Project Settings & Preferences for DaVinci Resolve

foreign [Music] so your files are organized you're ready to go the first thing we need to do now is open up DaVinci Resolve and we need to change some settings on your project and also some resolve preferences so we're going to start with the project settings I'll see you there assuming you have your film Project open and resolved let's check out the project settings first down on the lower right you'll see a little gear icon if you click on that it brings up your project settings you can also go to file project settings or hit shift 9. we have our navigation over here on the left so the first thing under master settings is timeline resolution you can see mine right now is 4096 by 1716 dcisco 2.39 what a mouthful that's because I'm shooting 4K with this project and I was using an anamorphic lens if you're shooting just normal 4K 4K UHD and that would be you know this 3840 by 2160 and then if you're shooting 4K DCI with a normal lens and when I say normal one meaning it's not anamorphic 4K DCI would be 4096 by 2160. now here's the big thing to know about this you're not pouring cement for example I could set my timeline resolution on my project to 1920 by 1080 and then I could cut Reckoning the entire movie at this timeline resolution in fact that might text my computer a little less and will by the way cover other ways to not tax your computer in post-production too but I can leave it at this and then change it later and resolve will just add accurately map everything so no big deal my computer is fine with cutting the 4K footage so I added it that way I like to see it at that resolution the next thing you want to set is timeline frame rate this is something you cannot change later at least not easily that I know of but this needs to be set correctly at the beginning Moving On Down video monitoring is something we don't have to deal with right now this is for using black magic design hardware for monitoring your footage that's something we're not covering in this lesson at all so just leave all this as is optimize media and render cache in post-production 2 we're going to take a deep dive into what this stuff is but for right now here's what you need to pay attention to render cache format you want this to be probably prores 422lt again we'll go into details on this later but if you leave this at the default setting it's going to fill up your hard drive with a bunch of cache files and you'll be like wait what's going on so set to this for now if you're on Windows you probably want to use one of the DNS sodex so like lb or maybe SQ lb is less quality and so it takes up less space than SQ and again don't worry we're going to cover this in detail just want to mention that make sure you set your render cache to either 422 LT or one of these low DNX HR codecs and make sure there's a check for enable background caching every five seconds and now down to working folders as I said above we're going to talk about optimization in post-production 2. but these three locations deal with where resolve is storing files that are generated temporarily for your project and you don't want these going to your main computer hard drive for example you can see mine is set to my external drive in a resolve cache folder that I created so what I would do if I were you is go to finder or Windows Explorer go to your external drive where your film is and then create a resolve cache folder and you can create that anywhere you want and when we cover this stuff in detail you'll probably end up changing the location of the folder but just for now create it on your external drive and then come back here and click browse for each of these go to that external drive and highlight the folder resolve will automatically create these final subfolders you don't have to create those so only create the resolve cache folder on your external drive cool the next thing we need to look at is color management that's over here on the left some of you already changed this during production to see your raw footage correctly but the default is going to be DaVinci yrgb we're covering all of this color stuff in detail in that post-production course and you're going to love it I'm color grading is so amazing but for now you just want to set it to be color managed and this is assuming you shot in Blackmagic raw or some other type of raw format if you didn't do that I would probably just leave it at DaVinci wire GB for now but assuming you shot raw set it to color managed uncheck automatic color management and for your color processing mode set that to custom your input color space is not important if you shot in Blackmagic raw if you did not shoot in Blackmagic raw you need to choose the raw format from this list that you shot in and for example I could choose Blackmagic design film Gen 5 which is what my pocket Cinema cameras are shooting in but the reason I don't have to set this here is because the raw files take priority when DaVinci Resolve sees the metadata with your raw files then it knows exactly what your input color space is again we're going to cover this in more detail in the color grading course but if you have any questions about this just post in the community timeline color space needs to be DaVinci WG intermediate the working Loom luminance can be I think it defaults to HDR 1000 that's fine output color space needs to be Rec 709 gamma 2.4 unless you have a monitor that supports a different color space and you understand that of course you can you know this can be different but for right now just set it to rec 709 gamma 2.4 and that's all we need to look at for color management right now now on the left let's click on camera raw and set your raw profile to what you shot in so I'm going to choose Blackmagic raw decode quality I want that at full resolution and then decode using camera metadata and now with that said this is all we have to do in Project settings right now don't click save yet go up here on the top right to the three dot menu and choose save current settings as preset not default preset but save current settings as preset all of these settings are project dependent so whenever you create a new project and resolve you're gonna have to go through and set all this stuff again so I recommend naming give it whatever name you want like I have one called Theater 11 pictures which is my production company now I know I can just choose that whenever I working on a film and not have to redo everything once you've named it click OK and then you can click save and if it prompts you with anything like this just click update now if I click the gear icon again I could go in here go to my new preset and choose load preset okay cool the next thing we need to look at is the resolve preferences and the preferences are project independent so the things we set here will apply to every project that you do so let's go to DaVinci Resolve on the top left preferences or in a Mac you can hit command comma so the preferences screen is split up into two areas system and user let's start with system and click on memory and GPU on the top left you want these sliders to be all the way to the right and it should already be there but if it's not drag them over and then if you're on a silicon Mac which is one of the newer M chips you want to put a check here use apple neural engine when possible now click on media storage and uncheck direct i o next to your external drives if you don't see your external drive you can add it just click add ahead click on it here and click open you can also just add the actual folder where you keep your media files whichever you want to do neither is right or wrong and then once that's in here uncheck that and if you're wondering what that's about this is meant to speed things up by having your computer look at RAM memory instead of going to the disk for certain things but from what I've read it's actually not doing that and it at times it can slow your computer down so if that changes I'll post in the community but right now current info is go ahead and uncheck these now let's drop down to General and uncheck use Mac display color profiles for viewers we might put a check back in this later when we're doing the color management but for now let's go ahead and uncheck that all right cool now let's jump over to user and click on playback settings put a check mark and hide UI overlays and minimize interface updates during playback and now go to Project save and load you want this unchecked it should be that at default so now let's go down to save settings here is where you configure resolves automatic project save settings this is important I'm going to show you how to do manual project saves in a minute but for now you want all three of these checked and then here's what's going on this first one is where you get to tell resolve hey back up my project on you on its own like automatically every 20 minutes and then back it up again every two hours and then back it up once a day you can set this to whatever you want but to just know that when it creates a new daily backup it's not adding it you can't go back eight days and get the old eight day backup it's overwriting the daily backup the hourly backups are overwriting the old ones Etc and this is where your project backups are kept so there's no right or wrong here you can set this to whatever you want and then I'm going to show you how to do manual project backups to a different location whenever you want and in my opinion this is very valuable and you need this but the manual project backups are sometimes even more important we'll talk about that in a second in regarding the backup location this is up to you I typically leave this on my computer it's not taking up a ton of space and then I will do my manual backups to an external drive cool so that's all we're going to look at in preferences right now again just like project settings we can click the three dot menu in the top right and save our user preferences as a preset so I recommend you do that then click OK save your settings and those settings will take effect when you restart resolve so let's do that really fast now one other thing before I show you how to do manual project backups under playback go to render cache and set it to Smart this is part of what we're covering in post-production 2 but for now that'll do what you need it to do now to back up your project manually it's very simple just go to file export project if you're on a Mac hit command e and so what I do is I have a project backups folder on my external drive so you can click new folder and create that and then in the project backups folder I have folders for various films on this particular hard drive there's not much on here because this is just used for training you can click new folder create that and then within there I create another new folder with the date of this particular project backup and then click create and now if I click save it's going to put it in there if I go to finder there's my project backup so to me these are the important backups not that the auto backups can't save you but if I do a bunch of changes on my movie I'm editing my film and I spend a few hours or maybe even 30 minutes whatever but stuff that you would really be troubled at losing then you need to create a manual project backup and you can't have too many backups trust me so my recommendation is frequently export your project so that you have that peace of mind their thing you can do is do manual saves of your project so file save project or just command s on a Mac it's probably alt s or control s or something on Windows command s is not the same as creating an entire project backup a standalone backup but it's also something to do just as a safety now so you want to access one of these backups how would you do that just hit shift one to bring up your available projects control click or right click on Windows and choose other project backups and here you can load one of your other projects so if I just clicked on one of these quick load it's going to want me to name it because I already have a project called the gold training here so I could just say now if I close this there it is so there's that full project restored I don't need it so I'm just going to highlight it and hit delete so control clicking and going to other project backups these are automated backups or command s backups and that's how you'd access those to access one of the manual exports you did right click import project and then go to my external drive project backups and then I could click the DRP file right there and click open and again it's going to ask for a unique name so it's not conflicting with the project that I already have I'm just going to cancel but you get it so that's it for General project settings user preferences and project backup Hey listen if you like this training you should really check out my film School write and direct it's an online film School designed for one thing to help aspiring directors realize their dreams faster than normal education routes what do I mean by that well I did the traditional thing I went to film school in Los Angeles and it was great it was fun I learned a lot but it cost a lot of money and here's the thing when you graduate from Film School pick your school it doesn't matter that is not going to land you a job in Hollywood at least not a job as a director okay Hollywood doesn't care about where you went to school what they do care about is what movies you have actually directed and were they any good okay so what do you do if you spend a lot of money on school and you're kind of tabbed out and then you realize that the only way forward is to begin directing movies and it's on your dime well that's a kind of a scary place to be that's why you'll see a lot of people in La working at restaurants and stuff because they're trying to make ends meet they're trying to pursue their dreams and it's tough writing direct helps you sidestep some of this all right I teach you not only did I go to film school but I've been working in independent film for years since then and I've worked on Studio films and I teach you how to do a movie from development through post-production we cover everything in granular detail so that you are equipped to pursue your dreams faster than I was able to than so many other aspiring filmmakers so check it out rightdirect.com I really hope to see you there and if not there I'll see you here on the channel very soon [Music] thank you [Music] foreign

Channel: Write & Direct

Views: 7,103

Keywords: Project Settings in DaVinci Resolve, Best project settings for DaVinci Resolve, Film School

Id: avA15n4aQW0

Length: 14min 36sec (876 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 30 2023