In the following tutorials, we’ll cover some of the best tips, tricks, and advice for working with Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve.

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May 21, 2020 From importing unedited clips to rendering a final project, this video tutorial gives you a step-by-step guide to video editing in the best free software option, DaVinci Resolve. If you’re a marketer, a small business owner, a content creator, or a 2020-hybrid of all three, you’ve probably heard the phrase “Video is king.”. DaVinci Resolve’s Interface. DaVinci Resolve is the leading coloring platform in the industry. FREE Guide: Make great screencasts and rank better on YouTube: Start making professional videos for free in 2018 with Da.

Advanced Editing with DaVinci Resolve 15. These hands-on lessons will teach you the art and craft of editing using DaVinci Resolve’s advanced editing features. You’ll learn how to cut dramatic, documentary, music videos and action scenes, and how to build eye-catching effects on. Davinci Resolve/Fusion: Create a Retro Scrolling Parallax Background. A Blackbird called Sue explains how to make a Retro Scrolling Parallax Background using the Custom Tool that ships with version DaVinci Resolve 16.2.4. This tutorial covers how to make scrolling backgrounds, which immediately make me think of something behind the characters in Scooby-Doo or The Flintstones.

From its digital color correction roots back in the 1980s, DaVinci Resolve has transformed from a software with no more than a hundred users in 2009, to a product user-base of over two million in 2019, which is a number matching Apple’s Final Cut Pro X at its height in 2017. It’s safe to say that DaVinci Resolve is now one of the most popular video editing applications (both for color correction and non-linear editing) for film and video professionals.

Yet, for many in the industry, DaVinci Resolve might seem a bit daunting. This is especially true for those who’ve been happy and comfortable with other editing platforms. However, if you’re someone starting out in video editing for the first time — or thinking about trying out a new platform for some specific changes — DaVinci Resolve is fast becoming a new editing workhorse for many.

So, let’s dive into some of the best tutorials to get you started.

Color Grading in DaVinci Resolve

In my professional film and video career — as both an editor and a shooter — DaVinci Resolve came up most often as one of the better solutions for working with color grading and specific situations, like the above — working with skin tones.

However, while the app is much more than just a color grading software, for many it’s still one of the best options for touching up colors and tones. In the tutorial above, we not only get some great insights into how to work with different skin tones, but also how to make masks, unify tones, pair imperfections, and separate mixed nodes.

You can read more about the whole process in this article here.

DaVinci Resolve Easy Screen Pump Effect

One cool, simple trick — which is pretty easy to uniquely pull off in DaVinci Resolve’s NLE editing platform — is the iconic “screen pump” effect. You know, the one from concert or music videos where the screen seems to bounce with the beat of the song?

In this quick tutorial, Jay Lippman shows us how to create this effect without going into color of fusion, but by simply applying some basic keyframing techniques.

How to Remove Objects in DaVinci Resolve

So, less than a year ago Adobe turned some heads when they announced their “Content Aware Fill” tool for After Effects. This tool blew fans and editors away with its almost science fiction-level technology. And, while it’s a great option for After Effects users, in the tutorial above you can see that DaVinci Resolve (which is a free program as a basic offering) has the exact same technology.

You can follow along in the tutorial above, or check out this full article to learn how to use the Content Aware Fill on your Resolve projects.

Basic Fusion and Compositing

Getting back to the basics in this tutorial by Casey Faris, we dive into a quick primer on how to navigate DaVinci Resolve, and the first steps you’ll need to take when just getting started. In many ways, the platform is quite similar to other popular NLEs. But, once you start really getting into the fusion and composition, it might help to have a guide in order to understand what’s going on — plus all the advanced options at your control.

Using DaVinci Resolve’s Face Refinement Tool

As a good partner video and article to go along with the skin tone editing tutorial at the top of our list, DaVinci Resolve’s “Face Refinement Tool” is truly a remarkable tool video editors and color correctors/graders will love. DaVinci’s Face Refinement Tool was introduced in DaVinci Resolve 14, as seen in the video above.

If you really want your models, subjects, or actors to look their best in your film and video projects, check out the full, in-depth article here.

Create Neon Animations in DaVinci Resolve

In case you haven’t seen the trendy and stylized looks created by Blotter Media, you should definitely check out the channel here. And, if you’d like to add it to your films and videos, we have a great tutorial to recommend. Editor Jamie Fenn breaks down how to add the neon animations to your projects.

Taking a simple example using his fingers, Fenn takes you through creating the painted, soft glows and the frame-by-frame technique of creating your custom animations.

THE Total Guide to the Best Free Video Editor

Finally, if you’ve checked through the videos above and feel like you’re ready to fully dive into DaVinci Resolve and truly MASTER the platform as one of your regular editing options, we actually have a multi-episode course that’ll teach you the following:

You can read more about the full course guide and check out some of the individual episodes in this full article here.

Cover image via DaVinci Resolve.

For more DaVinci Resolve and video editing tips, tricks, and resources, check out some of these articles below.

Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve has long been the industry-standard software for color correction and grading, and for the past few years, its video editing features have also been improving exponentially. Today, DaVinci Resolve 15 is currently the only software that allows you to edit, create motion graphics and visual FX, mix audio, and, of course, color grade from start to finish. Even better, the basic version is available for free.

DaVinci Resolve’s interface is arranged into workspaces called Pages. There are six of them, arranged logically following the standard video-production workflow. They are: the Media Page, Edit Page, Fusion Page, Color Page, Fairlight Page, and Deliver Page. Read on for more info on how each one works.

The Media Page

Davinci Resolve Tutorial

The Media Page is your go-to place for importing and organizing all your media in DaVinci Resolve. It’s the most efficient place to organize all your videos, audio, sync files, add metadata, and even clone your original files. The Media Page itself is divided into five areas: The Library Browser is where you navigate and search files you need for your project. The Media Pool is where you can organize all your files into bins, rename files, arrange them based on metadata, and create Smart Bins, which organize your files based on metadata that you define. The Viewer, as the name implies, is where you preview your files before you import them or when they’re imported. The other panels in the Edit Page also include the Meters, Waveform, and Metadata Panel.

The Edit Page

The Edit Page is where you manipulate your clips, edit them, and turn them into one cohesive piece. The editing capabilities of DaVinci Resolve really have improved a lot since it was introduced a few years ago. Today, it contains nearly every editorial tool you need. The Edit page is divided into three sections: The Media Pool to browse all your files, the Viewers to preview your media, and the Timeline to trim and edit your clips. All of these work together so that you can create your next cinematic masterpiece fast and easy.

There are tons of features in DaVinci Resolve, but what I like best is the Trim Edit mode, because it lessens the keyboard shortcuts you need to memorize, especially when you’re new to the software. For example, if you’re in the selection mode, using the period or the comma key allows you to nudge your clip one frame at a time or trim either your heads and tails one frame at a time. When you switch to the Trim Edit mode, those same two keys change functionality depending on where you place your cursor. Put it on top of a clip and it becomes a slip tool; put it on the lower part, and it becomes a slide tool. Selecting either the head or tail of a clip allows you to do a ripple edit. With other NLEs, this would be a different keyboard shortcut for every command.

Another feature that I like is the Zoomed Audio Waveform feature. DaVinci Resolve allows you to view the embedded audio of your clip overlaid on the Source Viewer. It’s a simple feature, but it helps a lot, especially when you’re working on clips that have dialogues on them, because you can add in and out points to a clip more accurately when you can see the audio waveform.

The Fusion Page

The Fusion Page is the latest addition to DaVinci Resolve. The integration of Fusion is really a big thing, because it puts DaVinci Resolve way ahead of the competition and sets a new standard for motion graphics and visual-effects workflow for non-linear editing software. Fusion is a high-end node-based visual FX interface that works in true 3D space and is used in big Hollywood projects like Avengers, Maleficent, and Thor.

It has built-in advanced keyers, 3D titling, particle generators, and tracking and stabilization. If you’re an Adobe user, you might be familiar with Dynamic Linking, by which you can send your clips to After Effects for creating visual effects, and send them back to Premiere Pro without the need to export or render. But the problem with that is you’re still using two separate programs to do your tasks. Not to mention that these two programs are also using more of your computer’s memory. Plus, a lot of times, the connection between them is unstable and doesn’t really work. With Fusion right inside DaVinci Resolve, everything is a click away. Just park your playhead on any clip in your timeline, click on the Fusion Page, and you’re ready to go.

The Color Page

Color grading is synonymous with DaVinci Resolve, and its biggest strength is still the Color Page. Within the Color Page, you have all the controls and tools you need for adjusting and manipulating colors, creating secondary corrections, reducing noise, and creating looks. It also comes with a built-in color management system, allowing you to process images at full 32-bit float quality with GPU acceleration. No other NLE comes close to Resolve’s color grading toolset.

The Fairlight Page

When it comes to film, the visuals and the sound are equally important. People might forgive you for having grainy or overexposed footage, but they will never finish watching your video if you have lousy and noisy audio. Fairlight is a full professional digital audio workstation integrated in Davinci Resolve, meaning it can do far more than simple volume level adjustments and audio effects.

Fairlight is equipped with a set of professional audio tools that allow you to create cinematic audio with no additional crew or budget required, so you don’t have to send your audio work to another facility or hire another person to do the work for you — it can all be done within DaVinci Resolve. You can also plug in an external Fairlight professional console, which can make audio mixing faster and more intuitive.

Davinci Resolve

The Deliver Page

After everything is ready, it’s time to export your finished work. The Deliver Page is Resolve’s dedicated interface, created just for outputting your work. It’s very flexible, and allows you to export from proxies to high-quality files. You can output to the most commonly used web codecs, like h264, or to professional codecs like ProRes or MXF. DaVinci Resolve allows you to output timelines, a portion of a timeline, individual clips, or even batch process different outputs. The output presets available also make it easier to output for the web, streaming services, or cinema.

Davinci Resolve Tutorial 2020

DaVinci Resolve has gone a long way from being just a color-grading application. It has grown into a fully mature and powerful non-linear editing application that lets you do offline and online editing, color correction and grading, visual FX, and audio mixing, while collaborating seamlessly with other team members (collaboration features are available on the paid version of the software). There’s nothing to lose by trying the free version, and it might just be the NLE you’ve been looking for.