Tricky Little Things in DaVinci Resolve - Episode 4
As a professional video editor, I love clip markers and I love DaVinci Resolve AND I LOVE using the Index panel to navigate quickly for finding specific moments. But what I don’t love is seeing a marker on all of my source clips video AND audio tracks. I just want to see one marked part, the video part, so it’s fast to jump between them on a timeline.
It turns out you can quickly remove those pesky audio markers once they are on the timeline by locking the video track so it’s left alone and going up to the mark menu and all the way down to delete all markers.
I’m Chadwick and I have more of my little pro secrets and tricks I use to edit in DaVinci Resolve coming right up in episode four of this series today.
Custom Thumbnails
Thumbnails matter right? We’re visual creatives. How often do you get a thumbnail that’s randomly chosen and has nothing to do with that clip?
You can actually hover scrub in thumbnail view with your mouse and hit command or control P and lock in a new poster frame or a thumbnail view of the clip or timeline in the media pool. You can’t really move the thumbnails around, but hopefully, this is on a roadmap for the future if you’re watching Blackmagic.
Gray User Interface
I switch between several computers each week, but there are a couple user interface settings I almost always change right away.
The first thing I’m not a fan of is the default blue background. Maybe it’s there to help make it stand out, but even if you’re not color grading and need a neutral background, I just prefer black. Well there is an option for that if you go up to the resolve menu - preferences - user - ui settings and the checkbox for use gray background for user interface. After a restart, you can say goodbye blue.
But, while you’re there, also consider checking the box for show focus indicators in the user interface. This places a thin red bar on whatever panel you are currently selecting. And honestly, this is the best way to know where you’re at when you work as much as possible with keyboard shortcuts. Shortcuts are not only page specific most of the time but also panel specific.
Match Frame vs Match Frame to Source Clip
Davinci match frame is not the same as match frame to source clip. I didn’t even know this until a few months ago. From now on, I just use match frame to source clip.
To back up, the purpose of a match frame is this button here. You hit it and it calls up that exact frame in the source monitor and is perfect to find what other material is available to work with on that clip without changing the timeline at all. The default is F as a shortcut.
But when you use multicam clips, and you have multicam clips with synced multichannel audio, which is super common for the work I do, the normal match frame only pulls up the multicam clip. To get back to the source clip, which has access to all the audio channels you can use match frame to source clip. This is one way to get around working with adaptive audio track when you need to on the edit page.
Go to the clip menu and then a the very bottom is match frame to source clip. I set this to N on the keyboard, but essentially once I call up a clip with match frame to source clip I can overcut the original multichannel sound back to the timeline like this.
Mark your timeline clip
Match Frame to Source Clip
Disable video patching (the little orange box)
Overwrite Edit (F10)
The Flatten & Clip Attributes Microphone Swap
Perhaps a simpler way is to only work with one microphone at a time for a cleaner timeline sequence. Because synced (linked) audio in DaVinci Resolve is all non-destructive metadata, this can be changed at any time - even on clips on the timeline. For multicam clips you must first flatten the audio segment to get access to clip attributes. Then you want to change the format to mono instead of adaptive. Pick your source channel and you’re done!
If you aren’t working with multicam clips, this is still a great way to change what source audio channel you are using on the edit page. A common workflow would be to use the stereo mix until you get close to doing a final mix and then change to the microphones you want at that later stage in the editing workflow. The great thing about this is that it prevents you from babysitting lots of unnecessary tracks during the creative shot selection and timing part of the editing process.
