How to Edit a Video from Start to Finish With DaVinci Resolve 14

Blackmagic's DaVinci Resolve is widely known for its color grading tools. It’s what many would call an industry standard thanks to its powerful features. With the Beta 4 of Resolve 14 that was released a little while ago, the software saw its editing and audio capabilities improving quite a bit as well. However, many forget or don't know about them and stick to working with Premiere or Final Cut Pro. Discover in this video how Resolve editing and audio features work. Perhaps you’ll see they are exactly what you needed.

One of the biggest advantages of DaVinci Resolve over Final Cut Pro and Premiere is its price. It’s totally free unless you need more advanced features. But to get going, the free version is more than enough. Unless you have an Adobe CC Master subscription, the features in the free version of Resolve make it a very attractive option. The editing features and the audio functionalities are perhaps not as robust as those in Premiere or Final Cut Pro, but they are extremely close.

In the video above, Casey Faris demonstrates how you can use DaVinci Resolve from start to finish. He’ll show you how to import and manage your media before adding it to a timeline and editing. Then, he’ll also work with the audio tool that’s been entirely revamped with the new beta version and will finally export the finished project. Only the color grading part is missing, but truthfully, there are so many tutorials on YouTube that matter that there was no need to include it in this video.

I’ve been getting into video lately and trying both Resolve, Premiere, and Final Cut Pro X as my software for editing. While I didn’t like Apple’s solution, Resolve and Premiere definitely have their place in my workflow. What’s especially interesting in using just Blackmagic’s alternative is not having to round-trip the edit to bring the color grading back into Premiere. Having everything in one single place is less cumbersome and makes the whole process faster. For smaller projects, it’s definitely a great option that videographers or photographers starting out with video should look into.

Quentin Decaillet's picture

Quentin Décaillet is a photographer and retoucher based in Switzerland specializing in portrait and wedding photography.

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6 Comments

Thanks so much for this! Been wanting to dive in and start working with Resolve. This helps!

I've been using Resolve for the past few months and it significantly sped up my workflow. Compared to Premiere and even Final Cut it's so much faster on my little MacBook.

I would also like to get into short video making and since I am a real beginner I looked into Corel Videostudio and Hitfilm Express. Corel's product is very affordable (but not free) and looks like a very easy route if you are an absolute novice, very much like Premier Elements.

Fitfilm seems to be with a steeper learning curve but with much more to offer (I think).

I am wondering how Resolve is compared to those two I mentioned.

If you have a Mac, iMovie is a great place to start. Otherwise perhaps something like GoPro studio (not just for GoPro stuff and they have some nice templates). Once you have figured the basics of editing in a timeline you can switch to the big boys (Premiere, Final Cut, Resolve).

I will take a look at the GoPro app, was never aware of its existence. Thank you.

The software time out so fast that I cannot download it - in spite of I use the Internet Download Manager :((