Import & Organize Media in DaVinci Resolve - Workflow Tip for Beginners!

a place for everything and everything in its place I get a lot of questions about how to organize media how to bring it into resolve without losing your dang mind well here's a little guide for beginners here we are in the media page of resolve this is a great place to start when you have some media that you want to import you can of course import media into the media pool from basically any page of resolve but the media page is really great because you can navigate your system with this upper left hand part this media storage and find whatever folder you have your media in and it's really nice because you can preview any piece of media you want without having to import it into the project so you can just import the good ones from there anything that you want in your project you just drag down into the media pool we have a shoot here for one of our short films that will be coming out at some point but the first thing that I like to do is make a couple of bins in our media pool so I'll right click here and say new bin and I like to just keep things simple so we'll just say maybe day one and inside of day one we'll make a new bin for video and a new bin for audio and inside the video bin that's where we'll drag all of our video clips just drag those in and then the Audio I like to have organized in an audio folder on my computer anyway we'll take all this audio here and we'll drag this into the audio bin for now so depending on the type of shoot you have you might want to get more or less organized than this if your audio is going right into the camera then things are a little bit easier but if you have separate audio like we have here that's recorded with an external recorder there's a little bit more work that needs to happen to kind of get organized one thing I would recommend doing is always shoot with a slate that means this clapboard thing right here we can just zoom into this slate here and the Slate has all of the information visually for this shot this is roll one scene two take one it has the date and everything that we need to know about this shot and what's cool is over here in the right hand side of the media page if you click on metadata up here you can bring up the metadata panel and by default it probably looks like this with the clip details but if you go up to the upper right hand corner and click on this little list arrow thing you can go to shot and scene and here we have a bunch of fields that we can fill out about this media so whatever we have selected we can fill out information for here in the metadata panel so the first thing that I like to do is shift select all of the shots from this day and I can kind of batch edit all of the metadata for this footage so we'll just go through here description is going to be different for every clip so won't worry about that same with comments keywords people clip color scene take yep okay day and night we can click this little check box and that's going to update whatever I put in here for everything that I have selected when I hit the save button let's just call this Knight and it's an interior shoot day we'll call this day one date recorded 118 23 camera number is camera one real number is one program name we'll call deadbeat location Dan's house and I think that's all of the common things for these clips and I'll go ahead and hit save and now all of these clips will have that information then it's just a matter of going through the clips and finding the slate and saying okay this is scene two take one and you can kind of scrub through middle button click that's clicking down on your scroll wheel to kind of pan around here we're just zooming into the Slate this is scene two take two and we kind of just go through and find the Slate for each clip and label this like this I like to do this because it makes it really nice later when you're trying to find stuff you can even organize things by seeing when you do your edit and so that's a really nice way to kind of throw the clips together in a rough edit and if you're just selecting One Clip you can change any of these fields and you don't have to hit save it automatically updates it you can also shift select maybe just one scene here so this scene is scene 3A I can select all of these and say Scene Three a and hit save and now I'll have scene 3A on all of these and I can just work in the take so this is take one take two take three and so on and basically you fill out all of the information you can with all of this footage now again this might be Overkill if you're doing something just for yourself like you're just working on a small small project just with you you shot it you know you know all about it you might not need to go this crazy but there's something kind of nice about going through and getting really organized makes me feel good but I'm also working with a couple other people on this production so I want to make sure that the editor and sound guy and everybody has all the information that they need about all of this media without having to go through and scrub it through themselves once we go through and do this for all of the video we should also go through and do it for the audio and it works pretty much the same way I can double click to open up a piece of media and we'll scrub through the piece of media until we find the Slate which is right here that's why we have that clapboard and whoever's running the Slate should have yelled out the numbers that are on the Slate so you can hear it on the audio and know which take and scene and everything this is for our audio let's just listen so this is scene two take three scene two take three and again you can go through all of these and scene two take four and again this takes quite a while to go through but when you have this much footage and you're working with other people it's a really good idea to go through and put down all of that information the neat thing is that once you have your media logged like this scene two take four you can drag the audio to the same folder as the video and you can sort by this information so I'll right click and we'll say scene and take make sure that those are clicked and I'll just unclick some other stuff here and now we can sort by scene now we have scene two take four and scene two and take four and we know that these belong together I can right click on this and go to auto sync audio based on waveform and now it's linked that secondary audio to our video and now as we play the video we have the good audio linked to it Sean is that you so even though it is a little bit of work to go through each of those clips the result is a very clean very organized way to work especially if you're working with other people now we're set up really easily to just take this clip and throw it into a timeline and we don't have to worry about resyncing the audio or anything because it's linked we can just drag this into our timeline and we can see here in fairlight the individual audio channels and we can pick which audio is the best can use the audio from his lav or from the shotgun John is that you Sean it's just really nice because that is kind of attached to the file moves around with it and it kind of just stays in sync so I hope that's a helpful introduction to anyone trying to get organized bringing their media in and such like that if you want some more tips and kind of useful workflow tips we have a workflow course on DaVinci Resolve make sure to check that out because uh we go through a little bit more detail on this kind of thing as well as a bunch of other stuff that will speed up or help your workflow inside of resolve okay okay that's a good that's a good idea I am a fan of that idea I like it a lot and that is something that I like I'm never going to take a sip of this I'm only gonna almost take a sip I lied

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 58,330

Keywords: Davinci Resolve 17, blackmagic design, casey faris, how to, free video editor, tutorial, davinci resolve 18, resolve for beginners, davinci tutorials, editing, color, fusion, fairlight, editing video, davinci resolve 18 tutorial for beginners, davinci resolve tutorial 18, davinci resolve tutorial, how to import media to davinci resolve, how to import media to davinci resolve 18, how to organize video files for editing, how to organize video files, professional video editing tutorial

Id: 75fCmrLF8Qk

Length: 7min 13sec (433 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 29 2023