DaVinci Resolve End to End: Seven Pages, Ripple Editing, Scopes Over Eyeballs, the Fairlight EQ-FX-Dynamics Chain, and Why Not to Use the Export Presets

Media, Cut, Edit, Fusion, Color, Fairlight, Deliver - the whole pipeline that used to need several applications, tabbed along the bottom. Media organises large shoots but can be skipped by importing straight on the Edit page. Cut is built for speed, with a dual timeline and ripple editing on by default, and it hides tools in a way that confuses beginners - which matters because Resolve often opens there. Edit is home base for cutting, music, effects, titles and stacked audio. Fusion is motion graphics and tracking, Color is grading, Fairlight is real audio, and Deliver is where format and destination are chosen. Two pages carry a complete project.

Resolve's free tier includes editing, music, transitions, effects, colour correction, audio work and Ultra HD export, with no watermark and no time limit - which makes it the only professional-grade editor a beginner can use indefinitely for nothing. Studio adds AI tools, noise reduction, 3D editing, multi-GPU support and above-4K export. The split becomes concrete later in the module when AI Voice Isolation turns out to be Studio-only, and the instructor simply moves on rather than pushing the upgrade. Registration is still required: name, email and country to Blackmagic.

Of everything in project settings, only timeline resolution and timeline frame rate really matter. 1920x1080 is the standard; ticking 'use vertical resolution' flips it to 1080x1920 for TikTok and Instagram, and vertical is a different timeline rather than a crop. Frame rate is the trap: he recommends 23.976 as the industry standard, but whatever you choose is locked as soon as the first clip lands, and the only way out is a new timeline at the new rate with everything pasted across. Before export, confirm the timeline still matches the source footage, because a mismatch costs quality silently. The project behaves like a folder - 'you have this main folder, and inside of that main folder, you have a bunch of subfolders' - and every new timeline inherits its settings.

The module remaps three shortcuts and calls them 'the all time best keyboard shortcuts': ripple delete left and right on R and T, which remove everything on one side of the playhead and slide the rest over, and ripple delete on E, which removes a selected middle section and closes the gap from both sides at once. Alongside them, two timeline controls decide whether an edit behaves. The Auto Track Selector determines which tracks receive a cut or paste and defaults to the lowest active track, so switching it off on the music track means edits elsewhere stop shifting the song. Locking a track prevents edits while still allowing playback. And Paste Attributes copies just one property - a zoom, a colour correction - from one clip to another.

Correction is technical - exposure and white balance - and grading is creative. Both are judged against scopes rather than the screen, because 'even if our monitor on our computer or desktop are a bit off' the numbers are not. The parade shows red, green and blue on a 0-1023 scale, and a flat line at the top or bottom means clipped data that no amount of dragging will bring back; it is generally easier to rescue an underexposed shot than an overexposed one for exactly that reason. The wheels map to something familiar: lift, gamma, gain and offset are shadows, midtones, highlights and a master, 'likened to EQ bass/mid/treble plus a master volume knob'. And the vectorscope's skin-tone line shows where human skin should sit regardless of skin colour, which makes white balance a measurement rather than an argument.

Audio gets two passes. Level one is a quick normalise on the Edit page toward about -6dB, either by the slider or by Normalize Audio Levels at True Peak -2. Level two moves to Fairlight and follows a fixed chain - EQ, then FX, then Dynamics - because you shape the sound before you set its level. EQ is used surgically: sweep a narrow band, find the frequency that sounds harsh, cut it. The compressor is explained in plain terms - threshold decides when it 'steps in', ratio decides 'how much would you like me to turn the volume down by', with 2:1 gentle and 10:1 strict. A noise gate hides breaths and hum below a threshold, but set too aggressively it eats wanted audio. The whole chain then saves as a Global Track Preset for the next recording with the same microphone.

The YouTube, Vimeo and TikTok buttons on the Deliver page look helpful and quietly re-compress your footage. Setting it by hand takes ten seconds: MP4, H.264 - or H.265 for a smaller file - resolution set to Timeline Resolution, audio sample rate Same as Project. Two traps follow. Subtitles do not export unless you enable them explicitly and choose to burn them in. And adding to the render queue is not rendering: the file only exists after you press Render. Vertical output needs a vertical timeline set up at the start, not a crop at the end, or you get black bars.

Separate bins for A-roll, B-roll and sound effects, ideally living on an external drive, plus a dedicated Timelines bin. The mechanical detail that saves an hour: dragging an already-organised folder into the Media Pool's Master bin preserves the subfolder structure inside Resolve, whereas dragging into a subfolder flattens everything. Two habits go with it. A 'selects' timeline is where footage you are unsure about goes, so it is neither lost nor cluttering the edit. And duplicating a timeline before a round of client revisions preserves the version you may have to go back to.