in DaVinci Resolve it's most akin to After Effects the difference here though is that it's node based and after effects is layer base so if you are used to After Effects there is quite a learning curve coming across to Fusion we won't be looking at Fusion today it's a little bit more in-depth this is a quick start guide for beginners moving forward we've got the color page now this is really what DaVinci Resolve in the past has been known for and then obviously they've developed out all the rest of the tools like the edit page and fairlight and things like that but this is industry standard color grading and color correction tools here so even in the free version you've got access to just some really really powerful tools if you want to learn to be a colorist or if you you know just want to learn more about the color page in DaVinci Resolve then I reckon you should go and check out the color grading tutorial that I created for envato tuts plus it goes very in depth into this color page here and I I basically show you every tool that you see here and how to use it so this is the color page we'll come back to this briefly in this tutorial as well but you know like I keep saying quick start guide we're going to keep moving fairlight is the next one here fairlight is our audio editor nothing to see here at the moment but I'll bring you back over here once we've put some footage and some audio onto our timeline this is where you can get a lot more granular with your audio editing than you can in the edit Tab and then finally you've got deliver which does exactly what it says on the tin this is where you set your export settings you render it out and you deliver your footage we'll come back to this at the end of the little video so you might think we're going to go back to Media here and start to import all of our stuff but no this is the quick guide for beginner editors I'm going to take you straight to the edit tab here and I'm going to show you how to do it all basically within the edit tab the color Tab and then the deliver tab as well so in the edit tab I'll kind of walk you through all the things that you're seeing on the screen as we start to build the edit out very quickly in the top left hand corner you've got media pool and this is basically a you know a smaller condensed version of your media tab so in your media pool you can right click and you can go new bin and I'm going to call this one elements and that's because I've got some footage and some music from envato elements that I'll be bringing in and that will be what makes up our edit now you might want to put rushes or music or whatever you want to do but I do urge you to use bins to kind of keep your edit nice and neat from the get-go the next one I'm going to do is right click create bin and then call this one timelines and this is where I'll keep all my timelines so going into the timelines bin right clicking go timelines create new timeline you can also do command n this brings open the new timeline dialog now you can call this let's call it DVR Quick Start uh call it demo not demop demo uh you can if you know that all of your project settings are set up right which you can do down here uh in the little Cog wheel bottom right hand side of the screen if you know that all of that's right you can just click create but the sort of quick way to do it is just uncheck use project settings and then you've got a few different things that you can check here it's a condensed version of your wider Global program settings so really what I'm looking for is the format page and I want to make sure my timeline resolution is set to 1920 by 1080 and for me I want to make sure the timeline frame rate is set to 25 frames because I work in a pal region 1920 by 1080 even if you've got 4K footage and you want to export in 4k uh keep this on 1920 by 1080 for the time being it will make your edit Journey a lot quicker and a lot smoother when you're actually crafting and working on your edit but then in the deliver page later on we can set that to 4K if we're working with 4K footage and we can export at the higher resolution so making sure that's 1920x1080 25 frames per second or whatever you need it to be we've got our you know our timeline named it's in Stereo whatever you need to change there you can change hit create and you'll see there it's created a timeline for us to start working in you'll see the timeline over here on the left hand side and you'll see it denoted up here as well now if you've got multiple timelines they'll all be here and this is where you can quickly switch between each timeline rather than going in and double clicking to open up a new timeline over here so let's just bring some footage onto the timeline so I've got some things to look at as we demonstrate the rest of the edit page so basically going into our elements here we just want to bring some media in so we can either just go to our finder window or our Explorer window if we're on PC and just drag and drop footage into this bin or you can right click and go import Media or you can do command I so clicking import media you'll see here it basically is going to open up where I've got my footage stored I'm going to hit OK to drag that in and I'm going to do it one more time command I and just bring in this music track here so now I've got my footage into DaVinci Resolve I'm going to select it all or I could just do it individually but I'm going to select it all either dragging my mouse around or hitting command a and then I'm just going to drag and drop that onto the timeline I'm going to use command minus and you can do command plus to zoom in but command minus to zoom out to start to see what we've got here and then I'm going to drop my media pool Away by clicking this button up here this just gives us a bit more screen real estate so you can see here I've got uh footage here I've got the Cinematic drone I've got this woman here I've got this woman here and then down here I've got this portrait of this guy plus I've got a music track here which I'm just going to mute so that uh you know you guys can still hear me um I've got this music track here that's playing underneath now if I just click and drag this around I can click and drag the music track down below but I can't drag the music track up above because we've got our audio Down Below in green and we've got our video up above in blue you can see here V1 A1 audio track video track now you can have multiple video tracks you can see here I've just dragged that up and it's created you know video two video three four five Etc and you would usually use that to layer different things like you can put the footage over the top of each other or you can put Graphics over the top and so on and so forth that's how you layer things over the top of each other you can do the same with audio you can create multiple audio tracks as you can see here so for instance you could have different tracks like for dialogue for music for sound effects and and so on you can also label them here as well so if I just double click on this and I go music or for instance you know if there was two people being interviewed you could do you know person a person B music Etc it's good to keep things labeled just so you know what's happening and now I mentioned before as well I muted that track so uh just hitting M there mute the track if I unmute it and play it it's going to be very loud but I'll just play it very quickly you know you can see there it plays so you can mute you can solo and you can lock tracks as well so if I lock that track I now can't click and drag around I also can't make edits to it so it's sometimes handy to lock the music track if you do want to make some edits to the video without you know splitting up your music now this piece of footage that I bought in over here uh you can see that the video and audio has come in these ones don't have any audio on them this one technically doesn't have any audio on it as well but it has Dragged In and you know a blank audio track so how do we get rid of that I want to just click on it and delete it but if I click on it and delete it it's going to delete my video as well well what you want to do is you want to unlink them you can see this little chain icon here that means things are linked now globally for this timeline if I click on this button here it means I can unlink things and now those two they're still technically linked you can see here but it means that I can select them individually so if I do that I can then just delete the audio track which is great so just in command Z to undo that so I can demonstrate further if this is still selected and things are linked you can individually unlink tracks so you can right click and go link Clips here and that will individually unlink these tracks even though the global track link is on so again I can just delete that piece of footage now I'm just clicking and dragging things around here and that's pretty simple to do and we're using this tool here which is the selection tool that's also a on your keyboard if I wanted to start making edits to these pieces of footage or the music or you know whatever it is let's say I wanted to cut the music here I can go over and use my blade tool or I can hit B on the keyboard and you'll see that's been selected there and I can simply just click now if I zoom in and move the playhead around you can see that that has created a cut and now back on my a tool here I can click and I can drag that away and now I've got two pieces of music or you know I can just delete that and another way to make that edit would just be to grab the end of the track like here and just drag it down and therefore it's also done you know that same edit that you would have done with the blade tool now when I do things like this on the timeline this is a non-destructive editor so basically what it means is on the timeline I can chop this up as much as I want I can you know use my blade tool here chop the end of that delete it I can chop this up as much as I want but that piece of footage is still in my media pool intact the full piece is intact and then it's also on my finder like on my actual computer it's also intact as well so you can chop everything up as much as you want in your timeline you can delete it you can move it around and if for instance you've you know made a mistake and you you can't go back enough times you can just bring that piece of footage back in and create the same edits again it's really simple Now quickly giving you more of an overview of the edit page here we've got our media pool which we've already gone through then we've got effects up here so you've got different things like this where you can start creating some texts and titles and things like that again check out envato tuts Plus on YouTube it's a channel you're watching right now I've done some text tutorials for DaVinci Resolve on there and a lot of the video tutorials that we have for DaVinci Resolve I go through all of these things as well if you do want to learn how to become an editor in DaVinci Resolve and I'm not talking just about learning where things are on the program I'm talking about actually learning how to craft and edit from a creative process point of view I did make a tutorial for beginner editors specifically for DaVinci Resolve so I sit with you for about an hour and a half and we go through from opening up the project showing you where everything is bringing footage in making edit decisions kind of crafting a little micro documentary with some footage that I shot a few years ago adding music adding titles all that good stuff and then exporting it for the web so if you do want to learn more about actually editing go ahead and check out that video now I'll put the link in the description below so effects that's all up here for the purpose of this little quick start don't worry about index don't worry about Sound Library for now you can look at all of these in your own time mixer over here just turns on the audio mixer which I think is a good thing to have when you're editing you've got your metadata you've got your inspector as well so your inspector basically if you're selected a piece of footage or audio you can well it'll be different tools for audio but after you've selected a piece of footage here you can zoom in and out out I can reposition let's just say we want to reposition like so and you know obviously depending on the resolution that you're working with if it's 4k on a 1080 timeline you can zoom in you know only so much and and so forwards I don't go too crazy but that's how you can reposition things there if you want to undo that you just click these little uh undo arrows on the side you've got things like rotation angle Anchor Point picture all that kind of stuff you've got some cropping tools here as well and then you've got your composite mode as well so all of your different blending modes here as well as well as your opacity so that's the that's the inspector uh let's just you know go through and clear all this off now speaking of videos I did on DaVinci Resolve that are over on the Enviro touch plus YouTube channel I did a quick one which went through some keyboard shortcuts for DaVinci Resolve and I think as a new editor if you're wanting to learn this and learn it quickly there are a couple of things that you do need to know especially transport controls and what I mean by transport controls is like play pause fast forward and things like that so let's just move all of this footage down here and we'll bring our playhead to the very start play Space Bar pause spacebar if you want to speed up your footage while it's playing you can hit uh L on your keyboard to play hit Al again and it will be two time speed you can see that denoted down here keep hitting it and you can go all the way up to 64 times speed so that's really good for scrubbing through your selects or rushes on timeline you can do the same thing with Jay so you just hit backwards a few times and it will go back uh you know in time at various speeds and then again I'm hitting play to stop that when things are playing you can hit K on your keyboard to stop as well and if you hold K and you press forward one frame you can see there I'm just advancing one frame every time I press it and again you can do that in reverse holding K and hit j a couple of times and reverses per times that you hit the keyboard that will reverse each frame cool so let's say that we're happy with that edit and we want to just do a basic color grade before we export out you can go over to the color Tab and you'll see here all of your pieces of footage are denoted here let's quickly go back to the color page just to show something here if you go back to the color page and you make a cut to one of these pieces of footage let's make a cut to this one so selecting my blade tool and making a couple of cuts here so all those pieces of footage are still there and they're all still playing through but they're being cut up we go into the color page again now you can see that those cuts are reflected in the color page so the more Cuts you have on your timeline the more images will show up here and the more I guess color grading you'll have to do but it's pretty easy to copy your grade over if you've got the same footage so let's say we wanted to push this piece of footage here to more of like a teal and orange look we'll just bring some teal into the Shadows some you know orange up into the highlights here a bit of warmth in the mids play around with this let's just say you know this little wacky situation is exactly what we want ah maybe bring the highlights down a little bit it's getting a bit Moody I like that that's fun let's say let's say we're really happy with that looks lovely and you can preview your uh grade here with this little magic button tool up here turn it off and on and it basically bypasses the grade so you can see what you've done you can also do that per node hitting command D turning your nodes on and off so let's say we want to copy that grade across to these pieces of footage as well so that it doesn't just do this in the edit and you're playing it with a nice grade and then oh the grade just snaps off let's copy that over so clicking on here making sure this one's selected you right click and you go grab still and now that will come up in the gallery section here so you'll see that denoted there now easily all I need to do is Select this one here hold command and then select the rest and right click and go apply grade and you'll see that now has been applied across all of these pieces of footage and again back into our edit you'll see that's applied across all those pieces of footage now if you do want to learn a lot more about the DaVinci Resolve color page please go and check out my DaVinci Resolve beginner color grading tutorial I go through everything you need to know about color correction and then color grading footage again about an hour and a half I sit with you I go through every tool that you see on the color page here and I work through all of my process about you know why I'm making different color decisions and things like that I go through Scopes I go through everything that you need to know on the page here but really what you want to look at here is you know lift gamma gain and offset plus some color tools so you can find all that in the primaries color wheel so we'll just look at this piece of footage here lift is your shadows so you can see here I'm grabbing this little jog wheel and moving it to the left that's bringing my Shadows down moving it to the right let's bring my Shadows up resetting here so you can bring your shadows down a little bit gamma is your mid-tone so bringing your mid up or down and then gain is your highlights so bringing that up or down as well offset globally does that again up and down illuminance with this little jog wheel now the color wheels let's just say we wanted to make this a little bit more teal and orange it's already kind of heading that way we can just grab the Little Wheel In The Middle on our shadows and bring a little bit of teal down into the Shadows here which is bringing the nice Sky out it's bringing more teal into her Shadows here and then on our gamma which is our mid-tones remember we'll push that a little bit towards like red just a little bit and then in our highlights which is our gain we'll push that towards orange and then we're getting that kind of like teal and orange look now I think it needs to go a little bit more darker here on the teal side of things so we'll just grab the offset wheel and play with that actually that looks pretty good there uh and then just play with that a little bit so let's say we're happy with that then across the top here you've got temperature obviously cooler or warmer you've got 10 plus or minus green or magenta you've got contrast it's pretty self-explanatory adding more or subtracting contrast from real footage you've got other things like color boost so that will just boost specific colors within the image you can see there those teal and oranges are really coming out now if we push that you know let's move it to roughly around about here if you wanted to saturate the entire image more you can grab the saturation and that just boosts the saturation for the entire image not those specific colors highlights pull your highlights down Shadows put your shadows down and up pretty self-explanatory and then you've got Hue shift as well if you want to really get crazy and shift the Hue around you can do so there's a whole bunch of other tools like I said go ahead and check out my much longer much more in-depth tutorial about how to color grade individual resolve but the last little thing I'll leave you with for this quick start guide is how to use Luts so up here on the left hand side you've got your Luts now Luts basically if you're not aware it stands for lookup tables but effectively what it is is it's a it's a filter it's a filter for your footage so DaVinci Resolve comes with all of these uh Luts for different cameras and different manufacturers and you would use those to go from log footage or raw footage to you know a basic color grade or color correction really so these are all kind of specific to different cameras that you're working with but you can also bring in your own Luts as well and I've brought in a few from elements here so let's just kind of click on here and have a little play and see how they work uh let's find something like you know Hong Kong and we'll just hover our Mouse over kind of start to see what that does so these ones you know you can see immediately that's giving that kind of really nice cool look I think this one looks good so let's just say we're happy with this one we can right click and go apply light to current node and there we go we'll drop that away you can see there holding command D to turn that off and on we've gone from you know a relatively nice piece of footage but there's nothing really stylistically about the grade that's interesting to something that looks pretty stylistically interesting and and we can go from there and then just tweak that as well a little bit more blue in those Shadows like we had before a little bit more uh you know orange into the highlights playing with our contrast bringing that down a little bit or up uh you know saturating certain parts of the image and then just bringing that all down a little bit like I think that looks really cool and we've done that in just a few clicks so there you go pretty simple but like I said super powerful tool so much to learn about the color page intervention resolve so go check out the more in-depth tutorials let's say we're finished now we're happy we'll go back to our edit just to make sure that everything's ready to export oh one last thing actually before we go uh you know I should have mentioned this in the edit portion if you do want to change the audio levels here you can click on your audio track and you can just grab this white line that's running through the middle you'll see these little arrows denoted when you put your mouse over it you can hover over it you can grab that and then you can just drag it down and you'll see that little readout there so we want to hit maybe about negative six negative seven uh when we've just got music overlay if you've got music overlay plus dialogue you want to pull that back down to something like you know negative 23 24 but kind of see what feels right for you so uh we'll we'll bring it back down to about there I'm going to unmute it now just so we can see what happens over in a mixer and you can hear it so play that through and you can kind of get an idea over here in the mixer you want things to be sitting in that sweet spot in the yellow and not really hitting the red so we're still a little bit loud here on those drum beats so I'm just going to grab it down and bring it back down to maybe about negative nine so that's perfect because actually our bus one here that's our main audio feed that's out that's our kind of global mix so as long as that's not hitting yellow or red we're uh we're golden foreign so to finish this off clicking anywhere in the timeline past your footage you can just hit up on your keyboard hit o to create an out point and if you don't have an endpoint already it will create an endpoint just at the start of your footage if you just wanted to you know export just this part you could go your endpoint there but we want to export the whole thing so in and out like so so that means we're now ready to export so go over to your deliver tab and you'll see here you're in and out points are selected you've got the right uh timeline if you had multiple timelines that you wanted to export as well you can change those up here or select them up here over on the left hand side these are all of your render settings let's say we want to make a h.264 master which is what you want to use when you're uploading to the web so clicking on that that's going to just put some basic settings in and then what we've got to do is we're going to go through and we're going to browse where we want this to be so I'm just going to put this on the desktop and again we'll call this quick start demo okay so that's done our file name and our location then we want to make sure this is rendering one single clip we don't want to render out all these individual Clips we want it to render out one single clip then down here in the video settings you obviously want to make export video make sure that's selected in format I'm going to actually change that to MP4 and keep the codec on h.264 now this is because we're uploading it for the web and an mp4 is kind of your standard delivery method for the web down here this is your resolution which is currently set to the timeline resolution of 1920x1080. this is where we can go ahead and set that to 4K if we want to set that to 4K to render out our 4K footage for me I'm just going to keep that on 1920x1080 right now and then we're going to keep that at 25 frames per second now you can keep the quality on automatic or you can restrict it to a certain amount of kilobits per second depending on where you're uploading it say for instance you're uploading to YouTube well the upload limit for uh 4K footage for YouTube I believe at uh 4K 25 frames per second is 45 000 kbps for HD I think it is 8 000. you can look at that yourself depending on where you're uploading your footage and you can change the quality to match we'll just keep it on automatic for now and you can also hit multi-pass and code as well if you do want to encode it multiple times what that does is it gets you slightly higher quality but also eliminates some of those rendering artifacts that you might get on a lower bitrate MP4 export so that's basically all good to go hit add to render queue and you'll see here it goes over to our randiku on the right hand side now let's say we wanted to do two renders at once we can do that let's say we also want to do a prores master of this one just a master copy that we can keep on our Drive we're not going to upload this one because you know it'll be a bigger file format it's not optimized for web like MP4 is but we do want to have that nice chunky Master Copy that we can watch locally again we'll go and browse where we want it to be again we'll just call this a quick start demo and this can be the same name as well because this is going to be a DOT mov whereas the MP4 is a DOT MP4 in our video settings we want to make sure QuickTime is selected apple prores and then you can pick your flavor of prores I'm happy here Apple prores 422 HQ keeping it on 1920x1080 depending on what you're working with put it to 4K if you need 25 frames per second all happy there you know use constant bitrate that's going to get you a a bigger file a more stable file but it's going to take longer to render you can do that if you want for this little piece it's not not that important I'm going to hit add to render queue so now over an hour and a queue here you can select you know job one and you hit render one you can select job two and just hit render one or if you've just clicked off there and none is selected you can choose to render all so if you've got like 10 videos here you can just render them all at once and we're going to do that and you'll see how quick it is so hitting render all you can see now it's doing our MP4 version and again this is a very quick little timeline here it's like 40 seconds of you know a few videos some basic color grades and some music and you can see it's already done our MP4 and our prores there we go that's giving you all the fundamental tools to open up the program start clicking around and sort of familiarizing yourself with where everything is but if you do want to continue to learn as an editor and grow and you're still not 100 sure where to start with your own edits then take the course that I've put up it's completely free it's on envato touch plus it's our guide to DaVinci Resolve for beginner editors and there's also one for color grading as well we'll link both of those videos at the end of this video also let me know down in the comments if there's any other programs that you want some quick start guides to just to wrap your head around where everything lives it's a really fun industry to be part of so I'm very happy to help you learn if you are brand new to editing all right until next time guys happy editing [Music]

Channel: Envato Tuts+

Views: 91,593

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Id: P73m0p8JbV0

Length: 29min 18sec (1758 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 11 2023