Everything You Need to Start Editing in DaVinci Resolve (2026 Edition)

D Vinci Resolve isn't hard, it's just unfamiliar. And once somebody explains it the right way, it clicks. Well, hello out there. My name is Brandon Baldivan, but depending on where you look on the internet, you may also know me as Wampus. If you don't edit with a blanket, what I mean, what are we doing? I started out just making fun gaming videos with some friends. I've had the opportunity to work on weddings, music videos, trailers, short form videos, podcasts, and long- form documentaries. At this point, I've covered it all, if not at least most of it. Mind you, not at a Hollywood level, but I think that's why you and I can be a great fit, cuz I understand where you're coming from. I understand the journey that you're about to go on. And now through bring your own laptop, I have the opportunity to teach a full course that I can confidently say will prepare you for anything because the beautiful thing about Da Vinci Resolve is that it covers everything and anything in the post-production world. And I really mean anything. Unlike its competitors, Da Vinci Resolve combines all aspects of the post-production process into one comprehensive package. meaning that not only will we become proficient as editors, but we'll learn the basics of motion graphics and animation through the fusion page, and we'll explore the color page, which is unparalleled in its capabilities. We're going to cover a lot of techniques, but I'd also like the wise. What I'd like to do is to give you the right tools and ingredients so that you can create anything that fits your taste. Editing is an art form at the end of the day. There is never a singular correct or right answer. There are just better choices that we can learn to make. The only thing that you are going to need is your copy of Da Vinci Resolve installed on whatever device you plan on learning on. All the course material will be provided for you at the end of each workingclass project. You will have a final render deliverable that you'll need to upload. Each of these projects will be something that you can also use on your portfolio or showre to highlight some of the skills that you've learned. With all of that said, if you watch each of the laid out sections without skipping, you know who you are. You will walk away a confident editor and creator. So, let's get familiar with Da Vinci

Resolve. All right, everybody. It is officially go time. Let's go ahead and kick off the Da Vinci Resolve essentials course. Now, before we get started, there are a couple things we need to make sure everybody has ready to go. On the course website, there will be exercise files, which is what we will use throughout the course for example footage and media for you to practice with. Go ahead and click download those files and unzip them. Depending on your operating system, it should look something like this. I'm going to have a couple extra folders in mind, but you should have a folder for each of the sections that we're going to use to talk about Da Vinci Resolve. Make sure you move this out of your downloads folder into an appropriate place on your computer so that we can access them as we move through the course. The other really big thing you're going to want to make sure you have ready to go is Da Vinci Resolve. So, if you haven't already, go ahead and download Da Vinci Resolve. And the only place you should download Da Vinci Resolve from is from Blackmagic Design's website. Blackmagic Design is the company behind Da Vinci Resolve. So, do not trust any other distributors. Make sure you download from the official source. Now, there are two versions of Da Vinci Resolve. There's a free version and a paid version called studio. Moving forward, if I ever mention the word studio, I'm referring to the paid version of Da Vinci Resolve. You are perfectly okay to use the free version throughout the entirety of this course. The free version of Da Vinci Resolve is incredibly powerful and there's only a few, we'll call them smarter features inside Dinci Res Studio that'll be lacking in the free version. But this course is tailored to the free version of Da Vinci. If there is an opportunity to use something that's in the paid version, I'll make sure to call it out. But again, one of the best parts of Da Vinci Resolve and probably the reason why a lot of you guys are here is because there is a free version and the free version is incredibly powerful. So with that said, I will be editing on Da Vinci Resolve 20. You might be operating on an older version Da Vinci or version 21 and beyond might be out. The only difference that you'll find moving between Vinces Resolve version 20 or version 19, 18 or again if version 21 is out at the point that you're watching this, some of the interface elements might be a little bit different. So a menu might have a few more buttons to it or it might be in a slightly different location, but for the essentials course, everything that we're going to do is going to remain relatively the same. So do not be alarmed if you're not on the exact version that I'm using or if you're on a newer version or an older version. The only thing I'll say is that if you are on an older version, be aware that there might be a few new options that you don't quite have yet. And again, I'm on the Blackmagic Design official website. The only other thing that I'd like to call out here is that Blackmagic Design actually has a support page. So, if I go up to the support website, it is here that we can download and access any version of Da Vinci Resolve that is officially released. So, on their website, if you are on the homepage, just go up top to support. And then what you would want to do is go over and click Da Vinci Resolve and Fusion software. And now if I scroll down a little bit, you'll see all of the most recent downloads available for Da Vinci Resolve. So if you ever update your software and it introduces new bugs that you don't like, you can always come to the sport website and download an older version. Be aware that there is always two versions of the software. There's the Da Vinci Resolve normal version and then there's the studio version. You will not be able to use the studio version if you do not have a studio license. Once you download install it along with the course exercise files, you will be ripping and raring ready to go. The final comment I'll make on using Da Vinci Resolve when it comes to performance is Da Vinci Resolve is a pretty RAM intensive software. Meaning that if you're on a slightly older PC or you're using a laptop or there is an iPad version of Da Vinci Resolve, you may struggle with playback from time to time. I believe they normally recommend at least 32 gigs of RAM, which is what I'm using. But if you have 64 and higher, you're going to be much better off. With that said, later on the course, we will discuss some techniques for improving and smoothing out playback. Now, I've got one final message for you guys, and then we will officially begin our journeys editing in Da Vinci Resolve. What is the

point here? What are we trying to achieve inside this Da Vinci Resolve Essentials course? Well, before I answer that, the better question is why? Why trust me? What makes me qualified to talk to you guys about Dav Vinci Resolve? Well, I was like you. Uh, I had no video editing experience about 5 to 6 years ago and it was required of me to learn. I was put in a position where I needed to help some people create some videos. And so, it was my task to go, okay, what do I need to know? How do I make effective videos that help tell stories? And like you, I probably searched around for what editing software is best. And then, you know, you land on Da Vinci Resolve because it's free. You download and you try it and then there you are. Da Vinci Resolve in front of your face. Now what? And over the span of the last 5 6 years, the thing that I think I've done really well is I've figured out what's important. What do we actually need to know? I would wager that the majority of us aren't going to end up in a Hollywood film studio. Some of us might. Some of you might end up working on a bigger team, but a lot of us are hobbyists or creators or just want to start some kind of an editing journey. So, what do we need to understand? If you're just looking for what buttons to click, I Google. Google's going to be your best friend. You can Google how to do said thing and it'll tell you click this button. That's not what I'm here for. I'm here to help you understand why we do certain things. Why does this work well? Why should we implement a certain tool in a specific scenario? You see, to understand Da Vinci Resolve, we need to understand video editing as an art form and a craft. Because otherwise, what you'll end up doing is making decisions without motivation. And you'll hear that term thrown out a lot if you've watched other tutorials or even listen to myself talk about video editing. What's motivating the decisions that we're making? Why are we using certain tools? Why are we making a cut in a certain location? Or why did we choose to remove or add certain pieces of footage? When we begin to understand those things, we can influence and inform the choices we're making inside the timeline. So, my goal here is to provide you with the technical information needed to operate comfortably and confidently inside Resolve, but also provide the wise. Why are we making the choices and the decisions that we're making? And if I've done my job well, you'll understand how to learn inside Da Vinci Resolve and not just what buttons do I need to click. One final thing I'd like to add, and if you kind of drone down my ramble there for a moment, maybe tune back in. Video editing is equal parts video and audio editing. So, what you'll end up finding throughout this course is that we spend a good amount of time talking about how to make cuts and how to make our video look and move better, but we also spend a lot of time talking about audio. Audio is it's the visceral portion of the video. It's what you feel. It's what really invokes a lot of emotion in the edit. So, if you have it, I would really recommend watching, listening, and editing with headphones on. It'll give you a much better appreciation for some of the choices that we're making on the timeline. But if not, it's totally okay. It's just something I would recommend moving forward. Now, we're going to spend so much time inside Da Vinci Resolve together, but there's one final thing I do need to cover before we actually open up the program. A lot of

us here are going to be coming from different backgrounds. Some of us might be hobbyists. actually be cinematographers that now need to learn how to edit their own footage. And if you're like me, you just work with a lot of screen recordings. So, what that means is that there's going to be different bases of starting points for everybody. To make sure we're all on even grounds going into Da Vinci Resolve, I've got one thing I really need to talk about very briefly. There's going to be two vocab terms I throw out through the entire of this course that I need to make sure we all understand. One of them is frame rate or normally how it's abbreviated in softwares is FPS or frames per second. So, frame rate or FPS, frames per second. What does this mean? Some of you are already going to be familiar with this concept, especially if you're like me and you come from the gaming world. But for those of you who are not, have you ever taken a step back and thought about how cameras actually record footage? Well, it's not black magic, pun intended. In order for moving media to be generated or a video file to be generated, a video camera will record individual frames or stills or images quickly. So if we had a given second worth of time, so this was 0 seconds and 1 second. If I were to take a single still or a single frame or a single image, there is no motion because we have one frame. And in fact, that is a picture, right? If you were to take a picture with your phone, you have one frame. You've got one image. Well, a video camera will attempt to grab individual frames at a consistent pace over the span of a second depending on the number of frames, which would be these guys here that the camera records in a given second. That would be your FPS or your frame rate. So, just to reiterate, the frame rate or the FPS is the number of frames per second. Does that make sense? When we talk about video files, what we're really doing actually is talking about a lot of images stacked on top of each other moving very quickly. If the concept is still eluding you, it'll definitely begin to make more sense as we hop onto the timeline. But a good visual representation of this would be a flip book. So, you might have seen some comic flip books where they flip through the pages and the pictures move. The reason why this is important is because we're going to work with different frame rates. Some of the more common ones would be 24 fps, 30 fps, and if you're in the gaming world, 60 fps. The number 24 has specific significance because it is the lowest FPS to where the human eye can no longer pick out individual frames. So, at 24 fps, we see a smooth video. When we go below this, the video will appear a little bit laggy or it'll almost look like stop motion. 30 fps is also a common frame rate and any multiple of 60. So 30 is half of 60 is nice because it divides evenly with the time scale. The natural time scale, you know, 60 seconds in a minute, etc. 60 fps is a lot less common when working with actual camera footage unless you were recording for slow motion. We'll talk about retiming and slow motion later in the video, but often times when you see OBS recordings or screen recordings, they'll be recorded at 60 fps. That's how you get that really smooth playback. You'll also notice when something is recorded at a high frame rate and played back cuz it almost looks uncanny. It feels like too smooth. So, we're going to typically operate between 24 and 30. The other term that you're going to hear me thrown out is resolution. And I think most people understand what resolution is. But just to clarify real quick, the resolution of your image is the height and the width of that image. One of the most common resolutions is 1920x 1080. And these numbers represent pixels. So 1,920 pixels by 1,080 pixels. This gives us a 16x9 aspect ratio. Another common aspect ratio that you'll see on older footage would be something like 4x3, but that is not what we're going to use in this course. We're going to operating on a 16x9 aspect ratio. What I really want to call out here is that sometimes I'll throw out the term 1080p. The P standing for pixels. Just like 24 fps, 1920 x 1080 holds special significance because it's considered, you could think of it as like the base resolution for most things. There are a lot more technical terms when it comes to video files and video editing, but it's not going to matter if we don't know how to use it and work with it inside Da Vinci Resolve. So, let's go ahead and get started. And it is

officially about that time. We are going to open Da Vinci Resolve and begin editing. But real quick, this section in particular, I think is very important because for one, we are going to open up Da Vinci Resolve. I'm going to walk you through how to start a project and learn the basics of editing. But the bigger thing that I'd like you to take away here are the wise of what we're doing. Down the road, it's going to be so much more important to understand the decisions you're making and what's motivating them rather than the technique itself. So, the question that I would really like you to continue to ask yourself, not only in this section, but throughout the course, is why? Why are we making the decisions that we're making? And how does it affect the message or the story that we're trying to convey? With that said, let's go ahead and open up Da Vinci Resolve. And this is what we're going to be working on throughout this section. It's called a talking head video because there is one person who is talking straight to the camera. We're going to incorporate a sound effect, a simple background music track, some B-roll transitions, and there's some weird stuff going on here with the fact that we've got two layers of videos overlapping each other. And that's something that we're going to address as we go along in this video. All righty. So the f the first step to start us on our journey is to uh well we got to open up the program. So on Windows I'm going to type my window key, start typing in Da Vinci Resolve and open up the software. So this is the very first window we are going to be greeted by when we open up Da Vinci Resolve. This is the project manager and this is where we create and group our projects together. Now I'm not going to spend too much time here. You can think of this as kind of the homepage for Da Vinci Resolve. The one thing I do want you to double check is to make sure that you're on your local database. Databases are a conversation for a different day, but we don't want to be on the network and in the cloud. However, just for your awareness, if you do want to collaborate with people online in a Da Vinci Resolve project, the cloud system is an option. So, just be aware of that. Now, within the project manager, there's really only two things we can do. If we rightclick, we can either create a new project or a new folder. What I would like you guys to do is to create a new folder. This way we can group all of our projects together into one nice pretty area. I'm going to name my folder the essentials course and hit create. Now let's go ahead and open up our essentials course folder. And from here we can either now rightclick and hit new project or go down in the bottom right corner over here and hit new project. And this presents the very first decisions that we're going to have to make. We can do this first is what we're going to name this. So, what I would like you to name this project is two dashtalking head because that is the type of video that we are going to be working on. And before you hit create, there is this second little option down here that says media location. This will be where Dav Vinci Resolve attempts to save any temporary files or things that you cache or render in place. Those terms will be things that we continue to explain as we move along. But what I would suggest is setting this location to be wherever you have your course material. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit change location, and I'm going to navigate where I have the course material saved. Now, at the time of recording, this is what my folder structure looks like. Yours might look slightly different than mine, but you're going to want to locate the two-talking head folder. And then once you're inside the talking head folder, hit select. If you choose the wrong folder location, is it going to mess up your experience? No. It's just one of those things that's good practice to do for future projects where you're working with different folders and different types of footage. With all that said though, go ahead and hit create. And here we go. We are now inside Da Vinci Resolve. Now, real quick, Da Vinci Resolve is what's called an NLE or a nonlinear editing software. You don't really need to worry about what an NLE is, but the one thing that makes Da Vinci Resolve very special is that it includes everything. If you're somebody who's a little bit more familiar with Adobe, they like to split each of their tools into their own program. Da Vinci Resolve puts it all into one spot, which is what makes it so powerful. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to cover what each of these pages does and how we're going to cover them. Now, there's no need to follow along through this section. I'm going to try to be brief so we can get to actually importing our footage and editing, but I do think that this is important. Over here on the left, we have our media page. This page is dedicated to importing and sorting through footage. This will be something that we do touch on, and I'll show you why it's powerful and how we use it. Next up, we have the cut page. Now, something that I do think is a little bit confusing for beginners inside the program is the difference between the cut and the edit page. I'm just going to eliminate that question right now. We are not going to use the cut page. I repeat, we're not going to touch this page. We're not even going to look at it. You can just icky. I don't even want you thinking about the cut page. Now, obviously, the cut page is in the program for a reason. And what I'll say is that it's mostly used for quick editing. You can think of it as Da Vinci Resolve's light editor. It's used for processing a lot of footage. And it down the road, if you do feel like it's worth it for you to learn the cut page, go crazy. There's nothing wrong with doing it. I just don't think it's going to serve us a great purpose for the bulk of our editing experience. I'm going to skip the edit page for now because that is where we're ultimately going to end up landing on. Next up is Fusion. And Fusion is Da Vinci Resolve's version of After Effects. It's what we use for compositing, motion graphics, doing visual work. It's one of my favorite pages inside Da Vinci Resolve. And we are going to have a whole section that covers how to use Fusion. So don't be alarmed. We are going to talk about Fusion. After that, we have the color page. And quite simply put, the color page is something truly spectacular. If you didn't know, Da Vinci Resolve was actually just a [clears throat] coloring software first. It wasn't until a few years later down the road that they began to incorporate other editing tools. So, what that means for you is that the color page is the oldest. It's the most developed. It has the most tools and features and it is unparalleled when it comes to color correction and color grading. This we will also have a dedicated section on and go over some of the basics for you to use in your own videos. But again, this page is truly incredible. Next up, we have the Fairlight page. And this we will not have a dedicated section on, but this is Da Vinci Resolve's audiomixer, meaning that this would be where you would go to EQ or equalize your different music tracks or voice overs or sound effects or change the volume levels, add audio effects, etc. The Fairite tends to be a little bit more advanced for somebody who's a bit newer to editing inside Da Vinci and we'll be able to get by just fine on the edit page. Last up is the deliver page and all roads lead to here. This will be where we end up saving our final video or rendering our final video is the proper term. But that takes us to the edit page and this is going to be our home base for the bulk of the course. Now again, if you are newer to using editing tools, this kind of this can feel super overwhelming. So just real quick, let me talk through what the different areas are of the edit page and then we'll go ahead and bring in our footage and start to work with it. The one thing that I would like to say and what you'll begin to find out the more we begin to use Da Vinci Resolve is that Da Vinci Resolve gives you the ability to do everything, which means that it has buttons for everything that you could want to do. But we're probably only going to end up caring about 5% of those things. So, the trick to learning the edit page is just learning what buttons do I need to click and where look. Down here in the bottom is our timeline and this is going to be where we bring in footage and audio and we actually do the book for editing. You could think of this as like the edit page workspace. We've got two windows up here. We've got one on the left. This is our preview window where we can preview footage in our media pool. And on the right is our primary viewer and this will be where we view our edit. And up top we've got two rows. Uh this top row that I'm kind of hovering back and forth to gives you the different sub menus inside Dinci Resolve. But again, like I said, we're probably not going to use any of these. We're definitely going to use the inspector tab, which is where we can change our video properties, and we might use the quick export for quick saving things, but we're not going to worry about the metadata, and we're definitely not going to use our mixer right away. And the same thing with over here on the left. We're not going to work with key frames, our sound library, index, effects, etc. The one that we are going to use is our media pool. And the media pool is where all our assets are going to live. So, all our video and audio and still images are going to live right in here. And now it is almost your turn to follow along. What we're going to do is we're going to bring in our footage. And then we're going to create our first timeline. So, what I would like you to do is locate your course material, go into section two, the talking head section, and locate class project one. And there should be two folders inside of here. And what we're going to do is we're going to drag and drop these folders into Da Vinci. But before you do that, listen to this real quick. Drag and select your two folders. And we're not going to drop it into the big pool here itself. I want you to drop it into this little side column. Go ahead and hit release. And there's a very important message that pops up here. Anytime you add footage for the first time into Da Vinci Resolve, it's going to ask, do you want to change the project frame rate? And I'm going to address that in just a little bit. But what I would like you to do is hit don't change. It is okay if you happen to hit change on accident, but hit don't change. I'll show you how to address that problem later. So, hit don't change. And there we go. All of our footage is now sorted inside Da Vinci Resolve in our master folder in our media pool. The reason why I have you drag it over to the left column is because what will happen is don't follow along here. If you take your folders and just drop it into the main uh pool itself, it's just going to dump everything here. So, nothing is sorted. you just have all of your files in here. This could be something that you want to do later down the road, but for right now, we do not want to do that. And if you accidentally did that, hit control-z. Z is the universal undo or command- Z if you're on uh Mac. Now, if you're in a weird folder, you need help navigating, you can go over to the left column over here and click around to jump to the different folders. If for some reasons yours isn't showing, make sure this little icon in the top left isn't collapsed. And you can always double click on the row up top here to jump up a folder or two. But I can go to my video folder, go to the A-roll folder, and now if I hover my mouse, uh, we can see some footage. And now you are primed to begin working on your first editing project. All

righty. So, this section is going to be very short and sweet, but please do not skip it. There's just a couple things we need to make sure are set up appropriately in your project so that weird stuff doesn't happen down the road. Inside Da Vinci Resolve, in the very bottom right hand corner, there's two icons. This home icon actually takes you back to your project manager. So, you can double check to make sure you're in the right project, but that's not what we're here to talk about. In the very bottom right hand corner, there is this cog wheel. This is your project settings. Go ahead and click that. And this is going to bring up a ginormous menu of options and tools that you can end up tweaking and changing for your project. And the key word there being project settings. So these are not global settings. These are only settings that apply to this specific project that we're currently working in. Now, I'm not going to do a full walk through of every single possible setting that we could change cuz we would be here for the full length of the course. But there are two in particular that I would really like you to set correctly. The first one is our timeline resolution. This is going to be the default resolution for the timeline that you're working on. Unless something weird happened, your timeline resolution should be 1920x 1080. Just double check to make sure it says that. The big one that we do want to change is our timeline frame rate. This is the default frame rate for our timelines. Now, frame rates can always be a little bit confusing for somebody who might be just starting out. But what I'd like you to think about is that 24 frames per second is normally meant for films, movies, and things recorded in real life, and 30 frames per second a lot of times used for digital recordings. There's a lot of reasons and things in between that might dictate which frame rate you choose to edit on. For us, I do want you to change your frame rate from 24 to 30. The only other thing that I'd like you to double check is for your optimized media and render cache. These aren't set to uncompressed. This is not something that we're going to dive too deep into in this course, but you can think of proxies and render caches as lowmemory versions of your footage to help you edit faster. And again, the big thing you want to double check here is that nothing says uncompressed. I'm going to quickly walk through some recommended settings that I would use if I were you. If you don't use exactly these settings, you will still be able to edit just fine. But I do think it's worth a couple of minutes to get really technical right now so we can set these up because we'll use them for the rest of the course. The first two settings are our proxies. Now proxies are copies of our video files that are a smaller format, which makes it easier to send to other editors to edit on the fly or if they're working remotely. We're going to set our proxy media resolution to quarter and the media format from ProRes HQ to ProRes 42:2 proxy. Now, depending on what version of Da Vinci Resolve you have, if you're on an older version, you might not have the ProRes codec. So, if that's the case, go ahead and do DNx HRLB. But for us, we're going to use uh ProRes 4222 proxy. Your optimized media is Da Vinci Resolve's own version of proxies and it's probably not something you'll ever really use. But just to be safe, we're going to do the exact same thing. We're going to change the resolution to quarter and the format to 4222 proxy. And same rules apply for DNx HR. And for the last uh cache format, you guessed it, we are also going to change it to 422 proxy. These four settings we're going to cover in a future video, so we're going to leave them at default for now. And then if we scroll down just a little bit more, uh, we can find our project media location. So if you accidentally boofed on this in the beginning, you can go ahead and reset your, uh, your media location. And the last thing I would double check is to make sure that your proxy generation location, your cache files, and your stills are all saved on a local hard drive. By default, they should be, but for whatever reason, you know, maybe you got an external hard drive and it randomly set it. Make sure this is set locally to either your C drive or I have two internal hard drives, so mine are mapped to my D drive. And before you hit save, what I would like to call out is I'm going to scroll all the way back up to the top. There's three dots up top here. And we can do one of two things now. For one, we can set our current settings as our default preset. Meaning that each time we start a new project, these settings, including the resolution, the frame rate, the optimized media proxy resolution, and all of our working folders are set as our default settings. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to click these three dots, and that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to set our current settings as our default preset. It's going to prompt you and say, "Hey, are you sure you want to do this? Go ahead and hit, yeah, I do. I actually I do want to update those. " Now, in the future, just for your own reference, let's say you're working on some 4K footage and it's a 24 fps timeline and you're doing a lot of them and you don't have to reset this up every time. But what you can do is again go to these three dots and there's this little option here that says save current settings as presets. So, you can save some presets for your project settings. So, that again, you don't have to do this every single time. But for now, we are all good to go. So, I'm going to go ahead and hit save. And again, it's going to pop up that big important question. Do you want to change the project frame rate? This time we are going to say yes, change. Now again, this is a super important step that we have to take in the beginning of each project. If you mess it up, is your project ruined? No. And I will show you how to address it. But anytime you start a new project, make sure you are setting your default resolution and frame rate every time. All righty, folks. So, we

are going to create a timeline and begin to use the edit page, which is very exciting. I do want to check in with you real quick because I know that these opening sections might feel like we're not doing enough to get the edit done, but I implore you to continue to be patient and continue to ask yourself why and get just comfortable with these opening concepts because it will pay off down the road. Let's go ahead and hop back into Da Vinci Resolve. Now, I want you to locate your master media pull folder. It's the one all the way at the top. And if you've done it correctly, you should see two. You should see your video and audio folders. And what we're going to do is we're going to create a third folder. So I want you to rightclick in your media pool and hit new bin. Bins are Dav Vinci Resolve's naming terminology for folder. So go ahead, hit new bin and name this 03 timelines. Perfect. Go ahead and open up this timelines folder. All right, here we go. So what I'd like you to do is in this blank media pool region, rightclick, go to timelines. timelines, create new timeline. Now, depending on what version of Da Vinci Resolve you're in, this little menu might look a little bit different, but there will be a spot that says timelines, create new timeline. Go ahead and click it. And now we're prompted with how do we want to set our timeline up? We're going to leave all of these settings alone, but what I would like you to do is rename it. I mean, you could leave it alone as timeline one, but I'm going to name it main because it is going to be the main working timeline for us. It's prompting you, do you want to add some video tracks? audio tracks? Again, leave it alone. But if you are someone who accidentally messed up your project settings, here's where you can fix it. Uncheck this little box down here. And then where I'd like you to click is the format tab. Double check that we're on a 1920x 1080 timeline and our frame rate is 30. If yours isn't, make it match this. If all this looks okay, go ahead and hit create. And there we go. Oh, we've got our very first timeline. Now, I probably said the word timeline 50 times. What is a timeline? Well, it's a workspace. It's a working area where we can cut up our footage. So, let's bring in some footage so that we I can show you. Go back over to your media pool and you can either click straight into your A-roll folder or go back to the master folder. We're go to video A-roll and there should be one video file right here. And what I'm going to ask you to do is go ahead and drag this footage and bring it on down into your timeline. Our footage is here. And what a happy looking guy over there. I didn't realize that was going to be the starting frame. It's too funny. So, what I'd like to do is explain a couple things to you guys before we get a little bit too lost in what the heck are we looking at. First of all, you can now see over here in the right window, we can see what's happening in our timeline. So, I'm seeing where my playhead is at in the video. This orange vertical bar right here is called our playhead. And wherever it's at in the video is what's gets displayed in the preview window. If you would like to move your playhead, you cannot click in the blank space here. You need to click on this ticked line bar up top here and drag it forward. And now we can begin to scrub through our footage. Again, I'm clicking in this upper bar here and scrubbing left and right. If we look down here in the timeline itself, we've got two things going on. We've got this blue bar up top and this green one down below. This is our video track where the visual information is being presented. And the green track is our audio track. These little white blobs that are running across the audio track are our waveform previews, meaning that it is previewing the sound that is going to be said. So, if I were to drag my playhead and bring it to the beginning of the video, and then you can either hit the play icon in your preview window, or you can hit the space button. Well, hello crew. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. And then I can hit the space button again to stop our playhead from playing. But hopefully you notice that as soon as our playhead crossed where our audio waveform is at, that was the area where I began to speak. So again, if I drag my playhead back, hit play. Well, hello crew. Let's talk about that's where I'm speaking. So if we take a macro look at our timeline here, we can see the spots where I am speaking. Now, there's a couple things that I'd like to call out and then we'll begin to move more and more into actually working with this footage. First things first is uh this guy right over here. This is our time stamp. Again, if I grab my playhead and begin to scrub with our footage, you can see that our time head changes. The one thing that I would like to call out is this far right number over here. Now, you might think that it's milliseconds, but if I scrub very slowly, you can see that it resets at 30. This is our frame number because again, a video is created by stitching still images one frame at a time. So, if I were to go down to my keyboard and use the left and right arrow, I can scrub through my footage one frame at a time. Again, I'm using the left and right arrow to scrub through my footage one frame at a time. All right, next thing's next. Uh, we're probably not going to need our preview window here, and it's taking up a good chunk of real estate. to hide it so that we can expand our preview viewer. What I'd like you to do is with our timeline previewer here. Go to the top right and there's this little square icon. It's next to the like the color page icon. This little square guy. Go ahead and click it and that'll expand our preview window. Typically, I like to work with a single viewer, but I do know that some people prefer to have preview and timeline viewer at the same time. There's not a right or wrong answer. It is just completely up to you. I like working with one big screen. Another quick customization option that I do think is important to show off is right above our time stamp over here. There's this little like layered track icon. Go ahead and click that. This will give you your timeline preview and view options. The one that I do like to have on is stacked timelines, and I'm going to show you why in just a second. And if you don't like audio waveforms, you can turn those off. There's a whole slew of options to kind of change the display of the timeline. So, feel free to customize that to fit whatever you'd like. But what I'd like to do real quick is kind of show how you use a timeline and navigate through it. And then I'll walk backwards so that you guys can begin to follow along. Right now, we only have one video and one audio track, but if I click on our footage and drag up, you'll see it creates a second one. And we can do this as many times as we would like. We go and bring this back down to track one. And editing with layers works on a hierarchy system, which means that whatever is on the highest track gets displayed over what's on the bottom. So, if I wanted to, what I could do, and there's no need to follow along here, is I can go to my B-roll and add some footage in here. And you see how now it's displaying this B-roll and not the footage underneath. This is a very important concept that I'll continue to reiterate on as we move forward. I can select this footage and hit the backspace button to delete it. And now we're right back to where we started. Now again, we are presented with a whole bunch of buttons that we can click. And now our inspector tab is populated with things that we can change. We don't need to worry about any of that. All that I hope that you see right now is one timeline and a video and audio file. All righty. So, this is

our very first class project. And the class project system is not meant to be scary or intimidating. These are set up so that we can begin to cement some of the ideas that we're learning as we go along with this course. And our very first project will be a talking head project. We've been asked to create a video that is clear, concise, and illustrates the points in the video we are editing. The video must be under 60 seconds long, which shouldn't be a problem. And they've asked us to use some B-roll along with a backing music track. They've also requested the video be 1080p and an MP4 file. and we will cover exactly what that means in a future video. One thing that I need to call out so that you guys can receive credit for this course is how to submit the videos. So, unfortunately, we can't upload and host all the videos on the course website. So, what I'd like everybody to do is to upload to a streaming service. I would recommend that 99% of people use YouTube because you can create account for free. There's no limits and it's going to work really well. But if you already have a Vimeo account or you operate on Behance, that's totally fine. There are a lot of different streaming sites out there that will work really well. The one thing that we will not be doing is submitting a Dropbox or Google Drive or any kind of cloud service link. Particularly what I'm referencing here is that we should not have to download any files. We should be able to click a link, it opens a video player, and then we can watch whatever you've submitted. I promise you will not get banned off of the website if you accidentally do a Google Drive link. But just know that in order to receive credit for this project, we need some kind of streamable link. If you are not super comfortable doing something like this, do not fret. At the end of the project, when we've rendered everything out and saved everything, I will do a walkthrough of how to upload to something like YouTube and provide a link so that you can submit it to the website. But with all that precursory stuff out of the way, let's go ahead and hop into the project. Hey, time out real quick. We're about halfway through the video. How's everything feeling? Are there questions already forming in your head? Are there things you're hoping that we really cover sooner than later? Let us know in the comments below. And if you do enjoy this video, please please if you can just give it a quick like uh or comment or even better if you could subscribe. The more support we get on videos like these is a really good indicator that you all out there are looking for more tools and information on Da Vinci Resolve. So if at the end of this video you are also looking to continue your journey and learn more about Da Vinci, check out the full course. We do some really deep dives into specific subjects. We cover some more advanced techniques and effects. So at the end of the video, if you would like to continue your journey, check out the full course. With that said, let's hop back into it.

All righty, crew. The glasses are off, so you know this is about to get serious. So, where we're at right now is we have our timeline set up and we're ready to begin editing our footage, which means we're going to have to start using our keyboard and mouse to do some editing. So, this section lays out the foundation of how to use those tools. Now, big disclaimer, I'm going to use my keyboard shortcuts. You do not have to use them, but in the course resources, there will be a file that says these keys. Those will be importable keyboard shortcuts that I'll show you how to use. Again, you don't have to use them and I will call out when I'm using a specific shortcut and what the default button would be in Da Vinci Resolve. This is the system that I found works best for me and I think is easy to pick up. With that said, let's hop back into Da Vinci Resolve. All right, so there's one thing I'd like to call out real quick and that's over here in the bottom lefthand corner. I've added a keyboard overlay to my Da Vinci Resolve, which means that as I am navigating in Da Vinci, it will update to whatever key I'm pressing. Now, again, these are using my keyboard shortcuts. So, let's talk about how we can get those all set up. All the way in the upper leftand corner of Da Vinci Resolve, there is a Da Vinci Resolve menu item. Go ahead and click that button, and then we're going to find keyboard customization. Go ahead and open up that guy. Now, this is going to open up our keyboard customization menu, which is actually pretty well done for Da Vinci Resolve. You can click on any key in here, and it will tell you uh which function or command it is linked to. And if you're ever looking for a certain keyboard hotkey, you can go over to this little search bar and type in things like ripple delete, and it'll tell you which button it is associated with. Go ahead and clear that real quick. Now, for you guys, up in the upper right hand corner over here, it's going to say Da Vinci Resolve because this is the default keyboard layout when you start up Da Vinci Resolve. If you're somebody who's coming over from uh Premiere Pro or Final Cut, they do have some presets for those. I don't know how accurate they are to those programs, but they are an option for you if that's something you're already comfortable with. Well, what I would like you guys to do is all the way in the upper right hand corner of this menu, click these three dots right here, and there's an option to import a preset, which is what we're going to do. So, go ahead and click that button and locate the folder in your course resources that have my keyboard shortcuts in it. It should look something like this. Bees keys or BS keys. It'll be this. ext file. Once you find it, go ahead and hit okay in this menu to import that preset. And if you've done it correctly in the upper right hand corner, it should say B's or BS keys. Now, something else that I have provided is this hotkey cheat sheet. So, as we are going along, if you are ever confused or forget or if you don't want to use my keyboard shortcuts, but you're hearing me talk about something with navigation or editing, you can always refer to this to help refresh your memory. Once these are all imported, go ahead and hit save and then close. Now, from here on, moving forward, I'm going to be using my keyboard shortcuts. I will do my best to call out what the default bind is for a certain function or command, but I'm going to be assuming that you imported my keyboard shortcuts. With that said, before we start actually editing our footage, something that I would highly encourage you doing is to update your keyboard shortcuts as we go along. These have been set up for me and what I feel like are the easiest and strongest set of keys for beginners. It's something I've developed over time and it's something that is going to continue to change as I continue to edit. So, you should do the same. Within the first couple lessons, you're probably not going to know what works best for you, but as we continue to move along, you might find things that you're doing over and over that you wish you could just press a button to do. So, feel free to change these layouts if that is something that you want to do. Again, go in the upper leftand corner, Da Vinci Resolve, keyboard customization, find whatever command that is. So maybe you want to change the fastforward hotkey. You can type in fast forward. Hit the X on the existing hotkey and add your own over here. Once it's all said and done, go ahead and hit save. And it might not even be a bad idea to go up to this upper right hand corner and save your own keys as a new preset. But for now, I ask you to stick with my keyboard shortcuts through the beginning sections of this course. So, my right hand is going to stay on the mouse, and my left hand is going to sit on the home row, which is the biggest thing that I'd like you to take away from this section. When I say the home row, I mean the A, D, and F keys. So, I've got four fingers on the ASD, and F keys, and my right thumb is on the space bar. The first two buttons we're going to talk about are the S button and the D button. S is timeline zoom out, and D is timeline zoom in. So, we can use S to get a better look at all of the footage on our timeline. And we can use D to be a little bit more precise with how we're making cuts, changes, adjustments to anything on this track. Now, the reason why I like using S and D so much is because as we begin editing and as we begin using more and more clips and footage and music, etc., etc., if I need to jump to a later part in our timeline, there's a few ways we can go about doing it. But the way I like is if I hit S to zoom out, I can click and drag my playhead to a later part in the timeline. And I'm going to hit D to zoom in, but keep an eye on where our playhead goes as we continue to zoom in. So, I'm going to hit D to zoom in. And you see how our playhead stays dead center frame. So, anytime I want to reenter or jump to a different part in our timeline, I will use S and D to make those jumps. Now, there's a few alternatives to this one. Uh there's this plus and minus slider up above here in this uh little mini toolbar. This will do the same thing. We can zoom in and zoom out on our timeline. The default shortcut for doing this is alt and the scroll wheel or option if you're on Mac. Moving forward, if I do ever forget to say it, when I say alt plus a keyboard button, it means option plus that button on Mac. And same thing with control, it's the command key on Mac. So on the scroll wheel, we'll do the same thing. And if we are trying to actually jump to a later part in our timeline up in our play bar up above here, we can actually scroll through the entire timeline. Okay. So again, S and D. Let's get back to focusing on the home row. So S and D are timeline zoom in and zoom out. The next big one that we're going to learn is the A key. And if I press A, it is going to split our clip or it's going to make a cut. Now the default for this I believe is controll and b but we are going to be cutting so much we cannot be two-fingering the cut button. So again a is cut. There is an alternative to using uh a in our little mini editing toolbar up top here. There is this razor blade icon and this is our blade mode. I am not a fan of the blade mode but I know some people that will ride and die with the blade mode and I'll show you what it does. If I click it, it turns my mouse into a little razor blade. And now we can split our clips whenever I click. I tend to find this less precise than moving my playhead and cutting, but if this is something you enjoy, you know, go crazy. To toggle off the blade mode, you just need to go back up top here and make sure your mouse is highlighted in orange again. Now, to undo, I'm going to hit control-z a few times. If you're ever wanting to redo and undo. So if I undo too far and I want to redo those cuts, you can actually hit control shift and Z and it will redo your edits. And again, if you're on Mac, that is going to be command shift and Z. All right, so we've got two uh two little cuts here. How do we now get rid of these clips in here? Now, this is actually a bigger decision than you might think because there's two primary ways of deleting footage. First of all, to select this clip, you can either click it and that'll select the video and audio. Or what you'll often see me do is drag and select. This is just a habit I've got into mostly because we often work with more than one track or what we'll end up talking about later is like the video and audio might not be linked together. So, I end up dragging selecting. So, you don't have to do this. You can always click, but just, you know, FYI. Now, the first method to delete this is actually going to be the backspace key. So, I'm going to take my right hand off the mouse and hit backspace. What that does is it deletes the selected footage. Now, the backspace key is the default key to do this. But now, we have this gap in here. So to fix this, one of the things that we can do is we can drag and select the right side of our footage and then leftclick, drag and move it over, and it'll actually snap into place, which is pretty handy. Now, that's not too bad, but what happens if I need to do this again? So, we've got this other section that I want to get rid of. So, I'll click it, hit backspace, and again, now I've got to drag and select and pull this over. Now, that's not too bad, but that is three actions required out of us every single time we want to make a change. We have to delete the clip, select the footage to the right, and then pull it over. And what were to happen if say we had more than just this footage here? So, what if we had five clips, 10 clips, 20 clips, 4,000 clips? I think you can see where I'm getting at. So, I'm going to hit control- Z a couple times. So, we have our two splits here remaining. So, the second method to remove or delete footage slash clips on your timeline is our fourth home row button and it is ripple delete and it's the F key. So, I'm going to select this clip and watch how these cut points move to the right of this footage. I'm going to hit the F key which ripple deletes the footage and see how everything shifts over to the left over here. Ripple deleting closes any gaps created when you delete clips on your timeline. So again, I could click this clip right here, hit F, and it ripple deletes our footage. And on the surface, that seems much better than just hitting backspace, right? So why would we ever do that? Well, you have to be careful when you ripple delete footage because if you have more than one track or you've got things that aren't quite lined up with the audio, ripple delete will slide everything over to the left. So, it's a very powerful tool, but with great power comes uh great responsibility. So, you just have to be aware of what you're doing. Something else that I just want to point out real quick is uh Da Vinci Resolve is pretty dang awesome. I don't know if I've said that yet, but let's say I hit the backspace here and I do have this gap. Da Vinci also has this very cool feature where if I were to click in the gap. So, if I leftclick in this gap here, see how it highlights in gray, I can now hit the F key to ripple delete that gap. So, even if you are editing and you've got some space in here that you want to close or things are split for whatever reason, you can always just click gaps and hit F and it will close the space. So, again, I cannot emphasize enough how important it is. We just really need four keys. The S key, the D key, the A key, and the F key. That is going to carry you 95% of the way there when it comes to editing any and all of your footage. Which means that if we've learned ASDNF, we're ready to start editing our footage. All right. So, we're going to begin what's called

the rough cut or sometimes it's called the assembly cut of the edit, which means we're going to take our raw footage and trim it down until it's in a usable place. And what that means is we're going to get rid of some of the ums and the uh and gaps, the bad takes, etc. until we have usable footage for our edit. And there is one thing in particular that I'm going to show off that is a very important concept in Da Vinci Resolve that I'll take a couple minutes to talk through, but it is very important to understand and know how to use. So, let's go ahead and hop back into Resolve. All righty. So, let's go ahead and do some editing. Quick reminder, bottom lefthand corner is my input history. So, as we continue to move along in the course, you should be able to keep track of what keys I'm pressing, but your timeline might look a little bit different than somebody else's. So, what I'd like us all to do is to start fresh together. Hit S to zoom all the way out on your timeline so that you can see all of your footage. Drag and select it all and hit the backspace key to delete it or F or you could have hit F to delete it. Now, what I want you to do is go over to the upper leftand corner here for our media pool. Go to the video folder, find your A-roll, and let's re bring in our footage. There we go. Now, this is personal preference, but I like having the entire bottom section here for my timeline cuz I like having a little more working real estate. So, what I'll do is up in the upper leftand corner of Da Vinci Resolve, there's this little square with what you call that a carrot icon. Go ahead and click that and it will collapse the media pool to just be on this upper portion. So that way we have our entire bottom half for our timeline. Now, unfortunately in Da Vinci Resolve, you can't drag and drop menus around to be in different locations, but we can always grab dividing lines to make sure things fit however we feel best. So sometimes you'll even see me grab this middle bar in between the video and audio tracks to move things around a little bit more if I need to see the audio or if I want to see the video a bit better. So with all that said though, what we're going to be doing today is I'm going to hit D a couple times to zoom in. We're going to be cleaning up our footage a little bit. I might throw out terms like working through our footage or trimming. It all kind of means the same thing, different context. All I'm trying to say is that in our video, you see how there's these little gaps in here where nothing's being said. We're going to try to get rid of those. There's going to be sections where I goof up. We don't want to include the goof ups there. And we also need to be aware of the things I'm saying in this footage. You see, editing is a very active craft, which means that we can't just go along, look for where the audio is, and get rid of stuff where there's no audio. We need to be aware of what our subject, in this instance, me, is saying because at the end of the day, we need to string together all these little bits and pieces so that it makes one cohesive message slashstory. So, there are moments where you can kind of turn your brain off a little bit, but the sorting process, the rough cut process tends to be something that you do need to pay attention to. So, let's start working through it. First things first, I'm going to drag my playhead all the way to the beginning. Oh, it looks like I didn't bring our footage all the way snug on 00. So, let me drag and slide that over. Made spacebar to play and stop it right before I'm about to speak. Something else you'll see me do throughout this that I want to call out now in case I've already done it a few times is as the video is playing, I'll oftentimes hit S to zoom out to see kind of where we're at in the uh total video length and D to zoom in so I can be a little bit more precise. The other benefit to this, and this is what we discussed in that last section, is it keeps our playhead mostly centered. So, as I'm playing, I can zoom in and it'll put our playhead right in the middle. All right. So, I'm going to drag our playhead somewhere to the beginning here. It does not have to be exact. You do not have to copy my timestamps. Those things are unimportant. But I'm going to hit A to cut. Select that first half. F to delete. Now, I'm going to hit space to play through this little bit. — Well, hello crew. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. Perfect. I tapped A to make a cut. Now, a common question that gets asked early on is where do I cut things off? At what point when I finish saying something, do I make this cut? And what I'd like to say is this. What I'm going to do is I'm going to hit shift and use my middle mouse button. Excuse me, shift and the scroll wheel to expand our audio track here. And this is uh a little exaggerated for the purpose of what we're doing, but it is nice to kind of visualize what I'm saying. Most of the times when somebody is speaking, there is a little tail at the end of their annunciation. This tail might look different depending on what's being said, but I would say 99 times out of 100, there's this little trail that carries through whatever the last word is that we said. So, what I would say is try to get your cut to be kind of close to where that tail ends. Doesn't have to be exact, but what will happen is if let's say I make a cut before there. So like right here, I'll play this before I cut it off. So this is the talking section. — Other beginners make. Looks like make is the final word. If I were to cut off somewhere right here. ripple delete this with F. And you do not have to follow along here. I replay this beginners make. — Can you feel the abruptness? Maybe you can't. Depending on where you cut off this tail, it can feel pretty jarring. So our goal is to leave that little bit. Hey, shift and the scroll wheel to kind of recondense our audio waves here. Now, a skill I'd like you to try to form as we begin to work through this footage is looking at these audio waves and trying to determine what's going on. We can use our first clip as an example. You can see kind of the shape and the fullness here. This is when somebody's speaking up ahead. We've got a lot of these little like blips. I would wager that it's me kind of grunting or making some noises or trying to start what I'm about to say. — [clears throat] — Yeah, we don't need that. So, I'm going to hit A here to make a cut. F is ripple delete. Go ahead and play this forward. — Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. Perfect. A to cut. And what we're going to do is we're going to continue to get rid of some of these like weird noises and some of these bad takes. But before we do that, I need to cover a very important editing concept slashtechnique. So, we are going to

cover how to trim our footage. And we're going to add it to our arsenal of techniques here inside Da Vinci Resolve. And I'm going to do it working with just these first two little clips. So, I'm going to put my playhead on this cut. Hit D to zoom in a little bit. I'm going to shift my playhead off just a smidgen. And we need to talk about this right here, this cut point. Something I haven't done yet, and something you might have experimented with is shifting this cut point. If I hold my mouse in between so that it's directly in between, you can see that it forms this bracket. And so what I can do is I can shift this cutter point around. Excuse me. This can be very useful for when we want to change when one video leads into the other or the audio as well. So clicking the middle shifts that. If I move ever so slightly to the There we go to the left, my icon changes to a single bracket with this filled rectangle. This allows me to drag the edge of our cut. So, if I wanted to get a little bit closer to where I start speaking here, I could again grab the edge and pull it over. Now, we've got this gap in between. So, what I could do is drag and select this, pull it over, or I'm going to hit control-z once like I showed off in the last video. We can click the gap, hit F to ripple delete. That process that we went through is typically called trimming your footage because we're shaving off the edge of where things are beginning and ending. Now, here's where some really important stuff comes in. That process is a destructive process. Meaning that we cannot recover information if we change this cut point or we trim the edges. Let me show you what I mean. You see this little blur here where I say, "Hey, hey. " Okay. If I were to take the cut point of this clip here and shift it over so that I get rid of the hay. If I were to take this second clip and move it to the right, you notice how we don't regain that audio file. That's because when we put audio or video on top of existing audio or video, it overwrites it. It does not store that information underneath. Again, if I were to take this clip right here, move it over to the left, release my mouse button, drag it over to the right, you see how it deletes the existing footage. This can become very important because let's say I bring this over to the left and I go, well, hm, my voice is getting cut off here. I need to drag the edge over. Well, then in doing so, we've lost the beginning of this clip. Obviously, the quick fix is to kind of grab that edge here and pull over to the left. And then we, you know, problem solved, but on bigger timelines, we want to avoid having this headache. So, there is a very powerful tool built into Da Vinci that handles this, and it's called our trim mode. So, if I go up to our editing toolbar here, and I hover over this icon, this will toggle our mouse to go into the trim edit mode. Now, if you're using my keyboard shortcuts, I have mapped that to the shift and W button. So, you can either click this icon or hit shift and W to swap to the trimedit mode. Now, this is a very, very special tool, and I'll show you why. If I were now to go to the edge of our clip here in the trimedit mode, watch what happens with our audio and video. As I move this point, it pushes it to the right. We're not overwriting anything. we're pushing our footage away. Vice versa, if I go to the left side, it's going to maintain our footage over here and push it out as well. So, if you're ever in a situation where some part of your footage is cut off, what you can do is select the trim mode, go to the edge, and then push it out so that we regain that information and we don't override anything on the other side of the playhead. Now, the trim mode has a lot of really cool features. Like, for example, if I were to click on our right clip here, and I have my mouse just somewhere in the middle, okay? So, it's not sitting on any of the borders or the edges. I can slide the footage so that our cut points remain the same, but the in andout points of our media shift. So, if I wanted our audio to be closer to this edge, well, I can slip it that way. Very useful, very powerful tool. To get back to the normal uh selection mode, you can either hover with the mouse and click it, or I have it mapped to W. So, for us to toggle between these two modes, we can either hit shift and W to go to our trim mode, or just hit normal selection mode, and then we can use the normal selection functions. Again, big takeaway here. Moving our footage is a destructive process. In Dinci Resolve, when you move clips or assets on top of each other on the same track, it overwrites it. it deletes it. We are now getting more

comfortable with our keyboard shortcuts. We know how to trim and edit our footage. And now we need to finish the rough cut of our edit. With that said, uh let's continue to edit. So, I'm going to reset this up so that we're at a similar point. Okay. So, now we've [clears throat] got our two clips here and let's continue to play through things. Well, hello crew. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. Hey, Ah, you might have missed it the first time, but these two clips are saying the exact same thing. So, we've got two takes of the same line. This will be a decision that we have to make later on down the road. Until then, I'm going to cut off the edge of this footage here. We could either hit A and F, or we could just grab the end and pull her in. Let's click this gap here. Hit F to ripple delete. And now we've got this big gap here where it doesn't look like anything's being said. As editors, our duties are to scrub through and get familiar with as much of the footage as possible. However, because we know this is a talking head video, and I am supposed to be speaking, more than likely, this is stuff that's not going to be used. We should always double check by grabbing our playhead and scrubbing through here to make sure nothing's happening. But we can kind of move through this sequence confidently knowing that we'll probably need to get rid of this. So, I'm going to hit A to make a cut. F to delete. Let's go ahead and play through here. — Something that a lot of beginning editors will make. Oh, messed up. Let's keep going. So, a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make. Oh, messed up again. Remember how I said a skill I'd like you to start forming is looking at audio waves and trying to predict what's going to happen ahead of time. You see how these two audio waveforms are very similar? In my head, because I've been doing this for a little while, I know that more than likely these are probably the same things being said. And our options are one, one is a good take and one is a bad take. Two, they're both good takes that we could possibly use. Or three, it is the same take and I mess up on both of them. We're ending up with option three here. So, what I can do is after both of them, hit a F to delete. If for some reason you feel like you need to go back and regain that take, well, lucky for you, we can use that trim mode. So, I could hit shift and W to swap to trim mode, click our clip here, go to the edge, and push it out till we regain it. Now, as I'm scrubbing through the footage as well, you know how you can kind of hear it in the background? That's cuz audio scrubbing is turned on. If you do not like that, uh, there is a way to turn it off. Go up top to the very upper menus over here. Click timeline and then we're going to find the audio section and then audio scrubbing. So I have it mapped to shift S to turn it on and off. So if you don't want it, you can just toggle it off, but sometimes I like it just to kind of preview uh what's being said. All right. So again, we don't need these two sections. So I'm going to go to the beginning here, hit A to make a cut. That's a delete. And the only thing I'm keeping in mind when I'm cutting ahead of the clips is to make sure I'm not cutting off the head of the audio. The preciseness again, it doesn't matter too much. Let's go ahead and play. So, a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make is that they focus on the spectacle of the edit over the story of the edit. Perfect. And now looking ahead, we got this short little blip. Is it likely that this is a good take? No. But we'll go ahead and play it just in case. what we're talking about. See, there is always a chance because we don't know this audio. We don't know what's being said. We don't know if this is like a short exclamation. So, there is a chance that this is usable, but more than likely editor brains on. Probably don't need it. Let's go ahead and move forward. When we're talking about the thing that really ma what really matters. Okay, blueofed again. A plus F. See how often I'm pressing that A and F key. So, I cannot stress enough that you don't have to use the home row, ASD, and F, but you should find some keyboard shortcuts that you are comfortable with that you use over and over. Anyways, let's carry on. When we're talking about what really matters the most at the end of the day, it's the message being told in the video, not what kind of effects you can include. Perfect. Make a cut. Drag my playhead forward. Cut. Plus F. can include. Something else a lot of beginning editors are uncomfortable doing is letting a cut. with is cutting naturally. Okay, perfect. This is a bad take. We'll go ahead and hit ripple delete it. Now, sometimes what I'll do as well when I'm sorting through footage is if I hit S to zoom out a little bit, we still got a little chunk to work through. And sometimes you can kind of lose track of where you're at in that edit. So, sometimes what you'll catch me doing is if I hit D to zoom in, I'll just bring whatever that last little clip is that I edited and I'll bring it up a track just so I know for myself, hey, I've made it at least this far. Stuff to the left has been sorted through. Quick note, though, um, when I drag footage up and down, you see how there's this hovering time stamp? That's the amount of seconds plus frames it's been shifted. So, if I were to drag it up and go to the right, you see how we're adding frames and seconds. Let's go to the left frames and seconds. So, you want to make sure it's at 0 0. And if yours isn't snapping to the edges. So, see how mine it kind of like snaps in when I get close to an edge. Make sure this magnet icon is toggled on. Sometimes it can get turned off if you accidentally press the I think is it mapped to? Yeah, it's mapped to the N key. If you accidentally press N or click it for whatever reason. So, just make sure that's turned on. I'm going to go and bring this. Oh, no. Wait. I want it up. All right. Editor brain turned on. I bet that this uh is this like an um — um — sure is. So as you continue to get better and better, a lot of times what you'll see me do is just kind of scrub past it. A F. — Something else a lot of beginning editors feel like that something else. — Okay. A F bad take. Something else a lot of beginning editors do often is the overuse of pre-builtin transitions. Until you're more comfortable with how you should edit a video, I'd avoid using some of those presets. Perfect. Nicely said, Brandon. We'll make a cut here. And the last thing that I want to talk about is And one of the last things I want to talk about Okay, bad take a F. Can I see the rhythm that we're getting into? One of the last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. Your audio makes up 50% of any video edit. So, you should spend as much time as possible. Huh. Okay. So, looks like we got a good sentence. Now, — one of the last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the time as possible. Don't finish the second half. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a cut here and I'm going to drag it up one track. I'm looking over to the right and I'm seeing that the audio waveforms don't quite match what's being said here. So, just in case I need to use this first half, I don't want to delete this yet. There is the chance that we need to get rid of it, but as of right now, not sure I want to get rid of it. Now, I have a little horizontal mouse wheel, which just lets me do this, which is pretty fun. A lot of mouses don't have that. So, if you ever want to scroll left and right, the hotkey is controll plus middle mouse button. and that'll let you move left and right. Or you can always click ahead, S to zoom out, D to zoom in, and that'll recenter your playhead. All right, editor brains turned back on again. Right. So, if I'm looking at this little section of audio waves, we've got a couple of little short blips here that are more than likely not going to be useful. So, if I was editing this video for real, what I would do is this. Scrub forward. I go, "Yep, not good. " Quick decision. Boom. If you're not comfortable doing that, continue to play it. Your audio the the more times you do this, the more confident you'll get with making quick decisions on what to keep and remove. When in doubt, you know, take your time. But either way, we do need to select this. F ripple delete. The audio of the video accounts for over 50. The audio of the don't need any of this. A F. The audio of the video accounts for 50% of the final edit. So you should spend just as much time working with your audio as you do working with the video. Perfect. Nicely done, Brandon. Okay, so where does this sentence start? Where does this video start? Excuse me, where does this clip start? And one of the last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. Your audio makes up 50. Ah, see this is why we made this step to bring this up a track in case we needed to use it. See, the beginning of this clip leads into what I'm saying here because when I was recording, I forgot to say this first sentence. So, what I'm going to do is scrub forward, zoom in. I'm going to make a cut right before the uh the second part of the clip. Select it. F. ripple delete. And now if I were to play this, it should sound somewhat cohesive. Last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. The audio of the video accounts for perfect. How did I know to do that? Well, I have the benefit of having recorded this video. So, I know how I tend to speak and talk. So, if you're not sure that's going to work, just keep it. We can come back and refine things later, but I'm trying to save us as many iterations as possible. So again, if you're not sure, leave it in there. You can always remove things later on, but we're just trying to train our editor's brains to start making some of these uh confident decisions earlier on. All right, drag my playhead over. I'm going to use my horizontal mouse wheel. Again, you can use control or command and the scroll wheel. Editor brains turned on. These two waveforms are looking very similar, so I would wager that this is a boof. Hope this helps you guys and excited to talk more about some Yep. And we flubbed it. So, scrub forward. AF video. Hope this helps and excited to talk more about editing. Perfect. A F. If I were to hit S to zoom out, I'm going to hold shift and the scroll wheel to bring in our video tracks a little bit. Clean it up. Bring our playhead back to the beginning. Zoom in with D a couple times. And now we have a rough cut of our edit. Is this a good cut of our edit? No. But could you, if you had to, send this to somebody to take a look at? Yeah, for sure. We've gotten rid of all the gaps. mess ups, and now we have a somewhat cohesive take of our talking head example. So, the next step is to continue to refine this and make it a good edit. We finished our rough cut of

the edit, and the next step is to make a more presentable version of the video. So before we do that, what I'd like to do is quickly review where we're at and some of the things that we're going to look for to add to the video and to remove from the video to improve it before we come up with our final delivery. Now, depending on the size of the video and the editor that you're talking to, this stage of the cut will be tagged different things. Some people will call it the rough cut, uh an assembly just even call it the selects of your edit. And typically the first pass is the least fun part of the editing process, but we've done it and now we have our working cut. So what I like to do is talk through a couple things. One of the first things that I like to try to keep in mind is the total length of the video as is. So up in the top left corner by our preview window here is the timestamp of the total timeline length. So right now we're about 57 seconds, which is a little under a minute, which I think is great for this project. Next thing that I'm going to do is play the video from beginning to end so that we continue to familiarize oursel with the footage and the direction that we're going in and then we can talk through what we're going to need to add into the video. All right, let's go ahead and play from the beginning. Well, hello crew. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. Hey, Ah, that's right. We've got more than one take here. Now, there are a few different ways to handle multiple takes, and this becomes more of a pressing issue later down the road if you're working on a film set that has 1 2 3 4 10 different takes. But for us, we just need to pick between the two. So, I don't think there's a wrong or right answer here, but what I would like you to do is pick one that you feel like is a stronger version of that opening sentence. Well, hello crew. I think I personally like this second take because it's saying the same thing in less words and we get into the rest of the video a little bit faster. So, what I'm going to do is select our first take and hit F to ripple delete. Now, again, let's play this video from beginning to end. Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So, a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make is that they focus on the spectacle of the edit over the story of the edit. When we're talking about what really matters the most at the end of the day, it's the message being told in the video, not what kind of effects you can include. Something else a lot of beginning editors are uncomfortable with is cutting naturally. Something else a lot of beginning editors do often is the overuse of pre-builtin transitions until you're more comfortable. Okay. And see, this is why we play our video from beginning to end because it looks like in the selection process, I didn't catch this duplicate take of me saying something that doesn't transition well into the rest of the video. Right? So, if we play this section again, something else a lot of beginning editors are editors do often is the overuse of pre-built-in transitions. So, what we can do is get rid of this unneeded segment. Let's go ahead and start playing all the way through again. — It's the message being told in the video, not what kind of effects you can include. Something else a lot of beginning editors do often is the overuse of pre-builtin transitions until you're more comfortable with how you should edit a video. I'd avoid using some of those presets. And one of the last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. video accounts for 50% of the final edit. So, you should spend just as much time working with your audio as you do working with the video. Hope this helps and excited to talk more about editing. Perfect. And so, now we have one cohesive message throughout the now 46 seconds of video. As editors, what are some things that we should start being conscious of now? Well, for one, we need to start thinking about the pacing of the video. The pacing of a video is a broadstroke term for how fast or slow does the video continue to carry out as you play it. Are things being said quickly? Is there time in between scenes? Are we letting certain shots linger for a long amount of time? Are we cutting very quickly? Depending on the video or the subject matter, a certain rhythm to the video might be more appropriate than another. The pacing is very much so a feel thing and it's something that I'll try to continue to hammer home on as we continue to progress through the course. The next couple things that I'm starting to think about are a lack of audio underneath. So, there's no music. We have no sound effects to kind of highlight certain things and certain emotions throughout the video. And there's also no visual references throughout the video to highlight some of the things that are being said. Typically, additional footage to the main footage is called B-roll. and the primary footage that is driving the video forward is the A- roll. So, what we've done is come up with a cut of our A-roll. And now we need to start thinking about is there ways to introduce B-roll to highlight some of the things that I'm being said. And these are the big ticket issues that we need to address. The next step is to

add in assets to the video, meaning music, sound effects, and B-roll. And the art of choosing your assets is almost as big of a skill as learning how to edit itself. I think a lot of editors will tell you that the procurement process of acquiring footage and music and sound effects can be more timeconuming than actually coming up with the edit. But lucky for you guys, I've already gone through and acquired the music and sound effects that we're going to use throughout the course. Now, with all that said, I'd like to introduce you guys to the media page inside Da Vinci Resolve. We're not going to spend too much time on it, but it is nice to know where it is and how to use it. So, thus far, we have been living over here in the edit page, but don't you forget we've got all these other tools here inside Da Vinci Resolve. So, let's go ahead and meander on over to the media page. Now, depending on you and your workflow, you might not spend a lot of time in the media page, or you might spend a ton of time in the media page. The media page is essentially set up to sort through and bring in footage, audio assets, images, etc., etc. The bottom half here is our media pool. So, this is everything that we have currently imported into our working project. So, we can cycle through our folders just like we could on the edit page. And if I wanted to, I could double click on some of the footage and we can preview it here in our media pool. Quick aside, I have the audio muted here so that it doesn't get in the way of me speaking. If you do ever want to mute and unmute stuff, you can uh just click the little speaker icon or you can rightclick and now you have a volume bar. But I'm going to go ahead and keep this muted. Something else that's kind of a fun tool, and you might have seen this on the edit page, is this little uh circle with two arrows on the left and right side of it. This is your jog wheel. So, you've seen me grab my playhead and move it left and right here to quickly scrub through the footage. But if you want to do a little bit more fine-tuning, you can click and hold the jog wheel and move your mouse right and left. And now you have a little bit more fine control, I guess I should say, in your preview here. But this is what I really wanted to show you guys in the top left corner here. This is where we can preview and import footage. In the upper left here are all your connected drives. You can see I've got a few, including Mr. Burger, who is somebody I am working with right now. And if you click on one of these drives, so if I click on my D drive, which is my media drive, and I have this nice juicy folder over here in my D drive, it's called my stock media folder. And inside this folder is everything I've ever downloaded to work on a video ever for the most part. So I've got music, stock footage, uh visual effects, whatever. If you can think of it and it goes in a video, it belongs right in here. So, just like File Explorer on Windows or Mac, you can go ahead and open up your various folders. And I can go find my audio folder. And then we can even click on something like uh sound effects. And I can go to my save sound effects over here. And I've got a bunch of folders of random various sound effects. And one of the fun ones to look through is the whooshes. So, if I click on my whooshes folder, we can begin to preview some of the whooshes that I have saved here. So, if I unmute my audio here, I can drag my mouse over to preview it. If you don't like the mouse dragging preview, which for me sometimes gets in the way of me just kind of scrubbing through stuff in your preview window, there's three dots in the upper right hand corner. If you click those and then uncheck live media preview, now you can kind of scrub through things without it instantly playing. But I can doubleclick on any one of these to preview it. And where this is nice is if I have something that I find that I'd like to use. So let's say I click here and I like that little whoosh. Well, what I can do is go to my pre-created sound effects folder that we already created. Click there and I can drag and pull it in. And so a lot of times in the beginning of edits, what we'll end up doing is we'll come up with a rough cut and then we might sort through some of our assets that we have that we've either been provided or that we've gone and downloaded ourselves and try to procure which we want to use in our video. Now you guys are going to have access to the sound effect. So I'm going to hit control-z so that we're all working with the same stuff. And the last thing that I like to call out here that is personally my favorite feature of the media pool is there's this little section over here on the left where it says favorites. If I grab this middle bar and bring it up so you guys can see it a little better, you can see I have four folders saved here that I call all the time. And so for you, you know, if you have your stuff saved on the C drive, you can see that sometimes it can be a little bit of a nuisance to find the right folders. So if there is one that you use all the time, you can always right click on that folder and add folder to favorites and then it'll locate it over here. So now what I can do is I can go over to my audio tab and then I have all my music and sound effects right there. So then I can quickly go through, find some of the different music tracks that I have saved and preview them on the fly. Pretty neato, right? And so again, if I this is a track that I'd like, I can just drag and select it and pull it down into our media pool. And so the next steps that we're going to take is we're going to introduce some of these audio items into our video. A very common

question at this stage in the video edit is which do I do first, audio or add B-roll? And I think what you'll find as you continue to edit is that it kind of doesn't matter. it's going to make more sense, for instance, if you're working on a music video to add the music first. But when you're working on like something, you know, like a documentary, it might make more sense to structure the video and the B-roll before you begin to add in uh music and sound effects. But what ends up happening a lot of times is you'll do one and then you'll have to adjust the other. And it's kind of like a little bit of a back and forth game. But for us, we're going to start with some audio. Let's get some audio in the mix. All right, here. So, we left off on the media page. So, let's bounce on back over to the edit page. And depending on what folder you clicked on in the media page is where your media pool will start in the edit page. So, the first thing that I'd like us to do is to pick an audio track to use. And we've got three here. Now, if you muted your audio in the last section, make sure it is unmuted so that we can preview our audio. And what I'd like you to do is one of two things. One, I'd like you to preview the music and make a decision on which one you'd like to introduce. And there's two ways to do that in Da Vinci Resolve. The first way to do that, if you remember, right, a few videos ago, we actually collapsed our uh video player here into one viewer. So, we can undo that by going up to the top right and clicking the split rectangle here to get back our second preview window. And this preview window is specifically set to preview footage in your media pool. So I can double click on anything in my media pool to preview it here on the left while maintaining the uh imagery from our timeline on the right. So what we can do is begin to preview our music by hitting the space bar. Now by default most music is normalized or has their audio level max to the max level. So it might be pretty loud when you preview it. If it is coming in a little bit loud, you can always adjust your volume over here by dragging it over to the left just a little bit so your eard drums aren't completely smashed out. So, that's one way we can preview our music. The other way would be, again, I like I just like working with one window at a time. I'm going to recolapse this left window here by going over again to the upper right and clicking our giant rectangle. And now we can just doubleclick instead to preview whatever is in our media pool. That being said, we do lose what's happening over here in our timeline. But for simpler edits and simpler videos, there's often not a need to have both up at the same time. And I will show you when it is appropriate to have both and when it makes a little bit more sense. But I like just having one window. Again, it's completely up to you. There's not a wrong answer here. So, let's go ahead and preview our audio. Okay, so this is kind of like a lowfi track. Now, a question that might have formed in your noggin over there is, uh, how do I know which one of these is good as we begin playing through them? Well, listen to me. You're going to have to make a choice, an informed choice. Remember, editing is a creative field, so you can have some creative liberty for what makes sense. there's going to be more appropriate choices for music and sound effects uh as opposed to others, right? So, like if we're doing a sad emotional scene, it's probably not going to make sense to have some kind of like thumping EDM music in the background. But like I've said once and I'll continue to say throughout this course, there's not a correct answer. It's just what makes sense to you. So, if you're looking for a little bit of guidance into what kind of song should you begin looking for, well, again, we have to think about the overall message of the video, what is being said in this segment, and what kind of audio is going to feel appropriate. So, if I were to click my mouse back on the timeline, we're going to lose our preview. But remember, this video is me talking about some basic editing mistakes. So, the music that we choose to use shouldn't feel intrusive. We will probably just want something that sits in the background that just fills in some of the gaps in between the talking points. So, I'm going to double click on that lowfi song again to continue to preview it. And I kind of like the rhythm in that song. oftentimes as well when I'm previewing music, what you can kind of do, and again remember we're trying to train ourselves with recognizing waveforms is I'll kind of skim ahead to moments where the beat kicks in or there's a needle drop moment. So you can kind of see here the regularity of the waveform increases and right around here is probably where the main verse of the song kicks in. So I'll kind of scrub over to here. Perfect. Make him a little mental note of that. Let's check out on the last song over here. I'm going to double click it. So, again, when I immediately pull this up, the thing I notice is we've got two kind of driving moments here where there's a lot of stuff going on and then kind of like a down moment. So, I'll probably preview a snippet in here and then to see how each sounds. And if I didn't call it out earlier, unfortunately, you can't drag and move the uh playhead in this main working area. You have to use this upper section here to scrub through the song. You can also use this little bit down here and the jog wheel just like we talked about in the last section. So, I'm going to go ahead and hit play. And right away, this is a lot more upbeat than that lowfi track that we were using. — Okay, I think I've got a general gist of what that sounds like. Let me go ahead and click forward. See what this little area sounds like. Interesting. Okay, so each of these songs brings a slightly different vibe and energy. So, which should we use? We've got this one called cinematic documentary soft background. got a lowfi song and the soft background music. To me personally, this last track sounds a little bit more like it's a news update, and the cinematic one sounds like it's meant for a documentary. I don't know if it quite fits the tone that I'm looking for. There's something about it that invites a little bit more drama that I think that I'm looking for. So, I'm going to bring in the loi background. To do so, uh, well, we just go to our media pool. We go to that file, and we're going to drag and drop it in. Now, what you're going to kind of see me do is drag and swing it around over here because I don't want a happen chance to overwrite some of the dialogue. So, what can happen, and don't follow this step, is you bring in your music, you go here, and then you go shoot. So, what I'm going to do is go ahead and drag our song, swing it down and around. A common follow-up question when it comes to importing music and sound and footage even is, what if I don't want the whole thing? So, obviously, we're not going to use all 2 minutes and 13 seconds of the song. So, what if I only want it to go up to here? Well, what you can do is set in andout points on any of the media in your media pool. O is for out. And see how our player preview gets cut off short here. If I were to drag my playhead to the left, I is for in. So, I equals in, O equals out. And if you're currently previewing that media, you can also just drag and pull down from the media preview itself. And see how we have a much smaller snippet here. I'm going to go ahead and hit backspace again. And the reason why I'm not hitting F, remember F is ripple delete. When I hit F, it's going to look to ripple delete this entire segment from left to right. So watch what happens. See how it shifts everything over to the left. So we got to be careful with our rippling and our deleting. Hit control +- Z again. Select our music track. Backspace to get rid of it. I'm going to double click the song preview again. How do we reset our in-n-out points? Well, we're going to hit Alt + I, and Alt + O. The Alt key is a modifier. I'm not sure if I've mentioned it yet, but we will talk more about modifiers later in the future. So, again, I equals in, O equals out. Alt plus I resets the endpoint. Alt plus O resets the outpoint. All right, let me go ahead and drag redragra in our music track here. I'm going to go to the end of our video and then hit A to cut. Now, you notice here that I didn't actually have the song selected before I do that. If you don't have a particular file selected, when you go to make a cut, it will cut every single track. So, watch as I hit A, it's going to make a cut on everything. So, with that said, we just need to make sure we're intentional with our cuts now moving forward that we have multiple tracks and more than one thing happening. I'm going to hit Crl +-Z a couple times and then delete this back portion of the music.

I'm going to bring my playhead all the way back to the beginning. And before I begin to preview what we have right now, you're probably already wagering that this is going to be too loud. Look at how big the waveforms are compared to our voice. If I were going to play this, the music is going to come in so stinking strong and loud that we're not going to be able to hear anything. So again, I have my audio over here lowered a little bit so that I don't blow out my eardrums, but I'm going to go ahead and hit play. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake beginning editors make is that they focus on and wow, can you sure hear the song now? Okay, so what volume level should our audio be? With my music track selected, I'm going to go ahead and look to the up right here to our inspector tab. Now remember, the inspector tab is what controls the video and audio properties. So if I were to click on a video track, go over to the inspector tab, and if yours isn't open, it's this upper right icon over here that says inspector on it on one of our video clips, I can go to the video tab, and we have all of our video properties, right? So we got the zoom, we've got the position, etc., etc. Going to click these little reset icons to reset that. When I click the audio track here, we don't have a video tab because there well there's no video, but we do have this very big and important slide over here called volume. We're not going to worry about any of these other intimidating looking things down here. We're just going to look at the volume. Now, you see here how it says zero. Well, that might not quite make sense because obviously we have sound. Our volume is not at uh zero. Well, what I'd like you to do is this. up in the upper right hand corner over here. Click the mixer icon. Now, I can't remember what the default opener is, but you might have one of two things. It might say mixer or meters. I would like us to just look at the meters. So, if you have the mixer on first open, go to these three dots right next to it and turn it on meters. Now, we have one single bar over here to the right. Now, it might be a bit hard to see, but at the very tip top of this bar, you see how it says zero? Most of the time when we're talking about audio, the way that it is produced is it's normalized on a tippy top max of zero. Anything that goes past zero peaks the audio and it's when you get that like real crunchy squealy noise. And so, what that basically means is that when we're working with audio, zero is the max. If we want to lower audio, we need to subtract and bring the audio down. So, if I were to bring my playhead all the way to the left and play this. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of. You see how we clip this zero mark, which means our music is going past this zero point, which is bad. We do not want that. So, again, how loud do we make our music? Well, let me open up my handy dandy, very official whiteboard. There are going to be three very general volume ranges that we can sit in depending on what we'd like to do. If we want our audio to be the primary driver of the video, meaning music video, a montage, the audio is the thing that is making the video happen. We can go anywhere from I would say minus 3 dB to minus 10 dB. What's decel? Well, a decibel is the unit of measurement here for our audio. So, when we're subtracting volume here, we are doing it in terms of decibb. So, it's not just a random floating number here. These are decibb. If we would like our audio to be complmentary, meaning something that is heard but isn't quite as loud as our primary audio, we're going to go anywhere from minus12 to I will go minus 21 dB. This volume range is definitely still going to be heard by the viewer, but it's not going to be in the way as much as when we're up in this range. If we want background music, so something that is not in the way, but can still fill in some of the dead spaces of our video, we're going to shoot for the minus30 dB range. We can go a little above and below this, but minus30 dB is going to be our happy space. So what I would like you guys to do is with our volume track selected you can either type in the inspector tab minus30 or hit +-z click and hold this property. So again I am left clicking and holding and drag this to the left until you hit minus30. Or what you can do, hit control- Z once, is go over to the music track itself in the timeline. And it's going to be a bit tricky to see, but there's this little floating white line right here. And when your mouse hovers over it, the icon changes to two up and down arrows. And you can drag the volume down directly on the timeline. Now, it's pretty fast when you do so. So, if you'd like to slow down how much it changes, we can hold down the shift key to add a little granularity when we're changing the volume. And now our music is going to sound like this. And I would recommend having headphones on because if you're on speakers, it might be a little difficult to hear the music. So, a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make is that they focus on the spectacle of the edit over the story of the edit. So, see how in moments like this where there's just little pauses between the things that are being said, the music kind of fills that gap. That's what we want. The music isn't the focus here. What I'm saying is the focus, and we want to make sure we're hearing what I'm saying. What I'd suggest doing in your own time is changing the audio level of the music track here and seeing how it affects your the understandability of what I'm saying. I'd also suggest changing where the music starts. Cuz if you remember, this section right in here is where the main beat of the song kicks in. And when I say kicks in, I I all I mean is that it's starting right there, right? where a lot of more of the instruments are coming into play. If I increase the volume level a little bit so I make sure I can hear the song — often is the overuse right it's right in here. — So what I can do is I can make a cut here on the music track exactly where the beat kicks in and then I can shift this point around to see how it affects the video. So if I wanted to I could actually have the beat kick in much closer to the beginning portion. So, I could drag this over to the left, grab the left handle, pull it over, grab the right handle, extend it, and then let's what happens if I were to leave this at minus 18, right? So, somewhere in between this -12 and minus 21 range. Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So you can still hear what's being said, but the music becomes a much bigger presence of the video. So again, experiment, play with these things, see what makes sense to you. Remember, the whole point of this section in particular, this course is to just experiment and figure out how things affect one another. So with that said, what I am going to do is I'm going to bring this down back to minus 30 because I would like this to be backing audio. Again, I'm holding down the shift key to fine-tune. It doesn't have to be exact. Minus 30. 27 is just fine. And now we're ready to move on. And would you look at

that? I've got headphones on. So, we've got music down. Next thing is we're going to try to fine-tune our pacing. And the way that we're going to do that is with one of the most important editing techniques you will learn in this course and in your lifetime. Okay? And I'm talking about J and L cutting. If you're already familiar with this, fantastic. If not, one of the most common questions I get is, "How do I make smooth transitions or smooth cuts? " And there's a lot of different answers to that, but my go-to is teaching people how to do J and L cutting. So, what I'm going to do is show you a quick demonstration of what it is and then how we apply it to our own videos. Cool. Let's do it. This next bit is purely for demonstration. You guys do not have access to this footage. I would just like you guys to watch and follow along as I explain what a J and L cut is. We have two clips here. I have an airplane flying and an airplane landing. As is the transition from this left flying clip to the right landing clip is a standard cut. Sometimes this is called a jump cut. So if I were to hit play, it sounds and looks like this. Now, the transition as isn't awful, but we can apply a J and L cut to strengthen this transition. So, what I would like to do is preview this landing audio before we actually cut to the plane landing. And the way that we do that is as follows. Now, there is more than one way to do a JNL cut, but this is the simplest approach I have found. I'm going to take the left clip and drag it up one track. Oh, but let me get rid of this uh subtitle track real quick. I forgot I had that. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the landing clip and slide it underneath the other clip. Now, what's going to happen when I play this? Well, we are going to see the flying video all the way through to the end of the clip, but we're going to preview the audio before we transition to this scene. And that's going to look something like this. Now, this audio getting cut off abruptly makes this feel a tad bit jarring. So, what I'm going to do is on the music track, when I hover at the edge in the upper corners, and I can do this on any video, you'll see these little white tabs. If I grab that, I can fade out the audio. So, let me go ahead and replay that. As viewers, our mind is being primed for some kind of change that's happening in the next scene. We don't know what it is yet, but we're beginning to hear audio from something that's happening in the future. So now when we make this cut, this transition going from flying to landing, we're already primed in gear to see the plane landing. Again, if I were to go full screen, that's going to look and sound something like this. Isn't that pretty cool? It's much smoother than if we were to just go from A to B with nothing in between. Now, in traditional forms of editing, what this ends up looking like is something like this. I'll grab this video track up here. Pull it down. If we were to look at this cut point, we form a J. So, this is a J cut. A J cut in video editing is when we preview and lead in with audio from the upcoming scene. An L cut is the uh the opposite of this. So, if I were to hold down the Alt key and drag our cut point over here. So now what's going to happen is we're not going to preview the audio of the upcoming scene, but we're going to lead out with the audio from the previous scene. And that looks and sounds something like this. And again, if we were to look at this transition point, we have an L that forms here. When and where do we use JNL cuts? Well, let's go ahead and talk about that. So, we're now back on our main working timeline here with our music and our talking head footage. And what we're going to do is we're going to begin to introduce J and L cutting to help with the pacing of the video here. You don't have to follow along, but you can choose to if you'd like to. What I'm going to do is I'm going to drag and select these first two clips right here. And all I'd like to do is hit Ctrl + C, scrub my playhead ahead to any random point outside of our main working area, and hit Ctrl +V to paste them. So, Crl + C is copy. Crl +V is paste. I'm going to move my playhead over here. Hit D to zoom in. And then use my horizontal scroll wheel to bring these two things in. What I'd like us to do is to begin to string together these different sentences and thoughts so that it feels more cohesive because as is, there's noticeable gaps in between. So, if I were to play this, a lot of beginners make. So, a mistake that a lot of beginning again. Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So, a mistake that a lot of it is okay to have natural pauses and dialogue. However, we do want to keep things moving along. There shouldn't be a moment in the video where there is a hiccup, right? There's like a noticeable uh like a lull in the video. So, what we can do is drag up this left track, drag the right track, and pull it underneath where? Well, let me click my playhead here so I can zoom in. Remember how we were saying that after every sentence or break in words, there's a little tail, right? There's a little tail in the audio. And again, I'm hitting shift and the scroll wheel to expand my uh music tracks. We want to keep this audio tail because otherwise, if we cut it off, the audio will feel it'll feel cut off. So, what I like to do is try to line up the head or the beginning of the next audio phrase so that it sits somewhere on this tail. Where? Well, it's very dependent on the flow of the dialogue, but let's go ahead and play this as is. So, a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make. It's not bad. What if I were to bring it even further? So, a mistake that a lot of be little bit more punchy. It's sounding a little bit more intrusive. What if I were to bring it out a little bit? So, a mistake that a lot of beginning editors Interesting. So, where should you put it? I don't know. It's time for you to start making some decisions on how you want the pacing and the feeling of the video to sound. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring it forward just a little bit. So, if you were looking to imitate me, the head of this audio is sitting somewhere in the tail of this one. It's kind of a kind of middle point. So again, it's going to sound something like this. — About some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of quick pop quiz. What kind of transition is this? Remember, we're leading in with the audio from the next scene before we're seeing it. Give you three seconds. J cut. This is a J cut. A J cut in particular is a very, very powerful tool when working with dialogue. It's how we can maintain the audio synctity of the previous clip while also pushing along what's being said next. From here, I'm going to show you two techniques that we can use to fine-tune this kind of transition, this cut, and then we'll begin applying it to our working timeline. Through this next section

we're going to apply our JNL cutting and end up with a close to final version of our edit. as is. This is where the video portion, the visual portion transitions from this clip to this clip. Well, what if I would like the video to start here, right? So, I'd like it to start on this peak of the audio wave right here. There's two ways that we can go about doing this. The first is to use the alt key to select just the video track. The alt key is a modifier inside Da Vinci Resolve or it would be the option key if you're in Mac. When we're editing, if we only want to select just the audio or just the video of a given video and audio clip, we can use the alt key to select one of those. So, with just the video selected, I can grab that right end and pull it in. Or what you can do is you don't even have to select the video track with just the alt key. You can hold down the alt key and drag just the end of it. because if not, if I were to select both the video and audio, we're going to again we're gaining back in that territory. We're cutting off the audio tail. So, alt key, drag and select the right end. The alternative to this, so I'm going to hit control-z. And I'm not as big of a fan of this workflow, but if it makes sense to you, go ahead. I'm going to hold down the alt key and click just the video track again. Right? So, I'm just want the video track. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag it down so that they're both on the same track. And now what we can do is grab the transition point and pull it over forming that more traditional J. So that looks and sounds like this. Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake beginning editors make is There we go. Now let's go apply this to our timeline to improve the pacing of our video. I'm going to hit S to zoom out. Shift and scroll wheel to make things a little bit more condensed. I'm going to get rid of these two practice clips by dragging selecting them and hitting F or the backspace key to get rid of them. Now, back to the beginning. D to zoom in. I'm going to begin to work with just our A-roll here, our talking head footage. While we're doing that, there might be moments where I go to cut and we accidentally cut our music track, which we don't want to do. I I'd like to leave our music track alone as is. So, what we can do is this. Go ahead and direct your eyes over to the left over here. You might have noticed that each track has a few little icons next to it. Each of these serves a very useful purpose. For example, if I wanted to mute the audio on this first track, what I can do is I can click the M button. And now we only hear the background audio. Let me uncheck that real quick. What if we've got 10 different audio tracks and we only want to hear this third one? Well, the button right next to it is called solo because we will solo that track. Pretty nifty, right? You can also drag and hold down to select multiple tracks at one time. So, if I want to unmute and mute all three tracks, I can drag and select up and down. The icon next to that is the sync lock, which we're not going to address quite yet. But the final one is this lock icon. And when we click that, it locks this track from any changes and adjustments. So, if I were to hit A, I cannot cut the music track and I can't move it either. So, if we were to begin ripple deleting here, this track is locked in place for all adjustments. So, with the music track lock, let's go back to the beginning of our footage here and let's begin to do some J cutting. Here's my workflow. Anytime I'm transitioning from this clip to this clip, I will either drag the clip up so that I can begin to adjust the timings of the following clip or I will go to the end and make an arbitrary cut on the tail portion. Could be here, could be here. Doesn't matter. I just need a chunk that I can bring up one level so that way I can grab this clip and slide it underneath. Here we mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So, a mistake that a lot of beginning editors Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So, a mistake that a lot of beginning edit ah problem we didn't move everything else over. Well, couple solutions. For one, we could drag and select all the footage over here and pull it over. For two, uh we could go to this little gap in here, hit F to ripple delete. Or what we can begin doing is using a new keyboard shortcut. And for us, if you've downloaded my shortcuts, that button is E. E selects everything to the right of the playhead. So if I were to select E, I can pull everything over to the left. If you are using the default keyboard, that button is going to be alt + Y or option plus Y. So now what we're going to do is we're going to continue to clean up the timeline and improve the pacing. I'm looking to string sentences together. So what I do is something like this. Click towards the end. Hit play of the edit over the story of the edit. One more time. Okay. Zoom in. I can probably get rid of this portion right here. Make a cut. F. So that I'm still seeing the tail. And again, it might be hard to see on your guys' end, but I can see a little tail here. Make a cut on the tail portion. Pull it up. Go to the right. And now I'm going to press E to select everything so that when I pull this next clip underneath, I'm grabbing everything. And it's just somewhere arbitrary the edit over the story of the edit when we're talking about what perfect that sounds pretty good to me in my mind I'm just trying to line up head to tail somewhere in there again go over here not what kind of effects you can include something else a lot of beginning hold this up E slide this underneath do you have to do this for every single cut no of course not if I were to hit control- Z a couple times I could just snip off this little bit here so that We're starting right at the beginning of the dialogue. So I could hit a F. So I'm really close to being right at the beginning. What kind of effects you can include something else a lot of beginning and I think that works perfectly fine as well. Again, no right answer here. The thing that we're trying to do is just make better choices. Let's go ahead and hit play. — Editors do often is the overuse of pre-builtin transitions. Until you're more comfortable with how you should edit a video, I'd avoid using some of those presets. Perfect. A cut. Another thing you could think about doing is in between these pauses here if you want to make things a little bit tighter. See how there's a little bit of a delay in transitions until you're more comfortable. You could even think about making a J cut here, but I'm going to leave it alone as is using some of those presets. And one of the last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. The audio. Do we need a J cut in between here and here? I don't know. And one of the last things I think as is it feels a little bit it's pretty natural talk about focusing on the audio of the video. The audio of the here I do want to make a little J cut. Why? Because I just feel like I kind of want this to punch in sooner. A cut the tail off. Drag up E to select everything to the right. Pull it in about is focusing on the audio of the video. The audio of the video accounts for 50% of the final edit. So, you should spend just as much time working with your audio as you do working with the video. Hope this helps. And make a little cut here. F. I think one of the big reasons why I like J cutting like this is because there's an element of forgiveness to the edit. If you don't want to do this and if you want to make sure that the uh the beginning of this clip starts right at the beginning of the dial dialogue every time, well, you got to be pretty precise there. you need to bring your playhead right to that point right before the dialogue begins. Well, if I do JNL cutting, well, what I can do is I can just grab the tail here and then just pull this in somewhere relatively close so that it feels somewhat smooth. But you notice how I'm not grabbing the ends here or grabbing the ends here. I'm just moving things to where it feels okay video. Hope this helps and excited to talk more about editing. Perfect. I think we can actually cut it right there. And there's one last step. Our music carries on without any of the video. So, we need to trim the end of our music here. I'm going to go all the way over to the track three, unlock it, and then pull in the end of our music. And now we're sitting at 44 seconds. And this is what our video looks and sounds like. So, a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make is that they focus on the spectacle of the edit over the story of the edit. When we're talking about what really matters the most at the end of the day, it's the message being told in the video, not what kind of effects you can include. Something else a lot of beginning editors do often is the overuse of pre-builtin transitions. you should edit a video, I'd avoid using some of those presets. Very nice crew. We're getting close to wrapping up this

project. All right, so we've got a pretty decent cut of our video now. We've got music. Our video is paced decently well. Our next step is going to be to add in some visuals, some of the B-roll, because for the entire video, we are looking at one camera angle and one perspective. It is just me looking right at you in the camera. So, let's add in some visual to add a little variety to uh help kind of smooth things along on the spectacle of the edit over the story of the edit. when we're talking about what really matters the most at the end of the day, it's the message being told in the video, not what kind of effects you can include. So, I think right in here when I'm talking about not focusing on the spectacle and instead focusing on the message of the story, we can introduce some B-roll probably right here on this cut. So, again, that's right in here. Editors make is that they focus on the spectacle of the edit over the story of the edit when we're talking about what Yeah, I think right in here we can introduce some B-roll. So, up in our media pool, I'm going to locate the B-roll folder, which is under our video folder. I'm going to click here, and I've given us five videos that we can use. Wow. So, how do we know what to use and uh where to put it? Well, again, there's a few ways that we can go about doing this. We can always just individually preview our video by double clicking on it. And then we can kind of sort through and familiarize ourselves with what's being going on. So, it looks like we got some snow footage here. And I think my intent with this was to show you guys that in our main working section, I'm talking about how it's more important to show the story over spectacle. And so what I'd like to do is make a little mini story of the skiers in here and the mountains and this imagery as opposed to this first video up top here where I've just got some random moving snowboards. Now, here's a cool little trick and workflow technique that I'd like you guys to get the hang of. So, as is, I am much more familiar with the footage than you guys because I picked it out. So, if you're somebody who's been given a bunch of footage, it's going to be pretty slow to individually click through everything to preview what the heck is going on in here. So, as always, there's a few techniques to do this, but one of the most straightforward ways is to do this. drag and select all of your footage in the media pool. Or you can hit Ctrl+ A to select everything in your uh B-roll folder or your B-roll bin, excuse me. Right click and the very top option for me says create new timeline using selected clips. Now, before I click that, remember what is a timeline? Well, we've been working on our main timeline. We've got one timeline right now. Well, in good old Da Vinci Resolve, we can create multiple timelines to be working with multiple things all at once. So, if I again, if I drag and select this footage, rightclick, create new timeline using selected clips, we can create a new timeline. And remember how we set up our project settings over here? Well, now again, everything's all set up. So, we don't need to go uncheck this and double check to make sure format and all that is all set up. We just use our project settings. And I'm going to rename this new timeline. We'll just keep it simple for now. B roll or BC roll. Hit create. Now earlier on I turned on this tabbed option over here so that I can see both my main timeline and my B-roll timeline. If you don't have that or you would like to now toggle this on, remember it's this little icon up over top here. Click that and you want display stacked timelines. That'll let you toggle between our main timeline and our B-roll timeline. And now if I hit S to zoom out, we can see all of our footage at a glance. Very cool. Very cool. So, I'm going to tidy up our media pool really quick. Uh because we have a timelines folder. Remember, this is where our main timeline is at. So, in the B-roll folder, it generates our timeline, which is indicated by this little, it's pretty small, but it's this little uh timeline icon in the bottom left corner. I'm going to take that and drag and put it in our timelines bin. So, now when I click the timelines folder, I can see both of our working timelines here. So, I'm going to toggle over to the main timeline, hit play because I'm trying to remember where we wanted to insert some footage. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So, a mistake beginning editors make is that they focus on the spectacle of the edit over the story of the edit. When we're right here, I think I want to introduce some other video right here. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring my playhead here. Click anywhere in the empty space. Make sure footage is not selected. And I'm going to hit the M key. And what that does is it adds a marker on our timeline here so that we can remember where to put our footage. So that way you don't have to have perfect memorization skills. If you don't want to use M, there's always the marker icon up above here in our little editing toolbar. So let's find something that seems like it might fit. We're looking for something that doesn't have spectacle. might have a story behind it, maybe some character. Where my head goes are to these two skier clips right in here. So I think what I'd like to do is take this clip and bring it over into our main timeline. And now, can you guess what I'm about to say? There's a few ways that we can do this. What I will say, and the wrong way to do this is this. Clicking on this clip, hitting Ctrl + C to copy it, going back to the main timeline, and then pasting it on the marker. That is going to overwrite everything that we've already laid out because we're pasting it here on the first track. So, how do we not do that? Well, let me hit Z. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how I would do this and then introduce different methods that might fit your own workflow. For me, uh, what I would probably do is this. I would drag it up one track and one more track. So that way it's already on the third track. I would hit Ctrl + C to copy it, go over to the main timeline, hit Ctrl +V to paste, and it's going to paste it here on our third track. So now we have our footage separated, ready to go. Alternatively, what I might do, so I'm going to hit backspace here to delete that, is I would look to bring it in from our media pool. Now, depending on the amount of footage you have, it might be easy to find this footage or it might be difficult. If you're struggling to find this clip, well, what you can do is on your B-roll timeline, click the footage that you'd like to locate. Make sure your playhead is over that footage. And then, if you're using my keyboard shortcuts, we would hit alt F. You'll see it highlights it here in our media pool. And now what I can do if I go back to my main timeline here now that I know where my footage is at, I would drag it on down into the timeline. So those two methods are commonly what I do. Let me show you a couple other options that might make a little bit more sense to you. Let me hit backspace here. So again, what I did is I brought this up to the track that I'd like it to be on. Hit Ctrl + C and then Ctrl +V to paste it here. Or I would locate it in my media pool and then drag and insert it down. Now, if you don't want to bring it up to a third track every time you want to copy and paste something from one timeline to another, what you can do is this, and this is kind of a fun one. In the upper right hand corner of our timeline uh working area, there's this little plus icon right here. See it? It's got a little plus with the window pane. If I click that, whoa. It splits our timeline viewer into two timeline viewers. Now, this might be a little advanced, but what we can do is close our B-roll timeline there and open it down here. And if I use shift and the scroll wheel to shrink things and reposition my timelines so that I can see both, well, now I have two working timelines at the same time. This is a very powerful technique. You will probably need to have an okay computer in order to do this. But now what I can do is instead of tabing between the two, I can just click this one clip, hit Ctrl + C, click up to this timeline, and again hit Ctrl +V. But again, remember that I brought this up to track three so that it pasted over on track three. I'm going to control Z to undo that. And you can actually split your timeline workspace into as many times as you want. I would I'd probably caution doing over more than two. And if you would like to close a certain window, again over in the right over here, there's an X icon now so that I can close that. If I'd like to reopen that B-roll timeline, well, I just need to go to my timelines folder and open up the B-roll timeline. And there we go. Shift and the scroll wheel to expand these back out so that it's a little bit more visible. And let me go back to the main timeline here. Now, the last option, and this is more of a professional technique, but I'd like to show you just so that you're aware of it. go to my B-roll folder here, find that BCAR 2 footage that I like to use. And there's a set of icons over here in our editing toolbar that are designed to insert footage from our media pool. So, we've got this first one here that says insert clip, overwrite, and replace clip. We're going to avoid using the replace clip for now, but if I were to look at these first two, insert and overwrite. If I were to click this footage here and then click the insert option, you can see that it inserts it where my playhead was at. So again, Ctrl +-Z to undo, control shift Z to redo, see how it inserts and shifts everything around. If I were to click this other button here, overwrite clip, well, instead of inserting it and shifting everything around, it completely squashes everything underneath it. So, how do we make this button work so that it goes over here on track three? Well, let me hit control-z. Done. Do that. Over here on our video tracks, we've got a few icons just like the audio tracks when we covered there. All the way over to the left, there's this little blue V1 icon. Now, depending on what version of Da Vinci Resolve you're on, this might look a little bit different. If you're on an older version, it might be a red rectangled outlined V1, but wherever this lives is where my footage gets inserted when I click that icon. So, if I bring it up to video track three and hit the overwrite button, now our video gets inserted on track three. If you choose to do this, you just need to be conscious of where this button lives. But now we have our B-roll, and we can begin to add the rest of our footage to fill out this talking head portion. Let's continue to carry on

with adding in the rest of our B-roll. And we're also going to finally take a look at that effects tab and some video transitions. So, let's go ahead and hit play. When we're talking about what really matters the most at the end of the day, it's the message being told in the video, not what kind of effects you, you can do. [clears throat] So, I'd like to insert our snowboard scene right here, right on the peak of my audio. A to cut this B-roll footage. Backspace to delete. I'm going to go up top to our media pool here because I know what footage I'm looking for. There's no need for me to tab over the timeline. I'mma drag and select and drop in that footage. Perfect. Let's carry on. When we're talking about what really matters the message being told in the video, not what kind of effects you can include. Something else a lot of beginning editors do often is the overuse of pre-builtin transitions until you're more comfortable. Okay, so something else beginner editors do is use pre-builtin transitions. I think we're going to need to introduce some more footage in here. But where where do we insert it? Well, what feels right? Where is there a natural lull to where we can insert a change in scenery effects you can include? Something else a lot of beginning editors do often is the over I think it's right in there. Something a lot of beginner editors do often something else a lot of beginning editors do often is right in there. This is when I like to have audio scrubbing turned on. Remember that's in the timeline settings. audio audio scrubbing because then I can kind of fine-tune editors do right where I begin to start the next sentence. So, I'm going to hit A to make a cut on our motion graphics video here. So, that way I have a natural cut point to insert new footage. Or another option again is I could just click somewhere in the timeline and hit M to add a marker. So, I think what I'd like to do here is use similar footage to highlight the use of transitions. So, if I go back to my B-roll timeline here, I've got two wide-angle shots of mountains and trees and mountains and trees. So, I'm go back to my main timeline here. I'm going to go over and just find one of these clips. I don't think it really matters which one and begin to drag and drop it in on that cut point. Go ahead and hit play. editors do often is the overuse of pre-builtin transitions until you're more comfortable with how you should edit a video. I'd avoid using some of those presets. And one of the last things I want I'd avoid using some of those presets. Avoid using some of those pres Now, what do I mean by presets? What are preset transitions? Well, let me show you. Let me go ahead and hit A to cut here. And let's drag in that second clip. Depending on which one you use, use the other version. So, I'm going to go ahead and drag and drop this in. And hm, we got a little bit of a problem here. It looks like this video file has video and audio. So, when I drag and insert it, the audio is kind of cutting off and overwriting the video. Well, I don't want that. So, how do we address this? Well, let me hit Ctrl +-Z to undo all that. If I want to bring in just the video for my media pool, well, I can doubleclick here on the media pool to preview it. And then there's two icons. There's a video and an audio icon. Well, I can just grab the video icon to bring in just the video. Alternatively, and this is the method I prefer to do, let me hit control-z. I can just hold down the alt key to bring in just the video portion. If you would like just the audio portion, so let me hit control-z. You can hold down the shift key to bring in just the audio. So alt is video, shift is audio. So, if I want to bring in just the video, I'm going to hold down the alt key and drag and insert our footage right there. So, now we go from here, how you should edit a video, I'd avoid using some of those presets. And one of the last things I to there, right on presets. So, what is a preset transition? Well, you'll notice to this point that we have not used any of them. The only technique that we've been using to cut up our video is that we've been cutting the video. And that has been a very intentional decision on my part. You see, when a lot of people first begin to learn how to edit, there's a reliance on extras. And that can be effects and transitions that do flashy things. And there is a time and a place to use some of these effects and transitions cuz I mean they are in Da Vinci Resolve for a reason. But if you don't understand why to use them some of them, then what ends up happening is your video tends to look pretty cheesy or pretty amateur. So, let me show you what I mean. If I were to go and bring my mouse all the way to the upper left here, for the most part, we've been sticking right with the media pool, but there is a nice little tab to the right of it called effects. If I were to click on the effects tab, voila, we have our effects. Now, we will cover more of these effects as we go on, but you can see that we have video transitions. We've got titles for text that we can add in. We've got generators for different kinds of colors that we can add in along with some of Resolve's built-in effects like uh some blurs. Well, there's a tab all the way at the top here called video transitions. And the video transitions tab is a very, very dangerous place to go when you're first starting out. And it's for the reasons previously stated. If I were to scroll down here, we've got a bunch. We've got some dissolves. We've got some shape transitions. And if I hover my mouse over it, we can begin to preview what they do. Splits, slides, boxes. You can kind of go ahead and experiment with all of them. If I wanted to add one into our video, what I would do is I would go to that transition. So, I'll just do the arrow iris transition. Drag and select it. And what you're going to look to do is apply it to the cut point of the video. So right here and now when I hit play it will apply that transition to avoid using some of those presets and one of the last things. So there you go. Now like I said does having a random arrow mask dissolve transition presets and one of the does that make sense? It's the point I'm emphasizing in the actual talking head here. And what I'd like you guys to remember is that I would only use this kind of transition when there's some motivation behind it. And if you cannot answer what is motivating the use of it, then don't use it. Again, I tend to find that it hurts the video more than it helps it. Now, something that you might have noticed is that I can't adjust the transition to be on the left side of the video. Well, that is because whenever we add transitions into videos, it has to use frames from the previous clip. Oh, let me go ahead and turn off my audio scrubbing. It has to use frames from the previous video and the next video. So, if it's only on the right, that means that it has frames from this video to transition from. But because I inserted the video at the very beginning, right? So, this is the very beginning of this video file. Well, what frame should it use to transition over here? It can't. We don't have negative frames. This is the beginning. So, if we would like to transition in the middle or even have this on the left, well, we need to give it some frames to use. And what I mean by that is this. I'm going to click on the transition itself and hit the backspace key to get rid of it. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut ahead and pull it over. So that way it's not starting on the first frame. So watch this. If I cut here and drag it over to the left, if you look at where my mouse is at, I have cut off a second and 20 frames. Go ahead and release. So now if I were to go and add in another one of these transitions. So let's use something a little bit more abstract. Let's use the block glitch. Now I can insert it on the middle. And in fact, if I grab this handle, I can pull it out exactly 1 second and 20 frames. But just know that in order to use one of these pre-builtin transitions, you need to have frames before and after the previous and following clip because otherwise it's got nothing to pull from to use the transition. All right, so let's go ahead and continue to play with how you should edit a video. I did avoid using some of those presets. And one of the last again, doesn't that I just I can't say it enough. Whenever I see something like this, like a random glitch transition, it just it doesn't make sense to me. How you should edit a video, I'd avoid using some of those presets. And one of the last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. The a perfect. So now we are about to begin talking about a different subject matter. So, I don't think it makes sense to continue on with the lessons that we were showing before with the snow. So, actually, let me first get rid of this uh extra B-roll over here. Hit backspace to get rid of it. And so, I'm going to bring in the edge of our B-roll so that it ends right when this new section begins. So, now we go like this. Avoid using some of those presets. The audio of the video accounts for 50%. Perfect. And now we have successfully introduced B-roll into our video. Is this the best use of B-roll? I don't know. Maybe there's a section here where we begin to talk about using audio more, right? So, is there some form of B-roll that we could use here? Maybe. Maybe there's something online or maybe you can make something that fits here. Again, these are decisions as editors we need to start thinking about as we're forming our videos. And we've got one

let's get familiar with Da Vinci Resolve. All right, everybody. It is officially go time. Let's go ahead and kick off the Da Vinci Resolve essentials course. Now, before we get started, there are a couple things we need to make sure everybody has ready to go. On the course website, there will be exercise files, which is what we will use throughout the course for example footage and media for you to practice with. Go ahead and click download those files and unzip them. Depending on your operating system, it should look something like this. I'm going to have a couple extra folders in mind, but you should have a folder for each of the sections that we're going to use to talk about Da Vinci Resolve. Make sure you move this out of your downloads folder into an appropriate place on your computer so that we can access them as we move through the course. The other really big thing you're going to want to make sure you have ready to go is Da Vinci Resolve. So, if you haven't already, go ahead and download Da Vinci Resolve. And the only place you should download Da Vinci Resolve from is from Blackmagic Design's website. Blackmagic Design is the company behind Da Vinci Resolve. So, do not trust any other distributors. Make sure you download from the official source. Now, there are two versions of Da Vinci Resolve. There's a free version and a paid version called studio. Moving forward, if I ever mention the word studio, I'm referring to the paid version of Da Vinci Resolve. You are perfectly okay to use the free version throughout the entirety of this course. The free version of Da Vinci Resolve is incredibly powerful and there's only a few, we'll call them smarter features inside Dinci Res Studio that'll be lacking in the free version. But this course is tailored to the free version of Da Vinci. If there is an opportunity to use something that's in the paid version, I'll make sure to call it out. But again, one of the best parts of Da Vinci Resolve and probably the reason why a lot of you guys are here is because there is a free version and the free version is incredibly powerful. So with that said, I will be editing on Da Vinci Resolve 20. You might be operating on an older version Da Vinci or version 21 and beyond might be out. The only difference that you'll find moving between Vinces Resolve version 20 or version 19, 18 or again if version 21 is out at the point that you're watching this, some of the interface elements might be a little bit different. So a menu might have a few more buttons to it or it might be in a slightly different location, but for the essentials course, everything that we're going to do is going to remain relatively the same. So do not be alarmed if you're not on the exact version that I'm using or if you're on a newer version or an older version. The only thing I'll say is that if you are on an older version, be aware that there might be a few new options that you don't quite have yet. And again, I'm on the Blackmagic Design official website. The only other thing that I'd like to call out here is that Blackmagic Design actually has a support page. So, if I go up to the support website, it is here that we can download and access any version of Da Vinci Resolve that is officially released. So, on their website, if you are on the homepage, just go up top to support. And then what you would want to do is go over and click Da Vinci Resolve and Fusion software. And now if I scroll down a little bit, you'll see all of the most recent downloads available for Da Vinci Resolve. So if you ever update your software and it introduces new bugs that you don't like, you can always come to the sport website and download an older version. Be aware that there is always two versions of the software. There's the Da Vinci Resolve normal version and then there's the studio version. You will not be able to use the studio version if you do not have a studio license. Once you download install it along with the course exercise files, you will be ripping and raring ready to go. The final comment I'll make on using Da Vinci Resolve when it comes to performance is Da Vinci Resolve is a pretty RAM intensive software. Meaning that if you're on a slightly older PC or you're using a laptop or there is an iPad version of Da Vinci Resolve, you may struggle with playback from time to time. I believe they normally recommend at least 32 gigs of RAM, which is what I'm using. But if you have 64 and higher, you're going to be much better off. With that said, later on the course, we will discuss some techniques for improving and smoothing out playback. Now, I've got one final message for you guys, and then we will officially begin our journeys editing in Da Vinci Resolve. What is the point here? What are we trying to achieve inside this Da Vinci Resolve Essentials course? Well, before I answer that, the better question is why? Why trust me? What makes me qualified to talk to you guys about Dav Vinci Resolve? Well, I was like you. Uh, I had no video editing experience about 5 to 6 years ago and it was required of me to learn. I was put in a position where I needed to help some people create some videos. And so, it was my task to go, okay, what do I need to know? How do I make effective videos that help tell stories? And like you, I probably searched around for what editing software is best. And then, you know, you land on Da Vinci Resolve because it's free. You download and you try it and then there you are. Da Vinci Resolve in front of your face. Now what? And over the span of the last 5 6 years, the thing that I think I've done really well is I've figured out what's important. What do we actually need to know? I would wager that the majority of us aren't going to end up in a Hollywood film studio. Some of us might. Some of you might end up working on a bigger team, but a lot of us are hobbyists or creators or just want to start some kind of an editing journey. So, what do we need to understand? If you're just looking for what buttons to click, I Google. Google's going to be your best friend. You can Google how to do said thing and it'll tell you click this button. That's not what I'm here for. I'm here to help you understand why we do certain things. Why does this work well? Why should we implement a certain tool in a specific scenario? You see, to understand Da Vinci Resolve, we need to understand video editing as an art form and a craft. Because otherwise, what you'll end up doing is making decisions without motivation. And you'll hear that term thrown out a lot if you've watched other tutorials or even listen to myself talk about video editing. What's motivating the decisions that we're making? Why are we using certain tools? Why are we making a cut in a certain location? Or why did we choose to remove or add certain pieces of footage? When we begin to understand those things, we can influence and inform the choices we're making inside the timeline. So, my goal here is to provide you with the technical information needed to operate comfortably and confidently inside Resolve, but also provide the wise. Why are we making the choices and the decisions that we're making? And if I've done my job well, you'll understand how to learn inside Da Vinci Resolve and not just what buttons do I need to click. One final thing I'd like to add, and if you kind of drone down my ramble there for a moment, maybe tune back in. Video editing is equal parts video and audio editing. So, what you'll end up finding throughout this course is that we spend a good amount of time talking about how to make cuts and how to make our video look and move better, but we also spend a lot of time talking about audio. Audio is it's the visceral portion of the video. It's what you feel. It's what really invokes a lot of emotion in the edit. So, if you have it, I would really recommend watching, listening, and editing with headphones on. It'll give you a much better appreciation for some of the choices that we're making on the timeline. But if not, it's totally okay. It's just something I would recommend moving forward. Now, we're going to spend so much time inside Da Vinci Resolve together, but there's one final thing I do need to cover before we actually open up the program. A lot of us here are going to be coming from different backgrounds. Some of us might be hobbyists. actually be cinematographers that now need to learn how to edit their own footage. And if you're like me, you just work with a lot of screen recordings. So, what that means is that there's going to be different bases of starting points for everybody. To make sure we're all on even grounds going into Da Vinci Resolve, I've got one thing I really need to talk about very briefly. There's going to be two vocab terms I throw out through the entire of this course that I need to make sure we all understand. One of them is frame rate or normally how it's abbreviated in softwares is FPS or frames per second. So, frame rate or FPS, frames per second. What does this mean? Some of you are already going to be familiar with this concept, especially if you're like me and you come from the gaming world. But for those of you who are not, have you ever taken a step back and thought about how cameras actually record footage? Well, it's not black magic, pun intended. In order for moving media to be generated or a video file to be generated, a video camera will record individual frames or stills or images quickly. So if we had a given second worth of time, so this was 0 seconds and 1 second. If I were to take a single still or a single frame or a single image, there is no motion because we have one frame. And in fact, that is a picture, right? If you were to take a picture with your phone, you have one frame. You've got one image. Well, a video camera will attempt to grab individual frames at a consistent pace over the span of a second depending on the number of frames, which would be these guys here that the camera records in a given second. That would be your FPS or your frame rate. So, just to reiterate, the frame rate or the FPS is the number of frames per second. Does that make sense? When we talk about video files, what we're really doing actually is talking about a lot of images stacked on top of each other moving very quickly. If the concept is still eluding you, it'll definitely begin to make more sense as we hop onto the timeline. But a good visual representation of this would be a flip book. So, you might have seen some comic flip books where they flip through the pages and the pictures move. The reason why this is important is because we're going to work with different frame rates. Some of the more common ones would be 24 fps, 30 fps, and if you're in the gaming world, 60 fps. The number 24 has specific significance because it is the lowest FPS to where the human eye can no longer pick out individual frames. So, at 24 fps, we see a smooth video. When we go below this, the video will appear a little bit laggy or it'll almost look like stop motion. 30 fps is also a common frame rate and any multiple of 60. So 30 is half of 60 is nice because it divides evenly with the time scale. The natural time scale, you know, 60 seconds in a minute, etc. 60 fps is a lot less common when working with actual camera footage unless you were recording for slow motion. We'll talk about retiming and slow motion later in the video, but often times when you see OBS recordings or screen recordings, they'll be recorded at 60 fps. That's how you get that really smooth playback. You'll also notice when something is recorded at a high frame rate and played back cuz it almost looks uncanny. It feels like too smooth. So, we're going to typically operate between 24 and 30. The other term that you're going to hear me thrown out is resolution. And I think most people understand what resolution is. But just to clarify real quick, the resolution of your image is the height and the width of that image. One of the most common resolutions is 1920x 1080. And these numbers represent pixels. So 1,920 pixels by 1,080 pixels. This gives us a 16x9 aspect ratio. Another common aspect ratio that you'll see on older footage would be something like 4x3, but that is not what we're going to use in this course. We're going to operating on a 16x9 aspect ratio. What I really want to call out here is that sometimes I'll throw out the term 1080p. The P standing for pixels. Just like 24 fps, 1920 x 1080 holds special significance because it's considered, you could think of it as like the base resolution for most things. There are a lot more technical terms when it comes to video files and video editing, but it's not going to matter if we don't know how to use it and work with it inside Da Vinci Resolve. So, let's go ahead and get started. And it is officially about that time. We are going to open Da Vinci Resolve and begin editing. But real quick, this section in particular, I think is very important because for one, we are going to open up Da Vinci Resolve. I'm going to walk you through how to start a project and learn the basics of editing. But the bigger thing that I'd like you to take away here are the wise of what we're doing. Down the road, it's going to be so much more important to understand the decisions you're making and what's motivating them rather than the technique itself. So, the question that I would really like you to continue to ask yourself, not only in this section, but throughout the course, is why? Why are we making the decisions that we're making? And how does it affect the message or the story that we're trying to convey? With that said, let's go ahead and open up Da Vinci Resolve. And this is what we're going to be working on throughout this section. It's called a talking head video because there is one person who is talking straight to the camera. We're going to incorporate a sound effect, a simple background music track, some B-roll transitions, and there's some weird stuff going on here with the fact that we've got two layers of videos overlapping each other. And that's something that we're going to address as we go along in this video. All righty. So the f the first step to start us on our journey is to uh well we got to open up the program. So on Windows I'm going to type my window key, start typing in Da Vinci Resolve and open up the software. So this is the very first window we are going to be greeted by when we open up Da Vinci Resolve. This is the project manager and this is where we create and group our projects together. Now I'm not going to spend too much time here. You can think of this as kind of the homepage for Da Vinci Resolve. The one thing I do want you to double check is to make sure that you're on your local database. Databases are a conversation for a different day, but we don't want to be on the network and in the cloud. However, just for your awareness, if you do want to collaborate with people online in a Da Vinci Resolve project, the cloud system is an option. So, just be aware of that. Now, within the project manager, there's really only two things we can do. If we rightclick, we can either create a new project or a new folder. What I would like you guys to do is to create a new folder. This way we can group all of our projects together into one nice pretty area. I'm going to name my folder the essentials course and hit create. Now let's go ahead and open up our essentials course folder. And from here we can either now rightclick and hit new project or go down in the bottom right corner over here and hit new project. And this presents the very first decisions that we're going to have to make. We can do this first is what we're going to name this. So, what I would like you to name this project is two dashtalking head because that is the type of video that we are going to be working on. And before you hit create, there is this second little option down here that says media location. This will be where Dav Vinci Resolve attempts to save any temporary files or things that you cache or render in place. Those terms will be things that we continue to explain as we move along. But what I would suggest is setting this location to be wherever you have your course material. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit change location, and I'm going to navigate where I have the course material saved. Now, at the time of recording, this is what my folder structure looks like. Yours might look slightly different than mine, but you're going to want to locate the two-talking head folder. And then once you're inside the talking head folder, hit select. If you choose the wrong folder location, is it going to mess up your experience? No. It's just one of those things that's good practice to do for future projects where you're working with different folders and different types of footage. With all that said though, go ahead and hit create. And here we go. We are now inside Da Vinci Resolve. Now, real quick, Da Vinci Resolve is what's called an NLE or a nonlinear editing software. You don't really need to worry about what an NLE is, but the one thing that makes Da Vinci Resolve very special is that it includes everything. If you're somebody who's a little bit more familiar with Adobe, they like to split each of their tools into their own program. Da Vinci Resolve puts it all into one spot, which is what makes it so powerful. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to cover what each of these pages does and how we're going to cover them. Now, there's no need to follow along through this section. I'm going to try to be brief so we can get to actually importing our footage and editing, but I do think that this is important. Over here on the left, we have our media page. This page is dedicated to importing and sorting through footage. This will be something that we do touch on, and I'll show you why it's powerful and how we use it. Next up, we have the cut page. Now, something that I do think is a little bit confusing for beginners inside the program is the difference between the cut and the edit page. I'm just going to eliminate that question right now. We are not going to use the cut page. I repeat, we're not going to touch this page. We're not even going to look at it. You can just icky. I don't even want you thinking about the cut page. Now, obviously, the cut page is in the program for a reason. And what I'll say is that it's mostly used for quick editing. You can think of it as Da Vinci Resolve's light editor. It's used for processing a lot of footage. And it down the road, if you do feel like it's worth it for you to learn the cut page, go crazy. There's nothing wrong with doing it. I just don't think it's going to serve us a great purpose for the bulk of our editing experience. I'm going to skip the edit page for now because that is where we're ultimately going to end up landing on. Next up is Fusion. And Fusion is Da Vinci Resolve's version of After Effects. It's what we use for compositing, motion graphics, doing visual work. It's one of my favorite pages inside Da Vinci Resolve. And we are going to have a whole section that covers how to use Fusion. So don't be alarmed. We are going to talk about Fusion. After that, we have the color page. And quite simply put, the color page is something truly spectacular. If you didn't know, Da Vinci Resolve was actually just a [clears throat] coloring software first. It wasn't until a few years later down the road that they began to incorporate other editing tools. So, what that means for you is that the color page is the oldest. It's the most developed. It has the most tools and features and it is unparalleled when it comes to color correction and color grading. This we will also have a dedicated section on and go over some of the basics for you to use in your own videos. But again, this page is truly incredible. Next up, we have the Fairlight page. And this we will not have a dedicated section on, but this is Da Vinci Resolve's audiomixer, meaning that this would be where you would go to EQ or equalize your different music tracks or voice overs or sound effects or change the volume levels, add audio effects, etc. The Fairite tends to be a little bit more advanced for somebody who's a bit newer to editing inside Da Vinci and we'll be able to get by just fine on the edit page. Last up is the deliver page and all roads lead to here. This will be where we end up saving our final video or rendering our final video is the proper term. But that takes us to the edit page and this is going to be our home base for the bulk of the course. Now again, if you are newer to using editing tools, this kind of this can feel super overwhelming. So just real quick, let me talk through what the different areas are of the edit page and then we'll go ahead and bring in our footage and start to work with it. The one thing that I would like to say and what you'll begin to find out the more we begin to use Da Vinci Resolve is that Da Vinci Resolve gives you the ability to do everything, which means that it has buttons for everything that you could want to do. But we're probably only going to end up caring about 5% of those things. So, the trick to learning the edit page is just learning what buttons do I need to click and where do I need to look. Down here in the bottom is our timeline and this is going to be where we bring in footage and audio and we actually do the book for editing. You could think of this as like the edit page workspace. We've got two windows up here. We've got one on the left. This is our preview window where we can preview footage in our media pool. And on the right is our primary viewer and this will be where we view our edit. And up top we've got two rows. Uh this top row that I'm kind of hovering back and forth to gives you the different sub menus inside Dinci Resolve. But again, like I said, we're probably not going to use any of these. We're definitely going to use the inspector tab, which is where we can change our video properties, and we might use the quick export for quick saving things, but we're not going to worry about the metadata, and we're definitely not going to use our mixer right away. And the same thing with over here on the left. We're not going to work with key frames, our sound library, index, effects, etc. The one that we are going to use is our media pool. And the media pool is where all our assets are going to live. So, all our video and audio and still images are going to live right in here. And now it is almost your turn to follow along. What we're going to do is we're going to bring in our footage. And then we're going to create our first timeline. So, what I would like you to do is locate your course material, go into section two, the talking head section, and locate class project one. And there should be two folders inside of here. And what we're going to do is we're going to drag and drop these folders into Da Vinci. But before you do that, listen to this real quick. Drag and select your two folders. And we're not going to drop it into the big pool here itself. I want you to drop it into this little side column. Go ahead and hit release. And there's a very important message that pops up here. Anytime you add footage for the first time into Da Vinci Resolve, it's going to ask, do you want to change the project frame rate? And I'm going to address that in just a little bit. But what I would like you to do is hit don't change. It is okay if you happen to hit change on accident, but hit don't change. I'll show you how to address that problem later. So, hit don't change. And there we go. All of our footage is now sorted inside Da Vinci Resolve in our master folder in our media pool. The reason why I have you drag it over to the left column is because what will happen is don't follow along here. If you take your folders and just drop it into the main uh pool itself, it's just going to dump everything here. So, nothing is sorted. you just have all of your files in here. This could be something that you want to do later down the road, but for right now, we do not want to do that. And if you accidentally did that, hit control-z. Z is the universal undo or command- Z if you're on uh Mac. Now, if you're in a weird folder, you need help navigating, you can go over to the left column over here and click around to jump to the different folders. If for some reasons yours isn't showing, make sure this little icon in the top left isn't collapsed. And you can always double click on the row up top here to jump up a folder or two. But I can go to my video folder, go to the A-roll folder, and now if I hover my mouse, uh, we can see some footage. And now you are primed to begin working on your first editing project. All righty. So, this section is going to be very short and sweet, but please do not skip it. There's just a couple things we need to make sure are set up appropriately in your project so that weird stuff doesn't happen down the road. Inside Da Vinci Resolve, in the very bottom right hand corner, there's two icons. This home icon actually takes you back to your project manager. So, you can double check to make sure you're in the right project, but that's not what we're here to talk about. In the very bottom right hand corner, there is this cog wheel. This is your project settings. Go ahead and click that. And this is going to bring up a ginormous menu of options and tools that you can end up tweaking and changing for your project. And the key word there being project settings. So these are not global settings. These are only settings that apply to this specific project that we're currently working in. Now, I'm not going to do a full walk through of every single possible setting that we could change cuz we would be here for the full length of the course. But there are two in particular that I would really like you to set correctly. The first one is our timeline resolution. This is going to be the default resolution for the timeline that you're working on. Unless something weird happened, your timeline resolution should be 1920x 1080. Just double check to make sure it says that. The big one that we do want to change is our timeline frame rate. This is the default frame rate for our timelines. Now, frame rates can always be a little bit confusing for somebody who might be just starting out. But what I'd like you to think about is that 24 frames per second is normally meant for films, movies, and things recorded in real life, and 30 frames per second a lot of times used for digital recordings. There's a lot of reasons and things in between that might dictate which frame rate you choose to edit on. For us, I do want you to change your frame rate from 24 to 30. The only other thing that I'd like you to double check is for your optimized media and render cache. These aren't set to uncompressed. This is not something that we're going to dive too deep into in this course, but you can think of proxies and render caches as lowmemory versions of your footage to help you edit faster. And again, the big thing you want to double check here is that nothing says uncompressed. I'm going to quickly walk through some recommended settings that I would use if I were you. If you don't use exactly these settings, you will still be able to edit just fine. But I do think it's worth a couple of minutes to get really technical right now so we can set these up because we'll use them for the rest of the course. The first two settings are our proxies. Now proxies are copies of our video files that are a smaller format, which makes it easier to send to other editors to edit on the fly or if they're working remotely. We're going to set our proxy media resolution to quarter and the media format from ProRes HQ to ProRes 42:2 proxy. Now, depending on what version of Da Vinci Resolve you have, if you're on an older version, you might not have the ProRes codec. So, if that's the case, go ahead and do DNx HRLB. But for us, we're going to use uh ProRes 4222 proxy. Your optimized media is Da Vinci Resolve's own version of proxies and it's probably not something you'll ever really use. But just to be safe, we're going to do the exact same thing. We're going to change the resolution to quarter and the format to 4222 proxy. And same rules apply for DNx HR. And for the last uh cache format, you guessed it, we are also going to change it to 422 proxy. These four settings we're going to cover in a future video, so we're going to leave them at default for now. And then if we scroll down just a little bit more, uh, we can find our project media location. So if you accidentally boofed on this in the beginning, you can go ahead and reset your, uh, your media location. And the last thing I would double check is to make sure that your proxy generation location, your cache files, and your stills are all saved on a local hard drive. By default, they should be, but for whatever reason, you know, maybe you got an external hard drive and it randomly set it. Make sure this is set locally to either your C drive or I have two internal hard drives, so mine are mapped to my D drive. And before you hit save, what I would like to call out is I'm going to scroll all the way back up to the top. There's three dots up top here. And we can do one of two things now. For one, we can set our current settings as our default preset. Meaning that each time we start a new project, these settings, including the resolution, the frame rate, the optimized media proxy resolution, and all of our working folders are set as our default settings. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to click these three dots, and that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to set our current settings as our default preset. It's going to prompt you and say, "Hey, are you sure you want to do this? Go ahead and hit, yeah, I do. I actually I do want to update those. " Now, in the future, just for your own reference, let's say you're working on some 4K footage and it's a 24 fps timeline and you're doing a lot of them and you don't have to reset this up every time. But what you can do is again go to these three dots and there's this little option here that says save current settings as presets. So, you can save some presets for your project settings. So, that again, you don't have to do this every single time. But for now, we are all good to go. So, I'm going to go ahead and hit save. And again, it's going to pop up that big important question. Do you want to change the project frame rate? This time we are going to say yes, change. Now again, this is a super important step that we have to take in the beginning of each project. If you mess it up, is your project ruined? No. And I will show you how to address it. But anytime you start a new project, make sure you are setting your default resolution and frame rate every time. All righty, folks. So, we are going to create a timeline and begin to use the edit page, which is very exciting. I do want to check in with you real quick because I know that these opening sections might feel like we're not doing enough to get the edit done, but I implore you to continue to be patient and continue to ask yourself why and get just comfortable with these opening concepts because it will pay off down the road. Let's go ahead and hop back into Da Vinci Resolve. Now, I want you to locate your master media pull folder. It's the one all the way at the top. And if you've done it correctly, you should see two. You should see your video and audio folders. And what we're going to do is we're going to create a third folder. So I want you to rightclick in your media pool and hit new bin. Bins are Dav Vinci Resolve's naming terminology for folder. So go ahead, hit new bin and name this 03 timelines. Perfect. Go ahead and open up this timelines folder. All right, here we go. So what I'd like you to do is in this blank media pool region, rightclick, go to timelines. timelines, create new timeline. Now, depending on what version of Da Vinci Resolve you're in, this little menu might look a little bit different, but there will be a spot that says timelines, create new timeline. Go ahead and click it. And now we're prompted with how do we want to set our timeline up? We're going to leave all of these settings alone, but what I would like you to do is rename it. I mean, you could leave it alone as timeline one, but I'm going to name it main because it is going to be the main working timeline for us. It's prompting you, do you want to add some video tracks? audio tracks? Again, leave it alone. But if you are someone who accidentally messed up your project settings, here's where you can fix it. Uncheck this little box down here. And then where I'd like you to click is the format tab. Double check that we're on a 1920x 1080 timeline and our frame rate is 30. If yours isn't, make it match this. If all this looks okay, go ahead and hit create. Oh, we've got our very first timeline. Now, I probably said the word timeline 50 times. What is a timeline? Well, it's a workspace. It's a working area where we can cut up our footage. So, let's bring in some footage so that we I can show you. Go back over to your media pool and you can either click straight into your A-roll folder or go back to the master folder. We're go to video A-roll and there should be one video file right here. And what I'm going to ask you to do is go ahead and drag this footage and bring it on down into your timeline. Our footage is here. And what a happy looking guy over there. I didn't realize that was going to be the starting frame. It's too funny. So, what I'd like to do is explain a couple things to you guys before we get a little bit too lost in what the heck are we looking at. First of all, you can now see over here in the right window, we can see what's happening in our timeline. So, I'm seeing where my playhead is at in the video. This orange vertical bar right here is called our playhead. And wherever it's at in the video is what's gets displayed in the preview window. If you would like to move your playhead, you cannot click in the blank space here. You need to click on this ticked line bar up top here and drag it forward. And now we can begin to scrub through our footage. Again, I'm clicking in this upper bar here and scrubbing left and right. If we look down here in the timeline itself, we've got two things going on. We've got this blue bar up top and this green one down below. This is our video track where the visual information is being presented. And the green track is our audio track. These little white blobs that are running across the audio track are our waveform previews, meaning that it is previewing the sound that is going to be said. So, if I were to drag my playhead and bring it to the beginning of the video, and then you can either hit the play icon in your preview window, or you can hit the space button. Well, hello crew. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. And then I can hit the space button again to stop our playhead from playing. But hopefully you notice that as soon as our playhead crossed where our audio waveform is at, that was the area where I began to speak. So again, if I drag my playhead back, hit play. Well, hello crew. Let's talk about that's where I'm speaking. So if we take a macro look at our timeline here, we can see the spots where I am speaking. Now, there's a couple things that I'd like to call out and then we'll begin to move more and more into actually working with this footage. First things first is uh this guy right over here. This is our time stamp. Again, if I grab my playhead and begin to scrub with our footage, you can see that our time head changes. The one thing that I would like to call out is this far right number over here. Now, you might think that it's milliseconds, but if I scrub very slowly, you can see that it resets at 30. This is our frame number because again, a video is created by stitching still images one frame at a time. So, if I were to go down to my keyboard and use the left and right arrow, I can scrub through my footage one frame at a time. Again, I'm using the left and right arrow to scrub through my footage one frame at a time. All right, next thing's next. Uh, we're probably not going to need our preview window here, and it's taking up a good chunk of real estate. to hide it so that we can expand our preview viewer. What I'd like you to do is with our timeline previewer here. Go to the top right and there's this little square icon. It's next to the like the color page icon. This little square guy. Go ahead and click it and that'll expand our preview window. Typically, I like to work with a single viewer, but I do know that some people prefer to have preview and timeline viewer at the same time. There's not a right or wrong answer. It is just completely up to you. I like working with one big screen. Another quick customization option that I do think is important to show off is right above our time stamp over here. There's this little like layered track icon. This will give you your timeline preview and view options. The one that I do like to have on is stacked timelines, and I'm going to show you why in just a second. And if you don't like audio waveforms, you can turn those off. There's a whole slew of options to kind of change the display of the timeline. So, feel free to customize that to fit whatever you'd like. But what I'd like to do real quick is kind of show how you use a timeline and navigate through it. And then I'll walk backwards so that you guys can begin to follow along. Right now, we only have one video and one audio track, but if I click on our footage and drag up, you'll see it creates a second one. And we can do this as many times as we would like. We go and bring this back down to track one. And editing with layers works on a hierarchy system, which means that whatever is on the highest track gets displayed over what's on the bottom. So, if I wanted to, what I could do, and there's no need to follow along here, is I can go to my B-roll and add some footage in here. And you see how now it's displaying this B-roll and not the footage underneath. This is a very important concept that I'll continue to reiterate on as we move forward. I can select this footage and hit the backspace button to delete it. And now we're right back to where we started. Now again, we are presented with a whole bunch of buttons that we can click. And now our inspector tab is populated with things that we can change. We don't need to worry about any of that. All that I hope that you see right now is one timeline and a video and audio file. All righty. So, this is our very first class project. And the class project system is not meant to be scary or intimidating. These are set up so that we can begin to cement some of the ideas that we're learning as we go along with this course. And our very first project will be a talking head project. We've been asked to create a video that is clear, concise, and illustrates the points in the video we are editing. The video must be under 60 seconds long, which shouldn't be a problem. And they've asked us to use some B-roll along with a backing music track. They've also requested the video be 1080p and an MP4 file. and we will cover exactly what that means in a future video. One thing that I need to call out so that you guys can receive credit for this course is how to submit the videos. So, unfortunately, we can't upload and host all the videos on the course website. So, what I'd like everybody to do is to upload to a streaming service. I would recommend that 99% of people use YouTube because you can create account for free. There's no limits and it's going to work really well. But if you already have a Vimeo account or you operate on Behance, that's totally fine. There are a lot of different streaming sites out there that will work really well. The one thing that we will not be doing is submitting a Dropbox or Google Drive or any kind of cloud service link. Particularly what I'm referencing here is that we should not have to download any files. We should be able to click a link, it opens a video player, and then we can watch whatever you've submitted. I promise you will not get banned off of the website if you accidentally do a Google Drive link. But just know that in order to receive credit for this project, we need some kind of streamable link. If you are not super comfortable doing something like this, do not fret. At the end of the project, when we've rendered everything out and saved everything, I will do a walkthrough of how to upload to something like YouTube and provide a link so that you can submit it to the website. But with all that precursory stuff out of the way, let's go ahead and hop into the project. Hey, time out real quick. We're about halfway through the video. How's everything feeling? Are there questions already forming in your head? Are there things you're hoping that we really cover sooner than later? Let us know in the comments below. And if you do enjoy this video, please please if you can just give it a quick like uh or comment or even better if you could subscribe. The more support we get on videos like these is a really good indicator that you all out there are looking for more tools and information on Da Vinci Resolve. So if at the end of this video you are also looking to continue your journey and learn more about Da Vinci, check out the full course. We do some really deep dives into specific subjects. We cover some more advanced techniques and effects. So at the end of the video, if you would like to continue your journey, check out the full course. With that said, let's hop back into it. All righty, crew. The glasses are off, so you know this is about to get serious. So, where we're at right now is we have our timeline set up and we're ready to begin editing our footage, which means we're going to have to start using our keyboard and mouse to do some editing. So, this section lays out the foundation of how to use those tools. Now, big disclaimer, I'm going to use my keyboard shortcuts. You do not have to use them, but in the course resources, there will be a file that says these keys. Those will be importable keyboard shortcuts that I'll show you how to use. Again, you don't have to use them and I will call out when I'm using a specific shortcut and what the default button would be in Da Vinci Resolve. This is the system that I found works best for me and I think is easy to pick up. With that said, let's hop back into Da Vinci Resolve. All right, so there's one thing I'd like to call out real quick and that's over here in the bottom lefthand corner. I've added a keyboard overlay to my Da Vinci Resolve, which means that as I am navigating in Da Vinci, it will update to whatever key I'm pressing. Now, again, these are using my keyboard shortcuts. So, let's talk about how we can get those all set up. All the way in the upper leftand corner of Da Vinci Resolve, there is a Da Vinci Resolve menu item. Go ahead and click that button, and then we're going to find keyboard customization. Go ahead and open up that guy. Now, this is going to open up our keyboard customization menu, which is actually pretty well done for Da Vinci Resolve. You can click on any key in here, and it will tell you uh which function or command it is linked to. And if you're ever looking for a certain keyboard hotkey, you can go over to this little search bar and type in things like ripple delete, and it'll tell you which button it is associated with. Go ahead and clear that real quick. Now, for you guys, up in the upper right hand corner over here, it's going to say Da Vinci Resolve because this is the default keyboard layout when you start up Da Vinci Resolve. If you're somebody who's coming over from uh Premiere Pro or Final Cut, they do have some presets for those. I don't know how accurate they are to those programs, but they are an option for you if that's something you're already comfortable with. Well, what I would like you guys to do is all the way in the upper right hand corner of this menu, click these three dots right here, and there's an option to import a preset, which is what we're going to do. So, go ahead and click that button and locate the folder in your course resources that have my keyboard shortcuts in it. It should look something like this. Bees keys or BS keys. It'll be this. ext file. Once you find it, go ahead and hit okay in this menu to import that preset. And if you've done it correctly in the upper right hand corner, it should say B's or BS keys. Now, something else that I have provided is this hotkey cheat sheet. So, as we are going along, if you are ever confused or forget or if you don't want to use my keyboard shortcuts, but you're hearing me talk about something with navigation or editing, you can always refer to this to help refresh your memory. Once these are all imported, go ahead and hit save and then close. Now, from here on, moving forward, I'm going to be using my keyboard shortcuts. I will do my best to call out what the default bind is for a certain function or command, but I'm going to be assuming that you imported my keyboard shortcuts. With that said, before we start actually editing our footage, something that I would highly encourage you doing is to update your keyboard shortcuts as we go along. These have been set up for me and what I feel like are the easiest and strongest set of keys for beginners. It's something I've developed over time and it's something that is going to continue to change as I continue to edit. So, you should do the same. Within the first couple lessons, you're probably not going to know what works best for you, but as we continue to move along, you might find things that you're doing over and over that you wish you could just press a button to do. So, feel free to change these layouts if that is something that you want to do. Again, go in the upper leftand corner, Da Vinci Resolve, keyboard customization, find whatever command that is. So maybe you want to change the fastforward hotkey. You can type in fast forward. Hit the X on the existing hotkey and add your own over here. Once it's all said and done, go ahead and hit save. And it might not even be a bad idea to go up to this upper right hand corner and save your own keys as a new preset. But for now, I ask you to stick with my keyboard shortcuts through the beginning sections of this course. So, my right hand is going to stay on the mouse, and my left hand is going to sit on the home row, which is the biggest thing that I'd like you to take away from this section. When I say the home row, I mean the A, D, and F keys. So, I've got four fingers on the ASD, and F keys, and my right thumb is on the space bar. The first two buttons we're going to talk about are the S button and the D button. S is timeline zoom out, and D is timeline zoom in. So, we can use S to get a better look at all of the footage on our timeline. And we can use D to be a little bit more precise with how we're making cuts, changes, adjustments to anything on this track. Now, the reason why I like using S and D so much is because as we begin editing and as we begin using more and more clips and footage and music, etc., etc., if I need to jump to a later part in our timeline, there's a few ways we can go about doing it. But the way I like is if I hit S to zoom out, I can click and drag my playhead to a later part in the timeline. And I'm going to hit D to zoom in, but keep an eye on where our playhead goes as we continue to zoom in. So, I'm going to hit D to zoom in. And you see how our playhead stays dead center frame. So, anytime I want to reenter or jump to a different part in our timeline, I will use S and D to make those jumps. Now, there's a few alternatives to this one. Uh there's this plus and minus slider up above here in this uh little mini toolbar. This will do the same thing. We can zoom in and zoom out on our timeline. The default shortcut for doing this is alt and the scroll wheel or option if you're on Mac. Moving forward, if I do ever forget to say it, when I say alt plus a keyboard button, it means option plus that button on Mac. And same thing with control, it's the command key on Mac. So on the scroll wheel, we'll do the same thing. And if we are trying to actually jump to a later part in our timeline up in our play bar up above here, we can actually scroll through the entire timeline. Okay. So again, S and D. Let's get back to focusing on the home row. So S and D are timeline zoom in and zoom out. The next big one that we're going to learn is the A key. And if I press A, it is going to split our clip or it's going to make a cut. Now the default for this I believe is controll and b but we are going to be cutting so much we cannot be two-fingering the cut button. So again a is cut. There is an alternative to using uh a in our little mini editing toolbar up top here. There is this razor blade icon and this is our blade mode. I am not a fan of the blade mode but I know some people that will ride and die with the blade mode and I'll show you what it does. If I click it, it turns my mouse into a little razor blade. And now we can split our clips whenever I click. I tend to find this less precise than moving my playhead and cutting, but if this is something you enjoy, you know, go crazy. To toggle off the blade mode, you just need to go back up top here and make sure your mouse is highlighted in orange again. Now, to undo, I'm going to hit control-z a few times. If you're ever wanting to redo and undo. So if I undo too far and I want to redo those cuts, you can actually hit control shift and Z and it will redo your edits. And again, if you're on Mac, that is going to be command shift and Z. All right, so we've got two uh two little cuts here. How do we now get rid of these clips in here? Now, this is actually a bigger decision than you might think because there's two primary ways of deleting footage. First of all, to select this clip, you can either click it and that'll select the video and audio. Or what you'll often see me do is drag and select. This is just a habit I've got into mostly because we often work with more than one track or what we'll end up talking about later is like the video and audio might not be linked together. So, I end up dragging selecting. So, you don't have to do this. You can always click, but just, you know, FYI. Now, the first method to delete this is actually going to be the backspace key. So, I'm going to take my right hand off the mouse and hit backspace. What that does is it deletes the selected footage. Now, the backspace key is the default key to do this. But now, we have this gap in here. So to fix this, one of the things that we can do is we can drag and select the right side of our footage and then leftclick, drag and move it over, and it'll actually snap into place, which is pretty handy. Now, that's not too bad, but what happens if I need to do this again? So, we've got this other section that I want to get rid of. So, I'll click it, hit backspace, and again, now I've got to drag and select and pull this over. Now, that's not too bad, but that is three actions required out of us every single time we want to make a change. We have to delete the clip, select the footage to the right, and then pull it over. And what were to happen if say we had more than just this footage here? So, what if we had five clips, 10 clips, 20 clips, 4,000 clips? I think you can see where I'm getting at. So, I'm going to hit control- Z a couple times. So, we have our two splits here remaining. So, the second method to remove or delete footage slash clips on your timeline is our fourth home row button and it is ripple delete and it's the F key. So, I'm going to select this clip and watch how these cut points move to the right of this footage. I'm going to hit the F key which ripple deletes the footage and see how everything shifts over to the left over here. Ripple deleting closes any gaps created when you delete clips on your timeline. So again, I could click this clip right here, hit F, and it ripple deletes our footage. And on the surface, that seems much better than just hitting backspace, right? So why would we ever do that? Well, you have to be careful when you ripple delete footage because if you have more than one track or you've got things that aren't quite lined up with the audio, ripple delete will slide everything over to the left. So, it's a very powerful tool, but with great power comes uh great responsibility. So, you just have to be aware of what you're doing. Something else that I just want to point out real quick is uh Da Vinci Resolve is pretty dang awesome. I don't know if I've said that yet, but let's say I hit the backspace here and I do have this gap. Da Vinci also has this very cool feature where if I were to click in the gap. So, if I leftclick in this gap here, see how it highlights in gray, I can now hit the F key to ripple delete that gap. So, even if you are editing and you've got some space in here that you want to close or things are split for whatever reason, you can always just click gaps and hit F and it will close the space. So, again, I cannot emphasize enough how important it is. We just really need four keys. The S key, the D key, the A key, and the F key. That is going to carry you 95% of the way there when it comes to editing any and all of your footage. Which means that if we've learned ASDNF, we're ready to start editing our footage. All right. So, we're going to begin what's called the rough cut or sometimes it's called the assembly cut of the edit, which means we're going to take our raw footage and trim it down until it's in a usable place. And what that means is we're going to get rid of some of the ums and the uh and gaps, the bad takes, etc. until we have usable footage for our edit. And there is one thing in particular that I'm going to show off that is a very important concept in Da Vinci Resolve that I'll take a couple minutes to talk through, but it is very important to understand and know how to use. So, let's go ahead and hop back into Resolve. All righty. So, let's go ahead and do some editing. Quick reminder, bottom lefthand corner is my input history. So, as we continue to move along in the course, you should be able to keep track of what keys I'm pressing, but your timeline might look a little bit different than somebody else's. So, what I'd like us all to do is to start fresh together. Hit S to zoom all the way out on your timeline so that you can see all of your footage. Drag and select it all and hit the backspace key to delete it or F or you could have hit F to delete it. Now, what I want you to do is go over to the upper leftand corner here for our media pool. Go to the video folder, find your A-roll, and let's re bring in our footage. There we go. Now, this is personal preference, but I like having the entire bottom section here for my timeline cuz I like having a little more working real estate. So, what I'll do is up in the upper leftand corner of Da Vinci Resolve, there's this little square with what you call that a carrot icon. Go ahead and click that and it will collapse the media pool to just be on this upper portion. So that way we have our entire bottom half for our timeline. Now, unfortunately in Da Vinci Resolve, you can't drag and drop menus around to be in different locations, but we can always grab dividing lines to make sure things fit however we feel best. So sometimes you'll even see me grab this middle bar in between the video and audio tracks to move things around a little bit more if I need to see the audio or if I want to see the video a bit better. So with all that said though, what we're going to be doing today is I'm going to hit D a couple times to zoom in. We're going to be cleaning up our footage a little bit. I might throw out terms like working through our footage or trimming. It all kind of means the same thing, different context. All I'm trying to say is that in our video, you see how there's these little gaps in here where nothing's being said. We're going to try to get rid of those. There's going to be sections where I goof up. We don't want to include the goof ups there. And we also need to be aware of the things I'm saying in this footage. You see, editing is a very active craft, which means that we can't just go along, look for where the audio is, and get rid of stuff where there's no audio. We need to be aware of what our subject, in this instance, me, is saying because at the end of the day, we need to string together all these little bits and pieces so that it makes one cohesive message slashstory. So, there are moments where you can kind of turn your brain off a little bit, but the sorting process, the rough cut process tends to be something that you do need to pay attention to. So, let's start working through it. First things first, I'm going to drag my playhead all the way to the beginning. Oh, it looks like I didn't bring our footage all the way snug on 00. So, let me drag and slide that over. Made spacebar to play and stop it right before I'm about to speak. Something else you'll see me do throughout this that I want to call out now in case I've already done it a few times is as the video is playing, I'll oftentimes hit S to zoom out to see kind of where we're at in the uh total video length and D to zoom in so I can be a little bit more precise. The other benefit to this, and this is what we discussed in that last section, is it keeps our playhead mostly centered. So, as I'm playing, I can zoom in and it'll put our playhead right in the middle. All right. So, I'm going to drag our playhead somewhere to the beginning here. It does not have to be exact. You do not have to copy my timestamps. Those things are unimportant. But I'm going to hit A to cut. Select that first half. F to delete. Now, I'm going to hit space to play through this little bit. — Well, hello crew. Perfect. I tapped A to make a cut. Now, a common question that gets asked early on is where do I cut things off? At what point when I finish saying something, do I make this cut? And what I'd like to say is this. What I'm going to do is I'm going to hit shift and use my middle mouse button. Excuse me, shift and the scroll wheel to expand our audio track here. And this is uh a little exaggerated for the purpose of what we're doing, but it is nice to kind of visualize what I'm saying. Most of the times when somebody is speaking, there is a little tail at the end of their annunciation. This tail might look different depending on what's being said, but I would say 99 times out of 100, there's this little trail that carries through whatever the last word is that we said. So, what I would say is try to get your cut to be kind of close to where that tail ends. Doesn't have to be exact, but what will happen is if let's say I make a cut before there. So like right here, I'll play this before I cut it off. So this is the talking section. — Other beginners make. Looks like make is the final word. If I were to cut off somewhere right here. If I were to ripple delete this with F. And you do not have to follow along here. I replay this beginners make. — Can you feel the abruptness? Maybe you can't. Depending on where you cut off this tail, it can feel pretty jarring. So our goal is to leave that little bit. Hey, shift and the scroll wheel to kind of recondense our audio waves here. Now, a skill I'd like you to try to form as we begin to work through this footage is looking at these audio waves and trying to determine what's going on. We can use our first clip as an example. You can see kind of the shape and the fullness here. This is when somebody's speaking up ahead. We've got a lot of these little like blips. I would wager that it's me kind of grunting or making some noises or trying to start what I'm about to say. — [clears throat] — Yeah, we don't need that. So, I'm going to hit A here to make a cut. F is ripple delete. Go ahead and play this forward. — Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. Perfect. A to cut. And what we're going to do is we're going to continue to get rid of some of these like weird noises and some of these bad takes. But before we do that, I need to cover a very important editing concept slashtechnique. So, we are going to cover how to trim our footage. And we're going to add it to our arsenal of techniques here inside Da Vinci Resolve. And I'm going to do it working with just these first two little clips. So, I'm going to put my playhead on this cut. Hit D to zoom in a little bit. I'm going to shift my playhead off just a smidgen. And we need to talk about this right here, this cut point. Something I haven't done yet, and something you might have experimented with is shifting this cut point. If I hold my mouse in between so that it's directly in between, you can see that it forms this bracket. And so what I can do is I can shift this cutter point around. Excuse me. This can be very useful for when we want to change when one video leads into the other or the audio as well. So clicking the middle shifts that. If I move ever so slightly to the There we go to the left, my icon changes to a single bracket with this filled rectangle. This allows me to drag the edge of our cut. So, if I wanted to get a little bit closer to where I start speaking here, I could again grab the edge and pull it over. Now, we've got this gap in between. So, what I could do is drag and select this, pull it over, or I'm going to hit control-z once like I showed off in the last video. We can click the gap, hit F to ripple delete. That process that we went through is typically called trimming your footage because we're shaving off the edge of where things are beginning and ending. Now, here's where some really important stuff comes in. That process is a destructive process. Meaning that we cannot recover information if we change this cut point or we trim the edges. Let me show you what I mean. You see this little blur here where I say, "Hey, hey. " Okay. If I were to take the cut point of this clip here and shift it over so that I get rid of the hay. If I were to take this second clip and move it to the right, you notice how we don't regain that audio file. That's because when we put audio or video on top of existing audio or video, it overwrites it. It does not store that information underneath. Again, if I were to take this clip right here, move it over to the left, release my mouse button, drag it over to the right, you see how it deletes the existing footage. This can become very important because let's say I bring this over to the left and I go, well, hm, my voice is getting cut off here. I need to drag the edge over. Well, then in doing so, we've lost the beginning of this clip. Obviously, the quick fix is to kind of grab that edge here and pull over to the left. And then we, you know, problem solved, but on bigger timelines, we want to avoid having this headache. So, there is a very powerful tool built into Da Vinci that handles this, and it's called our trim mode. So, if I go up to our editing toolbar here, and I hover over this icon, this will toggle our mouse to go into the trim edit mode. Now, if you're using my keyboard shortcuts, I have mapped that to the shift and W button. So, you can either click this icon or hit shift and W to swap to the trimedit mode. Now, this is a very, very special tool, and I'll show you why. If I were now to go to the edge of our clip here in the trimedit mode, watch what happens with our audio and video. As I move this point, it pushes it to the right. We're not overwriting anything. we're pushing our footage away. Vice versa, if I go to the left side, it's going to maintain our footage over here and push it out as well. So, if you're ever in a situation where some part of your footage is cut off, what you can do is select the trim mode, go to the edge, and then push it out so that we regain that information and we don't override anything on the other side of the playhead. Now, the trim mode has a lot of really cool features. Like, for example, if I were to click on our right clip here, and I have my mouse just somewhere in the middle, okay? So, it's not sitting on any of the borders or the edges. I can slide the footage so that our cut points remain the same, but the in andout points of our media shift. So, if I wanted our audio to be closer to this edge, well, I can slip it that way. Very useful, very powerful tool. To get back to the normal uh selection mode, you can either hover with the mouse and click it, or I have it mapped to W. So, for us to toggle between these two modes, we can either hit shift and W to go to our trim mode, or just hit normal selection mode, and then we can use the normal selection functions. Again, big takeaway here. Moving our footage is a destructive process. In Dinci Resolve, when you move clips or assets on top of each other on the same track, it overwrites it. it deletes it. We are now getting more comfortable with our keyboard shortcuts. We know how to trim and edit our footage. And now we need to finish the rough cut of our edit. With that said, uh let's continue to edit. So, I'm going to reset this up so that we're at a similar point. Okay. So, now we've [clears throat] got our two clips here and let's continue to play through things. Well, hello crew. Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. Ah, you might have missed it the first time, but these two clips are saying the exact same thing. So, we've got two takes of the same line. This will be a decision that we have to make later on down the road. Until then, I'm going to cut off the edge of this footage here. We could either hit A and F, or we could just grab the end and pull her in. Let's click this gap here. Hit F to ripple delete. And now we've got this big gap here where it doesn't look like anything's being said. As editors, our duties are to scrub through and get familiar with as much of the footage as possible. However, because we know this is a talking head video, and I am supposed to be speaking, more than likely, this is stuff that's not going to be used. We should always double check by grabbing our playhead and scrubbing through here to make sure nothing's happening. But we can kind of move through this sequence confidently knowing that we'll probably need to get rid of this. So, I'm going to hit A to make a cut. F to delete. Let's go ahead and play through here. — Something that a lot of beginning editors will make. Oh, messed up. Let's keep going. So, a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make. Oh, messed up again. Remember how I said a skill I'd like you to start forming is looking at audio waves and trying to predict what's going to happen ahead of time. You see how these two audio waveforms are very similar? In my head, because I've been doing this for a little while, I know that more than likely these are probably the same things being said. And our options are one, one is a good take and one is a bad take. Two, they're both good takes that we could possibly use. Or three, it is the same take and I mess up on both of them. We're ending up with option three here. So, what I can do is after both of them, hit a F to delete. If for some reason you feel like you need to go back and regain that take, well, lucky for you, we can use that trim mode. So, I could hit shift and W to swap to trim mode, click our clip here, go to the edge, and push it out till we regain it. Now, as I'm scrubbing through the footage as well, you know how you can kind of hear it in the background? That's cuz audio scrubbing is turned on. If you do not like that, uh, there is a way to turn it off. Go up top to the very upper menus over here. Click timeline and then we're going to find the audio section and then audio scrubbing. So I have it mapped to shift S to turn it on and off. So if you don't want it, you can just toggle it off, but sometimes I like it just to kind of preview uh what's being said. All right. So again, we don't need these two sections. So I'm going to go to the beginning here, hit A to make a cut. That's a delete. And the only thing I'm keeping in mind when I'm cutting ahead of the clips is to make sure I'm not cutting off the head of the audio. The preciseness again, it doesn't matter too much. Let's go ahead and play. So, a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make is that they focus on the spectacle of the edit over the story of the edit. Perfect. And now looking ahead, we got this short little blip. Is it likely that this is a good take? No. But we'll go ahead and play it just in case. what we're talking about. See, there is always a chance because we don't know this audio. We don't know what's being said. We don't know if this is like a short exclamation. So, there is a chance that this is usable, but more than likely editor brains on. Probably don't need it. Let's go ahead and move forward. When we're talking about the thing that really ma what really matters. Okay, blueofed again. A plus F. See how often I'm pressing that A and F key. So, I cannot stress enough that you don't have to use the home row, ASD, and F, but you should find some keyboard shortcuts that you are comfortable with that you use over and over. Anyways, let's carry on. When we're talking about what really matters the most at the end of the day, it's the message being told in the video, not what kind of effects you can include. Perfect. Make a cut. Drag my playhead forward. Cut. Plus F. can include. Something else a lot of beginning editors are uncomfortable doing is letting a cut. with is cutting naturally. Okay, perfect. This is a bad take. We'll go ahead and hit ripple delete it. Now, sometimes what I'll do as well when I'm sorting through footage is if I hit S to zoom out a little bit, we still got a little chunk to work through. And sometimes you can kind of lose track of where you're at in that edit. So, sometimes what you'll catch me doing is if I hit D to zoom in, I'll just bring whatever that last little clip is that I edited and I'll bring it up a track just so I know for myself, hey, I've made it at least this far. Stuff to the left has been sorted through. Quick note, though, um, when I drag footage up and down, you see how there's this hovering time stamp? That's the amount of seconds plus frames it's been shifted. So, if I were to drag it up and go to the right, you see how we're adding frames and seconds. Let's go to the left frames and seconds. So, you want to make sure it's at 0 0. And if yours isn't snapping to the edges. So, see how mine it kind of like snaps in when I get close to an edge. Make sure this magnet icon is toggled on. Sometimes it can get turned off if you accidentally press the I think is it mapped to? Yeah, it's mapped to the N key. If you accidentally press N or click it for whatever reason. So, just make sure that's turned on. I'm going to go and bring this. Oh, no. Wait. I want it up. All right. Editor brain turned on. I bet that this uh is this like an um — um — sure is. So as you continue to get better and better, a lot of times what you'll see me do is just kind of scrub past it. A F. — Something else a lot of beginning editors feel like that something else. — Okay. A F bad take. Something else a lot of beginning editors do often is the overuse of pre-builtin transitions. Until you're more comfortable with how you should edit a video, I'd avoid using some of those presets. Perfect. Nicely said, Brandon. We'll make a cut here. And the last thing that I want to talk about is And one of the last things I want to talk about Okay, bad take a F. Can I see the rhythm that we're getting into? One of the last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. Your audio makes up 50% of any video edit. So, you should spend as much time as possible. Huh. Okay. So, looks like we got a good sentence. Now, — one of the last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the time as possible. Don't finish the second half. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a cut here and I'm going to drag it up one track. I'm looking over to the right and I'm seeing that the audio waveforms don't quite match what's being said here. So, just in case I need to use this first half, I don't want to delete this yet. There is the chance that we need to get rid of it, but as of right now, not sure I want to get rid of it. Now, I have a little horizontal mouse wheel, which just lets me do this, which is pretty fun. A lot of mouses don't have that. So, if you ever want to scroll left and right, the hotkey is controll plus middle mouse button. and that'll let you move left and right. Or you can always click ahead, S to zoom out, D to zoom in, and that'll recenter your playhead. All right, editor brains turned back on again. Right. So, if I'm looking at this little section of audio waves, we've got a couple of little short blips here that are more than likely not going to be useful. So, if I was editing this video for real, what I would do is this. Scrub forward. I go, "Yep, not good. " Quick decision. Boom. If you're not comfortable doing that, continue to play it. Your audio the the more times you do this, the more confident you'll get with making quick decisions on what to keep and remove. When in doubt, you know, take your time. But either way, we do need to select this. F ripple delete. The audio of the video accounts for over 50. The audio of the don't need any of this. A F. The audio of the video accounts for 50% of the final edit. So you should spend just as much time working with your audio as you do working with the video. Perfect. Nicely done, Brandon. Okay, so where does this sentence start? Where does this video start? Excuse me, where does this clip start? And one of the last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. Your audio makes up 50. Ah, see this is why we made this step to bring this up a track in case we needed to use it. See, the beginning of this clip leads into what I'm saying here because when I was recording, I forgot to say this first sentence. So, what I'm going to do is scrub forward, zoom in. I'm going to make a cut right before the uh the second part of the clip. Select it. F. ripple delete. And now if I were to play this, it should sound somewhat cohesive. Last things I want to talk about is focusing on the audio of the video. The audio of the video accounts for perfect. How did I know to do that? Well, I have the benefit of having recorded this video. So, I know how I tend to speak and talk. So, if you're not sure that's going to work, just keep it. We can come back and refine things later, but I'm trying to save us as many iterations as possible. So again, if you're not sure, leave it in there. You can always remove things later on, but we're just trying to train our editor's brains to start making some of these uh confident decisions earlier on. All right, drag my playhead over. I'm going to use my horizontal mouse wheel. Again, you can use control or command and the scroll wheel. Editor brains turned on. These two waveforms are looking very similar, so I would wager that this is a boof. Hope this helps you guys and excited to talk more about some Yep. And we flubbed it. So, scrub forward. AF video. Hope this helps and excited to talk more about editing. Perfect. A F. If I were to hit S to zoom out, I'm going to hold shift and the scroll wheel to bring in our video tracks a little bit. Clean it up. Bring our playhead back to the beginning. Zoom in with D a couple times. And now we have a rough cut of our edit. Is this a good cut of our edit? No. But could you, if you had to, send this to somebody to take a look at? Yeah, for sure. We've gotten rid of all the gaps. mess ups, and now we have a somewhat cohesive take of our talking head example. So, the next step is to continue to refine this and make it a good edit. We finished our rough cut of the edit, and the next step is to make a more presentable version of the video. So before we do that, what I'd like to do is quickly review where we're at and some of the things that we're going to look for to add to the video and to remove from the video to improve it before we come up with our final delivery. Now, depending on the size of the video and the editor that you're talking to, this stage of the cut will be tagged different things. Some people will call it the rough cut, uh an assembly just even call it the selects of your edit. And typically the first pass is the least fun part of the editing process, but we've done it and now we have our working cut. So what I like to do is talk through a couple things. One of the first things that I like to try to keep in mind is the total length of the video as is. So up in the top left corner by our preview window here is the timestamp of the total timeline length. So right now we're about 57 seconds, which is a little under a minute, which I think is great for this project. Next thing that I'm going to do is play the video from beginning to end so that we continue to familiarize oursel with the footage and the direction that we're going in and then we can talk through what we're going to need to add into the video. All right, let's go ahead and play from the beginning. Well, hello crew. Ah, that's right. We've got more than one take here. Now, there are a few different ways to handle multiple takes, and this becomes more of a pressing issue later down the road if you're working on a film set that has 1 2 3 4 10 different takes. But for us, we just need to pick between the two. So, I don't think there's a wrong or right answer here, but what I would like you to do is pick one that you feel like is a stronger version of that opening sentence. Well, hello crew. I think I personally like this second take because it's saying the same thing in less words and we get into the rest of the video a little bit faster. So, what I'm going to do is select our first take and hit F to ripple delete. Now, again, let's play this video from beginning to end. Something else a lot of beginning editors are uncomfortable with is cutting naturally. Something else a lot of beginning editors do often is the overuse of pre-builtin transitions until you're more comfortable. Okay. And see, this is why we play our video from beginning to end because it looks like in the selection process, I didn't catch this duplicate take of me saying something that doesn't transition well into the rest of the video. Right? So, if we play this section again, something else a lot of beginning editors are editors do often is the overuse of pre-built-in transitions. So, what we can do is get rid of this unneeded segment. Let's go ahead and start playing all the way through again. — It's the message being told in the video, not what kind of effects you can include. Something else a lot of beginning editors do often is the overuse of pre-builtin transitions until you're more comfortable with how you should edit a video. I'd avoid using some of those presets. So, you should spend just as much time working with your audio as you do working with the video. Perfect. And so, now we have one cohesive message throughout the now 46 seconds of video. As editors, what are some things that we should start being conscious of now? Well, for one, we need to start thinking about the pacing of the video. The pacing of a video is a broadstroke term for how fast or slow does the video continue to carry out as you play it. Are things being said quickly? Is there time in between scenes? Are we letting certain shots linger for a long amount of time? Are we cutting very quickly? Depending on the video or the subject matter, a certain rhythm to the video might be more appropriate than another. The pacing is very much so a feel thing and it's something that I'll try to continue to hammer home on as we continue to progress through the course. The next couple things that I'm starting to think about are a lack of audio underneath. So, there's no music. We have no sound effects to kind of highlight certain things and certain emotions throughout the video. And there's also no visual references throughout the video to highlight some of the things that are being said. Typically, additional footage to the main footage is called B-roll. and the primary footage that is driving the video forward is the A- roll. So, what we've done is come up with a cut of our A-roll. And now we need to start thinking about is there ways to introduce B-roll to highlight some of the things that I'm being said. And these are the big ticket issues that we need to address. The next step is to add in assets to the video, meaning music, sound effects, and B-roll. And the art of choosing your assets is almost as big of a skill as learning how to edit itself. I think a lot of editors will tell you that the procurement process of acquiring footage and music and sound effects can be more timeconuming than actually coming up with the edit. But lucky for you guys, I've already gone through and acquired the music and sound effects that we're going to use throughout the course. Now, with all that said, I'd like to introduce you guys to the media page inside Da Vinci Resolve. We're not going to spend too much time on it, but it is nice to know where it is and how to use it. So, thus far, we have been living over here in the edit page, but don't you forget we've got all these other tools here inside Da Vinci Resolve. So, let's go ahead and meander on over to the media page. Now, depending on you and your workflow, you might not spend a lot of time in the media page, or you might spend a ton of time in the media page. The media page is essentially set up to sort through and bring in footage, audio assets, images, etc., etc. The bottom half here is our media pool. So, this is everything that we have currently imported into our working project. So, we can cycle through our folders just like we could on the edit page. And if I wanted to, I could double click on some of the footage and we can preview it here in our media pool. Quick aside, I have the audio muted here so that it doesn't get in the way of me speaking. If you do ever want to mute and unmute stuff, you can uh just click the little speaker icon or you can rightclick and now you have a volume bar. But I'm going to go ahead and keep this muted. Something else that's kind of a fun tool, and you might have seen this on the edit page, is this little uh circle with two arrows on the left and right side of it. This is your jog wheel. So, you've seen me grab my playhead and move it left and right here to quickly scrub through the footage. But if you want to do a little bit more fine-tuning, you can click and hold the jog wheel and move your mouse right and left. And now you have a little bit more fine control, I guess I should say, in your preview here. But this is what I really wanted to show you guys in the top left corner here. This is where we can preview and import footage. In the upper left here are all your connected drives. You can see I've got a few, including Mr. Burger, who is somebody I am working with right now. And if you click on one of these drives, so if I click on my D drive, which is my media drive, and I have this nice juicy folder over here in my D drive, it's called my stock media folder. And inside this folder is everything I've ever downloaded to work on a video ever for the most part. So I've got music, stock footage, uh visual effects, whatever. If you can think of it and it goes in a video, it belongs right in here. So, just like File Explorer on Windows or Mac, you can go ahead and open up your various folders. And I can go find my audio folder. And then we can even click on something like uh sound effects. And I can go to my save sound effects over here. And I've got a bunch of folders of random various sound effects. And one of the fun ones to look through is the whooshes. So, if I click on my whooshes folder, we can begin to preview some of the whooshes that I have saved here. So, if I unmute my audio here, I can drag my mouse over to preview it. If you don't like the mouse dragging preview, which for me sometimes gets in the way of me just kind of scrubbing through stuff in your preview window, there's three dots in the upper right hand corner. If you click those and then uncheck live media preview, now you can kind of scrub through things without it instantly playing. But I can doubleclick on any one of these to preview it. And where this is nice is if I have something that I find that I'd like to use. So let's say I click here and I like that little whoosh. Well, what I can do is go to my pre-created sound effects folder that we already created. Click there and I can drag and pull it in. And so a lot of times in the beginning of edits, what we'll end up doing is we'll come up with a rough cut and then we might sort through some of our assets that we have that we've either been provided or that we've gone and downloaded ourselves and try to procure which we want to use in our video. Now you guys are going to have access to the sound effect. So I'm going to hit control-z so that we're all working with the same stuff. And the last thing that I like to call out here that is personally my favorite feature of the media pool is there's this little section over here on the left where it says favorites. If I grab this middle bar and bring it up so you guys can see it a little better, you can see I have four folders saved here that I call all the time. And so for you, you know, if you have your stuff saved on the C drive, you can see that sometimes it can be a little bit of a nuisance to find the right folders. So if there is one that you use all the time, you can always right click on that folder and add folder to favorites and then it'll locate it over here. So now what I can do is I can go over to my audio tab and then I have all my music and sound effects right there. So then I can quickly go through, find some of the different music tracks that I have saved and preview them on the fly. Pretty neato, right? And so again, if I this is a track that I'd like, I can just drag and select it and pull it down into our media pool. And so the next steps that we're going to take is we're going to introduce some of these audio items into our video. A very common question at this stage in the video edit is which do I do first, audio or add B-roll? And I think what you'll find as you continue to edit is that it kind of doesn't matter. it's going to make more sense, for instance, if you're working on a music video to add the music first. But when you're working on like something, you know, like a documentary, it might make more sense to structure the video and the B-roll before you begin to add in uh music and sound effects. But what ends up happening a lot of times is you'll do one and then you'll have to adjust the other. And it's kind of like a little bit of a back and forth game. But for us, we're going to start with some audio. Let's get some audio in the mix. All right, here. So, we left off on the media page. So, let's bounce on back over to the edit page. And depending on what folder you clicked on in the media page is where your media pool will start in the edit page. So, the first thing that I'd like us to do is to pick an audio track to use. And we've got three here. Now, if you muted your audio in the last section, make sure it is unmuted so that we can preview our audio. And what I'd like you to do is one of two things. One, I'd like you to preview the music and make a decision on which one you'd like to introduce. And there's two ways to do that in Da Vinci Resolve. The first way to do that, if you remember, right, a few videos ago, we actually collapsed our uh video player here into one viewer. So, we can undo that by going up to the top right and clicking the split rectangle here to get back our second preview window. And this preview window is specifically set to preview footage in your media pool. So I can double click on anything in my media pool to preview it here on the left while maintaining the uh imagery from our timeline on the right. So what we can do is begin to preview our music by hitting the space bar. Now by default most music is normalized or has their audio level max to the max level. So it might be pretty loud when you preview it. If it is coming in a little bit loud, you can always adjust your volume over here by dragging it over to the left just a little bit so your eard drums aren't completely smashed out. So, that's one way we can preview our music. The other way would be, again, I like I just like working with one window at a time. I'm going to recolapse this left window here by going over again to the upper right and clicking our giant rectangle. And now we can just doubleclick instead to preview whatever is in our media pool. That being said, we do lose what's happening over here in our timeline. But for simpler edits and simpler videos, there's often not a need to have both up at the same time. And I will show you when it is appropriate to have both and when it makes a little bit more sense. But I like just having one window. Again, it's completely up to you. There's not a wrong answer here. So, let's go ahead and preview our audio. Okay, so this is kind of like a lowfi track. Now, a question that might have formed in your noggin over there is, uh, how do I know which one of these is good as we begin playing through them? Well, listen to me. You're going to have to make a choice, an informed choice. Remember, editing is a creative field, so you can have some creative liberty for what makes sense. there's going to be more appropriate choices for music and sound effects uh as opposed to others, right? So, like if we're doing a sad emotional scene, it's probably not going to make sense to have some kind of like thumping EDM music in the background. But like I've said once and I'll continue to say throughout this course, there's not a correct answer. It's just what makes sense to you. So, if you're looking for a little bit of guidance into what kind of song should you begin looking for, well, again, we have to think about the overall message of the video, what is being said in this segment, and what kind of audio is going to feel appropriate. So, if I were to click my mouse back on the timeline, we're going to lose our preview. But remember, this video is me talking about some basic editing mistakes. So, the music that we choose to use shouldn't feel intrusive. We will probably just want something that sits in the background that just fills in some of the gaps in between the talking points. So, I'm going to double click on that lowfi song again to continue to preview it. And I kind of like the rhythm in that song. oftentimes as well when I'm previewing music, what you can kind of do, and again remember we're trying to train ourselves with recognizing waveforms is I'll kind of skim ahead to moments where the beat kicks in or there's a needle drop moment. So you can kind of see here the regularity of the waveform increases and right around here is probably where the main verse of the song kicks in. So I'll kind of scrub over to here. Perfect. Make him a little mental note of that. Let's check out on the last song over here. I'm going to double click it. So, again, when I immediately pull this up, the thing I notice is we've got two kind of driving moments here where there's a lot of stuff going on and then kind of like a down moment. So, I'll probably preview a snippet in here and then to see how each sounds. And if I didn't call it out earlier, unfortunately, you can't drag and move the uh playhead in this main working area. You have to use this upper section here to scrub through the song. You can also use this little bit down here and the jog wheel just like we talked about in the last section. So, I'm going to go ahead and hit play. And right away, this is a lot more upbeat than that lowfi track that we were using. — Okay, I think I've got a general gist of what that sounds like. Let me go ahead and click forward. See what this little area sounds like. Interesting. Okay, so each of these songs brings a slightly different vibe and energy. So, which should we use? We've got this one called cinematic documentary soft background. got a lowfi song and the soft background music. To me personally, this last track sounds a little bit more like it's a news update, and the cinematic one sounds like it's meant for a documentary. I don't know if it quite fits the tone that I'm looking for. There's something about it that invites a little bit more drama that I think that I'm looking for. So, I'm going to bring in the loi background. To do so, uh, well, we just go to our media pool. We go to that file, and we're going to drag and drop it in. Now, what you're going to kind of see me do is drag and swing it around over here because I don't want a happen chance to overwrite some of the dialogue. So, what can happen, and don't follow this step, is you bring in your music, you go here, and then you go shoot. So, what I'm going to do is go ahead and drag our song, swing it down and around. A common follow-up question when it comes to importing music and sound and footage even is, what if I don't want the whole thing? So, obviously, we're not going to use all 2 minutes and 13 seconds of the song. So, what if I only want it to go up to here? Well, what you can do is set in andout points on any of the media in your media pool. O is for out. And see how our player preview gets cut off short here. If I were to drag my playhead to the left, I is for in. So, I equals in, O equals out. And if you're currently previewing that media, you can also just drag and pull down from the media preview itself. And see how we have a much smaller snippet here. I'm going to go ahead and hit backspace again. And the reason why I'm not hitting F, remember F is ripple delete. When I hit F, it's going to look to ripple delete this entire segment from left to right. So watch what happens. See how it shifts everything over to the left. So we got to be careful with our rippling and our deleting. Hit control +- Z again. Select our music track. Backspace to get rid of it. I'm going to double click the song preview again. How do we reset our in-n-out points? Well, we're going to hit Alt + I, and Alt + O. The Alt key is a modifier. I'm not sure if I've mentioned it yet, but we will talk more about modifiers later in the future. So, again, I equals in, O equals out. Alt plus I resets the endpoint. Alt plus O resets the outpoint. All right, let me go ahead and drag redragra in our music track here. I'm going to go to the end of our video and then hit A to cut. Now, you notice here that I didn't actually have the song selected before I do that. If you don't have a particular file selected, when you go to make a cut, it will cut every single track. So, watch as I hit A, it's going to make a cut on everything. So, with that said, we just need to make sure we're intentional with our cuts now moving forward that we have multiple tracks and more than one thing happening. I'm going to hit Crl +-Z a couple times and then delete this back portion of the music. I'm going to bring my playhead all the way back to the beginning. And before I begin to preview what we have right now, you're probably already wagering that this is going to be too loud. Look at how big the waveforms are compared to our voice. If I were going to play this, the music is going to come in so stinking strong and loud that we're not going to be able to hear anything. So again, I have my audio over here lowered a little bit so that I don't blow out my eardrums, but I'm going to go ahead and hit play. So a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make is that they focus on and wow, can you sure hear the song now? Okay, so what volume level should our audio be? With my music track selected, I'm going to go ahead and look to the up right here to our inspector tab. Now remember, the inspector tab is what controls the video and audio properties. So if I were to click on a video track, go over to the inspector tab, and if yours isn't open, it's this upper right icon over here that says inspector on it on one of our video clips, I can go to the video tab, and we have all of our video properties, right? So we got the zoom, we've got the position, etc., etc. Going to click these little reset icons to reset that. When I click the audio track here, we don't have a video tab because there well there's no video, but we do have this very big and important slide over here called volume. We're not going to worry about any of these other intimidating looking things down here. We're just going to look at the volume. Now, you see here how it says zero. Well, that might not quite make sense because obviously we have sound. Our volume is not at uh zero. Well, what I'd like you to do is this. up in the upper right hand corner over here. Click the mixer icon. Now, I can't remember what the default opener is, but you might have one of two things. It might say mixer or meters. I would like us to just look at the meters. So, if you have the mixer on first open, go to these three dots right next to it and turn it on meters. Now, we have one single bar over here to the right. Now, it might be a bit hard to see, but at the very tip top of this bar, you see how it says zero? Most of the time when we're talking about audio, the way that it is produced is it's normalized on a tippy top max of zero. Anything that goes past zero peaks the audio and it's when you get that like real crunchy squealy noise. And so, what that basically means is that when we're working with audio, zero is the max. If we want to lower audio, we need to subtract and bring the audio down. So, if I were to bring my playhead all the way to the left and play this. Let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of. You see how we clip this zero mark, which means our music is going past this zero point, which is bad. We do not want that. So, again, how loud do we make our music? Well, let me open up my handy dandy, very official whiteboard. There are going to be three very general volume ranges that we can sit in depending on what we'd like to do. If we want our audio to be the primary driver of the video, meaning music video, a montage, the audio is the thing that is making the video happen. We can go anywhere from I would say minus 3 dB to minus 10 dB. What's decel? Well, a decibel is the unit of measurement here for our audio. So, when we're subtracting volume here, we are doing it in terms of decibb. So, it's not just a random floating number here. These are decibb. If we would like our audio to be complmentary, meaning something that is heard but isn't quite as loud as our primary audio, we're going to go anywhere from minus12 to I will go minus 21 dB. This volume range is definitely still going to be heard by the viewer, but it's not going to be in the way as much as when we're up in this range. If we want background music, so something that is not in the way, but can still fill in some of the dead spaces of our video, we're going to shoot for the minus30 dB range. We can go a little above and below this, but minus30 dB is going to be our happy space. So what I would like you guys to do is with our volume track selected you can either type in the inspector tab minus30 or hit +-z click and hold this property. So again I am left clicking and holding and drag this to the left until you hit minus30. Or what you can do, hit control- Z once, is go over to the music track itself in the timeline. And it's going to be a bit tricky to see, but there's this little floating white line right here. And when your mouse hovers over it, the icon changes to two up and down arrows. And you can drag the volume down directly on the timeline. Now, it's pretty fast when you do so. So, if you'd like to slow down how much it changes, we can hold down the shift key to add a little granularity when we're changing the volume. And now our music is going to sound like this. And I would recommend having headphones on because if you're on speakers, it might be a little difficult to hear the music. So, see how in moments like this where there's just little pauses between the things that are being said, the music kind of fills that gap. That's what we want. The music isn't the focus here. What I'm saying is the focus, and we want to make sure we're hearing what I'm saying. What I'd suggest doing in your own time is changing the audio level of the music track here and seeing how it affects your the understandability of what I'm saying. I'd also suggest changing where the music starts. Cuz if you remember, this section right in here is where the main beat of the song kicks in. And when I say kicks in, I I all I mean is that it's starting right there, right? where a lot of more of the instruments are coming into play. If I increase the volume level a little bit so I make sure I can hear the song — often is the overuse right it's right in here. — So what I can do is I can make a cut here on the music track exactly where the beat kicks in and then I can shift this point around to see how it affects the video. So if I wanted to I could actually have the beat kick in much closer to the beginning portion. So, I could drag this over to the left, grab the left handle, pull it over, grab the right handle, extend it, and then let's what happens if I were to leave this at minus 18, right? So, somewhere in between this -12 and minus 21 range. So you can still hear what's being said, but the music becomes a much bigger presence of the video. So again, experiment, play with these things, see what makes sense to you. Remember, the whole point of this section in particular, this course is to just experiment and figure out how things affect one another. So with that said, what I am going to do is I'm going to bring this down back to minus 30 because I would like this to be backing audio. Again, I'm holding down the shift key to fine-tune. It doesn't have to be exact. Minus 30. 27 is just fine. And now we're ready to move on. And would you look at that? I've got headphones on. So, we've got music down. Next thing is we're going to try to fine-tune our pacing. And the way that we're going to do that is with one of the most important editing techniques you will learn in this course and in your lifetime. Okay? And I'm talking about J and L cutting. If you're already familiar with this, fantastic. If not, one of the most common questions I get is, "How do I make smooth transitions or smooth cuts? " And there's a lot of different answers to that, but my go-to is teaching people how to do J and L cutting. So, what I'm going to do is show you a quick demonstration of what it is and then how we apply it to our own videos. Cool. Let's do it. This next bit is purely for demonstration. You guys do not have access to this footage. I would just like you guys to watch and follow along as I explain what a J and L cut is. We have two clips here. I have an airplane flying and an airplane landing. As is the transition from this left flying clip to the right landing clip is a standard cut. Sometimes this is called a jump cut. So if I were to hit play, it sounds and looks like this. Now, the transition as isn't awful, but we can apply a J and L cut to strengthen this transition. So, what I would like to do is I would like to preview this landing audio before we actually cut to the plane landing. And the way that we do that is as follows. Now, there is more than one way to do a JNL cut, but this is the simplest approach I have found. I'm going to take the left clip and drag it up one track. Oh, but let me get rid of this uh subtitle track real quick. I forgot I had that. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the landing clip and slide it underneath the other clip. Now, what's going to happen when I play this? Well, we are going to see the flying video all the way through to the end of the clip, but we're going to preview the audio before we transition to this scene. And that's going to look something like this. Now, this audio getting cut off abruptly makes this feel a tad bit jarring. So, what I'm going to do is on the music track, when I hover at the edge in the upper corners, and I can do this on any video, you'll see these little white tabs. If I grab that, I can fade out the audio. So, let me go ahead and replay that. As viewers, our mind is being primed for some kind of change that's happening in the next scene. We don't know what it is yet, but we're beginning to hear audio from something that's happening in the future. So now when we make this cut, this transition going from flying to landing, we're already primed in gear to see the plane landing. Again, if I were to go full screen, that's going to look and sound something like this. Isn't that pretty cool? It's much smoother than if we were to just go from A to B with nothing in between. Now, in traditional forms of editing, what this ends up looking like is something like this. I'll grab this video track up here. Pull it down. If we were to look at this cut point, we form a J. So, this is a J cut. A J cut in video editing is when we preview and lead in with audio from the upcoming scene. An L cut is the uh the opposite of this. So, if I were to hold down the Alt key and drag our cut point over here. So now what's going to happen is we're not going to preview the audio of the upcoming scene, but we're going to lead out with the audio from the previous scene. And that looks and sounds something like this. And again, if we were to look at this transition point, we have an L that forms here. When and where do we use JNL cuts? Well, let's go ahead and talk about that. So, we're now back on our main working timeline here with our music and our talking head footage. And what we're going to do is we're going to begin to introduce J and L cutting to help with the pacing of the video here. You don't have to follow along, but you can choose to if you'd like to. What I'm going to do is I'm going to drag and select these first two clips right here. And all I'd like to do is hit Ctrl + C, scrub my playhead ahead to any random point outside of our main working area, and hit Ctrl +V to paste them. So, Crl + C is copy. Crl +V is paste. I'm going to move my playhead over here. Hit D to zoom in. And then use my horizontal scroll wheel to bring these two things in. What I'd like us to do is to begin to string together these different sentences and thoughts so that it feels more cohesive because as is, there's noticeable gaps in between. So, if I were to play this, a lot of beginners make. So, a mistake that a lot of beginning again. So, a mistake that a lot of it is okay to have natural pauses and dialogue. However, we do want to keep things moving along. There shouldn't be a moment in the video where there is a hiccup, right? There's like a noticeable uh like a lull in the video. So, what we can do is drag up this left track, drag the right track, and pull it underneath where? Well, let me click my playhead here so I can zoom in. Remember how we were saying that after every sentence or break in words, there's a little tail, right? There's a little tail in the audio. And again, I'm hitting shift and the scroll wheel to expand my uh music tracks. We want to keep this audio tail because otherwise, if we cut it off, the audio will feel it'll feel cut off. So, what I like to do is try to line up the head or the beginning of the next audio phrase so that it sits somewhere on this tail. Where? Well, it's very dependent on the flow of the dialogue, but let's go ahead and play this as is. It's not bad. What if I were to bring it even further? So, a mistake that a lot of be little bit more punchy. It's sounding a little bit more intrusive. What if I were to bring it out a little bit? So, a mistake that a lot of beginning editors Interesting. So, where should you put it? I don't know. It's time for you to start making some decisions on how you want the pacing and the feeling of the video to sound. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring it forward just a little bit. So, if you were looking to imitate me, the head of this audio is sitting somewhere in the tail of this one. It's kind of a kind of middle point. So again, it's going to sound something like this. — About some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So a mistake that a lot of quick pop quiz. What kind of transition is this? Remember, we're leading in with the audio from the next scene before we're seeing it. Give you three seconds. J cut. This is a J cut. A J cut in particular is a very, very powerful tool when working with dialogue. It's how we can maintain the audio synctity of the previous clip while also pushing along what's being said next. From here, I'm going to show you two techniques that we can use to fine-tune this kind of transition, this cut, and then we'll begin applying it to our working timeline. Through this next section, we're going to apply our JNL cutting and end up with a close to final version of our edit. as is. This is where the video portion, the visual portion transitions from this clip to this clip. Well, what if I would like the video to start here, right? So, I'd like it to start on this peak of the audio wave right here. There's two ways that we can go about doing this. The first is to use the alt key to select just the video track. The alt key is a modifier inside Da Vinci Resolve or it would be the option key if you're in Mac. When we're editing, if we only want to select just the audio or just the video of a given video and audio clip, we can use the alt key to select one of those. So, with just the video selected, I can grab that right end and pull it in. Or what you can do is you don't even have to select the video track with just the alt key. You can hold down the alt key and drag just the end of it. because if not, if I were to select both the video and audio, we're going to again we're gaining back in that territory. We're cutting off the audio tail. So, alt key, drag and select the right end. The alternative to this, so I'm going to hit control-z. And I'm not as big of a fan of this workflow, but if it makes sense to you, go ahead. I'm going to hold down the alt key and click just the video track again. Right? So, I'm just want the video track. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag it down so that they're both on the same track. And now what we can do is grab the transition point and pull it over forming that more traditional J. So that looks and sounds like this. So a mistake that a lot of beginning editors make is There we go. Now let's go apply this to our timeline to improve the pacing of our video. I'm going to hit S to zoom out. Shift and scroll wheel to make things a little bit more condensed. I'm going to get rid of these two practice clips by dragging selecting them and hitting F or the backspace key to get rid of them. Now, back to the beginning. D to zoom in. I'm going to begin to work with just our A-roll here, our talking head footage. While we're doing that, there might be moments where I go to cut and we accidentally cut our music track, which we don't want to do. I I'd like to leave our music track alone as is. So, what we can do is this. Go ahead and direct your eyes over to the left over here. You might have noticed that each track has a few little icons next to it. Each of these serves a very useful purpose. For example, if I wanted to mute the audio on this first track, what I can do is I can click the M button. And now we only hear the background audio. Let me uncheck that real quick. What if we've got 10 different audio tracks and we only want to hear this third one? Well, the button right next to it is called solo because we will solo that track. Pretty nifty, right? You can also drag and hold down to select multiple tracks at one time. So, if I want to unmute and mute all three tracks, I can drag and select up and down. The icon next to that is the sync lock, which we're not going to address quite yet. But the final one is this lock icon. And when we click that, it locks this track from any changes and adjustments. So, if I were to hit A, I cannot cut the music track and I can't move it either. So, if we were to begin ripple deleting here, this track is locked in place for all adjustments. So, with the music track lock, let's go back to the beginning of our footage here and let's begin to do some J cutting. Here's my workflow. Anytime I'm transitioning from this clip to this clip, I will either drag the clip up so that I can begin to adjust the timings of the following clip or I will go to the end and make an arbitrary cut on the tail portion. Could be here, could be here. Doesn't matter. I just need a chunk that I can bring up one level so that way I can grab this clip and slide it underneath. Here we mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So, a mistake that a lot of beginning editors Hey, let's talk about some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So, a mistake that a lot of beginning edit ah problem we didn't move everything else over. Well, couple solutions. For one, we could drag and select all the footage over here and pull it over. For two, uh we could go to this little gap in here, hit F to ripple delete. Or what we can begin doing is using a new keyboard shortcut. And for us, if you've downloaded my shortcuts, that button is E. E selects everything to the right of the playhead. So if I were to select E, I can pull everything over to the left. If you are using the default keyboard, that button is going to be alt + Y or option plus Y. So now what we're going to do is we're going to continue to clean up the timeline and improve the pacing. I'm looking to string sentences together. So what I do is something like this. Click towards the end. Hit play of the edit over the story of the edit. One more time. Okay. Zoom in. I can probably get rid of this portion right here. Make a cut. F. So that I'm still seeing the tail. And again, it might be hard to see on your guys' end, but I can see a little tail here. Make a cut on the tail portion. Pull it up. Go to the right. And now I'm going to press E to select everything so that when I pull this next clip underneath, I'm grabbing everything. And it's just somewhere arbitrary the edit over the story of the edit when we're talking about what perfect that sounds pretty good to me in my mind I'm just trying to line up head to tail somewhere in there again go over here not what kind of effects you can include something else a lot of beginning hold this up E slide this underneath do you have to do this for every single cut no of course not if I were to hit control- Z a couple times I could just snip off this little bit here so that We're starting right at the beginning of the dialogue. So I could hit a F. So I'm really close to being right at the beginning. What kind of effects you can include something else a lot of beginning and I think that works perfectly fine as well. Again, no right answer here. The thing that we're trying to do is just make better choices. Let's go ahead and hit play. — Editors do often is the overuse of pre-builtin transitions. Perfect. A cut. Another thing you could think about doing is in between these pauses here if you want to make things a little bit tighter. See how there's a little bit of a delay in transitions until you're more comfortable. You could even think about making a J cut here, but I'm going to leave it alone as is using some of those presets. The audio. Do we need a J cut in between here and here? I don't know. And one of the last things I think as is it feels a little bit it's pretty natural talk about focusing on the audio of the video. The audio of the here I do want to make a little J cut. Why? Because I just feel like I kind of want this to punch in sooner. A cut the tail off. Drag up E to select everything to the right. Pull it in about is focusing on the audio of the video. Hope this helps. And make a little cut here. F. I think one of the big reasons why I like J cutting like this is because there's an element of forgiveness to the edit. If you don't want to do this and if you want to make sure that the uh the beginning of this clip starts right at the beginning of the dial dialogue every time, well, you got to be pretty precise there. you need to bring your playhead right to that point right before the dialogue begins. Well, if I do JNL cutting, well, what I can do is I can just grab the tail here and then just pull this in somewhere relatively close so that it feels somewhat smooth. But you notice how I'm not grabbing the ends here or grabbing the ends here. I'm just moving things to where it feels okay video. Perfect. I think we can actually cut it right there. And there's one last step. Our music carries on without any of the video. So, we need to trim the end of our music here. I'm going to go all the way over to the track three, unlock it, and then pull in the end of our music. And now we're sitting at 44 seconds. And this is what our video looks and sounds like. you should edit a video, I'd avoid using some of those presets. Very nice crew. We're getting close to wrapping up this project. All right, so we've got a pretty decent cut of our video now. We've got music. Our video is paced decently well. Our next step is going to be to add in some visuals, some of the B-roll, because for the entire video, we are looking at one camera angle and one perspective. It is just me looking right at you in the camera. So, let's add in some visual to add a little variety to uh help kind of smooth things along on the spectacle of the edit over the story of the edit. So, I think right in here when I'm talking about not focusing on the spectacle and instead focusing on the message of the story, we can introduce some B-roll probably right here on this cut. So, again, that's right in here. Editors make is that they focus on the spectacle of the edit over the story of the edit when we're talking about what Yeah, I think right in here we can introduce some B-roll. So, up in our media pool, I'm going to locate the B-roll folder, which is under our video folder. I'm going to click here, and I've given us five videos that we can use. Wow. So, how do we know what to use and uh where to put it? Well, again, there's a few ways that we can go about doing this. We can always just individually preview our video by double clicking on it. And then we can kind of sort through and familiarize ourselves with what's being going on. So, it looks like we got some snow footage here. And I think my intent with this was to show you guys that in our main working section, I'm talking about how it's more important to show the story over spectacle. And so what I'd like to do is make a little mini story of the skiers in here and the mountains and this imagery as opposed to this first video up top here where I've just got some random moving snowboards. Now, here's a cool little trick and workflow technique that I'd like you guys to get the hang of. So, as is, I am much more familiar with the footage than you guys because I picked it out. So, if you're somebody who's been given a bunch of footage, it's going to be pretty slow to individually click through everything to preview what the heck is going on in here. So, as always, there's a few techniques to do this, but one of the most straightforward ways is to do this. drag and select all of your footage in the media pool. Or you can hit Ctrl+ A to select everything in your uh B-roll folder or your B-roll bin, excuse me. Right click and the very top option for me says create new timeline using selected clips. Now, before I click that, remember what is a timeline? Well, we've been working on our main timeline. We've got one timeline right now. Well, in good old Da Vinci Resolve, we can create multiple timelines to be working with multiple things all at once. So, if I again, if I drag and select this footage, rightclick, create new timeline using selected clips, we can create a new timeline. And remember how we set up our project settings over here? Well, now again, everything's all set up. So, we don't need to go uncheck this and double check to make sure format and all that is all set up. We just use our project settings. And I'm going to rename this new timeline. We'll just keep it simple for now. B roll or BC roll. Hit create. Now earlier on I turned on this tabbed option over here so that I can see both my main timeline and my B-roll timeline. If you don't have that or you would like to now toggle this on, remember it's this little icon up over top here. Click that and you want display stacked timelines. That'll let you toggle between our main timeline and our B-roll timeline. And now if I hit S to zoom out, we can see all of our footage at a glance. Very cool. Very cool. So, I'm going to tidy up our media pool really quick. Uh because we have a timelines folder. Remember, this is where our main timeline is at. So, in the B-roll folder, it generates our timeline, which is indicated by this little, it's pretty small, but it's this little uh timeline icon in the bottom left corner. I'm going to take that and drag and put it in our timelines bin. So, now when I click the timelines folder, I can see both of our working timelines here. So, I'm going to toggle over to the main timeline, hit play because I'm trying to remember where we wanted to insert some footage. When we're right here, I think I want to introduce some other video right here. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring my playhead here. Click anywhere in the empty space. Make sure footage is not selected. And I'm going to hit the M key. And what that does is it adds a marker on our timeline here so that we can remember where to put our footage. So that way you don't have to have perfect memorization skills. If you don't want to use M, there's always the marker icon up above here in our little editing toolbar. So let's find something that seems like it might fit. We're looking for something that doesn't have spectacle. might have a story behind it, maybe some character. Where my head goes are to these two skier clips right in here. So I think what I'd like to do is take this clip and bring it over into our main timeline. And now, can you guess what I'm about to say? There's a few ways that we can do this. What I will say, and the wrong way to do this is this. Clicking on this clip, hitting Ctrl + C to copy it, going back to the main timeline, and then pasting it on the marker. That is going to overwrite everything that we've already laid out because we're pasting it here on the first track. So, how do we not do that? Well, let me hit Z. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how I would do this and then introduce different methods that might fit your own workflow. For me, uh, what I would probably do is this. I would drag it up one track and one more track. So that way it's already on the third track. I would hit Ctrl + C to copy it, go over to the main timeline, hit Ctrl +V to paste, and it's going to paste it here on our third track. So now we have our footage separated, ready to go. Alternatively, what I might do, so I'm going to hit backspace here to delete that, is I would look to bring it in from our media pool. Now, depending on the amount of footage you have, it might be easy to find this footage or it might be difficult. If you're struggling to find this clip, well, what you can do is on your B-roll timeline, click the footage that you'd like to locate. Make sure your playhead is over that footage. And then, if you're using my keyboard shortcuts, we would hit alt F. You'll see it highlights it here in our media pool. And now what I can do if I go back to my main timeline here now that I know where my footage is at, I would drag it on down into the timeline. So those two methods are commonly what I do. Let me show you a couple other options that might make a little bit more sense to you. Let me hit backspace here. So again, what I did is I brought this up to the track that I'd like it to be on. Hit Ctrl + C and then Ctrl +V to paste it here. Or I would locate it in my media pool and then drag and insert it down. Now, if you don't want to bring it up to a third track every time you want to copy and paste something from one timeline to another, what you can do is this, and this is kind of a fun one. In the upper right hand corner of our timeline uh working area, there's this little plus icon right here. See it? It's got a little plus with the window pane. If I click that, whoa. It splits our timeline viewer into two timeline viewers. Now, this might be a little advanced, but what we can do is close our B-roll timeline there and open it down here. And if I use shift and the scroll wheel to shrink things and reposition my timelines so that I can see both, well, now I have two working timelines at the same time. This is a very powerful technique. You will probably need to have an okay computer in order to do this. But now what I can do is instead of tabing between the two, I can just click this one clip, hit Ctrl + C, click up to this timeline, and again hit Ctrl +V. But again, remember that I brought this up to track three so that it pasted over on track three. I'm going to control Z to undo that. And you can actually split your timeline workspace into as many times as you want. I would I'd probably caution doing over more than two. And if you would like to close a certain window, again over in the right over here, there's an X icon now so that I can close that. If I'd like to reopen that B-roll timeline, well, I just need to go to my timelines folder and open up the B-roll timeline. Shift and the scroll wheel to expand these back out so that it's a little bit more visible. And let me go back to the main timeline here. Now, the last option, and this is more of a professional technique, but I'd like to show you just so that you're aware of it. go to my B-roll folder here, find that BCAR 2 footage that I like to use. And there's a set of icons over here in our editing toolbar that are designed to insert footage from our media pool. So, we've got this first one here that says insert clip, overwrite, and replace clip. We're going to avoid using the replace clip for now, but if I were to look at these first two, insert and overwrite. If I were to click this footage here and then click the insert option, you can see that it inserts it where my playhead was at. So again, Ctrl +-Z to undo, control shift Z to redo, see how it inserts and shifts everything around. If I were to click this other button here, overwrite clip, well, instead of inserting it and shifting everything around, it completely squashes everything underneath it. So, how do we make this button work so that it goes over here on track three? Well, let me hit control-z. Done. Do that. Over here on our video tracks, we've got a few icons just like the audio tracks when we covered there. All the way over to the left, there's this little blue V1 icon. Now, depending on what version of Da Vinci Resolve you're on, this might look a little bit different. If you're on an older version, it might be a red rectangled outlined V1, but wherever this lives is where my footage gets inserted when I click that icon. So, if I bring it up to video track three and hit the overwrite button, now our video gets inserted on track three. If you choose to do this, you just need to be conscious of where this button lives. But now we have our B-roll, and we can begin to add the rest of our footage to fill out this talking head portion. Let's continue to carry on with adding in the rest of our B-roll. And we're also going to finally take a look at that effects tab and some video transitions. So, let's go ahead and hit play. When we're talking about what really matters the most at the end of the day, it's the message being told in the video, not what kind of effects you, not what kind of effects you can do. [clears throat] So, I'd like to insert our snowboard scene right here, right on the peak of my audio. A to cut this B-roll footage. Backspace to delete. I'm going to go up top to our media pool here because I know what footage I'm looking for. There's no need for me to tab over the timeline. I'mma drag and select and drop in that footage. Perfect. Let's carry on. When we're talking about what really matters the message being told in the video, not what kind of effects you can include. Okay, so something else beginner editors do is use pre-builtin transitions. I think we're going to need to introduce some more footage in here. But where where do we insert it? Well, what feels right? Where is there a natural lull to where we can insert a change in scenery effects you can include? Something else a lot of beginning editors do often is the over I think it's right in there. Something a lot of beginner editors do often something else a lot of beginning editors do often is right in there. This is when I like to have audio scrubbing turned on. Remember that's in the timeline settings. audio audio scrubbing because then I can kind of fine-tune editors do right where I begin to start the next sentence. So, I'm going to hit A to make a cut on our motion graphics video here. So, that way I have a natural cut point to insert new footage. Or another option again is I could just click somewhere in the timeline and hit M to add a marker. So, I think what I'd like to do here is use similar footage to highlight the use of transitions. So, if I go back to my B-roll timeline here, I've got two wide-angle shots of mountains and trees and mountains and trees. So, I'm go back to my main timeline here. I'm going to go over and just find one of these clips. I don't think it really matters which one and begin to drag and drop it in on that cut point. Go ahead and hit play. editors do often is the overuse of pre-builtin transitions until you're more comfortable with how you should edit a video. And one of the last things I want I'd avoid using some of those presets. Avoid using some of those pres Now, what do I mean by presets? What are preset transitions? Well, let me show you. Let me go ahead and hit A to cut here. And let's drag in that second clip. Depending on which one you use, use the other version. So, I'm going to go ahead and drag and drop this in. And hm, we got a little bit of a problem here. It looks like this video file has video and audio. So, when I drag and insert it, the audio is kind of cutting off and overwriting the video. Well, I don't want that. So, how do we address this? Well, let me hit Ctrl +-Z to undo all that. If I want to bring in just the video for my media pool, well, I can doubleclick here on the media pool to preview it. And then there's two icons. There's a video and an audio icon. Well, I can just grab the video icon to bring in just the video. Alternatively, and this is the method I prefer to do, let me hit control-z. I can just hold down the alt key to bring in just the video portion. If you would like just the audio portion, so let me hit control-z. You can hold down the shift key to bring in just the audio. So alt is video, shift is audio. So, if I want to bring in just the video, I'm going to hold down the alt key and drag and insert our footage right there. So, now we go from here, how you should edit a video, I'd avoid using some of those presets. And one of the last things I to there, right on presets. So, what is a preset transition? Well, you'll notice to this point that we have not used any of them. The only technique that we've been using to cut up our video is that we've been cutting the video. And that has been a very intentional decision on my part. You see, when a lot of people first begin to learn how to edit, there's a reliance on extras. And that can be effects and transitions that do flashy things. And there is a time and a place to use some of these effects and transitions cuz I mean they are in Da Vinci Resolve for a reason. But if you don't understand why to use them some of them, then what ends up happening is your video tends to look pretty cheesy or pretty amateur. So, let me show you what I mean. If I were to go and bring my mouse all the way to the upper left here, for the most part, we've been sticking right with the media pool, but there is a nice little tab to the right of it called effects. If I were to click on the effects tab, voila, we have our effects. Now, we will cover more of these effects as we go on, but you can see that we have video transitions. We've got titles for text that we can add in. We've got generators for different kinds of colors that we can add in along with some of Resolve's built-in effects like uh some blurs. Well, there's a tab all the way at the top here called video transitions. And the video transitions tab is a very, very dangerous place to go when you're first starting out. And it's for the reasons previously stated. If I were to scroll down here, we've got a bunch. We've got some dissolves. We've got some shape transitions. And if I hover my mouse over it, we can begin to preview what they do. Splits, slides, boxes. You can kind of go ahead and experiment with all of them. If I wanted to add one into our video, what I would do is I would go to that transition. So, I'll just do the arrow iris transition. Drag and select it. And what you're going to look to do is apply it to the cut point of the video. So right here and now when I hit play it will apply that transition to avoid using some of those presets and one of the last things. So there you go. Now like I said does having a random arrow mask dissolve transition presets and one of the does that make sense? It's the point I'm emphasizing in the actual talking head here. And what I'd like you guys to remember is that I would only use this kind of transition when there's some motivation behind it. And if you cannot answer what is motivating the use of it, then don't use it. Again, I tend to find that it hurts the video more than it helps it. Now, something that you might have noticed is that I can't adjust the transition to be on the left side of the video. Well, that is because whenever we add transitions into videos, it has to use frames from the previous clip. Oh, let me go ahead and turn off my audio scrubbing. It has to use frames from the previous video and the next video. So, if it's only on the right, that means that it has frames from this video to transition from. But because I inserted the video at the very beginning, right? So, this is the very beginning of this video file. Well, what frame should it use to transition over here? It can't. We don't have negative frames. This is the beginning. So, if we would like to transition in the middle or even have this on the left, well, we need to give it some frames to use. And what I mean by that is this. I'm going to click on the transition itself and hit the backspace key to get rid of it. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut ahead and pull it over. So that way it's not starting on the first frame. So watch this. If I cut here and drag it over to the left, if you look at where my mouse is at, I have cut off a second and 20 frames. Go ahead and release. So now if I were to go and add in another one of these transitions. So let's use something a little bit more abstract. Let's use the block glitch. Now I can insert it on the middle. And in fact, if I grab this handle, I can pull it out exactly 1 second and 20 frames. But just know that in order to use one of these pre-builtin transitions, you need to have frames before and after the previous and following clip because otherwise it's got nothing to pull from to use the transition. All right, so let's go ahead and continue to play with how you should edit a video. I did avoid using some of those presets. And one of the last again, doesn't that I just I can't say it enough. Whenever I see something like this, like a random glitch transition, it just it doesn't make sense to me. How you should edit a video, I'd avoid using some of those presets. The a perfect. So now we are about to begin talking about a different subject matter. So, I don't think it makes sense to continue on with the lessons that we were showing before with the snow. So, actually, let me first get rid of this uh extra B-roll over here. Hit backspace to get rid of it. And so, I'm going to bring in the edge of our B-roll so that it ends right when this new section begins. So, now we go like this. Avoid using some of those presets. The audio of the video accounts for 50%. Perfect. And now we have successfully introduced B-roll into our video. Is this the best use of B-roll? I don't know. Maybe there's a section here where we begin to talk about using audio more, right? So, is there some form of B-roll that we could use here? Maybe. Maybe there's something online or maybe you can make something that fits here. Again, these are decisions as editors we need to start thinking about as we're forming our videos. And we've got one last step before finally rendering out our project. and we'll make it a short one because we'll kind of expand on it later. But we're going to introduce sound effects. Now, sound effects I'd like to introduce now because understanding sound effects and how to sound design your videos is as important, if not more important than the video edit. I will say it again, understanding how to do sound design becomes more important than the video edit often. However, for this video, it's a pretty straightforward edit, so we probably don't need a ton of sound effects in the video. Now, if you are still in the effects tab over here in the upper lefthand corner, go ahead and head on back over to the media pool. I'd like you to locate your audio folder and then the sound effects or SFX folder. And we've got three that we can play around with. We've got a ding. Ah, very nice. We've got a riser, very nice, as well, and a swoosh. These three sound effects will probably be some of the more common categories that you'll use when you're editing. The ding might be considered an impact, and while it's not exactly a thud, it hits and then trails off. A riser is a tensionbuilding tool. We have a slow build of audio that ends abruptly. So, we've got hits and impacts, risers, and then swooshes. Swooshes and whooshes are very common when it comes to highlighting movement and scene changes. But, we don't have a lot of movement here in this video. I don't know if I need to add some swooshes when my head is turning. All I'd like us to do is this. Let me go ahead and play this real quick. So, a mistake that a lot right here, when we're about to begin the conversation point, I would like a little bit of a oomph, a little cube that says, "Hey, we're going to talk about video editing. " So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag down the ding to track four. And I'm going to try to line it up right here. I would like the ding, so the beginning of this ding to start right when the video transitions. Now, we can move our playhead one frame at a time using the left and right arrow keys, remember? And then I could drag this over to line up with our playhead. Or we can use another little keyboard shortcut, which is the comma key and the period key. Comma will shift a clip one frame to the left, period right. And so, we can fine-tune this to kind of sit exactly where we would like. So, let's go ahead and uh let's play that. So, a mistake that a lot of Uh oh. Problems. If you don't have headphones on, you might not have heard it, but if you did, you probably noticed that this ding only comes in on the left headphone. Well, uh, why mistakes that a lot of beginners make? So, a mistake that a lot of What happened here? What did we do something wrong? No, not exactly. When you're given audio files, there will be two very common formats for it. There is mono and stereo. Now stereo files are audio that get output to both the left and right output of your speakers or your headphones. However you are monitoring your audio. So inside that audio file there is a left and a right audio track. This is how music can pan between the left and right headphone. An audio file that has a mono format has one singular audio output. There is no left or right. So if our ding is mono, why are we only hearing it in the left headphone? Well, if I go back to Da Vinci Resolve and I hover over our audio track here, right where this 2. 0 is, you see how it says stereo? That's because this audio track is formatted for a stereo audio file. So, what Da Vinci is trying to do is output our audio file to a left and right headphone, but it only has one audio track. So, it's only going to the left headphone. So, there's two ways that we can correct it. The easiest way is to just change this track to be mono. And the way that we do that is we rightclick, change track type to mono. And you'll know if you had done it right if you get a 1. 0 over here. And now, if we were to play it, it should hit both. some editing mistakes that a lot of beginners make. So, a mistake that a lot of There we go. Loud and proud. Both earphones. If for whatever reason you don't want to change the track type, there is a quick fix as well that's a little bit more convoluted, but I will show you. I'm So, I'm going to change this back to stereo. You can also rightclick on whatever audio clip that you'd like to change and go to clip attributes. And over here on our audio tab, you can see that it's formatted for mono over here. Well, this is a stereo track type. So, what we would need to do is change the format to stereo. And you see here's the problem. We've got nothing going in our right headphone here. So, what we would do is click here and feed in that first channel. Either or works. It's probably going to be easier though to just change this track type to mono. Now, it's a bit loud. Uh, I'd probably like it to sit maybe we'll go down to like minus 10. Let's try that. So, a mistake that a lot of beg Perfect. And I think that's a nice little cue that the video is about to begin. And if I were to zoom out on our timeline, look what we did, guys. We made a video edit, which means it's time to render or save this final version of our video. All righty, crew. We are ready to deliver our video. Before you do, I recommend on any video edit playing back the video in its entirety on the timeline one more time. It is good to double check to make sure there's no weirdness, there's no irregularities. So, let's go ahead and do that. Now, you can either play it back with the timeline still in frame or if you'd like to full screen the entire thing. The shortcut for that is P. And now we can hit spacebar to play. Nicely done, everybody. Let's go ahead and save this sucker. We're going to venture over into a new page in Da Vinci Resolve. Look in the bottom right here. We're going to go to the deliver page. And just like every other page in this program, it may feel intimidating at first, but I promise we're going to click all of two buttons. What I'd like you to do is go ahead and direct your attention over this left column here. These are our render settings. Now, I am not a Kodak expert. I don't have a master's degree in bit rate. So, when I look over here, we got a lot of settings that we can choose. So, what do we need to do? Well, I have good news for you. If you go up top here to this upper column, we go to the right, we have a bunch of presets for us ready to go. Now, I might spend a little bit of time in the future talking over some of these settings and which ones might matter to you moving forward, but what I'd like us to do to keep things nice and simple is to scroll on over to the right here. And we're just going to click the YouTube 1080p preset. And that's going to simplify life for us a good bit. Double check to make sure the resolution is 1920 x 1080 cuz that's the timeline that we're on. By default, it should say timeline frame rate. If it doesn't, make sure it's set to 30. And the format, uh, the format, the format. Now, the YouTube preset limits this to MP4 and QuickTime. QuickTime will render to AOV file. The difference between QuickTime and MP4 really is not that much. So, what I'd like you to do is go to MP4 and make sure that your video codec is set to H. 264. Again, do not stress about the rest of these settings. We'll cover them in future videos. The next thing that we need to do is choose where we'd like to save it. I'm gonna go ahead and save it to my desktop so that I can find it. And then we just need to name it. I'm gonna name ours Bol class project one. Running your own laptop class project one. And at the very bottom down here, there's a button that says add to render queue. Now, before we actually render, one thing I'd like you to double check is that on your timeline, so the same controls apply over here on the deliver page. So I can hit shift and the scroll wheel to change the zoom level. Bring this up. Make sure that the in and out point are set to your video's in andout point. Sometimes if you've got footage hanging out over here, it's going to try to render the entire timeline. So again, O is out, I is in. Make sure we're rendering the proper section here. And if that all looks good, go ahead and go to the bottom left here and add to render Q. And then we're going to click render all. But we are not quite done yet because you need to submit the video in order to receive credit for the course. So to do that, what I'm going to recommend everybody do is use YouTube. If you don't use YouTube, totally fine. Remember, you can use something like Vimeo, Behance, any other streaming or portfolio service. But a quick reminder, please do not use a Google Drive or a Dropbox link or anything where we're going to have to actually download the video file to review it. It's okay if you accidentally goof up and do that, but just know that in order to receive credit, we're going to need some kind of streaming link. The example that I'm going to use to demonstrate this with is going to be YouTube. Again, totally okay to use something else, but you're just going to have to figure it out on your own. I'd wager the majority of us all have a YouTube account or a Google account, but to not make assumptions, I'm going to go ahead and walk through the entire process. You will need to go to youtube. com. That is step one. If you don't already have an account, you're going to need to create one. So, depending on the current YouTube layout, there will probably be an option in the upper right-hand corner that says sign in. From there, you can either log into your existing Gmail account or create a new one. Once you've all signed in and created an account, go ahead and move to the upper right hand corner where your profile icon is. Go ahead and click that icon and you're going to want to go to YouTube Studio. I may have a few more options than you here, but what you're going to want to locate is YouTube Studio. Now, again, depending on the current iteration of the YouTube Studio user interface, this icon might be moved around, but we're going to want to locate the create icon. We've got a few options here. We're going to go with upload videos. That'll give us this big old prompt to locate our video file. So, you can either go to your desktop or wherever you saved it, drag and drop the file on, or hit the button in the middle and hit select files. From there, locate wherever you have rendered and saved this file and hit open. And that'll begin the upload process of this video. And there's only going to be a couple things we need to change here. And then we are good to go. For one, we should probably rename this to be class project one and then whatever your name is. Once you've done that, there's two important settings that we need to remember. On YouTube, for any video you upload, it asks if it's kid appropriate. Now, our video is kid-friendly, right? But what this is really asking is, is this video safe and marketable for kids? So, just be aware in the future if you were ever to publish videos unless you are specifically making educational content for children, we're going to check no. This doesn't give it a PG-13 or an R rating. This just says, hey, don't market this video to kids on YouTube. Once that's all said and done, hit next, next, next until you get to the visibility page. And by default, it should say unlisted. This is what we want. Again, unlisted. Do not set this to private. And unless you want this to be public, don't hit public. All unlisted means is that this video is hidden. It's hidden. Nobody can find this on the internet unless you have the link, which is what we do want. Double check. unlisted, not private, not public, unlisted. And then if you click these two rectangles over here, it will copy the video link for you. And then hit save. And that will save this video to your YouTube studio. If for whatever reason you lose the link, do not stress. It's very easy to find. Just make sure you're in again your YouTube studio. You can't be on the YouTube homepage. And then go over to content. This will list all of the videos that you've uploaded to your YouTube studio. And again, ours says unlisted here, which is what we want. And if you need that sharable link, there's these three dots right here that you can click and it says get sharable link. And then again, we'll copy the link to your clipboard. Once you have that sharable link from YouTube or Vimeo or wherever, go ahead and go to the course project sections in the assignment section and paste it there and submit it. Congratulations, friends. You guys have rendered your very first video inside Da Vinci Resolve. You are no longer a beginner. You officially have your legs underneath you inside Da Vinci Resolve. So the question is, what are you hoping to learn? We covered the basics. We've covered the fundamentals. We've laid our foundation. So what's the next step for you going to look like? Please let us know in the comments so that we can tailor some more content towards you and your specific want and needs. But if you do like this video, an even better way to let us know that you want more Dinci Resolve is to like the video, comment, subscribe. The more interactions, the better sign it is that you want more Da Vinci stuff. And if you do want to continue your journey, I have great news for you. The full course is live. The Da Vinci Resolve Essentials course is live on the Bring Your Old Laptop website. Go check it out. We cover some more techniques. We cover the color page. We color fusion, which is my favorite page. So, if you want to continue your journey, go check out Bring Your Old Laptop where we have the Da Vinci Resolve Essentials course along with a ton of other resources. I'm currently taking the Blender course, which I'm really excited about. So, thank you all for tuning into the video and until next time, I'll see you all later. Peace.