DaVinci Resolve Tutorial: Cutting a clip into scenes

My name is Jordi “Yoyi” Molina, I’m a freelance colorist used to work on TV series (“Herederos”, “El Comisario”, “Fuera de Lugar”), documentaries and short films. Starting this week I’m going to start a series of posts about Davinci Resolve: an incredible color correction tool that used to belong to the realm of big post-production companies and that after being bought by Blackmagik Descklink has lowered its price to the point that it’s possible to incorporate it to modest productions.

In the posts I will give you an introduction to its tools from my perspective as a user of Apple Color, Avid Ds and After Effects. I’m in love with the program but I’ll try to be objective.

At the beginning of this post I will tell you what I liked the most at the beginning: THE PROGRAM CAN CUT THE PLANS ITSELF! A frequent situation in color correction is that it is done in a different station than the one used to edit the online. Often it takes more time to prepare the conform, match formats and resolutions and cut planes than the color correction itself. A veces el programa a corregir viene directamente como una única película sin cortes (frecuentemente llamado cariñosamente “chorizo”) y repetir con cuidado los cortes en un programa de dos horas es leeeeeeeeeeento.

Well, the Ressolve, aside from not having a 20 minute limit (Zass in the mouth, Apple Color) can try (and get it right!!!) in auto-detecting where the cuts should be. BIEEEEEEEN.

For it in the BROWSE window, where we look for in the hard disk the shots that would compose the film, we choose the “CHORIZO” that has all the montage. Right click and choose “SCENE CUT DETECTION”, this will take us to the SCENE window
(I attach a screenshot where you can see the cut graph of my short UKEMI) and voilá, a 15 minutes chorizo cut correctly in less than a minute…

And we finally have a timeline to work with for real.

I like it, A LOT.

I anticipate that the next posts will be an introduction to CColor and the use of masks (and 3d tracker!!!!).

You can see the DaVinci Resolve course that we are organizing here