So maybe you're thinking, you know, maybe it's time I check out that DaVinci Resolve. See what, see what all the hubbub's about. Resolve 19 just came out.
That seems like a good, that seems like a good time. If that's you, you are in a perfect place because I've designed this to be the most useful, helpful video for anyone starting DaVinci Resolve. We're going to go over all the major things you need to know and where to find more information.
Okay. Okay. And the number one thing you need to do right now is get our resource guide. There is a link down in the description. I'll also put a link right here.
This is a PDF that outlines the best resources available for learning the different pages of Resolve and all the little things you need to know. Step one, download that. I'll wait.
Did you do it? Make sure you do it. All right.
So first, let's talk about just an overview of Resolve. When you first open up Resolve 19, you're going to have this window up here. This is called your project manager. This is where you make new projects and organize them and open them and...
export them and all of that kind of stuff. I'm just going to double click on untitled project just to open that up here. Now this isn't going to be a full step-by-step tutorial. This is kind of an overview, but I'll show you exactly where to go for all the best information.
So when you open up a new project in Resolve 19, it looks like this. And the big thing you need to know is the stuff right here. This, this little bar down here, this has several different icons on it. And whichever one is darker is the active page. And so if I click on edit, that switches to the edit page.
And you'll notice the rest of the interface switches all around anytime that I hit one of these different pages. That's because Resolve is several different programs kind of smashed into one. And it's designed to take you through your post-production journey.
What that means is from kind of importing your footage and getting organized all the way to editing, to doing effects and graphics and color correction and sound mixing. all the way to rendering. So exporting your movie so people can actually see it. And those steps are kind of reflected in these buttons here.
So you could start here with media and import your footage and get it organized and that kind of thing. And then these two pages are all about editing, actually putting your story together in a timeline. So especially the edit page is really what you would think of as a video editing app.
So it has a timeline down here. It has a viewer here. There's all kinds of effects and things that you can use. And that's kind of where you put your story together. Then in the fusion page, this is where you do fancy things like putting together graphics and visual effects and compositing fire and explosions and, you know, making 3D titles and things like that.
Then we have the color page. This is where you do your color correction and color grading and you adjust how your images look. Fairlight is all about audio. And so audio mixing. And then the deliver page is when you render everything out into a video file that you can upload to YouTube or give to your client or whatever you want to do.
So it's really essential that you just kind of have a idea that this is how Resolve is built is there are several different specialized apps that you can flip through with these buttons. This is the part where there's kind of the danger of being overwhelmed a little bit because there's seven buttons here and each one is I mean, just as in-depth and detailed as its own piece of software. So you can think of like there's other suites of software that might be creative, you know, and each app has like a specialized thing.
It does editing effects, audio, illustrating things, some kind of shop that you would use to edit photos. You know, imagine each one of those apps getting shoved into one of these tabs. So it's kind of way more than we can go into in one video. However, if you'd like to see me try, you can check out this four-hour course that I made totally free on DaVinci Resolve. Shows you all the basics that you need to know.
However, I'd recommend finishing this video first because we're going to have kind of just a nice overview of things. So here's pretty much how a project would go. A big deal in Resolve is this panel right here called the media pool. This is where you import all of the media that you want to use in your project.
To do so, you can right click and select import media. I'll just bring in some footage here, and that brings this footage into my project so that I can actually use it. I can double click on a piece of media to preview it here in the viewer, but all I'm really doing is picking it up and looking at it. I haven't actually added it to my video yet.
To add it to my video, I can grab it from this viewer and drag it down into the timeline. And then this is where you can do some editing and put a bunch of clips together to actually make your video. So we can throw these down in here.
and trim these and put them one after another to actually make a story, right? Like I said, there is a ton to go over in the edit page. And if you're not familiar with video editing at all, and you're completely new, then I would honestly just kind of stay on this page because this is going to do most of what you will want to do with your videos.
It lets you import footage, view it, and then add it to the timeline to build your story here with different clips. And that's kind of the basics. That's what you really need to understand and get familiar with if you're brand new to video editing.
And if you are brand new to editing, I highly recommend checking out this video, Start Editing YouTube Videos for Free with Zero Knowledge. This is a video where I go over just the insane basics of editing a video in Resolve. It's a couple of years old, but the essentials are like exactly the same in Resolve 19. If you are into editing and you just want to learn how to do it well in Resolve, I would highly recommend checking out MrAlexTech's channel. This guy is a fantastic teacher and one of his specialties is showing you time-saving tips, ways to work more efficiently, setting up shortcuts and templates and all of those kind of things that make your life easier.
This is the guy. I would also highly recommend checking out CameraTim on YouTube. This guy has a lot of great videos on shortcuts in Resolve as well as things like multi-cam, how to import things, do freeze frames, proxies.
Just a really great resource if you want to edit better in Resolve. Now, we kind of skipped to the edit page, but I want to back up to these other two pages. The first one would be the media page.
The media page is a great place to import your media and kind of preview it. So we already have some media imported here, but you could also up here in the upper left navigate your computer. And what's really cool is you can go through and kind of preview your media. before you import it into your project. So this is a really great way if you're not exactly sure what you want to put into your project yet, you can navigate anything on your computer and then just drag it down to the media pool right here.
And this is the same panel that we see in the edit page right here. It's the same thing. It's just across the bottom in the media page. And so that's really the main thing I use the media page for.
You can also adjust the metadata. And so here we have the metadata panel. And I'll just go ahead and close this audio panel.
By the way, all these buttons up here and here, those control what panels on the interface are open. So if this is white, that means the panel is open. And if I click it once, it'll turn gray and close the panel. But here in this metadata panel, you can switch this to all groups and you can fill in notes and details about any piece of media that you have selected.
You can get really, really detailed. So I mean, if you are one of those kind of detail oriented, really organized kind of people. This is just a fantastic place to get organized with your media. There are tons of things you can do in the media page, and it's really great for kind of going one level deeper in your organizing and you're exploring your media. But at the same time, you can kind of get away with just going to the edit page and bringing your media directly into the media pool, dragging it down here and starting to edit.
The next page is the cut page. This is also a page that's designed to be a place where you edit your footage. But it has these two views of the timeline.
There's the zoomed out view up here, and there's the zoomed in view down here. And kind of the idea is that this saves you time from having to zoom in and out and everything. You can just go to wherever you want in your project. You can grab the edge of this and trim it.
Go here, grab the edge, trim it, that kind of thing. And it really makes your life easier if you're doing certain kinds of projects. Now, what kind of projects? I'm talking about projects that are generally a little bit more simple, a little bit more straightforward.
You know, you just have some shots that you're going to put together and then kind of trim. This would be great in the cut page. Things like news stories or even documentaries might be good, depending on how deep you need to get with your audio mixing and that kind of thing. So you can use this page to put together certain edits and it's a little bit faster, a little bit more streamlined.
But something I want to point out here is you'll notice this timeline that I'm looking at. This is the timeline that I built in the edit page. So if I switch back over to the edit page, there's my timeline.
And if I were to move this over like this and switch over to the cut page, you see I have my gap right here in the cut page. And this is kind of the magical thing about Resolve. All of these pages, they share the same timeline. And so I can take the same timeline and work on it in the cut page and use the tools that are there or the edit page and use the tools that are there.
And the same timeline is already available in the other pages here. Now, These two pages, the edit and the cut page, are all about actually putting your story together. But these three pages, Fusion, Color, and Fairlight, those are kind of more specialized. So it's not necessarily about putting your story together as it is kind of adjusting the details of the clips that are within your timeline. For instance, the Fusion page, we see this is the clip of him standing there by the counter.
If we go down and click on the Fusion page, look what happens. It brings... this clip into the Fusion page where we can work on it.
Now, what the heck is the Fusion page? The Fusion page is where you go to basically get fancy visuals. It's a compositing app.
And so what that means is that you're putting different elements together and making them look like they all belong together. Fusion is the page where I would open up a clip and then put a digital painting on the wall, or I would erase this outlet. Or I would add a fire here, you know? This is where all the crazy things happen.
But not only that, this is also the place where you would make your graphics. So for instance, I could go up to my media pool, which is again the same thing as the edit page. And I could right click somewhere and say new fusion composition and hit create.
And what that'll do is make a new fusion composition here in my media pool. I can double click on that. And that's going to make a blank composition for fusion. and using the tools in Fusion and using the tools in Fusion, I can make my epic motion graphics. I can make titles and 3D and particles and all kinds of crazy stuff.
Again, it's kind of like what you would use Photoshop for, but instead of making graphic design for, you know, print or web, you're making your designs for your videos. So you can have animated motion graphics right here within Resolve in the Fusion page. Now the Fusion page is extremely deep, just like the other pages of Resolve.
And it uses these little things called nodes, which can feel really intimidating. But it's one of those systems that is so powerful and so amazing that once you understand how it works, you can basically do anything. It's like limitless potential.
The Fusion page is the most exciting part of Resolve for me. In fact, that's kind of my specialty is teaching people how to use Fusion. And so as you're jumping into Resolve, if you want to learn Fusion... I want to teach you.
I have a ton of videos on fusion and the basics and kind of how it works, but a great place to start is with the Fusion Survival Guide. There's a link right there. That's a totally free course on the basics of fusion and it starts really really simple and shows you exactly how fusion works and kind of gets you going.
And if you're interested in learning fusion I would also recommend checking out this video, Fusion Nodes Explained with Toast. This I think is the most visual amazing way to understand the thinking behind how nodes work. Before you watch this video, it might seem like some kind of magic black box that you can't crack.
And after you watch the video, you're going to understand at least the basics of how nodes work. And not only that, you're going to be able to use them to make cool stuff in Fusion. And here's what's cool. If you click on the clips button up here, then you can see the clips that are in your timeline. And so you can switch quickly to any clip in your timeline and you can work on it in Fusion.
You don't have to convert it or move it into another program or do any kind of specialty thing. You just click on it and you're there and you can do fancy things to it. I'll just say fancy things for now. And as soon as you click back into the timeline, the things that you did in Fusion are already on the timeline. So it's a massive time saver, whether you're doing visual effects or whether you're doing graphics or tracking things and sticking things to moving objects.
It's really easy to integrate into your workflow once you understand how Fusion works. Now, kind of similarly, we have the color page. The color page is where you do all of your color work for your movie.
Now, you may have noticed, it might have even bugged you, that this footage is kind of gray and washed out. That's because this footage is shot in a log format, which basically means that it's trying to crunch a bunch of information into a video signal, and when you look at it on your display, it kind of looks gray and washed out. And so it needs some kind of color correction to make it look good again. And this is the place where you can take footage like that and you can adjust it and make it look nice. So if you know a little bit about color correction tools, this is a great place to do that, making it look nice again.
However, before you do any of that, I would really recommend that you set up color management in Resolve. Now, there are a few different ways to do color management, but since you're new, why don't you start with this? Go down to the lower right hand corner of Resolve and click on this little settings cog. and that'll bring up our project settings.
So these are just the settings for the project that we have open right now. And over here in this left menu, we have an option called Color Management. When you click that, that's going to bring up this right here where it says Color Science.
By default, it's on DaVinci YRGB. If you switch this to DaVinci YRGB Color Managed, and then go down and hit Save, look what happens to my footage. Resolve recognizes my footage, and it adjusts the colors to look good on a display. Now the reason it's doing that, is because this footage is actually Blackmagic RAW.
And it's not necessarily because it's Blackmagic, but because it's RAW footage, it has data in there that kind of tells Resolve what camera it came from and what settings it should use to make the colors look good on your screen. So if you have RAW footage, Resolve will do some work for you. But if the footage that you have isn't RAW, like for instance this MP4, let's just throw that in there. Boop. This is a video of me being very awkward and making chocolate milk.
You'll notice that these colors aren't fixed like these are. So this looks pretty nice, but these don't. That's because this isn't raw and it doesn't know what camera this is from.
But what I can do is right click on it and go up to input color space here and select the camera that I used. So this was actually shot on a Sony and select the type of log that we shot with. So this was shot with S-Gamut 3 Cine S-Log3.
Now I click this and the colors are made a lot nicer. If you don't know what format you shot with, you have to find that out. That's the only way to do this correctly. Okay.
But once you have that all worked out, then your color management will work. And that will give you a really great starting point, not only to edit with because it won't look grayed out and nasty. But it'll also give you a really great starting point to do some color grading in the color page.
And again, this can be its own huge video. Because again, the color page is just like, I mean, it's an entire app. But just to give you like the airplane view, if you open up your clips panel with this little button up here, you can see all of the clips in your timeline. And this is the same timeline from the Edit page. Okay, when you have a clip selected, it brings it up in the viewer.
and you're looking at that clip. Whatever clip you're looking at, that's the clip that you're going to be adjusting with all of the tools down here. Okay, this area down here is called the color palettes.
Using the color palettes, you can adjust the colors of whatever clip you have selected. And so if I want to make this a little bit warmer, I can just take the offset on this wheel and push this a little bit more warm. That's going to push some warmth into my image. If I want to adjust the contrast, there's a little slider here called Contrast, and I can push that up and make that more contrasty.
I can push up the saturation, whatever I want to do. And if you're brand new to color and you haven't ever really done any color correction, I have a color page crash course, which is from Resolve 18, but not a whole lot has changed since Resolve 18. So that's a great place to start if you like how I teach. Another guy who is amazing is Darren Mostyn.
This guy is a professional colorist. I mean, he is the real deal. He does really high profile projects.
This guy really knows what he's talking about. And he will teach you the color page of Resolve and you will learn a heck ton from this dude. So check him out.
That's Darren Mostyn on YouTube. He has all kinds of videos on color. That's like this guy's specialty.
But what's cool about the color page is not only can you adjust the colors overall, but you can use again nodes and make a series of corrections and even do stuff like select just part of the shot and do some color correction on just that one part. And so you can get extremely detailed, just crafting every little bit, every little part of your image in the color page. Resolve has been around for a long time.
And the first thing that it did was color. In fact, it used to be just an app that did color grading. And so this part of Resolve is very, very good, very advanced. I would say definitely considered to be the industry standard. That's kind of what.
a lot of Hollywood movies are color graded in Resolve. You just can't get better than the tools that you have available in Resolve, especially at the price point, which is free or $300 for the paid version. Just nuts.
The next specialty page is the Fairlight page. Now, this is where you can get really detailed with your audio. And if you've ever used any kind of audio app, this should make tons of sense to you.
You have your timeline with tracks. You have your video up here. You have a mixer with slots to put effects and... You have dynamics and compressors and pretty much everything you would want to make your movies sound, sound amazing.
And for audio, I cannot recommend anyone more than Jason Yadlovsky. This guy is an audio wizard. And if you want to learn how Fairlight works, this is the place to go. He has a Fairlight 19 crash course, which is about an hour long.
And it's just, it's so good. Highly, highly recommend. If you need help with audio, just go to this guy's channel.
That's, that's the guy. But yeah, the cut and the edit pages combined with the fusion color and fairlight pages let you put together your story, make sure it looks and sounds great. And once your edit looks and sounds and feels just how you want, you can go to the deliver page.
The deliver page is where you export your movie over here on the left. You have your render settings. This is where you can decide what your movie should be called, what format it should be, what codec.
They even have presets along the top. If you're rendering for YouTube or Vimeo, you can start there. But once you decide where it goes and what it's called, you click add to render queue, and that's going to put a job right here in the render queue. And you can make several different versions, different timelines, different projects even. And you can stack all those jobs here in the render queue.
And then you can hit this render all and render it all at once. And so you can have, you know, 10 different episodes of your web series all in three different formats. And so you can have, you know, 30 different jobs here, select them all and hit render all then you can go to lunch and let resolve, think about your project and it'll render it out typically very, very quickly. And once this green bar is all the way to the right, then your movie is done and you can upload it to YouTube, give it to your client, however you want to deliver it. And here it is exactly what I wanted.
There's my movie colors looking nice. Everything's looking and sounding amazing. If you want to learn more about exporting. Mr. Alex Tech has a great video on this. There's also a great video from EposVox, who is a big old nerd about settings and things like that.
So definitely check out his video. It's on 18.6, but again, things haven't really changed that much between 18.6 and 19. So yeah, there is the guide on how to get started in Resolve and all of the resources you need. If you're new here, my name is Casey and I teach the Fusion part of Resolve.
And so when you're ready to dive into that, come see me. But for now, get our Resolve resources PDF. It's right here.
It's a free download. And there's links to all the best resources when it comes to learning Resolve. Okay? All right.
If you want to see that crazy four hour video right there, that's where it is.