Everything You Need to Start Editing in DaVinci Resolve (2026 Edition)
A 2.5-hour, start-to-finish walkthrough of DaVinci Resolve's free version, building one real talking-head project from a blank timeline to a rendered, uploaded video.
Posted
7 months ago
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Tutorial
educational
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Big Idea
The argument in one line.
DaVinci Resolve's free version can carry a beginner through a complete talking-head edit end to end, and the fastest way to learn it is four keyboard shortcuts, S and D to zoom the timeline, A to cut, F to ripple-delete, paired with a habit of asking why every cut or sound choice is being made.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
You just installed DaVinci Resolve's free version and don't know where to click first.
You have zero editing background and need to turn raw talking-head footage into a finished, uploadable video.
You want a repeatable keyboard-shortcut workflow instead of hunting through menus for every action.
You're deciding whether the free version of Resolve is enough before paying for the Studio upgrade.
SKIP IF…
You already edit professionally and know Resolve's page layout, trim tools, and audio mixer.
You're looking for Fusion motion-graphics or Color-page grading technique; this video stays entirely on the Edit page.
You need documentary or multi-camera workflows; this is a single-camera talking-head project from start to finish.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
This is a full walkthrough of DaVinci Resolve's free version through one real project: a sub-60-second talking-head video with music, B-roll, and sound effects. The instructor sets up a custom four-key workflow, S and D to zoom the timeline, A to cut, F to ripple-delete, and uses it to build a rough cut by reading audio waveforms rather than watching video. From there he layers in a three-tier volume chart (-3 to -10 dB for primary audio, -12 to -21 dB for complementary, -30 dB for background), teaches J and L cuts to smooth transitions between sentences, adds B-roll with the Insert and Overwrite tools, fixes a mono-versus-stereo sound effect bug, and renders through the Deliver page on a YouTube preset. The throughline: every editing decision should have a reason behind it, not just a button someone said to click.
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Brandon Baldwin introduces himself and Bring Your Own Laptop, explains why the free version of DaVinci Resolve is enough for this course, and frames the whole video around asking why instead of just memorizing buttons.
09:53 – 14:51
02 · Frame Rate & Resolution: The Only Vocab You Need
Explains FPS using a flipbook analogy, why 24 fps became the film standard, the difference between 24/30/60 fps, and what 1920x1080 resolution and 16:9 aspect ratio mean.
14:51 – 25:21
03 · First Look at DaVinci Resolve: Project Manager & the Seven Pages
Opens DaVinci Resolve for the first time, creates a project folder and new project, and tours the seven pages (Media, Cut, Edit, Fusion, Color, Fairlight, Deliver), explicitly telling students to skip the Cut page entirely.
25:21 – 31:07
04 · Dialing In Project Settings
Walks through the Project Settings menu: setting timeline resolution to 1920x1080, changing frame rate from 24 to 30, and configuring proxy and optimized media so nothing is left uncompressed.
31:07 – 38:11
05 · Building the First Timeline & Reading the Playhead
Creates the first working timeline, drags in the A-roll footage, and explains the playhead, video/audio track hierarchy, and how footage on a higher track always overrides what's below it.
38:11 – 40:57
06 · Class Project 1: The Talking-Head Assignment
Lays out the first class project: a talking-head video under 60 seconds with B-roll and a music track, plus instructions for submitting it as an unlisted YouTube link.
40:57 – 52:32
07 · Keyboard Shortcuts & the ASDF Home-Row Method
Imports a custom keyboard shortcut preset and introduces the home-row editing method: S and D to zoom the timeline out and in, A to cut, and F to ripple-delete.
52:32 – 59:09
08 · Starting the Rough Cut: Reading Audio Waveforms
Begins trimming the raw talking-head footage, teaching how to read the shape of audio waveforms to predict good takes from bad ones and where a spoken sentence's natural trailing tail ends.
59:09 – 1:15:12
09 · Trim Mode & Why Moving Clips Is Destructive
Demonstrates that dragging or trimming a clip directly overwrites whatever footage is underneath it, then introduces Trim Mode (Shift+W), which pushes neighboring clips instead of erasing them.
1:15:12 – 1:20:23
10 · Reviewing the Cut for Pacing
Plays the rough cut start to finish, catches a duplicate take that slipped through, and introduces pacing as a feel-based judgment about how fast or slow a video should move.
1:20:23 – 1:42:51
11 · The Media Page, Choosing Music & Setting dB Levels
Tours the Media Page for browsing and favoriting footage and audio folders, previews music options against the video's tone, and introduces the three-tier volume chart: -3 to -10 dB primary, -12 to -21 dB complementary, -30 dB background.
1:42:51 – 1:50:53
12 · J and L Cuts: The Technique
Uses a demo clip of a plane flying and landing to explain J cuts (previewing the next scene's audio before its picture) and L cuts (letting the previous scene's audio linger after the picture changes).
1:50:53 – 2:00:21
13 · Applying J and L Cuts to Finalize the Edit
Applies J-cutting to the talking-head timeline to smooth transitions between sentences, locks the music track to avoid accidental cuts, and introduces the E key to select and shift everything right of the playhead.
2:00:21 – 2:20:40
14 · Inserting B-Roll & Why to Avoid Preset Transitions
Creates a second timeline from the B-roll folder, shows several ways to move footage between timelines, uses the Insert and Overwrite tools, and explains why unmotivated preset transitions read as amateur, plus the buffer-frame requirement they need to render.
2:20:40 – 2:26:30
15 · Sound Effects and the Mono/Stereo Fix
Adds a ding, riser, and swoosh sound effect to the edit, then diagnoses why a mono sound effect only played out of one headphone channel and fixes it by changing the track type.
2:26:30 – 2:35:45
16 · Rendering, Export Settings & Publishing to YouTube
Finishes on the Deliver page with the YouTube 1080p H.264 preset, then walks through uploading the finished render to YouTube as an unlisted video for course submission.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
DaVinci Resolve's free version covers almost everything a beginner needs; Studio only unlocks a handful of advanced features that don't matter until you're already comfortable.
Four keyboard shortcuts, S and D to zoom the timeline out and in, A to cut, F to ripple-delete, cover about 95% of the actions used in a real edit.
Moving or trimming a clip on top of existing footage in DaVinci Resolve overwrites that footage permanently; Trim Mode (Shift+W) pushes clips apart instead so nothing gets destroyed.
A good cut point isn't right where the last word ends; it's a little into the speaker's natural trailing decay, cutting it off too early sounds abrupt.
Ripple-deleting with nothing selected can hit every track at once, so lock any track (like a music bed) you don't want touched before making cuts elsewhere.
Music volume falls into three practical ranges: -3 to -10 dB when it should drive the video, -12 to -21 dB when it should support without overpowering, and around -30 dB for pure background fill.
A J cut previews the next scene's audio before its picture appears; an L cut lets the previous scene's audio linger after its picture has already changed.
24 fps is the lowest frame rate at which the human eye stops perceiving individual frames as separate images, which is why it became a film standard.
Pre-built transition effects need buffer frames before and after the cut point to pull from, so a transition placed at the very start or end of a clip has nothing to draw on and won't render.
A mono audio file loaded onto a stereo timeline track will only play out of one channel; the fix is changing the track type to mono or feeding the missing channel manually.
Reviewing a rough cut start to finish, not just clip by clip, catches duplicate lines and dead transitions that individual trims miss.
The rule for using any transition or effect: if you can't state what's motivating it, don't use it, unmotivated effects read as amateur rather than polished.
B-roll and sound design are added last, after the rough cut is trimmed clean of dead air and duplicate takes; editing raw footage before it's clean wastes review time.
Takeaway
How to Learn DaVinci Resolve By Building One Real Project
WHAT TO LEARN
The whole video is one continuous demonstration that a beginner can go from a blank DaVinci Resolve project to a finished, uploaded video by learning four keyboard shortcuts, three volume ranges, and one rule: never use a technique you can't explain the reason for.
01Welcome & Why This Course Works
A tool's free tier is often enough to learn real skills; check what's actually locked behind a paid version before assuming you need it.
Asking why a technique works, not just which button performs it, is what makes a skill transferable to new tools and situations.
02Frame Rate & Resolution: The Only Vocab You Need
24 frames per second is the lowest rate at which the human eye stops seeing individual images, which is why it became the standard for film.
Resolution is just the pixel height and width of an image; 1920x1080 (16:9) is the common baseline most video work targets.
03First Look at DaVinci Resolve: Project Manager & the Seven Pages
All-in-one software can overwhelm because it exposes every tool up front; the fix is learning which small fraction of its buttons you'll actually use, not touring all of them.
When two similar tools exist in one program, picking one and ignoring the other from day one avoids wasted context-switching.
04Dialing In Project Settings
Locking in a project's resolution and frame rate before importing footage prevents mismatched-timeline problems later.
Any setting labeled 'uncompressed' for proxy or cache media should usually be changed; uncompressed files defeat the purpose of a lightweight proxy.
05Building the First Timeline & Reading the Playhead
On a multi-track timeline, whatever sits on the higher track always displays over what's beneath it, that hierarchy is the core logic of layered editing.
The playhead only responds to clicks on the scrubber bar, not the empty timeline space, a small UI detail that trips up nearly every beginner.
06Class Project 1: The Talking-Head Assignment
A tight constraint, like a hard 60-second cap, forces faster editing decisions than an open-ended assignment would.
Requiring a real deliverable, a streamable, watchable link rather than a downloadable file, is a habit worth carrying into any client or portfolio work.
07Keyboard Shortcuts & the ASDF Home-Row Method
Four keyboard shortcuts, mapped to adjacent keys under one hand, cover most of what a full edit session requires: zoom out, zoom in, cut, and ripple-delete.
A custom shortcut layout is worth building deliberately over time; the right keys are the ones you find yourself reaching for repeatedly, not a default someone else picked.
08Starting the Rough Cut: Reading Audio Waveforms
A spoken sentence almost always has a natural trailing tail after the last word; cutting before that tail ends makes the edit sound abruptly clipped.
Recognizing the shape of an audio waveform, its fullness versus small blips, lets an editor predict a bad take before even listening to it.
09Trim Mode & Why Moving Clips Is Destructive
Dragging or trimming a clip on a timeline overwrites whatever footage sits underneath it; that loss is permanent unless it's undone immediately.
A dedicated trim mode that pushes neighboring clips apart instead of overwriting them removes the risk of losing footage while fine-tuning cut points.
10Reviewing the Cut for Pacing
Playing a rough cut straight through, not just checking clip by clip, is the only way to catch a duplicate line or an awkward transition the trim pass missed.
Pacing is a feel judgment, not a formula, about how quickly a video should move between ideas.
11The Media Page, Choosing Music & Setting dB Levels
Music intended to drive a video should sit around -3 to -10 dB, music that supports without dominating around -12 to -21 dB, and pure background fill around -30 dB.
Most stock or downloaded music is normalized near maximum volume by default and needs to be pulled down significantly before it belongs under dialogue.
Saving frequently used source folders as favorites removes the friction of navigating a deep folder structure every time you need a specific asset.
12J and L Cuts: The Technique
A J cut plays the next scene's audio before its picture appears, priming the viewer for a change before they see it.
An L cut lets the previous scene's audio continue after the picture has already cut away, the mirror image of a J cut.
13Applying J and L Cuts to Finalize the Edit
Locking a track, like background music, before making cuts elsewhere prevents an accidental cut or delete from hitting the wrong layer.
There's no fixed rule for exactly where two overlapping audio phrases should meet; it's a judgment call based on what sounds natural, not a formula.
14Inserting B-Roll & Why to Avoid Preset Transitions
Supplementary B-roll should reinforce the point being made in the primary footage, not just fill visual space at random.
A hard rule worth adopting: if you can't state what's motivating the use of an effect or transition, don't use it, unmotivated effects read as amateur rather than polished.
Prebuilt transition effects need buffer frames from the clips on both sides of a cut; a transition placed right at the very start or end of a clip has nothing to pull from and won't render.
15Sound Effects and the Mono/Stereo Fix
Sound effects fall into a few practical categories, impacts, risers, and swooshes, each suited to a different kind of visual or emotional cue.
A mono audio file placed on a stereo timeline track will only play out of one channel; fixing the track type, or feeding the missing channel manually, restores it to both.
16Rendering, Export Settings & Publishing to YouTube
Using a platform-specific render preset, like a YouTube 1080p export setting, removes most of the guesswork around codec, resolution, and format choices.
Setting a shared video to unlisted rather than private or public is the standard way to share a link for review without publishing it to a public audience.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Rough cut / assembly cut
The first pass of an edit where dead air, mistakes, and duplicate takes are removed, before music, B-roll, or effects are added.
Ripple delete
Deleting a clip and automatically closing the gap it leaves by shifting everything after it to the left.
Trim mode
An editing mode where dragging a clip's edge pushes neighboring footage out of the way instead of overwriting it.
J cut
A transition where the audio from the upcoming scene starts playing before its picture appears on screen.
L cut
A transition where the audio from the previous scene continues playing after the picture has already cut to the next scene.
A-roll / B-roll
A-roll is the primary footage driving the story, usually the person talking; B-roll is supplementary footage used to illustrate or add visual variety.
Proxy media
A lower-resolution copy of footage used to edit more smoothly on less powerful hardware, swapped for the full-resolution file only at final render.
NLE (non-linear editor)
Software like DaVinci Resolve that lets you rearrange and edit clips in any order, as opposed to older linear tape-to-tape editing.
Resources
Things they pointed at.
03:40toolBlackmagic Design (official DaVinci Resolve download and support site)
38:11productBring Your Own Laptop DaVinci Resolve Essentials course (exercise files, BS Keys custom shortcut preset)
2:31:24toolYouTube Studio
2:34:34productBring Your Own Laptop full DaVinci Resolve Essentials course (Fusion and Color page sections)
Quotables
Lines you could clip.
00:05
“DaVinci Resolve isn't hard. It's just unfamiliar. And once somebody explains it the right way, it clicks.”
tight thesis statement that works as a cold open on its own→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
09:06
“Video editing is equal parts video and audio editing.”
standalone teaching point, no setup needed→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
52:18
“That is going to carry you 95% of the way there when it comes to editing any and all of your footage.”
punchy payoff right after teaching the four-key method→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
51:27
“It's a very powerful tool, but with great power comes a great responsibility.”
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.
17px
metaphoranalogy
DaVinci Resolve isn't hard. It's just unfamiliar. And once somebody explains it the right way, it clicks.
Well, hello out there. My name is Brandon Baldwin. But depending on where you look on the internet, you may also know me as Wampus.
If you don't edit with a blanket, I mean, what are we doing? I started out just making fun gaming videos with some friends. I've had the opportunity to work on weddings, music videos, trailers, short -form videos, podcasts, and long -form documentaries.
at this point i've covered it all if not at least most of it mind you not at a hollywood level but i think that's why you and i can be a great fit because i understand where you're coming from i understand the journey that you're about to go on and now through bring your own laptop i have the opportunity to teach a full course that i can confidently say will prepare you for anything because the beautiful thing about davinci resolve is that it covers everything and anything in the post -production world.
And I really mean anything. Unlike its competitors, DaVinci Resolve combines all aspects of the post -production process into one comprehensive package, meaning that not only will we become proficient as editors, but we'll learn the basics of motion graphics and animation through the Fusion page, and we'll explore the color page, which is unparalleled in its capabilities.
We're going to cover a lot of techniques, but I'd also like to cover a lot of the whys. What I'd like to do is to give you the right tools and ingredients so that you can create anything that fits your taste. Editing is an art form at the end of the day.
There is never a singular correct or right answer. There are just better choices that we can learn to make. the only thing that you are going to need is your copy of davinci resolve installed on whatever device you plan on learning on all the course material will be provided for you at the end of each working class project you will have a final render deliverable that you'll need to upload each of these projects will be something that you can also use on your portfolio or showreel to highlight some of the skills that you've learned with all of that said if you watch each of the laid out sections without skipping you know who you are.
You will walk away a confident editor and creator. So let's get familiar with DaVinci Resolve. All right everybody it is officially go time.
Let's go ahead and kick off the DaVinci Resolve Essentials course. Now before we get started there are a couple things we need to make sure everybody has ready to go. On the course website there will be exercise files which is what we will use throughout the course for example footage and media for you to practice with.
Go ahead and click download those files and unzip them. Depending on your operating system, it should look something like this. I'm going to have a couple extra folders in mind, but you should have a folder for each of the sections that we're going to use to talk about DaVinci Resolve.
Make sure you move this out of your downloads folder into an appropriate place on your computer so that we can access them as we move through the course. The other really big thing you're going to want to make sure you have ready to go is DaVinci Resolve. So if you haven't already, go ahead and download DaVinci Resolve.
And the only place you should download DaVinci Resolve from is from Blackmagic Design's website. Blackmagic Design is the company behind DaVinci Resolve, so do not trust any other distributors. Make sure you download from the official source.
Now, there are two versions of DaVinci Resolve. There's a free version and a paid version called Studio. Moving forward, if I ever mention the word Studio, I'm referring to the paid version of DaVinci Resolve.
You are perfectly okay to use the free version throughout the entirety of this course. The free version of DaVinci Resolve is incredibly powerful, and there's only a few, we'll call them smarter features inside DaVinci Resolve Studio that'll be lacking in the free version. But this course is tailored to the free version of DaVinci.
If there is an opportunity to use something that's in the paid version, I'll make sure to call it out. But again, one of the best parts of DaVinci Resolve and probably the reason why a lot of you guys are here is because there is a free version and the free version is incredibly powerful. So with that said, I will be editing on DaVinci Resolve 20.
You might be operating on an older version DaVinci or version 21 and beyond might be out. The only difference that you'll find moving between DaVinci Resolve version 20 or version 19, 18, or again, if version 21 is out at the point that you're watching this, some of the interface elements might be a little bit different.
So a menu might have a few more buttons to it, or it might be in a slightly different location. But for the essentials course, everything that we're going to do is going to remain relatively the same. So do not be alarmed if you're not on the exact version that I'm using, or if you're on a newer version or an older version.
The only thing I'll say is that if you are on an older version, be aware that there might be a few new options that you don't quite have yet. And again, I'm on the Blackmagic Design official website. The only thing that I'd like to call out here is that Blackmagic Design actually has a support page.
So if I go up to the support website, it is here that we can download and access any version of DaVinci Resolve that is officially released. So on their website, if you are on the homepage, just go up top to support. And then what you would want to do is go over and click DaVinci Resolve and Fusion Software.
And now if I scroll down a little bit, you'll see all of the most recent downloads available for DaVinci Resolve. So if you ever update your software and it introduces new bugs that you don't like, you can always come to the support website and download an older version. Be aware that there is always two versions of the software.
There's the DaVinci Resolve normal version, and then there's the studio version. You will not be able to use the studio version if you do not have a studio license. Once you download and install it, along with the course exercise files, you will be ripping and raring ready to go.
The final comment I'll make on using DaVinci Resolve when it comes to performance is DaVinci Resolve is a pretty RAM intensive software. Meaning that if you're on a slightly older PC or you're using a laptop or there is an iPad version of DaVinci Resolve, you may struggle with playback from time to time. I believe they normally recommend at least 32 gigs of RAM, which is what I'm using.
But if you have 64 and higher, you're going to be much better off. with that said later on the course we will discuss some techniques for improving and smoothing out playback now i've got one final message for you guys and then we will officially begin our journeys editing in davinci resolve what is the point here what are we trying to achieve inside this davinci resolve essentials course well before i answer that the better question is why why trust me what makes me qualified to talk to you guys about davinci resolve well i was like you uh i had no video editing experience about five to six years ago and it was required of me to learn i was put in a position where i needed to help some people create some videos and so it was my task to go okay what do i need to know how do i make effective videos that help tell stories and like you i probably searched around for what editing software is best and then you know you land on davinci resolve because it's free you download and you try it and then there you are davinci resolve in front of your face now what
And over the span of the last five, six years, the thing that I think I've done really well is I've figured out what's important. What do we actually need to know? I would wager that the majority of us aren't going to end up in a Hollywood film studio.
Some of us might. Some of you might end up working on a bigger team, but a lot of us are hobbyists or creators or just want to start some kind of an editing journey. So what do we need to understand?
If you're just looking for what buttons to click, Google. google is going to be your best friend you can google how to do said thing and it'll tell you click this button that's not what i'm here for i'm here to help you understand why we do certain things why does this work well why should we implement a certain tool in a specific scenario you see to understand davinci resolve we need to understand video editing as an art form and a craft because otherwise what you'll end up doing is making decisions without motivation and you'll hear that term thrown out a lot if you've watched other tutorials or even listened to myself talk about video editing what's motivating the decisions that we're making why are we using certain tools why are we making a cut in a certain location or why did we choose to remove or add certain pieces of footage when we begin to understand those things we can influence and inform the choices we're making inside the timeline so My goal here is to provide you with the technical information needed to operate comfortably and confidently inside Resolve, but also provide the whys.
Why are we making the choices and the decisions that we're making? And if I've done my job well, you'll understand how to learn inside DaVinci Resolve and not just what buttons do I need to click. One final thing I'd like to add, and if you kind of droned out my ramble there for a moment, maybe tune back in.
Video editing is equal parts video and audio editing. So what you'll end up finding throughout this course is that we spend a good amount of time talking about how to make cuts and how to make our video look and move better. But we also spend a lot of time talking about audio.
Audio is it's the visceral portion of the video. It's what you feel. It's what really invokes a lot of emotion in the edit.
so if you have it i would really recommend watching listening and editing with headphones on it'll give you a much better appreciation for some of the choices that we're making on the timeline but if not it's totally okay it's just something i would recommend moving forward now we're going to spend so much time inside davinci resolve together but there's one final thing i do need to cover before we actually open up the program a lot of us here are going to be coming from different backgrounds some of us might be hobbyists some of us might actually be cinematographers that now need to learn how to edit their own footage and if you're like me you just work with a lot of screen recordings so what that means is that there's going to be different bases of starting points for everybody to make sure we're all on even grounds going into davinci resolve i've got one thing i really need to talk about very briefly There's going to be two vocab terms I throw out through the entire of this course that I need to make sure we all understand.
One of them is frame rate, or normally how it's abbreviated in softwares is FPS or frames per second. So frame rate or FPS frames per second. What does this mean?
Some of you are already going to be familiar with this concept, especially if you're like me and you come from the gaming world. But for those of you who are not, have you ever taken a step back and thought about how cameras actually record footage well it's not black magic pun intended in order for moving media to be generated or a video file to be generated a video camera will record individual frames or stills or images quickly so if we had a given second worth of time so this was zero seconds and one second If I were to take a single still or a single frame or a single image, there is no motion because we have one frame.
And in fact, that is a picture, right? If you were to take a picture with your phone, you have one frame, you've got one image. Well, a video camera will attempt to grab individual frames at a consistent pace over the span of a second, depending on the number of frames.
which would be these guys here, that the camera records in a given second, that would be your FPS or your frame rate. So just to reiterate, the frame rate or the FPS is the number of frames per second. Does that make sense?
When we talk about video files, what we're really doing actually is talking about a lot of images stacked on top of each other moving very quickly. If the concept is still eluding you, it'll definitely begin to make more sense as we hop into the timeline, but a good visual representation of this would be a flipbook. So you might have seen some comic flipbooks where they flip through the pages and the pictures move.
The reason why this is important is because we're going to work with different frame rates. Some of the more common ones would be 24 FPS, 30 FPS, and if you're in the gaming world, 60 FPS. The number 24 has specific significance because it is the lowest FPS to where the human eye can no longer pick out individual frames.
So at 24 FPS, we see a smooth video. When we go below this, the video will appear a little bit laggy or it almost looks like stop motion. 30 FPS is also a common frame rate and any multiple of 60, so 30 is half of 60, is nice because it divides evenly with the time scale, the natural time scale, you know, 60 seconds in a minute, etc.
60 fps is a lot less common when working with actual camera footage unless you were recording for slow motion and we'll talk about retiming and slow motion later in the video but oftentimes when you see obs recordings or screen recordings they'll be recorded at 60 fps that's how you get that really smooth playback you'll also notice when something is recorded at a high frame rate and played back because it almost looks uncanny it feels like too smooth so we're going to typically operate between 24 and 30.
Another term that you're going to hear me thrown out is resolution. And I think most people understand what resolution is. But just to clarify real quick, the resolution of your image is the height and the width of that image.
One of the most common resolutions is 1920 by 1080. And these numbers represent pixels. So 1920 pixels by 1080 pixels.
This gives us a 16 by 9 aspect ratio. Another common aspect ratio that you'll see on older footage would be something like 4 by 3, but that is not what we're going to use in this course. We're going to operate on a 16 by 9 aspect ratio.
What I really want to call out here is that sometimes I'll throw out the term 1080p, the p standing for pixels. Just like 24 FPS 1920 by 1080 holds special significance because it's considered you could think of it as like the base resolution for most things. There are a lot more technical terms when it comes to video files and video editing but it's not going to matter if we don't know how to use it and work with it inside DaVinci Resolve.
So let's go ahead and get started. And it is officially about that time we are going to open DaVinci Resolve and begin editing but Real quick, this section in particular, I think is very important because for one, we are going to open up DaVinci Resolve.
I'm going to walk you through how to start a project and learn the basics of editing, but the... bigger thing that I'd like you to take away here are the whys of what we're doing. Down the road, it's going to be so much more important to understand the decisions you're making and what's motivating them rather than the technique itself.
So the question that I would really like you to continue to ask yourself, not only in this section, but throughout the course is why. Why are we making the decisions that we're making and how does it affect the message or the story that we're trying to convey? With that said, let's go ahead and open up DaVinci Resolve.
and this is what we're going to be working on throughout this section it's called a talking head video because there is one person who is talking straight to the camera we're going to incorporate a sound effect a simple background music track some b -roll transitions and there's some weird stuff going on here with the fact that we've got two layers of videos overlapping each other and that's something that we're going to address as we go along in this video Alrighty, so the first step to start us on our journey is to, well, we got to open up the program.
So on Windows, I'm going to type my window key, start typing in DaVinci Resolve and open up the software. So this is the very first window we are going to be greeted by when we open up DaVinci Resolve. This is the project manager, and this is where we create and group our projects together.
Now, I'm not going to spend too much time here. You can think of this as kind of the homepage for DaVinci Resolve. The one thing I do want you to double check is to make sure that you're on your local database.
Databases are a conversation for a different day, but we don't want to be in the network and we don't want to be in the cloud. However, just for your awareness, if you do want to collaborate with people online and a DaVinci Resolve project, the cloud system is an option. So just be aware of that.
Now within the project manager, there's really only two things we can do. If we right click, we can either create a new project or a new folder. What I would like you guys to do is to create a new folder.
This way we can group all of our projects together into one nice, pretty area. I'm going to name my folder, the essentials course. And it create.
Now let's go ahead and open up our essentials course folder. And from here, we can either now right click and hit new project or go down to the bottom right corner over here and hit new project. And this presents the very first decisions that we're going to have to make.
We can do this first is what we're going to name this. So what I would like you to name this project is two dash talking head, because that is the type of video that we are going to be working on. And before you hit create, there is this second little option down here that says media location.
This will be where DaVinci Resolve attempts to save any temporary files or things that you cache or render in place. Those terms will be things that we continue to explain as we move along. But what I would suggest is setting this location to be wherever you have your course material.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit change location. And I'm going to navigate where I have the course material saved. Now at the time of recording, this is what my folder structure looks like.
Yours might look slightly different than mine, but you're going to want to locate the two dash talking head folder. And then once you're inside the talking head folder, hit select. If you choose the wrong folder location, is it going to mess up your experience?
No, it's just one of those things that's good practice to do for future projects where you're working with different folders and different types of footage. With all that set though, go ahead and hit create. And here we go.
We are now inside DaVinci Resolve. Now, real quick, DaVinci Resolve is what's called an NLE or a non -linear editing software. You don't really need to worry about what an NLE is.
But the one thing that makes DaVinci Resolve very special is that it includes everything. If you're somebody who's a little bit more familiar with Adobe, they like to split each of their tools into their own program. DaVinci Resolve puts it all into one spot, which is what makes it so.
powerful. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to cover what each of these pages does and how we're going to cover them. Now, there's no need to follow along through this section.
I'm going to try to be brief so we can get to actually importing our footage and editing. But I do think that this is important. Over here on the left, we have our media page.
This page is dedicated to importing and sorting through footage. This will be something that we do touch on and I'll show you why it's powerful and how we use it. Next up, we have the cut page.
Now, something that I do think is a little bit confusing for beginners inside the program is the difference between the cut and the edit page. I'm just going to eliminate that question right now. We are not going to use the cut page.
I repeat, we're not going to touch this page. We're not even going to look at it. You can just icky.
I don't, I don't even want you thinking about the cut page. Now, obviously the cut page is in the program for a reason. And what I'll say is that it's mostly used for quick editing.
You can think of it as DaVinci resolves. light editor it's used for processing a lot of footage and it down the road if you do feel like it's worth it for you to learn the cut page go crazy there's nothing wrong with doing it i just don't think it's going to serve us a great purpose for the bulk of our editing experience I'm going to skip the edit page for now because that is where we're ultimately going to end up landing on.
Next up is Fusion. And Fusion is DaVinci Resolve's version of After Effects. It's what we use for compositing, motion graphics, doing visual work.
It's one of my favorite pages inside DaVinci Resolve. And we are going to have a whole section that covers how to use Fusion. So don't be alarmed.
We are going to talk about Fusion. After that, we have the color page and quite simply put the color page is something truly spectacular. You didn't know DaVinci Resolve was actually just a coloring software first.
It wasn't until a few years later down the road that they began to incorporate other editing tools. So what that means for you is that the color page is the oldest. It's the most developed.
It has the most tools and features and it is un. paralleled when it comes to color correction and color grading. This we will also have a dedicated section on and go over some of the basics for you to use in your own videos but again this page is truly incredible.
Next up we have the Fairlight page and this we will not have a dedicated section on but this is DaVinci Resolve's audio mixer, meaning that this would be where you would go to EQ or equalize your different music tracks or voiceovers or sound effects or change the volume levels, add audio effects, etc. The Fairlight tends to be a little bit more advanced for somebody who's a bit newer to editing inside DaVinci and will be able to get by just fine on the edit page.
Last up is the deliver page and all roads lead to here. This will be where we end up saving our final video or rendering. Our final video is the proper term.
But that takes us to the edit page. And this is going to be our home base for the bulk of the course. Now, again, if you are newer to using editing tools, this can feel super overwhelming.
So just real quick, let me talk through what the different areas are of the edit page. And then we'll go ahead and bring in our footage and start to work with it. The one thing that I would like to say and what you'll begin to find out the more we begin to use DaVinci Resolve is that DaVinci Resolve gives you the ability to do everything, which means that it has buttons for everything that you could want to do.
But we're probably only going to end up carrying about 5 % of those things. So the trick to learning the edit page is just learning what buttons do I need to click and where do I need to look? Down here in the bottom is our timeline.
And this is going to be where we bring in footage and audio and we actually do the bulk for editing. You could think of this as like the edit page workspace. We've got two windows up here.
We've got one on the left. This is our preview window where we can preview footage in our media pool. And on the right is our primary viewer.
And this will be where we view our edit. And up top, we've got two rows. This top row that I'm kind of hovering back and forth to gives you the different sub menus inside DaVinci Resolve.
But again, like I said, we're probably not going to use any of these. We're definitely going to use the inspector tab, which is where we can change our video properties. And we might use the quick export for quick saving things, but we're not going to worry about the metadata.
And we're definitely not going to use our mixer right away. And the same thing with over here on the left, we're not going to work with key frames or sound library, index effects, et cetera. The one that we are going to use is our media pool.
And the media pool is where all our assets are going to live. So all our video and audio and still images are going to live right in here. And now it is almost your turn to follow along.
What we're going to do is we're going to bring in our footage and then we're going to create our first timeline. So what I would like you to do is locate your course material, go into section two, the talking head section and locate class project one. And there should be two folders inside of here.
And what we're going to do is we're going to drag and drop these folders into DaVinci. But before you do that, listen to this real quick. Drag and select your two folders.
And we're not going to drop it into the big pool here itself. I want you to drop it into this little side column. Go ahead and hit release.
And there's a very important message that pops up here. Anytime you add footage the first time into DaVinci Resolve, it's going to ask, do you want to change the project frame rate? And I'm going to address that in just a little bit.
But what I would like you to do is hit don't change. It is OK if you happen to hit change on accident, but hit don't change. I'll show you how to address that problem later.
So don't change. And there we go. All of our footage is now sorted.
inside DaVinci Resolve in our master folder in our media pool. The reason why I have you drag it over to the left column is because what will happen is don't follow along here. If you take your folders and just drop it into the main pool itself, it's just going to dump everything here.
So nothing is sorted. You just have all of your files in here. This could be something that you want to do later down the road.
But for right now, we do not want to do that. And if you accidentally did that, hit control Z. Control Z is the universal undo or command Z if you're on Mac.
Now, if you're in a weird folder, you need help navigating. You can go over to the left column over here and click around to jump to the different folders. If for some reasons yours isn't showing, make sure this little icon on the top left isn't collapsed.
And you can always double click on the row up top here to jump up a folder or two. But I can go to my video folder, go to the A -roll folder. And now if I hover my mouse, we can see some footage.
And now you are primed to begin working on your first editing project. Alrighty, so this section is going to be very short and sweet, but please do not skip it. There's just a couple things we need to make sure are set up appropriately in your project so that weird stuff doesn't happen down the road.
Inside DaVinci Resolve, in the very bottom right -hand corner, there's two icons. this home icon actually takes you back to your project manager so you can double check to make sure you're in the right project but that's not what we're here to talk about in the very bottom right hand corner there is this cogwheel this is your project settings go ahead and click that and this is going to bring up a ginormous menu of options and tools that you can end up tweaking and changing for your project and the key word there being project settings so these are not global settings these are only settings that apply to this specific project that we're currently working in now i'm not going to do a full walkthrough of every single possible setting that we could change because we would be here for the full length of the course but there are two in particular that i would really like you to set correctly the first one is our timeline resolution this is going to be the default resolution for the timeline that you're working on
unless something weird happened your timeline resolution should be 1920 by 1080 just double check to make sure it says that the big one that we do want to change is our timeline frame rate this is the default frame rate for our timelines now frame rates can always be a little bit confusing for somebody who might be just starting out but what i'd like you to think about is that 24 frames per second is normally meant for films movies and things recorded in real life and 30 frames per seconds a lot of times used for digital recordings there's a lot of reasons and things in between that might dictate which frame rate you choose to edit on for us i do want you to change your frame rate from 24 to 30.
The only other thing that I'd like you to double check is for your optimized media and render cache. These aren't set to uncompressed. This is not something that we're going to dive too deep into in this course, but you can think of proxies and render caches as low memory versions of your footage to help you edit faster.
And again, the big thing you want to double check here is that nothing says uncompressed. I'm going to quickly walk through some recommended settings that I would use if I were you. If you don't use exactly these settings, you will still be able to edit just fine.
But I do think it's worth a couple of minutes to get really technical right now so we can set these up because we'll use them for the rest of the course. The first two settings are our proxies. Now, proxies are copies of our video files that are a smaller format, which makes it easier to send to other editors to edit on the fly or if they're working remotely.
We're going to set our proxy media resolution to quarter and the media format from ProRes HQ to ProRes 422 proxy. Now, depending on what version of DaVinci Resolve you have, if you're on an older version, you might not have the ProRes codec. So if that's the case, go ahead and do DNxHRLB.
But for us, we're going to use ProRes 4222222 proxy. Your optimized media is DaVinci Resolve's own version of proxies, and it's probably not something you'll ever really use. But just to be safe, we're going to do the exact same thing.
We're going to change the resolution to quarter. And the format to 4222 proxy and same rules apply for DNxHR. And for the last cache format, you guessed that we are also going to change it to 422 proxy.
These four settings we're going to cover in a future video. So we're going to leave them at default for now. And then if we scroll down just a little bit more, we can find our project media location.
So if you accidentally boofed on this in the beginning, you can go ahead and reset your media location. And the last thing I would double check is to make sure that your proxy generation location, your cache files, and your stills are all saved on a local hard drive. By default, they should be, but for whatever reason, you know, maybe you got an external hard drive and it randomly set it.
Make sure this is set locally to either your C drive or I have two internal hard drives. So mine are mapped to my D drive. And before you hit save, what I would like to call out is I'm going to scroll all the way back up to the top.
There's three dots up top here. And we can do one of two things now. For one, we can set our current settings as our default preset, meaning that each time we start a new project, these settings, including the resolution, the frame rate, the optimized media proxy resolution, and all of our working folders are set as our default settings.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click these three dots and that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to set our current settings as our default preset. it's going to prompt you and say hey are you sure you want to do this go ahead and yeah i do i actually i do want to update those now in the future just for your own reference let's say you're working on some 4k footage and it's a 24 fps timeline and you're doing a lot of them and you don't have to reset this up every time but what you can do is again go to these three dots and there's this little option in here that says save current settings as presets so you can save some presets for your project settings so that again you don't have to do this every single time but for now we are all good to go so i'm going to go and hit Save.
And again, it's going to pop up that big important question. Do you want to change the project frame rate? This time we are going to say yes, change.
Now, again, this is a super important step that we have to take in the beginning of each project. If you mess it up, is your project ruined? No.
And I will show you how to address it. But anytime you start a new project, make sure you are setting your default resolution and frame rate every time. already folks so we are going to create a timeline begin to use the edit page which is very exciting i do want to check in with you real quick because i know that these opening sections might feel like we're not doing enough to get the edit done but i implore you to continue to be patient and continue to ask yourself why and get just comfortable with these opening concepts because it will pay off down the road let's go ahead and hop back into da vinci resolve now i want you to locate your master media pull folder It's the one all the way at the top.
And if you've done it correctly, you should see two. You should see your video and audio folders. And what we're going to do is we're going to create a third folder.
So I want you to right click in your media pool and hit new bin. Bins are DaVinci Resolve's naming terminology for folders. So go ahead, hit new bin and name this 03 underscore timelines.
Perfect. Go ahead and open up this timelines folder. all right here we go so what i'd like you to do is in this blank media pull region right click go to timelines cool timelines create new timeline now depending on what version of davinci resolve you're in this little menu might look a little bit different but there will be a spot that says timelines create new timeline go ahead and click it and now we're prompted with how how do we want to set our timeline up We're going to leave all of these settings alone.
But what I would like you to do is rename it. I mean, you could leave it alone as timeline one, but I'm going to name it main because it is going to be the main working timeline for us. It's prompting you.
Do you want to add some video tracks? Do you want to add some audio tracks? Again, leave it alone.
But if you are someone who accidentally messed up your project settings, here's where you can fix it. Uncheck this little box down here. And then where I'd like you to click is the format tab.
Double check that we're on a 1920 by 1080 timeline and our frame rate is 30. If yours isn't, make it match this. If all this looks okay, go ahead and hit create.
And there we go. We've got our very first timeline. Now, I probably said the word timeline 50 times.
What is a timeline? Well, it's a workspace. It's a working area where we can cut up our footage.
So let's bring in some footage so that I can show you. Go back over to your media pool. And you can either click straight into your A -roll folder or go back to the master folder.
We're going to video, A -roll, and there should be one video file right here. And what I'm going to ask you to do is go ahead and drag this footage and bring it on down into your timeline. And there we go.
Our footage is here. And what a happy looking guy over there. I didn't realize that was going to be the starting frame.
It's too funny. So what I'd like to do is explain a couple things to you guys before we get a little bit too lost in what the heck are we looking at. First of all, you can now see over here in the right window, we can see what's happening in our timeline.
So I'm seeing where my playhead is at in the video. This orange vertical bar right here is called our playhead. And wherever it's at in the video is what gets displayed in the preview window.
if you would like to move your playhead you cannot click in the blank space here you need to click on this ticked line bar up top here and drag it forward and now we can begin to scrub through our footage again i'm clicking in this upper bar here and scrubbing left and right if we look down here in the timeline itself we've got two things going on we've got this blue bar up top and this green one down below this is our video track where the visual information is being presented and the green track is our audio track these little white blobs that are running across the audio track are our waveform previews meaning that it is previewing the sound that is going to be said so if i were to drag my playhead and bring it to the beginning of the video And then you can either hit the play icon in your preview window, or you can hit the space button.
Well, hello crew. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. And then I can hit the space button again to stop our playhead from playing.
But hopefully you notice that as soon as our playhead crossed where our audio waveform is at, that was the area where I began to speak. So again, if I drag my playhead back. Hit play.
Well, hello crew. Let's talk about. That's where I'm speaking.
So if we take a macro look at our timeline here, we can see the spots where I am speaking. Now there's a couple of things that I'd like to call out and then we'll begin to move more and more into actually working with this footage. First things first is this guy right over here.
This is our timestamp. Again, if I grab my playhead and begin to scrub with our footage, you can see that our time had changes. The one thing that I would like to call out is this far right number over here.
Now you might think that it's milliseconds, but if I scrub very slowly, you can see that it resets at 30. This is our frame number. Because again, a video is created by stitching still images one frame at a time.
So if I were to go down to my keyboard and use the left and right arrow, I can scrub through my footage one frame at a time. Again, I'm using the left and right arrow. to scrub through my footage one frame at a time all right next things next uh we're probably not gonna need our preview window here and it's taken up a good chunk of real estate to hide it so that we can expand our preview viewer what i'd like you to do is with our timeline previewer here go to the top right and there's this little square icon it's next to the like the color page icon this little square guy go ahead and click it and that'll expand our preview window Typically, I like to work with a single viewer, but I do know that some people prefer to have preview and timeline viewer at the same time.
There's not a right or wrong answer. It is just completely up to you. I like working with one big screen.
Another quick customization option that I do think is important to show off is right above our timestamp over here. There's this little like layered track icon. Go ahead and click that.
This will give you your timeline preview and view options. The one that I do like to have on is stacked timelines, and I'm going to show you why in just a second. And if you don't like audio waveforms, you can turn those off.
There's a whole slew of options to kind of change the display of the timeline. So feel free to customize that to fit whatever you'd like. But what I'd like to do real quick is kind of show how you use a timeline and navigate through it.
And then I'll walk backwards so that you guys can begin to follow along. right now we only have one video and one audio track but if i click on our footage and drag up you'll see it creates a second one and we can do this as many times as we would like we're going to bring this back down to track one and editing with layers works on a hierarchy system which means that whatever is on the highest track gets displayed over what's on the bottom so if i wanted to what i could do and there's no need to follow along here so i can go to my b -roll and add some footage in here and you see how now it's displaying this b -roll and not the footage underneath this is a very important concept that i'll continue to reiterate on as we move forward i can select this footage and hit the backspace button to delete it and now we're right back to where we started now again we are presented with a whole bunch of buttons that we can click and now our inspector tab is populated with things that we can change we don't need to worry about any of that all that i hope that you see right now is one timeline in a video and audio file
Alrighty, so this is our very first class project and the class project system is not meant to be scary or intimidating. These are set up so that we can begin to cement some of the ideas that we're learning as we go along with this course. And our very first project will be a talking head project.
We've been asked to create a video that is clear, concise, and illustrates the points in the video we are editing. The video must be under 60 seconds long, which shouldn't be a problem. And they've asked us to use some B -roll.
along with a backing music track. They've also requested the video be 1080p and an mp4 file. We will cover exactly what that means in a future video.
One thing that I need to call out so that you guys can receive credit for this course is how to submit the videos. So unfortunately, we can't upload and host all the videos on the course website. So what I'd like everybody to do is to upload to a streaming service.
I would recommend that 99 % of people use YouTube because you can create account for free. There's no limits and it's going to work really well. But if you already have a Vimeo account or you operate on Behance, that's totally fine.
There are a lot of different streaming sites out there that will work really well. The one thing that we will not be doing is submitting a Dropbox or Google Drive or any kind of cloud service link. Particularly what I'm referencing here is that we should not have to download any files.
We should be able to click a link. It opens a video player and then we can watch whatever you've submitted. I promise you will not get banned off of the website if you accidentally do a Google Drive link but just know that in order to receive credit for this project we need some kind of streamable link.
If you are not super comfortable doing something like this do not fret at the end of the project when we've rendered everything out and saved everything I will do a walkthrough of how to upload to something like YouTube and provide a link so that you can submit it to the website. But with all that precursory stuff out of the way let's go ahead and hop into the project hey time out real quick we're about halfway through the video how's everything feeling are there questions already forming in your head are there things you're hoping that we really cover sooner than later let us know in the comments below and if you do enjoy this video please please please if you can just give it a quick like or comment or even better if you could subscribe the more support we get on videos like these is a really good indicator that you all out there are looking for more tools and information on davinci resolve so if at the end of this video you are also looking to continue your journey and learn more about davinci check out the full course we do some really deep dives into specific subjects we cover some more advanced techniques and effects so at the end of the video if you would like to continue your journey check out the full course with that said let's hop back into it already crew the glasses are off so you know this is about to get serious so
Where we're at right now is we have our timeline set up and we're ready to begin editing our footage, which means we're going to have to start using our keyboard and mouse to do some editing. So this section lays out the foundation of how to use those tools. Now, big disclaimer, I'm going to use my keyboard shortcuts.
You do not have to use them, but in the course resources, there will be a file that says. bees keys those will be importable keyboard shortcuts that i'll show you how to use again you don't have to use them and i will call out when i'm using a specific shortcut and what the default button would be in davinci resolve this is the system that i found works best for me and i think is easy to pick up with that said let's hop back into davinci resolve Alright, so there's one thing I'd like to call out real quick, and that's over here in the bottom left -hand corner, I've added a keyboard overlay to my DaVinci Resolve, which means that as I am navigating in DaVinci, it will update to whatever key I'm pressing.
Now again, these are using my keyboard shortcuts, so let's talk about how we can get those all set up. All the way in the upper left -hand corner of DaVinci Resolve, there is a DaVinci Resolve menu item. Go ahead and click that button, and then we're going to find...
Keyboard customization. Go ahead and open up that guy. This is going to open up our keyboard customization menu, which is actually pretty well done for DaVinci Resolve.
You can click on any key in here and it will tell you which function or command it is linked to. If you're ever looking for a certain keyboard hotkey, you can go over to this little search bar and type in things like ripple delete, and it'll tell you which button it is associated with. Go ahead and clear that real quick.
Now for you guys up in the upper right hand corner over here, it's going to say DaVinci Resolve because this is the default keyboard layout when you start up DaVinci Resolve. If you're somebody who's coming over from Premiere Pro or Final Cut, they do have some presets for those. I don't know how accurate they are to those programs, but they are an option for you if that's something you're already comfortable with.
But what I would like you guys to do is all the way in the upper right hand corner of this menu, click these three dots right here. And there's an option to import a preset, which is what we're going to do. So go ahead and click that button and locate the folder in your course resources that have my keyboard shortcuts in it.
It should look something like this bees keys or BS keys. It'll be this dot text file. Once you find it, go ahead and hit okay in this menu to import that preset.
And if you've done it correctly in the upper right hand corner, it should say bees or BS keys. Now, something else that I have provided is this hotkey cheat sheet. So as we are going along, if you are ever confused or forget, or if you don't want to use my keyboard shortcuts, but you're hearing me talk about something with navigation or editing, you can always refer to this to help refresh your memory.
Once these are all imported, go ahead and hit save and then close. Now, from here on moving forward, I'm going to be using my keyboard shortcuts. I will do my best to call out what the default bind is for a certain function or command, but I'm going to be assuming that you imported my keyboard shortcuts.
With that said, before we start actually editing our footage, something that I would highly encourage you doing is to update your keyboard shortcuts as we go along. These have been set up for me and what I feel like are the easiest and strongest set of keys for beginners. It's something I've developed over time and it's something that is going to continue to change as I continue to edit.
So you should do the same. Within the first couple lessons, you're probably not going to know what works best for you. But as we continue to move along, you might find things that you're doing over and over that you wish you could just press a button to do.
So feel free to change these layouts. If that is something that you want to do, again, go in the upper left hand corner, DaVinci Resolve, keyboard customization, find whatever command that is. So maybe you want to change the fast forward hotkey.
You can type in fast forward, hit the X on the existing hotkey and add your own over here. Once it's all said and done, go ahead and hit save. And it might not even be a bad idea to go up to this upper right hand corner and save your own keys as a new preset.
But for now, I ask you to stick with my keyboard shortcuts through the beginning sections of this course. So my right hand is going to stay on the mouse and my left hand is going to sit on the home row, which is the biggest thing that I'd like you to take away from this section. When I say the home row, I mean the A, S, D, and F keys.
So I've got four fingers on the A, S, D, and F keys and my right thumb is on the space bar. The first two buttons we're going to talk about are the S button and the D button. S is timeline zoom out and D is timeline zoom in.
So we can use S to get a better look at all of the footage on our timeline and we can use D to be a little bit more precise with how we're making cuts, changes, adjustments to anything on this track. Now, the reason why I like using S and D so much is because as we begin editing and as we begin using more and more clips and footage and music, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
If I need to jump to a later part in our timeline, there's a few ways we can go about doing it. But the way I like is if I hit S to zoom out, I can click and drag my playhead to a later part in the timeline. And I'm going to hit D to zoom in, but keep an eye on where our playhead goes as we continue to zoom in.
So I'm going to hit D. to zoom in and you see how our playhead stays dead center frame. So anytime I want to recenter or jump to a different part in our timeline, I will use S and D to make those jumps.
Now there's a few alternatives to this. One, there's this plus and minus slider up above here in this little mini toolbar. This will do the same thing.
We can zoom in and zoom out on our timeline. The default shortcut for doing this is alt and the scroll wheel or option in the scroll wheel if you're on Mac. Moving forward, if I do ever forget to say it, when I say alt plus a keyboard button, it means option plus that button on Mac.
And same thing with control. It's the command key on Mac. So on the scroll wheel, we'll do the same thing.
And if we are trying to actually jump to a later part in our timeline, up in our play bar up above here, we can actually scroll through the entire timeline. Okay. So again, S and D.
Let's get back to focusing on the home row. So S and D are timeline zoom in and zoom out. The next big one that we're going to learn is the A key.
And if I press A, it is going to split our clip or it's going to make a cut. Now, the default for this, I believe, is control and B. But we are going to be cutting so much we cannot be two fingering the cut button.
So again, A is cut. There is an alternative to using A. In our little mini editing toolbar up top here, there is this razor blade icon, and this is our blade mode.
I am not a fan of the blade mode, but I know some people that will ride and die with the blade mode, and I'll show you what it does. If I click it, it turns my mouse into a little razor blade. And now we can split our clips whenever I click.
I tend to find this less precise than moving my playhead and cutting, but if this is something you enjoy, you know, go crazy. To toggle off the blade mode, you just need to go back up top here and make sure your mouse is highlighted in orange. Again, now to undo, I'm going to hit control Z a few times.
If you're ever wanting to redo and undo. So if I undo too far and I want to redo those cuts, you can actually hit control shift and Z and it will redo your edits. And again, if you're on Mac, that is going to be command shift and Z.
All right. So we've got our two, two little cuts here. How do we now get rid of these clips in here?
Now, this is actually a bigger decision than you might think because there's two primary ways of deleting footage. First of all, to select this clip, you can either click it and that'll select the video and audio or what you'll often see me do is drag and select. This is just a habit I've got into mostly because we often work with more than one track or.
what we'll end up talking about later is like the video and audio might not be linked together so i end up dragging selecting so you don't have to do this you can always click but just you know fyi now the first method to delete this is actually going to be the backspace key so i'm going to take my right hand off the mouse and hit backspace what that does is it deletes the selected footage now the backspace key is the default key to do this but now we have this this gap in here So to fix this, one of the things that we can do is we can drag and select the right side of our footage and then left click, drag and move it over.
And it'll actually snap into place, which is pretty handy. Now that's not too bad, but what happens if I need to do this again? So we've got this other section that I want to get rid of.
So I'll click it, hit backspace. And again, now I've got to drag and select and pull this over. Now, that's not too bad, but that is three actions required out of us every single time we want to make a change.
We have to delete the clip, select the footage to the right, and then pull it over. And what were to happen if, say, we had more than just this footage here? So what if we had five clips, 10 clips, 20 clips, 4 ,000 clips?
I think you can see where I'm getting at. So I'm going to hit Control -Z a couple times. So we have our two splits here remaining.
So the second method to remove or delete footage slash clips on your timeline is our fourth home row button and it is ripple delete and it's the F key. So I'm going to select this clip and watch how these cut points move to the right of this footage. I'm going to hit the F key, which ripple deletes the footage and see how everything shifts over to the left over here.
Ripple deleting closes any gaps created when you delete. clips on your timeline so again i could click this clip right here hit f and it ripple deletes our footage and on the surface that seems much better than just hitting backspace right so why would we ever do that well you have to be careful when you ripple delete footage because if you have more than one track or you've got things that aren't quite lined up with the audio ripple delete will slide everything over to the left so it's a very powerful tool but with great power comes a great responsibility so you just have to be aware of what you're doing something else that i just want to point out real quick is davinci resolve is pretty dang awesome i don't know if i've said that yet but let's say i hit the backspace here and i do have this gap davinci also has this very cool feature where if i were to click in the gap so if i left click in this gap here See how it highlights in gray?
I can now hit the F key to ripple delete that gap. So even if you are editing and you've got some space in here that you want to close or things are split for whatever reason, you can always just click gaps and hit F and it will close the space. So again, I cannot emphasize enough how important it is.
We just really need four keys. The S key, the D key, the A key, and the F key. That is going to carry you 95 % of the way there when it comes to editing any and all of your footage, which means that if we've learned ASDNF, we're ready to start editing our footage.
All right, so we're going to begin what's called the rough cut, or sometimes it's called the assembly cut of the edit, which means we're going to take our raw footage. and trim it down until it's in a usable place. And what that means is we're going to get rid of some of the ums and the uhs and get rid of some of the gaps, the bad takes, et cetera, until we have usable footage for our edit.
And there is one thing in particular that I'm going to show off that is a very important concept in DaVinci Resolve that I'll take a couple of minutes to talk through, but it is very important to understand and know how to use. Let's go ahead and hop back into Resolve. Alrighty, so let's go ahead and do some editing.
Quick reminder, bottom left -hand corner is my input history. So as we continue to move along in the course, you should be able to keep track of what keys I'm pressing, but your timeline might look a little bit different than somebody else's. So what I'd like us all to do is to start fresh together.
Hit S to zoom all the way out on your timeline so that you can see all of your footage. Drag and select it all. and hit the backspace key to delete it or f or you could hit f to delete it now what i want you to do is go over to the upper left hand corner here for our media pool go to the video folder find your a roll and let's re -bring in our footage there we go now this is personal preference but i like having the entire bottom section here for my timeline because i like having a little more working real estate So what I'll do is up in the upper left -hand corner of DaVinci Resolve, there's this little square with, what'd you call that?
The carrot icon. Go ahead and click that. And it will collapse the media pull to just be on this upper portion.
So that way we have our entire bottom half for our timeline. Unfortunately, in DaVinci Resolve, you can't drag and drop menus around to be in different locations, but we can always grab dividing lines to make sure things fit. However, we feel best.
So sometimes you'll even see me grab this middle bar in between the video and audio tracks to move things around a little bit more if I need to see the audio or if I want to see the video a bit better. So with all that said, though, what we're going to be doing today is I'm going to hit D a couple of times to zoom in. We're going to be cleaning up our footage a little bit.
I might throw out terms like working through our footage or trimming. It all kind of means the same thing, different context. All I'm trying to say is that in our video, you see how there's these little gaps in here where nothing's being said.
We're going to try to get rid of those. There's going to be sections where I goof up. We don't want to include the goof ups there.
And we also need to be aware of the things I'm saying in this footage. You see, editing is a very active craft, which means that we can't just go along, look for where the audio is and get rid of stuff where there's no audio. We need to be aware of what our subject in this instance, me is saying.
Because at the end of the day, we need to string together all these little bits and pieces so that it makes one cohesive message slash story. So there are moments where you can kind of turn your brain off a little bit, but the sorting process, the rough cut process tends to be something that you do need to pay attention to.
So let's start working through it. First things first, I'm going to drag my playhead all the way to the beginning. Oh, it looks like I didn't bring our footage all the way snug on 00.
So let me drag and slide that over. Mid spacebar to play.
And stop it right before I'm about to speak. Something else you'll see me do throughout this that I want to call out now in case I've already done it a few times is as the video is playing, I'll oftentimes hit S to zoom out to see kind of where we're at in the total video length and D to zoom in so I can be a little bit more precise.
The other benefit to this, and this is what we discussed in that last section, is it keeps our playhead mostly centered. So as I'm playing, I can zoom in and it'll put our playhead right in the middle. All right, so I'm going to drag our playhead somewhere to the beginning here.
It does not have to be exact. You do not have to copy my timestamps. Those things are unimportant.
But I'm going to hit A to cut. Select that first half. That's delete.
Now I'm going to hit space to play through this a little bit. Well, hello, crew. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make.
Perfect. I tapped A to make a cut. Now, a common question that gets asked early on is where do I cut things off?
At what point when I finish saying something, do I make this cut? And what I'd like to say is this. What I'm going to do is I'm going to hit shift and use my middle mouse button, excuse me, shift and the scroll wheel to expand our audio track here.
And this is a little exaggerated for the purpose of what we're doing, but it is nice to kind of visualize what I'm saying. Most of the times when somebody is speaking, there is a little tail at the end of their enunciation. This tail might look different depending on what's being said, but I would say 99 times out of 100, there's this little trail that carries through whatever the last word is that we said.
So what I would say is try to get your cut to be kind of close to where that tail ends. Doesn't have to be exact. But what will happen is if let's say I make a cut before there.
So like right here, I'll play this before I cut it off. So this is the talking section. Beginners make.
Looks like make is the final word. If I were to cut off somewhere right here, if I were to ripple delete this with F and you do not have to follow along here. I replay this.
Beginners make. Can you feel the abruptness? Maybe you can't.
Depending on where you cut off this tail, it can feel pretty jarring. So our goal is to leave that little bit. Shift and the scroll wheel to kind of recondense our audio waves here.
Now a skill I'd like you to try to form as we begin to work through this footage is looking at these audio waves and trying to determine what's going on. We can use our first clip as an example. You can see kind of the shape and the fullness here.
This is when somebody's speaking. Up ahead, we've got a lot of these little like blips. I would wager that it's me kind of grunting or making some noises or trying to start what I'm about to say.
Yeah, we don't need that. So I'm going to hit A here to make a cut. F is ripple delete.
We go ahead and play this forward. Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. Perfect.
A to cut. to do is we're going to continue to get rid of some of these like weird noises and some of these bad takes but before we do that i need to cover a very important editing concept slash technique so we are going to cover how to trim our footage and we're going to add it to our arsenal of techniques here inside davinci resolve and i'm going to do it working with just these first two little clips so i'm going to put my playhead on this cut hit d to zoom in a little bit I'm going to shift my playhead off just a smidgen.
And we need to talk about this right here, this cut point. Something I haven't done yet and something you might have experimented with is shifting this cut point. If I hold my mouse in between so that it's directly in between, you can see that it forms this bracket.
And so what I can do is I can shift this cut point around. Excuse me. This can be very useful for when we want to change when one video leads into the other or the audio as well.
So clicking the middle shifts that. If I move ever so slightly to the left, my icon changes to a single bracket with this filled rectangle. This allows me to drag the edge of our cut.
So if I wanted to get a little bit closer to where I start speaking here, I could again grab the edge and pull it over. Now we've got this gap in between. So what I could do is drag and select this, pull it over, or I'm going to hit control Z once.
Like I showed off in the last video, we can click the gap, hit F to ripple delete. That process that we went through is typically called trimming your footage because we're shaving off the edge of where things are beginning and ending. Now here's where some really important stuff comes in.
That process is a destructive process. Meaning that we cannot recover information if we change this cut point or we trim the edges. Let me show you what I mean.
You see this little blurb here where I say, hey, hey. Okay. If I were to take the cut point of this clip here and shift it over so that I get rid of the hey.
If I were to take this second clip and move it to the right. You notice how we don't regain that audio file. That's because when we put audio or video on top of existing audio or video, it overwrites it.
It does not store that information underneath. Again, if I were to take this clip right here, move it over to the left, release my mouse button, drag it over the right, you see how it deletes the existing footage? This can become very important because let's say I bring this over to the left and I go, well, my voice is getting cut off here.
I need to drag the edge over. Well, then in doing so, we've lost the beginning of this clip. Obviously, the quick fix is to kind of grab that edge here and pull over the left.
And then, you know, problem solved. But on bigger timelines, we want to avoid having this headache. So there is a very powerful tool built into DaVinci that handles this.
and it's called our trim mode. So if I go up to our editing toolbar here and I hover over this icon, this will toggle our mouse to go into the trim edit mode. Now, if you're using my keyboard shortcuts, I have mapped that to the shift and W button.
So you can either click this icon or hit shift and W to swap to the trim edit mode. Now, this is a very, very special tool and I'll show you why. If I were now to go to the edge of our clip here in the trim edit mode, watch what happens with our audio and video as I move this point.
It pushes it to the right. We're not overriding anything. We're pushing our footage away.
Vice versa, if I go to the left side, it's going to maintain our footage over here and push it out as well. So if you're ever in a situation where some part of your footage is cut off, what you can do is select the trim mode, go to the edge and then push it out so that we regain that information. And we don't override anything on the other side of the playhead.
Now the trim mode has a lot of really cool features. Like for example, if I were to click on our right clip here and I have my mouse just somewhere in the middle. Okay.
So it's not sitting on any of the borders or the edges I can. slide the footage so that our cut points remain the same, but the in and out points of our media shift. So if I wanted our audio to be closer to this edge, well, I can slip it that way.
Very useful, very powerful tool. To get back to the normal selection mode, you can either hover over the mouse and click it, or I have it mapped to W. So for us to toggle between these two modes, we can either hit shift and W to go to our trim mode.
or just hit W to go to our normal selection mode, and then we can use the normal selection functions. Again, big takeaway here, moving our footage is a destructive process. In DaVinci Resolve, when you move clips or assets on top of each other on the same track, it overwrites it, it deletes it.
We are now getting more comfortable with our keyboard shortcuts. We know how to trim and edit our footage, and now we need to finish the rough cut of our edit. With that said, let's continue to edit.
So I'm going to reset this up so that we're at a similar point. Okay. So now we've got our two clips here and let's continue to play through things.
Well, hello crew. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make.
Ah, you might've missed it the first time, but these two clips are saying the exact same thing. So we've got two takes of the same line. This will be a decision that we have to make later on down the road.
Until then, I'm going to cut off the edge of this footage here. We can either hit A and F, or we could just grab the end and pull her in. Let's click this gap here, hit F to ripple delete.
And now we've got this big gap here where it doesn't look like anything's being said. As editors, our duties are to scrub through and get familiar with as much of the footage as possible. However, because we know this is a talking head video and I am supposed to be speaking, more than likely this is stuff that's not going to be used.
We should always double check by grabbing our playhead and scrubbing through here to make sure nothing's happening. But we can kind of move through this sequence confidently knowing that we'll probably need to get rid of this. So I'm going to hit A to make a cut, F to delete.
Let's go ahead and play through here.
Oh, messed up. Let's keep going. So a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make.
Oh, messed up again. Remember how I said a skill I'd like you to start forming is looking at audio waves and trying to predict what's going to happen ahead of time. You see how these two audio waveforms are very similar in my head, because I've been doing this for a little while.
I know that more than likely, these are probably the same things being said. And our options are one. One is a good take.
And one is a bad take. Two, they're both good takes that we could possibly use. Or three, it is the same take and I messed up on both of them.
We're ending up with option three here. So what I can do is after both of them, hit A, F to delete. If for some reason you feel like you need to go back and regain that take, well, lucky for you, we can use that trim mode.
So I could hit shift and W to swap to trim mode, click our clip here, go to the edge and push it out till we regain it. Now, as I'm scrubbing through the footage as well, you know how you can kind of hear it in the background? That's because audio scrubbing is turned on.
If you do not like that, there is a way to turn it off. Go up top to the very upper menus over here. Click timeline.
And then we're going to find the audio section and then audio scrubbing. So I have it mapped to shift S to turn it on and off. So if you don't want it, you can just toggle it off.
But sometimes I like it just to kind of preview what's being said. All right. So again, we don't need these two sections.
So I'm going to go to the beginning here. Hit A to make a cut. That's a delete.
And the only thing I'm keeping in mind when I'm cutting ahead of the clips is to make sure I'm not cutting off the head of the audio. The preciseness, again, it doesn't matter to too much. Let's go ahead and play.
So a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make is that they focus on the spectacle of the edit over the story of the edit. Perfect. And now looking ahead, we got this short little blip.
Is it likely that this is a good take? No, but we'll go ahead and play it just in case. when we're talking about see there is always a chance because we don't know this audio we don't know what's being said we don't know if it's like a short exclamation so there is a chance that this is usable but more than likely editor brain's on probably don't need it let's go ahead and move forward when we're talking about the thing that really matt when we're talking about what really matters okay bloofed again a plus f see how often i'm pressing that a and f key So I cannot stress enough that you don't have to use the home row A, S, D, and F, but you should find some keyboard shortcuts that you are comfortable with that you use over and over.
Anyways, let's carry on. When we're talking about what really matters the most at the end of the day, it's the message being told in the video, not what kind of effects you can include. Perfect.
Make a cut. Drag my playhead forward. Cut.
Plus F. Something else a lot of beginning editors are uncomfortable doing is letting a... Cut.
Something else a lot of beginning editors are uncomfortable with is cutting naturally. Okay, perfect. This is a bad take.
We'll go ahead and ripple delete it. Now, sometimes what I'll do as well when I'm sorting through footage is if I hit S to zoom out a little bit, we've still got a little chunk to work through. And sometimes you can kind of lose track of where you're at in that edit.
So sometimes what you'll catch me doing is if I hit D to zoom in, I'll just bring whatever that last little clip is that I edited and I'll bring it up a track. Just so I know for myself, hey, I've made it at least this far. Stuff to the left has been sorted through.
Quick note though, when I drag footage up and down, you see how there's this hovering timestamp? That's the amount of seconds plus frames it's been shifted. So if I were to drag it up and go to the right, you see how we're adding frames and seconds, go to the left, frames and seconds.
So you wanna make sure it's at zero, zero. And if yours isn't snapping, the edges so see how my it kind of like snaps in when i get close to an edge make sure this magnet icon is toggled on sometimes it can get turned off if you accidentally press the i think is it mapped to yeah it's mapped to the end key if you accidentally press n or click it for whatever reason so just make sure that's turned on i'm gonna bring this oh no wait i want it up i want it up all right editor brain turned on i bet that this uh is this like an um Sure is.
So as you continue to get better and better, a lot of times what you'll see me do is just kind of scrub past it. A F something else. Something else.
A lot of beginning editors feel like that. Something else. Okay.
A F bad take something else. A lot of beginning editors do often is the overuse of prebuilt in transitions until you're more comfortable with how you should edit a video. I did avoid using some of those presets.
Perfect. Nicely said, Brandon. We'll make a cut here.
And the last thing that I want to talk about is, and one of the last things I want to talk about. Okay. Bad take.
A, F. Can I see the rhythm that we're getting into? One of the last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video.
Your audio makes up 50 % of any video edit. So you should spend as much time as possible. Huh.
Okay. So looks like we got a good sentence out. things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video your audio makes up 50 % of any video edit so you should spend as much time as possible hmm don't finish the second half so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make a cut here and I'm gonna drag it up one track I'm looking over to the right and I'm seeing that the audio waveforms don't quite match what's being said here so just in case I need to use this first half I don't want to delete this yet There's the chance that we need to get rid of it, but as of right now, not sure I want to get rid of it.
Now I have a little horizontal mouse wheel, which just lets me do this, which is pretty fun. A lot of mouses don't have that. So if you ever want to scroll left and right, the hot key is control plus middle mouse button, and that'll let you move left and right.
Or you can always click ahead, S to zoom out, D to zoom in, and that'll recenter your playhead. All right, editor brains turned back on again, right? if i'm looking at this little section of audio waves we've got a couple of little short blips here that are more than likely not going to be useful so if i was editing this video for real what i would do is this scrub forward i go yep not good quick decision boom boom if you're not comfortable doing that continue to play it your audio the audio The more times you do this, the more confident you'll get with making quick decisions on what to keep and remove.
When in doubt, you know, take your time. But either way, we do need to select this. F, ripple delete.
The audio of the video accounts for over 50... The audio of the... Don't need any of this.
A, F. The audio of the video accounts for 50 % of the final edit. So you should spend just as much time working with your audio as you do working with the video.
Perfect. Nicely done, Brandon. Okay, so where does this sentence start?
The audio of the video accounts for 50 % of the final edit. The audio of the video accounts for 50 % of the final edit. Where does this video start?
Excuse me, where does this clip start? One of the last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. Your audio makes up 50%.
Ah. see this is why we made this step to bring this up a track in case we needed to use it see the beginning of this clip leads into what i'm saying here because when i was recording i forgot to say this first sentence so what i'm going to do is scrub forward zoom in i'm going to make a cut right before the uh the second part of the clip select it f ripple delete And now if I were to play this, it should sound somewhat cohesive.
I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. The audio of the video accounts for perfect. How did I know to do that?
Well, I have the benefit of having recorded this video, so I know how I tend to speak and talk. So if you're not sure that's going to work, just keep it, keep it. We can come back and refine things later, but I'm trying to save us as many iterations as possible.
So. Again, if you're not sure, leave it in there. You can always remove things later on.
But we're just trying to train our editor's brains to start making some of these confident decisions earlier on. All right. Drag my playhead over.
I'm going to use my horizontal mouse wheel. Again, you can use control or command and the scroll wheel. Editor brains turned on.
These two waveforms are looking very similar. So I would wager that this is a boof. Hope this helps you guys and excited to talk more about some.
Yep. And we flubbed it. So scrub forward.
a f video hope this helps and excited to talk more about editing perfect a f if i were to hit s to zoom out i'm going to hold shift and the scroll wheel to bring in our video tracks a little bit clean it up bring our playhead back to the beginning zoom in with d a couple times and now we have a rough cut of our edit is this a good cut of our edit no But could you, if you had to, send this to somebody to take a look at?
Yeah, for sure. We've gotten rid of all the gaps. We've gotten rid of all the mess ups.
And now we have a somewhat cohesive take of our talking head example. So the next step is to continue to refine this and make it a good edit. We finished our rough cut of the edit.
And the next step is to make a more presentable version of the video. So before we do that, what I'd like to do is quickly review where we're at and some of the things that we're going to look for. to add to the video and to remove from the video to improve it before we come up with our final delivery.
Now, depending on the size of the video and the editor that you're talking to, this stage of the cut will be tagged different things. Some people will call it the rough cut. Some people will call it an assembly cut.
Some people will just even call it the selects of your edit. And typically the first pass is the least fun part of the editing process, but we've done it. And now we have our working cut.
So what I'd like to do is talk through a couple of things. One of the first things that I like to try to keep in mind is the total length of the video as is. So up in the top left corner by our preview window here is the timestamp of the total timeline length.
So right now we're about 57 seconds, which is a little under a minute, which I think is great for this project. Next thing that I'm going to do is play the video from beginning to end so that we continue to familiarize ourselves with the footage and the direction that we're going in. And then we can talk through what we're going to add into the video.
All right, let's go ahead and play from the beginning. Well, hello, crew. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make.
Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. That's right. We've got more than one take here.
Now, there are a few different ways to handle multiple takes, and this becomes more of a pressing issue later down the road if you're working on a film set that has one, two, three, four, ten different takes. But for us, we just need to pick between the two. So I don't think there's a wrong or right answer here.
But what I would like you to do is pick one that you feel like is a stronger version of that opening sentence. Well, hello, crew. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make.
Hey. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. I think I personally like the second take because it's saying the same thing in less words and we get into the rest of the video a little bit faster.
So what I'm going to do is select our first take and hit F to triple delete. Now again, let's play this video from beginning to end. Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make.
So a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make is that they focus on the spectacle of the edit over the story of the edit. When we're talking about what really matters the most at the end of the day, it's the message being told in the video, not what kind of effects you can include. Something else a lot of beginning editors are uncomfortable with is cutting naturally.
Something else a lot of beginning editors do often is the overuse of pre -built -in transitions. Until you're more comfortable... Okay, and see, this is why we play our video from beginning to end, because it looks like in the selection process, I didn't catch this duplicate take of me saying, it's something that doesn't transition well into the rest of the video right so if we play this section again something else a lot of beginning editors are uncomfortable with is cutting naturally something else a lot of beginning editors do often is the overuse of pre -built -in transitions so what we can do is get rid of this unneeded segment let's go ahead and start playing all the way through again it's the message being told in the video not what kind of effects you can include Something else a lot of beginning editors do often is the overuse of pre -built -in transitions.
Until you're more comfortable with how you should edit a video, I'd avoid using some of those presets. And one of the last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. The audio of the video accounts for 50 % of the final edit.
So you should spend just as much time working with your audio as you do working with the video. Hope this helps and excited to talk more about editing. Perfect.
And so now we have one cohesive message throughout the now 46 seconds of video. As editors, what are some things that we should start being conscious of now? Well, for one, we need to start thinking about the pacing of the video.
The pacing of a video is a broad stroke term for How fast or slow does the video continue to carry out as you play it? Are things being said quickly?
Is there time in between scenes? Are we letting certain shots linger for a long amount of time? Are we cutting very quickly?
Depending on the video or the subject matter, a certain rhythm to the video might be more appropriate than another. The pacing is very much so a feel thing, and it's something that I'll try to continue to hammer home on as we continue to progress through the course. The next couple of things that I'm starting to think about are a lack of audio underneath.
So there's no music. We have no sound effects to kind of highlight certain things and certain emotions throughout the video. And there's also no visual references throughout the video to highlight some of the things that are being said.
Typically, additional footage to the main footage is called B -roll. And the primary footage that is driving the video forward is the A roll. So what we've done is come up with a cut of our A roll.
And now we need to start thinking about, is there ways to introduce B roll to highlight some of the things that are being said? And these are the big ticket issues that we need to address. The next step is to add in.
assets to the video meaning music sound effects and b -roll and the art of choosing your assets is almost as big of a skill as learning how to edit itself i think a lot of editors will tell you that the procurement process of acquiring footage and music and sound effects can be more time consuming than actually coming up with the edit.
But lucky for you guys, I've already gone through and acquired the music and sound effects that we're going to use throughout the course. Now, with all that said, I'd like to introduce you guys to the media page inside DaVinci Resolve. We're not going to spend too much time on it, but it is nice to know where it is and how to use it.
So thus far, we have been living over here in the edit page, but don't you forget, we've got all these other tools here inside DaVinci Resolve. So let's go ahead and meander on over to the media page. Now, depending on you and your workflow, you might not spend a lot of time in the media page or you might spend a ton of time in the media page.
The media page is essentially set up to sort through and bring in footage, audio assets, images, et cetera, et cetera. The bottom half here is our media pool. So this is everything that we have currently imported into our working project.
So we can cycle through our folders just like we could on the edit page. And if I wanted to, I could double click on some of the footage and we can preview it here in our media pool. Quick aside, I have the audio muted here so that it doesn't get in the way of me speaking.
If you do ever want to mute and unmute stuff, you can just click the speaker icon or you can right click. And now you have a volume bar. But I'm going to go ahead and keep this muted.
Something else that's kind of a fun tool, and you might have seen this on the edit page, is this little circle with two arrows on the left and right side of it. This is your jog wheel. So you've seen me grab my playhead and move it left and right here to quickly scrub through the footage.
But if you want to do a little bit more fine tuning, you can click and hold the jog wheel and move your mouse right and left. And now you have a little bit more fine control. I guess I should say in your preview here.
This is what I really want to show you guys in the top left corner here. This is where we can preview and import footage. In the upper left here, all your connected drives.
You can see I've got a few, including Mr. Burger, who is somebody I am working with right now. If you click on one of these drives, so if I click on my D drive, which is my media drive.
And I have this nice juicy folder over here in my D drive that's called my stock media folder. And inside this folder is everything I've ever downloaded to work on a video ever. And for the most part, so I've got music, stock footage, visual effects, whatever.
If you can think of it and it goes in a video, it belongs right in here. So just like a file explorer on Windows or Mac, you can go ahead and open up your various folders and I can go find my audio folder. And then we can even click on something like sound effects.
And I can go to my save sound effects over here. And I've got a bunch of folders of random various sound effects. And one of the fun ones to look through is the whooshes.
So if I click on my whooshes folder, we can begin to preview some of the whooshes that I have saved here. So if I unmute my audio here, I can drag my mouse over to preview it. If you don't like the mouse dragging preview, which for me sometimes gets in the way of me just kind of scrubbing through stuff.
In your preview window, there's three dots in the upper right -hand corner. If you click those and then uncheck live media preview, now you can kind of scrub through things without it instantly playing. But I can double click on any one of these to preview it.
And where this is nice is if I have something that I find that I'd like to use. So let's say I click here. And I like that little whoosh.
What I can do is go to my pre -created sound effects folder that we already created, click there, and I can drag and pull it in. And so a lot of times in the beginning of edits, what we'll end up doing is we'll come up with a rough cut and then we might sort through some of our assets that we have that we've either been provided or that we've gone and downloaded ourselves.
try to procure which we want to use in our video now you guys are going to have access to the sound effects so i'm going to hit ctrl z so that we're all working with the same stuff and the last thing that i'd like to call out here that is personally my favorite feature of the media pool is there's this little section over here on the left where it says favorites if i grab this middle bar and bring it up so you guys can see it a little better you see i have four folders saved here that i call all the time And so for you, you know, if you have your stuff saved on the C drive, you can see that sometimes it can be a little bit of a nuisance to find the right folders.
So if there is one that you use all the time, you can always right click on that folder and add folder to favorites and then it'll locate it over here. So now what I can do is I can go over to my audio tab and then I have all my music and sound effects right there. So then I can quickly go through.
find some of the different music tracks that I have saved and preview them on the fly.
Pretty neato, right? And so again, if this is a track that I'd like, I can just drag and select it and pull it down into our media pool. And so the next steps that we're going to take is we're going to introduce some of these audio items into our video.
A very common question at this stage in the video edit is, which do I do first? audio or add b -roll and I think what you'll find as you continue to edit is that It kind of doesn't matter. It's gonna make more sense for instance if you're working on a music video to Add the music first, but when you're working on like I mean, you know like a documentary It might make more sense to structure the video and the b -roll before you begin to add in music and sound effects.
But what ends up happening a lot of times is you'll do one and then you'll have to adjust the other. And it's kind of like a little bit of a back and forth game. But for us, we're going to start with some audio.
Let's get some audio in the mix. All right here. So we left off on the media page.
So let's bounce on back over to the edit page. And depending on what folder you clicked on in the media page is where your media pull will start in the edit page. So the first thing that I'd like us to do is to pick an audio track to use.
And we've got three here. Now, if you muted your audio in the last section, make sure it is unmuted so that we can preview our audio. And what I'd like you to do is one of two things.
One, I'd like you to preview the music and make a decision on which one you'd like to introduce. And there's two ways to do that in DaVinci Resolve. The first way to do that, if you remember right, a few videos ago, we actually collapsed our video player here into one viewer.
So we can undo that. by going up to the top right and clicking the split rectangle here to get back our second preview window and this preview window is specifically set to preview footage in your media pool so i can double click on anything in my media pool to preview it here on the left while maintaining the imagery from our timeline on the right so we can do is begin to preview our music by hitting the spacebar Now by default, most music is normalized or has their audio level max to the max level.
So it might be pretty loud when you preview it. If it is coming in a little bit loud, you can always adjust your volume over here by dragging it over to the left just a little bit so your eardrums aren't completely smashed out.
So that's one way we can preview our music. The other way would be, again, I just like working with one window at a time. I'm going to...
re -collapse this left window here by going over again to the upper right and clicking our giant rectangle and now we can just double click instead to preview whatever is in our media pool that being said we do lose what's happening over here in our timeline but for simpler edits and simpler videos there's often not a need to have both up at the same time and i will show you when it is appropriate to have both and when it makes a little bit more sense but i like just having one window again it's completely up to you there's not a wrong answer here so let's go ahead and preview our audio okay so this is kind of like a lo -fi track now a question that might have formed in your noggin over there is uh how do i know which one of these is is good as we begin playing through them well listen to me you're gonna have to make a choice an informed choice remember editing is a creative field so you can have some creative liberty for what makes sense there's going to be more appropriate choices for music and sound effects
uh as opposed to others right so like if we're doing a a sad emotional scene it's probably not going to make sense to have some kind of like thumping edm music in the background but like i've said once and i'll continue to say throughout this course there's not there's not a correct answer it's just what makes sense to you so if you're looking for a little bit of guidance into what kind of song should you begin looking for well again we have to think about the overall message of the video what is being said in this segment and what kind of audio is going to feel appropriate so if i were to click my mouse back on the timeline we're going to lose our preview but remember this video is me talking about some basic editing mistakes so the music that we choose to use shouldn't feel intrusive we will probably just want something that sits in the background that just fills in some of the gaps in between the talking points so i'm going to double click on that lo -fi song again to continue to preview it
and i kind of like the rhythm in that song oftentimes as well when i'm previewing music what you can kind of do and again remember we're trying to train ourselves with recognizing waveforms is i'll kind of skim ahead to moments where the beat kicks in or there's a needle drop moment so you can kind of see here the regularity of the waveform increases and right around here is probably where the main verse of the song kicks in so i'll kind of scrub over to here Perfect.
Make him a little mental note of that. Let's check out on the last song. I'm going to double click it.
So again, when I immediately pull this up, the thing I noticed is we've got two kind of driving moments here where there's a lot of stuff going on and then kind of like a down moment. So I'll probably preview a snippet in here and then a snippet in here to see how each sounds. And if I didn't call it out earlier, unfortunately, you can't drag and move the playhead in this.
main working area you have to use this upper section here to scrub through the song you can also use this little bit down here and the jog wheel just like we talked about in the last section so i'm going to go ahead and hit play and right away this is a lot more upbeat than that lo -fi track that we were using Okay, I think I've got a general gist of what that sounds like.
Let me go ahead and click forward to see what this little area sounds like.
Interesting. Okay, so each of these songs brings a slightly different vibe and energy. So what should we use?
We've got this one called Cinematic Documentary Soft Background.
Got a lo -fi song And the soft background music To me personally this last track sounds a little bit more like it's a news update and the cinematic one sounds like it's meant for a Documentary, I don't know if it quite fits the tone that I'm looking for There's something about it that invites a little bit more drama that I think that I'm looking for.
So I'm going to bring in the lo -fi background. To do so, well, we just go to our media pool. We go to that file and we're going to drag and drop it in.
And what you're going to kind of see me do is drag and swing it around over here because I don't want to happen chance to overwrite some of the dialogue. So what can happen and don't follow this step is you bring in your music, you go here and then you go shoot. So what I'm going to do is go ahead and drag our song, swing it down and around.
A common follow -up question when it comes to importing music and sound and footage even is what if I don't want the whole thing? So obviously we're not going to use all two minutes and 13 seconds of the song. So what if I only want it to go up to here?
Well, what you can do is set in and out points on any of the media in your media pool. O is for out. And see how our player preview gets cut off short here.
If I were to drag my playhead to the left, I is for in. So I equals in, O equals out. And if you're currently previewing that media, you can also just drag and pull down from the media preview itself and see how we have a much smaller snippet here.
I'm gonna go ahead and hit backspace again. And the reason why I'm not hitting F, remember F is ripple delete. When I hit F, it's gonna look to ripple delete, this entire segment from left to right so watch what happens see how it shifts everything over to the left so we got to be careful with our rippling and our deleting make control z again select our music track backspace to get rid of it i'm going to double click the song preview again how do we reset our in and out points well we're going to hit alt plus i and alt plus o The alt key is a modifier.
I'm not sure if I've mentioned it yet, but we will talk more about modifiers later in the future. So again, I equals in, O equals out. Alt plus I resets the end point.
Alt plus O resets the out point. All right, let me go ahead and redrag in our music track here. I'm going to go to the end of our video and then hit A to cut.
Now you notice here that I didn't actually have the song selected before I do that. if you don't have a particular file selected when you go to make a cut it will cut every single track so watch as i hit a it's going to make a cut on everything so with that said we just need to make sure we're intentional with our cuts now moving forward that we have multiple tracks and more than one thing happening and hit ctrl z a couple times and then delete this back portion of the music I'm going to bring my playhead all the way back to the beginning.
And before I begin to preview what we have right now, you're probably already wagering that this is going to be too loud. Look at how big the waveforms are compared to our voice. If I were going to play this, the music is going to come in so stinking strong and loud that we're not going to be able to hear anything.
So again, I have my audio over here lowered a little bit so that I don't blow out my eardrums, but I'm going to go ahead and hit play. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. so a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make is that they focus on and wow can you sure hear the song now okay so what volume level should our audio be with my music track selected i'm going to go ahead and look to the up right here to our inspector tab now remember this inspector tab is what controls the video and audio properties so if i were to click on a video track go to the inspector tab and if yours isn't open it's this upper right icon over here that says inspector on it On one of our video clips, I can go over to the video tab and we have all of our video properties, right?
So we've got the zoom, we've got the position, et cetera, et cetera. I click these little reset icons to reset that. When I click the audio track here, we don't have a video tab because there, well, there's no video, but we do have this very big and important slide over here called volume.
We're not going to worry about any of these other intimidating looking things down here. We're just going to look at the volume. Now you see here how it says zero.
Well, that might not quite make sense because obviously we have sound. Our volume is not at zero. Well, what I'd like you to do is this.
Up in the upper right hand corner over here, click the mixer icon. Now, I can't remember what the default opener is, but you might have one of two things. It might say mixer or meters.
I would like us to just look at the meters. So if you have the mixer on first open. Go to these three dots right next to it and turn it on meters Now we have a one single bar over here to the right now It might be a bit hard to see but at the very very tip top of this bar You see how it says zero most of the time when we're talking about audio the way that it is Produced is it's normalized on a tippy top max of zero anything that goes past zero peaks the audio and it's when you get that like real crunchy squealy noise and so what that basically means is that when we're working with audio zero is the max if we want to lower audio we need to subtract and bring the audio down so if i were to bring my playhead all the way to the left and play this you see how we clip this zero mark which means our music is going past the zero point, which is bad.
We do not want that. So again, how loud do we make our music? Well, let me open up my handy dandy, very official whiteboard.
There are going to be three very general volume ranges that we can sit in depending on what we'd like to do. If we want our audio to be the primary driver of the video, meaning music video, a montage.
The audio is the thing that is making the video happen. We can go anywhere from, I would say, minus three decibels to minus 10 decibels. What's decibel?
Well, a decibel is the unit of measurement here for our audio. So when we're subtracting volume here, we are doing it in terms of decibels. So it's not just a random floating number here.
These are decibels. If we would like our audio to be complimentary, meaning something that is heard but isn't quite as loud as our primary audio, we're going to go anywhere from minus 12 to I will go minus 21 dB. This volume range is definitely still going to be heard by the viewer, but it's not going to be in a way as much as when we're up in this range.
If we want background music. So something that is not in the way but can still fill in some of the dead spaces of our video, we're going to shoot for the minus 30 dB range. We can go a little above and below this, but minus 30 dB is going to be our happy space.
So what I would like you guys to do is with our volume track selected, you can either type in in the inspector tab minus 30 or hit control Z, click and hold this property. so again i am left clicking and holding and drag this to the left until you hit minus 30 or what you can do hit ctrl z once is go over to the music track itself in the timeline and it's going to be a bit tricky to see but there's this little floating white line right here and when your mouse hovers over the icon changes to two up and down arrows and you can drag the volume down directly on the timeline Now it's pretty fast when you do so.
So if you'd like to slow down how much it changes, we can hold down the shift key to add a little granularity when we're changing the volume. And now our music is going to sound like this. And I would recommend having headphones on because if you're on speakers, it might be a little difficult to hear the music.
Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make is that they focus on the spectacle of the edit over the story of the edit. So see how in moments like this where there's just little little pauses between the things that are being said the music kind of fills that gap.
That's what we want. The music isn't the focus here. What I'm saying is the focus and we want to make sure we're hearing what I'm saying.
What I suggest doing in your own time is changing the audio level of the music track here and seeing how it affects the understandability of what I'm saying. I'd also suggest changing where the music starts. Because if you remember, this section right in here is where the main beat of the song kicks in.
When I say kicks in, all I mean is that it's starting right there, right? Where a lot more of the instruments are coming into play. I increase the volume level a little bit so I make sure I can hear the song.
do often is the overuse right it's right in here is the overuse of so what i can do is i can make a cut here on the music track exactly where the beat kicks in and then i can shift this point around to see how it affects the video so if i wanted to i could actually have the beat kick in much closer to the the beginning portion so i could drag this over to the left grab the left handle pull it over grab the right handle extend it and then let's what happens if i were to leave this at minus 18 right so somewhere in between this minus 12 and minus 21 range hey let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make so a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make is that they focus on the spectacle of the edit over the story of the edit so you can still hear what's being said but the music becomes a much bigger presence of the video so again experiment Play with these things.
See what makes sense to you. Remember, the whole point of this section in particular, this course, is to just experiment and figure out how things affect one another. So with that said, what I am going to do is I'm going to bring this down back to minus 30 because I would like this to be backing audio.
Again, I'm holding down the shift key to fine tune. It doesn't have to be exact. Minus 30 .27 is just fine.
And now we're ready to move on. And would you look at that? I've got headphones on.
So we've got music down. Next thing is we're going to try to fine tune our pacing. And the way that we're going to do that is with one of the most important editing techniques you will learn in this course and in your lifetime, okay?
And I'm talking about J and L cutting. If you're already familiar with this, fantastic. If not, one of the most common questions I get is how do I make smooth transitions or smooth cuts?
And there's a lot of different answers to that, but my go -to is teaching people how to do J and L cutting. So what I'm going to do is show you a quick demonstration of what it is and then how we apply it to our own videos. Cool?
Cool. Let's do it. This next bit is...
purely for demonstration. You guys do not have access to this footage. I would just like you guys to watch and follow along as I explain what a J and L cut is.
We have two clips here. I have an airplane flying and an airplane landing. As is the transition from this left flying clip to the right landing clip is a standard cut.
Sometimes this is called a jump cut. So if I were to hit play, it sounds and looks like this.
Now the transition as is isn't awful, but we can apply a J and L cut to strengthen this transition. So what I would like to do is I would like to preview this landing audio before we actually cut to the plane landing. And the way that we do that.
is as follows. Now there is more than one way to do a J and L cut, but this is the simplest approach I have found. I'm going to take the left clip and drag it up one track.
Oh, but let me get rid of this subtitle track real quick. I forgot I had that. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the landing clip and slide it underneath the other clip.
Now what's going to happen when I play this? Well, we are going to see the flying video all the way through to the end of the clip But we're going to preview the audio before we transition to this scene.
And that's going to look something like this.
now this audio getting cut off abruptly makes this feel a tad bit jarring so what i'm going to do is on the music track when i hover at the edge in the upper corners and i can do this on any video you'll see these little white tabs if i grab that i can fade out the audio so let me go ahead and replay that as viewers our mind is being primed for some kind of change that's happening in the next scene.
We don't know what it is yet, but we're beginning to hear audio from something that's happening in the future. So now when we make this cut, this transition going from flying to landing, we're already primed and geared to see the plane landing. Again, if I were to go full screen, that's going to look and sound something like this.
Isn't that pretty cool? It's much smoother than if we were to just go from A to B with nothing in between. Now in traditional forms of editing, what this ends up looking like is something like this.
I'll grab this video track up here, pull it down. If we were to look at this cut point, we form a J. So this is a J cut.
A J cut in video editing is when we preview and lead in with audio from the upcoming scene. An L cut is the opposite of this. So if I were to hold down the alt key and drag our cut point over here.
So now what's going to happen is we're not going to preview the audio of the upcoming scene, but we're going to lead out with the audio from the previous scene. And that looks and sounds something like this.
And again, if we were to look at this transition point, we have an l that forms here when and where do we use j and l cuts well let's go ahead and talk about that so we're now back on our main working timeline here with our music and our talking head footage and and what we're going to do is we're going to begin to introduce j and l cutting to help with the pacing of the video here you don't have to follow along but you can choose to if you'd like to what i'm going to do is i'm going to drag and select these first two clips right here and all i'd like to do is hit ctrl c scrub my playhead ahead to any random point outside of our main working area and hit control V to paste them.
So control C is copy, control V is paste. I'm going to move my playhead over here, hit D to zoom in, and then use my horizontal scroll wheel to bring these two things in. What I'd like us to do is to begin to string together these different sentences and thoughts so that it feels more cohesive because as is, there's noticeable gaps in between.
So if I were to play this, lot of beginners make so a mistake that a lot of beginning again hey let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make so a mistake that a lot of it is okay to have natural pauses and dialogue however we do want to keep things moving along there shouldn't be a moment in the video where there is a hiccup right there's like a noticeable like a lull in the video so what we can do is drag up this left track drag the right track and Pull it underneath.
Where? Well, let me click my playhead here so I can zoom in. Remember how we were saying that after every sentence or break in words, there's a little tail, right?
There's a little tail in the audio. And again, I'm hitting shift in the scroll wheel to expand my music tracks. We want to keep this audio tail because otherwise, if we cut it off, the audio will feel, it'll feel cut off.
So what I like to do is try to line up the head or the beginning of the next audio phrase so that it sits somewhere on this tail. Where? Well, it's very dependent on the flow of the dialogue, but let's go ahead and play this as is.
Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make. That's not bad.
What if I were to bring it even further? Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of beginners...
Ooh. A little bit more punchy. It's sounding a little bit more intrusive.
What if I were to bring it out a little bit? Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of beginning editors...
Interesting. So where should you put it? I don't know.
It's time for you to start making some decisions on how you want the pacing and the feeling of the video to sound. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring it forward just a little bit. So if you were looking to imitate me...
The head of this audio is sitting somewhere in the tail of this one. It's kind of a middle point. So again, it's going to sound something like this.
Editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of... Quick pop quiz.
What kind of transition is this? Remember, we're leading in with the audio from the next scene before we're seeing it. Give you three seconds.
J cut. This is a J cut. A J cut in particular is a...
very, very powerful tool when working with dialogue. It's how we can maintain the audio sanctity of the previous clip while also pushing along what's being said next. From here, I'm going to show you two techniques that we can use to fine tune this kind of transition, this cut, and then we'll begin applying it to our working timeline.
Through this next section, we're going to apply our J and L cutting and end up with a close to final version of our edit. As is, this is where the video portion, the visual portion transitions from this clip to this clip. Well, what if I would like the video to start here, right?
So I'd like it to start on this peak of the audio wave right here. There's two ways that we can go about doing this. The first is to use the Alt key to select just the video track.
The Alt key is a modifier inside DaVinci Resolve, or it would be the Option key if you're in Mac. When we're editing, if we only want to select just the audio or just the video of a given video and audio clip, we can use the Alt key to select one of those. So with just the video selected, I can grab that right end and pull it in.
Or what you can do is you don't even have to select the video track with just the Alt key. You can hold down the Alt key and drag just the end of it. Because if not if I were to select both the video and audio we're gonna get we're getting back to that territory We're cutting off the audio tail.
So Alt key drag and select the right end The alternative to this so I'm gonna hit ctrl Z and I'm not as big of a fan of this workflow But if it makes sense to you go ahead I'm gonna hold down the alt key and click just the video track again, right? So I'm just want the video track and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna drag it down so that they're both on the same track and now what we can do is grab the transition point and pull it over forming that more traditional J.
So that looks and sounds like this. Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make is, there we go.
Now let's go apply this to our timeline to improve the pacing of our video. I'm going to hit S to zoom out, shift and scroll wheel to make things a little bit more condensed. I'm going to get rid of these two practice clips by dragging and selecting them and hitting F or the backspace key to get rid of them.
Now, Back to the beginning. D to zoom in.
I'm going to begin to work with just our A -roll here, our talking head footage. While we're doing that, there might be moments where I go to cut and we accidentally cut our music track, which we don't want to do. I'd like to leave our music track alone as is.
So what we can do is this. Go ahead and direct your eyes over to the left over here. You might have noticed that each track has a few little icons next to it.
Each of these serves a very useful purpose. For example, if I wanted to mute the audio on this first track, what I can do is I can click the M button and now we only hear the background audio. Let me uncheck that real quick.
What if we've got 10 different audio tracks and we only want to hear this third one? Well, the button right next to it is called solo because we will solo that track.
Pretty nifty, right? You can also drag and hold down to select multiple tracks at one time. So if I want to unmute and mute all three tracks, I can drag and select up and down.
The icon next to that is the sync lock, which we're not going to address quite yet. But the final one is this lock icon. And when we click that, it locks this track from any changes and adjustments.
So if I were to hit A, I cannot cut the music track. And I can't move it either. So if we were to begin ripple deleting here, this track is locked in place for all adjustments.
So with the music track lock, let's go back to the beginning of our footage here and let's begin to do some J cutting. Here's my workflow. Anytime I'm transitioning from this clip to this clip, I will either drag the clip up so that I can begin to adjust the timings of the following clip, or I will go to the end and make an arbitrary cut on the tail portion.
Could be here. Could be here. Could be here.
Doesn't matter. I just need a chunk that I can bring up one level. So that way I can grab this clip and slide it underneath.
Here we go. Mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of beginning editors.
Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of beginning editors. Ah, problem.
We didn't move everything else over. Well, a couple solutions. For one, we could drag and select all the footage over here and pull it over.
For two, we could go to this little gap in here. Hit F to triple delete. Or what we can begin doing is using a new keyboard shortcut.
And for us, if you've downloaded my shortcuts, that button is E. E selects everything to the right of the playhead. So if I were to select E, I can pull everything over to the left.
If you are using the default keyboard, that button is going to be Alt plus Y or Option plus Y. So now what we're going to do is we're going to continue to clean up the timeline and improve the pacing. I'm looking to string sentences together.
So what I do is something like this. Click towards the end, hit play.
Okay, zoom in. I can probably get rid of this portion right here. Make a cut, F, so that I'm still seeing the tail.
And again, it might be hard to see on your guys' end, but I can see a little tail here. Make a cut on the tail portion. Pull it up.
Go to the right. And now I'm going to press E to select everything so that when I pull this next clip underneath, I'm grabbing everything. And it's just somewhere arbitrary.
Perfect. That sounds pretty good to me. In my mind, I'm just trying to line up head to tail.
Somewhere in there. Again, go over here. Now what kind of effects you can include.
Something else a lot of beginning hold this up II slide this underneath. Do you have to do this for every single cut? No, of course not party at control Z a couple times I could just snip off this little bit here so that we're starting right at the beginning of the dialogue So I could hit a F so that I'm really close to being right at the beginning What kind of effects you can include something else a lot of beginning and I think that works perfectly fine as well Again, no right answer here.
The thing that we're trying to do is just make better choices. Let's go ahead and hit play. Editors do often is the overuse of pre -built -in transitions.
Until you're more comfortable with how you should edit a video, I'd avoid using some of those presets. Perfect. A cut.
Another thing you could think about doing is in between these pauses here, if you want to make things a little bit tighter, see how there's a little bit of a delay? Until you're more comfortable. You could even think about making a J cut here, but I'm going to leave it alone as is.
Using some of those presets. And one of the last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. The audio.
Do we need a J cut in between here and here? I don't know. And one of the last things.
I think as is, it feels a little bit, it's pretty natural. Talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. The audio of the.
Here, I do want to make a little J cut. Why? Because I just feel like I kind of want this to punch in sooner.
A. Cut the tail off, drag up, E to select everything to the right, pull it in. ...is focusing on the audio of the video.
The audio of the video accounts for 50 % of the final edit. So you should spend just as much time working with your audio as you do working with the video. Hope this helps.
Make a little cut here. F. I think one of the big reasons why I like J cutting like this is because there's an element of forgiveness to the edit.
If you don't want to do this and if you want to make sure that... The beginning of this clip starts right at the beginning of the dialogue every time. Well, you got to be pretty precise there.
You need to bring your playhead right to that point right before the dialogue begins. Well, if I do J and L cutting, well, what I can do is I can just grab the tail here and then just pull this in somewhere, somewhere relatively close so that it feels somewhat smooth. But you notice how I'm not grabbing the ends here or grabbing the ends here.
I'm just moving things to where it feels okay. Hope this helps and excited to talk more about editing. Perfect.
I think we can actually cut it right there. And there's one last step. Our music carries on without any of the video.
So we need to trim the end of our music here. I'm going to go all the way over to the track three, unlock it, and then pull in the end of our music. And now we're sitting at 44 seconds.
And this is what our video looks and sounds like. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make is that they focus on the spectacle of the edit over the story of the edit.
When we're talking about what really matters the most at the end of the day, it's the message being told in the video, not what kind of effects you can include. Something else a lot of beginning editors do often is the overuse of pre -built in transitions. Until you're more comfortable with how you should edit a video, I'd avoid using some of those presets.
And one of the last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. The audio of the video accounts for 50 % of the final edit. So you should spend just as much time working with your audio as you do working with the video.
Hope this helps and excited to talk more about editing. Very nice crew. We're getting close to wrapping up this project.
All right. So we've got a pretty decent cut of our video. Now we've got music.
Our video is paced decently. Well, our next step is going to be to add in some visuals. some of the b -roll because for the entire video we are looking at one camera angle and one perspective it is just me looking right at you in the camera so let's add in some visual to add a little variety to uh helps kind of smooth things along on the spectacle of the edit over the story of the edit when we're talking about what really matters the most at the end of the day it's the message being told in the video not what kind of effects you can include So I think right in here, when I'm talking about not focusing on the spectacle and instead focusing on the message of the story, we can introduce some B -roll, probably right here on this cut.
So again, that's right in here. Editors make is that they focus on the spectacle of the edit over the story of the edit. When we're talking about what.
Yeah, I think right in here we can introduce some B -roll. So up in our media pool, I'm going to locate the B -roll folder, which is under our video folder. I'm going to click here.
And I've given us five videos that we can use. Wow. So how do we know what to use and where to put it?
Well, again, there's a few ways that we can go about doing this. We can always just individually preview our video by double clicking on it. And then we can kind of sort through and familiarize ourselves with what's been going on.
So it looks like we got some snow footage here. And I think my intent with this was to show you guys that in our main working section, I'm talking about how it's more important to show the story over spectacle. And so what I'd like to do is make a little mini story of the skiers in here and the mountains and this imagery, as opposed to this first video up top here, where I've just got some random moving snowboards.
Now here's a cool little trick and workflow technique that I'd like you guys to get in the hang of. So as is, I am much more familiar with the footage than you guys, because I picked it out. If you're somebody who's been given a bunch of footage, it's going to be pretty slow to individually click through everything to preview what the heck is going on in here.
So as always, there's a few techniques to do this, but one of the most straightforward ways is to do this. Drag and select all of your footage in the media pool, or you can hit control A to select everything in your B -roll folder or your B -roll bin, excuse me. Right click.
And the very top option for me says create new timeline using selected clips. Now, before I click that, remember, what is a timeline? Well, we've been working on our main timeline.
We've got one timeline right now. Well, in good old DaVinci Resolve, we can create multiple timelines to be working with multiple things all at once. So again, if I drag and select this footage, right click, create new timeline using selected clips, we can create a new timeline.
And remember how we set up our project settings over here? Well, now again, everything's all set up. So we don't need to go uncheck this and double check to make sure format and all that is all set up.
We just use our project settings and I'm going to rename this new timeline. We'll just keep it simple for now. B roll or B underscore roll.
Hey, create.
Now, earlier on, I turned on this. tabbed option over here so that I can see both my main timeline and my B -roll timeline. If you don't have that or you would like to now toggle this on, remember it's this little icon up over top here.
Click that and you want display stacked timelines. That'll let you toggle between our main timeline and our B -roll timeline. And now if I hit S to zoom out, we can see all of our footage at a glance.
Very cool. Very cool. Very cool.
So I'm going to tidy up our media pull really quick because we have a timelines folder. Remember, this is where our main timeline is at. So in the B -roll folder, it generates our timeline, which is indicated by this little, it's pretty small, but it's this little timeline icon in the bottom left corner.
I'm going to take that and drag and put it in our timelines bin. So now when I click the timelines folder, I can see both of our working timelines here. So I'm going to toggle over to the main timeline.
Hit play because I'm trying to remember where we wanted to insert some footage. let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make so a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make is that they focus on the spectacle of the edit over the story of the edit when we're talking right here i think i want to introduce some other video right here so what i'm going to do is i'm going to bring my playhead here click anywhere in the empty space make sure footage is not selected and i'm going to hit the m key and what that does is it adds a marker on our timeline here so that we can remember where to put our footage.
So that way you don't have to have perfect memorization skills. If you don't want to use M, there's always the marker icon up above here in our little editing toolbar. So let's find something that seems like it might fit.
We're looking for something that doesn't have spectacle. We're looking for something that might have a story behind it, maybe some character. Where my head goes are to these two skier clips right in here.
So I think what I'd like to do is take this clip. and bring it over into our main timeline. And now, can you guess what I'm about to say?
There's a few ways that we can do this. What I will say, and the wrong way to do this is this. Clicking on this clip, hitting control C to copy it, going back to the main timeline, and then pasting it on the marker.
That is going to overwrite everything that we've already laid out because we're pasting it here on the first track. So how do we not do that? Well, let me hit control Z.
So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show you how I would do this and then introduce different methods that might fit your own workflow. For me, what I would probably do is this. I would drag it up one track and one more track.
So that way it's already on the third track. I would hit control C to copy it, go over to the main timeline, hit control V to paste, and it's gonna paste it here on our third track. So now we have our footage.
Separated, ready to go. Alternatively, what I might do, so I'm going to hit backspace here to delete that, is I would look to bring it in from our media pool. Now, depending on the amount of footage you have, it might be easy to find this footage or it might be difficult.
If you're struggling to find this clip, well, what you can do is on your B -roll timeline, click the footage that you'd like to locate, make sure your playhead is over that footage. And then if you're using my keyboard shortcuts, we would hit Alt F. You'll see it highlights it here in our media pool.
And now what I can do, if I go back to my main timeline here, now that I know where my footage is at, I would drag it on down into the timeline. So those two methods are commonly what I do. Let me show you a couple other options that might make a little bit more sense to you.
Let me hit backspace here. So again, what I did is I brought this up to the track that I'd like it to be on. Hit control C and then control V to paste it here.
Or I would locate it in my media pool and then drag and insert it down. Now if you don't want to bring it up to a third track every time you want to copy and paste something from one timeline To another what you can do is this and this is kind of a fun one in the upper right hand corner of our timeline Working area. There's this little plus icon right here.
See it's got a little plus with the window pane if I click that Whoa, it splits our timeline viewer into two timeline viewers. Now. This might be a little advanced but what we can do is close our b -roll timeline there and open it down here and if i use shift in the scroll wheel to shrink things and reposition my timelines so that i can see both well now i have two working timelines at the same time this is a very powerful technique you will probably need to have an okay computer in order to do this but now what i can do is instead of tapping between the two i can just click this one clip Hit control C, click up to this timeline.
And again, hit control V. But again, remember that I brought this up to track three so that it pasted over on track three. I'm going to control Z to undo that.
And you can actually split your timeline workspace into as many timelines as you want. I would, I'd probably caution doing over more than two. And if you would like to close a certain window again, over in the right over here, there's an X icon now so that I can close that.
If I'd like to reopen that B -roll timeline, well, I just need to go to my Timelines folder and open up the B -roll timeline. And there we go. Shift and the scroll wheel to expand these back out so that it's a little bit more visible.
And let me go back to the main timeline here. Now, the last option, and this is more of a professional technique, but I'd like to show you just so that you're aware of it. Go to my B -roll folder here.
Find that B -Scare 2 footage that I'd like to use. And there's a set of icons over here in our editing toolbar that are designed to insert footage from our media pool. So we've got this first one here that says insert clip, overwrite, and replace clip.
We're going to avoid using the replace clip for now, but if I were to look at these first two, insert and overwrite, if I were to click this footage here and then click the insert option, you can see that it inserts it where my playhead was at. So again, control Z to undo, control shift Z to redo. See how it inserts and shifts everything around?
If I were to click this other button here, overwrite clip, well, instead of inserting it and shifting everything around, it completely squashes everything underneath it. So how do we make this button work so that it goes over here on track three? Well, let me hit control Z, done, do that.
Over here on our video tracks, we've got a few icons, just like the audio tracks when we covered there. All the way over to the left, there's this little blue V1 icon. Now, depending on what version of DaVinci Resolve you're on, this might look a little bit different.
If you're on an older version, it might be a red rectangle outlined V1. But wherever this lives is where my footage gets inserted when I click that icon. So if I bring it up to video track three and hit the overwrite button.
Now our video gets inserted on track three. If you choose to do this, you just need to be conscious of where this button lives. But now we have our B roll and we can begin to add the rest of our footage to fill out this talking head portion.
Let's continue to carry on with adding in the rest of our B roll. And we're also going to finally take a look at that effects tab and some video transitions. So let's go ahead and hit play.
When we're talking about what really matters the most at the end of the day, it's the message being told in the video, not what kind of effects you can do. Not what kind of effects you can do. So I'd like to insert our snowboard scene right here, right on the peak of my audio.
A to cut this B roll footage, backspace to delete. I'm going to go up top to our media pool here because I know what footage I'm looking for. There's no need for me to tab over the timeline.
I'm going to drag and select and drop in that footage. Perfect. Let's carry on.
When we're talking about what really matters the most at the end of the day, it's the message being told in the video, not what kind of effects you can include. Something else a lot of beginning editors do often is the overuse of pre -built -in transitions. Until you're more comfortable.
Okay, so something else beginner editors do is use pre -built -in transitions. I think we're going to need to introduce some more footage in here. But where?
Where do we insert it? Well, what feels right? Where is there a natural lull to where we can insert a change in scenery?
I think it's right in there. Something a lot of beginner editors do often.
Right in there. This is what I like to have audio scrubbing turned on. Remember, that's in the timeline settings.
Audio scrubbing. Because then I can kind of fine tune.
Right where I begin to start the next sentence. So I'm going to hit A to make a cut on our motion graphics video here. So that way I have a natural cut point to insert new footage.
Or another option again is I could just click somewhere in the timeline and hit M to add a marker. So I think what I'd like to do here is use similar footage to highlight the use of transitions. So if I go back to my B -roll timeline here.
I've got two wide angle shots of mountains and trees and mountains and trees. So go back to my main timeline here. I'm going to go over and just find one of these, one of these clips.
I don't think it really matters which one and begin to drag and drop it in on that cut point. Go ahead and hit play. Editors do often is the overuse of prebuilt in transitions until you're more comfortable with how you should edit a video.
I did avoid using some of those presets. And one of the last things I want, I'd avoid using some of those presets. Avoid using some of those presets.
Now, what do I mean by presets? What are preset transitions? Well, let me show you.
Let me go ahead and hit A to cut here. And let's drag in that second clip. Depending on which one you use, use the other version.
So I'm going to go ahead and drag and drop this in. And we got a little bit of a problem here. It looks like this video file has video and audio.
So when I drag and insert it, the audio is kind of cutting off and overwriting the video. Well, I don't want that. So how do we address this?
Well, let me hit control Z to undo all that. If I want to bring in just the video for my media pool, well, I can double click here on the media pool to preview it. And then there's two icons.
There's a video and an audio icon. Well, I can just grab the video icon to bring in just the video. Alternatively, and this is the method I prefer to do.
Let me hit control Z. I can just hold down the alt key to bring in just the video portion. If you would like just the audio portion.
So let me hit control Z. You can hold down the shift key to bring in just the audio. So alt is video shift is audio.
So if I want to bring in just the video, I'm going to hold down the alt key and drag and insert our footage right there. So now we go from here, how you should edit a video. I did avoid using some of those presets.
And one of the last things to there, right on presets. So what is a preset transition? Well, you'll notice to this point that we have not used any of them.
The only technique that we've been using to cut up our video is that we've been cutting the video. And that has been a very, very intentional decision on my part. You see, when a lot of people first begin to learn how to edit, there's a reliance on extras and that can be effects and.
transitions that do flashy things. And there is a time and a place to use some of these effects and transitions, because I mean, they are in DaVinci Resolve for a reason, but if you don't understand why to use some of them, then what ends up happening is your video tends to look pretty cheesy or pretty amateur. So let me show you what I mean.
I already go and bring my mouse all the way to the upper left here. For the most part, we've been sticking right with the media pool, but there is a nice little tab to the right of it called effects. if i were to click on the effects tab voila we have our effects now we will cover more of these effects as we go on but you can see that we have video transitions we've got titles for text that we can add in we've got generators for different kinds of colors that we can add in along with some of resolve's built -in effects like uh some blurs well there's a tab all the way at the top here called video transitions and the video transitions tab is a very very dangerous place to go when you're first learning out and it's for the reasons previously stated if i were to scroll down here we've got a bunch we've got some dissolves we've got some shape transitions and if i hover my mouse over it we can begin to preview what they do splits slides boxes you can kind of go ahead and experiment with all of them if i wanted to add one into our video what i would do is
I would go to that transition. So I'll just do the arrow iris transition. Drag and select it.
And what you're going to look to do is apply it to the cut point of the video. So right here. And now when I hit play, it will apply that transition.
There you go. Now, like I said, does having a random arrow mask dissolve transition. Does that make sense?
It's the point I'm emphasizing in the actual talking head here. And what I'd like you guys to remember is that I would only use this kind of transition when there's some motivation behind it. And if you cannot answer what is motivating the use of it, then don't use it.
Again, I tend to find that it hurts the video more than it helps it. Now, something that you might've noticed is that I can't adjust the transition to be on the left side of the video. Well, that is because whenever we add transitions into videos, it has to use frames from the previous clip.
Oh, let me go ahead and turn off my audio scrubbing. It has to use frames from the previous video and the next video. So if it's only on the right, that means that it has frames from this video to transition from But because I inserted the video at the very beginning, right?
So this is the very beginning of this video file. But what frame should it use to transition over here? It can't.
We don't have negative frames. This is the beginning. So if we would like to transition in the middle or even have this on the left, well, we need to give it some frames to use.
And what I mean by that is this. I'm going to click on the transition itself and hit the backspace key to get rid of it. And what I'm going to do is.
I'm going to cut ahead and pull it over. So that way it's not starting on the first frame. So watch this.
I cut here and drag it over to the left. If you look at where my mouse is at, I have cut off a second and 20 frames. Go ahead and release.
So now if I were to go and add in another one of these transitions, so let's use something a little bit more abstract. Let's use the block glitch. Now I can insert it on the middle.
And in fact, if I grab this handle, I can pull it out exactly one second and 20 frames. But just know that in order to use one of these pre -built in transitions, you need to have frames before and after the previous and following clip. Because otherwise it's got nothing to pull from to use the transition.
All right, so let's go ahead and continue to play. With how you should edit a video, I did avoid using some of those presets. And one of the last, again, doesn't that, I just, I can't say it enough.
Whenever I see something like this, like a random glitch transition, it just, it doesn't make sense to me. How you should edit a video. I did avoid using some of those presets.
And one of the last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. Perfect. So now we are about to begin talking about a different subject matter.
So I don't think it makes sense to continue on with the lessons that we were showing before with the snow. So actually, let me first get rid of this extra B roll over here, hit backspace to get rid of it. And so I'm going to bring in the edge of our B roll so that it ends right when this new section begins.
So now we go like this. Avoid using some of those presets. And one of the last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video.
The audio of the video accounts for 50%. Perfect. And now we have successfully introduced B roll into our video.
Is this the best use of B -roll? I don't know. Maybe.
There's a section here where we begin to talk about using audio more, right? So is there some form of B -roll that we could use here? Maybe.
Maybe there's something online or maybe you can make something that fits here. Again, these are decisions as editors we need to start thinking about as we're forming our videos. And we've got one last step before finally rendering out our project.
And we'll make it a short one because we'll kind of expand on it later. But we're going to introduce sound effects. Now, sound effects, I'd like to introduce now because understanding sound effects and how to sound design your videos is as important, if not more important than the video edit.
I will say it again. Understanding how to do sound design becomes more important than the video edit often. However, for this video, it's a pretty straightforward edit.
So we probably don't need a ton of sound effects in the video. Now, if you are still in the effects tab over here in the upper left -hand corner, go ahead and head on back over to the media pool. I'd like you to locate your audio folder and then the sound effects or SFX folder.
And we've got three that we can play around with. We've got a ding.
Ah, very nice. We've got a riser.
Very nice as well. And a swoosh. These three sound effects will probably be some of the more common categories that you'll use when you're editing.
The ding might be considered an impact. And while it's not exactly a thud, it hits and then trails off. A riser is a tension building tool.
We have a slow build of audio that ends abruptly.
So we've got hits and impacts, risers, And then swooshes.
Swooshes and wooshes are very common when it comes to highlighting movement and scene changes. But we don't have a lot of movement here in this video. I don't know if I need to add some swooshes when my head is turning.
All I'd like us to do is this. Let me go ahead and play this real quick. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make.
So a mistake that a lot... Right here. Right here when we're about to begin the conversation point, I would like a little bit of a oomph.
A little cue that says, hey, we're going to talk about video editing. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag down the ding to track four, and I'm going to try to line it up right here. I would like the ding, so the beginning of this ding, to start right when the video transitions.
Now we can move our playhead one frame at a time using the left and right arrow keys, remember? And then I could drag this over to line up with our playhead, or we can use another little keyboard shortcut, which is the comma key and the period key. Comma will shift a clip one frame to the left, period, one frame to the right.
And so we can fine tune this to kind of sit exactly where we would like. So let's go ahead and let's play that. Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make.
So a mistake that a lot of... Uh -oh. Problems.
If you don't have headphones on, you might not have heard it. But if you did, you probably noticed that this ding... only comes in on the left headphone.
Well, why? Mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of...
What happened here? Did we do something wrong? No, not exactly.
When you're given audio files, there will be two very common formats for it. There is mono and stereo. Now, stereo files are audio that get output to both the left...
and right output of your speakers or your headphones, or however you are monitoring your audio. So inside that audio file, there's a left and a right audio track. This is how music can pan between the left and right headphone.
An audio file that has a mono format has one singular audio output. There is no left or right. So if our ding is mono, why are we only hearing it in the left headphone?
Well, if I go back to DaVinci Resolve, And I hover over our audio track here, right where this 2 .0 is. You see how it says stereo?
That's because this audio track is formatted for a stereo audio file. So what DaVinci is trying to do is output our audio file to a left and right headphone, but it only has one audio track. So it's only going to the left headphone.
So there's two ways that we can correct it. The easiest way is to just change this track to be mono. And the way that we do that is we right click, change track type to mono.
And you'll know if you had done it right, if you get a 1 .0 over here. And now if we were to play it, it should hit both. Editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make.
So a mistake that a lot of... There we go. Loud and proud, both earphones.
If for whatever reason you don't want to change the track type, there is a quick fix as well. There's a little bit more convoluted, but I will show you. So I'm going to change this back to stereo.
You can also right click on whatever audio clip that you'd like to change and go to clip attributes. And over here on our audio tab, you can see that it's formatted for mono over here. Well, this is a stereo track type.
So what we would need to do is change the format to stereo. And you see, here's the problem. We've got nothing going in our right headphone here.
So what we would do is click here and feed in that first channel. Either or works. It's probably going to be easier though to just change this track type to mono.
Now it's a bit loud. I'd probably like it to sit. Maybe we'll go down to like minus 10.
Let's try that. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of beginners...
Perfect. And I think that's a nice little cue that the video is about to begin. And if I were to zoom out on our timeline, look at what we did, guys.
We made a video edit, which means it's time to render or save this final version of our video. Alrighty, crew, we are ready to deliver our video. Before you do, I recommend on any video edit, playing back the video in its entirety on the timeline one more time.
It is good to double check to make sure there's no weirdness, there's no irregularities. So let's go ahead and do that. Now you can either play it back with the timeline still in frame, or if you'd like to full screen the entire thing, the shortcut for that is P.
And now we can hit spacebar to play. Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make is that they focus on the spectacle of the edit over the story of the edit.
When we're talking about what really matters the most at the end of the day it's the message being told in the video not what kind of effects you can include. Something else a lot of beginning editors do often is the overuse of pre -built -in transitions. Until you're more comfortable with how you should edit a video I'd avoid using some of those presets.
And one of the last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. The audio of the video accounts for 50 % of the final edit. So you should spend just as much time working with your audio as you do working with the video.
Hope this helps and excited to talk more about editing. Nicely done, everybody. Let's go ahead and save this sucker.
We're going to venture over into a new page in DaVinci Resolve. Look in the bottom right here. We're going to go to the deliver page.
And just like every other page in this program, it may feel intimidating at first, but I promise we're going to click all of two buttons. What I'd like you to do is go ahead and direct your attention over this left column here. These are our render settings.
Now, I am not a Kodak expert. I don't have a master's degree in bitrate. So when I look over here, we got a lot of settings that we can choose.
So what do we need to do? Well, I have good news for you. You go up top here, this upper column.
We go to the right. We have a bunch of presets for us ready to go. Now, I might spend a little bit of time in the future talking over some of these settings and which ones might matter to you moving forward.
But what I'd like us to do to keep things nice and simple is to scroll on over to the right here. And we're just going to click the YouTube 1080p preset. And that's going to simplify life for us a good bit.
Double check to make sure the resolution is 1920 by 1080 because that's the timeline that we're on. By default, it should say timeline frame rate. If it doesn't, make sure it's set to 30.
And the format, the format, the format, the format. Now the YouTube preset limits this to MP4 and QuickTime. QuickTime will render to a .mov file.
The difference between QuickTime and MP4 really is not that much. So what I'd like you to do is go to MP4 and make sure that your video Kodak is set to H .264. Again, do not stress about the rest of these settings.
We'll cover them in future videos. The next thing that we need to do is choose where we'd like to save it. I'm going to go ahead and save it to my desktop so that I can find it.
And then we just need to name it. I'm going to name ours BYOL Class Project 1. running your own laptop class project one and at the very bottom down here there's a button that says add to render queue now before we actually render one thing i'd like you to double check is that on your timeline so the same controls apply over here on the deliver page so i can hit shift in the scroll wheel to change the zoom level bring this up make sure that the in and out point are set to your videos in an out point sometimes if you've got footage hanging out over here it's going to try to render the entire timeline So again, O is out, I is in.
Make sure we're rendering the proper section here. And if that all looks good, go ahead and go to the bottom left here and add to render queue. And then we're going to click render all.
But we are not quite done yet because you need to submit the video in order to receive credit for the course. So to do that, what I'm going to recommend everybody do is use YouTube. If you don't use YouTube, totally fine.
Remember, you can use something like Vimeo. Behance, any other streaming or portfolio service. But a quick reminder, please do not use a Google Drive or a Dropbox link or anything where we're going to have to actually download the video file to review it.
It's okay if you accidentally goof up and do that, but just know that in order to receive credit, we're going to need some kind of streaming link. The example that I'm going to use to demonstrate this with is going to be YouTube. Again, totally okay to use something else, but you're just going to have to figure it out on your own.
I'd wager the majority of us all have a YouTube account or a Google account, but to not make assumptions, I'm going to go ahead and walk through the entire process. You will need to go to youtube .com. That is step one.
If you don't already have an account, you're going to need to create one. So depending on the current YouTube layout, there will probably be an option in the upper right -hand corner that says sign in. From there, you can either log into your existing Gmail account or create a new one.
Once you've all signed in and created an account, go ahead and move to the upper right -hand corner where your profile icon is. Go ahead and click that icon, and you're going to want to go to YouTube Studio. I may have a few more options than you here, but what you're going to want to locate is YouTube Studio.
Go ahead and click that. Now, again, depending on the current iteration of the YouTube Studio user interface, this icon might be moved around, but we're going to want to locate the Create icon. Go ahead and click that.
We've got a few options here. We're going to go with upload videos. That'll give us this big old prompt to locate our video file.
So you can either go to your desktop or where you saved it, drag and drop the file on or hit the button in the middle and hit select files. From there, locate wherever you have rendered and save this file and hit open. And that'll begin the upload process of this video.
There's only going to be a couple of things we need to change here and then we are good to go. For one, we should probably rename this to be class. project one, and then whatever your name is.
Once you've done that, there's two important settings that we need to remember. On YouTube, for any video you uploaded, ask if it's kid appropriate. Now our video is kid friendly, right?
But what this is really asking is, is this video safe and marketable for kids? So just be aware in the future, if you were ever to publish videos, unless you are specifically making educational content for children, we're going to check no. This doesn't give it a PG 13 or an R rating.
This just says, hey, don't market this video to kids on YouTube. Once that's all said and done, hit next, next, next until you get to the visibility page. And by default, it should say unlisted.
This is what we want. Again, unlisted. Do not set this to private.
And unless you want this to be public, don't hit public. All unlisted means is that this video is hidden. It's hidden.
Nobody can find this on the internet unless you have the link, which is what we do want. Double check, unlisted, not private, not public, unlisted. And then if you click these two rectangles over here, it will copy the video link for you and then hit save.
And that will save this video to your YouTube studio. If for whatever reason you lose the link, do not stress. It's very easy to find.
Just make sure you're in, again, your YouTube studio. You can't be on the YouTube homepage. And then go over to content.
This will list all of the videos that you've uploaded to your YouTube studio. And again, R says unlisted here, which is what we want. And if you need that shareable link, there's these three dots right here that you can click.
And it says get shareable link. And then again, we'll copy the link to your clipboard. Once you have that shareable link from YouTube or Vimeo or wherever, go ahead and go to the course project sections in the assignment section and paste it there and submit it.
Congratulations, friends. You guys have rendered your very first video inside DaVinci Resolve. And would you look at that?
You are no longer a beginner. You officially have your legs underneath you inside DaVinci Resolve. So the question is, what are you hoping to learn?
We covered the basics. We've covered the fundamentals. We've laid our foundation.
What's the next step for you going to look like? Please let us know in the comments so that we can tailor some more content towards you and your specific want and needs. But if you do like this video, an even better way to let us know that you want more DaVinci Resolve is to like the video, comment, subscribe.
The more interactions, the better sign it is that you want more DaVinci stuff. And if you do want to continue your journey. I have great news for you.
The full course is live. The DaVinci Resolve Essentials course is live on the Bring Your Own Laptop website. Go check it out.
We cover some more techniques. We cover the color page. We color fusion, which is my favorite page.
So if you want to continue your journey, go check out Bring Your Own Laptop where we have the DaVinci Resolve Essentials course along with a ton of other resources. I'm currently taking the Blender course, which I'm really excited about. So thank you all for tuning into the video.
And until next time, I'll see you all later. Peace.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Brandon Baldwin opens by promising this isn't a button-clicking tutorial: the whole session is built around one real project, a sub-60-second talking-head video, so every technique gets taught with a reason attached, not just a keystroke to memorize.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
52:18acronym
The ASDF Home-Row Method
S = zoom timeline out
D = zoom timeline in
A = cut
F = ripple-delete
A four-key editing shortcut mapped to the home row (plus the space bar to play), positioned so one hand never has to leave the keyboard during a full editing pass.
Steal forany tutorial teaching keyboard-driven video editing to beginners
1:39:45model
The Three-Tier Volume Chart
Primary audio: -3 dB to -10 dB
Complementary audio: -12 dB to -21 dB
Background audio: around -30 dB
A rule-of-thumb decibel range for where music or secondary audio should sit depending on how much it should compete with the primary voice or footage.
Steal forany explainer on mixing music under dialogue
1:42:51concept
J and L Cuts
J cut: next scene's audio leads in before its picture
L cut: previous scene's audio lingers after its picture cuts away
A pair of named audio-lead editing techniques used to smooth the transition between two clips or two speakers.
Steal forany dialogue-heavy edit with hard cuts between speakers or scenes
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
40:05subscribe
“if you do enjoy this video please please please if you can just give it a quick like or comment or even better if you could subscribe”
Soft mid-roll ask tied to a promise: frames likes and subscribes as a signal of demand for deeper DaVinci content, then points to the full paid course at Bring Your Own Laptop for the sections (Fusion, Color) this free video skips.
Add Modern Creator as a preferred source and Google shows you more of our breakdowns in Search, Top Stories, and AI Overviews. It only changes what you see, and you can undo it in your Google settings anytime.
Add to Preferred SourcesOpens your Google source preferences with us pre-loaded. Tick the box and you're done.
A 45-minute screen-recorded tour of DaVinci Resolve's built-in AI tools, a reusable project template, and the shortcuts that turn editing into a five-step habit instead of a slog.
A videographer shoots one scripted hook line at a client's mansion, then rebuilds the whole thing in DaVinci Resolve with Magic Mask, hand-keyframed zooms, and AI reframe.
How to connect ChatGPT to free DaVinci Resolve with an open-source MCP server so it can transcribe, cut, and caption a highlight reel, a feature Resolve normally locks behind its $300 Studio license.
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