August 13, 2026

Video - DaVinci Resolve - more tutorials, 2026

Some odds and end after I finish the "byte size guide" series of beginner tutorials.

The new photo page

That's right. DR now has 8 pages, not 7. The new page is the photo page. This is all about bringing still images into DR. Instead of a Timeline, you now have a "photo album". The photo page has RAW support! What is interesting is that color grading as well as "Fusion" with node based image manipulation can now be applied to still images. Fusion works like a discontinue Apple product "Shake" used to work, and how an existing thing called "Nuke" does work. The hope is that this will grow. It currently does not include camera and lens profiles or noise reduction.

Keyboard shortcuts

I first encountered Ctrl-B above (and maybe DEL) as a keyboard shortcut. Here is a guide dedicated to them. It is text with tables, which is nice.

Another "tutorial" -- 7 beginner mistakes

He says to learn about and avoid 7 pitfalls before diving in. Sometimes he dives into unexpected topics after launching on a topic. For example under the sage advice "don't try to learn it all at once", he goes into describing an organized workflow. This is really another topic.

A lot of these points are not specific to DR, but are general advice for any video editor, or learning in general.

The title "7 beginner mistakes" is a typical youtube title designed to grab viewers. There is good advice here, but this video is by no means a list of clear-cut beginner mistakes.

He gives the advice of only focusing on the "edit" page when you are first learning DR. DR has 7 "pages", (now 8 as of DR 21).

He gives a whirlwind tour of how to use the edit page. However, if you haven't invested time in a thorough tutorial, expecting to learn what you need in 5 minutes here is silly.

It seems that you can ignore the "media" page and do everything from the "top left" pane of the edit page.
Edit page - 4 main areas.

On my machine, the top left pane seems to be the entire left. And on my machine typing i and o on the keyboard did not seem to work -- but they do! I was expecting some kind of popup announcement like the video -- but that must be some kind of adornment he added to the video itself. When I look at the display below with the red read head, I see it adds grey markers and shows the active part of the video in grey. So it works!

His point on sound effects is that they create emotion, and that is what you are aiming for. Again, this advice is not unique to DR. 

Sounds you see.
Sounds you don't see. (background)
Sounds you feel.

Gaps and dead air? Cut them out. Good advice, but chopping 2 seconds out of a sentence like he gives as an example is silly.

Don't use transitions between every cut. Use them when you are moving to an entirely new scene or topic.

Shortcuts -- here are two: Ctrl-B and DEL. Apparently DEL on the keyboard now does a ripple delete. When he made the video you needed Shift-DEL to get one.

One way to think about the color page is to ignore the word "color". Just use it as a contrast/brightness adjustment tool. You have 4 controls (shadows, mids, highlights, and brightness (everything). The labels in DR are lift (shadows), gamma (mids), gain (highlights), and offset (brightness). There is even a saturation control. You can import premade color grading LUTs, from sources he describes.

Boring editing exercise

I like this guy. He is giving high level strategy advice, not nuts and bolts details on DR itself.

He says flashy transitions and such are "junk food". The boring stuff is what really matters. Ask "what do I want the audience to feel?" and write it down. Feel when the in points and out points should happen.

Color grading is done by a specialist (a colorist). (I keep hearing warnings about color grading being a deep rabbit hole).
Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

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