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
- Editing
- Play a Portion of the Timeline on Loop
- Dual Viewer Mode on Edit Page
- Punch In / Crop in Post
- Animate Anything (eg, Camera Tracking) with Video Keyframes
- View and Delete Video (Fusion) Keyframes for Adjustment Clips
- Cross Dissolve (Fade in / out video)
- Editor Choppiness
- Render in Place…
- Improve Choppy Slow Motion with Frame Interpolation (when you didn’t capture at a high enough framerate)
- Copy and Paste Clip Attributes
- Paste Insert at Playhead
- Paste into Any Track
- Delete a Gap on the Timeline
- Organizing and Importing Media
- Sound
- Sync Based on Timecode
- Sync Clips Based on Waveform with Syncalia
- Syncalia Timeline Tracks Gotchas
- Transcribe Timelines
- Background Noise Filter
- Crossfade (Fade in + out audio)
- Normalize Audio Levels!!
- Normalizing Audio Levels (Continued)
- An Alternative to Audio Volume Keyframes
- Fix Left / Right Audio Pan Issues
- Fix Mono / Stereo Audio Issues
- Display Different Audio Channels from wav in Separate Tracks
- Fairlight Index
- Use a Bus to Group Audio Tracks
- Apply Filters to Entire Bus
- Use Dynamics Audio Compressor
- Make Dialog a Little More Clear By Adjusting Band 1 In Equalizer
- Make Something Sound Further Away
- Simulate a Walkie Talkie Sound
- Create Ambient Outdoor “Roomtone” by Looping Smaller Clips with Offsets
- Bounce Audio to a New Layer
- Sidechain Dialog to Music
- Target Loudness
- Color Grading
- 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
andOut
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, hitEnter
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 setZoom
to something greater than 1 and then center the frame to your liking using thePosition 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 setX
=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
to720p
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
- In
- 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 byshift+click
-ing theAuto 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 byshift+click
-ing theAuto Track Selector
on any track again
- turn off
- 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 theFilter
(magnifying glass) button.- NB: You may need to change the
Filter by
toAll Fields
.
- NB: You may need to change the
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.
- bins for media from each shoot day:
- 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
, chooseFile
, setName
to something human readable
- This guy uses Adjustment Clips as notes. Select the Adjustment Clip, open
Automatically Set Reel Names from File Pathname
- Under
Project Settings › General Options
checkAssist using reel names from the: Source clip file pathname
- I used
/live-video/%R/
to get a reel for each day, egday-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
- I used
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 chooseAll 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 anfcpxml
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”
- In the Media Pool (not in the Timeline), after re-importing the SYNC timeline exported by Syncalia, with SYNC timeline open, open the
- 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
andD/EXT ABBY
- consider using separate INT and EXT tracks for each speaker, eg,
- 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 theAudio
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 separateTrack
- From the Media Pool,
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, yourMain Bus
, perhaps aDialog 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 theDynamics Panel
for the Bus you want to manipulate
Use Dynamics Audio Compressor
- Reduce audio level by
Ratio
(multiple) whenever audio level exceedsThreshold
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
- Basically, you want to tweak the
- Then use
Make Up
to get back yourOutput
level to your target peak level (eg-12.0 db
)
Make Dialog a Little More Clear By Adjusting Band 1 In Equalizer
- Open
Equalizer
forDialog
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 (holdshift
and scroll up)
- NB: You will probably also want to Zoom the Timeline (
- 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
, chooseSend
- NB: you do not need to turn on compression for the sending tracks
- In the
Dynamics
for the Music track, turn ONCompression
- Choose
Listen
. Set theThreshold
really low andRatio
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
- play a dialog section, and try to get the
- 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 thenApply 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 rangealt+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.