Transcription
Are you tired of spending weeks editing videos that could have been done in a few hours? Sick of repeating the same repetitive processes over and over again or simply just given up because editing just takes too damn long, right? Well, if that sounds like you, you're in the right place.
I spent years taking way too long to edit my videos, lost clients because I couldn't keep up with the workload and I was this close to nearly burning out until I discovered a simple and effective workflow that allowed me to drastically speed up my editing.
All right, so the first thing I'm going to talk about is file organization. Now, this is incredibly important because if you set your project up right and you know where everything is, then your editing process becomes so much easier and it's so much faster to find the clips when you need them, which in turn speeds up the entire editing process.
So, when you open up Da Vinci Resolve, I want you to take note to this area here, which is the media pool. So, let's say we have a project where we've got an A-roll track, we've got some B-roll, and we've got some music. We're going to create these bins accordingly in the media pool. So, we're going to select new bin, and we're going to name this one A-roll, new bin, B-roll. and we'll create one more for music.
So now we're going to add our clips into each folder. We've got our A- roll here. Let's drag that in. Then we'll go to our B-roll. We'll drag this in. And then we'll go to our music. And we'll go ahead and drag our music in as well. So that's step one of file organization.
But I want to show you something else that's really cool in Dinci Resolve, which is power bins. So a power bin is basically like a media library that's accessible from all of your projects. So, if you've got sound effects that you use all the time or you've got animations or transitions or any kind of asset that you might want to use in multiple projects, you can actually create a power bin. And as you can see down here, I've got all these sound effects. So, if I ever need to use these in any of my projects, rather than having to go and search for them on my computer, I can simply add them to a power bin.
So, to create a power bin, it's exactly the same as creating a regular bin, you're simply going to click down here where it says power bins. And if you don't see that, right click, show power bins, and then you just create the bin you want. Let's name this sound effects. And then all the sound effects that you most commonly use, you can simply add them in here and it will be super accessible for any project. This will save you so much time rather than having to search through your computer every time.
Okay, so now we've got our clips laid out on the timeline. We're going to talk about keyboard commands. Now, these are going to help so much in speeding up your workflow. I'm going to provide you with a preset and a PDF in the description down below that you can simply import into your keyboard preferences and then you'll be able to follow along with these keyboard shortcuts.
So, if you go into keyboard customization, you're then going to right click on these three dots up here, and you're going to select import preset. And then you're going to click on this declan txt file, and you're going to open it. And then you can just label this keyboard shortcuts or whatever you want. Okay. Boom. Just like that. Okay.
So, the first three keyboard shortcuts that we're going to look at is going to be Q, W, and E. Now, Q is going to say start to playhead, W split the clip, and E end to playhead. Now, I'm going to demonstrate what this actually means on the clip in the timeline. So, first let's zoom in on our clip by pressing the plus button on the keyboard. And then we're going to just drag this waveform out nice and big so we can see everything that's going on.
Now, looking at these audio waveforms are going to be our best guide for editing this footage as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Now, if we drag this playhead over to the start of the audio waveform and we press Q, it's going to ripple delete everything to the left of this playhead. So, if I press that, that will all cut out and it will drag this rest of the clip back to that starting point. We're then going to drag the playhead over. We're going to go to here, the end. Press W to split the clip. Drag the playhead over and you're going to press Q again to ripple delete everything to the left. Drag it over again. W to split. Drag it over again. Q to ripple delete everything to the left. Now, let's go to the end of this clip here. And if you have an area to cut at the end of the clip, you would then press E, which would ripple delete everything to the right, like so.
Just to summarize, Q will delete everything to the left of that playhead. W will split and then E will delete everything to the right of the play head and drag in the next clip. So, it's a ripple edit. And then command Z will also undo that if you make a mistake.
Now, there is another keyboard shortcut that you need to make sure that's turned on, and that is going to be Ctrl P. So, if I take that off, then after I split the clip by pressing W and I drag my playhead over, this new section won't be automatically selected. So if I try and press E or Q, nothing will happen. I'll have to manually click and then press Q, drag again, have to manually select and then press Q, which is quite timeconuming. We're trying to speed things up. So by pressing Ctrl P, that's going to enable auto select of the playhead. So if we drag it back, it'll automatically select. We drag it forward, it'll automatically select. So now we can drag it across, make our edits, and it will just ensure that wherever we're selecting with the playhead that the clip also will be selected, which will just speed up the process.
So, as you can see here, I'm scrubbing through the timeline super quick, pressing W, split, Q, ripple, delete to the left, drag across, W, Q, E. So, once you learn these shortcuts and you get used to them, your editing will start to speed up extremely fast. So, if you look here, simply looking at the waveforms, we're just going to go bang bang play. You can just press the playhead, let it play, click again, watch it through, click, go through, just like that. Super fast. And this will speed up your process so much faster. You don't even need to play the clip. You can just simply look at the waveforms. Boom, boom, boom, boom. It speeds up your process so quickly. You can just skim through this footage like that. Super big time saver. I highly recommend you get used to these shortcuts and you implement them into your workflow.
Now, before we move on to the next tip, I'm going to show you a couple more quick keyboard commands that going to help you to quickly switch through these tabs here. So, we've got our media, cut, edit, fusion, color, fair light, and export tabs. But if we want to quickly switch between these tabs, we can use shift one which will get to the project manager. Shift two will get to the media tab. Shift three, cut tab, shift four, edit tab, shift five, fusion tab, shift six, color tab, shift 7, fair light tab, and shift 8 will be the export tab. And then shift 9 will also be project settings.
So again, in the description down below, there will be a link to download the preset so that you can import this straight into your Da Vinci Resolve keyboard customization tab, as well as a PDF that I've provided. You can quickly find each of these shortcuts that I've talked about, and you can reference them as they're needed in your edit. So, you should take the time to learn those shortcuts, and your workflow will speed up drastically.
Now, this next tip is massive when it comes to speeding up your editing workflow. And I'm going to first show you my preferred way of doing it, and then I'm going to show you a free way you can do it within Da Vinci Resolve. Now, the way I like to do it is to use a software called Gling. Full disclaimer, this video is not sponsored by Gling. I just personally use this software and it really speeds up my editing process. So, let me show you what Gling actually does.
So, first you're going to bring in your clips and let's add in our A-roll talking head shots. Now, I will say that this software is only useful if you're doing a talking head style video. If you're trying to film videos that have a lot of action or not as much dialogue, then this won't be useful. So, you can skip to the next section of the video. So, you can see here we've got all the clips placed into the timeline, we're then going to click continue. We're then going to get rid of this. Get rid of this this and just leave cut silences. Then click enhance and edit. And then gling will take a minute to do its thing. I'll leave a link in the description of this video where you can download Gling.
Okay. So once Gling has processed the files, there's a quick little adjustment that we're going to make here which is going to be the pace. Drag that from five to 2 seconds. And I find this has the best effect in making the pacing as succinct as possible. Then click apply. And then if I play this through, this is a Sony FX3. Arguably one of the best video cameras you can buy today. But what if I told you it was possible to make this even better? You can see that it's cut all the spaces and it's made it sound natural. So, if you are doing a super long talking head video and you use this software, you can imagine how much time you can save.
Once you've made those adjustments within Gling, you're going to go up to the top right hand corner, press export, and you're going to click resolve FCPXML file here. Click that. Let's name this practice. And let's save that to the desktop. And then now that we're back in Diage Resolve, let's create a new timeline. And to import the Gling file, we're going to go file, import timeline, and you'll click practice, import. Okay. And as you can see, everything's been cut up for us. And we've just saved so much time. Let's play it back. This is the Sony FX3. Arguably one of the best video cameras you can buy today. But what if I told you it was possible to make this even better? As you can see, it sounds great. Honestly, Glas has done such a good job.
Then what we can do is use something called the trim tool. So we're going to press T or you can select it here. And what this is going to do is if it missed anywhere, let's say something was cut too short, you can then drag it out using this trim tool to add in extra sections. And that will ripple edit the timeline as well. So if it's cut too short, drag it back out, let it breathe a bit more. So maybe there's somewhere like this where it's just been cut off a bit, you can just drag that out and you can just correct any mistakes that Gling might have made. Like so using the T for trim command there.
Now, there is also a way to do this within Da Vinci Resolve, which is completely free. However, I found that within Da Vinci Resolve, it doesn't do as good of a job and it's not as accurate, which requires me to go in and adjust it more myself, which just takes a little bit longer. It still helps, but if you're okay with paying a subscription to a third party software like Gling, I'd highly recommend that as it will definitely save you more time.
To do this in Da Vinci, we'll make a new timeline. We'll drag our clips out again. And what we're going to do is we're going to click this timeline here, right click, AI tools, audio transcription, and then transcribe. Okay, so now Da Vinci has transcribed the entire timeline. What we're going to do is we're going to select all that text and then we're going to click up here on these three dots and click remove silent portions and that will cut it up for us like so. As you can see does a similar thing but you can even see right here it's made a few more mistakes than glink. To correct that press T for the trim tool up here and you're going to drag this out just give a bit more breathing room like so. Again here made a couple of mistakes. Just drag it out like so.
So both those two methods will save you so much time when editing talking head footage. So, I highly recommend you try them out.
All right, so now I want to show you how you can quickly save animations in Da Vinci Resolve that you can make once and then apply to all of your projects. Okay, so let's start by going up to the effects tab here. We're going to select effects and we're going to grab adjustment clip and drag that over the top of our clip like so. Just bring it down so that it's the correct size.
Now, by pressing shift 5, it'll take us automatically to the fusion page. Now, I'm going to make some text that's going to simply just pop up and say FX3. To do that, just drag this text box here, like so. Drag the end of this corner to here, like so. And then we're going to write in this text box, Sony FX3. We're also going to make the screen just a bit bigger by pressing up here. And we're going to drag this over like so.
Now, just to spice this up, we're going to add a glow node. So, press shift space, and then you're going to type in glow, select that, press add, and now our text is glowing. We're then going to make a bit more space under here. Then we're going to select this node here, which is the transform node, and we're going to do a quick transform adjustment. So, we're going to make this drop down into the image. So, let's say we want the text to come in around 5 seconds. Let's set a Y-axis key frame. Let's go back 5 seconds by pressing the arrow keys. 1 2 3 4 5. And then, let's drag this up out of the image. Now, let's bring our playhead back. Let's leave this on for maybe another 5 seconds. And then, let's make another key frame. Again, using the arrow keys, go 1 2 3 4 5. and we'll drag it back up out of the screen.
If we play that back, we get this, which is a bit too fast. So, we'll just quickly adjust that by going to our key frames up here. Select that. We'll go to the transform and we'll select this icon, which will expand everything. And then we'll just select these two key frames and we'll drag them out a little bit like so. Now, when we play the edit back, comes down, comes up. It's a bit longer. Comes down, comes up.
Then, we'll select the spline adjustment up here, and we're going to select the transform box. Tick that. We'll close this key frame tab as well for a bit more space. Again, click that to close it. And now we're going to select this expand icon. And now we can see the splines of our key frames displayed here. What you're going to do is just drag over two sets of key frames, and you're going to press S on the keyboard, which will smooth them out. And then again, we'll select these two key frames, press S, and smooth it out. What this will do is it will give us a smooth ease in ease out adjustment. So smooth, smooth. So it just makes the transform adjustments more smooth.
Now, I understand if you're just starting out in Da Vinci Resolve, this Fusion tab is a little bit complicated, but if you can follow along and create this simple text adjustment, I'm sure you'll find it extremely useful in a variety of projects. Once we've done that, we'll just go ahead and add a little bit of motion blur. So, while the transform node is selected, we'll go to our settings and we'll select motion blur. And now, when we play it, it'll have some blur like so. You can adjust the quality of this motion blur by dragging this slider. But for the sake of this tutorial, I'm going to leave it at two because the higher the quality, the slower the playback.
So now by pressing shift 4, we'll go back into our timeline. So now when we play this back, we can see our text animation up here. Now to save this to use it for later, we can simply go into our media pool and go into our power bins and we can just grab this adjustment clip and drag it into here like that. Extremely simple. And now this will be here. Let's name this text. And now wherever we want on the timeline, we can simply drag this and boom, it's here again. And this can be opened in any project that you have in Da Vinci Resolve. And you can simply re-edit that again by pressing shift five to go into Fusion. Click the text and you can write something else. And then we go back and as you can see the new text is now showing. This can be done with any animation in Fusion. That was a very simple text one. But anything you create in the Fusion page, you can simply drag and save it into the power bins to use for later.
Now, if we go into the color page by pressing shift 6, I'm going to show you how you can speed up your color grading workflow. Now, I have a full beginner's color grading tutorial that you can watch if you're interested, which I'll put a link to at the end of this video. So, stick around to the end and I'll give you the link for that video.
I'm going to do a super quick color grade on this. I'm going to create four nodes by pressing option S. On the final node, I'm going to open a color space transform node. Again, if you're not familiar with this, watch the tutorial that I'll link at the end of this video. Going to select Sony Sgamut Cinei Sony Slog 3 to convert it to REC 79. Then we're going to make a quick white balance adjustment by looking at our vectorscope here. I'm going to drag this color wheel on the offset back slightly. Let's get a more flattering image of me. Now we'll go into our contrast. We'll name this node white balance. We'll then go to the next node, name it exposure. We'll open up our waveform and we're going to bring up the gain a little bit, bring down the gamma, create a bit of contrast, and then we might just pump in a bit of saturation by going to the color slice tab. Select this value here and we'll just drag it up ever so slightly like so.
Now, to quickly apply this color grade to the other clips, we can click up here where it says clips. Simply press command C and then select all the clips on the timeline by going to the very end, press shift and select. And now we've got a full selection of all the clips and then you'll press commandV and that will copy and paste to all these clips. Now, as you can see here, this is accidentally copied onto the adjustment clip. What you can do to avoid that is if you go to let's reset that first. If you go to timeline here, you can disable specific video tracks that you don't want to be affected. For example, let's disable this top one. And now it's just the A-roll that would be affected. So, we can copy and paste that on everything without worrying about applying the grade to the wrong clips. Let's close that.
Now, what if you wanted to save a color grade that you could use across different projects? The answer is quite simple. We're going to save it as a power grade. Okay. To create a power grade, it's super simple. All you're going to do is rightclick, grab still. Then, let's right click, change label, and we'll name that color grade. like so. And that is going to be saved for use on all of our projects across Da Vinci Resolve. So, let's say we had a clip down here that had no grade. All we need to do is just delete all the nodes and drag this power grade over like so. And that has all of our adjustments saved and and ready to apply. Oh, and I just realized I forgot to label these. So, these are now labeled like so.
Now, the final tip I'm going to show you will be in the export page. You're going to press shift 8, and that will take us to the export tab. And then you're going to set up your export. So, let's say we're going to name this tutorial. Let's save it to desktop. Save. And then let's save this to 100,000 kilobytes per second. Encoding profile high. And then what we can do is if we're happy with this and this is how we want to set up all our projects. We can right click up here and you can click save as new preset. And you can name it. Let's call it YouTube export. Then you can simply click save. However, there is actually a dedicated YouTube preset up here you can find. If you right click that, you can get 4K and that will do everything for you that's optimized for YouTube. Super simple, super easy. Add to render queue and render.
All right, so I hope that those tips will be useful for you to speed up your editing process. Honestly, once I started incorporating these tips, my editing got so much faster and I was able to save so much time. Now, like I mentioned earlier, if you want to learn more about color grading, you can click this video here, which is a complete beginner's guide, super in-depth, where I teach you my entire color grading workflow. So, click this video if you're interested. If you guys have any more questions about any of the keyboard shortcuts, or there's anything you're not quite sure of, leave a comment in the description down below, and I'll do my best to answer all of them. and I'll see you in the next.