Editing in DaVinci Resolve can be time-consuming, but it doesn't have to be. Instead of digging through menus every 10 seconds to find the tool you want, pressing one single button on your keyboard instead, is going to help you avoid wasting hours of time per project editing the slow way. And it comes from using a pre-made keyboard shortcuts file that you can download 100% for free by following the link below. Then simply head up to DaVinci Resolve > keyboard customization, then click the three dots, import preset, select the BC editing shortcuts file, and voila! You can also follow along and add these 30 shortcuts manually. However, there are a lot of them, and that might take a while. So, let's dive in. I'm sure you already know the basic shortcuts like copy, paste, save, and so on. So in this video, instead of the basics, I'm going to cover the shortcuts that make the biggest difference when it comes to cutting down your editing time. The first shortcuts are to do with selection. Anytime you want to return to the arrow key when you've been using another tool, simply press V on your keyboard, and it will return automatically to the arrow. You can think of the V like an upside-down arrow. Two more selection shortcuts I use all the time are select forward and select backwards. So let's say I want to select all the clips to the right of the playhead. By pressing full stop or the sideways arrow, automatically DaVinci Resolve is going to select all those tracks for easy movement. Let's say you want to insert something in here. You would do that, and then you can move it back. Likewise, by pressing comma or the left bracket arrow thing, it will select all clips to the left of the playhead, including the clip that is over the playhead at the time you select it. You can then move those clips wherever you like. So you can think of these three shortcuts like arrows, normal arrow, select leftwards, and select rightwards. Next, let's move on to some cutting shortcuts. But before we do that, it's important to understand the role of each of your hands during editing. While editing, you'll always want to have one hand on the mouse and one hand free to use your keyboard shortcuts. Which is why most of the most important shortcuts can be found here on the left-hand side of the keyboard. So, I'm right-handed, so I'll normally have my hand on the mouse, and I use that to navigate around the timeline while simultaneously resting my left hand on the left side of the keyboard to use my most frequently used editing shortcuts. And those are, firstly, B, if you press B at any point, you'll automatically change from the arrow to the blade tool. So if I go V, it changes to arrow, B, it's a blade. You would think you would use this shortcut a lot, but for me, it's a lesser-used shortcut because it's even faster getting again to use a shortcut that will make the cut for you instead of you having to manually make the cut yourself. Which is where the next three shortcuts come in, and these are literally my three most used shortcuts on the entire keyboard. The first one is S. What this does is it makes a cut across all tracks of the timeline. So, no matter how many video tracks and audio tracks you have, just press S, and it will cut right through all of your video, audio, effects, text, and more. Whereas, if you use the blade for this, you could only cut one track at a time. Then there's Q and W, which delete left and delete right. So, let's say I want to delete this bad take. Instead of doing this the slow way by maybe selecting the blade tool, then arrow, then deleting, then selecting and moving it across (which was like five steps), instead, all you need to do is press Q, which deletes everything to the left-hand side of the playhead up to the closest cut point. Likewise, if you press W, it will delete everything to the right of the playhead up to the next cut point. Which will be this cut here and press it and there it goes. I find I use Q and W the most when I'm doing my very first rough edit of my footage. I'm getting rid of all the bad takes, all the silences, and I just want a quick way to eliminate all the bad stuff from my video. Now, let's say we're midway through our edit and we've decided that we don't like this line here in the middle of the video. Well, instead of pressing delete, and then select all to the right, and then arrow and moving it across, which was three steps, instead all I'm going to do is select the clip I don't want and press R, which is Ripple Delete. So that will be handy whenever you want to quickly remove a line and fill in the gap simultaneously. Which you may not use it a lot, but it definitely will come in handy when you're going back to revise your edit. The final shortcut in my keyboard shortcuts to do with cutting is T. What T does is bring up this icon here, which means it's in trim edit mode. What that does is take the clip that you're selecting, it keeps the exact length and position on the timeline, but move the start and end point to a different points. As you'll see by the time code, you can move the clip around so you're either starting earlier and finishing earlier or starting later and finishing later. While I don't use this a lot, it is extremely helpful for situations where your sound might be out of sync or you're editing to music and you need the timing of the best bits to sync just a little bit better with the cut points of the music. The next shortcuts have to do with timeline navigation, and this is one I find myself using a lot, especially on bigger projects where you need to zoom in and out and find a specific place on the timeline and you need to do it as quickly as possible. So, press plus and minus on your keyboard to zoom in and out. You can also hold down option and scroll with your mouse wheel. This is a more precise way of getting to the right level of zoom that you need. Or, if you're really zoomed in but you want to instantly return to the entire timeline being in view, just press Z. Done! So, play with all three zoom methods because it's definitely one of those things that everyone has their own preferred way of doing it. For me, it's just plus and minus. Now, as you get more advanced as an editor, you'll find yourself using the mouse less and less, including for moving the playhead along the timeline. This is because, again, keyboard shortcuts can do it much faster. So, the quickest way to move across your timeline, let's say I want the playhead to be here so I can do some fine editing over here. By pressing up and down on your keyboard, you can instantly move the playhead to the next cut point. Then, by pressing left and right, you can move frame by frame. So, let's say I've got a frame here that I want to delete. I'd now press Q, and no question this is going to be faster than manually moving the playhead like this, especially when snapping is on. Speaking of snapping, you're probably familiar with it. Snapping is like the magnetic pull that the playhead has when it comes to a cut point. And this can be really handy for the majority of your edit. Sometimes, though, you want to turn it off. So, let's say I wanted to place this text, but I didn't want it to end right at the very end. With snapping on, it's snapping it to the playhead, and I don't want that. So, what I'll do is press N. Now, when I drag this across, it won't snap, and I can place it exactly where I need it to be, a few frames before the end. If you want a quick way to play your timeline forwards or backwards, you can press L to go forwards, J to go backwards, and K to pause. The next shortcut I use quite a lot but never thought to turn into an actual shortcut until now is add transition. So, let's say we want to add a transition between these two clips here. Simply click the transition point, and you'll see it's highlighted in green. And press X. Likewise, you can do the same thing to your audio, click the transition point and press X. You can remember this one kind of like the X being a transition from one clip to another, kind of like the two clips are crossing. Being sewn together, one shortcut I use a lot is Add Marker. If you press M, you'll notice a marker shows up at the top of the timeline, and this is where you can make editing notes like "Add b roll shot" or whatever other kinds of notes you want to leave yourself at specific points on the timeline. If you ever want to duplicate one of your timeline clips, just hold down Option or Alt on your keyboard, click a clip, and drag it up. And you can do this as many times as you like and create infinite duplicates, which can be handy with certain effects or if you've got a lot of text layers that you want to duplicate, so that's definitely one you'll want to remember. Also, in case you didn't know, if you ever want to watch back your edit in full screen, just press Command F on your keyboard, then play. Now, if you're editing with multiple tracks, which is very likely you will be at some point, sometimes it's hard to see what's on the bottom, especially when you've got a lot of layers. So if you select one of the layers on the top and press D on your keyboard, it will disable it or make it see-through so you can see the layer on the bottom. Then just press it again to re-enable it. You can think of it like D for disable. Now, in editing, sometimes you need a side-by-side view of two different clips for comparison's sake. So, maybe you want to see which one makes the better thumbnail, or maybe you just want to reference one clip so you can color grade another clip in the same way. Well, to do that, press F on your keyboard to match frame, and that will display the frame you're at on the left-hand side. Now you can move your timeline across, and now you have a side-by-side view if you want to make any changes or make the second one look more like the first one. Something else I use all the time is compound clips. So, as you can see, I've got the opening to this video here, and let's say I want to zoom in slowly from the start all the way through to the end. Well, these are all separate clips, and even with good keyframing, you can only keyframe within the box of the clip that you've got selected. This is where compound clips come in. So, if you select all your clips and now press C on your keyboard, you can turn these into a compound clip. So I'll click create, and now it's one clip, meaning that I can start a keyframe here at the start in the wide shot, and then at the end, I can turn it into a super uncomfortable closeup like this close. And as you'll see, it zooms in from start to finish at the same pace despite it technically being lots of clips and a couple of jump cuts. Next shortcut that you'll probably use a bit is, let's say we want this sequence to have a couple of punch-ins, but I want it to have this exact level of zoom without having to manually go to every single clip and do that manually. Instead, I'm going to press Command C to copy. Then with this clip here, I'm going to press P, and what this does is paste attributes, meaning anything that you've applied to this, including zoom, crop, flip, scale, and so on, will now be applied to this new clip. And likewise, you can go ahead and do that to as many clips as you like by clicking P for paste. Don't be mistaken, though, this isn't actually paste. If you were to copy and paste a clip, you still have to press Command V to paste the entire clip, whereas the P that I've set just pastes the attribute without duplicating the original clip.Two shortcuts you may or may not already know are I and O, and this sets your in and out points for export. Let's say from this timeline I only want to export up to here since I might have edited two separate videos on the same timeline. Well, what I'm going to do is navigate to the start of the timeline and press I for in, then I'm going to go back to that point and press O. This has set our in-point and our out-point. Now, if we were to export this timeline, we're now only exporting this section and nothing else. Now, I know that's already 30, but I want to give you one more as a bonus shortcut, and that is by pressing E on your keyboard, it will automatically export a still frame. This is especially handy for YouTube thumbnails. I find the fastest way to shoot a thumbnail is making it a video and then exporting stills from that video where you try different poses, lighting, and so on, and then I might export several different versions of that to choose later which is the best for the thumbnail. Again, you can download my free template which will automatically add all of these shortcuts into your DaVinci Resolve. Just follow the link below, download the file, and import the .txt file into the keyboard customization section of DaVinci. I'm curious, do you have any other go-to shortcuts that you want to recommend for DaVinci Resolve? If so, let me know down below. And if you're new to DaVinci and haven't taken the time to learn the basics yet, in this video here I'll teach you everything you need to know to start editing right away.