In this tutorial, we'll learn how to create a new project in DaVinci Resolve (version 18.6).
Step 1: download and install DaVinci Resolve for free from its official website (blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve), then open DaVinci Resolve.
When DaVinci Resolve starts, a banner will appear as it loads the resources the application needs to work. After Davinci Resolve finishes loading, a dialog will appear where you can see your projects. If you have created a project before, this dialog will appear empty except for one button at the start that reads "Untitled Project."
Step 2: double click on "Untitled Project" to create a new project without a title. Alternatively, click on the "New Project" button on the bottom-right of the dialog to create a project with a title. If you do this, a dialog box will appear for you to input the title of the new project.
Note: if you create an untitled project, it won't be saved automatically by default, and you'll need to set the title later when you save it.
Having done this, you'll be greeted with DaVinci Resolve's main window, which can be rather daunting at first due to how complex it is.
There are three things you'll want to do in every new project: import a video, image or audio file so you can start editing it, add it to the timeline, and change the project settings so DaVinci knows what aspect ratio you want to work with.
How to Import a Video Files
Step 3: click on File -> Import -> Media... on the menubar (keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+I) to import a new media file. Doing this will open a file selector dialog. A media file is the video, image (photo, drawing, illustration), or audio (sound effects, music) that you want to include in your project.
Alternatively, you can drag and drop them a media file from a file manager into DaVinci Resolve. This doesn't work on all views of DaVinci Resolve. At the bottom of the window, you'll find 7 different icons that switch between the views. The leftmost icon switches to the "Media" view. Click on it, and then you can drag and drop a file from a folder opened in File Explorer into DaVinci Explorer.
Step 4: if you import a video file, DaVinci Resolve may show you a dialog that says: "Change Project Frame Rate? The selected clips have a different frame rate to the project. Would you like to change your timeline frame rate to match? You can't undo this action." If you are editing only one video file or multiple video files with the same frame rate, then you should click "Change." Normally they will be the same frame rate if they were all recorded the same way, the frame rate is generally a common value, such as 30 FPS.
How to Add a Video Clip to the Timeline
Next, we'll create a clip from the media file we imported. To do this, we also need to create a new timeline, because a single DaVinci project may have multiple timelines. Let's learn how to do it:
Step 5: on the "Media" view, right click on the imported video file to open its context menu, then click on the option "Create New Timeline Using Selected Clips...," this will make a dialog appear for you to input the name and other properties of the new timeline.
Step 6: simply click the Create button on this dialog without changing the default values.
Alternatively, you can also create a timeline automatically by going to the Cut or Edit views and dragging the video file from the Media Pool into the timeline.
It's also possible to skip another step by dragging a file from the file manager directly into the timeline of those views.
How to Change the Video Size (Aspect Ratio)
At this stage, we can already export a video from DaVinci Resolve, but there's another step it's good to learn about: how to change the dimensions (the width and height, aspect ratio) of the video, of the project, or of the a timeline.
IT'S IMPORTANT YOU DO THIS BEFORE EDITING A VIDEO! If you edit the video first and then try to change this setting, it may mess up your edits!
When you export a video in DaVinci Resolve, you can set whatever width and height you want, and DaVinci will scale the video to match that width and height. The same thing happens when you add a clip of one size to a project of another size. Let's understand how this works.
For example, let's say my project is 1600 pixels of width by 900 pixels of height, and I have a a video clip that is 1280x720px. Both the dimensions 1600x900 and 1280x720 have an aspect ratio of 16:9. We can make a 1280x720 video clip fit perfectly into the 1600x900 space by scaling it by a factor of 1.25. We can observe that in the following multiplications:
1280 × 1.25 = 1600
720 × 1.25 = 900So in this case, if my project is 1600x900, and I export the video as 1600x900, but my video clip is 1280x720, it will be upscaled to fit the output size, which will make it blurry.
DaVinci renders videos in two stages. First it will scale the clip according to the project size, then it will scale the result to the exported size. This means that if we make the project size very small (the smallest we can make is 256x256), and then export it to 1024x1024, for example, it will look very blurry even if the original clips were larger than 1024x1024, because DaVinci will first create a 256x256 frame, and then upscale this frame to 1024x1024.
In summary, this means that you should set the project size to the largest size that you plan to export the video as.
If you plan to make a 1600x900 and a 1280x720 version of the video, you should set the project size to 1600x900, and then set the output size to 1280x720 when exporting.
Another important thing: if you plan to export to an aspect ratio different from the default.
For example, on Youtube, for a Youtube Video to be classified as a Youtube Short, it must have a vertical aspect ratio. If your project size is 1600x900, and you tried to export to 600x900, it would squish the video horizontally to make the 1600 vertical lines fit a 600 lines space instead of cropping it.
Now that we understand how it works, let's see how to change it.
Step 7: click on File -> Project Settings... in the menubar. The Project Settings dialog will appear.
Step 8: on the sidebar, select the section Master Settings. It's the first one, above Image Scaling.
Step 9: the first setting you see should be in a Timeline Format section, labelled Timeline resolution. This is a dropdown list from which you can select common video resolutions, such as 1280 x 720 HD 720P and 1920 x 1080 HD. If you click on one of these, the properties under it will change accordingly.
If the dimensions you want aren't in the list, you can simply type them in the two boxes (in "width x height" layout) under it. For example, to make the project 600x900, we'd type 600 in the first box, and 900 in the second box.
Step 10: click Save to close the dialog and apply the changes.
In complex projects with multiple timelines, you can specify a different size for each timeline. In this case, you would have to right click on the timeline in the Media view, click on Timelines -> Timeline settings..., uncheck Use Project Settings, and then you'll be able to change the size and other settings of that timeline specifically. Note that you can also create multiple timelines from the same video clip and insert one timeline as a clip of another timeline. In other words, each timeline is like a video you can export, except you don't need to export them in order to import them into another timeline.
Exporting the Video
One bonus step: to export the video after you have edited it, click on the Deliver view (rocket ship icon) at the bottom of the window, click the button "Add to Render Queue" on the "Render Settings" sidebar at the left, and THEN click on the "Render All" button at the bottom of the "Render Queue" panel at the top-right. This should start rendering the video, which will be saved in your Videos folder by default.
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