Editing in Davinci Resolve

Resolve is extremely similar to any other non-linear editing software out there, if you're familiar with Final Cut Pro, Premiere, or Avid, you'll likely notice that they seem to have taken the most popular tools from each of them. With a little familiarity and some time, you'll likely adapt to Resolve surprisingly quickly.

For those of you just jumping into editing for the first time, Resolve has a logic of its own and once you get used to it, you'll fall right into your comfort zone!

A Quick Tour

Resolve seems to have designed themselves with small screen users in mind, preferring to hide and reveal their workspaces, as needed. Instead of having one huge jungle of buttons and options, they've set their workspace options along the top of the window.

Inspector

This is the panel that allows you to effect the base qualities of every media clip. For video, it's things like zoom, position, and rotation. For audio: volume, pan, and pitch.

Media pool

This one is fairly self explanatory, it's all the media that you've imported into your project. The nice part about this is that it has dynamic scrubbing over the clips, letting you preview them extremely quickly.

Metadata

This is simply a data readout of all the different qualities of the selected clip.

Effects Library

The effects library is where you'll find all of Resolve's premade effects. Everything from cross dissolves to their OpenFX libaries that are constantly being updated with open source effects.

Sound Library

Resolve's download interface, they have an expansive library of foley sounds you can download, you can also build one yourself and load it here.

Edit Index

This is a list of every start and stop point of each clip in the timeline, along with relevant information. Extremely useful for timing out clips, navigation, and tagging systems.

Mixer

A nice little volume interface that corresponds with whichever audio clip you currently have selected.

Jumping In

For the most part, once you're oriented to the space and used to the process of finding, selecting, and placing your clips, you should have a good jumping off point to start exploring and experiencing the post-production process for yourself! If you skipped over the home page of this guide and missed out, here is the very basic tools of editing you might need.