- DaVinci Resolve is
an awesome video editor for Mac, for PC, and for Linux. So in this video we're gonna run through a complete tutorial for beginners with everything that you need to know, all the key features and a
ton of video editing tips to get you cutting videos like a pro fast in DaVinci Resolve. Hey, it's Justin Brown
here from Primal Video, where we help you grow an audience and scale your revenue with online video. If you're new here, make sure you click that subscribe button. And all the links to everything
we mention in this video, you can find linked in
the description box below. So let's jump into it. Now I've gotta tell you, this is one of our most requested videos. DaVinci Resolve is actually
taking out the top spot in several categories of our best video
editing software reviews, for the past few years, both on the PC and Mac side of things. So if you're interested in checking out our latest roundup of best
video editing software, then I've included links to
those in the description. But in this video though, we're gonna fast track
your editing with Resolve. Whether you're brand-new to it or whether you've been
using Resolve for a while, I'll be giving you a full
tutorial for beginners with everything that you need to know, all the key features to be aware of, plus a ton of pro tips to help you maximize your
efficiency along the way. Now the fastest way to
edit your videos down in the most efficient and effective way is to follow a streamlined process. So throughout this video, I'm gonna be sharing with you our Primal Video Method process which is the fastest and
the most efficient way of editing your videos down, with minimal waste of time and rework. So I'm gonna be taking
you through these steps in this video, but at the end, I will link
to where you can download your copy of the Primal Video Method to follow along while
you're editing your videos, no matter which video editing software you're going to be using. Okay, this is the first thing you'll see when you open up DaVinci Resolve. This is your project manager window. This is where you can
open up existing projects that you might already have on the go or you can start a new one and you can sort them in here
by adding folders as well. But for now we're just
gonna go New Project, and let's call this Justin Edit, and we'll go Create. So this is the DaVinci Resolve interface and the first thing to notice
is down the bottom here, you have these different areas of working or different workspaces. So you've got your Media, you've got your Cut for basic edits, you've got your Edit area which is where you're gonna do the bulk of your video editing. Fusion here is really your special effects and motion graphics and
all of that kind of stuff. Next one across is Color. This is where you can do
all your color grades, color correction. Fairlight is for all of the audio stuff and all of your pro
audio tools are in here. And Deliver, this is
where you have control over exporting and rendering
out your video projects. So typically with any project, you're going to work from left to right. So we're gonna come back
across to the media area here. Now just before we start bringing in all of our footage and video assets, the first thing that you wanna do is to make sure that your
project is setup correctly. So you wanna come down the bottom here to the Settings button and then this is where you can configure all of the settings and
everything for your video. The main ones that you
wanna change in here are your timeline resolution. So you can see here, we're currently set to Ultra HD. For this one, we're gonna
go to 1080p, 1920 by 1080. You can then select your
timeline frame rate. For us the bulk of the footage that we're gonna be using
today is 25 frames per second. So we're gonna set this to 25. But it's likely you're gonna
be selecting 24, 25, or 30, based on the footage that
you're going to be editing. And whatever you select here
for timeline frame rate, you wanna make sure that
you're selecting the same one down here under playback frame rate too. And likewise for the next
one down here, video format, you wanna match that again. So we've got 1080p 24
or we're using 1080p 25. So we'll wanna pick here 1080p 25. Now obviously there's a lot
of other settings in here we can go through. We're not gonna have
time to cover them all. But just cover off the main ones that you need to get you going. So now that you've got
your settings in there, if you do wanna save a preset, just come back to presets, hit save. Give your preset a name, so we can go 1080p 25. And go, OK. And we've now got all of those
settings that we've applied saved as this preset. So next time, we just
can come back in here and load this preset. Okay, so we can close out of this now and we can come across and start to import our video footage. Now as with any video editing application, there's lots of different
ways to do the same thing. My personal preference is to come down to the media pool here, right-click and choose Import Media, and find the footage
that you want to import. We could go Footage, Camera1, Camera2. If you hold down Control or Command, you can select multiple
clips and hit Open, and they will be imported. Or the other way that you can do it, is you can literally just drag and drop. If you've got a folder like
we do on the desktop here, we can drag this folder
into the media pool and that will import all of those clips into our project for us. So you can see the footage
that we just brought in, we've got two files, Camera1 and Camera2, off one of our YouTube videos. We've got two music tracks here and we've got some b-roll
or some overlay footage of the Elgato stream deck. So now that we've got all of our media in or our video assets in, the next step is to
start cutting that down. There's two different
ways you can do this. DaVinci Resolve does have a Cut area or a Cut workspace where you can start to
trim down your footage with some very basic tools here. So this could be ideal
if you're gonna cut down a heap of different clips. But my personal preference is to just jump straight
into the Edit area and just start to build out the story and build out your edit, all within this one workspace. So the next step here is to bring in all of our
primary video footage, the actual story content or the primary content of your video. So we're gonna grab Camera1. I'm just gonna drag it down
onto the timeline here. So this here is our timeline interface. You can see as we click
and scrub across here, we're able to move through
the footage back and forth. Up the top here is our playback monitor. This is what our finished
product is gonna look like and over here we have our preview window. So if I wanna preview any of our clips, I just click and drag
them into this area here, and as I click and drag along here, then I'm able to scrub
through this footage here. Now we have our playback controls here, if we wanna play through the footage, we can hit play. If we wanna zoom in and
out on our timeline, we can grab this little slider bar here and you can see we can
zoom all the way out, zoom all the way in, get more control, or more perspective over our edit, or we can use these two little
buttons here, Detail Zoom, which will jump straight into
where our playback head is, or our playback indicator,
this orange line. Or if we wanna zoom back
out to see our entire edit, then we can click this
one here, Full Zoom, and that'll pull us back out. Now if we're gonna change how the clips on our timeline look, we can come over here,
press this button here, and we get to customize up that view. So if we wanna turn off
our audio waveforms there, then we can press this button here, and those are off. I'll put them back on.
I like to have 'em on. We can customize up the
way the video piece looks. If we just want one thumbnail image at the start and at the end, we can select this next view or if we want no thumbnail
images or no pictures at all, then we can turn them off completely. And this can be really
handy to customize this up, if you are working on a really large or really complicated project. Now I personally like
it with the film view or the little thumbnail images, and you can change the track
height down the bottom here. You can see it's a little bit smaller now. We can make that bigger or smaller using the slider down at the bottom. And we'll turn audio waveforms back on and you can customize up the view for the audio waveforms here as well. All right, we'll make
that a little bit bigger. So for me, I just like to have things at a size where I can easily see which clip I'm working on. And I can clearly see the
audio in there as well. Now one other thing I like
to do before I get started is just to maximize the
screen real estate here, so we've got a bit more room. So I have to come up here
and press on this button here to hide that panel and then grab this side
here and shrink it down, so that we've got a bit more
real estate to play with. All right, now for the editing. We've got our base footage in here. The first step here is to
start trimming this down. So I will zoom in on our
timeline here using the slider. And I do here, is we're going through it, we're doing a quick pass and we're removing any of the bad takes or any of the mistakes or any footage that you 100% don't want
in your finished product. There's a few different tools
that you can use to do this. So we can grab our playback head here and we can scrub through or we can just hit play. Now we can move our cursor back here to the start of the clip. You can see that the
cursor actually changes. We can click and drag back this way and our video clip is now
gonna start at this point. So we've removed all of that
stuff at the start of our clip. Now what we have got at the
start of our video here though is some blank space. So we can click on that
and just press Delete and now our actual video
starts at this point too. So that's one way. Just using these handles here on the end to slide it in and out. Now let's say that there was a mistake in this first take here and we actually wanna
start the video here. We could just grab that handle
at the start of the clip and slide it back as we just did or we can press B on the keyboard to bring up the Blade tool and we can just click on that place. And we've actually cut our
clip in two different areas. So we can go through and
add cuts in our timeline or in our clips just by
clicking with the Blade tool. So we can go through and we
can select all of these areas where there is no audio. So there's no audio in this section here and we can start to remove
some of the gaps that way. So by using this Blade tool, we're slicing up our footage, then we can press A on the keyboard to come back to our arrow or you can come up here
and select the arrow. We can select this clip and if you press Delete
with that clip selected, we're going to just remove that clip without closing the gap
if we undo that now. And we select that clip again
and press Shift + Delete, then that's going to remove
it and close the gap. So likewise with this one, we can press Shift + Delete, and we have removed that
section from our video. Now you can actually use a
combination of these as well. So we could come over here to this clip, click and drag this back
to remove the start of it. Select that gap in the
middle, press Delete, and we have closed up the gap. So there's no right or
wrong with this stuff. It's just knowing which
tools you've got access to to be able to edit your video down fast. Now the other tool that
I love and I use a lot is called a Ripple Edit or
a Trim Top or Trim Tail. Now we're just showing
you how you can add a cut in our footage here and we could then select
this clip and press Delete and then close up the gap. But using Ripple Edit
Left or Ripple Edit Right, we're able to do all of that with some keyboard shortcuts
with really one press. So let's say that we wanna
finish our clip here, at this point, we wanna
delete this section and close up the gap, and move all of this stuff back. All we need to press is Command + Shift and Square Bracket Right or Control + Shift + Square Bracket Right. And obviously, if we wanna
go back the other way, let's say that we want
to start this clip here at this point, and remove all of this, then we can use Command or Control + Shift and Square Bracket Left. And we have removed all of the stuff to the left of that clip. Now while you're going
through and trimming down and editing your clips, you can also pick them up and move them around. So you can click on them,
you can lift them up, if you want them out of the way, and you wanna move some
clips and things around, or you might even wanna
swap the order of them. So you can pick them up
and swap them straight in. It's really like a big game
of shapes and Tetris here, where you can pick up your clips and move them around. So we might want this one here
a little bit further down. We can click on that one. Now if we just let it go here, that's going to overwrite that footage. So the footage that was
underneath it is now gone, we'll undo that. So now that you know some
of the most common ways to trim your footage down in this step, we're gonna go through and remove anything that you 100% don't want in your video. Remove all of the gaps,
remove all of the bad takes. But your focus here is on
building out the content or building out the story of your edit. Okay, so now
that you've gone through and you've done your first pass
of refining this edit down, the next step is to start to add in some of your b-roll or some
of your overlay footage to really help your viewers stay engaged but also understand what
it is you're talking about in your video. So if we come up the top here
to some of our b-roll footage, we get to move our mouse
cursor left and right on this to find where we want that clip to start and press I on the keyboard
to mark an in point. And if we scrub across here, let's say we want it right when
it hits the other edge there before it bounces back, about here, and press O on the keyboard, we've now marked and in and an out. So you can see, we've
selected just this section of that much bigger clip. Now if I click and drag
this down at the timeline, we've just got that section of the clip. And you can see, it's also
got audio added to it. If we don't want the audio, we can either mute it by
grabbing this little line and pulling it down or we can Alt + Click or Option + Click just that audio piece to not select the video as well and we can just press Delete and now that clip has no
audio associated with it. Now obviously, the other way that we
could bring our footage in is just to bring in that
entire clip into our timeline. We can again Option + Click
or Alt + Click the sound if we don't want it on that. And we can just use our regular tools to find the start and the end point of the clips that we wanna use. So we start at around there, play it through to where we wanna stop it. Now you can see here that
our cursor is snapping or jumping to these
edits in our timelines. If you don't want that
and you want more control, then just turn off this
button here, the Snap tool, and that's gonna give you a
greater amount of control. So I do find myself turning
that on and off quite a bit throughout the edits, but find where we want this
to finish, select our clip, and we're going to cut off the end of this using Command + Shift
+ Square Bracket Right to remove all of that. So again, lots of different ways to essentially do the same thing when you're video editing. So we'll go back to our other clip here, just double-click on that to open in this preview monitor. And let's see what else
we've got in the clip here. Now the pan across. Let's start that, so we'll
press I on the keyboard to mark an in point about there. O to mark an out point. We've got this section selected. Now you can just click and drag again, to bring in both the audio and the video. But if I put this back up here now, you can see what's
appeared down the bottom is we can just grab the
video or just the audio. So if we only want the video piece, we can click on that and drag that down and see that we don't have the audio that comes down with it. And let's put it about here. So go through in this step and add in all of your
b-roll or overlay footage. And as you're going through, you might find that you're
making some minor edits to your timeline, tweaking and adjusting some of the clips, all just to refine your edit down and to build out the story. So your video editing here really is an iterative process where you're going through,
making tweaks and adjustments and building this out on each pass. So the next step then
is to bring in any audio or any music into your videos, if you want audio or music in your video. So we're gonna come up here. We're gonna grab this music track and drag it down into our timeline here. And just the same as we did
with all of our video clips, you've got the ability to
pick up your audio track, to move it around. You can adjust the start and end points using all of those same tools, these handles using the Blade tool or using Ripple Edit, left and right. So let's make sure this finishes
at the end of our video. Clip selected, Command +
Shift + Square Bracket Right or Control + Shift + Square Bracket Right and our song is gonna
finish at that point. Now if you wanna add a
Fade In and a Fade Out to this music track, then you can move your mouse cursor up to this little top marker here, and pull it back in. And you can see that we've got a time
indicator there that's shown. So let's just say this
is about four seconds. So what this means is that our audio is gonna play through here
at a normal volume level. When it hits this marker for four seconds, it's going to drop that
down to a zero volume level. So it's going to fade it out to nothing. Likewise if you want one at the start, you wanna fade your audio in. We can pull that little marker in for as long as you want that transition or that effect to come into play. So now that you've got your
music in and you've gone through and refined your edit even further, it's now time to add
any text or any titles or graphic elements into your video. So let's come back towards the start here. We'll come up the top
here to Effects Library and let's come down here to Titles. Now the titles at the top here are your basic text titles that you can add in and customize up. And your Fusion Titles are
a little bit more advanced. So you can see here, we've
got a lot of 3D ones. I'll just drag one of these out, so you can see what we're talking about. And if we scrub through this, you can see we've got
the first line of text, spins around second line of text, and then it slides back out. So there's a lot more advanced titles and things in here as
well that you can use. I'm gonna select that,
go ahead and delete it. We're just gonna grab the basic text here, drag this out and then you can see, it definitely is basic text. Now we're gonna double-click on this and that's going to open
up our Inspector palette up the top here. This is where we can customize this up. So if we select the title
here or the text here, we can type in Justin Brown. We can change our fonts. Let's go down to or up to Oswald. Let's make it bold. We can adjust the size. We could make it all capitals if we want. We can rotate it, change
the position of it. You can also add a drop
shadow, stroke, backgrounds. You can customize it
up quite a bit in here. Let's just move it down to the
bottom corner here somewhere. And for more finer controls, we can come back over
to this position X and Y and we can move it up and down, to move it over to the side a little bit. And maybe we'll change the
color to be Primal Video blue. Okay, maybe we'll make
this a little bit smaller. Let's put it down that bottom corner here. Let's move it across. Now let's turn on a
background so we can read it. Let's adjust the width
down and the height down. Okay, something simple like that. Now this clip, just
like all the other ones, we can adjust the start
and the end time on it. So if you zoom in now, I'll show you what this looks like. Zoom in so you can see that
as we play through here now, when we hit that title, the title appears, and then it disappears at the end. And again, you can adjust the length and everything of these, and pick them up and move them around, just as you can with any other clip. So this step here is to go through and add in all of your
titles, all of your text, whether it's for a section header, whether it's a list of text
you wanna bring up on-screen. These are the tools that you use to add all of your text in. Once all your texts and titles are in, the next step is to add in any effects or transitions to your video. So if you've still got this
panel here open on the side, they're in here as well. If not, come up to Effect Library, and then down to Video Transitions. Now Video Transitions is
one of the easiest ways that people can make their
videos look really bad by going overboard with
silly-looking transitions or too many transitions. I would suggest that you're
using these sparingly and using them as a storytelling element or to add a little bit
of polish to your videos. But do not go overboard with transitions. So let's say that instead
of just appearing, we want this title to fade in. We could come over here
to a cross dissolve and click and drag it
and drop it on our clips. You can see, we've now
got one at the start. Let's put one at the end as well. And as we play through this now, that title is fading on. Let's say we want to adjust
the speed of that fade, we can come down here and
we can make it shorter. So it's a quick fade. Or if we wanted a longer slow fade, we can stretch that out as well. So if we scrub through now, it fades on, and at the end it fades off. Really simple. Likewise, you can apply this to any clip. Let's grab a Dip to Cross Dissolve and put it on the start of this one here. So if we scrub through this one here now, instead of just appearing, it's now gonna dip to
white or flash to white and then when it comes back from white, it's now our b-roll or
our overlay footage. So this could be like
a little camera flash. So let's just scrub through this. You can see what looks like. I finished talking and
it slowly fades to white and then back. Now obviously with this one here, we could speed this right up as well. So it is like a little camera flash, much quicker. So there's lots of little
things that you can add, just add a little bit of polish, a little bit of style to your video, without just using hard jump cuts. But again, I would suggest that you're using these things sparingly. And there's lots of other
ones in here as well. But the other one that we use
from time to time is a Wipe. And if we delete that, I'll
show you the other one here, Slide, it's very similar. Scrub through this. Just sliding it off the screen. Now for us, we don't normally
use too many transitions in our videos. But in a case we've got a hard cut between two different clips here. Maybe I've made a mistake, and it's likely I've made a mistake, we've cut it out and there is a hard cut. You could apply some sort of transition. You could leave it as just a cut or you could zoom in on
one of these two clips just to make it look a
little bit different. And then this is typically what we'll do. So in this case, we'll
select this second clip here. We'll come up the top here to video. Now you can either just tick
the box here for dynamic zoom and that's going to jump in or punch in a little bit on that shot or for me personally, I
don't really use that. I'll come over here to zoom and I will just zoom in a
little bit on the shot here. And the trick to really make this work, if you're doing it on a shot
where there's someone on camera is to try and keep the eyes
in a very similar position. So it's just a subtle zoom in or a subtle change of shot, without it being too jarring. So we might move our second
one down a little bit here, just to try and get them
a little bit closer. And down a little bit more
and maybe across a little bit. Now it doesn't need to be perfect but it's just a little
bit to break up the shot, so it's not just a hard cut all the time. All right, so go through, add in all of your video
transitions or video effects and then we're going to
adjust your audio levels. Now with the audio tracks
down the bottom here, what we're going to look at
first is our spoken audio, the actual core audio for our video. So we are going to mute the music. So the only thing that we hear is the stuff that I'm actually saying. Now if you are a more advanced user, you're likely gonna be doing
this over in the Fairlight area where you have so much
more control and features and pro level tools in
here just for audio. But for most people and for me personally, I do most of my audio adjustments just here on the Edit window, as you would in most video
editing applications. But what I do enable is the Audio Mixer. So you wanna come up here to Workspace, then down to Show Panel in Workspace, and select Mixer. This is gonna give you volume
controls here on the side. So you can see here, we've
got a volume level for Audio 1 which is our Audio 1 track here. We've got a volume level
for our Audio Track 2 which is our music track in this case, and then we've got Main 1 which is our overall master volume. So if we wanna make a volume adjustment to all of our Audio 1, we can boost the volume up
here or lower it down here, and exactly the same for all of our music or we can actually adjust our
audio on a clip-by-clip basis. So let's just go back to the
start of our project here and hit play and let's gauge what audio
levels our content is. Landscape constantly changing, here's our latest roundup of the best video editing
software for Mac right now, including free, paid, and professional. So you can see, it's mainly in the yellow with some of it going into the red. But what you definitely don't want is to have your audio hitting the top, hitting the zero, and have a peaking and distorting. That sounds really really bad. So ideally, you want it
sort of around this level where it is in the yellow and
a little bit into the red. But again, definitely
not touching the top. So we might bring this
down just a little bit. We'll grab this slider here and just lower it down a little. Now because all of our audio here was recorded the same
time, same microphone, the audio is gonna be pretty consistent across this entire track. Now if we did want to adjust our audio on a clip-by-clip basis, we can come over and select our clip. And when you put your mouse over this little faint line here, this is your volume line, we can click on it and
we can drag up and down. So you can see that we're
lowering our volume here and our audio waveform is getting smaller or we can actually stretch this up and increase our volume
here at this point as well. So that's how you can adjust
your audio on the entire clip. But what if there's one little section that we wanted to make louder or quieter and not affect the rest of the clip? If we Alt or Option +
Click on our audio track, just so we've got just
that audio clip selected and not the video piece, come up here to our Blade tool
or press B on the keyboard. Then we could cut out that section. Let me go back to our arrow cursor, I'll press A on the keyboard, and you can see here that we have that little volume indicator that we can now increase or decrease just that section of the audio. So we'll undo that now and I'll show you one other way, just Command + Z or Control + Z. So we've undone all of that. The other way you can do it, is to select your clip. Come up to the top here for audio. If you're not seeing that, you can double-click on the clip and then you've got your audio panel which will show up on the top here. Go across to where you wanna start making adjustments to your audio, and you can use the left and right arrows on the keyboard to really dial this in. And you can adjust the
settings up here as well. So we're gonna add what's
called a key frame. We're gonna select that key frame there. We'll come across a
little bit in our timeline using the arrow keys, and we'll add another key frame. Let's go across to the other end of this. Add another key frame, move across a little bit further, and add one more key frame. Lots of key frames. Now if we click and select
on that little circle, that's that key frame we just added, and we Shift + Click on
the second one there, now we can boost or lower the volume here, just for that section. And if we wanna expand this out and get some more control over it, you give out this little symbol down here, showing the key frames. If we click on that, we're able to see this a
little bit bigger down here. And it's gonna give us
more control over it. So we maybe wanna stretch
this out a little bit on either side. This is essentially where
we're starting a fade. So our volume at this
level is coming in at, it's call it 100%, and then drops a little bit
to wherever we have set it to, and then it starts to transition back to the original volume
level after that key frame. So you can see how easy it is in here to really get a great level of control, quite easily in your timeline while you are editing. And to hide this key frame window, we'll just click on that
again and that is gone. Okay, so we've gone through it. We've done the audio on
our primary audio track, the spoken piece. Now let's unmute our music and let's get that
volume set right as well. Now there really is no right or wrong with what volume your music should be at, as long as it's not
distracting or overpowering, and as long as your viewers can still hear and understand any spoken audio
that is on at the same time. Depending on the actual audio track itself and how loud it is and how
fast or slow the track is, would typically lower the
audio in our YouTube videos down to around 25 to minus 30 decibels. But it really is a case
of setting it, playing it, and seeing how it sounds, and then tweaking and
adjusting as you need to. Again, there's no right
or wrong with this stuff. So we can make that adjustment on the entire music track over here or you can do it on the
actual clip itself as well. So we'll undo that 'cause we've
done it on the entire track. So now that you've got
your audio levels set, you can go and apply any audio effects or any audio transitions
to your audio as well. So if you wanna tweak or adjust the way that the audio sounds, you can select your music track
or one of your audio clips. You can come up the top here, then you've got some basic tools in here, like an equalizer, or if you come over here to the Effects Library again, down to Audio Effects, there's a lot of different things you can apply to your audio here to really tweak and adjust it. And there's also some simple
audio transitions here like a cross-fade, in case you wanna fade between some of your clips. So we want a nice soft audio fade between these two. If there's a lot of
background noise in one and not in the next, you can soften it by using a cross-fade. And as I said earlier, if you're on the more pro side of things or you looking for way more
features and control and stuff, you've got this Fairlight feature
or area down here as well, which has all of that in there. So now that you have your audio sorted, the next step is to color grade or color correct your video footage. So for that we're gonna jump across to the Color workspace
down the bottom here. Now this area is one
that we could dive into literally for hours, to be able to totally master this. This is a beginner tutorial, so I'm gonna show you some
of the beginner things that you can look at to get
your videos looking good. But I do wanna stress that this
is not an advanced tutorial by any means, and this is top level, professional grade video editing software, specifically color grading software, and tools in here as well. So we are definitely only
covering the basics here. So once again, we've got our playback monitor here which is our preview of what
our video is looking like. We have all of our clips
here from our timeline. In this area up here, this is where we can have all of our nodes or essentially layers
that we're able to apply different effects and color
grades and controls to and down the bottom here are all our color adjustment tools. And we can switch between them using the buttons across the top here and then over the side here, we've got our key frames once again to really get granular control and to animate and tweak
some of these effects that you're going to apply. Again, this is gonna be
a really quick overview. So the first place that
you wanna start in here is by enabling the Scopes over here by pressing this button. This gives you a visual
representation of the shot for how bright and dark everything is but also the different
color levels as well. So once I've got that on, the next place that I'll come across to is the Lift to the little
slider down the bottom of it. Now I'm dragging this to
the left or to the right to really set the brightness of the dark areas in my shot. Now as we move this slider left and right, you can see in that
Scopes panel on the side that that is updating as well. It's giving us, again,
a visual representation of what is going on in our shot. So as I make those black areas brighter, we're seeing everything move up. And as I make it darker, we're
seeing everything move down towards that zero line. So a really general rule here is that you don't wanna
go below that bottom line and you don't wanna go
above that bottom line and wherever your colors or whatever areas are
hitting that top line or the bottom line, you're actually going
to be losing information or having areas that are too dark or too bright in those areas. So once I've adjusted the Lift or the dark areas of the shot, I'll then come across to the gain to adjust the bright areas
or the whites in the shot. And again, if I grab that
slider down the bottom, you see that if I pull it down, we're darkening the shot
or darkening those whites. And if I pull it back the other way, yeah, blowing out the whites. We're going well above that line. So I'll drop it down to
somewhere around there. So we've done the dark areas, we've done the bright areas. Next we're gonna look
at the mid-range colors and use skin tones. And once again, we're gonna
grab that slider down the bottom and adjust it to where we would like it. Now that we can adjust the
colors even more in your shots, this is where you wanna start using these actual color wheels. And you can just grab this center point and move it around to add
or remove a certain color. So if we wanna add more
warmth to our shot, more yellow, more orange. We can grab this slider and move it towards the orange section, towards the orange colors around this way. You can see that we've added more orange or more warmth to our shot
in the mid-tones area. So using these little circles here and really just some minor adjustments, we can make some simple tweaks to really dial in the
look and feel of our shot. Okay, so now that I've got the Lift, the Gamma and the Gain sorted, the next settings we're gonna play with are down the bottom here,
Contrast and Saturation. That's the two primary ones. So coming down the
bottom here to Contrast, put your mouse over this section, and move your pointer to
the left and to the right. You're able to make further adjustments to the contrast in your shot. Then we'll jump across to the Saturation which is the amount of color. So if we again click and move
this all the way down to zero, you can see we've removed
all the color at zero. 50 was the start point, the midpoint, but if we go beyond that, then we're boosting the
colors dramatically. So for this one, I'm only gonna increase
it just a little bit. Let's go around 52, somewhere around there and likewise with the hue, we can make some adjustments here as well. If we move to the left,
we're adding more green and if we move to the right
it's gonna be more pink. Again, we are really only
covering the basics here but just to show you, this is what our shot looked like before and this is what it is
currently looking like. So it's a subtle difference but definitely looks better. Now if you wanna apply all these settings to the other clips in the video, there's a couple of different
ways that you can do it. The first one is to come up here, right-click on this area
and choose Grab Still. You see we've got a still added up here and then we can apply the
settings from that still to any of the other clips
in our timeline here. So if we select our next clip here that we wanna apply it to, we can then come up to this one, and choose Apply Grade, and that is now applied. Now another way that we
can apply these settings or these grades to other clips, is that we can select the
one that we wanna apply. So let's go back to our first one here. We'll come over here to this node, click on it so that it's selected, press Control + C or Command + C to copy that node and those effects, and come across to the
clip we want to apply it to and then paste it with
Command + V or Control + V, and that is pasted. So that's the primary camera
footage that we've done. You can also apply all of the same things to all of your b-roll or
overlay footage as well. So once you've got all of your color correction or color grading done, the next step is to export your video. And for that, you wanna
come down to Deliver, so we can deliver your video out. Now at the top corner here is where you can get everything
setup for your export. So if you've got specific settings that you're looking to use, you can key all of those in here. You've got the basic settings and you've got more advanced
settings down under here too. But you've also got
presets up the top here for places like YouTube and Vimeo. And if you are going to use
either one of those two, then these are a great place to start. So what you need to do is select on say YouTube, click the little arrow next to it, choose if you wanna export in
720p, 1080, or 2160p or 4K. So for us, we've got a 1080p project. Let's just select 1080p. We can give our file a name, Justin Edit. We can hit Browse to choose
where we want this to go. Let's just put it into Movies and if you'd like,
there is the option here to upload your file directly to YouTube once the export has complete. Now personally, I don't use this. I'd rather have the file
on the computer myself, preview it, make sure it's all good, and then upload it when I'm ready, than to have DaVinci Resolve automatically upload it to our channel. So once you're happy with your settings, just hit Add to Render Queue. This will pop up on the side over here and you will need to then hit Start Render and that will go through and
start saving out your video. Once that's done, you'll wanna play back your
video, make sure it's all good. Obviously, if you've
got any changes to it, then you wanna come back into Resolve and make those changes
and export it again. But what I would strongly recommend is that you are previewing
or playing back your video on a couple of different devices, things like your computer, your phone, your iPad, if you've got one, just to see what it looks like and just to see that you're happy with the overall look
and feel of your video on multiple devices, especially because that's
where a lot of people are consuming your content these days. So once you're happy with that, then your video is done and it is ready for upload. So that is a complete editing walk through using DaVinci Resolve for beginners. Now earlier in this video, I said I would share with you a link to where you can download our free PDF guide to the Primal Video Method, the most efficient way and effective way to edit your videos down with minimal wasted time and rework. And this will work no matter which video editing
software or app you are using. So to grab your copy, there is a link on-screen now. It's also below in the description and I'll see you in the next video.
