Here Are Some Helpful Tutorials to Get You Started Editing & Grading in DaVinci Resolve 12

When it's officially released later this summer (or early fall), Resolve will become the most fully featured NLE and color correction tool that you can get for free on any major operating system. Like many of you, I'm extremely excited for that proposition, especially considering that I edit a lot less than I used to, and forking out Creative Cloud subscription fees month after month is starting to seem like a waste of money. For that reason, I'm definitely thinking about adopting Resolve as my primary editing tool. And in order to learn it and see if it will meet my needs, I've taken to YouTube to find the best tutorials.

Even though the beta has only been out for a few weeks at this point, there are already some damn good tutorials showcasing both the editing and color correction prowess of the software. First up is an in-depth look at Resolve 12's editing interface from Dave Andrade over at the Post Color Blog:

One of the biggest additions in Resolve 12 is, of course, multicam editing. In this quick tutorial, MiesnerMedia shows us how quick and simple it is to create a multicam clip and then edit it down in realtime.

In almost all respects, it seems like Blackmagic has added enough editing features to satisfy most casual and professional editors alike. The real test for this system's overall viability, however, is editing and playback performance. By many accounts, playback can get choppy with certain media types, especially once you start adding transitions and color correction nodes. I've been playing around with 1080p ProRes 422 and h.264 DSLR footage on a maxed-out 5K iMac, jumping back and forth between the color and edit workspaces, and it seems to run smoothly. Then again, it's a fairly hefty machine, so results on laptops and other systems might vary.

The only problem I've come across is that the preset keyboard layout for Avid isn't particularly spot on, which made it necessary to go in and change a bunch of them by hand. Definitely a pain, but that's to be expected when working with a new NLE.

Now on to the color side of things. In an excellent overview video by Casey Faris, he walks you through the entire Resolve 12 interface and shows you the essentials that you need to know in order to get started with grading:

There are, of course, many more tutorials out there that go into detail about specific features and grading techniques, but these should get you started down the path of learning this powerful software. If you haven't downloaded the Resolve 12 beta yet, it's available over on Blackmagic's site.