14 DaVinci Resolve Tips You MUST KNOW! Beginner to Pro!
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14 DaVinci Resolve Tips You MUST KNOW! Beginner to Pro! In this DaVinci Resolve video editing tutorial Alli will share 14 Must Know Tips and Tricks in DaVinci Resolve so that you can edit faster, edit more efficiently and boost your productivity while editing videos! Learn how to import media while maintaining folder structure for better organization, how to customize your timeline settings, how to Live Save your project files, DaVinci Resolve keyboard shortcuts, how to turn effects on and off and more!
GENERATED CAPTIONS:
In this video, I'm going to share tips, tricks, and things that you just got to know how to do in DaVinci Resolve to save you time and to save your sanity. This video is going to be helpful whether you're brand new to Resolve, even if you're an expert, you might learn a thing or two. And while all these tips and tricks and must-knows are in no particular order of best to least best, I think I've saved the best for last. And if you're new here, I'm Ali, and I release weekly videos all about editing, videography, as well as gear reviews. Coming up really soon, I'm going to be releasing a tutorial showing you my favorite text effects that I use on things like commercials, corporate videos, social media videos. If you're into that sort of thing, subscribe to our channel, and now let's hop into Resolve and get started.
So I, like many other editors, like my footage in a specific folder, my audio in a specific folder, and my other media nice and organized in specific folders. So the first must-know I want to show you is how to quickly import your media while maintaining the folder structure you've set up outside of Resolve. Okay, so we're in the Edit page. Let's just make sure our media pool is open, and we have our bin list tab open as well. So you may currently be importing your media by right-clicking in the media pool, choosing Import Media, finding your footage, then selecting it, then hitting Open. And this pop-up window might show up asking you if you'd like to change your timeline frame rate to match your footage, and it says you can't undo this. Don't let that scare you because I'm going to show you how to customize your own timeline settings shortly.
Here's our imported footage, and to stay organized, right-click to create a new bin, name it "Footage," then drag the clips into it. And then do this process all over again to bring in our audio. This is just way too time-consuming and unnecessary because there's a much better way. All you've got to do to import your media and folder structure all at once is grab the folder or folders you want to import and drag them into the master panel. And there they all are, folder structure maintained and organized perfectly, making life just a little easier.
Next, have you ever been working on a project, you're working away, and then your computer crashes for some reason? You go back in, open up the project just to see that all the hard work you did hadn't been saved. I'm going to show you a really cool feature in Resolve so that this doesn't happen to you. Click on DaVinci Resolve Preferences, go to the User tab, Project Save and Load, and under Save Settings, checkmark "Live Save," which does exactly that. It saves every time you make any change. And while we're here, I also recommend you have "Project Backups" checkmarked. This will save in increments depending on what time limit you set, and it's helpful if, for some reason, you need to access the work you had done earlier on your project because you could go into your backups and open up that previous version. I like to perform backups every five minutes. And if you'd like to see where your backup location is, you can choose "Browse." Let's save that.
Remember the annoying pop-up window that said we can't change our timeline frame rate once we set it? Well, who cares? Not me, because you can easily customize and set up your own timeline settings. Let's see how to do so. We can go up to File, New Timeline, call it whatever you'd like. You can customize the number of video tracks, audio tracks, audio track type (I'm not going to worry about that right now). The important thing I want to show you, that you might not know but you gotta know, is uncheck "Use Project Settings." Now we have more options. Let's go to "Format," and here is where we can change our timeline resolution. You can change yours to whatever works for your project, the timeline frame rate I'm fine with, and now I will choose "Create." And there you go.
Let's say you're like me and you never use the Media page. Does anyone do you ever use the Media page? Does anyone ever use the Media page? Well, if you don't use it, lose it. Go up to "Workspace," show page, and uncheck "Media." There we go. It's gone. And you can hide any of the other pages too if you want to. But for whatever reason, go back up to "Workspace," show page, and you can checkmark it again.
So, as you can see, a lot of the time I'm editing on my laptop, and then I plug in the second monitor so that I can have DaVinci Resolve on two screens and utilize both of them to have more screen real estate. But how do you get DaVinci Resolve to show up on both screens? Well, you have to go up to "Workspace," "Dual Screen," and turn it on. And when you do, DaVinci Resolve should now show on both of your screens. As of now, you can only turn dual screen on if you're in the Edit, Fusion, Fairlight, or Color page. And if, for some reason, you're in one of those pages and dual screen is still grayed out, well, sometimes I've noticed this happens if I've been working a while in DaVinci Resolve just on my laptop, and then I go to plug in a monitor. I'm hoping this is just a bug they fix because I find it kind of annoying. But I found closing my project, then restarting it does the trick.
Next, depending on the computer you're using, if you're in DaVinci Resolve Free or the Studio version, what kind of footage and other media assets you're working with, your playback might be a little choppy and slow. If this is the case, one thing you can try doing is changing your timeline proxy resolution, which will make performance better while reducing the quality of video you're seeing so that you can edit faster. To do this, go up to "Playback," "Timeline Proxy Resolution," and you can change it from Full to half or a quarter. Doing this should make your playback operate better. And when you're done working, just remember to change it back to full.
A question I've been asked quite a few times is how to zoom in and out of the timeline. So to do that, you can just go right up here and move the slider to the left to zoom out, move to the right to zoom in. But you can also use keyboard shortcuts. I love keyboard shortcuts. Coming up, I'm going to show you how to change and customize your keyboard shortcuts. And I'm going to show you one of my favorite and most used shortcuts.
So, the keyboard shortcut to zoom in on your timeline on a Mac is Command and the plus key. I believe it would be on Windows, Control and the plus key. And to zoom out on a Mac, Command and the minus key, so on Windows, Control and the minus key. Another super handy shortcut is one that gives you the ability to make your program window full screen.
So, the keyboard shortcut to zoom in on your timeline on a Mac is Command and the plus key. I believe it would be on Windows, Control and the plus key. And to zoom out on a Mac, Command and the minus key, so on Windows, Control and the minus key. Another super handy shortcut is one that gives you the ability to make your program window full screen. To do that, you can either press "P" on your keyboard or Command + "F".
Now, you probably already know how to change the color of your footage and audio in your timeline by selecting it, right-clicking, choosing "Clip Color," and changing the color. Easy peasy. I'll just remove that media from the timeline for a sec.
So, for efficiency when I'm editing, I like to have my talking head footage on the V1 track, my b-roll clips on the V2 track, and so on. And it's really nice to visually be able to spot which media is which. So what I want to show you is how to change your track colors. To do this, right-click on the Video 1 track, choose "Change Track Color," and I'll set this to purple. I'll also right-click on the Audio 1 track and set it to purple because I like to have my talking head footage with the camera audio this color. Then I'll right-click on my B2 track, change its color to Olive, bring down a b-roll clip on the V2 track, great. And I'll change my audio track color as well, so when I bring down my external audio, it's easy to spot in orange.
And if you want to go even further with organization, you can actually name your track. So by clicking where it says Video 1 here on the V1 track, I will change this track to be called "Talking Head." The V2 track, I will change to be called "B-Roll." And if you want to do this with your audio track, I just need to drag this down a bit here where it says "Audio 1," and I'll rename that audio track as well.
Now, let's say that you have some effects on your footage, and it's slowing playback down or you want to see what things were looking like before you added those effects. So hold on a sec, let me just grab some random effects here and put them on my footage. So what you can do is go up here to the bypass icon, which is this magical starry-looking icon here. Click on it to turn those effects off, turn it back on. Cool.
If you want to duplicate a clip, you could select it, right-click, press "Copy," go somewhere else on your timeline, and press Command + "V" or Control + "V" to paste it. Or just undo that for a sec. Or you can select the clip you want to duplicate, hold down "Option" on a Mac, "Alt" on a PC, drag the clip to where you'd like that duplicate, and there we go, we now have a duplicate of that clip.
Alright, so I imagine you know what in and out points are. If you don't, I highly recommend you check out my DaVinci Resolve for beginners video where I cover that and lots more. So assuming you already know about in and out points, you know that to create an endpoint, you press "I" on your keyboard, to create an outpoint, you press "O." But do you know how to easily get rid of these in and out points? If not, here's how. On your keyboard, hold down "Alt" or "Option" + "I" to remove your in points and "Alt" or "Option" + "O" to remove your outpoint. I'm just going to undo that for a sec because I also want to show you if you want to remove both at the same time, you can hold down "Alt" or "Option" and "X."
And now I'm going to show you one of my favorite keyboard shortcuts. It saves loads of time when you're editing, and that is pressing "Option" + "A" on your keyboard, which will select anything that the playhead's over or anything to the right of the playhead so that you can easily drag it to the right or to the left.
Now, by default, this keyboard shortcut is actually set to a different command, but I don't know, for me, I just don't like it. So I set up a custom keyboard shortcut to do that. Go up to DaVinci Resolve keyboard customization, and making sure under commands you have all commands highlighted, show all. Here in the search bar, type "select clips" and click on "Select Clips Forward," "Select Clips Forward All Tracks." I'm going to change the default shortcut by Xing it out and typing "Option" + "A" here. When you do this, a pop-up window might say you already have this command assigned, so do you want to assign this new keystroke? I'll choose "Assign."
And we're not done just yet. We next have to click on this exclamation mark, which takes us to the previous command that "Option" + "A" was set to, which is "Normal Edit Mode," and we have to remove the "A" keyboard shortcut from it. Okay, awesome. So now we can press "Save," which lets you rename this keyboard preset. I'll rename it to "DaVinci Resolve Alley." And if I create any other keyboard shortcuts, I would also save them under this preset.
If you decide for whatever reason you want to use DaVinci Resolve's default keyboard shortcuts again, super easy to do. Just click on this dropdown menu here and choose "DaVinci Resolve," and there you go.
So what do you think? Did you already know some of these tips and tricks, or were there any that just blew your mind or that you're excited to use? Let me know in the comments below. If you like the music you hear in this video or you want to know the gear that we recommend and use, check out the description for weekly Resolve tutorials as well as videography tips and tricks and gear reviews. Subscribe to our channel. I hope you have a lovely rest of your day. Thank you for checking this video out, and I hope to see you in another one. Thank you.
SUBSCRIBE ON YOUTUBE FOR MORE! (200+ FILMMAKING TUTORIALS):
➜ https://youtube.com/alliandwill
🎵MUSIC & SOUND FX WE USE IN OUR VIDEOS🎵
➜ https://bit.ly/2NPCjd7
👉GET 50% OFF OUR PRODUCTS:
➜ https://alliandwill.com/featuredproducts
👉VISIT OUR AMAZON STOREFRONTS:
➜FOR VIDEO EDITING: https://amzn.to/3XSlIHj
➜FOR FILMING: https://amzn.to/3EB8DuZ
OUR VIDEOS ARE EDITED IN ADOBE PREMIERE PRO. GET IT HERE:
➜ https://adobe.prf.hn/click/camref:1101lr4SX