Phillips / Honey Video Editing Made Easy with DaVinci Resolve 20

Create quick video content for your social media, the web, and business
2. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-83620-882-2
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten

Micro-content drives today's social media and business marketing, but poor editing and low-quality video can quickly turn viewers away. DaVinci Resolve helps you elevate your content using professional-grade technology trusted in Hollywood films, TV shows, and commercials.
In this practical, beginner-friendly guide, Lance Phillips, a Blackmagic Design Certified Training Partner with over 30 years of teaching and industry experience, shows you how to create polished video content for social media, business, and the web using DaVinci Resolve. Selected sections of the book are presented in color to clearly illustrate visual workflows and key editing concepts. While the book is written using DaVinci Resolve 20, most workflows, techniques, and concepts apply to DaVinci Resolve 18 and later versions.
You'll learn how to create complete short-form videos using the Cut page, apply efficient editing techniques such as split edits, syncing externally recorded audio, and recording voiceovers directly into your project. You'll also explore essential sound editing workflows and simple yet powerful visual effects, including green screen, split screen, and picture-in-picture.
By the end of this book, you'll be able to confidently edit, finish, and publish short-form videos to platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, and Vimeo.

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Autoren/Hrsg.

Phillips, Lance

Honey, Nigel G

Fachgebiete

• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik EDV & Informatik Allgemein

Leseproben

1

Getting Started with Resolve – Publishing Your First Cut

As a video content maker, whether you are creating videos for the web, YouTube, or TikTok, there will come a point where you will need to edit the videos you have made using dedicated video editing software, rather than struggle with the limitations of a phone application. Dedicated video editing software applications can be quite daunting for a beginner, but once mastered, they can provide a whole host of powerful features to take your videos to the next level.

There are many video editing applications to choose from. This book will cover how to use DaVinci Resolve, a powerful video editor that is used by the film and TV industry to edit, color, and add sound and visual effects to films. It is amazing that Resolve, which used to cost thousands of dollars, is now available for free!

Resolve is an incredibly powerful piece of software. It is not just one software program – it is a combination of several very powerful software programs that the film industry has been using separately for decades. Each page in Resolve has the power of each of these software programs. We will cover some of these pages later in this book, but since you are a beginner, we will be mostly focusing on using the Cut page to help you create your edited video quickly and simply.

Fun fact – the editing term cut is named after the physical cutting process that was used in the early years of editing film, where a razor blade was used to cut out unwanted footage before it was all taped back together for the final edit. Today, it is a lot safer just to use DaVinci Resolve to your films digitally!

The Cut page is an incredible tool for quickly putting together your first video edit or . Many more tools are available in the rest of DaVinci Resolve, but they have been simplified into one page to make them quicker and easier to use.

In this chapter, you will learn how to quickly import, organize, review, assemble, and publish video footage on the Cut page’s timeline. Additionally, you will learn how to start a new project and set and save your project settings for future use. You will be shown the interface of Resolve and the Cut page, learn how to customize it, and be able to save certain settings so that you can have a user workspace that suits you. Then, you will import media that you want to edit together (that is, audio, video, photos, and computer graphics) and use the unique features of the Cut page, such as Source Tape and Smart Insert, to review and add footage to the timeline to quickly create a basic edited video. Finally, you will export and publish a video directly to YouTube from within the Cut page of DaVinci Resolve rather than having to export it first and then upload it later.

All these tools combined will make editing and publishing short-form films and videos much quicker, saving you time and freeing you up to make more content.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following main topics:

• Creating your first project in DaVinci Resolve
• Customizing your digital workspace
• Getting your media files in and organized
• Reviewing your shots and cutting them all together
• Publishing your video to social media

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Technical requirements

To complete this chapter, you will need to install a copy of DaVinci Resolve version 20. Some exercises may work in older versions of Resolve after version 16. However, to get the most from this book, it is best to have the latest version of DaVinci Resolve. You can download the latest free version of DaVinci Resolve from the Blackmagic Design website: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/uk/products/davinciresolve/.

Also, ensure you download the DaVinci Resolve Bins (drb) file from https://packt.link/gbz/9781836208839.

All exercises will also work with the paid Studio version of DaVinci Resolve. The technical requirements for your computer to run DaVinci Resolve can be found on the Blackmagic Design website: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/support/readme/d8c4a8297ebb4d94b14a045ba7eda2eb.

The purpose of this chapter is to get you up and running quickly on editing your own footage. However, if you want to practice on video footage already shot, I have listed, in the section at the end of this chapter, download links to sources of free-to-use video footage that you can use. Later in the book, I will supply you with specific video footage to download to help illustrate the exercises in those chapters.

With these requirements in place, let us start learning!

Creating your first project in DaVinci Resolve

When opening Resolve for the first time, it can be quite confusing knowing where to start. In this section, you will learn how to create a new project and where to set and save project settings in DaVinci Resolve so that you can load them up quickly for future projects.

Opening Resolve for the first time

After installing Resolve, the first time you open it, you will be greeted with the welcome screen (), which gives you an overview of the latest features. This can be found in the Help menu. From there, you can choose Welcome to DaVinci Resolve:

Figure 1.1: Welcome screen

Next, after clicking the Continue button , Resolve will ask where you want to save the files it needs to be able to work. You can always change these locations later, but first, let us look at what they are so that you can better understand where to tell Resolve to store them.

Cache files

Cache files are media files that Resolve stores temporarily for easy access to help Resolve access them more quickly while you are editing. This also helps with playing media back faster in the timeline. It is best to store these cache files on the internal hard drive on your computer or, if it is faster, an external Solid State Drive (SSD) connected to your computer. If you are using an external drive for your cache files, remember to plug it in before you start Resolve; otherwise, Resolve will not know where to store your cache files and present the following message ():

Figure 1.2: Cache files warning message

Stills

Resolve also needs to know where to save your stills. Otherwise, you will get the following message () if Resolve cannot find the drive your stills folder is linked to:

Figure 1.3: Stills warning message

Note that this is not where you store still photos you use in your edit. It is where Resolve stores still images of frames you select from your timeline. It is a bit like a screenshot or photo of a moment in time of your edit.

This can be useful if you want to share an image from your timeline as a thumbnail for your social media posts. You can store these stills on a hard drive anywhere. It does not need to be a fast drive – save that for your cache files.

If you change your mind, you can change the cache and stills locations later. It is good practice to store the cache and stills files directly on your computer, as Resolve will not lose the link to them – unless, of course, you move the folders when tidying up your computer. In this case, you can relink them to the moved folder or create a new folder to link to if you have deleted it.

Creating your first project

Now that we have told Resolve where to store the files it needs to create to work fluidly, you can create your first project. This can be done in the Project Manager window ():

Figure 1.4: Project Manager

There are two ways to create a new project:

• Click on the New Project button in the bottom-right corner of the Project Manager window
• Alternatively, open the Untitled Project template

Which you choose is up to you.

As for DaVinci Resolve 20, there is no difference between using New Project or Untitled Project; both will ask you to name your project and decide where on your computer you want to save it.

Now that you have created your first project, let us look at the visual layout or user interface (UI) of Resolve and how you can customize it to suit how you work.

Customizing your digital workspace

When using Resolve for the first time, it can be a little confusing as there are so many pages, all with a myriad of functions, which, to a beginner, can be understandably overwhelming. It is like learning...