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 a dedicated video editing software, rather than struggle with the limitations of a phone app. 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, which is a powerful video editor 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 $1,000s, is now available for free!
Resolve is an incredibly powerful piece of software. In fact, it is not just one software program, it is a merger 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 one of these software programs. We will cover some of these pages later in the book, but as a beginner, we will be mostly focusing on using the Cut page to quickly and simply create your edited video.
The Cut page is an incredible tool to quickly put together your first video edit or cut. It has many tools available in the rest of DaVinci Resolve but simplified onto 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 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 your preferred settings so that you can have a user workspace that suits you. You will then import media that you want to edit together (i.e., 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’re going to cover the following main topics:
- Creating your first project in DaVinci Resolve
- Laying out your digital workspace how you want it
- Getting your media files in and organized
- Reviewing your shots and cutting it all together
- Publishing your video to social media
Fun fact
The editing term Cut is named after the physical cutting process 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 cut your films digitally!