1:12:14Victor Grubbe · Tutorial
Master Reel Editing in DaVinci Resolve
A 72-minute follow-along course building a polished short-form reel from blank timeline to final render inside free DaVinci Resolve.
November 15th 2025The argument in one line.
DaVinci Resolve 20 is structured as eight sequential workflow stages, and a beginner who learns only the Cut and Edit pages can produce publish-ready videos without ever touching Fusion, Fairlight, or the paid Studio tier.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You have never opened DaVinci Resolve and want a single video that takes you from blank project to exported file.
- You edit in iMovie or CapCut and want to graduate to a professional-grade free tool without a steep learning curve.
- You shoot YouTube-style talking-head content and need to know how to handle jump cuts, b-roll, music mixing, and basic color.
- You downloaded Resolve months ago, felt overwhelmed by all the pages, and gave up — this video explicitly de-scopes the scary parts.
SKIP IF…
- You already know DaVinci Resolve basics and want advanced color science, Fusion compositing, or Fairlight audio engineering.
- You need a feature-by-feature comparison between Resolve and Premiere Pro — this is a standalone Resolve tutorial, not a switcher guide.
The full version, fast.
DaVinci Resolve 20 organizes video editing into six pages; beginners only need two of them. The Cut page handles fast rough cuts, and the Edit page adds a second clip-preview window for more precise work. From there the workflow is linear: import footage, blade and ripple-trim the bad takes, stack b-roll on a higher track, add titles from the Effects panel, apply transitions sparingly (or use a zoom-in instead for jump cuts), set music volume to around -25 to -30 dB, do a quick color pass on the Primaries panel, and export via a platform preset on the Deliver page. Every step shown uses the free version.
Free for members
Chat with this breakdown — free.
Sign in and you get 23 free chat messages on us — ask for the hook, quote a framework, find the exact transcript moment, generate a markdown action plan. Bring your own key when you want unlimited.
Create a free account →Where the time goes.
00:00 – 00:39
01 · Intro + promise
Host-to-camera hook, free PDF guide and AI prompt offered as companion resources, scope-set for the tutorial.
00:39 – 01:00
02 · Creating a new project
Project Manager screen, naming a project, clicking Create.
01:00 – 03:00
03 · Interface and pages overview
All six pages explained; Cut and Edit identified as primary workhorses; Fusion, Color, Fairlight, Deliver de-scoped for beginners.
03:00 – 03:50
04 · Project settings
Timeline resolution (4K), frame rate matching, vertical video toggle for portrait output.
03:50 – 04:32
05 · Importing media
Right-click import in Media Pool; frame rate match prompt on first import.
04:32 – 09:28
06 · Cutting, trimming, and ripple edit
Blade tool (Cmd+B), drag-trim from clip edges, gap closing with Shift+Delete, ripple edit left/right for fastest removal workflow.
09:28 – 11:13
07 · Adding B-roll and overlay footage
Drag b-roll to a higher video track; I/O marking to import only a clip section; stacking multiple overlay tracks.
11:13 – 13:34
08 · Adding titles and text
Effects panel Titles section; Basic and Fusion animated titles; Inspector panel for font, size, color, background, position.
13:34 – 18:46
09 · Transitions and effects
Cross dissolve and star wipe demonstrated; use sparingly; zoom-in technique for jump cuts; Dynamic Zoom one-click feature; speed change and stabilization.
18:46 – 23:39
10 · Music and sound effects
Importing music from Epidemic Sound/Artlist; blade to trim to video length; meters panel; track-level volume; AI Dialogue Leveler (free) for voice cleanup.
23:39 – 26:45
11 · Color grading
Color page Primaries panel: brightness, temperature, saturation, contrast; before/after comparison; grab still to save grade; bulk apply grade.
26:45 – 28:38
12 · Exporting
Deliver page; YouTube 4K preset; naming and location; Add to Render Queue; queue multiple formats; Render All.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- The Cut page and the Edit page show the same timeline — the only meaningful difference is that Edit has a second preview window for auditing clips before dragging them down.
- Ripple edit left/right (Cmd+Shift+[ or ]) removes a section and closes the gap in one keystroke, which is the fastest way to cut bad takes from a long talking-head recording.
- For YouTube jump cuts, zooming in on one clip by 7-10% is cleaner than adding a transition — it reads as a second camera angle and costs zero render overhead.
- DaVinci Resolve 20 includes an AI Dialogue Leveler in the free version that reduces loud peaks and lifts soft speech automatically.
- Color grades can be saved as gallery stills and bulk-applied to every clip at once with Cmd+Click and right-click Apply Grade — no per-clip repetition needed.
- Dynamic Zoom is a one-click feature that adds a slow Ken Burns zoom to any clip; the direction (zoom in vs. zoom out) is swappable with a single toggle.
- Setting music volume to -25 to -30 dB is the standard starting point when mixing against a spoken-word primary track.
- Advanced noise removal and background cleanup tools are only in Resolve Studio (paid); the free AI Dialogue Leveler handles most voice cleanup for YouTube.
- Marking in/out points with I and O before dragging a clip into the timeline lets you import only the usable portion, skipping a second trim step.
- The Deliver page includes platform presets for YouTube, Vimeo, and TikTok — selecting the right preset and hitting Add to Render Queue is sufficient for most YouTube creators.
Eight steps that take raw footage to a finished YouTube video.
WHAT TO LEARN
DaVinci Resolve 20's free version covers the entire publishing pipeline, and the eight stages that matter most can all be learned in under 30 minutes.
03Interface and pages overview
- The Cut and Edit pages are nearly identical; the only practical difference is that Edit shows a second preview window for auditing clips before placing them on the timeline.
06Cutting, trimming, and ripple edit
- Ripple edit (Cmd+Shift+[ or ]) removes a clip section and closes the gap in a single keystroke -- faster than blade-select-delete for cleaning talking-head footage.
- Mark in and out points (I and O keys) before dragging a clip to the timeline to import only the usable section, skipping a second trim step.
09Transitions and effects
- A 7-10% zoom-in on one side of a jump cut reads as a second camera angle and eliminates the need for a transition, keeping the edit looking clean rather than cheap.
10Music and sound effects
- Track-level volume adjustment in the mixer affects every clip on that track at once; set the track baseline before making individual clip tweaks.
- The AI Dialogue Leveler is included in the free version and handles most voice-level inconsistencies automatically; advanced noise removal requires the paid Studio tier.
11Color grading
- Color grades are saved as gallery stills and bulk-applied to all clips with Cmd+Click and Apply Grade -- no per-clip repetition needed for a consistent look.
12Exporting
- The Deliver page's platform presets (YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo) handle codec and resolution automatically; Add to Render Queue + Render All is the complete export workflow.
Terms worth knowing.
- Blade tool
- A cut command (Cmd/Ctrl+B) that splits a clip at the playhead position into two independent clips, allowing selective deletion of bad takes.
- Ripple edit
- An edit operation that removes a section of a clip and automatically closes the resulting gap in the timeline, keeping all subsequent clips in their relative positions.
- B-roll
- Supplementary footage placed on a higher video track above the primary camera recording to cover jump cuts or illustrate narration.
- Media Pool
- The DaVinci Resolve panel that stores all imported footage, audio, and graphics for a project before they are placed on the timeline.
- Primaries panel
- The color correction interface in the Color page that provides sliders for brightness, temperature, saturation, and contrast as the recommended starting point for grading.
- Dynamic Zoom
- A built-in Resolve effect that animates a slow zoom in or zoom out across the full duration of a clip with a single checkbox toggle.
- Render queue
- A list of export jobs staged in the Deliver page that Resolve processes sequentially when the user clicks Render All.
- Gallery still
- A saved snapshot of a clip's color grade settings that can be applied to other clips, enabling one-click bulk grading across an entire timeline.
Things they pointed at.
Lines you could clip.
15:10
“Too many people jump in and they'll add too many fades and wipes and things, and it just makes their video look really cheap.”
16:40
“What we would do instead for our YouTube videos is we would just zoom in on one of the shots.”
23:00
“Where I would normally adjust the volume to this as a starting point would be down to around negative 25 to negative 30.”
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
00:00In this step by step tutorial for beginners, I'm gonna show exactly how to use DaVinci Resolve 20 so you can get up to speed fast using this amazing free video editor. Now I'm gonna take you through using the free version of DaVinci Resolve, but obviously what I'm covering here is gonna apply to the paid studio version as well.
00:16And to help you with your video editing throughout this tutorial, but also beyond into your own projects, we've put together a free PDF guide and even an AI prompt to help take you through step by step how to effectively edit in DaVinci Resolve in your own time. So follow along and get up to speed in this tutorial, but don't forget to grab those extra resources to really help you level up.
00:38So this is what you see when you first open up DaVinci Resolve. It's gonna show you all of your previous past projects in here. These are ones on your local computer.
00:46We can also see ones over network or even through to Blackmagic Cloud as well. To make a new project though, we wanna come down the bottom here to new project. We wanna give our project a name, resolve tutorial, and we can hit create.
01:02So straight away, probably the most important thing to understand with DaVinci Resolve is that it's actually broken down into these pages down the bottom here, which actually are the different steps of the video creation process. So we've got a media page here, which is where we can import all of our media. We have one for doing some basic cuts and simple edits.
01:21We have our full edit interface here. Think of this like your Adobe Premiere equivalent through to then fusion, which is motion graphics and animations and stuff.
01:30We have a dedicated page here for color grading, color correcting, and really adjusting the look and feel of your video. One for audio and sound, and then through to the deliver page here, which is where we export and save out our creation. So while there are all of these pages across the bottom here, the bulk of the work that we're actually gonna do here is inside the cut and the edit page.
01:51Because some of these other pages like fusion and color and fairlight, these could be own professional grade dedicated tools just for doing those things, just for color grading. I know a lot of people edit their videos in other tools as well, but they bring them into DaVinci Resolve just for the powerful color grading alone.
02:09So I don't want you to be overwhelmed with this stuff, but obviously if you're inclined, then dive in and have a play around. But I'm gonna show you the fundamentals here and the stuff that you need to know to get results fast. So jumping back here to our cut page, because this layout here is very similar to the edit page, up the top here is where we can import all of our files.
02:26We've got our playback window here. We can preview our editing masterpiece, and we've got our video timeline down the bottom here, which is where we're actually going to be editing.
02:34If we jump to the edit page, you'll see that it's pretty much exactly the same. The biggest difference though is that we have a preview here and we have a playback. So we can preview clips here before we bring them down into our timeline, whereas on the cut page, we just get the one preview here at default.
02:51So the first thing we wanna do is to make sure our project is set up correctly. So for this, we wanna come down to the little settings wheel down the bottom corner here. And this is where we can set up our project if we've got specific requirements for things like the frame rate, for the size of the videos, so the resolution.
03:07We wanna dial those in here. So we can see we've got timeline resolution. Mine is currently set to four k.
03:12And we can specify our frame rate here as well. You can see you get lots of different options here to choose from. But ideally here, you wanna match the footage that you shot.
03:20So if you were shooting at four k 25 frames per second, then we wanna try to match this here. They do also have the option in here to check this box for vertical resolutions. So if you want a portrait video, then we've now got access to those with that box selected.
03:36But if you're not sure what resolution or frame rate you should be using here and you just wanna match whatever your camera recorded at, then we can hit cancel here. So we can ignore this step. We can come back over here to where we import our footage based out settings from.
03:52So we could import our video clips here from the media page, from the cut page or the edit page. It doesn't really matter. They've all got a clips window here if we've got media pool selected.
04:02So we can just right click here and we can choose import media. Maybe wanna go ahead and find our clip. Again, we wanna pick our primary camera footage first.
04:11So if we go open here, it's gonna prompt us here to change our project frame rate. It says, would you like to change your timeline frame rate to match? Yes.
04:19Let's change it. So our frame rate is now going to match the clip that we've imported first. Now from here, we can go ahead and bring the rest of our clips in.
04:27So we can right click and choose import media, and we can go through and bring in the rest of our clips.
04:34So now it's time to start cutting down our footage to remove all the bad takes or the mistakes so that we're able to build out the story. I'm gonna show you a couple of different ways that you can do this on both the cut and the edit page because there are pros and cons to each, and sometimes it's gonna make more sense to use one over the other.
04:50So let's start on the cut page again, the simplified editing interface here for simple cuts. Let's grab our primary clip here, and let's drag this down into our timeline. So we can see we've got our video track here.
05:01Down below that, we have our audio waveforms so we can see the visual representation of what I'm saying in this case with the audio. Because if we have the ability to scrub across our timeline here by clicking and dragging or by scrolling your mouse wheel.
05:14We can also do that from up here as well. If we wanna jump across to different sections of our timeline of our video, this preview up here is our entire video from start to finish. Whereas down the bottom here, we're seeing a zoomed in version of this.
05:28So let's just jump back to the very start of our video here. And we could just hit play and play this through to work out where we actually want this clip to start. Because at the start of the video here, you'll see I'm looking around, I'm testing one two one two, making sure that everything is all good.
05:45And then we can see here the part where I actually start talking. So if we want to actually start the video at this point, we can just select the clip. We can press control b or command b if you're on a Mac, and that's going to blade our clip at that point.
05:59You can see now we have two clips. So if we select the left one here, which is all the stuff that we don't want, we press delete on the keyboard, then our video now is gonna start from this point. So we've trimmed that off.
06:09Another way that we could do this if I just hit undo on this now, so command zed or control zed. Let's come back to the start of our edit. We also have the ability to put our mouse over the edge of any clip as well.
06:19You can see that's now gone red. And we can click and drag across to the side and we can adjust that start time. So we just keep dragging and we're gonna go a bit more here until we get to that section where we want our video to start.
06:32Around this point here and we can really dial this in to about there. So if I hit play now, that's exactly where we want the video to start.
06:41So we can use a combination of using the blade to split our clip and deleting the sections that we don't want, or we can drag from the ends of the clips back as well. This is on the cut page. If we jump over to the edit page, you can see we can go back and forth with this.
06:55It's not changing our project or anything. We're just getting a different view on it. On this page view, you can see we're still seeing the video and the audio here, but we're actually able to see the audio in more detail.
07:05But you can see that we've still got our video starting from the right point here because we had made those adjustments. We still got the ability to do the same stuff. So let's say we wanna add a cut in our timeline at this point where we can see that I stopped talking, we can press command b and we've bladed through those clips.
07:22We could select our clip, we could move to the edge of it, and we could adjust where this next clip starts. But you'll see that when we do it in here with the current settings I have selected, that we've actually now left a gap in the timeline here as well. So we could just pick up this clip and we could move it back.
07:39Or if I have a gap here, I can actually select the gap and I can press shift delete and it's going to close that gap for us. Because there will be sometimes when you're building out your story where you might wanna have some gaps to bring other things down or to have some creative freedom while you're experimenting with different things.
07:56But another really powerful tool in here and the fastest way I think to edit down your footage is to use the ripple edit functionality. So let's just say we have a cut in the timeline here where I stop talking, so we could command b or control b to blade that. Let's say that we're playing through, we're scrubbing through our footage till the piece here where we want it to start again.
08:16So we wanna remove all of this section here from this marker, this orange line, this playback indicator. We wanna remove from here back to the left.
08:25So there's a tool called ripple edit left and ripple edit right. So if we want to ripple edit this left side here, left of this playback indicator, then we can use the keyboard shortcut command shift square bracket left or control shift square bracket left. And you can see that's done the same thing as adding a cut in our timeline, selecting the clip, removing it, and closing the gap, all with that one ripple edit left.
08:50And the same works back the other way. Let's say that we had some cuts in our timeline here, so we've added a cut here and we were going through and we wanted to finish this clip here at this point and we just wanted to remove all of this stuff here up to our next cut in our timeline. Then here we could use ripple edit right.
09:09So command shift square bracket right or control shift square bracket right, and that edit has been performed for us. So you wanna go through now and you wanna remove any bad takes, any mistakes using the blade, using the trim functionality, just dragging the ends or using the ripple edit functionality so that you're just left with the good stuff.
09:30So once that's done, we then wanna go through and bring in any b roll or overlay footage into our project. So we could just grab one of these clips here, this snowboarding clip, click on it and drag it down into our timeline above our regular clip here. So this hasn't replaced it or removed it.
09:47Underneath it, we've still got me talking. So we're still gonna hear this, but at this time in the video, we're now seeing this snowboarding clip over the top. Now we can straight away see that this clip is pretty big.
09:59But again, got access to the same tools to trim this down. We could grab the end of the clip and we could adjust the end time. We could adjust the start time.
10:07We can pick it up. We can move it around. But we also have the option to not just bring in the entire clip.
10:13We could double click on a clip to open it up here in the preview window here, and we can just select the area that we want to bring in. So let's just say that we only wanted this little piece here starting from this turn. I can press I on the keyboard to mark an in point, and let's come across to where we want this to finish, maybe about here, and press o on the keyboard to mark an out point.
10:36So we've got an in and out, and we can see this here. We've got our in point and our out point. We can make adjustments to these if we'd like to, but then all we need to do is grab the clip from here and bring it down, and we've just bought in just that chunk of footage, not the entire thing.
10:50And exactly the same for this next clip here. We can double click on it to open the preview of it here. We can quickly see what actually happens in this clip.
10:58And maybe we only want a small portion of it. We can mark an in point, mark an out point, and we can bring that section in. So you wanna go through now, build out your edit with any b roll, overlay footage, graphics, and things to help build out your story.
11:15From there, we're gonna add in any titles or text into our project. So let's come across back to the very start here. And let's say we want to add in a name tag.
11:23So for this, we wanna click on effects up the top here, and we then come down to titles. And in here, there's a bunch of presets that we can use in our projects to help make the titles that we're after.
11:35So we've got some basic ones here that we can customize up, or we've actually got these fusion titles, these animated titles and things down here as well. And again, we can easily customize these up even with the animations and stuff on them so that we're able to use them in our project really, really easily. I'm just gonna come back up here to a basic title here.
11:53I'm gonna click and drag that into our project. Again, we can see it's its own standalone clip here that we can adjust how long we want it on screen for, also adjust the position where we want it. I'm just gonna leave it around here, and then we can double click on it to open up our inspector panel up the top here.
12:12So we can toggle this on and off, but this is where we get to dive deeper into all of the settings and configure things up. So we can adjust the text here, we can change the fonts, we've got control over the size, all of that stuff in here.
12:25We can add a stroke or a border, the background. Let's adjust the height. Let's adjust the width to bring that back in.
12:33Let's boost. Let's increase the opacity so it's not see through, and we can change the corner radius so that they're not curved.
12:41Okay. Simple title. If we come back up the top here, we can also adjust the position, the size, the rotation, all of that stuff for it.
12:49So maybe we'll just bring it down a little bit with the y axis here. Also, if you select the clip here in your timeline, then you can actually select it here in the window here as well. So we could pick it up and we can move it around much easier up here than using these sliders.
13:04So that's how easy it is to bring in any text. Obviously, the same applies for any of these animated ones down the bottom here. Let's drop it over here.
13:12So we've got the title here. We can again select it and we can change the text. And we've got all of our controls on here to customize this up, but the animation, everything stays with this clip.
13:22So we're able to easily customize stuff up really, really quickly. I'm gonna go ahead and remove that. So I'll select it and press delete on the keyboard and it's gone.
13:29So you wanna go through now and add in any titles or text into your videos.
13:35Then from there, we can add in any transitions or effects. So we still wanna make sure that we have our effects tab open here on the left.
13:43And down under here, we've got a bunch of video transitions that we can add in. There's a lot in here to choose from. I'd say use these sparingly or where they're adding to the story.
13:53Too many people jump in and they'll add too many fades and wipes and things, and it just makes their video look really cheap. But let's say that we wanted to instead of just having this clip here appear on screen, you can see it just cut straight on. Let's say that we wanted to add a transition on, then we could add something like a cross dissolve.
14:12I can pick this and I can drop it onto the start of that clip here. And now when I play this, we could see that it is a fade on.
14:21So there's a bunch of other ones in here as well. Maybe we pick a star wipe. And let's put one on the other end of this and we play this now.
14:30We now have a star wipe. So I say use these sparingly and where they're really adding to the overall feel and flow of your video, so many people just overdo it and they can look rubbish. If we zoom in on the timeline though either using this slider here or we can use command or control plus and minus on the keyboard to zoom in and out, then we can adjust these as well.
14:49So you can see we can adjust the length of that transition. We can also remove it by selecting on it and pressing delete. So we can apply these transitions to the start, to the end, or even between clips as well.
15:00So we could actually have a transition that's coming down here and add one camera shake. Let's drag that and put it between two of our primary clips here, and let's play this.
15:12Okay. So it actually did a pretty good job of masking the hard cut. It would've looked something like this where it's just a little jump or glitch almost in there where we've cut out a chunk of footage.
15:22So normally though in terms of our YouTube videos, we would just leave it like this, that little hard jump, and it's perfectly fine. Or what we would do instead of applying a transition to try and hide it is that we would just zoom in on one of the shots.
15:35So let's just play this original clip here. You see there's a slight little glitch there. What we would do instead for our YouTube videos is we would just pick one, doesn't matter which one, maybe the second clip, and I would just zoom in on it.
15:47So I come over here to video and I'm just zooming in. Now depending on how you've shot this, your camera quality, all of that stuff, you could lose a little bit of quality here, so don't zoom in too far.
15:57But we wanna try to, in this case, line up my eyes so it's not so jarring between the two shots. So now let's have a look. Okay.
16:07It's not perfect, but it's pretty close. It just breaks it up a little bit and makes it feel like it was almost like a second camera angle or a zoomed in shot. This still flows fine for your viewers watching, but it can help change up the shot a little bit, make it a little bit more engaging because something has changed.
16:23Now there's also a cool feature built into DaVinci Resolve. Let's come across and pick one of these other clips here. So we just scrub through this.
16:30There is nothing happening, no effects, no animations or anything on this. With this clip selected, press dynamic zoom, then you can see straight away it's zoomed in on our clip here. If we hit play now, it's going to slowly zoom out that clip for the length of the clip.
16:46So if we actually click on where it says dynamic zoom instead of the little toggle on and off, then we can choose to swap this. So right now it's starting zoomed in and it's zooming out. If we wanted to swap it and have it the other way around, start zoomed out and a slow zoom in, we can easily do that.
17:02And we can also control how the zoom happens with these options here too. So pretty awesome that you've got some simple stuff like that that you can just toggle on and off to make your videos look a little bit more dynamic.
17:15So once you've got your transitions or zoom ins or these dynamic zooms added to your timeline, this is where we can go ahead and add in any other effects that you want. So up on this same area here, again, with our video clip selected, we've got options in here for speed change. So this is where we can adjust the direction of the playback.
17:33Do we want this playing in forward, normal, or do we want this playing in reverse, or do we want this to pause? Do we wanna create a freeze frame? We can also adjust like speed up and slow down our clips here just under speed change.
17:44There's also the option to stabilize your footage. So if you got shaky camera footage, something that was handheld instead of something on a tripod, you can take some of that shakeout with this stabilization effect here. But all the rest of the effects inside of resolve are over here, again, under that effects panel down under effects.
18:02You can see that there are just so many different effects and things that we can apply. You get a preview of them just by putting your mouse cursor over them. There's also more effects here under open effects.
18:12There's a bunch more in there. And you'll see some of them are free, some of them are only on the paid version of resolve, so resolve studio. But also know that for those of you that wanna geek out further and get more advanced with this, we do have access to fusion in here where you can create something purely custom yourself.
18:28Now that is far beyond the boundaries of this beginner tutorial, but it's awesome that that's built in there too. And if you wanna geek out further on all the AI functionality built into DaVinci Resolve Studio, the paid version, then I do have a video linked in the description box below purely on that. And there's some awesome stuff in there.
18:47So the next step, once all your effects and everything are in, is to bring in any music, any sound effects into your video. So I do have a music file here from epidemic sound. So for our YouTube videos, we use epidemic sound or art list.
19:01Both of them are great options if you're looking for music. So I'm just gonna select our music track here. I'm gonna drag it down into our timeline.
19:09I'm gonna put it down below all of the other clips here. So it's now on its own audio track, audio layout two.
19:16So let's zoom out in our timeline here. Let's pick it up. Let's move it back to the start of our edit.
19:21We can see that it is too long at the end here, so we could blade our clip at this point, select the second one, press delete. At least now our music finishes at the time that our video does.
19:32So you would apply the same process to import any sound effects or other music files and drag those down into your timeline too. And you can layer them up down here easily as well. Once you've got your music in, it's a good idea to play through your edit here because you might find that you're making minor tweaks and adjustments to the timing of things.
19:50Maybe you wanna match the beat on the music with some cuts. Then you wanna do that at this phase here, and then we're gonna jump in and we're going to dial in our volume levels. This is one of those creative things where there really is no right or wrong outside of you don't want your audio too loud where it's sounding bad and it's distorting, then that's gonna turn people away.
20:09So where I suggest you start is we wanna get the volume right for the primary piece of narration or of storytelling in the video, which in this case is me talking. So I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna mute the music piece here. I'm just gonna press the m here and the entire track here, if we had other clips on there as well, would then be muted.
20:28So when we play this back, we will only hear our primary camera footage here in this case. And so we wanna get the volume levels right on that piece and then the music and everything secondary. So to help us with this, we wanna enable the mixer.
20:41So if we come up here and turn this on, we wanna make sure that for right now, we're not seeing mixer, we're changing here with these three little dots to meters. This is gonna give us a visual representation of how loud our audio is. So if we come back to the start here and we hit play, I've got this muted just to make this tutorial easier.
20:59You'll see here we've got green, yellow, then into the red. And this is giving us the volume levels in real time of what's happening. You can see there, at that point there, we hit too loud.
21:08We hit zero. You don't wanna have your audio maxing out. So we need to lower the volume of this clip, but also given that all of these clips were shot at the same time, same microphone, same settings, we wanna actually adjust all of them and bring that volume down a little bit.
21:22So we could do this on a clip by clip basis where we select a clip, we come over here to audio, and we can adjust up or down the volume.
21:30If I grab the volume slider here now and pull it down, we can actually see down the bottom here in that little audio waveform, we can see the changes happening there as well. So if we go too loud, you'll start to see that it flattens off at the top. That's another visual indicator that your audio is too loud.
21:45So you don't want your audio hitting the top of that box there, something like this. So if we play through this now, we'll see that our audio goes into the green, yellow into red, but is not getting close to maxing out at that top of the box there, the zero. But we've only done the first clip in this case.
22:03So we could go through manually adjust all of these clips. Or if I undo this now, let's hit the reset button on this, we have the ability to make volume level adjustments on the entire track. So on audio track one here, we can make adjustment once.
22:18It's gonna apply to all of those. So if we switch this little meters option here back to mixer, you can see we have audio track one, and we have a volume level control for that.
22:27So let's just bring it down maybe minus two decibels in this case. Let's switch back to meters. And now if we would play through this, we can see that our adjustment has been made across all of these clips.
22:39And you could also do a mix of the two. You could adjust the entire track level and then make minor adjustments to the individual clips as you need to. There is also AI dialogue leveler in here now as well in the free version where if we enable this on our clips, this will help us reduce louder dialogue.
22:55It'll lift up or increase softer dialogue, and it can also help reduce background noise. But if you're in the paid version of DaVinci Resolve, there are some really amazing background noise removal and audio cleanup tools in there as well, only on the paid version.
23:10But the process for the music track is exactly the same. Obviously, we want to unmute it so we can hear it. And I would suggest that you're doing this piece with headphones on so that you can really hear what this sounds like as a mix with your music and your spoken piece as well.
23:24And every music track is likely going to be a little bit different, but where I'd normally adjust the volume to this as a starting point would be down to around negative 25 to negative 30 and just hitting play and seeing what it sounds like and then making further adjustments as we go. Once that's done, now it's time for us to adjust the colors in the video to apply any color grades, any looks, adjust the look and feel of what your video looks like.
23:50So for this, we're doing that over on the color page, and this is an absolute beast of a tool, just this page alone. You could spend hours and hours and hours really trying to dive in and master all of this stuff.
24:01For most people, you're not gonna need to. But again, this is pro grade software. There is so much in here.
24:07So it's a very similar layout to what we've seen before with our playback window at the top here, our preview. We can now see each of our clips across here where we can select on each one and make individual adjustments to those. And then we've got all of our different color adjustment tools and things down the bottom here as well.
24:23And yes, you can really go deep on this stuff. But where it suggests you start is back here on this primaries color bar, so this icon here. And then the first thing we'll look at is adjusting things like the brightness in the shot.
24:35Is it too bright? Is it too dark? Again, this is a creative thing.
24:39So we can individually adjust the red, the green, the blue. So you can see we can dial things in manually.
24:45Let's just undo this. Or if we hit the white one here and increase this, then we're able to effectively brighten the shot, or we can darken it down at this point as well. So make the adjustments here as you need to, maybe something like this.
24:58Now from there, I would adjust the temperature. So if we need to make the shot more cool, so add in more blue, you see if we slide across to the left, adding more blue. Likewise, we wanna warm our shot back up, we can drag it the other way.
25:11We're really talking minor adjustments here, maybe something like this. Then from there, I'd come down to saturation, which is amount of color or intensity of the color.
25:20So we can boost this up. Again, don't wanna go too far, or we can actually take the color right out from here as well. Maybe somewhere around here.
25:28And then you can adjust the contrast up or down to again get that look that you're after. Probably something like this in this case. So if we wanna see a comparison, this is obviously the after.
25:38If we wanna go to before versus after, we can see the difference we've made just with moving a few sliders and things here. And obviously, we can just keep tweaking this until we're happy.
25:47But once we've got a preset or a set of changes that we have made here, we can right click on this window here and we can choose grab a still. And that's gonna save this as a preset for us to then apply to our other shots. So we could then jump across to our next shot and we could grade that manually.
26:05We can choose apply grade and that's now been applied for us. Or we can actually do it in bulk by holding down command or control, selecting the shots that you want this applied to. And again, right click and choose apply grade.
26:19Now if we wanted to make minor tweaks and adjustments to an individual one, we can definitely do that or also our b roll clips as well. We have the same controls to dial those in here. Once you're finished with your color grade, it's a good idea to come back to the edit or the cut page to play through your video and make sure it is exactly how you would like.
26:37And then it's time for us to export that video, which is where we're gonna jump to the deliver page down here.
26:45Then over on the left here, this is where we can dial in all of our export settings. If we scroll across, we can see we've got presets in here, which is a great place to start for things like YouTube, Vimeo, TikTok. There's a bunch of others as well.
26:58But with the YouTube one and we hit the little down arrow here, then we can choose what type of video, what quality video do we want to actually export. So if I wanted a four k YouTube ready video, then I would pick that preset and we're almost there. We can give our video a name.
27:14We can choose the location of where it's gonna be saved on our computer. We can again make changes to these things if we need to, if we've got something specific that we're needing to do. If not, at this point and applying a preset, we just need to hit add to render queue and that's good to go in terms of it's ready to render.
27:31Hasn't started yet, but it's ready to render. If we wanted to queue up multiple things to save out at once, maybe we want a lower quality version. We could add that to the render queue as well, and you see them queuing up on the side here.
27:42You could also come back here and you could add your complete custom render where you are dialing in all of these things to get something exactly how you want it. But for most people, I would recommend that you're just using these presets here. So then when it's time to render, we can select either just one clip to render or we can hold down shift and select all the ones that we've got in here and we can choose render all and that's gonna save them out for us.
28:06So now that you're to speed at a beginner level in DaVinci Resolve, we've got a bunch of other tools and resources to help you even further, including a deeper dive training on DaVinci Resolve, all linked in the description box below. Don't forget to grab our free PDF editing guide and AI prompt to take you through step by step exactly what I just took you through.
28:25So when you're editing your videos, you've got someone there telling you what to do and when. There is a link to grab that totally free on screen and also in the description box below, and I will see you in the next video. Cheers.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The pitch lands in the first breath: a free professional editor, a complete beginner walkthrough, and a promise to be fast. What follows delivers on all three.
Named ideas worth stealing.
01:00list
The 8-Stage DaVinci Resolve Workflow
- Interface
- Import
- Trim
- B-Roll
- Titles
- Effects
- Audio
- Color
- Export
The sequential pipeline shown in the persistent bottom nav bar throughout the video.
Steal forAny software tutorial video -- a visual progress bar like this bottom nav reduces viewer overwhelm and keeps retention high
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
28:10link
“Don't forget to grab our free PDF editing guide and AI prompt to take you through step by step exactly what I just took you through.”
Lead magnet (free PDF + AI prompt) pushed in the outro with an on-screen link. Secondary CTA: paid course linked in description. Soft and non-pushy -- no mid-video sponsorship interruption.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
AFFILIATECommission earned if you click.
- go.primalvideo.com ↗
- go.primalvideo.com ↗
- go.primalvideo.com ↗
- go.primalvideo.com ↗
- Custom Animated Graphics - Placeit ↗
- Music - Artlist ↗
- Music - Epidemic Sound ↗
- Stock Video Footage - Storyblocks ↗
- go.primalvideo.com ↗
- go.primalvideo.com ↗
- Subscribe to receive the latest updates and news from Primal Video ↗
Visual structure at a glance.
