Learn DaVinci Resolve 16 in 16 Mins For Beginners (Free Video Editing Software)
In this video editing tutorial, Alli teaches you how to use Davinci Resolve 16 in 20 minutes for beginners! Davinci Resolve is a free video editing program with a lot of impressive features.
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Hey everyone. I'm Ali and over the past few months, we've been getting a lot of requests from people asking which free editing software we'd recommend. Although there are a lot of great ones out there, I really like black magics DaVinci Resolve 16. DaVinci Resolve has been around for years and it has been the go-to when it comes to color grading and color correcting for Hollywood feature films.
More recently DaVinci Resolve has upped its game and incorporated the ability to edit videos within it which is awesome. There are currently two versions of DaVinci Resolve out there. There's DaVinci Resolve 16, which is the free version and DaVinci Resolve 16 studio, which costs around $300 US. We're gonna be looking at how to use and how to get nice and comfortable with DaVinci Resolve 16, the free version. We'll take a look at the interface, how to get nice and organized, how to import Clips, how to edit clips working with different tools and effects, how to export your video, and more. So let's hop in. there
When you open up DaVinci Resolve, the first window you'll see is the project manager window. If you had worked on any previous projects and saved them, they would show up here. You'll notice on the left under disk, it says local database. You can use this local database to save your projects too. To find out the location of this database you can right-click on it, click on reveal and finder. On windows, I believe it would save reveal and Explorer and the location is revealed, or you could create a new database and this is what I like to do. I'll explain why in just a second but first let's click on new database.
To create one, click on create where it says Name. I'll choose the name DaVinci YouTube database. Any YouTube projects I work on, I'll save to this new database. Sometimes I also edit client projects. I would create another database called work project database and that's where I'd store those client projects. This keeps my different work projects more organized. If I'm working from my YouTube database, any other YouTube project that I've saved to the same hard drive and to my YouTube database will be easily accessible for me in DaVinci. The same would go for my work database. Next, let's click on location to choose where we'll save this database. I'll be saving mine to an external hard drive in my YouTube folder, and I'll create a new folder that I'll call the DaVinci YouTube database. I'll press open and make sure you have the create tab selected and then click create. I'll select this new database to start working from awesome ok so we can either create a new project by double-tapping where it says untitled project, or by clicking new project. So let's do that and I'm gonna be using clips from a BC trip I took. We're gonna call this project BC trip. Press create lovey and that brings us into DaVinci Resolve. DaVinci Resolve has seven different workspaces that allow you to work on different aspects of your video. So let's quickly go over them, and because this is a beginner tutorial we aren't gonna do a deep dive into each of them. We're mainly gonna focus in the Edit workspace.
So starting from the left we have our media workspace this is where we'd organize any footage or other assets that we want to work on in DaVinci Resolve and where we import them next we have the cut workspace which is newer to dimension Resolve and this is kind of like Adobe rush. It's a workspace design for quickly putting together video edits the Edit workspace is where I do my editing and where we're gonna be spending most of our time in this tutorial. We'll get back to that in a minute in the fusion workspace. You can work on visual effects we have our colored workspace where you'd focus on color correction and color grading the Fairlight workspace for editing and mastering audio and our deliver workspace where you would render and export your clips.
Let's import some media by going over to our media workspace and we can import footage by going to the top left where it says media storage, and navigating to the footage location. In this panel, we can browse through and locate our footage, and before we import it. One thing I've done and I recommend you do is customize your media pool columns so that you're only seeing specific data of each of these clips to do this right-click on one of the columns to open up your options and you can checkmark or uncheck any of the information that you don't want to see. So personally I like to see the file name, the resolution the frames per second, and the date that it was created. I only have those four checked and I've saved that as Allie's layout if you want to save your column layout as well you can click on create column layout name it whatever you like and press ok. I'm gonna press cancel because I rehab mine save let's change list view to thumbnail view so we can see what each of these clips looks like. To import your footage into DaVinci Resolve, you can drag over it to select it and then drag it into the master panel. Next let's hop into our edit workspace where we can start working on our video edit. I'll select these clips and drag them onto the timeline. We can zoom in or out of our timeline by going over to the slider here and adjusting it we can grab our playhead and scrub over these clips to check them out.
Let's click on the timeline view options icon under video view options I prefer the film which allows me to see not only the thumbnail of each clip but on longer clips it allows me to see multiple thumbnails that indicate what's going on in that area of the footage under audio view options. I like to see the full waveform but even though it clicks it we can't see any waveforms right now that's because right under where it says Timeline view options we have to select audio waveforms awesome and we can now see the visual of our waveform in the audio track of our dialog clip and just on the side note, I didn't record audio with my other b-roll clips that's why there's no audio waveform showing up underneath them. We can also adjust the track height of the video or the audio using these sliders. I'll click off of that when I'm editing I like to keep all of my dialogue footage on my video one track and my b-roll clips on a video to track, so I will select all of the other clips and drag up and doing that automatically creates a video to track as well as another audio track. This clips also be real clip so we'll drag it up awesome next I'd like to delete the audio from my b-roll Clips but when I drag over them by default they are linked to the footage so I'll just click away to select just the audio portion of your footage you can hold down alt or option on your keyboard and select just that audio. I'll press Delete to remove it and get the audio from that b-roll clip as well great if we want any of our b-roll clips to show over our talking-head clip, making sure we're using our selection tool we can select say this helicopter clip and drag it over top of that talking head clip currently as I drag my talking head clip around on the timeline you'll notice that the audio is linked to it indicated by this link symbol, but let's say for some reason you want to unlink the audio from that clip you can do so by right-clicking on it and unchecking link clips. There we go, now when I drag the footage portion of the clip it drags independently and the audio from that clip stays where it is. I'm going to press command Z on my keyboard a few times because I actually do prefer that footage to be linked to the audio. I'm gonna zoom into my timeline using the command plus key on my keyboard a few times and I want to check out this paddling clip. So that was shot in slow motion but I'd like to speed it up to do that we can right-click on the clip and click on change clip speed, and I'm gonna double the speed of this clip to 200% press change so let's check out how it looks when it's fed up cool okay that's looking good if we want a trim part of a clip we can hover our mouse over the end of a clip and I'll drag that in to the left there we go we've edited off the end of that clip okay I'm going to zoom out on my timeline and before we continue.
Let's save this project. You can do so by pressing command S or ctrl s on your keyboard or you could go up to file save project and you want to remember to periodically save your project while you're working on it. You can turn a track off by clicking on this film strip so it shows in red with a slash through it. We'll just turn that back on. If you want to increase the volume of your audio you can hover over this line in your audio track and drag up. If you'd like to fade your audio in or out on either end of your audio track where you see this white marker click on it and drag it into the track if you want to make a cut point in a specific part of your clip, you can do so by selecting the Blade tool here and making a cut grab our selection tool, and we can drag that cut part of our clip over if we want to with it selected we can delete it as well.
I'd like to add a music track to this project. To do so I'm gonna tab over to my Finder window and I can very simply just drag my music track into the media pool, and I'll drag this song onto the 8th to track so that it sits under my dialog ok and you see how. I have this big space in my timeline well I want everything on my timeline to sit right at the beginning of the timeline here so I could either select everything and drag it over or I can click on this blank spot and press delete on my keyboard, and there you go. Sometimes when I'm working on longer edits, I use a song a few times within the Edit. So let's say we want to do that here to duplicate this music track, you can hold down alt or option on your keyboard select that music track and drag it over when you let go you'll have your duplicate. I'm gonna lock the a2 track so that as I'm moving around clips on my timeline I don't accidentally drag these music tracks over so I will press this lock icon there we go and now they're not going anywhere I'm gonna select this clip of will in my timeline and go over to the drop-down menu here currently. I have transformed selected which allows me to grab any of these nodes and drag the size of this clip smaller or larger. I can adjust where it sits in my frame let's click the drop-down menu again and select crop. I can drag in on either side of the frame to crop it and let's say, I want to crop from the top. Currently, we can't see the top of this frame so up here where it says 56%. I'm gonna click this drop-down menu and choose 25%, and this has zoomed out this clip for us. So we can see what we're working with which makes it very easy for me to adjust the top of this crop cool and I'll adjust the bottom as well. Let's go back to fit, so I have this clip cropped I can click on it and drag the cropped area around. We'll put that clip over the top of the helicopter clip. If you wanted to have a clip within a clip that's how you could make that happen let's click this drop-down menu again and let's take a look at dynamic zoom. The green border indicates what the frame will look like when the zoom begins and the red border indicates where the zoom is going to end. Let's adjust the screen border so it's really tight on Will and I'm gonna really overemphasize the look of this so that you can see what dynamic zoom does. So I'll hit spacebar my keyboard to play this back. This clip now starts off super zoomed in on the shot and it ends on this wider shot. I'll undo that now you can also more precisely change the scale size position and so on of your clip by again making sure it's selected and clicking on inspector.
Let's bring this clip over top that's helicopter clip again. So I can adjust the opacity of the clip, you could add keyframes so I'm gonna bring my playhead to the beginning of this clip. Click on this opacity keyframe, use my right arrow key on the keyboard to move into the clip click on the keyframe again, bring the opacity up to 100 let's watch that back and we've just keyframed our opacity. We could also change the composite mode from normal to add or color burn and so on under transform, we can adjust the rotation of our clip like so. We'll undo that by clicking on this circular arrow. You can adjust the x-axis or y-axis position again. You could add keyframes if you wanted to. You can also zoom in zoom out let's undo both of those great and if you wanted to turn off any of these effects, you could click on the toggles to the left of their names. I'm just gonna go up to the top of my workspace and hover over the word edited check out when I last save this project and it was saved over an hour ago. So let's press command S or ctrl s on our keyboard to save clicking on effect library you have different effect options.
Let's grab blur dissolve drag it on to the front of this clip. We can drag that blur dissolve out to extend the duration of the dissolve and we can also make any adjustments to that transition over here under inspector. I'll just turn blur dissolve off. We can also choose different titles here, so I'll click on the lower third title and drag that onto our v3 track. You can change the text as well as the font the color of the text and so on. If you want to extend the duration that that lower third stays on the screen, you can simply drag it out. I'm gonna delete that because I just wanted to show you it as an option. If we go over here and scroll down you can see that you have tons of audio effects. I like noise reduction let's drag that onto the talking-head audio on a one-track and that opens up the noise reduction window here. You can adjust the threshold attack sensitivity and so on. I'll select that dialogue audio, and under the audio tab, we can adjust the clip volume pan clip pitch and more. We can also adjust different parameters in our noise reduction audio effect if we want to.
One other thing I want to show you in terms of organization that comes in handy especially if you have lots of different assets in your project is how to create bins. You may have noticed when I created a new timeline that the timeline also showed up here amongst our footage and our music track. So let's create some bins to stay nice and organized. You can right-click on your media pool click, add bin and it bends been created. So I'll call that bin footage and drag and drop accordingly and let's change this to ListView pool. I'll double click on my timeline bin to access it double click on the name of this timeline which by default just says timeline 1 and call it BC trip. Let's go back to the master. Often when you're working with an edit that has both dialogue audio and music you'll want to adjust the volume of the music in the areas that the dialogue will be heard. To do that, select your music track, go up to inspector where it says clip volume, click on this keyframe and that adds a keyframe onto your music track. I'm gonna move my playhead inward a little bit and I'll add a second keyframe click on that second keyframe and drag it down to around minus 17 decibels so that the volume of the music fades as the dialogue audio is heard. We'll go over close to the end of the dialogue and do the same thing. Now depending on how loud or quiet your audio is, your decibel settings will change accordingly. I'll trim the end of this music so that it ends in the spot that I'd like my video to end so when you're happy with your own video edit and you're ready to export, you can go over to the delivery window bring your playhead to the beginning of your video or the area that you'd like the exported video to start playing and press I to create an endpoint next we'll go to the end and create an out where we'd like our video to end.
On the top left under render settings, you can choose to create your own custom settings. There's a YouTube option, Vimeo option, and so on. Let's click on the YouTube option. Next, where it says location, click on browse and choose the location that you'd like your exported video to be saved. If you did want to customize any of your settings you can do so here we even have the option to upload our video directly to YouTube. When you're happy with your settings, you can click on add to render queue on the top right of your screen under the render queue. Your video is ready to be exported but the render hasn't started yet so you could choose to continue editing different video projects and continue adding them to your render queue and export multiple videos from DaVinci at once. If you're only exporting one video when it's in that render queue, click on start render and depending on how big or small your video file size will end up being the amount of time the render will take will differ and when the render has completed and your videos been exported it will show us completed.
There you go. You now know how to work in DaVinci Resolve 16. Thanks for checking this video out. If you liked it give us a thumbs up. Will and I are putting out new film making tutorials weekly here on our channel. So for more videos like this one subscribe/ to our Channel, ding the bell so you're notified when the newest video comes out and I look forward to seeing you in other videos.
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