On many of these tutorials, the person does some little but important thing without explaining it. Using the "j" key to go back 10 seconds and replay the segment often helps me to watch closely and see what they did.
I also find youtube "theater mode" helpful. Type "t" to toggle in/out of this. It expands the video to full width (but without taking over the whole screen). It shoves the comments and suggestions below the video. This is a nice help.
DR is 8 applications integrated as 8 pages. Adobe Premier Pro is the principle alternative -- at $696 per year. DR has industry leading features and is more stable than Adobe. The free version gives you 80 percent of the paid version. (But on Linux, I need the codecs in the paid version) He recommends using a fast SSD for the install, and he recommends keeping you current project on a fast SSD.
The first thing you see is the "project management page" with "new project" sitting at the upper left. He creates a folder here for "previous projects". All we need to do here is create a new project. (It puts these into /home/tom/'DaVinci Resolve Media' just so you know.) Give the project a name, hit Create, and you are in DaVinci Resolve.
The 8 applications that comprise DR are "tabs" at the bottom:
Media, Photo, Cut, Edit, Fusion, Color, Fairlight, and Deliver.
Amusingly, "Fairlight" is for dealing with audio.
Media and Edit are the two pages to get started with.
He begins by moving files around outside of DR, copying the MP4 files he wants to work with (from his DJI drone) to a directory on his fast SSD drive. Then in DR on the Media page, he creates a bin. I do so, naming it PenBin. My project name is Pen. Within that he creates another folder "Video". I do likewise.
I have two folders /home/tom/Video (from 2025) and /home/tom/Videos (from 2024)
that have files from my previous experimenting.
DR is showing me the Videos folder in the upper left of the Media page, and
it is not clear how to add another folder to that area.
I have a file I just shot using my Canon R5, and I do this to get it
ready to import into DR:
cd /home/tom mv 581A6208.MP4 pen.mp4 mv pen.mp4 VideosThis will do for now and get us moving in the tutorial. Now I drag the thumbnail for pen.mp4 from the upper left to the big canvas below which is the "project area", indicated as Master/PenBin/Video, Now the upper right has my video displayed with a slider below to move through it.
I can play it, but I don't hear any sound. See this link for details.
Now the tutorial video moves to the edit page. The bottom is the timeline. The upper left is the "media pool". I drag the thumbnail I see there to the timeline and it "unrolls it" along the timeline. The timeline should show sound waveforms in the green sound row.
You get to view the timeline on the upper right. The panel to the left is reserved to preview videos that are sitting on the media pool to allow you to make choices before you move them onto the timeline. You have a choice. At the upper right there are several icons that pertain to the preview panel. One is a toggle from the split 2 views and a single view. It looks like a rectangle, perhaps with a vertical line splitting it. You also can drag the boundary down between the preview and the timeline below to give yourself a bigger preview screen.
You can switch off/on the media pool. Switching it off allows both the timeline and previews to expand to full width. This is good.
Each video on the timeline has one audio track and one video track. The orange triangle that moves along as you play the video is the "play head". You can grab the play head with the mouse and move it around. Each track has controls to the left. You can disable the video and/or mute the audio then play the tracks. There are "padlocks" that make tracks readonly to avoid accidental modifications while you work on something else.
Notice "Index" towards the upper left. This can be useful when you have a complex timeline with many tracks. It is a toggle.
To start over entirely with the timeline, go to Media Pool. The last thumbnail will always be the timeline. Right click on this and you get a menu with many interesting options. Remove timeline will clear the timeline and allow you to start over.
At the absolute bottom right is a settings "gear" icon that brings up project settings. Master settings shows the timeline format. This will be automatically set when we first pull in a video clip. I see 1920x1080 HD at 29.97 fps.
He has a bunch of clips (104) in the media pool in chronological order. He selects the first one, then Ctrl-A to select them all, then drags them onto the timeline. Alternately you can drag them over the timeline preview and a menu pops out from the right. One option is "Insert" which will insert at the location of the Play head. His 104 videos yield almost 3 hours of video -- which could be exported as just that single video. He says you have to be brave and strong and even ruthless in order to cut out about 2 hours of this to get a 40 minute video!
/home/tom/Videos/Resolve Project BackupsWhen I click "Save" I get the error "Please add at least one media storage volume". I search on this and I am told to use the System tab in the preferences window, select Media Storage, then Add and select something. Then I should restart DR. I select /home/tom/Videos -- which seems to be used for a variety of things pertaining to DR. I use Ctrl-Q to quit DR, then start it again. It shows me my "pen" project. I double click on it, then seem to be back where I was.
I dismiss the media pool, click Timeline up top and select "find current timeline in media pool". We saw this before. The current timeline (Timeline 1) is the last entry in the media pool. The point of this is that this is a file saved in the media pool. We can right click on this to get a menu, among which is "restore timeline backup" and we get to choose among a variety of available backups shown by date and time. You can make a backup by hand in a variety of ways. You can "duplicate timeline", which essentially is a clone of what you currently have. There is also an entry to create a backup.
The first cut is to get rid of any rubbish. Accidental recording and footage that would never be of any use. Professionals call this "selects string-out". He is able to ditch about 15 minutes (about 10 percent), which he says a fairly typical.
To trim off junk at the start, play the junk to a stopping point, type Ctrl-B to cut at that spot. The timeline will show that the start is now isolated as its own thing. Click in it to select it (the outline turns red) and then DEL on the keyboard deletes it. This same scheme works in the middle of the video. You type Ctrl-B and the start and end of something you want to get rid of, then select it and type DEL. You can mark the end first and then the start.
The Ctrl-B is called the "Razor" command (it is also available as the Blade tool). Note that B corresponds to "Blade", which may or may not be the intent. There is also Ctrl-\ which is "split clip". Some people remap "S" to split clips. I read that Ctrl-B and Ctrl-\ used to be different but are now the same.
He gets to a section where he wants to keep the audio and delete the video. The marking of stop/start using Ctrl-B is the same. He uses the padlock for the audio track to lock it, He selects the cut, then right click gives a menu, and he uses "delete selected" (BS is the keyboard shortcut). This yields a black section of video. He says the other video could be placed here, but does not go into how to do it.
Drag a clip from the media pool over the display area and a menu pops out from the right.
"Insert" inserts to the left of the play head. If necessary it shoves things to the right, to get them out of the way. If the playhead is in the middle of a clip, it will split the clip, then do the insert.
Important -- to undo use Ctrl-Z (or use the mouse on Edit, then select undo). To redo, use Ctrl-Shift-Z, though I think that will be much less useful. There is apparently a history page that can yield fancier options.
Note that you can grab a clip from the Media pool, then drag and hover over the timeline to get an idea of how big it is, then do the drop on whatever menu thing you want to use.
"Overwrite" starts at the playhead position and writes over anything to the right. Nothing gets shifted.
"Replace" works to the right of the playhead. It truncates the clip you are "inserting" to match the length of that clip to the right, then replaces it. So no timings get changed. If the playhead is in the middle of a clip, it splits it, then replaces the fragment to the right.
"Fit to fill" is interesting. It changes timing to fit the video into the space indicated, perhaps speeding it up. He has to play with the "render cache" to get the preview to play smoothly. Crazy things happen with the sound as you might expect.
"Place on top" creates a new track for both audio and video. We have track "layers"!! The timing is like "Insert" in that the cut goes to the right of the playhead.
"Append at end" ignores the playhead and appends to the timeline after the last clip that is currently on the timeline, moving the playhead to the new end when done.
"Ripple overwrite" replaces the entire clip to the right of the playhead. The "ripple" is that it moves all the clips to the right of the ones replaced either right or left so that there is no gap or overwriting. Very useful.
That exhausts our options from the menu that pops out from the right side of the preview panel. Now we look at what we can do with the menu we get from clips that are already on the timeline.
We have copy and paste. "Copy" is in the big menu we get when we right click on a clip in the timeline, then we find "Paste" by right clicking on an empty part of the timeline. If we paste with the playhead on a clip on the timeline, it does a "Replace" overwriting to the right of the playhead without changing any timings.
"Paste insert" can be used when the playhead is between two clips. DR seems smart about snapping the playhead into the clip boundary, and if you right click there, you get a 3 entry menu just like on the empty timeline. The middle entry is "paste insert" and inserts the cut, ripple moving everything to the right to make room for it.
"Insert gap" works between cuts and will split a cut if the playhead is mid-cut. By default, you get a 7 second gap. You can change this (it is not easy) by going to Preferences -- User -- Editing and finding "standard still duration".
"Cut" removes the clip, leaving a gap. It acts like copy in that it has the clip in its "pocket" so you can use paste or paste insert to place it somewhere. So you use this to move a clip. Note that you can select a gap and then ripple delete it.
"Ripple cut" just makes the above easier. When it does the cut, it also does the ripple delete. Just what we want.
"Delete selected" removes a clip, but leaves a gap. You can select more than one clip and use this the remove them all. It seems to me that "ripple delete" is more useful.
"Ripple delete" (keyboard delete). The DEL key on the keyboard is a keyboard shortcut for this.
To delete all gaps and "compress" (tidy up) a timeline, you can use the Edit menu up top and select "Delete Gaps". You can assign this to a keyboard shortcut.
Tom's Digital Photography Info / tom@mmto.org