The Best Video Editor for Filmmakers on a Budget (my DaVinci Resolve workflow)

this episode is sponsored by squarespace whether you need a domain website or online store make your next move with squarespace i said a little while ago that i'd make more videos giving you tips about some of the filmmaking side of things and so today i thought i'd make a really practical little video just giving you a tip about the video editor i've been using for the last two years and why i made the switch when it comes to editing over my career i've been comfortable with both adobe premiere pro and final cut pro it just depended on the circumstance so every time i was working in-house for a company it seemed companies just buy everyone the adobe suite so i had to get used to premiere pro there and that's where i built up that skill set but at home i had an imac and so i bought final cut pro for my own stuff years ago in fact if you've been following this channel for a while the first three or four years of this channel was all put together on final cut pro however about two years ago that imac was really slowing down and it was time to upgrade and i just couldn't justify the expense for buying another apple machine when i knew that i could take the same amount of money that i could afford and build myself a monster pc with amazing specs but that obviously left me with a problem i could no longer use final cut pro because it only works on apple machines and so i had to take a look and was it time to fork out a lot of extra money every month with adobe to get premiere pro now i'm on the photographer's plan with adobe which means for about 10 pounds a month i have access to adobe bridge adobe camera raw lightroom both cc and classic and most importantly for me photoshop which means all those programs i get those five programs for 10 pounds a month but at the time i was looking at switching to adobe premiere pro if i wanted to add that one extra app to edit videos on my subscription would have gone from 10 pounds a month to 45 pounds a month which is 35 pounds extra just for premiere pro and i couldn't justify that cost but i knew that davinci resolve was a fully featured video editor with some of the best color grading tools in the industry and i really remember struggling with color grading on final cut pro 10 and best of all davinci resolve was a hundred percent free now it's important to say at this point that if you google it you'll probably see that about six or seven years ago before i had a youtube channel i actually did a little work with blackmagic they took 10 of us who were hybrid shooters which meant we shot both stills and video equally and they took us away for a weekend they gave us blackmagic pocket cinema cameras the first one the original one taught us how to use it and sort of encouraged us to maybe try and make the switch over to blackmagic however this was a long time ago i've never taken any money from them and even back then i had to turn around and say them listen as good as your pocket cinema cameras are and they are great cameras it just wasn't right for me and at the time i decided to stick with the canon cameras i was using and i told them that and i also said to them i'm afraid i'm not going to switch to davinci resolve which was in version 12 back then i think because it just wasn't quite there for me so even though they took us away and we did some work with them at the end of the day it just wasn't the right time to make that switch for me you have to say stuff like this in videos like this because the conspiracy theorist will be down in the comments below we did a bit of googling he did some work with them before and he's being paid to say this blackmagic don't know i'm making this video and they would honestly probably be very surprised to hear me saying this because the last time they heard from me i turned all their stuff down davinci resolve in particular i'm only sharing this stuff because it's genuinely the solution i found that works for my needs at the time when i built that pc we gone from davinci resolve 12 which i didn't feel was quite ready for me to davinci resolve 16 which was a far more slick operation and looking at the reviews i could see they'd done so much work to streamline the whole experience and strip it right down and so i thought with the fact that it was free i wasn't going to have to put any money down it was at least worth giving it a go at the time i remember i just filmed a video and i needed to have it edited by the weekend so there was a little bit of time pressure as well but i thought let me download this let me try it give myself the next couple of days to slowly edit through this video i have to do give myself that little extra buffer of a day maybe to hope that i can get to use this thing and get to know how it works and hopefully if i can get that video out by the weekend this might be a good solution for me and if not i'm going to have to fork out money and go with adobe but the experience of switching over was actually much easier than i thought it would be when you load up davinci resolve it even says to you are you more used to using adobe premiere pro or final cut pro 10 i selected final cut because it was what i was used to editing for these youtube videos and it automatically sets all your shortcuts up the same as you're used to on those other programs and so i found that i got through that edit for that video and it maybe only took me an hour extra not a day like i thought it might just an hour extra to get used to some of the extra things in that program and i put the video out on time and honestly i've never looked back so i thought in this video i give you an overview of what's now davinci resolve version 17 so you can see how easy it actually is to use because i think it will be incredibly helpful to those of you who are filmmakers on a budget or with limited means who need access to a full featured video editor so let's just open up davinci resolve 17 and i'll give you this basic overview of how i use it and it's important to say upfront that i'm a very simple user it's a very powerful program but i just use the tools that i need to get the videos done the way that i need them done which is you know i'm a very kind of lightweight user but hopefully it'll give you an idea this is your project pane here which shows you the different projects that you're working on uh this is the intro that i've just recorded for this video i'm working on now this is a video that's coming out in a couple of weeks and this is the last one that i did with josh edu so let's open this one up because you might have seen this video so you'll be able to sort of work out what i've done here and the important thing in davinci resolve is this bar along here this kind of walks you through creating your video from left to right media cut edit fusion color fairlight and deliver so you're just going to work left to right through these tabs so at the moment we have media selected and in media what i'm doing is i'm collecting all the elements that i need to build my video out so at the moment i've got master selected which just collects everything in one and a lot of people just drag all their clips into this one area and work from there and that's absolutely fine i like to organize things a little more than that so i create what are called bins underneath and bins are just separate folders where i can group different things so this is my interview folder where i've got the clips where i interview josh and the audio from that interview underneath is b-roll this is where i'm collecting all the clips i use just filming him out and about that i could cut over the interview make it more visually interesting this is the intro which i recorded for the video and the audio from that and here are photos that josh sent me to include to show his images at the end so i just like to organize things like that to create a new bin really simple just in this area here right click new bin and let's just create one called audio just for example six so if i select audio there's nothing in it yet here are my drives up at the top so if i go to my d drive and i go to current projects and i put everything in spicy because it's josh's name spicy meatball on instagram and then i'm going to drag in some audio clips here so go into my audio folder and you can see now i've just grouped things so now here are some audio items which i might want to use and having them just selected in these different bins helps me when it comes to editing now if we move from left to right one we get a cut i'm going to be honest i don't use this tab at all it's for sort of more detail editing i find that i just by zooming in and out i can do everything i need with edit so i go media and i skip straight over to edit now in my edit here this is where i start to build my timeline and those of you used editors before i don't need to explain what a timeline is if i just hold alt and scroll with my mouse wheel i can zoom in and out and i can drag along here to sort of access different parts and this is the edit that i've built out here so if i come to master you can see a little um red tick at the top corner of this this is my timeline i've called it final so this is the final build so you can see yeah i mean it's just been years and years of but more often than not yeah absolutely some b-roll some music underneath so all i'm doing in this tab is i'm building out my edits i'm using my interview clips and audio and then i'm adding b-roll in between different sections and music and my little uh outro section where i've recorded some some some stuff on the topic as well out into white background some photos at the end with some music so that's as simple as i keep this um let me just show you sort of from scratch how i do that so if i go right click into this area here i go timelines and let's go create new timeline and just do a test timeline here create so that's going to give me a blank timeline here now if i go to interview and let me drag on just a couple of clips of josh talking this is a question i get a lot actually because i record separate audio for um my cameras so the cameras the audio and the cameras doesn't sound that great the audio that i captured through the audio recorder on the lab mic which you'll see on his shirt here is always better quality so i need to sync that up right off the bat um so let me just go in here because this is a slightly longer section of audio than the actual clip so i'm just going to cut this here and clip that out so all i need to do is select all these clips together right click on it go up here to auto align clips and go auto align based on waveform i'm just going to let that run and it's going to line those clips up it's going to analyze the audio and line them up so let's just check that that's done that um here we go like shooting color and stuff and it wasn't an option and i eventually persuaded them to let me take color photographs so that sounds good to me uh it's all synced up together that's uh two different camera angles and i like to use two camera angles rather than just cropping in on a 4k or something because the change of camera angle let's see if i can just select the one the change on the camera angle and the change on the focal length i think adds a little bit of interest and quality so what i do then is i can mute these two tracks here and just use the good audio from the recorder and you can hear like if i if i mute this track here okay the audio is very soft at the moment let me just select those and go to inspector and i'm just going to boost up this volume for you so you can hear something for a couple of years i think i'm almost a bit like put off it by the whole you know rigorous art side of it a couple years after that i ended up starting a clothing business i was designing sweatshirts and backpacks you can hear a lot of echo and it's it just doesn't sound that great but if i mute those two and just have the audio from the actual audio recorder off the lab mic stuff and i realized i had to buy a camera to actually take the product shots and take pictures of models and stuff so i went out and bought a camera and the actual i actually found much better quality and i always think that like video editors need to pay attention to their audio it's half of the experience and just having that clean spoken word in your audio makes all the difference so let's make some quick cuts just for my shortcuts because i set this up to copy the shortcuts i had in final cut pro 10 a on my keyboard is my arrow but if i hit b it turns it to the blade tool so let's just clip a little piece out of here and if i go a again select these and delete those and go b here and let's just cut down here and let's a select that and delete if i click to the left here it just selects this and if i hit delete it's going to delete ripple so it's deleting any space here now let me just drag this to the left on the top clip and we'll go from this one angle enjoying taking the photos more than i did designing the actual clothes i was ended up carrying that around with me then we cut um i then took a trip to new york just to holla to that other camera angle so what i normally do is i look for a nice break in the actual speech pattern with the camera ended up carrying that around with me pause using spacebar and i'm going to drag this over here the camera ended up carrying that around with me um i then took a trip to new york just a holiday and kind of saw all this i don't use any fancy transitions uh when i edit i always have either straight cuts and it's only straight cuts in interviews like this but if i'm shooting with b-roll i'll often use maybe just a little fade to bring us out of the b-roll back into the into the actual interview and to do that to do just a straight fade it's super simple if you mouse over any clip you'll see you get these little icons on either side if i grab one of those and just pull it to the left you can see it creates a simple fade so no transitions for me it's either straight cuts in interviews or simple fades like coming back from b-roll and i keep things that simple so once i built out my whole timeline if we go back to master here you can see once i've built out that whole timeline that's what i'm then working on in terms of finalizing it through the last few stages i've got all my audio on separate tracks here i've got all my clips and you can see above here i've got different things like i've got text which i've dragged on and a lot of different things so if i go here to effects library this is where my titles are i can pull titles on top i can have generators with a solid color that i can change to white all those different elements are there waiting for me back to my media pool here and let's go one across now so if i go one tab to the right after i build my timeline i am infusion super honest i don't use fusion at all fusion is for special effects i never use special effects in my videos like i said everything's clean cuts so i just skip over this and i go straight to color and now let's go back to our timelines here let's go to that little timeline we created now as a test so we've only got two clips on here and if we go across to color here are our two clips now color grading is where davinci resolve really shines it's such a powerful piece of software but everyone's quite intimidated by it when they start it can do so much but i use it very simply and i'll show you how i think about it so here you've got what are called nodes and if you think about nodes especially for photographers like the layers in photoshop that's how i use them i just use them linear you can have things branching off and you can have nodes that affect other nodes but not other nodes i don't use it like that i use everything in sequence on one line so they act as layers in photoshop and what i do with this first node is i create my base color grade my primary color grade which is just to correct the flat footage so the footage i shoot in camera is shot on cine 4 on the sony so it has a slightly flatter look and the first thing i want to do is pull some contrast into my actual image and i can do that in a number of ways so you've got a little tab here which is your curves curves everyone who uses lightroom or photoshop especially photographers will be very familiar with curves so what i can do is i could just pull in some contrast using the curves like i normally would on any given image you could do it that way let me reset so if i right click on this node and go reset grade it's just going to flatten that back out video editors like to use color wheels they're very simple to use lift gamma gain just are your shadows your mid tones and your highlights and the little wheel underneath is what you want to use in terms of pulling in your actual exposure and offset here is just your global exposure so you can see if i dial this up and down that's my global exposure so i might want to pull that up a bit to start and then pull my shadow wheel down to so darken my shadows over to my highlights and boost those up a little bit and then maybe take this wheel here left and right and see where i want my mid tones so something like that that looks like a fairly good sort of contrast level for me maybe shadows down a little bit and then i've got my color boost here and my saturation let's push the saturation up a little bit slightly yellowy so i might want to dial that back a little bit so if i come over here to my color wheels again so i've got my shadows mid tones and my highlights and we've got on each color wheel green through yellow orange red magenta blue cyan back to green and i can pull colors in or out of my image by using these color wheels so because it's a bit yellowy i might just want to pull the opposite of yellow so pull into the blues a little bit just slightly on those highlights and maybe the mid tones as well just to take out some of that some of that yellow there i could do that on this global slider the offset and then that would sort of give a cast over the whole thing but it's it's better to sort of pull those in or out and this is where you can get very creative as well i mean you can see if i wanted to go wild i could just pull in loads of blues into my shadows which obviously looks horrendous if i double click it put it that puts that little dot back to the middle and cancels that but that sort of gives me a good starting point for that grade now i can add another node or another layer so if i right click in this area and i go add node and i go corrector over here that's going to add another corrector node i just need to attach it to this line so drag it up until that line glows let it go and now it's in sequence so this whatever correction i do here will now add to the correction i've made before it on this tab so let's see what else can we do we could go here to our qualifier this is a really powerful tool i'm not going to go through everything here i'm just giving you a quick brush over like the basic corrections you can use and and what i'm going to show you is plenty to get you started so with our corrector you can see if i mouse over the image i've got a little eyedropper tool so let's go to my uh reds here and i'm going to expand this out a little bit so what it's done is it selected the reds and the images and you should be able to see here just giving you a little outline of the area that you're affecting so now if i dial my saturation up 100 you can see what it's affecting in the actual image on those um on his some of his skin is being selected as well but also there's sort of that collar on his shirt as well and you can do different things like you can you can change uh to be brighter or darker and it's only those areas you've actually qualified that are being affected so you can imagine for example i wouldn't do this in this image but you can imagine if there's blue sky in an image you could select the blue sky and you could saturate that blue sky you could change the hue or you could dial it down to be darker there's lots of different things you can do with that so if i add another node corrector and i drag that onto the line as well if i come across to here this this fourth thing along called window and let's select the round window here if i click it it's going to create a window on my frame i do sometimes use this and i drag this this is the feathering of the area that's selected and drag this shape out a little bit and if i just put this center area here over the left side of his face where the light's hitting at the moment that window you can see i'm going to affect what's in the middle of this window and it's going to feather towards the outside where i'm not going to affect anything in the outside but what i want to do is let's say i want to darken the areas around so you're looking at the center here so i'm going to hit this little icon here on the right hand side of this window and it's going to invert that so that now the center isn't being affected but the outside is and now if i come back to my global exposure here i can dial this down and i can darken the outside of that area down and maybe i bring the highlights down as well so the brightest highlights the image and now around his face so you can see the first one here i just corrected the exposure contrast a little bit of saturation we just played around just to show you what that corrector did there with those qualifiers and then i've created a window here to draw your attention this is how simply i like to grade and then the big trick you need to know is obviously if you've got loads of clips along here you don't want to have to do this for every single clip so the simplest way to do it is if i click on the next clip that i want to color grade and you can select multiple by just holding ctrl and then if you've got one clip that you like the grade on and it's the same angle this isn't but i'll show you what to do about that you just go right click on the one next to it and you go apply grade and it's going to apply the same grade on top of that clip that you've just selected so now obviously that first one there that's your contrast it matches the first one that you did but maybe it's you want to correct that just a little bit more because it's shot slightly differently i want to bring the exposure up a touch let's leave that qualifier there and let's come across here to actually let's just reset this gray because we're only messing around on that and this window now is out of place so we want to drag that window over the left side of his face there and maybe change the shape slightly so now every time i've got this close-up shot i can select all those close-up angles and copy exactly that grade across to all of them and it saves you a ton of time once you build those looks you can just apply it to every clip that looks similar and then just go into each and tweak rather than build it from scratch so if we move one tab along to the right we've got a fairlight studio actually let's just go back to edit quickly and i want to select the final timeline with everything that i had on it let's go back to fairlight this is my audio studio where i can make sure that all my audio levels are correct let's just pull this along a little bit so we have our different tracks audio one two three and four and i've got the interview audio on the top there i have a pre-recorded bit of squarespace audio just at the start here on the two which is the ad read that was a slightly different audio level so i wanted it on a different track we've got some music here on track three and separate music on track four so i've split them out basically now when i played you're happy with but i can't see my levels jumping up and down for a long walk see where the music is i can see how much we're sort of peaking on different uh aspects of the audio and i can i can use this mixer here to dial audio up so maybe i want my uh spoken word absolutely matches better i want my music down maybe it's slightly too loud here i can dial that down and i can come across and start adding things like effects on these different channels so you can see here i've added a vocal effect so if i right click on a channel here with this little plus thing i can go channel i've got things like delay i can add reverb change pitch uh channel voice channel here is something i use a lot for sort of uh to to sweeten the dialogue of things i might sort of push up some of the bass and the spoken word and the treble i'm not going to teach you how to audio mix here there's obviously a lot you can do but just by looking at the different levels here as you sort of play through things you can make sure that everything is roughly equal and that it's all sounding good fair light itself is a really powerful audio editor and once i've got everything balanced in my audio the last thing is to come across here to deliver and this is where i'm actually going to prepare the file for export so let's go across here to youtube i could go down here to 4k and change all my resolutions i only film in hd for everything anyway so 1080p is fine change my file name let's go josh test and we're outputting to desktop that's fine and all my details here are good i could upload directly to youtube if i give it sign in details i don't bother with that i just kick it out to my desktop as a file upload manually and i go add to render queue down the bottom here now analyzes the timeline here and here it is at the bottom here job 4 and when i'm ready i can just hit render and it's going to start to work through all this all the clips everything that i've produced it's going to create that file put it onto the desktop for me where it's ready to upload online so i hope that's helped those of you out there who are aspiring filmmakers who need access to a full featured video editor but you're on a budget it's a great option it certainly worked well for me and one of the most powerful things about davinci resolve are its color grading tools i did a video probably about two three years ago now where i showed you how i use final cut pro 10 at the time to do my color grading and if you want i will do an updated video of that showing you how i do the same sort of color grading but using the more finesse tools i certainly find of davinci resolve so if you're interested in that comment below i'll take a scan if there's enough interest i'll try and put that out for you there are a few caveats before you dive into davinci resolve that you might want to think about and the first one is that i don't use any special effects in my videos so if you do you might find that you really need adobe after effects or apple motion for some reason because they're more powerful i can't comment on whether fusion keeps up with them in the little bit of research i've done it seems to be pretty powerful itself but you're going to need to do digging for yourself to find out if fusion is going to do everything on the special effects side that you need it to there are also a handful of features that aren't available in the free version you would have to get davinci resolve 17. things like the free version is limited to 4k 60 frames a second you can't have higher frame rate or more resolution than that you don't get access to the ai neural filters you don't get object removal or noise reduction and you can't do remote grades where you can work in a team and someone can work on the edit but someone else in another location can be working on the grade through multiple platforms so just keep in mind i mean those are not things i need in my use case but you might and so if you need those things you will have to pay for the studio version it's also important to say that if you use the free version of davinci resolve blackmagic will give you no customer service they won't help you out and i found this out the hard way in that first month where i was using davinci resolve i had a little timeline bug that kept appearing i could work around it and still get videos out on time but it was just annoying so i contacted their customer service and said hey this is the issue that i'm having and they asked me you know what was my serial number and i said look i'm just on the free version and they turn around and say listen we don't support people using the free version only the paid version so that is something to think about and i believe that the studio version of davinci resolve 17 is around 300 personally i've been able to get along fine with the free version but it is something to consider i know a lot of you out there are just starting out and you don't have a ton of cash to throw around on fancy software this is really a fantastic option and after using it for two years myself i can say that i'm 100 happy with it and for my use case it's more than enough software for me to do everything that i need to do in fact all the videos for the last two years that you've seen on this channel have all been cut on davinci resolve so if you are thinking about getting out there you want to start making things but all that software intimidates you i hope you've seen today that it is actually quite intuitive to use and you can definitely at least give it a go with no risk because it's 100 free thanks again to squarespace for sponsoring this video if you need a new website or a domain they're a fantastic option i've used them myself for almost a decade now long before they were a sponsor on this channel over the last year i've been getting into their email campaigns which i found really easy to use and some of you are already signed up to that newsletter you can go to my contact page and just put your email address in the block there and you then get an email to confirm that you actually want to subscribe to that newsletter and then when i come to put those emails together it's really easy nice and clean and minimally laid out just like my website and i can just do it by clicking and dragging in blocks of texts or buttons that you can click on or images looks really clean and simply laid out and when i'm ready to go i can just hit send and it sends out to that whole mailing list and then i even get graphs in the back end to say how many were sent out how many people received those emails and how many were opened so i can see how people are actually getting those emails on the other end start your free trial today at squarespace.com and go to squarespace.com forward slash sean tucker to get 10 of your first purchase [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Sean Tucker

Views: 34,203

Keywords: davinci resolve, davinci resolve 17, video editing, filmmaking, colour grading, color grading, media bins, timeline, audio syncing, audio mixing, file exports, video files for youtube, youtube, video editor, nle

Id: fBwkoWHu7pE

Length: 28min 40sec (1720 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 08 2021