Wacom Tablet Setup & TIPS for DaVinci Resolve
To edit video comfortably with a Wacom Tablet, there’s a solid 1-2 week learning curve, and the default settings need some customizing to be helpful in DaVinci Resolve. But I still love using a tablet because
My wrist isn’t sore after working long hours.
Speed & Control because 1 point on the tablet maps to 1 point on the computer screen.
I have Pressure Sensitivity for Painting in Fusion, so it's excellent for cleanup during finishing. Oh - and the pen doesn’t even use batteries, so nothing needs recharging. Welcome to my quick setup guide to using a Wacom for DaVinci Resolve
Download Wacom Driver
All Wacom devices need a driver installed to properly communicate with your operating system. You can grab the latest installer from their website here. Make sure to follow all the instructions to allow the necessary security permissions, especially on a Mac.
Once installed, at the bottom of the system settings, you will find the Wacom Center, which is a side application used to save user presets. Then, there is the “Wacom Tablet” panel, where you can customize your tablet and pen settings to your liking.
For application-specific commands, click the plus icon on the right-hand side under the application row to add specific applications you’d like to customize, like DaVinci Resolve.
I like to set the right click to the top button, and then the bottom button is application-specific. The bottom button for all applications is for pan/scroll. I set the bottom button for DaVinci Resolve to the middle click.
A useful tablet express key is to enable display toggle if you use multiple computer displays. Display toggle will remap your tablet surface from all computer screens acting as a single surface, to just one specific monitor at a time. I find it best to use display toggle for precise paint work to a single display, and then when I need access to other apps on the second display to toggle to all displays.
Wacom tablets have other on-screen customizations like radial controls. Still, I find it more intuitive and faster to use my left hand on the keyboard that sits directly to the left of my tablet for commands like modifiers.
Resolve Tips
Middle click has unique superpowers to DaVinci Resolve that aren’t used in any other video editing application. And with a middle click on a stylus, you don’t even touch the surface to activate it. Simply hold or click the bottom button on the wacom pen.
Some of my favorite middle click tips are:
Pan around the viewers on the edit, color, and fusion pages. This is especially useful after zooming in.
Pan up and down any panel in Resolve from the Media Pool to the Project Manager lists.
Closing Tabbed or “stacked” timelines on the edit page.
Pasting color grades or Fusion compositions from one clip to another (or many) without command c and command v.
Zooming into Viewers
One thing you’ll miss when you put the mouse away is how you work without the mouse scroll wheel. Well, this comes in 2 parts for me. For one use case, you can use the Touch Ring on the tablet as a replacement. The trick to using the touch ring is the window selection or cursor position on the Resolve interface. You can zoom in with the touch ring on viewers on the edit and color page. You can also increase or decrease track height with the shift modifier held down while rotating the wacom touch ring.
The second use case for zooming is the NUMBER 1 REASON why I love using a tablet. Zooming into the viewer on the Fusion page is a middle click swipe right to move in on the image. And a middle click swipe left to move back out. You can of course always fit the image back the viewers with command/control F in Fusion. Or Z to zoom to fit in edit or color viewers. The zoom in for Fusion anchors around the cursor position, making it extremely fast to get to the pixel level.
Paint and Roto
The ability to paint with pressure is a significant selling point of using a graphic tablet for compositing. With either the mask paint or regular paint tool in Fusion - the tools are already set up to work using pressure to control opacity. The harder you push down, the more paint you apply. It's very intuitive and can be modified to other controls with pressure, like the size of your brush. All the tablet controls are found in the tool inspector under the brush controls section.
The Wacom touch ring can’t control how large the brush size is. So here comes the middle click to the rescue again. To change brush size quickly - hold command/control and press the middle click - touch the tablet and swipe left or right. This is just like changing the size of the viewer, but instead, you can dynamically change the brush size without going over to an inspector slider.
Rotoscoping B-splines and polygons is a breeze with a pen and tablet, but one thing that is often overlooked in Fusion is the option modifier to grab a control point to the nearest point. This means you don’t have to click in super precisely on a point that might be difficult to grab to make position changes. Instead, hold down option/alt, and it will pull that control point along for the ride.
More Resolve Tablet Tips
Edit selection is made easier by lasso selecting edit points. Avid editors will be used to this, but essentially, you draw a box around the edit point or multiple points by holding the modifier keys option with shift. This keeps you from going into trim mode for a simple cut point or edit point selection.
Having the Bin view set to thumbnails can be a nice way to avoid renaming clips or timelines when double-clicking them in the media pool.
Right-click and chill. With the top pen button set to right-click, you don’t have to hold down that button while finding the contextual menu item you’re looking for. Some of the right-click options in Resolve are very long, so this means you can rest your clicking thumb and find what you need to select while that right-click menu stays up on the screen.
My first experience using a Wacom was in 2004 when I learned how to remove 3:2 pulldown on an Autodesk smoke system. I know many other tablet brands are out there now, and some are great. This is just my experience using some variants of the Wacom tablets over the last twenty years. I hope the settings I use are helpful to you, and because there is so much more to learn I’ll see you in the next video!
