Hello. My name is Paul David Murray. I am a Final Cut Pro trainer, editor and user group
leader based in Berlin, Germany. This is the first of two webinars. And in these webinars,
I am going to be looking at DaVinci Resolve and in particular its editing capabilities.
I'm on a Mac. I have downloaded DaVinci Resolve 11 Lite. This also works on Windows. So you can
get a version for Windows if you want. And I'm firing up the program. And we're going to look
at the first window here, which is a login window. This is a multiple user environment. So if we were,
if there were several people using this computer, the people, this different people could log in
as different people, they could set up accounts. The idea being that they would not mess up each
other's preferences. If you want to set up an account, you would do this down here, you would
press the create a new user button, enter your username, your password and verify and you're
ready to go to set up a new user. I've already set up myself as a user. So I'm just going to enter
my password here. And this takes me to the project manager. The project manager is where we manage
our projects. And inside the project manager, we have not only projects, but we also have folders.
And we put the projects inside folders.
Just working from left to right, we've got a little house here, the house goes to the root,
which basically takes us to the top of the pile of folders and projects. So the moment I'm at the
very top of the pile inside the project manager, I have the possibility to switch from the thumbnail
view to the list view. These are these two little symbols here. And I can search for a specific
project or folder by entering information here. So I could search for edits from scratch or
round trips or whatever I want to search for here. In the list view is pretty apparent what is a
folder and what is a project. So that's obviously a folder here as are these here. And if I go in here,
I have my projects. If I go to the thumbnail view, and I would go I press the home button again.
The clue here is if I'm in the thumbnail view and if I have a it looks like a pile of photographs
thrown on top of each other. That means I'm actually looking here at a folder. That's the clue.
So if I go in here into this folder, then I have projects. I just have one straight line.
That's telling me that I'm looking at a project and not a folder like the border of the photo here,
the thumbnail. Down here at the bottom left hand corner. This is where I deal with the user situation
and adding projects and folders. I can see that I'm logged in as myself. And if I wanted to switch
users, I would do this here. I would press on this little like a little planet symbol. And I could
switch users here. I don't need that. I'm going to close it. I'm just using this on my own.
So I'm quite happy being myself. I have a plus button here to add a new project. And I have
another plus button here on top of a folder, which adds a new folder. In this case, I'm going to now
add a create a new project. So I'm in my project manager in my edits from scratch folder. And
I'm going to create a project. And I'm going to call the project edits from scratch.
I have a little preview here of the settings for this project. And I'm going to do a double click
and open up my fresh project. The first thing I want to point out here is the little house down
in the bottom left hand corner. And if we look here closely, we see project manager.
That's basically what we just looked at. So the first point here is
is once we're inside resolve, and if we discover we're in the wrong project, it's not a big deal.
We don't have to shut the whole thing down. We go to this little house button, and we get back to
our project manager, and we can get into another project. So if we can always, we can change our
mind at any point. And again, inside the project manager, we also have a house to get back to the
top of the pile. I have to touch briefly on preferences, a very unpleasant topic. Preferences
are very complex for the simple reason that the program is very complex. And we do not find all
of the preferences in the same place. Seeing as how I just dealt with the house, let's just move
over here to the right hand side and look at the project settings first. It's a little button here.
A little like a cog, basically. You need to check the manual. You need to read the manual.
You need to know what you're doing here. One little mistake. If you have your different
frame rate set up, you could really get into trouble. So basically, make sure that you know
what you're doing, have everything set up so that it makes sense. And if you make a change,
remember to press apply down here with the apply button. One thing I will point out is the auto
save section. Make sure that your auto save is switched on. You want to back up your projects.
You want to crank this up and have as many backups as possible. I've got to a maximum of 16 backups.
And then you can set the time interval. How often you want this to happen.
And again, press apply. And then cancel to close the window.
So that was the project settings. We got to it from the little cog down here.
But we can also get to it here under the file section project settings. And there,
by the way, is the project manager. Again, we saw the project manager down here.
We want to look very briefly at the preferences. And preferences is the section where we
deal with stuff like language, the language that we're using on our system.
The media storage, this basically means any files that we're rendering or capturing,
they will go to this place. We want a big fast external drive. If we have interfaces,
I have a 4k ultra studio, but I don't have it connected the moment. If it was connected,
it would be showing up here in the list. Control panels for color correction and advanced,
we're not even going to go there. If you make changes, remember to press save down here,
bottom right hand corner, I'm going to press cancel in this case.
That's just really flying over the preference thing. Let's just before we now actually get
started, look at one more thing. And we need to be aware of the fact that the program is
divided up into four sections. We have a media section, we have an edit section, a color section
and a deliver section. And surprise surprise, the media section is where we manage our media,
edit is where we edit it, color is where we color corrected, we're not going to really look at the
color correction in DaVinci Resolve, because there are plenty of other people doing amazing
tutorials about this kind of stuff. We're going to basically jump over that completely. And then
we're going to get to the deliver section at the very end. I am in the media tab of resolve.
The media tab is divided into two sections to main sections, we have a section called the library,
and we have a section called the media pool. The library gives us access to all of the drives
connected to our system. So I can go to a particular drive and borrow down into a folder
and look for specific material. This little message here is telling me that my in out device
is not connected at the moment. I'm getting this because I have a device connected sometimes,
sometimes I don't have it connected. If you don't have a device connected, you're not going to see
this. I have different ways of viewing the material. We see this recurring throughout
the program. I have the thumbnail view and I have the list view and I can search for stuff here
in the search window. If you don't see this, this is a metadata window here in the bottom
right hand corner. If you don't see it, don't worry, you can get to it by pressing this little,
this is like a little label icon and then you see the metadata window. The metadata window
basically gives you some technical information about the clips in question, the clips that you
are looking to preview and potentially import into your project. I had actually three different types
of material. Quite frankly, it was a mess. This material came, this here came from a Blackberry.
I had some weird frame rates. I had some very strange stuff going on. Resolve was able to
import all of this stuff. Resolve will basically take pretty much anything you throw at it.
You might run into problems playing about this stuff. My computer was not happy playing back
70, 70 frames per second, which doesn't really surprise me regardless of the program in question.
So I went to the trouble of encoding my clips in advance. I made them all into
Apple ProRes 422 HQ. This just made it simpler for me to work with the material. It just makes
for me at least a more smooth experience and it gave me a level playing field with all of my
material being the same format. I can get more information about my clip here if I press on
the music icon and I can just get an audio preview here on the right hand side. If I just want to
just illustrate a point here, I can go to reveal and finder and I see exactly the same path that
I'm seeing here inside Resolve. Inside Resolve, I see I'm on my 4TB drive in my online folder.
Here on the finder level, I'm obviously on a Mac. I see the 4TB drive and I see the folder and the
folder and the clip in question. I'm going to get rid of these windows here at the moment. I don't
really need them. I've done my homework. I know that everything is okay. I can preview my clip here
in there. It's kind of like a viewer. I have here also some very basic information, my in and my
out point, which basically means I know how long the clip is. I have a little scrubber down here.
I can drag through the clip. I can press the play button. I can jkl. I can do all the usual
stuff that you would expect in a non-linear editor. At this point, I really want to start
to move down here into the media pool. What I want to do is I want to get the clips from the
library from the hard drive into DaVinci Resolve. Actually, I have the clips in Resolve and I'm
able to work with them and edit with them. I'll be editing them here in the edit tab very, very
shortly. I have different ways of getting the clips into the media pool. I can just do a double
click and it will end up, the first clip will end up here in the media pool. Again, I have this
thumbnail list option here, the search option. We see this all over the place inside Resolve.
I can also simply drag a clip into the media pool or I could indeed drag it here
into the media pool on the left hand side into the folder. In this case, it is a master folder.
There's always a master folder here automatically. I can select several clips. I can also do a
right mouse click and I can take this option here, add into media pool. Same kind of thing.
Four ways of getting to the same result. Down here in the bottom left hand corner,
I have a little plus button so I could make a folder. In this case, for example, I call this graphics.
And if I go back to the master folder, I could, for example, take my two graphics clips here
and I can drag them into my graphics folder here. So it's just basically a way of organizing and
sorting my clips. Once I've actually imported them into Resolve, I can organize and sort them
here in folders ready for the edit, which we'll be looking at in the next section.
This looks familiar. It's a thing called the media pool. This is where we have all of the
media that we went to the trouble of ingesting in the first section in the media tab. We are now
in the edit tab. We've got some other stuff in here. We've got here on the left hand side,
we have the folders. We had made the graphics folder. We have a master folder. If you don't see
these folders on the left hand side, you're probably not seeing them because you didn't
click on this little button down here. It's a little button that shows you the folder structure.
We have the usual kind of stuff here, different ways of viewing things,
thumbnails, list view. Let's just click on those there. And of course, we have timelines. As of
now, we've got no timeline, but we're going to change that very, very shortly. Here on the
left hand side, we have, it's called a two up editor. Basically, it means we've got two screens
where we can look at material. As of now, we have nothing, but that's going to change very shortly.
Here on the left hand side is where we look at the material we want to edit into our timeline.
And the right hand side is where we look at the material in our timeline.
Our timeline here, as of now, is absolutely empty. We don't even see any tracks here on
the left hand side. We don't actually really have a timeline. Technically, we just have a box
where we could put the timeline into. That's pretty much it. I suppose I could mention that
these two windows have a lot in common, the one on the left and the one on the right, the viewer
for our material and the viewer for our timeline. Usual kind of stuff. We've got timecode, we've
got duration, we've got the play, JKL, all this kind of stuff. Pretty, pretty standard two up editor.
Moving to the browser. So we've got the media pool. We've seen that we've got the timelines
window here. As of now, we don't have a timeline. So let's change that.
I do a mouse, a light, a right mouse click, and I say create a new timeline. And we give it a name.
And we've created a new timeline. And we see that here on the left hand side.
If we've been paying attention, we see up here also, we have our edit up on the top right hand
side of the timeline viewer. And here down the left hand side, we see we've got some tracks.
We have a video track and we have an audio track. Let's switch to the media pool. And we have our
clips inside here in the media pool. And let's just select the first clip. And in this case,
it's going to be the review of the film. This is the film that we're going to be looking at.
And this will be our review of the film. So usual kind of thing, you could double click to get that
into the into the viewer. There are different ways of getting it in there. You could double click it.
You could drag it in there. You could actually just press enter, which also makes a lot of sense.
All right, so we've got our first clip in the viewer. And now we want to have a look at it. So,
we're going to just do some very basic navigation here in the viewer. Let's just start at the beginning.
Let's press the home button on the numeric keyboard, assuming you have an enumeric keyboard
connected to your computer, you will have a home button. If you don't have a numeric keyboard,
there's other ways of doing it with function buttons on a laptop. So home button, I press the home
button that would take me to the very beginning of the clip. I see here these symbols, these three
rectangular boxes, these are telling me that I'm at the beginning of the clip. Underneath the home
button, there is also a end button. I press the end button. And I see these three little boxes here
on the right hand side that tells me I'm at the end of the clip. So I'm going to go back to the
home, back to the beginning again. And I actually have an in and out here. Let's just get rid of the
in and out. Back to the beginning, home. So this is the little playhead thing. It's in the viewer
and I can drag this to move through my clip. Then I also have the usual stuff like I can
press JKL. L is to press it once. If I press it once, it just plays a normal speed. Twice is two times.
Four times, eight times. And then K to pause. And of course, I can go backwards, the same thing.
Having the little green light showing up here is a good sign. It means I'm able to play my
material in real time. If it is red, I'm running into trouble and I'm dropping frames. I'm running
several programs here at the same time. So I'm actually, I'm taking my computer a little bit
to the edge, but it seems to be all working pretty, pretty okay at the moment. Okay, so that's just a
very, very basic navigation. We let's go to the beginning of this clip. And I just play this.
And I'm going to set an in and an out point. And I press I for in and O for out. And I just,
I know that where I want to get to is pretty much at the beginning of this clip.
That's, it's going to be around about here.
Which one?
And I press O for an out. If I'm not happy with either my in or my out point, I can correct that.
So for example, I could press shift I to get to my in point. That takes me to the in point,
I can check that. And if I want to check my out point, I press shift O. I could just rewind
a little bit by pressing J. A critic of the bandito machines, bandito machines. And I'm going to
correct my out point. I'm going to press O again, because I want to have my out point perfect.
Now at this point, what I can do is I can drag my clip to insert, to the insert
menu point here on the right hand side in the timeline viewer. And I just let go of the mouse.
And I've now inserted my first edit into the timeline. Before looking at the second edit,
I want to just briefly have a look at something here in the view menu. And I'm going to scroll
down here to source time, the viewer and the letter Q. This is the source viewer. This is the
timeline viewer. This is our two up editor. What this means is we can press the button Q.
And we change which window is active, which is a handy way of just basically switching.
We if we want to play the contents of the viewer, we press Q. If we want to press the
contents of the timeline, we press Q. It's a handy little shortcut. And it should seem
pretty familiar to anybody who is coming from Avid. Moving on to the second edit,
I select my clip from the media pool. I press enter to get it into the source viewer.
And I'm going to jkl to get to the point where I want to set my in point.
If I want to do some real some fine tuning, I can also use the arrow keys. So for example,
if I wanted to find the very first frame of this clip, I could use the arrow keys left and right
to find the first frame. And again here.
And set an out point. O for out, E for in.
Just, I actually wasn't technically parked on the last frame of the clip here in the
timeline viewer. So I just made it active and I pressed the end button and I see that I'm really
on the last frame because I have this jagged edge. And now I'm ready to do my second insert edit.
And I'm going to just drag and drop to do my second insert edit.
And now what I'm going to do is we're going to go down a little bit deeper.
And we're going to look at active window selection. At first glance, it might seem a
little bit overwhelming, but it's actually quite simple because it's just command and then one,
two, three, four, five. And just maybe the way to remember is it's kind of like a clock.
Basically works in a clockwise direction, starting with the source viewer. So command one,
going clockwise obviously on the clock. Command one is the selects or activates the viewer.
Command two activates the timeline viewer. Command three activates the timeline. Command four,
the browser. And command five activates the media pool. So this is a very, very efficient,
effective way of navigating the interface here in the edit tab of DaVinci Resolve.
So let's just make sure that our media pool is active command five. Once it's active,
I can start using the arrow keys up and down left and right to start navigating the clips
inside the media pool. Once my appropriate clip is active, and I see it's active,
I see the orange box here. Once it's active, I can press enter to get it into my source viewer.
Just briefly, I just touch on the timecode windows here. Left hand side is the duration of the clip.
Right hand side is where I'm parked in the clip. The same also goes for the timeline viewer here
on the left hand side. It's exactly the same thing. That is the duration of my clip, of my timeline
in end effect. And that is where I'm parked in my timeline. As soon as I start setting in
and out points, the duration will change. And the duration will basically be the time that
elapses between my in and my out point. At this point, I want to edit this clip into the timeline.
And I happen to know the exact timecode where this starts. So I could of course click here
and start entering my timecode. I don't even need to do that. The main thing is that this
clip in the source viewer is active. And then I can use my numeric keyboard to punch in the
appropriate timecode. So I happen to know that my in point is 24 or 6. So I've just jumped there
automatically. I see the timecode has changed appropriately. And now I press I for in. I
also happen to know what my out point is. And again, I see that my timecode changes appropriately.
And I press O for out. And that basically means I've set my in and my out point just by entering
timecode. And I'm ready to get this clip into my timer. And I'm going to drag this and I'm going
to drag this now for the last time. Because from here on in, we're going to add some more
shortcuts and become more efficient. So I'm going to drag and I do an insert edit into the timeline.
