You will see if you read on that I abandoned this tutorial. It is terrible. It almost seems AI generated. I found a much much better tutorial, so don't waste you time here. I do have some notes on tangential subjects, so I have kept this set of notes intact. You have been warned.
I type "resolve" at the command line and it launches. It takes a while to get going, then I am in the "Project manager", and I see one project in red named "Untitled Project".
I click on "New Project" at the bottom right, and it brings up a dialog asking me to name the project. I call the project "Ink" and click on the "Create Button". Now resolve goes full screen.
First tip -- because they made a crazy decision to use grey fonts on black and tiny fonts to boot, you should dim or turn off your room lights if you want to have any hope of reading things on the screen. One day when you become a veteran, you will "just know" where things are and won't need to read anything.
The tutorial talks about a home button, but I have no idea where it is. The home button on my keyboard does nothing.
You now have the "main interface", which is divided into workspaces.
At the very bottom center are 7 buttons that select:
Each of these totally transform the main interface. I suppose each transform is what they call a "workspace".
I click inside Media and get a menu which contains an entry to import a file. They say you can drag and drop files, but I'm not using any kind of graphical file system gadget that would allow that. The menu launches the usual file browser that I use to find the directory with my video and I import "ink.mp4" from my Canon R5 camera. The bottom section of the workspace is called the "media pool panel".
Now we arrive at a problem I suspected. I click on the file, but don't get any video display. The problem is that the video and audio codecs that my Canon camera generates are not supported by the free linux version of Resolve. And this is all about the MPEG_LA people getting paid royalties. These royalties have been paid by Microsoft, so if you run Resolve on Windows, it just works. The answer on Linux is to go through a hassle to convert video formats or to spend the money and buy DaVinci Resolve Studio.
Using "mediainfo-gui" on ink.mp4 tells me the video is encoded with AVC and the audio with AAC LC. At one time I used "ffmpeg" to convert mp4 files, but I am having no luck with it today. It is curious that vlc can display the file just fine. I just tried this:
ffmpeg -i ink.mp4 ink.movI omit any fancy options and let ffmpeg figure things out. It runs without error and the generated file plays using vlc. I use "import media" to pull it into Resolve, and it displays above the "media panel" now when I click on it.
We have AAC audio codec (not available). There is the H.264 video codec (not available). The AV1 codec will someday be free and fix all of this.You can encode to AV1 right now:
ffmpeg -i unhappy.mp4 -vcodec libaom-av1 -acodec pcm_s16le happy.mp4Enough of all this, let's get back to the mediocre tutorial. Note that we just delete ink.mp4 since it is useless with the free version of Resolve.
You can switch to Edit and still have the media pool (but it is now on the left). You copy (drag and drop) things from the media pool unto the main timeline above. Each thing you drag is called a "clip". Everything is confusing, the tutorial is moving too fast and not explaining things.
I'm bailing out on this terrible tutorial and looking for another one.
Tom's Digital Photography Info / tom@mmto.org