1 May 2022

DaVinci Resolve: Tips, Workflows, Keyboard Shortcuts

I started using DaVinci Resolve for all sorts of post production work (editing, sound, color) in 2020.

My usage is a bit sporadic, and I often need to re-remember how to do things, so I started making a search index of tips, tricks, keyboard shortcuts, and workflows here.

General
- TEST RENDER (frame rate, audio)
- Open Questions
Editing
Organizing and Importing Media
Sound
Color Grading
Multiuser
- Use an ec2 Postgres DB for Cloud Multiuser

General

TEST RENDER (frame rate, audio)

Try a test export early on to make sure frame rate and sound are OK!

Open Questions

…

Editing

Play a Portion of the Timeline on Loop

Mark In and Out on Timeline
Click the Loop arrow below the Viewer (so it’s red)
Choose Playback › Play Around/To › Play In to Out ( ⌥+/ )
To clear the loop, you can use shortcut ⌥+x

Dual Viewer Mode on Edit Page

To load a clip into the (left) Source Viewer, select the clip, hit Enter on it, and it will load the clip with the frame under the playhead

Punch In / Crop in Post

Use an Adjustment Clip › Transform and set Zoom to something greater than 1 and then center the frame to your liking using the Position X / Y

Animate Anything (eg, Camera Tracking) with Video Keyframes

You can animate all sorts of things (text animations, video transforms) over time using the diamond controls to the right of each attribute in the Video Inspector tab
Say, for example, you want to animate camera tracking after Zooming a shot. Add an Adjustment Layer over the clip, move the Playhead to the final frame of the clip, and on the Adjustment Layer Video Inspector, you might set:
- Dynamic Zoom = 1.5
- Anchor Point: X = -860.0
- click the diamond next to Anchor Point - it will turn red
Move the Playhead to the first frame of the clip, click the diamond next to Anchor Point again, and set X = 0.0
This will track linearly over time from right to left over the duration of the clip

View and Delete Video (Fusion) Keyframes for Adjustment Clips

After you’ve added keyframes to animate something in an Adjustment Layer you can navigate between them using the left / right chevrons next to the red diamond icon, but if you want to view all the keyframes (or delete one altogether), click the diamond icon at the bottom right of the Adjustment Layer clip to open a track below the clip that shows the various keyframes. Click one of these, it will select / turn red, and you can delete it:

Cross Dissolve (Fade in / out video)

Drag from Effects › Video Transitions › Cross Dissolve onto a clip to dissolve it in.
Another thing that might cause choppiness is insufficient disk space. I use Daisy Disk to quickly view disk usage, and recently when I had a choppiness problem, I opened my external drive in Daisy Disk and noticed a huge amount of space was marked has hidden space, so I emptied Trash on my Mac while the disk was attached and this cleaned up some of that space.

Editor Choppiness

Setting Project Settings › Timeline Resolution to 720p solved a lot of choppiness issues.

Render in Place…

If something is real choppy and you’re pretty sure you’re not gonna change it a lot, you can right click and Render in Place...
If you need to undo this later, right click and Decompose to Original

Improve Choppy Slow Motion with Frame Interpolation (when you didn’t capture at a high enough framerate)

On the Clip Inspector, set:
- In Retime and Scaling:
  - Retime Process = Optical Flow
  - Motion Estimation = Speed Warp
- In Speed Change:
  - Ripple Timeline = On (this will increase the clip duration as you slow it down)
  - Speed % = something < 100
NB: this may be choppy in the DaVinci Resolve preview.
- Try a test export to see how it looks
- You can also set Playback › Render Cache = Smart to improve the playback within Resolve
- OR, right click the clip and Render in Place...

Copy and Paste Clip Attributes

Select a source clip, cmd+c to Copy
Select all target clips, alt+v to Paste Attributes

Paste Insert at Playhead

Cut the clip you want to insert
Move Playhead, hit cmd+shift+v
NB: if your Playhead is in the middle of a clip (vs between two clips), it will split the clip in two to do the insert

Paste into Any Track

By default, if you cut a clip from Track n in Resolve, it will paste back into the same track (n)
To paste to any track
- turn off Auto Track Selector for all tracks by shift+click-ing the Auto Track Selector icon to the left of the timeline
- turn on Auto Track Selector by clicking the track you want to paste into
- paste
- turn back on Auto Track Selector for all tracks by shift+click-ing the Auto Track Selector on any track again
via Jason Yadlovskihttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D535CC4ObJo)

Delete a Gap on the Timeline

Select the gap by clicking it on the timeline. It will turn darker grey.
Hit backspace

Organizing and Importing Media

Search Text of Markers with Edit Index

You can access all the the text from the markers in the Edit Index view of the left pane of the Edit mode. Search the text with the Filter (magnifying glass) button.
- NB: You may need to change the Filter by to All Fields.

Organizing Media Links

Editing A Documentary - Workflow Organization & Project Setup in DaVinci Resolve. From a doc editor (with tons of footage).
- bins for media from each shoot day: day-01, day-02, …
- bin for timelines
- timelines for stringouts: footage from each day, ordered by timecode, so you can easily scrub through the entire day
  - NB: when you have multiple clips selected in a bin and add them to a timeline, the timeline order seems to be dictated by the column you are sorting by in the media panel
- timelines for selects: copy each day’s stringout timeline, annotate good stuff, remove the bad stuff
- likewise, making an outtakes timeline early on is a useful thing to do so you can just throw stuff there as you come across it.
DaVinci Resolve 17 Edit Training - Introduction to Editing Part 1. Video from Blackmagic on organizing and inserting clips in different timeline modes.

Use no-op Adjustment Clips as Annotations

via HOW TO STAY ORGANIZED WHILE EDITING - DaVinci Resolve Video Editing Tutorial.
- This guy uses Adjustment Clips as notes. Select the Adjustment Clip, open Inspector, choose File, set Name to something human readable

Automatically Set Reel Names from File Pathname

Under Project Settings › General Options check Assist using reel names from the: Source clip file pathname
- I used /live-video/%R/ to get a reel for each day, eg day-01, day-02, etc
- This is useful in case you want to isolate the reel as a variable, eg, to make a Smart Bin or to use in the Clip Name

Set Human Readable Clip Names with Metadata Variables

NB: I only wanted to do this with video files, and since they were in separate bins for each day, to select them all, I made a VIDEO Smart Bin:
- Match Any of the following rules:
  - MediaPool Properties › File Name › contains BRAW
  - MediaPool Properties › Format › contains RED
Select all the video clips, right click, choose Clip Attributes
I set the name to %Scene // %Take -- %Format (% will give you a type-ahead for all the metadata available as variables)

Keywords

I believe you can search these in the Edit Index (tho I have not used them much yet).
In order to get these to show up in the Metadata viewer / editor, I had to use this dropdown and choose All Groups (or Shot & Scene):

Custom Metadata Groups

I don’t think I’ve used this yet, but seems useful.
In Preferences › User › Metadata, you can set up your own custom metadata groups…

Fixing Framerate (fps)

On one project, we realized after we imported everything into DaVinci that we had shot everything in 60fps. When we imported, DaVinci asked us to auto change the Project Timeline settings to 60fps to match the imports. BUT, 48hfp required us to export at. 24fps and apparently in DaVinci you MUST export at the project timeline settings.

We had two options.

Option 1: Export from DaVinci at 60fps and then convert to 24fps after the fact:

# inspect the fps, was 60
ffmpeg -i  scene-06.mov

# convert from 60 to 24fps by dropping frames (vs changing duration)
ffmpeg -i scene-06.mov  -filter:v fps=fps=24 scene-06-24fps.mov

We would have done Option 1 if we had more work on the project done before we realized this error, but since we had done relatively little, we opted for Option 2.

Option 2: Create a new DaVinci project and DON’T change the Project Timeline fps when DaVinci prompts to do this on initial import.

Then, for all of the clips that are at 60fps, right click, select Clip Attributes and change Video Frame Rate from 24 to 60 fps.

NB: we did this once clips were in a timeline, BUT I think we might have been better off trying this in the Media Pool.

Sound

Sync Based on Timecode

caveat: When I imported media from different days into a single bin, then tried to Auto Sync Audio › Based on Timecode and Append Tracks, I had a strange sync ERROR where there were lots of mistakes. I think this was (maybe?) a result of time-code only being unique within a particular day (not unique across the entire shoot?). It seemed to work better when I separated media for each day into separate bins, day-01, day-02, etc.
- Once you have successfully done the sync, when you drag a video clip that has been synced to a sound file into a timeline, the synced sound file will automatically appear as a linked clip in the audio tracks below the video clip audio.

Sync Clips Based on Waveform with Syncalia

I’ve found the 3rd party software Syncalia does a much better job of syncing clips using Waveform than the native DaVinci Resolve tool for this:

Drag all video and audio into a Timeline named “Everything”
Open the timeline and File › Export AAF, XML and export an fcpxml file.
Open in Syncalia. Sync. Export XML.
Import the xml back into DaVinci, name Everything - SYNC.
Almost all of the audio should be synced.

Syncalia Timeline Tracks Gotchas

Syncalia does not seem to preserve which source files go in which video and tracks in the timeline. I like to have each device in its own track, so this is my workflow:
- In the Media Pool (not in the Timeline), after re-importing the SYNC timeline exported by Syncalia, with SYNC timeline open, open the Filter by and choose name and then type something to find all the media from a particular device, eg: “braw” or “Tr1” or “zoom”
Select all the files from the device in the Media Pool, right click, then set Clip Color
Then, in the Edit Timeline, Select Clips by Clip Color and shift drag these to a dedicated track.
(I’ve found different clip colors for media from different devices is generally useful).

Transcribe Timelines

I saw a tip that you can transcribe timelines automatically as DaVinci markers with a service called Simon Says. I have not yet tried this.
Keyboard Shortcuts: find them all under DaVinci Resolve › Keyboard Customization
Edit FASTER with Metadata in Resolve 17 - DaVinci Resolve Editing Workflow Tip
another video on editing metadata
Understand the 4 Edit Modes in DaVinci Resolve 16 (Move, Resize, Slip, Slide, Ripple, Roll Edits) - THIS IS GREAT

Background Noise Filter

Choose Noise Reduction › Auto Speech Mode (the default seems to be for this to be radio selected to Manual)
Good also for removing mic buzz.

Crossfade (Fade in + out audio)

Select an audio clip and hit cmd+t (fade in + out)
Useful for removing some clipping / clicking on audio in / out.
OR with mouse, grab the white dogear on the top left / right of a clip and drag it towards the center:
OR right click the transition between 2 audio clips and Add 6 frame Cross Fade 0db:

Normalize Audio Levels!!

Normalize Audio Levels works GREAT! Right click on audio clip to do this.
We targeted -4db (instead of the default -9db) for the max peaks.
We also found that you definitely want Set Level = Independent (not relative for this), which will bring the peak for each clip to the target (vs the peak across clips).
Finally, if there is any clip with NO DIALOG, it will be WAY too high after this, so go through and find clips that are just background and bring them back down to 0 (or even lower).

Normalizing Audio Levels (Continued)

split dialog (different speakers), bg sound, everything to different tracks
- consider using separate INT and EXT tracks for each speaker, eg, D/INT ABBY and D/EXT ABBY
for each track, Normalize Audio
- Normalization Mode = True Peak
- Target Level = -12.0 db
- Set Level = Independent

An Alternative to Audio Volume Keyframes

Split a clip in two (alt-s), add a Crossfade on the transition, and adjust the level of each new sub-clip independently:

Fix Left / Right Audio Pan Issues

I was only getting audio from left earbud, this time to fix I had to set the tracks in the Timeline to match the type in the media pool, which was mono:

Make sure you set both tracks type to mono. Then panning should work. Track type should match source file type. /via https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=62118

Fix Mono / Stereo Audio Issues

We had some issues setting the audio output correctly. Rob did something where he opened Clip Attributes on each audio clip, and in the Audio tab set:
- Format = Stereo
- Source Channel = Embedded Channel 1
- Track = Audio 1
- Channel in Track = Left
- (next row)
- Format (NULL)
- Source Channel = Embedded Channel 2
- Track (NULL)
- Channel in Track = Right

NB: this is just me looking at one example, but I think he did different things for different tracks.

Display Different Audio Channels from wav in Separate Tracks

If your sound recorder saves different mic sources to separate audio channels within a single .wav file, you may want to view these as separate timeline tracks so you can adjust them independently.
- From the Media Pool, Clip Attributes › Audio
- Format = Mono
- Tracks = 2 (or 3 or whatever)
- In each row, configure each Source Channel as a separate Track

Fairlight Index

In the Fairlight Page you easily move audio tracks up and down or toggle their visibility

Use a Bus to Group Audio Tracks

On Fairlight Page, in menu: Fairlight › Bus Format
Add Bus (as many as you want, eg, your Main Bus, perhaps a Dialog Bus, etc)
In Fairlight Mixer › Bus Outputs you can send each Audio Track to one or more Buses
THEN, send other buses to MAIN

Apply Filters to Entire Bus

In the Fairlight Mixer, double click the Dynamics grid icon to bring up the Dynamics Panel for the Bus you want to manipulate

Use Dynamics Audio Compressor

Reduce audio level by Ratio (multiple) whenever audio level exceeds Threshold
Gain Reduction will show a blue band towards the top whenever the compressor does its job
- Basically, you want to tweak the Threshold until you only see the blue when the level (eg dialog) hits a loud bit
Then use Make Up to get back your Output level to your target peak level (eg -12.0 db)

Make Dialog a Little More Clear By Adjusting Band 1 In Equalizer

Open Equalizer for Dialog Bus
Turn on Band 1
Drag right til it sounds slightly better but not too noticeable

Make Something Sound Further Away

Tip via reddit

First EQ and cut some of the highs then apply reverb to the eq’d sound and change the pre delay and the sound wetness (how much reverby) to fit the ambience in the shot. Meaning if it’s a hallway it’ll be very wet and even maybe have some echo. If it’s open space it won’t be as wet.

Reverbing eq’d sound because that’s how sound travels. The reverb you hear from naturally occurring sound will mostly be sans high frequencies. Hence eq to create this perceivable effect of distance.
I actually got a sound that achieved the result I wanted by just cutting the high frequencies:

Simulate a Walkie Talkie Sound

I just cut out all the highs and lows with the EQ:
And added some Distortion (starting with the Lo Fi Radio Preset)

Create Ambient Outdoor “Roomtone” by Looping Smaller Clips with Offsets

Great tutorial ~ p241 of DaVinci Resolve 17 Fairlight Audio Post Manual
Find a portion of one of your tracks where no-one is talking. It doesn’t have to be very long, like 2s worked for me.
In the Fairlight page, Zoom Waveform for the audio to increase the size by holding down shift+⎇ and scrolling up
- NB: You will probably also want to Zoom the Timeline (cmd++) and Increase the Track Height (hold shift and scroll up)
Zoom Waveform until you can see a thin line that crosses above and below the horizontal axis
Trim your clip to start where the Waveform crosses this axis
Zoom out a bit, move your playhead a second or 2 to the right
Zoom back in, and find another point where the Waveform crosses the horizontal axis, and trim your clip to end here
Now you can stitch together this clip into a bed
- Duplicate it 5 times, pasting it back to back with itself
- NB: reversing every other clip in your bed may make it less obvious. Select the 2nd, 4th, and 6th clips (in the Fairlight Page). Right click and Reverse Clip
- Duplicate your bed n times til you have a minute of roomtone.
Next, Bounce Audio to a New Layer…

Bounce Audio to a New Layer

In the Fairlight Page, select the track with the Audio Clips you want to combine (eg, your roomtone)
Open the Media Pool to the Bin where you want your new combined clip to appear (eg, the audio bin)
Select all the clips on that track you want to combine
Choose Timeline › Bounce Selected Tracks to New Layer
The new clip will appear in your selected Media Pool bin
When you use your roomtone, target -45db (via Fairlight Manual):

When you know the target volume level for the room tone, set the room tone of all the copied clips to match that level. (If you aren’t sure what level to aim for, try using -45 dB in the Mixer as a guide.)

(OLD WAY I did this):

There was an outdoor scene / location where we didn’t have a great continuous roomtone captured.

We did have a few very short bits, but looping any of them individual with crossfades always produced a bit of a metronome effect, so I ended up using a few of them together, on multiple tracks, and overlapping them with offsets, and then creating a longer Compound Clip I could use:

You may want to create a longer Compound Clip of this strung together.

Sidechain Dialog to Music

You may want to automatically decrease volume of a music track when you have dialog over it
Open the Dynamics for Dialog tracks in the Fairlight Mixe.
Under Compression, choose Send
- NB: you do not need to turn on compression for the sending tracks
In the Dynamics for the Music track, turn ON Compression
Choose Listen. Set the Threshold really low and Ratio really high to make sure you can hear it working, then dial these accordingly back to get to “just enough” reduction:
NB: I was thinking originally of doing this with Buses and not Tracks, but that looks a little bit more complicated per this Blackmagic forum post

Target Loudness

You can set to different standards, eg, Netflix is -27 LU Target
- (LU = “loudness units”)
BS1770-1 is -23 LU Target
Rule of thumb: you want most of your dialog hitting the Target Loudness Level
- play a dialog section, and try to get the Integrated Loudness to the Target level by boosting the gain of the Dialog (or MAIN) Bus
defs from the Resolve 18 Manual:
- Short: Measures the average LU level over a 30-second window following the playhead.
- Short Max: Shows the maximum level over the same 30-second window. This analysis is required by EBU R128.
- Range: Measures the dynamic range of the Loudness of your mix (in LU), which is the difference between the average soft and average loud parts of your mix. Analyzes the overall loudness over a played range of the mix, discounts the lowest 10% and highest 5%, and then gives a standardized expression of the difference between the remaining soft and loud levels that were analyzed. The window of analysis is as long as you’ve been playing. This analysis is required by most QC specifications.
- Integrated: Measures the LUFS value of the portion of the range of the mix you’ve played through. As you play, this integrated value accumulates. This analysis is required by most QC specifications.

Color Grading

Useful Shortcuts for Color Grading

Add Node › Add Serial: alt+s
Disable All Nodes: alt+d
Disable Selected Node: cmd+d
Show what is selected with Qualifier: alt+shift+h

Stills

Grab Still → saves to stills library, you can then Apply Still to Selected Clips
Tip: Label your stills!

Rob’s Basic Process for Color Grading

Select the BRAW clip and you can do things like:

Decode Using: Clip
Color Science: Gen 4
ISO: adjust

Make 6 or 8 Serial Nodes
Node 1: White Balance

Use the picker under Color Wheels, then click something white in the shot

Node 2: Skin

Open Scopes › Vector Scope on right col
do this in an early node!
select some skin tones with Qualifier
try to do adjustments in the color wheels that pull the visual towards the diagonal line at like 11 o’clock

Node 3: Light & Exposure

Use the dials under Color Picker Wheels to adjust the light / exposure: (the dial graphic thing, not the W/RGB)
LIFT = shadows, bring down
GAIN = lights, bring up
GAMMA = mids, do last and squash (to fix washout)
can also adjust the numbers under:
SHADOWS
HIGHLIGHTS
MID/DETAIL - adds a bit of blur
do 2 passes through everything til it looks OK

Node 4: Spot Adjust

in middle bottom panel, select Qualifier tab
use the dropper to click around and make a selection
Denoise the selection range
alt+shift+h shows what is selected
eg, take out monitor blues → select with Qualifier
Under Color Wheel › Hue vs Sat, you should see a peak on the blue part of the selection. Add toggle points, de-saturate the blues by adjusting down
Likewise, you might punch UP the saturation on greens of shirt (in a different node)

Node 5: Film Grain

Open FX › Resolve FX Texture › Film Grain
if you want to add a film grain

Node 6: Motion Effects

controls in bottom left
Frames: 3
Mo. Est. Type: Better
Motion Range: Medium
Temporal Threshold:
unlink Luma and Chroma
Luma: 13.2
Chroma: 4.8

Node 7: LUTs

Black Magic 4k Film to Extended Video V4 is what we used:

Multiuser

Use an ec2 Postgres DB for Cloud Multiuser

Rob and I setup an Postgres DB on ec2 (we could not use RDS because of the super user privileges DaVinci requires). This worked OK, but since then, Blackmagic has added first class multiuser cloud collaboration as of DaVinci Resolve 18, so our workaround is kind of unnecessary.