Introduction to DaVinci Resolve 17

1. Class Introduction: Welcome to this introduction course for Da Vinci Resolve. My name is shoot vests and I'm going to take you through everything that you need to know in order to get started with the Vinci Resolve. Davinci Resolve can be quite overwhelming at first, but once you get hang of it, it's quite easy to Vinci Resolve is a very powerful editing software, both for editing, color grading, media management, and a lot more. So let's get started. 2. The Topics: All right, So I'll quickly run you through everything that we're going to take a look at in this course. But first I wanted to mention that if you want to follow along with this course properly, go to my website. You can find the link in the description and download the free material so you can properly follow along. And also, and this is a very important step. Download my keyboard shortcuts because I will use particular keyboard shortcuts to work more efficiently. And if you really want to follow along, you need those installed as well. Of course, I will teach you that in this course as well. So let's see what we're going to take a look at in this course. The first thing that we're going to do is how to create a new project and how to make new folders inside the Vinci resolve to organize your projects properly. Next is a couple of ways to import your media into DaVinci Resolve. Then we take a look at how to create a rough cut in the cut page, doing it very fast and efficient. Next on the edit page would take a look at different functions such as scaling, retiring, text effects and video effects. Then on the Fusion page, we don't really do a lot here, but I'll just run you through what this is on the color page, how to import, let's how to use, Let's what notes are and what the most used pages inside the color page, then next and then deliver page how to export your project properly. And then lastly, how to archive your project properly. So let's get started. 3. Creating A New Project: Okay, The first thing we're going to take Luke, is how to create a new project. This is quite simple. Whenever you open up the Vinci Resolve, This is the screen digital get probably know folders because I created that obviously. And I like to do that to organize my project. So for example, if I open up the YouTube tab, you can see some YouTube projects that I've been working on lately. And that just keeps it nice and clean. So I highly recommend you do the same. There's a couple of ways you can create a new project. Usually this is opened up. You can start by clicking here. And also if you want to create a new folder, you can click on this one also. You can do all the same things when right-clicking in this area, or you can simply just click on this big button. One thing that I'd like to mention is that whenever you start out individual result for the first time, I highly recommend you create a new local database. You can do that by clicking on new database and then give it a location on your computer that is on a hard drive that is inside your computer. So it cannot be an external hard drive, otherwise you'll get errors. The good thing about this is that you can always locate your projects because if you don't do it, the Vinci Resolve, we'll store it in its normal database. And you can never find it because it's hidden so deep. So I highly recommend you do this. So let's click on this to create a new project. And then the first thing I do always is Command S to save the current projects. All right, this course, mmm, so now it's saved. And one thing I always do when opening up a new project is I check my autosave options are enabled. So go to the Vinci resolve in the left top corner, go to Preferences, user project save and load and make sure that LiveSafe project backups are enabled and you have given it a location because then once this whole program crashes, you have a backup every five minutes. So that's obviously very useful to have. 4. Importing Footage: All right, next up we'll take a look at how to import footage. So if you open up the Vinci resolve, it will probably go to the cup h first, head over to the Media tab. And then there's a couple of ways you can do it. You can either navigate through this entire menu, go to users, shoot a sling, that's my name, desktop. And then if this is the folder to want to import, you can either drag it or right-click and then add folder into media pool. You can do it this way, but I personally prefer to do it a little bit different, and that is just by dragging and dropping it from a Finder window. So I opened up my finder window. And then there's a couple of ways you can do this, either by dragging the folder into this area that will create a bin for you like that. Yes, So there's a been created in the master output that is very useful because if I would do it the other way, like dragging this folder inside this area, it's all being dropped in a monster output. If you drag 20 or 30 files worth of clips inside this area, everything is combined. So I highly recommend you create a file structure in your Finder or you know, in your Explorer if you're on Windows and then you drag it into this area of the Vinci Resolve and all the bins will remain the same. Alright, so now your clips are being imported. Let me go through a few things that you might find interesting on this page. If you click on Eclipse and you go to the metadata section, you can see all the information about the clip. This is shot in Blackmagic RAW in six, 24 frames a second. And all that stuff is right here. So if you're editing a project with clips that are not yours, this is always useful to check because then you have a little bit of knowledge about what the clips are and what kind of foods you work with. 5. The Cut Page: Next time we go over to the gut page, the cup h is a very useful tool to trim your clips very fast and efficient. So the first thing I always do is drag all the clips that I want to spot or I want to trim inside the timeline. So by doing that, just highlight everything and just drag it over to this section. Da Vinci resolve will create a timeline for you. Now, in the cut page, there's a couple of ways you can check what kind of settings or what kind of timeline you have just created. So go to the timeline here, right-click and then timelines settings. And then you'll see that the Vinci Resolve created an HD timeline because I have selected that in my preference window. You can also create a UHD preset, but that is for another course. So if you want to change this, you can uncheck this box and just scroll through all the different resolutions and then just click it. Okay, and you're good to go. Now it's an UHD timeline. You can also go here, and if you press this drop-down menu, you can quickly select a different resolution, such as square portrait flow, HD, and UHD. Very useful. Also if you're doing stuff for social, but you rather edit in a UHD format. You can setup saved guides over here, press this button, and then for example, if you do a story for Instagram, breast this one, and you see exactly what will be in the frame and what not very useful. All right, So let me uncheck this. And then let's go over to the timeline. You can scroll either with your mouse. If you have a scroll wheel that goes left and right, or you can just drag the entire timeline. Alright, if you have downloaded my keyboard shortcuts, let me show you how you can install them. Go to the top-left corner to DaVinci Resolve keyboard customization. Go to the top right corner to the three dots over here, Import Preset, and then navigate to the file that you've just downloaded from a website. And then it will say DaVinci Resolve mess. That is it. Alright, if you want to switch back to your regular, you can just click this drop-down menu and go back to the Vinci Resolve. But, you know, I worked a long time on these keyboard shortcuts and they really work. All right, So to keyboard shortcuts that I use most are to W and the Iike. The W key will ripple, delete everything from the left to the right, from where to play headstands. And the Iike will do exactly the opposite. So if we have the play head over here for example, and let's say we don't want this part of the image. We just press W and it will delete everything from the play head up to the left. So if we go to the end of the clip, let's say, you know, this is where we want the clip to end. We pressed it Iike, and everything from the player to the right will be deleted. Very useful. So this way you can just navigate through your clips very fast, but you can also do if your computer can handle it, is press the spacebar to play and press the L key to play it faster. If you do this and you use six K footage, I highly recommend you go up to playback, timeline proxies and then quarter resolution. This will tremendously increase the speed you or your laptop or your computer can play heavy files. So this is the normal speed and if I press L once, it will speed it up twice. So if you have a lot of footage to go through, that will be a very good step 2 to speed up your workflow little bit. Alright, so that is it for the cutback. Let's continue to the edit page. 6. Edit Page: Scaling & Retiming: Okay, on the edit page, the first thing we'll take a look at is how to scale an image properly. So I create a new Timeline and made it a portrait size. So that is Instagram portrait size. And we take a look at how to frame this image so it will fit inside the portrait resolution. The first thing you do is highlight the clip. Go to Inspect there on the top right corner, navigate all the way down to re-time in scaling. And then just fill in at the scaling drop-down menu Fill. And that's it. And now if you want to sort of replace the image, you can use the position x and a position. Why to do so? All right, Just check whatever you want to have in a frame and that's it. So very easy, very fast. And the good thing about this is that you can highlight all the clips and just do every clip at once. So that saves a lot of time. The next thing is retiring. Retiring can be very beneficial if you wanted to speed up a clip, slow down Eclipse, or creates speed ramps. Now we only take a look at how to re-time it because speed ramping is another course. So if you have highlighted a clip, press R, that will bring up your change clip Speed panel. Here you can either drag left and right to change the speed in percentages, or you can change the frame rates. So if you know that this clip is shot in 50 FBS, you can just type in 50, press Enter, and it will play back at its normal speed. And you can also do a free strain that will freeze the entire image from where the first frame of this image starts to. If you, for example, want to have this as a freeze-frame, you press W, R, and then freeze frame than the entire clip will set to the first frame of this clip. Very cool. Alright, Command-C out of it. Yeah, That is actually it. So that is a very easy and fast way to re-time your clips. 7. Edit Page: Add Text: Next I will take a look at how to put a text layer on top of your clip. This can be very useful because a client wants to add some text or you want to add some text, it's very simple individual results. So go over to your effects library, then go to titles, and they have a couple options. These are all presets. They are made in fusion, something that we'll take a look at in a bit. But they're kinda cheesy usually, so you can drag them onto your clips. And this will be basically an animated version of a title. And sometimes this can be very useful, but you just have to play around with it and check what's in this enormous library of presets. But the thing that we'll take a look at is a simple text layer. So drag it over your clip. And then this will give you a menu of different options. So let's type in basic intro course. Cool. Now you can highlight all the text and change the font like Nova. Cool. And then change the tracking, and then change the size. And that looks cinematic, doesn't it? Cool. So that's basically how you can import a text layer. Now, if you want to let it fade in and out, very simple, just drag this icon here to the right. Now it's fading in for 10 frames. That might be cool. Let's play back. Let's play it back one more time. Wow, cool. Very simple, very fast. This is how you can do it if you want to copy it over, press Alt on your keyboard and drag it. And that will automatically create a new text layer for you. 8. Edit Page: Add Effects: The next thing is effects. There's a bunch of effects individually result. If you go Open to open effects, you can see all these effects over here. Well, some of them are pretty difficult to understand, but the blurs are a very useful way to, for example, blur out the main image and to boot a text layer on top of it so you can properly read the text layer. Now, one thing that I recommend is to not put the blur onto the clip itself because that will take a lot of CPU. But what I do recommend is that you go over to Effects, add an adjustment Clip, and then put your effect onto the adjustment Clip. Bam. And you've got some blur. Pretty cool and simple. And then if you want to have another sort of same effect on another clip, you just hold Alt and drag this clip over, and then you've got the same sort of blur onto another clip. That's a very fast and efficient way to use and work with effects, individual results. And this is a way you do it in pretty much all the editing softwares. Do you use? Adjustment lips are adjustment layers. All right. 9. Fusion Page: Well that's it for the edit page. Let's go over to diffusion page. And this is a page that I'm not really familiar with. I can do some stuff in this, but it is very difficult. It's a bit similar like After Effects for Premiere Pro. And it is basically a composition in software to create 3D effects and all these very advanced things. I'm not going to go in depth about this because I don't know enough about this part of the Vinci resolve. So if you want to learn more about it, definitely check out other courses because I'm not going to tell you. All right, so let's go over to the color page because this is where I feel comfortable. 10. Color Page: Basic Corrections: Here we'll take a look at how you can do a basic correction work with Lutz and what nodes actually are. So the first thing is notes. This is basically how DaVinci Resolve works, and it is a bit different than, for example, Premier Pro or Final Cut X. Essentially a note is a layer that holds one or more adjustments. I would always just put one adjustment per node. So for example, if I want to raise the exposure, I go over to my wheels. And this is pretty much the only thing that you'll probably use in the beginning. Go over to offset and drag this wheel up to raise the exposure. A good thing is to click on this button over here to enable your scopes so you can see what you're actually doing. Now, I've raised the exposure. Now I make a new node, press Alt S to create a new node, and then you make another adjustment on this node, for example, contrast. So go to the contrast slider, increase it a little bit. And bam, you can see what a major difference that makes. Now, this is how you would go about color grading your footage. Color grading is quite difficult to make sure to check out my other courses where I go in depth about color grading into Vinci resolve. 11. Color Page: How To Work With LUTs: Alright, next up, let's take a look at how to work with. Let's, let's, or lookup tables are a very fast and efficient way to create a nice look for your image. And of course, I would recommend you to learn color grading because then, yeah, the possibilities are endless. But if you're in a hurry or you want to create a nice loop for your image fast to show your client or something. Uh, let can be very useful. So go over to the left page here, and then I've got my own LUT pack here, s0, s7 and ion, which is basically a conversion for Locke footage to Rec 709. So to color space that you typically want to work in if you're outputting for YouTube or Vimeo or any online service. So let's drag a black magic conversion in this generation, let's see $5 signs. And then let's take the V2 so you can see that it makes major difference. So we go from log to a very clean image that you can now grade. So this is a very nice starting point. And of course he can use this as your final result, but you can also great upon this. So that is as far as I go for this course, if you want to learn more about color grading and using lots and creating lots, even make sure to check out my other courses. All right. 12. Fairlight Page: Next up the fair light page. So to fair ly page is basically your audio processing page. Here you can do a lot of different things to get better sound for your film. And if you drag down, for example, your audio layer, Let's say this is a dialogue. They can put effects on each clip. But what I like to do, especially if it's dialogue and if it's one interview only, then you can put all your different effects on this layer here. And everything that you'll put on a one will affect all the clips here. So what I like to do with Hive, a bigger project with multiple interviews, I would probably put all the interviewees on a different timeline and then make sure to adjust and tweak these parameters so their voice sounds perfect. So what you can do is you can add EQ equalizer. You can add a dynamics, which is, for example, a compressor. But you can also add a lot more effects such as dialogue process or focal channel, which is basically a compressor and an EQ combined. So you can make presets for, for example, if you do a lot of YouTube videos like I do, you can make a preset for your voice that you can put on there, that you can put on there. And it sounds perfect right off the bat. Then There's so many different things you can do in the fair ly page. I just highly recommend you to scroll and browse through it and what the different options aren't. So that is it for this page. Let's go over to the last page, which is to deliver page. 13. Deliver Page & Archive Project: Okay, The Vinci Resolve has a very powerful Media Encoder and it's built into DaVinci Resolve, which is even better. Okay, Let's go over all the options that Da Vinci resolve features. The first thing you have to do is enter a filename. So my amazing projects, cool. Then add a file location. So I'll probably just put it on the desktop for now. Then we can dial in what kind of codec we want for our project. So for example, we want to put this on YouTube. Then I highly recommend you just use mp4 and your codec is H.264. Alright? Then use hardware acceleration if possible. That is fine because that will just make sure that it renders it as fast as possible using the power of your computer, then your resolution is, of course, your maximum resolution that your project is shot in or what you want to upload. Because Egypt handle six gay, but I feel like it doesn't really make sense to upload a file, so I'll late. So I personally would leave it at UHD. Not the frame rate is very important. It is always the frame rate that your project is shot in. If you shut your project in 24 frames a second and you export in 25 frames per second, then you get a like weird jitter in your video and you don't want that. Now for quality, you can leave it on automatic, totally fine. But I personally always put in my own bit rate. And for 4k UHD, I always put in 100 thousand k bps or 100 Mbps. And for HD 1920 by 1080, I always put half of it. So 50 K and so 50000 KPBS. Next, I would leave everything on auto. If you don't touch it, you're fine. Advanced settings, I would leave everything as is because all these settings are not interested for you in the beginning. And then if you have subtitles, which had didn't explain in this video, but you can just easily drag and drop subtitles from the title menu onto your clips. You want to export subtitles. If you don't have this box checked, the subtitles will not being exploited, then you have an option if you either one it as an SRT file separate, or you want them burnt into your video. Alright. Next up, very important is to check your audio. Now, if this box is not checked, no audio will be exported. So make sure to check this box. Your codec is AAC, totally fine and make sure to render it out at 320 k bps, that it's the maximum for a MP3 file. Alright, constant bit rate is cool. Put your bit depth at 16, which is totally fine because if you put it in YouTube, everything will be compressed down to 16 anyways. So exporting it on 24 doesn't make sense. All right, next, very quickly, if you have multiple timelines, you can go over to the timeline section here and then just click on the IgE for example. Now, let's say I want to export this clip. Pretty cool. I of course want to change the bit rate because this is going on. Instagram and Instagram compresses the hell out of it. So make sure to Instagram, but everything on 10 thousand KPBS. Yeah, So if this is your resolution, a 1080 by 1350 file, then your k bps will be fine at 10, K has a 10 thousand. Now if you, for example, 1, 2, let's go back to our main timeline. If you want to, for example, only render this clip. You can go to the clip section and right-click render this clip and it will only run, they're out this part. Of course you can also do it by pressing I and O on your keyboard. And then it will render out only this part that can be very useful if you, for example, make different advertisements for Instagram on one timeline. Yeah, So you can in an outpoint it and export it. Very cool, very simple. If you want to render out the entire timeline, just click this box, entire timeline, and you're good to go. Make sure to check if the end of the timeline is at the end of the clip. Because if you have multiple clips that are not part of your sequence and are floating around somewhere further down your timeline. We'll render them out as well. So make sure to always check if your in and out point are correct. Alright, another very cool feature to Vinci Resolve has is that you can export individual clips instead of having to render out every single clip like this and then add to Render Queue that takes ages. So the Vinci Resolve has a very good feature to render out every individual clip in your timeline. So for example, if you do stock footage, this is the best option ever. Yeah, so make sure to dial in your codec and everything that you need, for example, for this, I would like to export in progress. So put it in progress for 22 is fine. And then go over to your file section here that will pop up because now of course you have an individual clips. So make sure to check, use unique filenames because if you don't have that, then it will overwrite. Yeah. Now press in one. Then you can either choose to add a prefix or a suffix. That means that the Vinci Resolve, we'll create a number in front of the filename or after the file name. Now, if you have that all sorted out, press Add to Render Queue and you see that nine clips will be exported. Now if you want to also export the entire timeline, just click on single clip and you're good to go. This is EPA progress, for example. Now it's fine. Then the only thing that you need to do now is ran their all and the venture result. We'll do the rest. So very nice and very cool, super-fast, and it just works. Perhaps you have noticed these different presets in the top. Of course they can use them. I personally like to dial in everything my own because perhaps call me a control freak, but I like to have control over everything that I export my video into. So that is that. Okay, So let's assume you have exported your project, you're done, you're happy. Client is happy. Everything is just, you know, totally fine. Then it's time to archive your project. So press shift one to open up the menu that we started off with, and then this is our projects. So right-click on our project and go to Export project archive. Now, choose a file location. And then let's do the desktop for now. And then eventually resolve will ask you if it needs to copy the Render cache and the proxy media. So if you have, if you have proximity, of course, check it and then press Okay, what it will do. And this is very impressive. It will copy every single file that is used in the project. Doesn't matter where from, for example, your downloads file, your Google Drive file, maybe even your trash can. And it will copy everything into one folder for you to put on your hard drive. Now let's see what it looks like. So if you open up a folder, drag it over here and go to the desktop, you now have a course dot-dot-dot IRA. If you open it up, you have your cash, you have your media files, and you have your project. If you drag your project and put it inside resolve, it will create the project for you with all the tweaks, with all the bells and whistles that you've added into your project, like it never changed. That is such a powerful tool to use because if you have to work fast, you can download everything. You can just scramble your files from your entire computer, make your edit expert your edit, and then make a project archive. And the Vinci Resolve will copy everything into one folder, so powerful, so easy to use. And I believe that's why to Vinci Resolve is so intuitive and so good to use. So I think that's it. I hope that I explained everything well and that now you have a basic understanding of how to use Da Vinci Resolve. I personally switched from Premier to to Vinci Resolve about three years ago, and it has been the best choice I have made so far because the Vinci Resolve is so intuitive and so easy to use. And as you may have seen, it is very stable. I work in this pretty much the entire day, every day, and it doesn't crash. So that's one major reason to switch to DaVinci Resolve. 14. Learn More!: All right guys, I think that is it for this course. I hope this was helpful. If you have any follow-up questions, make sure to go to my YouTube channel at should vest or find me on Instagram, you can ask all the questions there. And if this was helpful, please give me a rating because that really helps. I switched to the Vinci resolve after using Premiere for 12 years and it has been the best choice I've ever made because as you may have seen, the Vinci Resolve is so easy, intuitive to use. And I think most importantly, it just does not crash. So make sure to check out my other courses where I go more in depth about specific topics on DaVinci Resolve. And thanks for watching. Bye.