In this episode of Fieldmotion's Growth Hub, Adam will go through the basics of editing, helping you to refine that video you've recorded. Be it on a professional camera or a phone, it can all be turned into content that will help your business shine. In this video, Adam will cover recommended project settings, bins, placing videos on a timeline, cutting, transitioning, adding basic subtitles and recommended export settings.
Transcript:
Hi everyone, this is Adam from Fieldmotion and welcome back to another episode of Fieldmotion's Growth Hub. So, in this video I want to go into a little bit about DaVinci Resolve. Now, there's a lot of editing softwares out there and a really powerful one is DaVinci Resolve. There is a free version and there's a paid version, but today I'm just going to show you the free version because it's super, super powerful.
There's also CapCut, which is a really good one as well, but for the purposes of this video I'm going to be talking about DaVinci Resolve. Because cutting together a video can be quite important. It can add really cool transitions and edits and it can add in music and colour correction. I'll do some of these points in separate videos, but for now I just want to show you the very, very basics.
You know, just laying the videos on the timeline and then cutting them together and yeah, we'll maybe add some subtitles as well. So, let's jump right in. So, for the purpose of this video I have some of the drone shots I've used for the Yardbox testimonial, which Cormac from Yardbox was very, very gracious enough to let us film at his big warehouse here. They just set this up.
It's nice and just super new and clean looking. Great stuff.
So, let's just first begin with how to actually begin a project and open it up. So, what you want to do is you want to open up DaVinci and then select New Project. You'll also get a prompt just asking you for a new project. So, we'll select that and then you'll be able to present...
It'll be presented with a way to enter your name here or your project name. So, let's just say like Project Test. Something like that, you know. I've called this Growth Hub Editing.
And then you want to select the location. So, let's just say your hard drive or your SSD and then hit Create. And then you're presented with a sort of blank screen like this.
Now, before we do anything else, I just want to point out, we can import our videos in no problem, but before we actually lay them on the track, let's go up to File here and then let's go to Project Settings. Now, you'll see here that there's the Timeline Resolution at the very top. What that is, that's, you know, how high quality your video is. So, you can set it to 720p.
You can really set it to any, you know, resolution you want. For the purpose of this video, we'll do a 16x9 1080p video. Because that's what a lot of social media platforms will use. They'll also maybe use vertical resolution as well.
And to do vertical, you just tick the box and that will change it to 9x16. But we'll keep it horizontal for now. So, the 1080p, no problem. The frame rate is an interesting one because depending on how smooth you want your video to be, let's say you've got, you know, slow motion footage, for example, you've captured on an iPhone, for example, whatever frame rate you've got on your iPhone, make it, you know, that frame rate in the playback frame rate.
So, just make sure that you're checking that before you actually begin. I've got things in 60fps, so I'll keep it at 60. So, you just hit Save.
Great. And then one more thing I want to do just before we go on to the actual project is if we go to the DaVinci Resolve in the corner here and hit Preferences. And then what we do is we go over to, it'll usually be, say, in System here, but if you go to User, and then we go to Project, Save and Load. So, this is how long, you know, every so often that DaVinci will save.
And we want this to be quite short. So, let's actually make the backups every five minutes. This is just one of those things where we don't want to be working a lot. You can do a lot in a few minutes in DaVinci, and we don't want to have all this progress to be lost if it, say, crashes or you're working on a PC and the power goes out, things like that.
We always want to have these backups. And also, if it's making a backup every five minutes, you'll have a big resource of backups. So, if there's ever something you're not happy with, you can really easily just restore a save. So, let's just hit Save on that.
And then in terms of getting your videos in, so it's quite simple. So, you just left-click. Oh, and I should actually mention, when you first jump in, you'll actually be sent up with this screen. So, all you want to do is...
And don't worry about this screen pretty much at all. This is the cut page. A lot of DaVinci editors just kind of ignore this page because it's kind of oddly laid out. So, we'll just jump into the Edit page because that's much cleaner.
It's much easier to sort of see where you're going. You can do exactly the same thing in the Edit page. So, let's just do a right-click and then go down to Import Media. So, I've had this in the Download section here.
So, let's see. It's DJI 009, 007. Let's just select both of those. I've actually already done this.
So, we can just then open them up in the bin. Now, bins are basically just storage. It's just another way of file management. So, let's say, for example, if I wanted to add a bin just entirely for music.
If I wanted to add a bin that's entirely for audio, we can do. So, this is the master bin. This accesses everything. So, you can see I can access music from there and audio from there.
And then there's a nice little sort of menu just cascading down.
So, let's just jump in with the first video. Let's do this one here. So, this is captured on our drone. So, if you want to kind of enlarge the video track there, you just hit the Zoom In button.
And then we can see the whole length of it. So, let's see. This is about 20 seconds long. So, if we wanted to start off where the drone's already in the air.
So, let's go right over to about, let's get past the construction equipment. So, let's say about there. What we want to do is, if we want that to be how our video begins, let's just make a cut at the blade tool here. And then make a cut there.
So, the cut will be made wherever your tracker is. And then to get rid of this piece of footage we don't need, we just click it. And then hit Delete. And then hit Enter again in this space.
Click this space and then hit Delete again. And that will jump our video all the way to the very beginning.
So, let's say, I'll start there. But we want to fade in maybe. Just so we don't have just an image immediately begin the video. So, there's a really, really easy way to make a fade in.
So, all you do is, if you go to the very end of your video track, you'll notice that there's a little symbol here marking the end of the track. If you just right click and you can add cross dissolve. What that does is brings the footage in from black to the video itself. So, let's do 60 frames.
So, that's great. But, so what we do is, our drone comes in and then it stops. And then I pull the drone back. And let's see.
I believe I make it land again, do I? No, I just hold it in the air. That's okay. That's no problem.
If you actually want to, we could actually use something interesting here. Let's just click the video track and hit Ctrl C. And then move your timeline scrubber here and hit Ctrl V. And that will duplicate the same video track.
And then what we can do is, if we right click again, and then go to speed. Because this has not got any people in it, it's not got any cars driving past, this will work really well. So, what we can do is, we can reverse the speed, which will literally just reverse the video track. So, let's change that.
And you'll see that it'll still fade in again, but it'll have a nicer, longer sort of, you know, this is just one of those methods where, you know, if you find that some of your video isn't coming out in the way you maybe expect, it's maybe not looking the correct way, you can actually just do things like reversing it. If there's no people in it, you know, you can't see anybody obviously walking backwards, it'll be a great opportunity to do that. So, this looks pretty natural. So, if I, you know, you can get a longer drone shot, which could work a wee bit better for what we'll do for this.
There we go. Now, that did jolt a little bit.
Sometimes with the higher video tracks, DaVinci can sometimes slow down just depending on your, the power of your computer. So, to actually prevent that, so let's just delete this track for now. We'll actually use the reversed one. But to prevent sort of stuttering, what we can actually do is, if you go to playback, and then you go to timeline playback resolution, we can actually quarter it, which will reduce the resolution by four times.
And then that will allow it to be much, much smoother. It's still jolting a wee bit. So, you know what we could do, if it's still jolting, there's actually a further thing we can do, which is if we go to the video track here, this is a, it's a really high quality drone, piece of drone footage. So, it's, it is, it does, it does make it chug a little bit.
But for things like phones, you know, they're much higher compression, so it won't be as much of a problem. But if it is ever a problem, this is a great thing that's actually coming up now, is that we can actually do something called proxy media. So, if we hit generate proxy media, what that'll do is it will create an additional video file, which is a much lower quality version of your video. So, you can see it's just changed there, and you can see that the HQ symbols appeared.
That just means that the footage is working off a proxy. So, a proxy is a lower quality video that we're going to work off of. So, up until we actually do what's called rendering it out, which is the final processing of the video, it will work off this lower quality version, which will prevent kind of stuttering, just as another way to lighten the load on the software. So, that's that sort of for now.
So, then let's jump into our next clip. And we'll just layer it right there. So, that will actually prevent... Oh, sorry.
It'll actually produce a cut for us there. But you can see it doesn't start off quite right. So, let's go down here. Let's start off where it's...
So, there's a turn there. Let's see. I'll go to the very end of the turn. And then I'll make another cut.
And we'll get rid of the rest of this footage here. And we'll actually do another reverse. Let's see. Reverse speed.
Perfect. And then that will allow us to actually pull in from the left to the right. So, whenever we actually look at the footage here... Okay.
So, I actually pulled the drone a little bit back. So, let's make a wee cut there. So, it's good just to check your footage. So, it stops over there.
So, to drag that track there, you just hit the... Go to the very end of the track and then left-click and drag it down. Easy as that. And then let's just close that gap again.
There we go. So, and then this is kind of lagging a tiny bit. So, let's actually proxy that. Proxy media.
So, depending on the length of the video, it'll take a little bit longer maybe for the proxy media to fully work. But it's only not even a minute, so it didn't take very long at all. So, that's just how you do basic cutting.
So, the last thing I wanted to do is... This is our testimonial video for Yardbox. And I wanted to show you how to generate subtitles really, really quickly, because subtitles are such an easy way to get that extra bit of viewer engagement and viewer retention. So, let's just delete this for now and bring the testimonial down.
So, let's go to... We want to just make sure we've got our track highlight here. This is the audio track down here below. You see the audio waves and then this is, of course, the video track.
And then if we jump to Timeline and then go to AI Tools, then we'll go to Create Subtitles from Audio. So, for our language, we'll select English and then Custom Preset. That's just Netflix there. And then Lines.
We can just keep it at single lines. That just means that each subtitle track is just one line going across. For horizontal video, that works really, really well. It's a little different for rules for mobile, but I'll cover that in another video.
So, what we want to do is hit Create. Now, again, just depending on the length of the video, it'll depend on how long the subtitles take to generate. But given that it's about a five-minute video, it shouldn't take too long at all. Okay, and we've got our audio track all sorted.
No, that didn't even take... I don't even think that took a minute. So, what we can do is we can zoom in here and we'll see it'll sometimes generate things. Like, I've got music in this video.
This is actually an already edited video. So, I can just... If I don't want the upbeat music track to be in, I can just hit Delete on that. Same as any other track in DaVinci.
And you'll see that because we've got a little bit of music in here, it's sort of... The subtitles aren't able to be generated from a purely clean source. So, this is just another great example of just make sure you check all of your subtitles to make sure they are correct. So, this would, of course, say Yardbox.
Perfect. Yardbox started as...
And what we can do is you can see it's kind of hard to read against the sort of white backdrop there. It sort of almost bleeds in. So, let's zoom back out and let's highlight everything. So, if I highlight all of our subtitle tracks, anything I do to change it will change in the whole thing.
So, first of all, let's change the text there. Let's change the font to something a wee bit stronger. Let's go to quite like Poppins there. And then it's just a regular.
And then let's increase the size a little bit. Just in this track section. Increase that a little bit. There we go.
And let's then add a drop shadow at the very bottom here. So, what that does is it adds just a little bit of... In fact, let's add a background instead. The reason I'm going to add a background is it just sounds like a little bit more.
But just to show you the drop shadow again, you can actually do a little offset there. That's why it doesn't appear immediately. It's that you can change the exact direction. If we want to double it up, we can.
But I don't think there's too much of a practical use of that. But let's just X off the drop shadow there. You can have multiple effects technically going at once, but just make sure if you don't want them to overlap, you just turn them off like so. And then let's add the background again.
I quite like that. And then if we want to actually curve the corner radius, we can just do so like that. Let's actually just lower the size just a tiny bit. There we go.
And you want to actually... If you're putting it up on YouTube or something and someone's scrolling through, you actually want to lift this up just a tiny bit just because the player track will maybe get in the way and you want people to still be able to read it. So, let's just raise it up like so. So, yeah.
That is just very, very basic editing in DaVinci. And it'll just get your first video across the line, just looking that little bit sharper, little bit cleaner. You know, we've done really basic transitions. We've done subtitles.
And, of course, we've done just the very basic cutting. So, thank you very much for watching, guys. This has been Fieldmotion, and this has been Fieldmotion's Growth Hub. Yeah.
So, thank you very much for watching. So, yeah. Thank you very much for watching. This has been Adam from Fieldmotion, and this has been Fieldmotion's Growth Hub.
So, in this video, we'll be talking a little bit about DaVinci. We're going to go through the very basic editing process. We're going to maybe show some transitions, subtitles as well. Just very, very basic stuff, just so this isn't a sort of overwhelming video, because it can kind of be an overwhelming task, just jumping into DaVinci and just really, really going into depth about it.
I'll make a series of videos around DaVinci, and by the end of it, you'll be a pro. And then just to wrap up coverage on the DaVinci Resolve tutorial.
So, let's go down to the Deliver page, and this is going to be exporting the video. So, this is actually processing it and making it basically an MP4 or whatever format you'd like. So, let's go with something like, let's just do Growth Hub editing. And always save the location in a sort of notable, you're going to have enough space, and it's going to be easy to find.
So, let's just do desktop for the sake of the video. And then we'll go down here, and you'll see that there's the audio section here, and that's ticked, and video section that's ticked. So, if it's unticked, just make sure you tick it if you want to have either video or audio. And in terms of the format, so, I like to kind of do things as MP4, H.265, and then NVIDIA for the encoder, or whatever your CPU is.
These kind of don't matter too much, really, in terms of what the format is. Formats, MP4, everybody's heard of an MP4, but you can also have things like QuickTime, which are quite similar. It's a bit more favourable towards Apple devices, but MP4 is quite a good sort of lower size file. And H.265, it just means that essentially the process is as efficient as possible.
And then the encoder, NVIDIA, you can leave that at auto if you'd like. It usually knows exactly what it's doing. So, then timeline resolution, just keep that absolutely similar. Frame rate as well.
In terms of the quality, so, if you're doing something with a lot of motion, you want to have a fairly high bit rate. So, I would just keep that to something, if you're putting it up on YouTube, medium quality is perfect. It's not a problem. It really just kind of comes down to, if you want to kind of lower it really heavily, the bit rate will cause it to almost, if you're pulling a camera from one side to another, it'll pixelate it quite heavily.
So, you want it to be kind of a good bit higher. You can set it to best, and it doesn't really impact the speed of the render too much. It just really kind of comes down to file size. And then just go all the way down, and then if we have subtitles here, you can see we export subtitle, and then what we'll do is, you hit burn into video.
And that means that, the subtitles are actually processed alongside the video, so it's all in the same file. And you can have a selection of, you know, making it a separate file, if you so wish. Add to render queue, and you'll see that there, just click on that, and then render all. And then that's it.
It'll render and take maybe, you know, for this video, maybe about a minute. It just kind of depends on your PC's hardware, but yeah. So, that's been the DaVinci Resolve sort of basic tutorial. So, this has been Adam from Fieldmotion.
Thank you very much for watching. This has been Fieldmotion's Growth Hub.