How To Use Davinci Resolve 18 - Complete Beginner's Guide

davinci resolve is a complete editing platform that you could use on a mac on a windows pc and even on linux computers and it's completely free to use there is no limitations there is no watermarks they do have a paid upgrade i'll mention what that gives you what most people use it completely for free and you could download the latest version of davinci resolve here on your computer depending on what platform you're using i'll put a link below just press the download link and again you could use it completely for free and while it's downloading let me quickly show you the difference here davinci resolve right here the free version is what i'm downloading but the studio version that's the paid upgrade so that gives you some other things like you will get some 3d tools you'll get a lot of filters that you won't have access to and you get a lot of audio plugins and more advanced color grading options okay so that's for more advanced users if you eventually want to upgrade to that paid version i've used the free version now for years and i'm going to make this video very step by step so if you never edited before this will walk you through the whole process one step at a time okay so the very first time you open davinci resolve here the very first thing you want to do is create a new project that's step one so you could go up here to file and new project that should be your very first step name your project here so i'm gonna name this tutorial video now for our second step i'm just gonna give you a quick brief overview of what you're looking at here and then as we go through it it becomes a lot easier to understand but right here this is pretty much the first place you will start this is your media pool or media panel basically any audio file video file pictures that you're going to use they're going to appear over here i'll show you how to do this in the next step this right here on the right side this is your preview so your video is going to show up over here once you have a video to look at and down here is called a timeline basically in a timeline that's where all your editing will take place and then on the bottom this is important right here it says media cut and so on this is basically walking you through step by step on what to do first what to do second and so on so media this is going to be your first step every time you click one of these it will change the whole layout right so it will move some things around so right now we're in cut mode that's editing then we're in full edit mode right that's where we really trim things down then we're gonna get to fusion mode and i'll explain all these as we go through it color fair lights and deliver finally is when you export your video okay the next step in the process is actually bringing in your video files or any type of media you want to use so i typically do that from this cut menu and i'm going to drag it to this what's called the media pool right here so the panel i showed you in the beginning so let me go to my finder window here you could do this obviously on a mac or pc and these are the files i have so i'm gonna go ahead and select one and then hold shift and select all four and then just drag them into this media pool area okay and i'm going to go ahead and change right here so it's going to take care of some more advanced things like frame rate for me i don't have to worry about those things and just to show you where i get this kind of footage from i use this platform called envato elements and they're sponsoring this video and with envato elements you could get unlimited downloads of anything you see on this platform for one subscription fee so i basically got all kinds of stock footage from here this is basically a licensing platform so i don't have to worry about copyright issues and things like that and it has just hundreds of thousands in fact if i remove the word beach here in search you will see it has millions of stock video files that you could choose from you could also get your music from here which i'll show you in a second and it has other things like it has millions of photos as well and this is all under the one subscription here so if you need any footage that's where i got my footage here and they're all imported over here again audio and photos will be imported the same way you just drag and drop them right into this project panel now you also may consider getting an external hard drive so then all your project panels could sit in an external hard drive as a way to keep everything backed up so i'll put a link in the description to the one i use so once we have our video files the next step is actually the editing process so let's go over here to the editing panel here and again it's going to change the layout really all it's going to do is still going to have the timeline down here this is going to be our media pool here on the left side this is going to be a preview window and this is going to be our final video here on the right side okay so i'll show you exactly what to do step by step so what i could do is i could click on any of the clips i have up here i'm going to double click it it's going to load it up over here it's still not being edited yet right now it's just going to let us preview it and i could press play right here it's going to go ahead and play it and then i could decide which portion of this i want to use i could also kind of scrub through it like this quickly and what i like to do is use here a keyboard shortcut that comes in really handy so you could use the keyword shortcut i so if you press i on your keyboard it'll create that as the in point so that's where my video is going to start and then i'll just go through it here and let's say i want to end it here and i'll press o so i stands for in point o stands for out points so you could see this is now a little bit lighter now i could drag it and bring it down here okay and i'll bring it right in the beginning and i'll let it go and just like that i have my first clip added and you could see this panel on the right side that's your edited video okay so the left side is your preview the right side is your edited video and again i could scrub through to see how my edit is looking this is just adding one clip so the next thing i want to do is okay what's the next clip i'm going to add i'm going to double click this one it's going to load it over here and again i'm going to go ahead and scrub through it and this is the section i'm going to press i for in it's going to start to edit here and oh for out and then i'll drag it and this time i'll put it right next to this one and you see how it's snapping next to this is called snapping this is what you want you want it to be exactly connected to the last clip so now if i take this red line let me bring it over here you could press spacebar it's going to start playing and you'll see what happens it will cut from this clip right to that clip right that's what i want if there is a gap between them so if i didn't let the snap here what ends up happening is it will just go to black so your finished video will have this black section that usually doesn't make sense so you want to make sure they snap together like you see over here and there are some tools up here that i haven't mentioned so far but snapping is one of those so you see this one right here the magnet tool so you want to make sure this is always turned on so your clips snap next to each other just like you see over here so you would do the exact same thing with all your clips in the order you want to tell your story so i decided hey that was clip one two and three so i'm gonna just press i press o and this is my third clip and you can see this one has a little green section to it that means this video clip has a little bit of audio with it so sometimes if you have a video clip where someone's talking like this so if i was talking you will see that now if you don't want the audio from it you could actually select it but you can't just press delete if you press delete it will delete the whole thing so i'm gonna go to edit up here and undo that so you could always undo something to bring it back and you'll have to right click on it i'm on a mac so i can't right click i'll have to hold down control and click and you could actually separate that audio on video here so you'll see lots of different options here that may be a little bit overwhelming but you don't have to worry about any of that right now all i want to do is i want to separate the two which is right here link clips i could go ahead and unlink them so now if i click on the green section and press delete it won't delete the video file so they're already on video and they lay out like that and just to take a closer look at the timeline here right here is your video track and down here is your audio track and you could have many video tracks and they were layer on top of each other and you could have many audio tracks too and they would blend in together i'll explain that as we go further so another thing you could do as you start editing is sometimes you decide hey this clip actually should be at the end so when the sun sets not in the beginning the sequence doesn't make sense so you could grab it and just bring it to the end here like this okay and now you have a blank section in the beginning you'll have to select this section and press delete and it will bring everything back so now my video starts as you see at the zero second mark and then it will just if i press play it will go clip by clip so that's how you change the order of clips and sometimes after you added a clip maybe your in point and out point are not correct so i could go down here and look i could actually change basically if i'm trimming one clip and extending the other one next to it so this one does come in handy and that's when you get those two brackets that's the signal for that and if you go a little bit over you see how it changes so now this will only trim this clip the beginning of this clip i could come on this side and do it to the end of this clip too so if you want to trim something in from the either side of it that's how you would do it you still have this blank section so you do have to go ahead and close the gap i'm going to actually select two clips this time like this and close this gap too okay so that's how you could trim clips that are already on your timeline down here if you didn't do the right in point and out point and sometimes when you're talking especially if you're making videos like this you can make a mistake in the middle of the clip right so you have to take some in the middle the in and out point doesn't quite work out so the way you do that is you need to split a clip that's this icon right over here so this is the blade tool so you could select this one and the keyboard shortcut for that is b that comes in really really handy so you will make a cut right here and i will move the red marker over here cut again and then i'll go back to the arrow tool one more time and select in the middle and press delete and that took out something in the middle of a clip that comes in really really handy in dialogue type scenes where i'm talking for example and then i could go ahead and grab this one and close that gap so it'll go from here to another clip so you would go ahead and assemble your first video track the next thing i want to show you is what's called adding b-roll so typically when someone's talking and then it shows what they're talking about that's what's called b-roll so in this case i have my video track one but let's say i wanted something on top of this video track i could add a video track too so for example i'll just grab this clip here i'll bring it on top and you see how as soon as i grab it and put it right on top here it creates another video track on top of it that's called a cutaway or a b-roll track so now if i just go on in the beginning here press spacebar to play it will go and it will show whatever is on top okay so it will basically mask what's under it and i could again trim this down if i want to so i'll go ahead and grab this and make it much shorter so this is what's going to happen it's going to go from my clip to the b-roll back to the original clip right so when someone's talking typically it's nice to show what they're talking about on that second video track now next we want to add transition so transition is what happens when one clip ends and another clip begins so in this case when this clip ends if i press space bar it went to this clip but there was no transition between that was just what's called the cut just cuts from one to another but sometimes to smooth things out you want to add a little transition so you could go and click right in between two clips and you could go ahead and right click on it and you could add basically a simple dissolve so you see these frames right here so typically a 25 frame dissolve is about a second in this case so i'll press it and let me press spacebar so you see the difference there between a cut and a dissolve this is just a much nicer transition and there's lots of different transitions here that you could choose so let me show you that now if you go up here to effects right here there's going to be a lot of video transitions you could click this toolbox video transition and i just did a simple dissolve but you could blur so that's what a blur looks like you could see if i scrub through it it shows me exactly what it's going to look like cross dissolve is what i showed you dip to a color like dip to black sometimes it's really nice but you could change that so any of these you could go ahead and see if this to your liking a lot of these like these iris ones are really cheesy so i typically stick with these dissolve options but sometimes a push comes in handy like this you could go ahead and choose that so to apply that you could drag it and put it in between two clips like this and it's going to apply it so there it is okay then i could show you another one here let me just go ahead and choose a simple one like this blur bring it between these two clips press play and that's a simple blur now let me show you a really simple way to add text so the easiest way to do that is again click on the effects panel the same way we found transitions and titles is what we want here and there's going to be a bunch of text options that you could simply choose okay so you could go through there's a lot of them here that you could choose so for example this one just fades in i could grab this just like a video clip i could put it anywhere i want and i could double click on this and it's going to let me edit that text in this text box and this is going to basically fade in and fade out and you have a lot of different text controls okay so you could change for example the style of the text entirely so you change the fonts right here you have colors you have sizes so you could increase the size with text you have very advanced options inside of davinci resolve here so make sure you play around with text and text could also be laid out on top of the video so if i grab it and put it on top of the video in track 2 for example this is what it's going to look like okay it's going to show up on top of the video which comes in handy lots of times but it really depends on how you're using it if you're using it at the end or the beginning and it's the title maybe you don't want video under it but again you could just simply drag and drop it from here anywhere on your project and they work exactly the same as a video file so you could go ahead and trim them the same exact way as i showed you you could use the blade tool to split the middle of them everything is the same as if you're using a video file and i'll grab a quick photo here from envato elements to show you exactly how to add a photo and this time i'm just going to bring it to this panel right here so i'm not even going to change my window i'm still in editing so i'll go over to the download folder and i'll grab and put it right here this is the clip and i'm going to drag it to my timeline and i'll put it right at the end over here and same thing with images too you could trim them the exact same way and you can make them as long as you want as well so that's one thing you can't do with video video is as long as that clip is with images you could just stretch them as long as you want and this is what it's going to look like and again you could add this to another layer as well so you could put it for example on video track number three i just created right that's going to cover my video under it and my text under it so whatever video track is at the very top is going to cover what's underneath so i'm going to go ahead and actually select this and press delete because i don't need that right now let's go and get music so this is again i recommend you get music from this sort of platform where you get what's called royalty-free music so you actually get a license to use these otherwise in platforms like youtube you get into what's called copyright issues so you technically can't just google a song and use it in your project you have to have copyright free or royalty free music so i typically again this has hundreds of thousands here and i listen to them and i'm going to go ahead and just download this one that i like i'll just go ahead and press download now this is going to give me this file right here i'm going to select that i'm going to bring it over here put it over here and i'm going to drag it down this time to the audio track right this is not a video file so i'm going to make sure it goes in the very beginning right here and let go and as you can see this is far longer than my edited video which is only 10 seconds right this is a minute long song so i could choose the blade tool cut the very end of it right here choose the selection tool select the remaining part and press delete okay so that's going to let me do exactly what i wanted to do have a song here that's the same as my video file now depending on what you're editing sometimes you want your song to be background sometimes you want it to take over and be the dominant sound so right now the audio level is exactly where i wanted it to be but if i want it to be background i need to reduce the audio level so you see right here if i go right on this line i could drag it down and typically for background music you want it to be somewhere around 30 to 35 db okay so that's the volume level of your song and then that way if someone's talking they're not really being overtaken by the music it's kind of blending the two together but if you're making for example a slideshow a music video or something like that you just leave that at 100 so i'm gonna go back at 0 db which is again 100 which is the regular volume of the song you can raise the volume of things by just going up but make sure you don't just go too high just listen to it and make sure it's not dominant now sometimes you want to fade out an audio track like a music right you don't want it to just suddenly end so let me actually use the zoom slider here so i could show you the end of it if you come to the very end you see this little white square here grab it and drag it in this is letting you fade it out so now this is gonna slowly fade out the music okay and you could stretch this out as long as you want so for example this is almost two and a half second fade out now now let me quickly show you some of these other panels so this fusion panel is far too advanced for someone that is starting out so i highly recommend you spend most of your time editing your videos in a beginner's guide in the edit panel the fusion panel i typically cover in more advanced trainings now you have the color panel davinci resolve used to really be one of the most prominent apps for color grading and color correction now it's a full-blown editor but this is really how it got its start and again if you've never done anything in the world of color correction this is going to seem way too overwhelming i've been editing for a long time well over a decade and this still is very complicated but it's very powerful but the simplest way basically to deal with color is you could select a clip it's going to load it up over here for you and you could go to this panel right here called luts and this is going to have some basically pre-designed color palettes here that you could simply choose from this whole list okay so this is one way for example you could double click on it and it will apply it to your clip this obviously doesn't need color correction but by just double clicking you would apply it and then you have this graph here where you could really take it to the next level again this is a beginner's guide so i'm not going to focus too much on color correction but sometimes this is how you could make some tweaks to your existing video files and fairlight this final window here before we get to the last thing is for advanced mixing of your audio so in the editing platform in the editing window typically you could do everything you need to with audio but fairlight lets you take it to a whole different level so if you think about it we really spent time in the first couple windows here and these last three before we get to deliver are for more advanced things that i don't recommend you touch i could basically create entire professional video projects just from the edit panel without ever getting into these three this is for much more high level so i'll cover these in upcoming videos but right now let's go to our final tab for delivery this is your export this is when you take it from the video editing and you actually get a usable video file that you could use whenever you want wherever you want so i'm going to show you exactly what to do over here on the left side you have a bunch of different settings h.264 is a very common export setting so you could choose this one this is how it compresses the large video file and makes it smaller so i would just choose this right now you could also use h.265 which is the more modern version of h.264 but h.264 has been around a long time so that's what i recommend you use right now then you change your format right here to mp4 that's pretty much most youtube videos kodak again is h.264 and resolution you already knew what it was so i didn't have to tell it what it was because it's based on the clips that you used same thing with the frame rate of what i got from envato elements so really i don't need to worry too much all i have to do is i have to make sure the format is mp4 which is very standard and h.264 is the codec and i need to name my video file okay and then i could decide where it's going so i'll just put it on my desktop press save and then i just have to press add to render q on the bottom i'm going to go ahead and press render all now okay it's done now if i go ahead and just minimize davinci resolve this should be on my desktop so i could press the spacebar and take a look at my entire video here and i'm also working on a very complete training for someone that wants to really learn davinci resolve so i'll go ahead and link that below go ahead and sign up and i'll let you know when it's complete thanks so much for all your time all the resources are below in the description and i'll see you next time

Channel: Howfinity

Views: 88,357

Keywords: How To Use Davinci Resolve 18, howfinity, how to, tutorial, Youtube, davinci resolve, davinci resolve tutorial, davinci resolve 17, how to use davinci resolve, davinci resolve 18, davinci resolve tutorial for beginners, resolve 18, free video editor, davinci resolve free, how to use davinci resolve 17

Id: OGX7-yp3SmE

Length: 22min 54sec (1374 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 12 2022