Edit video with professional tools
Video editing for free is the dream, isn’t it? Nobody really wants to invest in professional software just to stitch together a family video or a bit of gaming footage. But there’s a reason we call it a dream: Frankly, the majority of free video-editing software is terrible. Windows Movie Maker does a passable job, if you’re not looking for particularly presentable results; ShotCut, recently making its way over from Linux, has the instability and baffling UI typical of its original home. There’s a stack of other packages out there that can apparently do the trick, but they’re so obtuse and buggy that we wouldn’t touch them. Which means it’s time for some DaVinci Resolve. Recently made free (as an ad for its full version), Blackmagic’s editor is actually used, for real, for Hollywood film grading, and it includes full editing facilities to boot.
1 PREPARATIONS Begin by downloading and installing DaVinci Resolve. It’s a reasonably big package at over 400MB, and there are a few dependencies you may need, although the installer takes care of these for you. Although you need to register in order to download it in the first place, there are no nasty hidden extras to watch out for in the installer, as far as we can tell. Launch the software and take the tour to see a preview of a few of Resolve’s key features, then let it check your computer to see how well it’ll perform. You can now create a new project. Bear in mind that the maximum resolution of the free version is 1080p, because 4K editing is locked to the paid-for real deal. The next choice is for the editor’s keyboard shortcuts, which you can set to match those of a number of other high-end editors—we’re using DaVinci’s default set throughout this guide, but you may already be familiar with Premiere, Final Cut, or Avid Media Composer.
2 LOOK AROUND Resolve’s interface is split into four parts, which you can access using the bar at the bottom of the window, or by selecting them in the “Workspace > Primary Workspace” menu. The first one you’ll see is the media workspace [ Image A], so let’s take a quick and very basic tour. Starting at the top-left, there’s a list of folder locations, which you use to locate your media; once a folder is located, a list of clips appears to its right, which can be previewed in the window to the right of that. You add your clips to your project by dragging them to the large pane at the bottom of the interface, or view information about the currently selected clip in the bottom-right pane. Drag a few clips into the bottom pane, and hit Shift-4 to head to Edit mode.
3 THE EDITING ROOM Now we’re into the meat of Resolve’s editing facilities [ Image B], which will be familiar to anyone who’s used a non-linear editor before. You get access to the clips you’ve selected, a timeline at the bottom of the screen, a couple of preview windows at the top, and a limited list of effects and transitions. Begin by dragging one of your clips on to the timeline—we’re using freely available public domain footage sourced from Archive.org, so if you’re looking to try Resolve, but don’t yet have any footage to use, that’s a solid legal source. When you drop your clip in, two tracks are created: one for the video, and one for its associated audio track. Each of these elements can be edited independently, although they begin (usefully) linked together, so your audio won’t end up out of sync.
4 TRIM AND SPLICE Hover your mouse over the ends of your clip— scroll, or use your mouse wheel to zoom out, if you can’t see all of it—and you can top and tail it by left-clicking and dragging. While this is a viable tactic, it’s far from the most useful way to trim a clip, mainly because you have to keep previewing it to see exactly where you’ve trimmed to. Better, then, to splice, putting a break in your clip at the exact point it needs to be cut. Use the controls of the rightmost preview window to view your clip, and stop it at the exact point you’d like it cut. Alternatively, drag the red position marker to your splice location. Then select the razor blade tool along the top edge of the timeline pane, and click on the position marker to break the clip into two. Since this is non-linear editing, there’s no need to worry
about this brutality: you won’t affect your original files at all. Go ahead and clean up by selecting the arrow tool, clicking the excess, and hitting Delete.
5 LAYERING UP Let’s add a second clip now, and look at Resolve’s hierarchy. Drag your next clip and drop it above the original one, which creates a new video track. Overlap it with your first clip, and preview your video; you’ll see that the original has basically disappeared, since this new clip is at the top of the pile. This order matters, because it means you’re able to reliably mix video tracks together using transitions and cross fades. So, let’s do that. Move your upper clip close to the end of the lower one, overlapping just slightly. Hover, using the arrow tool, over the top-left edge of your top clip [ Image C] to reveal a white handle; drag it to the right, and drop it in line with the end of the first clip and—hey presto!—you’ve created a cross fade.
6 MAKING THE GRADE You could spend all your time in Resolve’s editing interface, and not worry about the rest of it. But Resolve was built as a color grading tool and, frankly, its non-linear editing portion is not quite as tasty as that of some of its competitors. The real meat, then, lies in the “Color” section, which hosts the grading, compositing, and effects tools. You’re working with a lesser collection than in the full version, but this is still a broadcast-standard selection. The only problem? The node-based system that Resolve uses can be a bit of a dog to get your head around. So, before we even touch the controls, let’s explain it with a little analogy. Many editors allow you to add effects to video using layers; think of this as a nice cream cake. If you’ve missed something out, it’s going to be a very messy job to pull it apart, put in the additional ingredient, and assemble the whole thing back into some presentable order. Using nodes is more like working with cupcakes; each one can be revised and decorated exactly as you wish; filling up your cupcake stand doesn’t mean they’re locked in place—if one looks a bit shoddy, you can pull it out without ruining the rest—and you’re free to eat them in any order you like. It’s an incredibly flexible way to add effects, and efficient, too: once you’ve created a node, you can reuse it as you wish.
7 COMPOSITION So, let’s try out this section with a bit of green screen—otherwise known as chroma key— compositing. We’re using the clip “Hair Detail” from www.hollywoodcamerawork.com/greenscreenplates.html as our test, since it gives us a good chance to fiddle with some relevant settings. If you’re creating your own green
screen shot, make sure your lighting is consistent, your surface as flat as possible, and your camera set with enough saturation that the green doesn’t tend toward the gray. Head back to the timeline section, and clear it off by dragging a box over all the clips within, and hitting Delete, then place the green screen footage on top of whatever background footage you’d like to use—head back to the “Media” section to import it, if you’ve not done so already. If you’re using the same source file as us, you’ll notice that it comes as a series of png files; Resolve treats these the same as it does videos, so rather than importing it frame-by-frame, drag the folder into the bottom pane. Our clip has a slight issue: it’s anamorphic, so it looks squashed. Select the clip in the bottom pane, then select “Clip Attributes”—setting “Pixel Aspect Ratio” to “16:9” worked to pull our clip to the correct scale.
8 SEE THE RESULTS Head back to the “Edit” section, and layer up a couple of clips, placing the green screen footage on top of your background. Use the preview window to ensure that you can see the green screen footage, then head to the “Color” section. Click on your green screen footage to show it in the preview window, then add a new serial node by hitting Alt-S. Click the eyedropper tool (the Qualifier) on the menu in the center of the screen, then click an area of green screen to select it. Not much seems to have changed, but click the sparkling magic wand icon above the preview, and you’ll see that Resolve has created a mask [ Image D], based on your selected color. At the bottom of the screen, under “Selection Range,” clicking the rightmost icon inverts the effect—because we’re looking to keep the foreground, rather than the background—and you can see how well you’ve done. Click and drag the values beneath hue, saturation, and luminance [ Image E] in the Qualifier window to increase the range of color you’re selecting, which should (hopefully) pull your chroma key much closer
to the content you wish to keep visible. In our case, it hasn’t worked well, because the green background is massively over-saturated.
9 COLORATION We need to bring that color down a little before our chroma key will work. Right-click the second node in the top-right pane, and select “Create serial node before.” On this node, linked in the chain prior to our chroma key operation, we’ll adjust the clip’s coloration, so click it to start editing it. There’s a problem, of course: if we just pull out a load of green from the clip, our cutout subject starts to look purple and unwell. But we can be more selective than that. Toward the bottom-left, click the icon that looks like a dot inside a circle to find the color wheels, then head to the third page. Drag the slider below the “Highlight” wheel, and you’ll start pulling down the brightness of the background, leaving the main image intact. Click on the original node, and drag the same slider back up a little, which should correct any disturbance to the original image. Make no mistake, we’re hacking here. There’s no adding quality to poor footage, and the green screen clip we’re using is supplied because it presents challenges; if you’re using your own stuff, you may not find it as difficult to work with. Sometimes, you just have to do the best job you can, and that means a lot of manual tweaking. Thankfully, pretty much every tool in Resolve’s Color section has a reset button, so you can try your tweaks, and undo them quickly.
10 QUALIFICATION Click the node with the chroma key applied to it, make sure the Qualifier tool is selected in the bottom-center pane, and drag the blur radius to increase its value slightly. Don’t go crazy, but apply at least a small amount, which will go some way to offsetting the harsh lines often present around the edge of a keyed image. Now it’s time to take a look at our results. In the nodes panel, right-click, and select “Add Alpha Output,” then click and drag a line between the triangular output of the rightmost node to the blue item that’s appeared. Switch off highlight mode by clicking the magic wand above the video preview, and the mixed picture appears. You may want to move the overlaid element; this is ridiculously easy. Just find the sizing tool on the central menu (third from right), and drag the values to move, rotate, or skew your overlay. The edges of the overlaid image block out the background, so head to the window tool (third from left), and click “Linear” at the top to draw a box around your image, and use it [ Image F] to clip the edges. If you have a poorly keyed background— perhaps with inconsistent green screen, or other elements you don’t want in shot—the window tool is a perfect way to get rid of them. So here we are—you’ve been given a glimpse of Resolve’s power, and we’ve spent four pages merely skimming the surface of what it can do. Head to the “Help” menu to open its reference manual, where over a thousand pages of instructions await you....