Get Your Settings Right! - Project Settings in Resolve 17 - The Essential Guide

oh hello i'm casey ferris i make videos on davinci resolve here on youtube and today we're talking about settings oh boy can you imagine a more nerdy thing well we're going to get real deep into the settings i'm going to show you every setting that i know maybe some that i don't know that i will definitely look up and then pretend like i know because that's how it works so here we are in resolve and when you talk about settings there's generally two places you go up here in the upper left where it says davinci resolve under preferences we have our system and user settings and we also if you go down in the lower right hand corner click on the settings cog here we have our project settings this is really confusing because everything lives in either one of these and if you're like me you pretty much forget which one it is all the time the big difference is that project settings are for your actual project so the specific thing that you're working on here it has to do with what size and frame rate what kind of specific things you want to happen just in this project the preferences up here are more for your system-wide stuff things that you always want to be set things like which hard drives to use what kind of equipment are you working with what hardware should resolve use that kind of stuff so that's a good clue on where you want to look for either of these settings let's jump into one of them it probably doesn't matter which one first we'll go into project settings because i feel like those are maybe a little bit more useful again click on the settings cog down here and it comes up with the project settings the thing that comes up by default is your master settings so this is everything that has to do with kind of the main features of your project so this is stuff like timeline resolution pixel aspect ratio frame rate that kind of stuff this timeline format this is mainly what you're going to change things in this is probably the most common area that i visit in the project settings so something to mention is that you can't change the timeline frame rate if you already have footage in your timeline it kind of locks that in so you generally want to set this before you start editing adding things to your timeline you can always change the timeline resolution but it locks in the timeline frame rate now don't get confused because playback frame rate is just how fast it will play back here in the viewer and stuff it's not the actual frame rate of your video then we have video monitoring and this section is all about if you have a outboard monitor of some kind one that's hooked up through sdi and really if you don't know what that is or you don't think you have that you can skip this if you ever get an sdi monitor like an output card this is where you change all of that stuff and if you're at that point where you're getting that you probably know what all of this means the next big section is the optimize media and render cache this is pretty important the first thing is the proxy media resolution and the proxy media format in resolve if you have footage that isn't playing back really well um something that might be really high resolution or raw what you can do is find that footage and right click on it and select generate proxy media and what that will do is make a low resolution copy of this file that's really easy to play back and it will kind of replace this high-res shot with that proxy media and then you can switch that out back and forth using the proxy if you want to play things back really well and switching back to the original if you want the ultimate quality but here's where you choose the proxy format the media resolution by default is set to choose automatically if you have really big footage like 8k footage i would do 1 8th or 1 16 maybe if you have 4k footage i do half recorder probably and then proxy media format these are the different formats that you can choose to actually convert it to and on my system there's basically two there's dnxhr and there's h264 dnxhr is a very nice format it plays back really easily and it looks amazing if you've ever used something like prores this is very similar if you want your proxies to look amazing and you just want them to play back really well dnxhr is probably where you want to be i would probably go for dnxhr hq for most things because you generally will switch out your proxies before you render so you're really just kind of choosing a pretty good looking proxy this will look really nice without being way too big on your system if you want to save a lot of space select h.264 some systems have a little bit more problem playing back h264 than dnxhr so if you have a really low spec system i would definitely pick something like dnxhr sq or lb if you have a pretty new system h.264 is a good choice especially if you're gonna do something like send proxies to somebody else over the internet it kind of depends on what you're doing that's why there's these two options optimized media is almost the same thing as proxy it's just it's more of kind of a behind the scenes thing it's like an automatic proxy that kind of switches out honestly i'm not sure if i would use optimized media very much anymore because proxy does everything that optimize media does and it's easier to manage the files and stuff so but it's basically the same idea if you want to use optimize media here's where you choose and you do have a few more options for your file types here render cache is when resolve just plays something back you know something like a fusion composition or a complicated color grade what it's really doing is rendering a little movie of each clip when it caches and this is where you choose what codec you want it to use again i'd probably do dnxhr hq or hqx by default this is switched out before you render none of these matter a whole lot for quality of the finished render it's just more what is convenient for what your system can play back and how much space you have on your hard drive enable background caching after five seconds this is how long it waits after you stop touching things to start rendering this render cache so if you're messing around in the timeline and then you kind of let go of the mouse it's going to wait five seconds and then it's going to start rendering because it figures if you're not paying attention to the computer it can take some time and think about stuff for you so that it will play back nicely when you come back we also have these two options automatically cache transitions in user mode as well as composites and fusion effects i would probably check all of these honestly unless you're having trouble with it because this will just make sure that you can play back everything in real time and it will automatically cache anything that it's having a hard time playing back under working folders this is pretty important proxy generation location as well as cache files and gallery stills this is where resolve is going to put all the extra stuff it makes cache clip especially and gallery stills all of these are going to fill up your hard drive so make sure that you put these on a separate drive if you have one something with a lot of space and that's especially true for proxy media if you're making a lot of proxies you can browse and choose the folder that you want those to go to last little bit here is frame interpolation these are just the default settings for your project of how you want to retime clips you can choose nearest frame blend or optical flow for retime process nearest basically if you slow down a clip it's just going to duplicate frames when it doesn't have any frames in between frame blend will fade them together and optical flow will do some fancy sciency things and actually make a fake frame in between the real frames to give you a little bit smoother motion this is the quality of how well it does that and this is how much motion it looks for while it does it so play around with these but you can always change these for each individual clip so that's master settings below master settings we have image scaling and again these are sort of your project wide settings and you can change these in each clip if you want to this first section here we have the resize filter this is all about basically if you're going to blow up a clip and make it a lot bigger say it's a 720p clip and you put it into a 4k timeline this is how it's going to treat it and do some fancy things to make it look a little bit nicer most of the time sharper is probably what you want but if things are looking weird when you're scaling them you can switch this a lot of the stuff you probably don't need to really mess with a whole lot so i'm going to skip over some of it one thing you definitely need is the input scaling what this is going to do is if you bring a piece of footage into a timeline and it's not the same size as the timeline right so if you bring in like a square icon into a 1080p timeline what this is going to do is this tells resolve how to treat that by default it says scale entire image to fit so if you drag in that icon it will just be a square that is the same height as your screen but there are also other options scale full frame with crop would be it's just going to scale until it fills the entire frame scale entire image to fit center crop with no resizing is just going to bring it in at whatever size it actually is so if you bring in a 4k image into a 1080p comp it's going to just show you the very middle of that image then stretch frame to all corners is going to distort it and just stretch it so the upper left hand corner in your source footage will be the upper left hand corner in the timeline you probably don't want this most of the time i usually like scale entire image to fit or center crop with no resizing so that i have control over how things look similarly down here in the output scaling i pretty much always leave this checked because i am almost always working at whatever resolution i want to deliver at and so i just have this match timeline settings checked but if you want to deliver at a different resolution all the time then you can uncheck that and customize this this is important mismatched resolution files i would set this to exactly this the same thing scale entire image to fit scale entire image to fit because if you don't and it's something weird like this you'll do something like you'll go to render and things will not scale the way that you think they would so that's what i like to do is set my timeline settings to be exactly my output make sure it looks good here and resolve and make sure that this and this are the same thing and then you'll have a predictable result okay color management this is a huge category it's probably way too deep for us to get into in a settings video if you want to learn more about color management i have a video that i did with our friend daria we'll put a link to that in the description but this is where you set all of your color management stuff one thing that you might want to pay attention to is if you use luts this is where you can open up the lut folder for your system and you can drag whatever luts that you want to use into your lut folder and then you hit update lists and the luts will be available in the lut browser and the color page this is also where you can set your broadcast safe which if you're doing something for broadcast you definitely want to set this and that's going to be dependent on the network specs which if you're worried about this you should have some kind of data on so you just select this and hit make broadcast safe and that will put a filter over everything to make sure that you don't have illegal colors under color management is general options first section here is the conform options conforming is basically reconnecting all of the clips that are in a timeline to a resolve timeline this can be something that is exported from another video editor this can be opening up an old project whatever it is it can be switching out media this is kind of what controls all of that stuff and again this is a lot to get into a couple of these to pay attention to is automatically conform missing clips added to the media pool this is nice if you have a bunch of clips in a timeline that aren't connected but then you find the missing clip you throw it into the media pool it'll automatically connect to whatever it's supposed to connect to you in the timeline so you don't have to select each one and re-link the clip this is all stuff that if you're kind of round tripping from other programs you're going to kind of want to pay attention to this stuff here's a bunch of advanced color options a lot of this stuff you probably don't need to mess with probably so i wouldn't worry about it unless you are super nerdy into color but here's where that stuff exists the other thing i might mention is this version section in the color page you can actually set different versions of each color grade that you do and here's where you can kind of name them for consistency right like if version one is always working on the background version two is always desaturated you can even type in stuff like client look producer look if you always kind of have the same workflow this is where you can kind of label those things instead of just calling them version one version two pretty nice next in our project settings we have camera raw and again this is all stuff that you can change later this is sort of just setting the default settings for your project if you bring in a raw file what settings do you want to use again if you're into working with raw media you probably know what all of this means next would be capture and playback this is only really useful if you are capturing from like a tape deck or like recording two-way type deck this is where all of those settings live subtitles these are kind of the default settings for your subtitles so max characters per line minimum caption duration maximum characters per second this just kind of sets those limits for your subtitles so if you're into subtitles make sure to check this out last but not least we have fairlight and this actually is pretty important if you have specific loudness targets that you're working with especially for something like broadcast this is where you set that stuff this is really important if you need to get really specific with your audio again if you need to get that specific and you're worried about that you probably know what this stuff is all right that's project settings look at this go all of that again lives in the lower right hand corner and the upper left hand corner under davinci resolve under preferences we have the system and user preferences let's start with the very top for system memory and gpu i pretty much want to crank these all the way up we want to give resolve as much memory as we can also if you have multiple gpus if you have the studio version of resolve you can kind of check which gpus to use for what if you only have one gpu you can just kind of set this on auto and it works great but that's where you can make sure that it's actually seeing the gpu that you're using and everything is good under memory gpu we have media storage again this is where you're going to be storing cache files and all the kind of extra stuff that resolve needs to make and put on your hard drive so make sure to set that to a drive that has some space you can set multiple drives so that it can overflow if you want to decode options this is just the settings for if you have h264 h265 or blackmagic raw settings for red you're setting how this uses the hardware video and audio io this is just kind of telling resolve what hardware you have and which ones you want to use right so what audio device you want to use for playing back audio what video device you want to use if you have again an external monitor and even down to surround sound setup and all of that stuff that's where that lives video plugins this is where you tell resolve where your openfx plugins are if you have you know something like sapphire or any kind of third-party openfx plug-in this is where it will list them same for audio plugins basically the same thing vst effects stuff like that you can add or remove different plugins there under this we have control panels you can select whichever panel you have if you have a color control panel same thing for audio console this is just to tell resolve what to use under general this is just kind of where other random stuff lives again you probably don't need to worry about this too much this has to do with sending reports if resolve crashes checking for updates that kind of thing this is also where you can set custom locations for your luts if you have your luts in a different folder you can just point resolve to that folder then it's easier to find those luts and you don't have to drag them into the project settings under internet accounts this is where you can sign in to various different internet accounts to automatically upload videos after they're rendered you can keep these signed in to whatever accounts you have and it will only upload them if you tick the box on the deliver page so it's totally okay to stay signed in on these but this is how resolve knows where to actually upload those last little tab here is advanced and this is where you can do things that are way too advanced for me you can type in commands and such which i'm just ain't nobody have time for that so this has all been the system preferences then we can switch over to user and there's a whole bunch more little options so under ui settings there's all different kinds of settings for how the interface looks kind of how it acts loading projects a lot of this again is probably stuff you don't really need to mess with but good to maybe just look through these under project save and load one thing to look at is the save settings this is where you can click on live save as well as project backups these are both very very good live save is pretty awesome it pretty much always saves your project so if resolve crashes or anything you can just open it right back up right where it was it's good to have this on you can also decide when to back up the projects and where the backups go under editing there's kind of the default options for starting time code how many video and audio tracks you want what type of audio track you want you can decide to put automatic smart bins in the media pool as well as set your standard durations so these are really cool to actually set yourself because for instance if you're doing a slideshow and you want each one to last three seconds you can set this to three seconds and then any time that you drag a still in it will last three seconds same thing for generators everything that's kind of just like the standard length for stuff that can be kind of any length again there's quite a few options here one of them that i like is always highlight current clip in the media pool so you can always see what the source piece of media is that you have selected in the timeline you can also set your default fades these are linear fades but you can also have them be kind of the curvy fades so if you find yourself doing a certain type of fade over and over again you can switch it to just kind of a different handle on your face for color here's a whole bunch of options and a lot of this is stuff if the interface doesn't quite work how you think it would sometimes there's a little toggle for that like the wipe wraps when viewing reference stills so this is like a reference still in the color page you can set it to wrap around like this and you can never drag it just totally off screen or not here's one that gets me always perform copy and paste on selected nodes i think this was a default a couple versions back and so i'm used to copying and pasting just from one specific node in the color page then again we kind of have the default settings here for the histogram background on the curves and everything defaults to input but you can also set it to off or output this is what happens when you switch clips it can select the last adjusted node from the clip or it can select the same node that you're on if you're on node four on one shot and then you switch to the next shot it can select node four for the next shot this is actually really nice if you're going through and adjusting something in like the last node of every single clip definitely have messed with this before there are some other things that are probably not so important for most people we also have fairlight settings this you can set the offset of your video monitor if you're having trouble with syncing audio with an external monitor stuff that pertains to fairlight these are different options that make it easier for you to play back things things like hiding ui overlays minimize interface updates during playback i usually have this clicked because i don't really care if my interface updates that much i just want to see what's actually happening on screen if you click this performance mode to manual you can select these different options to kind of optimize some things then we also have control panel stuff this is pretty much to set the speed of your hardware controls which again you're probably not going to worry about unless you have a control surface then we have metadata so these are little presets that you can use i can make a new preset and i can select various things that i want to pay attention to inside of the metadata panel and you can make metadata presets here and once you have all of your preferences set you can actually save these as a preset you can go up here to the three ellipses here and say save user preferences as preset so i'll call this ac and now if i ever want to bring these all back how i like them i can go to import user preferences and bring those up whoo so there you go there is an overview of all of the settings and preferences inside of resolve i hope this was helpful if you stayed all the way to the end make sure to let me know by hitting that like button and i hope this sets you up for success get it because it's settings anyway

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 21,982

Keywords: Get Your Settings Right! - Project Settings in Resolve 17 - The Essential Guide, davinci resolve, settings, tutorial, how to, best practice, blackmagic, best settings, video production, post production, filmmaking, how to use resolve

Id: c6o0LLsRLEA

Length: 19min 32sec (1172 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 31 2021