Why I NEVER Edit in 4k - My Davinci Resolve Workflow

i film most of my videos in 4k are you going to deliver most of my videos in 4k but i almost never edit my videos at that full 4k resolution i always lower it to something a little bit more manageable and it's not because of lack of hardware i've got an absolute beast of a pc which eats 4k for breakfast i've also got one of the new macbook m1 pros which is perfectly capable of editing in 4k as well so why don't i well it's really simple efficiency 4k is just that much harder to handle than a lower resolution something like 1080p and even if you're on an absolute beast of a rig a pc or a laptop there are still benefits to actually drop in that resolution to something a little bit more manageable so what exactly is resolution well video is just a bunch of still images stacked together to form a moving image or video how many still images you have per second is known as your frame rate 24 25 30 60 etc the resolution simply refers to the size of those still images or video [Music] simple right oh and why are we in the kitchen no other reason than i fancied a coffee come on [Music] this is an a5 piece of paper size as a sort of birthday card this represents 1080p this is an a3 piece of paper like a sort of poster size this represents 4k conveniently an a3 piece of paper is four times the size of an a5 piece of paper so this is actually a pretty accurate representation of 4k versus 1080p now in a really simplified version what your machine is having to do is to color these in for every frame within a second so if you're running at 25 frames per second like i do you're either coloring in this 25 times per second or this 25 times per second and naturally as you've guessed it's realistically gonna take about four times as long to color in the bigger a3 piece of paper than it is to color in the much smaller a5 piece of paper take this guy for example he's a beast is full of beans and he's raring to go he represents your high end machine your macbook pro or your big beastly pc he can happily colour in 25 of those a5 pieces of paper every second with no issues whatsoever doesn't even break a sweat smashes them out time after time just taking an easy job done you replace those a5 pieces of paper with a three pieces of paper i.e 4k and he can still do it it's breaking more of a sweat working a little bit harder but he can still do it time and time again no issues whatsoever that's when you get smooth playback in davinci resolve that's when you get full 25 frames per second whether you're on 1080p or 4k there's no dropped frames your machine is able to do 25 frames every single time no problem whatsoever so what does it look like on a slightly older slower device now let's take this guy he's a little bit older a little bit slower a little bit more tired he represents a slightly older workstation now he can just about manage those 25 a5 or 1080p pieces of paper every second he's sweating he's grinding but he can manage it he just finishes the 25 on the dock before the next 25 turns up so what happens when you swap out those a5 1080p pieces of paper for a three 4k pieces of paper or simply you can't do them all within that one second time frame if he could manage 25 before but these are four times bigger realistically he's only going to be able to manage six of them so 25 arrive he colors in six he has to bend the rest because you can't do them another 25 arrived colors in six you have to bend the rest and then on you go that's when you get dropped frames within davinci resolve so your device simply can't generate the required number of frames within the time frame so it has to drop frames giving you choppy playback and just generally making your editing experience really really miserable if you're on a higher end device yes you are managing to do those 4k 25 frames per second so you get smooth playback but your device is just working harder if you're on a pc that means that everything's running hotter your fans are kicking in more which is making your pc noisier and you'll potentially be paying higher electricity bills if you're on a laptop that means you'll get shorter battery life created two duplicate timelines one is a 1080p timeline and the other one is a 4k timeline i then let each of the timelines play through the full 30 minutes in real time and then measured the battery life after the 30 minutes the 4k started at 51 ended up at 40 battery life the 1080p timeline started at 51 and ended up at 43 so 3 that doesn't seem like a big deal but that's over just 10 of the entire battery life so if we multiply that to cover the entire length of a single charge on battery we get roughly 270 minutes which is four and a half hours of editing time when using the 4k timeline whereas using the 1080p timeline we get roughly 375 minutes which equates to a little over six and a bit hours and davinci resolve makes it so easy there are a bunch of different ways to actually lower your timeline resolution to something like 1080p without actually affecting the end result so you can still export your project in 4k it'll look just as good but you've made the whole editing process that much smoother the first one you can create proxies proxies are these small copies of your original source material that are easier for your device to handle and generally run at a lower resolution now i personally don't use proxies that often but if you want to know more about them here's a really great video by the creative video tips channel i've linked it down in the description below so you can check that out if you want to know more about proxies now why don't i use proxies because they take time to create and i don't want to add anything into my workflow that actually adds additional time unless i absolutely have to and as of yet i don't have that need the second option is to use the timeline proxy mode which essentially just drops the resolution of your timeline to whether half your original timeline resolution settings or a quarter of those original timeline settings now this is the one that i recommend you try because it's super quick super easy to toggle on and off and can have some really great results to do it open davinci resolve make sure your timeline is set to a normal 4k resolution then you just go to playback timeline proxy modes and you can switch between off half or quarter and then there's the third option where you manually set your timeline resolution to be 1080p even though you plan to deliver in 4k you just create a new timeline set it as 1080p and then bump it up to 4k before you actually render the project out now in theory this is probably the worst solution it's certainly not as easy to toggle on as the timeline proxy mode but that's the one i personally favor and i'll explain why towards the end of this video it's a really awesome little workflow tip so make sure you stick around for that but what do you actually lose out on well you lose a little bit of clarity within your preview window but other than that you won't really lose that much at all if you're just cutting and editing putting your timeline together does that little bit of clarity in your preview window matter anyway to me it certainly doesn't not when you compare it to the benefits but here's a good example take this image here view full screen this is a 4k image now let's switch it over to a 1080p image now depending on what device you're viewing this video on you can probably see a bit of a difference between those two images but unless you're editing in davinci resolve with a second monitor setup as a full screen sort of clean feed preview you're not going to be editing in full screen right instead you'll be editing with the preview window which is realistically probably only taking up about a quarter of your monitor at most so let's do that same test again but this time look up here this is the 4k one whereas this one is the 1080p one and even if you're on a 4k monitor i'd hazard a guess it's pretty hard to tell the difference between the two but are there times when viewing your preview window in full 4k makes sense yes of course there are here are a few examples this isn't a 100 list there's just a few examples to give you an idea where that might be necessary the first one something simple like transforming let's say you're trying to zoom in or punch into an image you need to see how far you can go in before your image starts to degrade viewing that in its full resolution makes sense so you can see all the detail and you can see if you can get away with that level of zooming color grading not necessarily for the color grading itself but for things like sharpening noise reduction face refinement you're going to want as much quality as much sharpness as possible so you can see that you're not over sharpening things you're not messing with people's skin too much or you're not trying to get rid of noise which actually isn't there another example is something like titles you can get away with smaller titles in a 4k image than you can on a 1080p image because they don't start to get as fuzzy so you may want to see the 4k image just to make sure that your text is still legible but that's when the timeline proxy mode is so so useful you can really quickly just turn it to off have a look at your image make sure it looks good turn it back to half or quarter and then carry on with your editing knowing that you're not pushing your machine unnecessarily to the max so what's this magic workflow tip i mentioned at the beginning of this video i use timeline templates now i've talked about timeline templates in the past because they're incredibly awesome i've made a video which i've linked up here or down in the description you go check that out i'm going to show you how they work really quickly right now on my desktop i've got this it just says youtube and this is a timeline template that i've created i'm just going to double click this and davinci resolve is going to open up on its own like so we're going to jump into the edit tab now i didn't even have to select anything within the project manager davinci resolve opens it automatically creates a new project and then it opens up that timeline ready to go so as you can see on this timeline i've got a couple of tracks i've got a b-roll i've got an adjustment track and i've got my a-roll i've then got a couple of audio tracks voice-over music i've got an adjustment clip which has already got my standard colour grade applied so that i can just drop some footage on here and start working and as you've probably guessed if i right click on this tutorial go to timelines timeline settings you can see this is set to 1920 by 1080 25 frames per second so all i need to do then is import some media and start editing so i've got that timeline template on my desktop pc and on my laptop whenever i want to start a project i just double click it opens up resolve the timeline's there i just import media i start working and i know straight away it's already set to 1080p so i don't need to worry about changing any settings i just edit and i'm good to go before i actually render this project out the only thing i need to do go to the tutorial within the media pool so this timeline here right click timelines timeline settings timeline resolution i'm going to bump that up to my ultra hd my 4k right here click on ok now my timeline is a full 4k timeline resolution so when i go to deliver it's already got resolution 4k and it's good to go as long as i stick to the same aspect ratio nothing's going to shift when i bump it up from 1080p to 4k all my titles will be in the same place all my transitions will be fine my effects everything will just fit into place look exactly the same but the resolution will be 4k rather than 1080p so then i can just export it and be good to go so how do you actually create them well it's incredibly easy this is a brand new project in davinci resolve what i'm going to do in my media pool here i'm going to right click timelines create a new timeline give this a name so i'm going to call this one just demo i can give myself a few additional video tracks audio tracks change the audio track type if i want to i'm going to untick this use project settings we're going to go to format i'm going to make sure my timeline resolution is set to wherever i want it to be so in my instance i want this to be 1080p and i want my timeline to be 25 frames per second so i'll just change the timeline and the frame rate to match whatever i want it to be when i first open this timeline template then i just amend any of the things that i want to amend on this timeline so i could change the name of this video track to b-roll i could change this one to be adjustments i could add any titles so let's just grab a title we'll put this on the timeline i could change this to be mr alex tech we could put things on the timeline we could apply audio effects we could do whatever we want for my color grade all i did was i added an adjustment clip onto my timeline went into the color page added let's just drop a lot on there for a quick example then we go back to edit and then that adjustment clip already has the lut on there i could then either put all my footage underneath or when i come into it i simply copy the color grade from the adjustment clip onto my footage and i'm good to go so mess around with this timeline getting it exactly as you want it to be the starting point whenever you open up this project and you want to start editing once you've done that you just need to export it as a timeline template within the media pool i've got my demo timeline here we're going to right click timelines export and then we just need to select this top one the aaf xml edl and then the drt which stands for davinci resolve timeline give that a click we've got file name demo.drt i'm going to put this one on my desktop just for the example click on save and now that's it if i close davinci resolve i've now got my demo.drt i can double click davinci resolve is going to open straight up we'll jump onto the edit tab i've got all my tracks ready to go i've got my mr alex tech title here and i've got my adjustment clip with my light on it ready to go so that's why i use that method but if you don't want to do that just start using the timeline proxy mode to get some instant wins as well thanks for watching let me know what you think let me know if you're going to try editing at lower resolutions in the future thanks for watching take it easy i'll catch you next time

Channel: MrAlexTech

Views: 20,862

Keywords: MrAlexTech, Mr Alex Tech, davinci resolve, davinci resolve tutorial, davinci resolve 17, 4k, 1080p, ultra hd, editing in 4k, editing in 4k vs 1080p, editing 4k in davinci resolve, editing 4k video, editing 4k status, 1080p video, 1080p vs 4k, workflow, davinci resolve 4k render settings, davinci resolve 4k editing, davinci resolve 4k, davinci resolve 4k to 1080p

Id: 4H4hQ1V8E7k

Length: 14min 26sec (866 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 19 2021