DaVinci Resolve Newbies Guide - EASY! Pro Explains

hi my name is Darren mosten I run a post-production facility in Brighton in the UK and I've been using DaVinci Resolve for well over 13 years now and during the pandemic work dried up a little bit so I started a YouTube channel which is what you're watching now and I've done many tutorials on color grading and editing techniques and quite advanced stuff and a few stuff on beginners but I realized I've never actually done an episode on how to literally start on DaVinci Resolve like what is it how does it work so I'm addressing that in this episode this is presuming you've never seen DaVinci Resolve in your life you've literally just come across from I know Adobe Premiere or Final Cut or it's your first ever editing application and you don't even know where to start so I'm gonna get you going in this episode I'm going to make it as short as possible I'm not going to anything deep I'm literally just showing you how all the different pages talk to each other so let's go and take a look first thing you need to know is where to get it from so you're going to go onto the Blackmagic design website and you're going to click up here onto support and you're going to click on DaVinci Resolve and fusion software and down here you'll see the latest downloads DaVinci Resolve and it's currently 18.1.4 and you'll also notice there's two different versions in there you've got DaVinci Resolve and you've got DaVinci Resolve studio so depending whether you want the full version or the free version will depend on which one you download and it works on Mac windows and Linux so just choose which one you've got so what's the difference between the free version and the paid version is a question I get asked all the time I'll summarize it quickly but basically the free version is going to do everything you need to do to get learning DaVinci Resolve you're going to be restricted to Ultra HD so you can't do 6K 8K and you're restricted to a single GPU for processing resolve the bigger the GPU the more gpus the faster it goes so that's a slight limitation but and a few effects missing and there's a few other things but it really is fully working what's the catch people always say what you know why is it free um when Adobe is on a subscription model Adobe don't make Hardware Blackmagic design make a lot of Hardware they make cameras monitors panels speed editors all sorts of stuff DaVinci Resolve is really the glue that holds a lot of this together so they're quite happy for it to be out there free if you need some extra features the studio version is there it's going to cost you about 300 pounds I don't know what it is in dollars uh that's a one-off fee that's not a month that's a one-off fee I bought mine about 10 years ago and I've never paid for a update since so it's free updates for life one off fee so that's the beauty of the model so just download the free version have a go with it first you'll know when you need the full version all right so let's launch DaVinci Resolve so once you've installed that installer you're going to double click down here and it's going to open up and what it's going to do is it's going to open the last project library that you worked in so I've got one here it's got some of my YouTube episodes in it and this is what's called a project Library so what is a project Library a project Library holds your projects and your projects contain your timelines your effects and the links to your media all that sort of stuff so we need a project library to be able to create a project so how do we do this well the first thing is you need to decide where the project library is going to go and you have a choice of a local drive you can just put it onto a local attached drive you could put it onto a network drive and you can even now put it into the cloud so last year Blackmagic launched the Blackmagic Cloud which allows me to save my project in the cloud which means I can create a project here in the studio I can go home I can open it on my iPad because DaVinci Resolve works on the iPad which is fantastic and I can see that project so as long as I've got the media in both places or proxies I can be carrying on working on the train or at home or whatever I want so once you've decided where you want to store it you're going to create the project Library so I'm going to do it locally I'm going to add a project library and the first thing I'll do is browse to a location so it needs its own folder so I'm going to create a folder on here call it Darren's project Library and I'm going to say open and now it wants a name so it's saying to create a project library and or you can connect to an existing project Library so I'm going to create one here I'm going to call it so I normally have the year first and then the month and my project library is going to be called Downs Library so create and so that has created a brand new project Library here it is Darren's library and inside there is a single blank empty project ready for me to populate and I can create as many projects in here as I wish okay so let's open up this project and have a look at how we literally get started in DaVinci Resolve so I'm going to double click it and we're into an empty DaVinci Resolve project so first thing to address really is what is DaVinci Resolve uh DaVinci Resolve was originally a color grading system and it's evolved over the years to become a fully featured editing system it's a compositing system and it has audio mixing capability at very advanced level and remember with these things you only go as advanced as you want to and at the end you've got this delivery page which allows you to export out in as many different formats as you can possibly think of including resizing for social media and all that sort of stuff so it is a fully integrated full post workflow so this is the equivalent in Adobe of having Adobe Premiere audition uh media encoder After Effects as all those separate applications but it's all in one application and it's rock solid this thing is absolutely stable so how does this thing work so down the bottom it's really controlled by these seven pages you've got the media page which is where you get your media in to start with you've got your cut and edit page which are two different ways of editing but they work together as well you've got the fusion page this allows you to do full compositing so this is the equivalent of like Adobe After Effects or something like that you've got the color page where we do car color grading this is the equipment of lumetri and you've got your fairlight page which allows you to do full professional audio mixing and you've got finally the deliver page which allows you to export in as many different formats as you can possibly think of that's the pages they think of these as like the different applications but they all talk to each other at the same time you'd have to export to one and Import and Export xmls and all that stuff it's totally integrated so it's a really brilliant way of working you can start and edit you can then do a little bit color grading you can then go back and change the edit color grade it a bit more add a bit of audio post production just work however you want so I'm going to show you all that in a second but before we do that let's just have a quick look at the preferences so as with any application when you first open it you're going to just want to check that the preferences are familiar I'm not going to go in detail here I'm just going to show you how to get started so let's open up the main settings are down here and these are my main projects I think so this is still an Untitled project we're going to save it in a moment and give it a name but the master settings here is the main thing you want to look at and at the top here you've got timeline format this is the resolution that my sequence will be created in so think of it like your sequence settings all right the beauty of DaVinci Resolve is I can start off in HD can be working with 4K footage I can edit it in HD so my system runs faster so a little quick tip for you there if you run it in HD the system runs quicker and at the end I can switch that to be Ultra HD everything gets remapped at perfect pixel quality and allows me to export that in full true Ultra HD or 4K or 6K or whatever you're working in so the timeline resolution is kind of independent and flexible at any time the timeline frame rate you need to determine this before you start your edits or certainly when you first bring in your media so it defaults to 24 frames per second the media that I'm going to import is in fact 24 frames per second but if you're working with 25 or 23.97 it's a good idea to just change this before you start importing media if you forget to do that DaVinci Resolve will prompt you when you bring in your first Clips it will say hey these clips are running at 25 do you want to change that setting but once you've set it it's locked all right the rest of it you can kind of ignore for now I'm not going to go through all these different settings this this program gets as deep as you want it to be but it doesn't have to be it's it works at a very light level until you want to go deeper alright so that's the project settings and the other place to look at up here is the DaVinci Resolve preferences so over here the user preferences for example I can set in here how often I save my project it's on live save as I said before DaVinci Resolve is absolutely Rock Solid but I've got the assurance that it's life-saving all the time but this thing just does not crash it might crash occasionally but very rare all right so that's your user settings so I'm going to press save so how do we get some information in here at the minute this is just empty there's nothing going on so there's two ways you can do this you can go to the media page here which is basically dedicated to importing media okay this is where you manage your media this page is also replicated in the edit page so up here you've got What's called the media pool this is a direct link to this page let me get some media in first and show you it might be a little bit easier the bottom half is what resolve can see so at the minute you can see that it can't see anything it can't see any media all we need to do is link it to Media that's on our drives so let's have a look I'm going to go up here to my backup Drive I've got here and I've got some footage in here in a folder okay and this is just some interview a bit of b-roll so this would be your camera rashes your the material that your client sent to you it might be a single clip that you want to just play with that is what it's looking at but at the minute this is not in DaVinci Resolve so I've got an image here if I guess my edit page I can't see it the reason I can't see it is because this clip in order to be seen needs to be down here in the media pool now we can see it if I go to the edit page there's my single clip and play it but I've only got one clip in so let's go back to the media page and we can import a few more so let's just drag and drop those in so now we've got six or seven Clips to play with here's some metadata information about what the clip resolution is and its frame rate and that sort of thing I'm not going to show you that now this can go as detailed as you want to you can create folders here if that's what I could do is actually take the entire folder and just drag and drop it in here and it brings the entire contents down so many different ways of bringing it in and the other way you can bring media in is literally you can go to Windows Explorer or the finder and you can literally drag and drop Clips in so I can just drop them down there and they're now individual resolve so that's all good and well we've got footage into the system but what do we do with it so at the minute we haven't even got an edit made this is an empty sequence this is our edit page this is probably the easiest page to get started on to build your program this is presuming you want to edit in resolve if you want to edit in a different application you could actually take that timeline and import it into DaVinci Resolve and then you might just want to do audio mixing and color grading on that that's really easy to do but I'm going to show you how to do it from scratches if you're bringing in your own footage so here's the media pool remember this these can switch all on and off by the way so here's my effects so I can switch these tabs on and off there's the media pool on and off remember the media pool is literally there's my bin structure is talking to this page it's an exact replica of this page so I never need to go to this page again in fact you don't need to go there to start with you can actually import your clips from here I can click in here and say import Media or you can drag and drop it as you saw me doing earlier all right so here's the footage so all I need to do now is just start viewing my clips so I can see them here you can have a look at that in thumbnail mode or whatever whatever you want to work with so I'm just going to double click a clip press play that's playing in my source viewer so I can either bring the whole clip down just drag and drop it down to my timeline that's the entire clip that's the obviously the video and the audio there and this is now the first clip in my sequence but what I did then was bring the whole clip down so what I'm going to do is put my playhead end this keyboard shortcuts for doing that as well so if I just press up and down on my keyboard I can move that and wherever this is now is going to be where the next clip goes I'm going to press play so just gonna take that little bit I just pressed I and O on my keyword then it's Mark in Mark out which is also here and it's just going to take that small section now drag and drop that down to my timeline and we're done there are many many tutorials on how to actually use the edit page this tutorial is really about how the pages talk to each other and getting a grounding in how DaVinci Resolve actually works so it's just to get you going so I'm not going to teach you how to use the entire edit page because we'd be here for another hour at least let's do one more just to just to make it a little bit more full in there so I can do marking I've got a shot of her cake and I can just drag and drop that down there so I've got three shots here first one second one and third one and if we go to the cut page what I want to show you is that all these pages are looking at that sequence at the same time so they're all sharing that information so we go to the cut page one two three there's our three edits one two three there's our three edits up here and it's just a different view the cut page is a different way of editing I think people come from Final Cut Pro find the cut page a little bit easier to use than maybe the edit page I think if you're from Adobe Premiere you might find the edit page easier to work with but watch this if I just make an adjustment here let's just shorten that clip and I guess the edit page you'll see that it shortened it and then I can do the same here oops in fact just to show you if I actually delete that clip I'm just going to highlight it and delete it let's go back to the cut page and there's the Gap you can see that it's quite clearly talking to each other all right so you can edit a bit in the cut page edit a bit in the edit page and you're gonna be happy whichever one you find more comfortable what I generally do is I'll start in the cut page and then I'll fine tune it in the edit page because there's a bit more flexibility but I suggest if you're just starting just go straight to the edit page and get going in there all right so what else is going on here the next page along is Fusion now I don't use Fusion too much it's it's a very powerful Advanced compositing system this is the equivalent of after effects in the Adobe suite but it's there and it's ready to go so if I go to this clip here maybe we want to do some light rays or some complex little thing on here we can go into Fusion there's the clip ready to go and I can put all of these different compositing techniques on there we could do some keying and masking all that sort of stuff I'm definitely not going to show you Fusion in this one because we'd be here for definitely more than an hour we'd be here for probably the rest of the day the big one we're going to go from the edit page and we're going to go to the color page now this is allowing me to do color grading at any time I like you don't have to be color grading when you finish the program you can do it during you can do it at the end and we can take this shot now and you can see there's shot one and their shot two but you don't see the edits you don't see the actual timeline however if you click up here on timeline you can actually see the timeline so there's that Gap that we made and this is the current clip that we're going to be grading and here's all the color tools you've got tons of tools in here that again I've got I've got episodes on how to start in the color page but I'm really just showing you the just talks to each other you don't have to send things anywhere everything updates so on here I can just literally start grading now so we could say let's just bring down our shadows a little bit and let's maybe just cool it off a little bit and there we go there are tons of different tools to work with let me just reset that that wasn't a very good example of that something more like that and I said put a bit of contrast in there something like that now if I go back to the edit page you'll see that that clip is now graded so I can just I can now carry on editing so I could say okay actually I want to move that app let's just move that clip up nicely snaps to the right place because this snapping tool is on I've got an inspector up here so if I open the inspector in here I can do zooming so maybe I will make that shot a little bit more zoomed in I can keyframe all this we can crop it we can put dissolves transitions all that sort of stuff let me just show you quickly where transitions are video transitions let's just put cross dissolve on that it's done it's as simple as that now if I go back to the color page you see that that Gap has been tightened up I can even see the dissolve on there all right so everything is talking to everything it's really that simple now I do go into depth on how to use the color page in many different episodes so check out some of my playlists um there may be a video appearing up here somewhere I don't know there'll be stuff in the description but you want to check it out now Fair light what's happening in fairlight fairlight is your pro audio mixing area so you can edit your audio in the edit page as you would traditionally so I can adjust the volume like so in fairlight you've got much more control and you can really do very Advanced uh audio mixing in here and once you've done that it's done you don't have to do anything you just mix it it's really that simple and then when you're finished you obviously want to render it out so this would be the equivalent in Adobe of the media encoder or you can file export in here go to the delivery page ton of presets up here for delivering so I can deliver straight to Youtube in fact you can connect your YouTube channel in the user preferences and I can literally upload to my channel here with chapter markers that get recognized it's really fantastic it sets all the presets up for me or you can go in here and custom export your own settings you've got Netflix settings in here you can export back to Premiere or Final Cut Pro if you want it really is as deep as you want to get but this is just a general overview to show you how these Pages talk to each other it really is that simple to get started on so get some media in there remember it just links you'd have to copy the media you're just literally linking to it and just start editing uh let me show you how fast it delivers so okay admittedly this is a very short clip but if I just go to here and browse so I'm going to click on here and let's say on here I'm going to say renders 2 create watch how quick it renders this so I'm going to press save I'm going to add it to the render queue and it's going to render this in h.264 I can choose any other codec that I want it literally renders in pretty much anything you can think of press render all and that has rendered already and this is super quick the bigger the GPU you've got the faster this thing goes so when you want to take this to the next level obviously I've got a ton of tutorials on my channel but have a look at the Blackmagic design website there are free tutorials that you can download with footage and it will take you from beginner to pretty advanced level in all the different pages YouTube has a ton of great channels on there so I would look at for editing I would be looking at Mr Alex Tech Alex Cameron Jade Lipman uh Casey Farris I hope I don't miss some people right now um Casey has a great channel that goes into Fusion as well for Fusion I'd be looking at Patrick Sterling and also Daria for soon has relaunched her Channel as Da Vinci master key audio Jason yadlovsky for color look at me and Cullen Kelly if you want to get into a little a bit deeper color science these are all great resources that I would pretty much trust on YouTube so I hope that's helped you sort of demystify what DaVinci Resolve is and help you get started look after yourselves and I'll see you in the next episode

Channel: Darren Mostyn

Views: 255,773

Keywords: DaVinci Resolve for beginners, Casey faris, Cullen kelly, Darren mostyn, Patrick Stirling, Jay Lippman, Daria Fissoun, Jason Yadlowski, Mr Alex Tech, DaVinci resolve 18.5, Resolve for Newbies, Resolve 18, Alex cameron, Learn Davinci resolve

Id: g52gP_bR65E

Length: 19min 19sec (1159 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 31 2023