August 20, 2026

My first video with DaVinci Resolve

Last week I went up Mt. Lemmon with my friend Alan. I took along my Sony A6600 and shot a bunch of random video. I was not making a serious effort to shoot quality video, just playing around and getting material to used to practice editing with DaVinci Resolve.

I pulled this material in DR 21 Studio. I am running DR on my Fedora linux machine. There are no problems with audio codec issues. There are 11 video files that run for a total of 3.5 minutes when I place them all on the timeline.

I call this project "Lemmon".

Music

This is a pandoras box. There are lots of sites offering "royalty free music" but most of them expect a subscription fee to access what they offer. The following are some recommended sources that don't have a paywall up front: I find a piece here that I like (searching for "banjo") and it tells me that I must give appropriate credit including song title, artist name, source (Free Music Archive) and license type (CC BY-SA).

It warns me that it is "not compatible with Youtube", and maybe not with Instagram and Facebook.

I have to set up an account (I do), then I download the file. It is: 

Policy King by Heftone Banjo Orchestra via Free Music Archive (CC BY-SA)
I move the file to /home/tom/Videos ('Heftone Banjo Orchestra - Policy King.mp3'). I use Ctrl-I to import the file into the project media pool and drag it to a new sound track on the timeline.

I want to find out if there are issues with using this on Youtube, so I go immediately to Deliver in DR. I pick a name lemmon1, tell it to use /home/tom/Videos, pick mp4 rather than apple quicktime, H.264 and I render it, obtaining lemmon1.mp4

Now to Youtube. I make sure I am logged in as Borax Bill. I go to Youtube Studio. Near the top right is an upload icon (up pointing arrow). I use "select files" on the gadget that opens up and select the lemmon1.mp4 file. I give a name and description (I plan to delete this soon anyway). I go to publish and click the "Premiere" box. And it uploads. Even this 4 minute video will take 11 minutes!

I will need to go back and add the attribution.

Deleting it is pretty easy. I go to youtube studio, select "Content" on the left, then pick the video I want to delete. When I check the checkbox, a bar appears on the top with actions. I select "additional actions" and see "delete forever".

Delete video but keep audio

I have a nice music track, but want to cut some of the video without also cutting the audio.

If my keyboard had a working ALT key, I could use that, but the following works: 

select the cut (both video and audio will select).
right click on the audio cut and uncheck "link clips" at the menu bottom.
click anywhere else to ditch the existing selections
select the video cut again (you should not get the audio).
press DEL on the keyboard.
Kind of tricky, and what I really don't want to cut is the music track. They say the think to do is to lock the music track layer and the razor tool will ignore it.
Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Digital Photography Info / tom@mmto.org