1:12:14Victor Grubbe · Tutorial
Master Reel Editing in DaVinci Resolve
A 72-minute follow-along course building a polished short-form reel from blank timeline to final render inside free DaVinci Resolve.
November 15th 2025The argument in one line.
DaVinci Resolve is seven specialized apps sharing one free download, and mastering just the Edit, Color, Fusion, and Fairlight pages in order is enough to produce professional-quality video.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You just downloaded DaVinci Resolve and feel overwhelmed by the interface.
- You are moving up from CapCut, iMovie, or a phone editor and want a professional desktop tool.
- You shoot on a cinema camera with a log profile and do not know how to fix the flat, gray footage.
- You have watched scattered tutorials but want one linear walkthrough covering editing, color, audio, and rendering in order.
SKIP IF…
- You are already comfortable in Resolve and want intermediate or advanced techniques.
- You need deep dives on Fusion or advanced color science — each topic gets roughly 15 minutes here.
The full version, fast.
DaVinci Resolve ships free with a non-linear editor, a motion-graphics compositor (Fusion), a Hollywood-grade color suite, and a full audio workstation (Fairlight) — all sharing one timeline. The course walks a Star Wars fan-film project through every major page: import footage into bins, trim and arrange clips, enable DaVinci YRGB color management to auto-fix log footage, build titles in the Edit inspector, understand Fusion's four-node-type model (image, effect, merge, mask), match multiple shots using the ECTO color workflow, build a multi-track mix in Fairlight, and export from the Deliver page. The core argument is that polished video is achievable with about 20% of what Resolve offers, and knowing which 20% is the entire point of the course.
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00:00 – 06:53
01 · Intro
Promise and overview; quick-start drag-to-timeline demo; Quick Export to YouTube; tour of all seven pages; pitch for Ground Control Film School.
06:53 – 08:15
02 · Media Management
Importing media via drag-and-drop into bins; keeping folders organized in the Media Pool.
08:15 – 09:25
03 · The Interface
Media Pool, Source Viewer, Timeline Viewer, and timeline layout explained.
09:25 – 13:21
04 · Editing Footage
Setting In/Out points in Source Viewer; trimming and rearranging clips; removing gaps.
13:21 – 16:17
05 · Color Management
Enabling DaVinci YRGB Color Managed mode; HDR DaVinci Wide Gamut Intermediate; assigning Input Color Space per clip to fix log footage.
16:17 – 24:24
06 · Working in the Timeline
Multiple tracks; video-on-top rule; waveform editing; keyboard splits; ripple trim; linked clips; J-cuts and L-cuts; cross-dissolves.
24:24 – 26:33
07 · The Inspector
Transform controls; dynamic zoom; crop; effect properties per clip.
26:33 – 29:25
08 · Adding an Effect
Effects panel; dragging effects onto clips; titles and generators; text title controls.
29:25 – 34:58
09 · Fusion (VFX)
Opening a clip in Fusion from the Edit timeline; node graph concept; adding blur and clouds demo.
34:58 – 42:06
10 · Types of Nodes
Four node categories: Image, Effect, Merge, Mask. Demos of each with the fan-film footage.
42:06 – 53:02
11 · Color
Color page layout; primary color wheels; lift/gamma/gain/offset; contrast, pivot, saturation, temperature, tint; before/after toggle.
53:02 – 57:56
12 · Color Workflow
Grouping shots; selecting an example shot; grabbing a still for split-screen comparison; matching clips to the still.
57:56 – 1:06:39
13 · Color Nodes
Using nodes as modular steps; labeling nodes with ECTO method; copying nodes to all clips; adjusting each shot against the reference still.
1:06:39 – 1:17:52
14 · Fairlight (Audio)
Fairlight overview; track folders; building multi-track mix; mixer; buses; dynamics compression; EQ.
1:17:52 – 1:24:15
15 · Delivery (Rendering)
Deliver page; render presets; render queue; adding jobs and rendering.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- DaVinci Resolve's free version has no watermark, no trial period, and is licensed for commercial work — the $295 Studio version adds AI effects most beginners will never need.
- Resolve is seven apps sharing one timeline — Media, Cut, Edit, Fusion, Color, Fairlight, and Deliver — and beginners only need to master three or four of them.
- Log footage looks flat and gray by design; two menu settings (DaVinci YRGB mode + Input Color Space per clip) fix it automatically without touching a single color wheel.
- The ripple trim shortcuts (Ctrl+Shift+[ and Ctrl+Shift+]) are the single highest-leverage skill in the Edit page — mastering them separates slow editors from fast ones.
- Building story from audio waveforms first, then checking the picture, is a professional editing habit that makes timeline work faster and more reliable.
- J-cuts and L-cuts soften edit transitions more naturally than cross-dissolves, which signal a time jump and feel wrong when there is no passage of time.
- In Fusion, dropping a node in the graph without connecting it to the pipeline has zero effect on the output — nothing happens unless nodes are linked.
- Every Fusion node falls into one of four categories: Image (raw ingredient), Effect (changes an image), Merge (stacks two images), Mask (controls transparency). Learning four types unlocks 90% of the tool.
- The ECTO color workflow — Exposure, Contrast, Temperature, Other — gives each clip a labeled to-do list and prevents missed adjustments.
- Grabbing a still from your best-looking shot and using split-screen playback to compare every other shot against it is more accurate than eyeballing color matches.
- In Fairlight, a bus lets you apply one compressor or EQ to an entire group of tracks simultaneously — essential once you have more than five audio tracks.
- Nobody will notice a missing vignette, but mismatched shots across a cut are immediately obvious — matching exposure and color across clips matters more than any single grade adjustment.
How to go from confused to capable in Resolve.
WHAT TO LEARN
DaVinci Resolve rewards beginners who learn the pages in order and treat each one as a separate discipline rather than trying to understand everything at once.
01Intro
- Resolve's free version is fully commercial-licensed with no watermark or trial — the $295 Studio version adds AI effects most beginners will never need.
02Media Management
- Dragging folders directly into the Bins area of the Media Pool preserves folder structure; dragging into the empty space below clips flattens everything into one bin.
03The Interface
- The Source Viewer shows a clip you are previewing; the Timeline Viewer shows what will be in the final video — confusing these two is the most common beginner mistake in the Edit page.
04Editing Footage
- Setting In and Out points in the Source Viewer before dragging to the timeline saves trimming time later — only the selected range is placed on the timeline.
- Ctrl+\ splits a clip at the playhead without switching tools; combining this with ripple trim shortcuts replaces most timeline drag-and-trim work.
05Color Management
- Enabling DaVinci YRGB Color Managed mode and then assigning the correct Input Color Space to your clips fixes log footage in two steps, with no manual color wheel adjustments required.
- If you shoot gaming content or any non-log camera, skip color management entirely — it only applies to cameras that shoot a flat, gray log image.
06Working in the Timeline
- Audio waveforms in the timeline show exactly where dialogue or sound events happen — trim to the waveform first, then verify the picture.
- J-cuts (audio in before video) and L-cuts (audio out after video) soften edits far more naturally than cross-dissolves, which should be reserved for time-jump transitions.
07The Inspector
- Every clip's properties (transform, crop, dynamic zoom) live in the Inspector when that clip is selected — the same pattern applies in Fairlight and Fusion, making it consistent across the whole app.
08Adding an Effect
- Effects dragged onto a clip are adjusted in the same Inspector panel — select the clip, select the effect tab, and the controls appear.
- Titles and generators are treated like media clips: drag them to the timeline, trim them, and adjust their text and style in the Inspector.
09Fusion (VFX)
- Opening a Fusion clip from the Edit timeline edits that specific clip non-destructively; the original media is never changed.
- Switching back to the Edit page after making Fusion changes immediately reflects the result in the timeline — you don't need to render a preview.
10Types of Nodes
- Placing a node in the Fusion graph without connecting it to the pipeline does nothing — the image only changes when data flows through a linked node.
- Merge nodes are how layers work in Fusion: foreground (green input) over background (yellow input), with blend controlling opacity.
11Color
- Offset affects the entire image brightness; Lift, Gamma, and Gain target shadows, midtones, and highlights respectively — using them together is how you add contrast without blowing out highlights.
- Shift+D disables the color grade on the current clip as a before/after toggle, which is the fastest way to check whether your adjustments are actually helping.
12Color Workflow
- Adding all clips to a group and grading one reference shot first creates a benchmark that every other clip can be compared to, turning matching from guesswork into a visual side-by-side check.
13Color Nodes
- Labeling nodes (Exposure, Contrast, Temperature, Other) turns a grade into a to-do list you can hand off, revisit, or partially disable without starting over.
- Applying blank ECTO nodes to all clips before grading any of them means every shot starts with the same structure — no clip is accidentally left with a single overloaded node.
14Fairlight (Audio)
- Track folders (new in Resolve 21) let you collapse groups of audio tracks in Fairlight without affecting their routing in the Edit page.
- Routing dialogue tracks through a shared bus means one compressor and one EQ setting covers all dialogue at once — adjust the bus fader to raise or lower the whole dialogue group in the mix.
15Delivery (Rendering)
- Adding multiple jobs to the render queue lets you walk away and return to finished files; each job can have different codec, resolution, or range settings.
Terms worth knowing.
- Log
- A flat, low-contrast camera picture profile that compresses a wide dynamic range into the video signal. Footage shot in log looks gray until color management or manual grading restores it.
- Color management
- A system (DaVinci YRGB in Resolve) that automatically converts log footage to a viewable color space by telling the software what camera and picture profile was used.
- Media Pool
- The panel in the Edit page that holds all imported footage, audio, and graphics. Clips in the Media Pool are not yet in the video — they are a library of ready-to-use assets.
- Ripple trim
- An edit operation that removes everything to one side of the playhead on a clip and automatically closes the gap by sliding all downstream clips.
- J-cut
- An edit where the audio from the incoming clip starts before its video appears, softening the transition by letting the viewer hear the next scene before seeing it.
- L-cut
- An edit where the audio from the outgoing clip continues after its video has been replaced by the next shot, creating a smooth audio bridge across the visual cut.
- Node (Fusion)
- A self-contained processing block in Fusion's node graph. Images pass through chains of nodes; each node performs one operation such as a blur, a color correction, or a merge of two layers.
- Merge node
- A Fusion node that composites one image over another. The foreground input (green) appears on top of the background input (yellow).
- ECTO workflow
- A color grading to-do list: four labeled nodes per clip named Exposure, Contrast, Temperature/Saturation, and Other, applied to every clip at once so no adjustment category is skipped.
- Bus (Fairlight)
- A virtual summing track that multiple audio tracks route through. Applying an effect or fader change to a bus affects every track feeding into it.
- Lift / Gamma / Gain
- Three tonal zones in the primary color wheels: Lift controls shadows, Gamma controls midtones, and Gain controls highlights.
- Group Post Clip (Color page)
- A color node layer that applies to every clip in a group simultaneously, used for a common look or exposure correction shared by all shots.
Things they pointed at.
Lines you could clip.
20:56
“I've been editing videos for almost twenty years, and this is most of it. Get good at this part. Master the basics.”
18:23
“If the audio works, the video will work too.”
05:45
“I just wanna make videos, and I feel like I have to learn a spaceship.”
1:02:40
“Nobody's gonna care if you have a vignette on this shot if your shots don't match.”
20:20
“The good news is it's that simple, and the bad news is there's a lot of it.”
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
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metaphoranalogystory
00:00All you gotta do is watch this video and follow along, and it's gonna unlock resolve for you. If you're brand new to making videos in resolve, this is the perfect place to start. And if you find yourself feeling overwhelmed because resolve is such a huge program, we're gonna cut out all the stuff you don't need to know, and we're just gonna focus on the essentials.
00:17Now if you wanna get this media and follow along, there's a link down in the description. When you click that link, that'll bring you to our free community.
00:25All you have to do is join the group, and when you get to the community, go up to where it says classroom, and this media is in our media vault. This is a huge collection of all kinds of practice media and footage and project files and all kinds of cool stuff.
00:42And you can use that to practice making videos. All the way to the bottom here is this Star Wars fan film media. This is what we want.
00:49All you have to do is click this download here button, and you can get everything you need to follow along. Let's get to it. First thing you gotta do is download DaVinci Resolve 21.
00:58Right now, it's in public beta, but that is the latest version. And if you're unfamiliar with Resolve, well, there's two versions. There's a free version and a paid version.
01:06I'm not gonna go into every single difference. What you need to know is the free version is super awesome. You can use it for commercial work.
01:11It doesn't have a trial period. It doesn't have a watermark. It's amazing.
01:15The paid version is a $2.95 1 time fee, and it unlocks even more awesomeness. Namely, AI assisted effects and some fancy stuff that you may or may not need for your videos. But whichever version you're using, download that.
01:27And the first time you open up Resolve, you're going to have a window like this. This is what we call our project manager. This And is kind of like the starting screen.
01:34This is where all your projects live. It's where you open, save, copy, export things. You can just go down here and hit new project.
01:41Click on that. Call it something. I'm just gonna call this demo one.
01:44Sure. Hit create, and that will open up the Resolve interface. Now in a second, I'm gonna show you how Resolve works and kind of the big idea behind, like, how it's organized and all that stuff.
01:54But just to get you started as soon as possible, like, most basic way to bring something into Resolve is just to find your footage in your explorer or your finder window and just drag this down to this area right here, and that's going to add it to a new timeline. And then you can play it back, and you're getting started on your video.
02:12And this timeline here is where you put clips together, you cut them up, make them shorter, adjust their order to create a story. And so you use all of the different tools in this page as well as all of the other pages down here to do specific things and get a little bit more fancy. And when you're done with your video and you actually wanna show people, one thing you could do would just be to go up here to this button that says quick export.
02:34Click on that. And there are some presets that you could use. So if you're making something for YouTube, you can select YouTube and hit export.
02:41You can even tick upload directly right here, and you can connect this with your YouTube channel, and actually upload it right to YouTube from Resolve, which is pretty cool. But when you hit export, it'll ask you where you wanna actually put it. I'll just put it on my desktop and hit save, and there we are at timeline one dot m p four.
02:56I can play this back, and guess what? It's a thing. Yay.
03:00So if you literally just need to know how to throw videos into a timeline and export them, that's how you do it. But the reason you're using Resolve is probably to get a little bit more fancy than that. Right?
03:10Resolve is a professional level app. They do color correction, color grading for Hollywood movies in the same app that you're using.
03:17You can make absolutely any kind of video in Resolve, and as crazy as you wanna get, it can handle it. So let's take a step deeper and explore how Resolve actually works. Something to notice about the interface here is these buttons down below.
03:31These are our pages. And what these do is when you click on a page, it completely switches out not just the interface of the program. It's not like just a preset workspace.
03:42It actually kind of switches to a different app that's inside of Resolve. And each one of these pages has a specific job. So we've been in the edit page, and its job is to edit videos to create an actual timeline.
03:55It's like the hub for where all of your clips go and how you organize them. Just this part of the app, this kind of does the job of like Adobe Premiere or Apple Final Cut or CapCut, that kind of thing.
04:08And so Resolve isn't just one app. It's kind of like several apps in one. The cut page is kind of a different approach to editing, although it does a similar job.
04:18It's still putting clips together on a timeline. It just has a little bit of a different interface. We also have a new photo page in Resolve 21, which is meant for actually editing and doing color grading for your photos.
04:28To the left of the photo page is our media page. This is where you import your media and kinda get it organized. And then to the right of the edit page, we have our fusion page, which is where you make visual effects, kinda like Photoshop effects for video, and where you make motion graphics.
04:42So animations and titles and that kind of thing. To the right of fusion, we have the color page, and this is for color grading. This is the oldest part of Resolve, and definitely still it's, like, biggest draw because, I mean, just about every Hollywood movie these days has been touched by Resolve at least in the color.
04:59Next to color, we have the Fairlight page, and this is like an entire audio workstation. Of course, there's like no audio in this clip, but we'll get to that. This is how you can get super deep with your sound design and your audio mixing for your videos.
05:12And then finally, we have the deliver page, which is the way that you would render your videos properly. So it's not just a quick export like I showed you earlier. It's like being really detailed with the settings, setting them exactly how you want, rendering different versions and different resolutions, and you can render 20 different things at the same time.
05:30It's very powerful. And so Resolve is a absolutely massive beast when it comes to video creation.
05:36It's like everything that you need in one place. And right now, if you're watching this and you're just like, oh my gosh. Like, I had no idea.
05:45You're not alone. One of the biggest things that we see with people who are new to resolve is they go, gosh. I just wanna make videos, and I .
05:54Like, there are so many things to concentrate on. Don't worry. By the end of this video, you're gonna have a much better idea of what's important and what's not.
06:03And if you need some help on a regular basis, that's actually what me and my team do. We have an online community called Ground Control Film School that is designed to help you focus on just what you need to focus on when it comes to video creation and get rid of all the other stuff. It includes all of our full resolve courses, and me and my team review your work on a regular basis.
06:20It's the best. There's a link in the description and more about that later. So So I'm just gonna show you the basics here that you need to really make some videos.
06:28Because the good news is you don't even need all of these pages. In fact, you could pretty much just ignore the cut page, the photo page, and the media page 90% of the time. In fact, if it helps, you can even go up to workspace where it says show page.
06:41You could uncheck the pages you don't like. So I could uncheck media, uncheck photo, uncheck cut, and look at that. It's already feeling better.
06:50But I'm going to undo that so that nobody gets confused. So what do we need first? Well, if we're gonna make a video, we need some kind of footage to work with.
06:59There are a bunch of ways to get footage inside of Resolve. One way we already looked at, which was just taking some footage and just dragging it right into that timeline. You could also right click here in this empty space over here in what we call the media pool and go down and say import media, and you can just navigate to whatever media you want and import it.
07:17What I like to do is just take the media that I want and drag it into the media pool over here. Now the media pool is just the window that holds all of your media. It's everything that you've actually imported into the project.
07:29It doesn't mean that your audience is gonna see it. It's kind of just they're ready to use. And what I like to do is just select my media here, and I'm just going to select the pieces that you have.
07:40Just gonna select these folders, and I can drag these folders in, and I can either drag it here into the empty space below my clips. But what that's gonna do is just put all of the media into my project, and I actually wanna keep the folders.
07:52And so I'm gonna drag it into right here where it says bins. Right under there. And what that's gonna do is actually make folders here in the media pool to keep stuff organized.
08:03Now I have a bin with my audio, a bin with my footage, a bin with my matte paintings, a bin with some photos, and some other goodies. And, actually, I'm gonna go ahead and get rid of this stuff that I grabbed earlier just to keep us organized. So now we have five bins.
08:15So let's talk about the interface here for just a second. We've been using the media pool, which is just this kind of, like, left hand window here. That's the media pool.
08:24That's where all our media for the project lives. Here, we have our source viewer and our timeline viewer. And down here we have our timeline.
08:33This is really the main interface of the edit page. What we do in the source viewer is we can open up a piece of media here and preview it, then we can take it from that preview and actually put it into the timeline. Once we have clips in the timeline, we can actually view what our video is going to look like in the timeline viewer.
08:49Let me show you what I mean. Here, I can kind of mouse over them, and I can kind of preview my footage here in this left viewer, this source viewer. If I double click on it, it's gonna load it in the viewer, and so I can move my mouse around still.
09:00And then I can grab this playhead and move this left and right to preview my clips. And from here, I can take this clip and move it into the timeline, or I can kind of trim it first. So one thing I could do would just be to drag this down to the timeline.
09:12That's gonna make a new timeline, which lives in my media pool. And then I can see as I scrub through here, I have my clip showing up in my timeline viewer. That means it's actually in the video that I'm making, and we're not just kind of picking it up and looking at it.
09:25But I could also, here in this viewer, I could trim this to be shorter. Let's pick a shot that actually makes sense to trim. And so we have all this kind of empty space here before they run, and let's say we want to cut into this right when they're running.
09:39Well, I can start this clip here just by clicking this little button right here, which sets an in. That means, like, the start of a clip when you trim it. So we can set that, and this little gray selection here moves.
09:51And then let's end it like right here. And so I'll hit this button, the out, and our little gray selection moves to be only this big.
09:59So that means that we're just gonna take a part of this clip, and then I can drag this down into my timeline, and it's a much shorter clip than it would be. Right? We're just using the good part.
10:08Alright? We're trimming it before. Now, we don't have to do it that way.
10:12Once we have a clip in the timeline, we can actually trim it in the timeline, and it's kind of the same thing. So let's grab this other clip. I'll just drag it down from the media pool.
10:20Now, we have this big long clip here where stuff's happening, and let's say I want it to start right about there. I can grab the beginning of this clip, just this little edge right here, and I can move this this way, and that's going to make this clip a little bit shorter. So I can grab this and move it this way like that.
10:36And then the end, let's trim that. And we can see there's kind of the entire clip kind of ghosted with an outline, so I can see how long the clip is and how short just my little trim for that clip is. I can grab the middle of this and move it around in the timeline, and I can switch the order of the clips like this.
10:53And this is essentially just how we build a story in the timeline of the edit page. We make these clips the length that we want. We just grab the parts that we want, and we put them in order with each other.
11:03So if we wanna start with this kind of over the shoulder looking shot, where we have our Jedi here, and then our bad guy in the background, and then we cut to a close-up of our bad guy, we can cut to this close-up here. So this one goes first, and then this one, and then maybe they run at each other.
11:19If we play this back, we'll notice that we're on him for a long time. So I'm gonna trim this to be a lot shorter. Here we go.
11:26And then let's go to the run. And as I move this over, it kind of snaps to the edges like that. So now we have these all together first clip, second clip, third clip, and that's the order they're gonna play it.
11:37Right? So one, two, three.
11:42Great. Now at the very beginning of our timeline, that's way over here. If we were to leave it like this, we have this kind of blank space here.
11:49And I can get rid of that blank space in a couple ways. I could select the blank space and hit backspace. That's gonna move those over.
11:55Or I can select all of these just with a box select and then drag it over like that. You don't generally want blank space in your videos. You just want to play the clips in order.
12:04K? And with just this information, you grab clips from the media pool. You can either preview them here, but you somehow put them into the timeline, and you can trim them in the timeline, move them around in the timeline to select the moments that you really want so that you're building your story in the timeline.
12:20Just that will help you make I mean, you need to do that for every video. So if you're new to video editing and that makes sense, oh my goodness, you are on your way. But now, let's get piggy here for just a second.
12:32You'll notice that this footage is really kind of gray and desaturated and nasty looking. Alright? It just looks kind of gray, and yes, this is on an overcast day, but, uh, like, there's almost no color to it.
12:46It looks terrible. The reason for this is because we shot it in log. Log is a special color mode that certain cameras shoot, and the point of it is to cram as much data into your video signal as you can so that you have a lot of options later when you're doing color grading.
13:02But a byproduct of that is it comes in looking bad. Now there are a lot of ways to fix this. One of the ways is just to manually mess with the colors, which we'll learn a little bit about in a little while.
13:14But the right way to do it, like the easiest way to do it, the most high quality way to do it is actually really easy, and you don't even need to know what you're doing. And that's by using color management. This is a big scary word that everybody gets gets worried about, but it's so simple.
13:28Let me show you how to do it. Go down to this little settings cog icon right here. That's gonna bring up our project settings.
13:34Now there are all kinds of project settings and specifics here. You don't need to know most of this. We're gonna go to the fourth option down where it says color management.
13:42Alright? And this very top part here where it says color space and transforms. What we gotta do is go here where it says color science and switch this to DaVinci y r g b color managed just like that.
13:54And you can totally just do that and call it good if you want to. But something that takes two more seconds and gives you a little bit higher quality is if you uncheck automatic color management like this, and then here where it says color processing mode instead of SDR Rec seven zero nine, go down and select HDR DaVinci wide gamut intermediate.
14:11K? That is a big mouthful. Set these like this, and that's it.
14:16I do have super nerdy videos on what the heck all this means, but literally, if you just set it like this, and you never know why, you're gonna be okay. Like, you're gonna make awesome videos.
14:26So just do that. Okay? Then we hit save, and now our colors still look gray.
14:31What do we do? Well, this is kind of the first step in two steps to fix this. Okay?
14:37The first step is go into color managed mode, which is what we just did. The second step is tell Resolve what camera we used to get this image.
14:46To do that, all we have to do is go over here to the media pool, and I'm just gonna box select all of my media, making sure I'm not selecting the timeline or this next part won't work. Just the media, and then I'm gonna right click on any of these, and I'm gonna go down to where it says input color space. This is where we can select the type of camera and settings that we used to shoot our videos, which for us is Blackmagic Design because we shot on a Blackmagic camera, and we're going to select Blackmagic Design film gen five.
15:14If you shot with different footage, if you shot, say, on a Sony, you're gonna have to pick Sony and pick whichever settings you used. If you don't know the settings you used, go and look them up.
15:24Go look in the settings of your camera. Every camera is different, but most cameras that shoot log are listed here. I'm gonna go to Blackmagic Design film gen five like this, and look what happens.
15:33When I select that, look, our colors get way way better. Look at that. It's still an overcast day, So so it's not gonna look bright and sunny, but the colors look much, much better.
15:42Alright? And that's what we're looking for when it comes to color management. We don't wanna look at this gray nasty footage the whole time when we're editing.
15:49And like you saw, we don't really need to know anything about color grading just to set a couple menu items. We're just setting a couple settings, and that's gonna give us a really decent image to look at while we edit, and then we'll worry about color grading and making it look really nice later. But it's just a lot more fun to look at an image that looks like this than the gray nasty one like this.
16:07Now, if you're doing like a gaming video or something where you don't shoot log, you can skip that part. This is only for the fancy cameras that shoot in that kind of gray desaturated log image.
16:18Okay. So we have our color management set up. We have some shots in the timeline.
16:22As far as actually working in the timeline, here's a couple things that you should really know. One is that a timeline has multiple tracks. And so if I wanted to, I could grab a clip from my media pool and drag it down here.
16:32I could drag it on this first track, or I can drag it up above like this on the second track, and what that's gonna do is just show whatever's on top in my final video. So as I play this back, we see just the clip that's on top. We don't see the clips under it.
16:45So this can work for your advantage. Let's say if you want to try a clip out and see if it works in your edit without actually getting rid of stuff or messing with it, you can just put it on that upper track. The other thing to mention about this is while your video, you only see one video at a time regularly.
17:01For the audio, all the audio is kind of added together. So you can hear this track as well as this track, and they play together.
17:08But for the video, you're only going to see the top track. Now there's ways that you can see multiple tracks and change the transparency and everything, which we'll get into in a second. But that's how things work normally.
17:18The other thing you can do is make your tracks bigger or smaller just by grabbing this little edge right here and moving it up or down. And what I do a lot of the time is I just make these all small like that because it plays back a little better.
17:31It's a little bit cleaner looking. And a lot of the time, I'll have the audio tracks a little bit bigger because one thing that you can do is you can figure out kind of where interesting stuff happens in your clips just by looking at the audio, looking at the waveform here because this is where speaking happens. And so if I just want his line where he's talking, I don't even have to play this back.
17:51I could trim this to be just where that audio is, and I know that that's where he's going to be talking. In fact, a lot of creating your story in the edit page has a lot more to do with actually looking at these waveforms and trimming it to the waveforms than it does actually looking at the image, which is kinda crazy. Especially when you're editing something like an interview or a voice over, you're doing a lot of looking at the waveforms and building your story with that audio.
18:19And then a lot of the time, I'll go back and just see if the video works. But usually, if the audio works, the video will work too.
18:25We've already talked about trimming the edges like this. Something else you'll find yourself doing is splitting a clip. I'll just drag this down so we can just use one clip here.
18:35If I want to split this clip into two, I can do that a couple ways. One way would be to grab this razor blade, select this, and that's going to turn my cursor into a razor blade, and then wherever I click, that's going to split whatever clip I click on. Alright?
18:49So I could come over here and split this right at the playhead because it kind of snaps to the playhead, and now I have two different clips. The other thing I can do is just split this at the playhead with a keyboard shortcut, which by default is control backslash. So the backslash that's right underneath backspace on your keyboard, control backslash like that, that's going to cut that.
19:10And so you can really easily just kind of chop this up just by hitting control backslash a lot, and that saves a lot of time switching in between the tools. Learning those keyboard shortcuts is essential. Speaking of keyboard shortcuts, I wanna show you the very best keyboard shortcut, like the the one that I use all the time.
19:26It will take a clip, whichever clip you're on, and if you have, let's say, your play head right here, and let's say I want to get rid of this part. Well, normally, what I could do would be to trim this like this, and then select all of these clips, and then move them down like that. But there's actually a keyboard shortcut that will do all of that at once, and that's called a ripple trim, which by default if is control shift left bracket, and look what it does.
19:51It just does all of that in one fell swoop. Okay?
19:54I can also trim the other side like this. Okay? If I move this playhead, I can trim this and move everything down.
20:01Control shift right bracket. Boom. Like that.
20:04And that's going to trim everything up until the end of the clip. So control shift right bracket. Good.
20:09Let's say I want just this little part control shift left bracket like that. So you can easily trim stuff in the timeline using the playhead to kind of aim things, and using keyboard shortcuts to either split it at the playhead or trim to the right or the left of it.
20:23And let me tell you, if you are good at that part, you can get a job editing because that makes things so so quick.
20:31And as much as we like to think of editing as adding all kinds of fancy transitions and, like, effects and everything, it's mostly this. It's mostly trimming stuff and making sure that it's the right length and that these clips are in the right order to make your story. And if you can do that part, the good news is it's that simple, and the bad news is there's a lot of it.
20:54That part is a little less glorious than you think it might be. I've been editing videos for almost twenty years, and this is most of it. Get good at this part.
21:03Master the basics. The better you are at the basics, the more comfortable you're going to be in Resolve, and the more you can do the fancy stuff. By default, if I were to grab a clip by either the video or the audio, it's going to move both of these.
21:16Alright? If I were to trim either side of this, it's going to move the audio and the video together. But you don't have to move them together.
21:24By default, if your video has audio, these two are linked. But you can unlink them or move them separately and keep them linked. You'll notice when I select this, we have these two little chain links.
21:35That means that the audio and the video are linked together. I could go right here where this chain link is, and I can click it so that it's not white anymore. It's kind of that gray.
21:44And now when I grab this edge, it doesn't move both of them. That the other thing I could do is keep this linked, and I could hold alt on the keyboard and move this back and forth.
21:54I like doing it that way because most of the time, I wanna move things together. Right? I wanna move them both at the same time.
22:01I wanna trim them at the same time and everything. There's only sometimes where I really want to just adjust the audio and not the video. That means I can just hold alt and then maybe drag this out.
22:10And so now I have the audio in this clip starting before the video. This is what we call a j cut. Okay?
22:17Because it kind of looks like a j. Alright? The opposite of this is an l cut.
22:22Okay? So if I were to hold alt and drag this out, this kind of makes an l. Alright?
22:27Here, I'll make it make it a little bit more l looking. Look. That's an l.
22:32Told you. K. This one's a j.
22:35J l. And you use these to kind of soften your edits.
22:39What I mean by that is when you cut from one clip to another, especially if they sound different, it can kinda be a harsh transition. For instance, let me just kind of cut in between this. And when I play this, it'll be a pretty harsh transition.
22:52Droid. K? But if I take this audio and I bring the audio in first before we cut to the video, I I can just hold alt and grab this, and I can trim both of these at the same time, which is called a roll.
23:03So I'm trimming this clip and this clip at the same time, and I roll this here so we have his line coming in before that video. Look at how good this feels.
23:13I'm here for the droid. Yeah. See?
23:16It feels like it softens it. It kind of brings you in with the audio, and then the video hits. That's the kind of thing that actually happens a lot more in professional edits.
23:25What happens sometimes is you'll have an edit like this Droid. And you're like, well, I don't want that to feel so sudden, and so there'll be a temptation to kind of crossfade them.
23:35Alright? Which by the way, you can do if you select in between these clips like this this little green selection. Just clicking it once.
23:42I can right click, and I can say add cross dissolve. It doesn't really matter which one I pick. I'll pick 12, and that's going to fade these clips together like this.
23:50So check this out. Droid. It's a crossfade.
23:53The ocean. Alright.
23:55The droid.
23:57The ocean. And it does soften it. It doesn't feel as sudden.
24:00Droid. But it also kinda feels weird. Really, the only time you want a fade like this for the most part is if there's a big passage of time.
24:08But if you're just trying to soften that edit, don't fade it just to soften it because it sends the wrong message. We wanna soften that edit. We just do something like a j cut.
24:19Droid.
24:20See, even that feels better. I'm here for the droid. Yeah.
24:24That's much better. Okay. So a couple other things in the edit page.
24:29When you have a clip selected, you can adjust kind of the details, the properties of the clip by going over to the inspector. That's this button right here.
24:39You can open this up, and I'll click on this little downy button thing here to extend this to be the full height of the screen.
24:49And this is just a list kind of of the properties of the clip that we have selected. And so with this clip selected, I can go up here to the transform controls, and I can put my mouse here and just kind of click and drag to the right to make this zoom in.
25:04Same thing for the position. I can kind of move this around rotation, and I can reset each control with these little reset buttons or I can reset the whole group of controls with this little circle arrow plus button, which like that.
25:18So really anything that you wanna do to this specific clip, when you have it selected, the properties are opened up in the inspector. And this is something that is common throughout Resolve, not just the edit page. The same thing happens in Fairlight and in Fusion.
25:32It's especially important in Fusion. But if you wanna do something like crop this clip, like cut this edge off, you do this by clicking on cropping and that twirls down this little section here, and I can crop this like that. And there's all kinds of goodies to play around with here.
25:47One of them that I really like is the dynamic zoom. So I'll select this clip right here, which is just people running at each other, and you'll notice there's no zoom at all. But if I click on dynamic zoom, this will automatically zoom this in over the length of the clip.
26:05And so if the clip is shorter, it zooms it in faster. And if it's longer, it zooms it slower. So this is especially good for things like slideshows where you wanna have a little bit of movement on all of your images.
26:17You can select all of your images and then just tick on dynamic zoom, and each one will zoom. It's really really helpful. But the essential concept here is when you select something down here in the timeline that its properties show up here in the inspector.
26:30That's how you adjust its details. Now the same thing happens when we add an effect. So let's go to this shot right here, and we can add an effect to this by going up here to right next to our media pool.
26:40We have this little button that says effects. I can click on this. That's going to switch this panel to be effects.
26:47I'll move my camera down here, so we can actually see it. And in this effect browser, we have all kinds of different effects, all kinds of goodies. So if I want to put a blur on this, let's say, I can just drag this down onto the clip like this.
26:58And when it turns white, I'll let go. And that's gonna add that radial blur to this clip. And then when I have the clip selected here in the effects tab, I can adjust the properties of the effect because I have the clip selected, and I have the effects selected here, and now I can change how this works.
27:15Isn't that cool? Maybe I'll change the center position a little bit. Get crazy.
27:20And I can easily turn this on and off by clicking this little on and off switch. Nice way to kind of preview this, and click the garbage can to get rid of it. There we go.
27:29And there are all kinds of effects. We don't have time to go over all the effects, but there's a lot. Alright?
27:34In the free version, there's quite a bit, and in the paid version, there's even more. And these aren't just effects that you can drop on to the clips. Up here, we have our titles and our generators, so I can twirl down titles.
27:44And here we have a whole bunch of titles that we can use for various reasons. Some of them have animation, and you can mouse over these to kinda see a preview of the animation.
27:55That's nice. And once you find one you like, you can just drag it to the timeline just like a clip, and that shows up here in the timeline. Again, you select this to bring up its properties in the inspector, and you can adjust the text and everything.
28:08Let's actually look at this. Well, let's say, you know, Star Wars. You could change the font.
28:13For instance, we could use a Star Wars y font. Of course, the animation is a little different than you might do for Star Wars, but that's how you adjust the details of your titles as you click on them and open them up here in the inspector.
28:29This is kind of a fancier title, but they have basic titles here at the top. So I could just grab this normal text, grab this, plug that in there, and we can adjust what it says and the font.
28:39There we go. And you have all of your controls for like your font and your tracking and your spacing and all of that. You can add a stroke to the font if you want to.
28:47You can add a drop shadow. You just have to click and drag this offset and that will activate it like that. You can make a background.
28:54I'll turn off the drop shadow and push up the height of the background. That'll make a little shape behind it.
29:00So there are a lot of tools that you can adjust for your title just within this one text title. Isn't that nuts? And this is one of several basic ones, which aren't even as crazy as the fusion titles, which there is a ton.
29:13There's a ton of them. But that's how you add text. You can just grab some text and throw it on there, and you trim this and move it around just like you would a piece of media in the timeline.
29:22But we're gonna keep moving, and I'm gonna show you some essentials of the other pages as well. And we're gonna start in fusion. First thing I'll do is just make sure my playhead is over a certain shot.
29:32So how about this one? And then I'm just gonna click on the fusion page. What that's gonna do is switch over to the fusion page, and it's gonna open the shot that I was over in the timeline in fusion.
29:44So here we go. Now we're working on this shot. Now just as kind of a basic concept of how fusion works, when you open up a shot like this, you're working on that shot in the timeline, but with your fusion tools.
29:58Okay? So let me do something fusion y to this real quick, and then I'll kind of explain what we're doing here in a minute. I'll just grab some clouds and put it over here, so this is nice and cloudy.
30:10Now I'm gonna switch back over to the edit page, and we'll see on the edit page that we still have our shot really cloudy. So as I play this back, we have the clouds over this shot that we're actually adding in fusion. Now this is something that's really important because all of the clips live here in the timeline, and they all have certain properties, right, that live in the inspector, but they also can be adjusted by fusion and color, but they always live here in the timeline.
30:36So we'll get to color in a few minutes, but for fusion, all we have to do is just be over this clip and then switch over to fusion, and now we're editing that clip itself inside of the timeline. Now, it's not actually making changes to the original clip at all. It's kind of like applying a effect to it in the timeline, but the effect lives in Fusion.
30:56Once you play with it a little bit, you kinda get the idea. And this is really one kind of major category of stuff that Fusion can do, which is adjust a shot from your timeline, and you can do visual effects to it.
31:09That stuff like adding fog and doing things that you would do in Photoshop and adding fire and explosions and duplicating people and adding three d and stuff like that.
31:20That kind of stuff is called visual effects. So it's kind of changing your footage. The other thing that Fusion can do is make titles and animations and that kind of thing.
31:29We'll get to that in a few minutes. For now, let's look at a couple of basics on how Fusion is set up and what the heck Fusion is and what it does, because this is the most powerful page of Resolve, and it's also the most intimidating and confusing. Here's the essentials.
31:43If you're gonna do visual effects, you open up a clip in Fusion from your timeline, which like we've done here. Just over the clip, switch it over to Fusion. That brings it into the Fusion interface, which is made up of a couple things.
31:55We have the viewers, which are here. We have the actual time ruler.
32:01That's where you can click and drag to move back and forth in time. It's like your playhead. And we have the playback controls.
32:07Here we have our toolbar where we can grab different tools and use them in the node graph, and then we have the node graph itself. This is like the bread and butter of Fusion.
32:18This is where 90% of the work happens. What we're doing down here is we're building a flowchart that we run our image through. And by default, the starting point of this flowchart is we have the original footage, the OG footage, and then we have what's rendered.
32:34Okay? It's what's being put into the timeline. Okay?
32:37Let's just say Render to Timeline. And each one of these boxes is called a node, and these nodes flow into each other. So we're starting with this node, and then it flows over to this node.
32:49And you can always kind of read this in a linear way. We're grabbing our original footage, then we're doing nothing to it, and then we're rendering it to the timeline. That's why it looks normal like this.
33:02But what we can do along this line is we can run it through other nodes that change the image. So for instance, if we wanted to make this really blurry, we could run it through a blur node.
33:12We can grab a blur node by clicking and dragging this little teardrop down here like this. I can grab it, drag it down. That's gonna make a blur node, and then we can take this original node.
33:23I'm just going to click on this line to get rid of it, and then I can take this little output, this gray output, and plug that into the yellow input like this, and this gray output and plug this into the yellow input like this, and this makes this image slightly blurry. It's a little bit hard to see on the recording, so I'm gonna select the blur node and go up here to blur size and push that up.
33:43Now that should be familiar because I'm selecting something down here, and its properties show up in the inspector, and I adjust it. Right? Just like we would adjust an effect in the edit page.
33:52So now step one is we grab our original footage. Step two is we blur it. And step three, we put it back on the timeline.
33:57So if I switch over to the edit page, we have our blurry footage on the timeline. K? Now something just to drive home here.
34:06If I didn't have this connected, and I just had my original footage connected to my media out like this, this would not be blurry. Just putting one of these nodes down here in this space doesn't affect anything. It only affects stuff when you link them up.
34:21Okay? We're building a flowchart, unless it flows through one of the nodes, it's not going to actually do anything. Now if we were to go up to the effects panel and twirl this down, we could see under tools all of the different nodes that are available in Fusion, and it's a lot.
34:39It's over 300 nodes. It's a lot of nodes. And if you're just learning fusion, you're probably like, dude, that's way too many.
34:50How am I ever going to know all these nodes? What am I gonna do? Oh, relax.
34:56You don't need to know all the nodes. In fact, you only need to know just a few. And to simplify this even more, you really only need to know four different kinds of nodes.
35:05There's really only four kind of categories of nodes, and every node within each category really kind of acts the same way. The first category would be called an image node.
35:15So that's like this node right here. This is a starting point. Okay?
35:18It's a raw ingredient, an image of some kind. So this is our original footage. Okay?
35:24We could also generate an image like with this background node. If I grab this down, I could say make a red background.
35:32And if I plug this into the media outlet, what happens? It becomes a red background because I'm generating a red image with that node.
35:41Okay? And I'm just plugging this into the media out, which just renders it to the timeline. Same thing I could do with a text node, this right here.
35:49Grab that down, We'll say text. I can plug this output into the media out, and look, we have text to the screen.
35:57It's rendering that text and making an image. Okay? So these are all image nodes.
36:02Okay? Image. Image nodes.
36:05The next kind of node we've already used, it's an effect node. So this node right here, this blur node, this is an effect node.
36:12The reason I know it's an effect node is because it changes an image. Alright? Just like if you apply a blur to a clip on the edit page, you actually just run an image through an effect like this.
36:23Okay? Because an effect only changes an image that runs through it like this. So we have a blurry original image.
36:31If I take this text, and I plug this in, we have blurry text. If I have this background and we plug this in, we have a blurry background, but you can't really tell. So that blur is affecting things that go through it.
36:44Now, are a few different effects like a color correction effect would do the same thing. So let's go through this color corrector effect, and I'll just plug that through, and we'll change this color.
36:54That's only going to affect things that go through the color corrector effect. Same thing with like brightness and contrast. Right?
37:02Kind of similar thing. Boom. Can change this contrast.
37:06Great. That only affects things that go through it. So these are all effect nodes.
37:13Effect nodes affect things that go through it.
37:17Effects nodes. One interesting effect node is a transform. That's this one right here.
37:22If I grab this down, this is a transform. And what this does is this changes an image, and so I'll push this through here.
37:29But it doesn't change it like it doesn't change the pixels necessarily. It moves the image around. So if I select transform and adjust the size, that's going to resize my image, and I can rotate it and everything.
37:41Just like the controls for the clips here in the edit page. If I select a clip here, just like these transform controls right here, these are controls that are kind of isolated just in this node.
37:53And so you can decide to move something just by putting it through that node. You're applying a transformation to it, and it's technically an effect.
38:02The third kind of node is a merge node. So a merge node are these two nodes right here. I'll just grab this first one and drag this down.
38:09What a merge node does is it puts one image over another image. So if I throw this blur into merge one, I and take the output of merge one and put that into media out one, we have our blurry Star Wars background, which makes sense because that's what's hooked up.
38:23Right? But if I had this text, could put this text into the green input of the merge like this. Look what happens.
38:29Now we have text over that background. So that's how you stack things in Fusion.
38:35You don't have layers. You only have nodes that put images over other images. And it's actually kind of the same idea as having a layer.
38:43It's just laid out in a different interface. When I first started with Fusion, I thought this was the dumbest thing. But it's actually really cool because you can have an image that is put in multiple different places.
38:56You could put this into 10 different merges in 10 different places in your composition, and you're just reusing that one image. Whereas with layers, if you have layer one and then you put something in layer two, that's where it lives in the layer stack, and it can only live in one place.
39:10But that's how we put an image over another image. Alright? With this merge node.
39:15And with the regular merge, you could only have a foreground and a background. And so if you want to put more stuff in front, so if I want to have some clouds in front, I can grab this generator here, this fast noise, and I can drag in emerge, and I'll just drag this onto the line where it turns blue and yellow and let go.
39:31That'll connect that, and then I'll take the output from this and put that into the green. And now I have the clouds over the text, which is over the background, And I can adjust the transparency of the layers of the foreground layer by selecting this merge and adjusting blend like this. Now I can blend that foreground down if I want to.
39:50I could select this one and blend that foreground down, adjust the opacity of that text, and this is how you build things in Fusion. The last category of node is a mask.
40:01Now this is cool. Alright. Let's get rid of a couple of these just to make this a little bit easier to understand.
40:07Okay. We have our guy. We have our text.
40:10Let's say I want to put our text behind our guy. We can do this with a mask. These little nodes right here, I can grab maybe this third one and drag it down.
40:18And this is called a polygon mask. It's a way to draw with the pen tool on the screen, and you can select an area on screen that you want to include or not include in various different ways. With my polygon, I'm gonna go over here and just draw around my guy a little bit.
40:36Now I'll just do this really quick so that we can move on. And if I were just to put this mask into the media out, we can see it's kind of making a black and white image here. I'll connect this again.
40:46I can take this polygon, and I can plug this into the blue input of that merge and look what happens when I do that. It keeps that text only within that mask, and so from there, I can select this mask and go and say invert, and that will mask everything but the guy.
41:03Right? And so we can adjust this and kind of play around and make sure it looks really good.
41:09So we have our text behind our guy. Is that cool?
41:13And so that's how you put things behind people is with masks. And there are so many different kinds of masks, and there's AI assisted masks now and all kinds of stuff, but the basics are that you have some kind of node that controls the transparency of another node. So this polygon mask controls where this merge does its job.
41:33Alright? You can also apply a mask to an image like this. I take this output, plug this into the blue input of our Star Wars guy.
41:40Check this out. Now it's actually cutting him out, which may or may not be what you want.
41:45The great thing is you are in control, complete control of what happens to your image in this little pipeline. Some people love this and some people don't. If you're looking at this and you're a little bit resistant, I would encourage you to give it a chance, get in and play, because it is really fun.
42:01I have so many videos on Fusion, and if you're willing to learn nodes and jump in and get messy, it's a really good time. Okay. So let's look at some color essentials.
42:12Let's throw this down here and just switch to the color page. Now the layout of the color page is one of those really intimidating things.
42:21If you're brand new to resolve, it probably looks like you're sitting at the helm of a spaceship, and that's really common. But I'm gonna simplify everything for you right now. When we switch to the color page, what we're doing is we're opening the same timeline that we're working on in the edit page.
42:37So this timeline right here is just being worked on in the color page. In fact, you can see a little preview of the timeline kind of here in the middle, and we can move our play head back and forth to navigate our timeline. And there's really just a couple of sections here in the interface.
42:54There's the viewer, obviously. There's the nodes over here. We'll get to those later.
43:00I'm gonna close this gallery here for a minute. In the middle here, we have a way to just navigate our timeline or in between different clips. So I can select whichever clip I want to color grade just by clicking on the thumbnail there, and that goes to that clip in my timeline instantly.
43:17And when I have this clip selected, that is the image that I'm working on. That's the clip that I am going to color grade.
43:25All of this stuff down here, everything here, these are just controls for actually changing that image.
43:33So you can kind of think of this as just like one big group of stuff, and we call this the palettes. I always forget if that word has two l's or two t's. If it's wrong, forgive me.
43:44But long story short, when you grab this control or this control or this control or this control, all of those are actually affecting just this clip, and you can see what's happening in this clip in the viewer.
43:55And so if I were to grab one of these color wheels, which we'll talk about in a second, and grab this little dot and push this this way like this, that's going to make this clip pink, and we're gonna see that it's pink up here in the viewer.
44:10And if you're brand new to color, it does not have to get lots more complicated than that. What we do in the color page is just select a clip that we want to adjust, and then we use whatever control we want down here to adjust it. In fact, we can make this even a little bit more simple by toggling some of our panels off and on.
44:31So I'll toggle off nodes, toggle off timeline, toggle off clips. So we're just looking at our image and our controls down here.
44:39In these palettes, we have all kinds of little controls, and these buttons right here actually switch out the controls.
44:46So as I switch to different buttons, this switches to different kinds of palettes. And each palette, some of them have sub palettes like like all these right here.
44:57There's more different kinds of controls, and so there's so much to explore here in the color page, which some people love and some people it stresses them the heck out. For right now, at first, we're just gonna ignore all of this, and we're gonna ignore all of this stuff, and we're just going to focus on this panel right here.
45:19This is called our primary color wheels, and there's a lot of controls here too. But the good news is you really only need to know a couple of them to do so much color stuff. One of the big things you'll do in color grading is make a image brighter or darker, and you can do that with these little sliders down here.
45:38Now, why are there four of them? Well, these are different controls for the different ranges of brightness in the image. Here's what that means.
45:45This one on the right under offset, if I were to grab this and pull this to the right, it's gonna make everything brighter.
45:53I can reset it by clicking any of these little reset buttons here. If I were to take this to the left, it's going to make it darker. Yes.
46:00I'm just grabbing and dragging it to the left. That makes the whole image darker. So offset controls the whole image, but lift gamma and gain, those control the darkest parts, the mid tones, and the lightest parts of the image.
46:15So if I were to grab this same control here in the gain, and I were to push this to the right, that's gonna make the brighter parts brighter. If I push it to the left, that's gonna make the brighter parts darker. Let's say I want to make the shadows a lot brighter.
46:29I can take this lift and take this to the right, and that's going to make the darker parts of my image lighter, which is going to make the whole image lighter, but it's mostly going to affect the darker parts.
46:39And then same thing here in the gamma, if I were to move this up or down, it makes the mid tones darker or brighter. And so you can use a combination of these sliders to affect the brightness of your image as well as the contrast.
46:52That's the difference between the bright and the dark parts. So I could take this gain and push this to the right, and the lift and push it to the left, and look what happens. As I push this to the right, it makes the brighter parts brighter, and as I take the lift and push it to the left, it makes the darker parts darker, which means that we get more contrast.
47:10If I hit shift d, that's gonna disable my color grade, and I can toggle that off and on to see the difference. So here's before those two adjustments that I made, and here's after.
47:20So I'm increasing that contrast. I'm making the darker parts darker and the brighter parts brighter. But we can adjust more than just the brightnesses of the image.
47:28We can also adjust what color things are. And we can do this in the color wheels, and these are split up just like the sliders are. So if I take this offset and push this a little bit blue, it makes everything a little more blue.
47:43If I take and push it to the green, it makes it green and so on. But I can also do this in the lift gamma or gain to affect the different tones in the image. So for instance, I could take my gain and push that a little bit warmer, and it's going to make the brighter parts warmer.
47:58I could take my lift and push that a little bit cooler, and that's gonna make the darker parts cooler. Now again, it's gonna affect the whole image. It's just stronger in the darker parts.
48:07And so as you kind of push and pull this, you can get all kinds of interesting looks by pushing the gain one way and the lift another way. So just knowing these sliders and the color wheels, have a lot of control over your image. But we also have these controls here on the top and bottom of the color wheels, and these we can click and drag to the left or right right here on the number, and as I grab and pull these to the right various things happen.
48:38So as I grab contrast, can add a little bit of contrast just with one slider. I can grab this pivot and move that back and forth, and that adjust the midpoint of the contrast.
48:47So it kind of decides if there's more things that are considered light or more things that are considered dark. So contrast and pivot, they kind of work together.
48:56You can double click on any of these to reset them, and it's a good idea to just grab these and explore. The great thing about the color page and really resolve in general is it's really hard to mess something up.
49:08You very rarely do something that you can't undo. So I mean, if I make this really pink and then push some contrast in it and change the pivot around and mess with the tint and, you know, desaturate it and all this stuff, I can make this look horrible.
49:21But all I have to do is click this little button right here and look. It's back to where it was. It's no big deal.
49:27There's no stress here. So get in here and play around. So let me just show you the essential things that I look at when I'm adjusting an image.
49:35The first thing I pay attention to is, okay. How's the brightness of the image?
49:39How does it feel? I'm looking at this, and it feels it feels good. I don't think it's overly bright or dark.
49:44It's probably fine. One thing that it could definitely take is a little more contrast because I want these darker parts to be a little bit darker and the brighter parts to be a little bit brighter, and so I can adjust that however I want.
49:55I can take the gain master wheel to the right and the lift master wheel to the left, or I can just take this contrast and take that to the right. So I'll maybe I'll do that. Push that contrast So I have a little bit more contrast there and I like it a little better.
50:08Then sometimes I'll grab the pivot and move it around to see if I like it a little brighter, a little darker, something like that. And then I'll go back to the image and I'll look at it and say, okay.
50:16The contrast looks a little better. What about just the colors? Does it feel like the colors are saturated enough?
50:21Like the colors are bright enough and strong enough? Well, I say maybe maybe we could put a little bit into that. So I could take this saturation and push this to the right.
50:29Take this and push that in, and now we're getting that nice green grass there. Now this is a little bit little bit crazy maybe, but now we have a really nice bright colors. And remember we can always grab this playhead and just move this back and forth to scrub through our footage.
50:46Now we have a little bit of skin tone there, so we have an idea of what skin tones look like. That's looking a lot better. Remember, you can always hit shift d, disable your color grade.
50:57That's the same thing as going up here to this little rainbow sparkle button and clicking this. You can see before and after. Yeah.
51:03We're making a big difference here with just a couple of sliders. All I did was grab this contrast, push this to the right, adjust the pivot a little bit, and then I took the saturation up a little bit like that. That's I really touched it three times and look at that difference.
51:16Isn't that crazy? That's the power of the color page. This is three little adjustments on just one of these palettes, which is just one of the many many palettes in the color page.
51:28It's crazy. This is why we have an essentials video like this, so you don't get lost. I think I'll take that saturation down a little bit.
51:35I can also adjust the temperature and the tint, so I can maybe push this temperature a little bit cooler. I can change the tint around, and I'm deciding how I want this clip to feel. Do I want it to feel bright and happier and exciting?
51:46No. This is like a, you know, a duel to the death. So we're not probably gonna do that.
51:51So we're gonna keep it kind of cool and somber. And as far as the essentials of adjusting the color in your videos, this is really like the big thing when it comes to adjusting a clip.
52:02And like I said, there are a lot of other tools that you can use for various reasons, but this is the biggest bang for your buck. Just staying in these primary color wheels, man. You can do so much with these.
52:14And really what I like to do is I like to look at the image and say, what does this need? Is it too dark or too bright? I feel like this is maybe just a touch dark, so I could take this gain and just push that to the right a little bit.
52:26What about the saturation? I can change the saturation and push this to the right to make it more saturated or to the left to make it less saturated. I could change the temperature and the tint to really give this a little bit of a different feel, but doing color grading is really a lot more than just adjusting one image.
52:43If you think about this, we're actually working on a sequence. Right? So there's multiple different shots in this timeline, and we want to make sure that not only does each image look good, but that they match together and that they all work as one project.
52:57So I'll just reset my layout here. And so we have five different shots here, and we want to make sure that they all work together.
53:06And this is really where workflow comes in because you could certainly just switch to this next shot, you know, and play around with it and change the temperature and all of that stuff and use the color tools that we've learned here in the primary color wheels. But then when you switch in between them, you're like, okay.
53:21Well, do those match? Okay. Well, maybe this one needs to be a little bit darker, and then what about this one and how do we change that?
53:28And it gets overwhelming really quickly. And so I'm gonna show you a really easy way to get your shots so they match, and you don't even have to be a professional colorist. Okay?
53:38The first thing I'm gonna do is hold shift and select all of these clips, and then I'm gonna right click here in this empty space, and say reset all grades and nodes.
53:48That's just going to reset everything. All I have is my color management on which we set up earlier. And I'm also gonna close my timeline just so I have a little bit more room here in the interface.
53:58And there's really kind of like three big main parts to this color workflow that's gonna be so easy. We're gonna group all of our shots. We're gonna pick an example shot to compare everything to, and then we're gonna use nodes in a really smart way.
54:12So the first thing I'm gonna do is just shift select all of my shots here, and then right click and select add into a new group. And we'll call this look l o o k like that. Alright.
54:26This is going to add all these shots to a group, and for now, nothing's really going to change. So if I make the shot pink, it just changes the shot pink like normal. But there is a little difference here.
54:36You'll notice down below each of these shots is a chain link icon. That means that all of these are in the same group. And when we have shots in a group, we can actually make a color adjustment to all the shots together.
54:51To do that, I'm gonna go up here to where it says clip above my nodes, and I'm gonna twirl this down and select group post clip. I'll select that. That's gonna turn this node yellow, which means that we're in group post clip mode.
55:04And now, any adjustment that I make with these nodes up like this, if I push this pink, look at that. It changes all of them to pink. So this is really great because I can make a common adjustment that all of the clips are gonna need without having to redo work on every single clip.
55:22So I'll right click here and say reset all grades and nodes. That's kind of the first part is I'm putting everything into a group. Next, I'm gonna pick a shot that I really like that also has some common elements between the other shots.
55:34So for instance, this shot shot four, we have the guy in the black robe, the guy in the brown robe, we have the lightsabers, we have the foliage. Those things exist in our other shots too.
55:46Even this first shot, we have the foliage and the guy in the brown robe. Same thing here. Guy in the black robe here, and then our last shot, we have all of those same elements.
55:56So shot four is actually a really great shot to kind of make some movie wide decisions. And again, we don't have to over complicate this. I can look at this shot and go, okay.
56:05What does this need? I feel like it needs maybe a little more contrast. So I'll take the contrast slider and push it to the right like this.
56:12Just add a little more contrast. Maybe darken this down a little bit. I'll take the gamma and push it down.
56:18Make it a little bit more dramatic. Maybe I'll take the saturation down just a touch, kind of desaturate this.
56:24Maybe I'll play around with the temperature. Maybe make that a little bit more blue. Change that tint.
56:29Sure. Something like that. Maybe I want a little more contrast in here.
56:33There we go. Yeah. Something like that.
56:36So here's our image now, and here's where it was before.
56:41So it doesn't even look like we did a whole lot until you turn this off and on. We get these nice rich tones in the brown, and these nice dark blacks here without putting too strong of a look on it. We still have detail in the dark parts, but the black parts are black.
56:56Yeah. I think that works really nice. We get a little bit more color from our foliage.
57:02Feels good. So let's say that we really like how this looks. Something I can do is just right click on this viewer, and I'll select grab still.
57:11What that's gonna do is actually save this color grade into a little preset over here called a still, and it's going to combine it with an actual still image that you can use and you can export as a image if you want to. But what we're gonna use it for is to compare our other shots too. Now check this out.
57:28This is this is the power. K. Let's switch over to shot five real quick, and then I'm gonna go up to my still right click and say play still.
57:37What that's gonna do is give me a split screen of these two shots so that I can compare them really really easily. So we have our example shot set the way that we want, and now what we're gonna do is just look at the difference between these shots and adjust this shot to match the still.
57:55When we do that, we're going to use nodes in a very specific way. Right now, remember we're still in the group post clip nodes, which means that anything that we do here, say if I make this pink, that's gonna happen to all of the shots, which is actually not what I want right now. I want to go back to adjusting the individual shots so that I can fix the differences in between them and they all match.
58:15So let me get rid of this offset here. I'll just click on this reset button, and I'm gonna switch back over from group post clip nodes back to clip nodes. So again, if I make this pink, that's only going to affect this shot.
58:28I can right click and reset. So now I'm just going to adjust this clip to match our still, which I can do in the primary color wheels. But something to mention, when I adjust something in the primary color wheels or anything down here, that adjustment actually lives inside of this node right here.
58:46Okay? Whichever node that I have selected. You can think of this just as like a box that contains all of these color adjustments that I'm making.
58:54And what's neat about this is I can make another node, I so could just right click and say add node add serial. This is just a node that goes in a series. So we do this one first and then this one second, and I can select this node and this will be another group of corrections.
59:11And so if I take this offset back more towards green, I can just about neutralize this image because I'm making it pink and then I'm adding green to it which kind of cancels it out.
59:23Now I could have done both of those things in one node, but I have the option to split them up if I want to. Now why would you split them up? The big reason is just organization.
59:32You can kind of think of this as steps. So I could right click on this and say node label, and we'll call this, uh, you know, exposure. And I'll adjust the exposure for this clip just by maybe by grabbing this offset and pushing it up to match this clip, and that's my exposure adjustment.
59:48Now, I could adjust the temperature and the tint and the saturation and a 100 other things right here, and those adjustments would live in this node. And there's nothing wrong with doing that, But to keep myself really organized, I'm actually gonna make another node. Right click, add node, add serial.
1:00:05You can also hit alt s. And with this node selected, I'm gonna be selective about the adjustments that I make. I'm gonna right click and say node label, and we'll call this saturation.
1:00:14Okay? So let's say I want to adjust some saturation here. I'm just going to select this and then grab my saturation, and I can adjust that and move that around to be just right.
1:00:23And what's nice about this is if I want to see what this image looks like without the exposure adjustment, I can click on this node number to turn it off and on. Same thing for saturation.
1:00:34And I can kind of look at the different steps that I'm taking in a modular way and turn one on or off. And so if I want to do some kind of experiment, let's say, I can hit alt s and add another node, and we'll call this, you know, contrast. And I can crank up this contrast and see if I like it and play around, and then I'm not messing up anything else because I can always just disable this node or even delete it if I don't like what I did.
1:00:59So it's a really smart modular way to work. Now, what's like next level here? What's like the best way to do this is to set up your nodes not just to be modular, but to be like a to do list for yourself.
1:01:12So what I like to do is something I like to call the ecto method. Right? I'm gonna reset our all grades and nodes, and I'm gonna add a couple of different nodes here.
1:01:22I'll hit alt s and make four nodes, and I'm gonna label each one. This one's gonna be e c t o.
1:01:32It's just easy to remember like ECTO from the Ghostbusters. Right? E stands for exposure, c is contrast, t is for temperature and saturation, o is for other stuff.
1:01:42And what we can do is select all of our clips like this, and we can copy these nodes into all of our clips even though these are blank nodes.
1:01:52They're not doing anything right now. I could middle button mouse click or I could right click on shot five and say apply grade, and now if I go to these different clips, we see those eCTO nodes throughout here.
1:02:06Okay? This looks crazy and fancy, but it's really not. All this is is four blank nodes where nothing is going on, just labeled e c t o here.
1:02:14Now here's where it gets awesome. So I'll switch over to shot five, and remember we have our split screen here. Now I'm just gonna go through this like a to do list.
1:02:23E for exposure. Is the exposure right? Okay.
1:02:26I'm gonna maybe change my offset and push that up and adjust the exposure to be better, and I'll kind of go in between this. K.
1:02:34Maybe play around, see if I can adjust the exposure there. Cool. Now let's look at the contrast.
1:02:39Is the contrast right? I feel like the contrast is maybe a little much in this shot, so maybe I'll take the contrast down a little bit. K.
1:02:47Temperature. Is the temperature the same? Let's grab the temperature and move that back and forth.
1:02:53I feel like it's pretty good. And then o for other stuff. Now actually this exposure, I feel like we could maybe push this up a touch.
1:03:02Yeah. I feel like that's going to work a little bit better. Now these match a lot better than they were.
1:03:07Maybe this temperature I'll take the saturation down a little bit. There we go. That's gonna fix this.
1:03:13Maybe even more. Something like that. Now if we're getting to the point where I can't quite tell the difference in between these, maybe we'll take this temperature a little bit more blue, something like that.
1:03:23That's when these are going to match pretty well. I can select all of these and hit control d for disable. Look at the difference that we're making in between these shots.
1:03:32It's just a bunch of little tweaks that really make these match a little bit better. So the question is, how do you match all of your shots to work together? Well, you just compare them all to your example shot.
1:03:44So shot three. Does this compare with our example? Actually, this looks pretty good, I'd say.
1:03:49Don't need to do a whole lot to it. And something important is just to not overthink it. If it feels like it works, just move on.
1:03:56It's okay. Shot two. Now this is obviously way too dark.
1:03:59Okay? So let's fix the biggest thing first, the exposure. Alright.
1:04:04Let's take this and I'll push this offset up. We want this to be much much brighter. That's working a lot better.
1:04:10What about the contrast? Maybe you could take this contrast down a touch. The temperature and saturation, I feel like that works a lot better.
1:04:19Good. So those are going to match a lot better than they were. Maybe could go just a little warm much much better.
1:04:26I'm looking at the browns. Do the browns match? Do the greens match?
1:04:29Do the foliage back here match? Does it feel like it lives in the same world? Yes.
1:04:34Switch back over to shot one, and I'll move this to a good place. And again, okay, what needs to change here?
1:04:42Let's take the exposure, push that exposure up. Oh, that's gonna fix a lot of stuff. Oh, that's much better.
1:04:49Just take that offset up. Oh, yeah. So good.
1:04:54Much better. Much much better. Play with this contrast.
1:04:57Maybe could add a little contrast to it. Temperature, let's maybe take the saturation down a little bit.
1:05:04That looks pretty good. Much better. And now that we've gone through each of those shots, and we had a little to do list for each of the shots.
1:05:12Now if I turn off this split screen, which is just right here, this little button. Turn this off. If I click through this, these should all match pretty well.
1:05:21And yeah, I don't think there's anything this one's maybe just a little bit yellow. So maybe we'll take this temperature just a little bit cooler and just flip in between them.
1:05:31You should be able to flip to any shot and they should all feel like they live in the same world. And if that's true, then they're gonna match pretty well. See how easy that was to match that?
1:05:40It's all about having a good color workflow. But that's really what's gonna get you started in the color page. It's not all about learning a specific tool.
1:05:48It's more of the technique. It's more of the workflow of adjusting one image, which you can do with the color wheels or any other tool that you want.
1:05:55Putting these all in a group and doing the the kind of big work here first because remember, we're making a lot of adjustments to all of these shots altogether in the group. And then under that group grade, we're also adjusting the clips.
1:06:09I have a lot of videos and training on this kind of workflow. It's the best workflow, man. And there's so much to go over with the color page.
1:06:17I mean, reading scopes and all the fancy things that you can do with masks and selecting certain colors and everything, but this is the basics. Get good at this first because that's what's really going to help your videos. Nobody's gonna care if you have a vignette on this shot if your shots don't match.
1:06:34Alright? That's the essentials. Get your image looking pretty good overall and make sure your shots match.
1:06:41That's how you do it in the color page. Alright. Let's talk about Fairlight.
1:06:45Fairlight works in a similar way to the other pages here and that it shares this timeline. And when we click into Fairlight, it goes into audio mode, basically.
1:06:57This is the interface, the the app within Resolve to get really crazy with your audio mixing, sound design, and pretty much everything to do with what you hear in Resolve.
1:07:09And here's really the big thing to remember. We have this timeline kind of unlike we have in the color infusion page, And so we can actually make edits in this timeline, and when we switch back over to the edit page, those edits are reflected in that timeline.
1:07:25K? Because we're really just we're working on the same timeline. It's just a little bit of a different interface as far as this part goes.
1:07:31Any changes that we make in the Fairlight page, I'm just grabbing these little handles to add a fade, or if I right click and say clip color and make it a different color, any of those changes are also going to have it on the edit page.
1:07:46And there's no real difference between adjusting some of these things on the Fairlight page versus the edit page. Kinda depends on just wherever you're at, whatever is convenient to do. But there are a couple reasons why you'd actually want to jump into the Fairlight page.
1:07:59The first one just being really practical, you can make these tracks huge, and you can get really crazy with your audio. For instance, if you want to hold alt, you can click on this little line right here, which is our volume line, and I have a lot of control over my audio.
1:08:15You can do stuff like this in the edit page, but it's a little bit easier to do when you can make the tracks really big. And that's really a big thing with Fairlight is you work on audio tracks in Fairlight. It's really optimized for a lot of tracks.
1:08:29So if I go to the media pool and open up my audio here, all of this audio is included in our downloadable media. And let's say, I'll just start grabbing these and throwing them in here, making new tracks. And if we were to play this back, it would be terrible.
1:08:43But I'll least show you kind of how this works. When you're working with a lot of audio and doing sound design and everything, you're typically working with a lot of tracks, and you can do some really cool stuff in Fairlight.
1:08:53And in some ways, these tracks are a lot easier to manage in Fairlight. For instance, one thing that is new in Resolve 21 is folders. So I can shift select some of these tracks.
1:09:05So tracks five through seven, right click, and say add tracks to new folder. And that will put these in a folder like this, and I can twirl this up.
1:09:14And now I have this folder of tracks that doesn't actually exist in the edit page. See, these are all separate tracks. But in Fairlight, I can twirl these up or down.
1:09:25And so if you have 500 tracks, you can group them into folders. You can even put folders inside of folders. And so if you're an audio nerd and you like to add a lot of sound effects and music and hits and all kinds of stuff, this is the place to do it.
1:09:38I'm just gonna get rid of this. Right click on one of these track headers and say delete empty tracks. So if I were gonna work on the sound for this movie, I could go up and open my media pool.
1:09:48And here under audio, I have all these sound effects. And let's just start kind of building the audio for this project.
1:09:56One thing we can do is replace the dialogue here. So we have some dialogue that's kind of on camera, and there's this clip called Malachi lines. I can double click on it to open it up here.
1:10:07And just like the source viewer in the edit page, I can kinda go through here and then hit I for in, or I can also click this button to set my in, and o for out. And then I can drag this down to a track, and I can adjust its position. We'll just mute this first track here.
1:10:22I'm here for the droid. Yeah. See that works.
1:10:25This is gonna be our dialogue track. So I'll just double click on this right here and just say DIA. That's gonna be our dialogue for our Jedi.
1:10:32Let's just say DIA dash Jedi. And then maybe we also have some dialogue for the bad guy here. So I'll find Ryan Vio.
1:10:41That's the name of the actor who played the bad guy. We'll grab a couple of his lines.
1:10:45Come and take it.
1:10:47Good. We'll just drag this down here, but I'm gonna put this on a new track, this third track. Come and take it.
1:10:57Let's rename this track dialogue dash sith. Sure.
1:11:01And now we have two tracks, one for each of our characters. I'll just kind of squish this track up like this. So we have a little bit more room.
1:11:10And maybe since we're in this forest environment, we wanna add some ambience. There is a forest ambience track here.
1:11:22Let's just throw this down in one of these lower tracks.
1:11:29That'll give us a good ambient track. And we can just kind of build our whole soundscape by just dragging our sound effects into our tracks like this. We'll just add a couple more things here.
1:11:39We have we have a little shot of our droid, which we need to colorize. I'll just right click and select input color space, make sure we have that selected.
1:11:47Blackmagic Design Film Gen five. There we go. That needs some visual effects, but we'll just go with this for now.
1:11:52I find our droid sound effects and drop that in there again in a new track.
1:12:02Great. We'll name that droid. This will be ambiance, and we just put in everything that we want to hear.
1:12:09And typically, it's a good workflow to put all the different things on different tracks. So your dialogue from one character in one environment goes on one track, in a different environment might go to a different track, from a different characters on a third track, sound effects from a certain source might go on their own track.
1:12:25You can have as many tracks as you want. And the advantage here is that all of the tracks show up here in the mixer, and it's really easy just to move these faders up and down to decide how loud or quiet the tracks need to be.
1:12:37So for instance, this ambience might be a little bit loud, so I can just take that down in the mixer while I'm listening to it, and really kind of dial that in.
1:12:48Maybe that droids a little loud too. We'll take that down, but we'll keep this dialogue I'm here for the droid. Nice and loud.
1:12:56Come and take it. And so we can put tracks in a physical group like I showed you earlier, like a folder, but we can also just run the output of a track through what we call a bus. A bus is like a special track that multiple audio tracks actually route through, and so you can apply effects or volume or EQ or all kinds of different effects to affect multiple tracks at once.
1:13:21Now by default, everything is going through bus one. That is like the main mix, the stereo mix. But if I go up to Fairlight and go to bus format, I can add a bus right here, and we'll call this instead of bus two, we'll call this dialogue dash bus and hit okay.
1:13:42And here in our mixer, if I scroll down on my scroll wheel, I can go to where it says bus outputs. And here for the dialogue Jedi and dialogue Sith, I can add a bus. So this dialogue bus like this.
1:13:55There we go. And I'll take away. I'll just remove these bus outputs for bus one.
1:14:02If I were to play this back, we aren't going to hear it because this is being played into a bus that actually isn't routed to the stereo. It's just kind of like a secondary mix. So both of these are playing back in this bus, but this bus itself, we don't actually hear it.
1:14:19But we can see the meters popping up here and here when we play it back. It's just not coming through the actual main output. So all we have to do here is for bus two, we need to make sure that has an output of bus one.
1:14:33So now when we play this back Come and take it. We still hear our dialogue, but it's going through bus two first. Here's what's cool about this.
1:14:41I can adjust both of these tracks together using this bus Take it. Or put on effects.
1:14:49So for instance, here where it says effects, I can click this little plus, and I can add something like how about some reverb? And now whatever's being put into that bus is going to go through this reverb.
1:15:10So that's really really heavy reverb. Don't probably want it that crazy. But that's a way that you can add the same effect to multiple different tracks without just duplicating the effect a whole bunch.
1:15:24Now on this same bus and in any track actually, we have a couple really powerful features. One is this horizontal green line, which if you double click on it is our dynamics.
1:15:36This is a way to add what we call a compressor to a track, which basically make sure that the louder parts of the audio aren't too loud, and there's ways to push up the quieter parts.
1:15:48And a lot of the time, you can just go to this preset up here where it says default. I'll just switch this to dialogue level expander. Sure.
1:15:55Come and take it. And what that's gonna do is just make sure that the loudest parts aren't too loud. And then we can push this makeup up and make the whole thing louder.
1:16:05Come and take it. So this is something that we do all the time on dialogue because it helps the dialogue be loud enough to kind of cut through the mix. Easy to hear when you have, you know, terrible speakers.
1:16:16In fact, my dialogue right now that you're hearing is going through something very similar to this to make sure that when I talk really quietly, you can still hear me. And when I talk really loud, it's not too loud.
1:16:27The other really powerful thing in each track is this little cyan line, which is the EQ. Double click on this, and that'll bring up our equalizer.
1:16:35This is a way to turn up or down certain frequencies in your audio. So right here Come and take it. Let's actually get rid of this reverb here for a minute.
1:16:46Come and take it. Maybe I'll just hit I and o to set an in and out on our timeline, and then I'll loop this. Come and take it.
1:16:57Come and take it. So we can hear it. Come and take it.
1:17:00And now check this out. Come and take I can take this and make him sound like he's in Take another room with the door closed just by doing this. Come and take it.
1:17:10Yeah. See? Come and take it.
1:17:13Or I can make him sound like he's on a phone speaker. Take it. Come and take it.
1:17:20Come and take it.
1:17:21Come and take it. And so you can add an EQ to any track or a bus. Audio is a just a massively huge world.
1:17:29But these are really the essentials of Fairlight. You put your audio in the various tracks. You have a lot of controls for each track here on the channel strips in the mixer, including effects, dynamics, EQ, panning controls.
1:17:43That's like panning it left and right, and you can decide which bus they go into. Not to mention you can mute your channels and adjust them up and down with the mixer. There are so many other things to show you with Fairlight, but those are the really essential things.
1:17:57Okay. So let's say that this video looks amazing. It's wonderful, and we're ready to render it.
1:18:01The way that you do that is you go to the deliver page. You click on that, and that's going to bring your timeline into the deliver page and get it ready to render. Rendering is converting your movie from this project in Resolve to an actual, like, video file that somebody can watch or you can upload to YouTube or share with your client or whatever you wanna do.
1:18:23And this is a pretty deep world too, but the essentials are this. Over here on the left, you have a whole bunch of presets that you can choose from. There's presets for YouTube, presets for TikTok, all kinds of stuff.
1:18:33And you set your settings under here, and you have settings for video and audio as well as your file name and that kind of thing. And I'll show you the most common settings because you can just go crazy on these settings and tweaking them all over the place. The too long didn't read is there's basically like two kinds of videos that you would make.
1:18:52One for sharing for for uploading to YouTube, that kind of thing, and the other kind would be like an archive. The YouTube version is pretty small, a little bit compressed, and is designed to be shared.
1:19:05The archive version is a much higher quality video, but it's a much bigger file size. So I'll show you how to do both. We could get into all the details here, but really, if you go to the presets and you switch to h dot two six five master, that is gonna be a pretty darn good preset for YouTube.
1:19:21Now, if you have the free version of Resolve on a PC, you won't be able to render h two six five. In that case, I would just recommend like a YouTube twenty one sixty p render, and that's gonna give you a pretty good result. But what I like to do is h two six five master, and the only thing I'm gonna change is this resolution.
1:19:37I'm gonna make this resolution at least UHD. Okay? Thirty eight forty by twenty one sixty.
1:19:43Now if I'm shooting in UHD and my timeline settings are UHD, that's gonna work great. But even if you didn't shoot UHD, even if you're just working with an HD timeline, I would render this UHD because when you upload it to YouTube, YouTube is going to treat it with more respect, and your video file is going to look better.
1:20:02There isn't anything magic happening when you upscale this to Ultra HD. It's not it's not doing anything fancy.
1:20:08It's just kind of tricking YouTube into treating it better, treating it nicely. So h two six five master preset, resolution thirty eight forty by twenty one sixty, add to render queue. It's gonna say, are you sure you wanna add higher resolution renders?
1:20:20And I'm gonna say, yes. I'm gonna add, and that's going to add the job to the render queue. Now, this isn't rendering yet.
1:20:26It's just kind of adding it to a to do list. So that is the version that we upload to YouTube. It's a good idea to make an archive version of your video.
1:20:36Now what is that? That's a high quality version that would be easy to bring back into an editor and re edit at some point. It's just the highest quality version you can make of your video, and you don't care if the file sizes are huge.
1:20:49So And I'm gonna go up to preset here, and I'm just gonna pick ProRes four two two HQ. This is a great place to start when it comes to making an archive version. In fact, I would pretty much just keep all of these same settings.
1:21:00The only tweak I would make is I would go to audio right here, and down here where it says output track one, I would switch this to all timeline tracks. What that's gonna do is render every single track on our timeline as a separate track in the video file. So that if you ever need to edit this a different way, you can bring it in and you have all of your audio separated, so you could remove the music or remove the sound effects or the dialogue or replace it or something if you need to in the future.
1:21:26You could probably leave this as is. If you want a little bit more quality, you could switch this to, like, 32 bit float. Sure.
1:21:31That's fine. Let's call this, you know, movie dash archive, and I'll hit add to render queue.
1:21:36And now we have both of our versions of our movies. I can select both of these and then go here to render all. And what that's gonna do is render both of the versions of these movies, one of them for YouTube and one of them for archive.
1:21:49Here I am. I have my YouTube version right here, and my archive version, if I just bring this back into Resolve, we can see what's up here.
1:21:57Right click, create new timeline. We can see that we have the video as well as the separated audio tracks.
1:22:04Isn't that cool? It's gonna be so helpful in the future if I need to re edit this. That's the essentials of creating a video in Resolve.
1:22:13Resolve is a huge deep program. Video creation is a massive topic. If you're looking at this and you're going, oh, wow.
1:22:21That's a lot. Me and my team want to help you. And so I wanna invite you to Ground Control Film School.
1:22:26This is our community, and what you can do is you can make a post and post a video that you've been working on. This is one from our friend, Sandro, and he's asking, what do you think about this video? And then every weekday, me and my team sit down, and we review the videos that are posted to the community.
1:22:41And we give comments and feedback, and we'll narrow it down to one major thing that you can do to make your videos better. Sometimes that has to do with learning a specific skill in Resolve. And in that case, you can go up to our classroom, and inside the classroom, we have access to all of our Resolve courses.
1:22:58So if you wanna learn fusion, we have fusion one zero one, two zero one, three zero one, practice projects. We have color one zero one, Fairlight one zero one. There is a massive amount of resources here.
1:23:07And so you can go in the classroom and dig in and nerd out and learn all kinds of stuff. Or if you wanna keep things simple, you can just go and study the lessons that we suggest. Then it's not overwhelming or frustrating.
1:23:17You're just always working on the right things to make the most progress in your video creation. We're seeing people who were making videos that were kind of meh, actually make videos that are really great. They're making huge progress in a matter of, like, days and weeks instead of years.
1:23:33And the cool thing is that can be your story too. All you gotta do is sign up, and you'll have me and my team behind you helping you. And so you don't have to be overwhelmed or lost or frustrated.
1:23:42You're just constantly working on the things that are really important, and you constantly have a clear path to always be working on the big stuff that's really gonna make a difference in your videos. If this sounds like a good time, there is a link in the description down below.
1:23:54That's a special invite to Ground Control Film School. I wanna see you in there. And again, if you want some media to follow along, we'll have how about there?
1:24:00How about how about you can get that media for free? That's all the Star Wars media, and you can just have a great time playing around, making some edits, doing some audio, some color grading, even some fusion stuff, making some lightsabers. Oh, baby.
1:24:12Hey. Thanks for hanging out with me. I'll see you later.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Casey Faris opens with the promise beginners most want to hear: Resolve can be unlocked in a single sitting. The rest of the video is the proof — 84 minutes, one fan-film project, every page of the software.
Named ideas worth stealing.
57:56acronym
ECTO Color Workflow
- Exposure
- Contrast
- Temperature/Saturation
- Other
Apply four labeled blank nodes to every clip at once, then treat each clip as a to-do list. Modular nodes mean you can disable or delete any step without losing other work.
Steal forAny multi-shot project where consistency between clips matters
34:58list
Four Fusion Node Types
- Image (raw ingredient: footage, background, text)
- Effect (changes an image: blur, color corrector, transform)
- Merge (stacks two images: foreground over background)
- Mask (controls transparency: polygon, ellipse, AI-assisted)
Every one of Fusion's 300+ nodes fits one of four buckets. Knowing the category predicts how to wire a node before you have any experience with it.
Steal forTeaching or self-learning Fusion without memorizing individual node names
53:02model
Group + Still Comparison Color Workflow
Add all clips to a named group, grade the most representative shot, grab a still, then use split-screen playback to match every other clip to that still before touching individual grades.
Steal forMatching color across a multi-shot project without a professional colorist
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
06:27product
“We have an online community called Ground Control Film School that is designed to help you focus on just what you need to focus on when it comes to video creation.”
Soft mid-video pitch, not aggressive. Repeated briefly at the end. No discount or urgency framing.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
Visual structure at a glance.
