DaVinci Resolve 15 Free Training

July 9, 2018
13 min read
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DaVinci Resolve 15 Free Training

Free Davinci Resolve 15 online training

DaVinci Resolve 15 is still rolling through its extensive beta process, which at the time of writing is currently ‘Public Beta 6’, which you can download here for free.

The headline new additions include:

  • Editing audio automation data in the Fairlight page
  • Simultaneous monitoring of HDR and SDR for Dolby Vision and HDR10+
  • New native French and Portuguese language support to the user interface
  • The ability to copy Fusion compositions
  • Use the clip name for data burn-in
  • Replace existing frame based files during renders
  • Support for audio clip levels from AAF imports
  • More audio file formats supported in the sound library
  • Subframe audio fades on the timeline
  • More robust metadata support for QuickTime files
  • More scripting APIs and documentation

If you’re not caught up with some of the previous improvements, Public Beta 5 included the following:

  • Initial support for OpenFX plugins on the Fusion page
  • Tint, temperature and exposure controls for Canon RAW clips
  • Add filters to clips with Fusion effects
  • New Python scripting APIs

It also addressed issues with:

  • Automatic audio synchronization
  • Dynamic trimming reliability
  • Video output from the Fusion page
  • LUT browser refreshes

If you want to learn a huge amount more about the new features in DaVinci Resolve 15 check out these previous posts:

How to Grade Like a Hollywood Colorist

In this free 20 minute crash course on DaVinci Resolve 15, colorist Denver Riddle gives you a pacy introduction to colour grading in Resolve.

If you’re fairly new to colour grading, this will be 20 minutes well spent as Denver covers key terminology, how to use video scopes (which is often a sizeable hurdle for new colorists) as well as his preferred colour correction workflow, or order of operations to match all of your shots within a sequence.

In the meat of the tutorial Denver also demonstrates how to create a specific look (which you can download as free LUT), create isolated secondary corrections using tracked Power Windows, addressing client requests across multiple shots using shared nodes and much more.

If you found the crash course useful and enjoyed Denver’s style of presentation then you should definitely check out his free 1 hour online workshop called How To Grade Like a Hollywood Colorist, in which you can also grab a download link to some unique free LUTS, ask him questions and a whole lot more.

Space is limited each time Denver runs the class so you’ll need to sign up for the next one here.

Denver has some great free and paid for LUTs and colour grading tools which I’ve previously written about here:

Download Five hours of Free DaVinci Resolve Training

free davinci resolve training

MixingLight.com, probably the premiere colour grading training site online today, has recently released a free 5 and a half hour course called DaVinci Resolve 14 QuickStart.

Before I get into what it offers, the obvious question arises; isn’t this already out of date if Resolve 15 is out?

Yes and no.

Yes in that the new features obviously won’t be in the training, but no in that the fundamental concepts, workflows and techniques will be the same as version 15 simply builds on version 14.

Spread across 62 individual lessons, with an average runtime of about 5 minutes each, the course is accessible to absolute beginners with the only requirement be that you are working with DaVinci Resolve 14.3 (the last stable release), which you can download for free here.

The course is split in two, with the first part (95 minutes) taking you through an entire spec project from start to finish. This helps you to get a sense of the overall picture before diving into the detail in part 2.

The second half gives you a ‘101’ of each of the four pages; Media, Edit, FairLight and Color with more depth and detail on each.

By the end you’ll have learned how to:

  • Set up a Project and key preferences
  • Import and organize your media
  • Edit video and audio into a timeline (and then make revisions)
  • Color correct to fix problems, build visual continuity and add effects
  • Set levels, EQ, and balance dialog and music
  • Render for final delivery to a client or the internet

download free grading training

There are a few little things that I always appreciate with a Mixing Light training course (I reviewed their last one here) which include things like having follow along exercise files so you can learn by doing as well as smaller, multi-part downloads, incase you’re not sitting on a fibre line.

In this case the five hour free QuickStart course is delivered as four 3GB zip files.

To find out more read this detailed 12 page PDF to see what each lesson covers, or sign up for free here.

professional color grading training

Lastly just to mention, a new feature that the Mixing Light team have recently added to the full subscription site is that of ‘Flight Paths’.

With nearly 700 tutorials on the site they needed a way to guide new users through that archive in a logical and sensible way.

These include things like: Building Your Edit or Colour Grading Suite, What is ACES and how do you work with it?, Using LUTS in DaVinci Resolve and many more.

You can grab a 7-day free trial to have access to everything MixingLight.com has to offer, here.

Advanced DaVinci Resolve 15 Tutorials

Colorist Juan Melara demonstrates how to reveal the StatusM film mode hidden inside FilmConvert’s colour grading plugin. Even though Juan does a great job of explaining what he’s doing step-by-step, the actual colour science is pretty complicated.

StatusM features in FilmConvert as it seems the matching between the cameras and motion picture film stocks is carried out in Status M density. It does however have a different spectral response compared to images that we normally work with, so we have to convert them.

You need to download the RED One Camera Profile to start this journey with Juan, which isn’t for beginners, although Juan does provide a free Powergrade of the whole process in Resolve. He also includes some stills of comparisons between the real film negative and his own emulation.

The reason you might want to use StatusM over the standard FilmConvert emulations is that StatusM is emulating a negative film scan as if it just came off the scanner.

The standard FilmConvert emulations are emulating the same film scans but then applying a print LUT on top.

This is fine if you’re after the contrasty look the print LUT imparts. But if you’re after a different look, say something a bit more subtle, you will need to battle the print LUT to get there. – Juan Melara.

By using the StatusM emulations you’re free to decide how the emulation converts from negative film scan to Rec709. You can apply you’re own print LUT, use a standard Rec709 conversion or even use a custom curve.

As you’ll need FilmConvert to make this work you can save 10% with the coupon code ‘Elwyn’ or click this link to activate it.

You can check out my own review of FilmConvert’s super useful colour grading plugin in this previous post.

Colorist Kevin Shaw shares some excellent tips on managing saturation in DaVinci Resolve in this short tutorial. Kevin walks through several options for working with saturation in ways that avoid using the ‘saturation’ control. Well worth a watch!

Colorist – A person of remarkable technical and aesthetic skills who advises on and manipulates colour and colour visual style. Colorists work in all industries from hair dressing and fashion to film and video…

Kevin also has a very detailed post production glossary which will give you easy to understand definitions of hundreds of technical terms.

His entire site is well worth rummaging through – lots of great articles and information on colour grading!

One of the exciting new features added to Resolve 15 is the ability to engage with Python and Lua scripting inside the app, which has come as a result of the incorporation of Fusion into Resolve.

In this tutorial Igor Ri?anovi? from HDHead.com, gives you a great taste of what’s possible when you know how including automating the creation of timelines from clips with a script. Presumably this would be a great way for DITs to speed up dailies creation.

You can keep track of Igor’s Resolve Python scripts, and download them for yourself, on his github page here.

In this follow up Igor shares some more details of his proof of concept app which allows you to control Resolve machines remotely.

In this excellent presentation from the LumaForge Faster Together suite at NAB 2018, Mixing Light founders Robbie Carman and Patrick Inhofer share how to use DaVinci Resolve to collaborate within a team of a senior and assistant colorist.

The guys discuss the benefits of Resolve Studio’s collaboration features which includes a chat box to communicate between collaborators, even without being on the internet, as long as you’re connected to the same shared database.

You’ll need to be running DaVinci Resolve Studio to create and use shared databases in this way. The bin locking functionality works on a ‘first-in, first-out’ method, so if you’re the first one into a bin you have control of it.

Well worth a watch if you are fortunate enough to be sharing your work load with others!

You can watch a lot more presentations from the LumaForge suite in this previous post, rounding up the best post production presentations from NAB 2018.

Spencer from RippleTraining.com shares this quick tip on how to work well during long distance collaborations with other DaVinci Resolve users.

Spencer effectively covers how to use markers and on-screen annotations to share comments with your team, exporting your project for sending to your team and then merging their work back into your project.

Tutorials on the New Features in Resolve 15

In this section of the post I’ve brought together some further tutorials which highlight some of the new features and functionality in DaVinci Resolve 15.

Paul Saccone is senior director of marketing for Blackmagic Design, and one of the interesting things that he said during this overview presentation of the app, was that in this release BMD has added over 100 new features that editors and colorists had specifically requested.

So be sure to get your feature requests in – you never know, maybe we’ll all benefit from your good ideas.

In this second presentation from the LACPUG event comes from Mary Plummer on how to make the most of the Fairlight page in DaVinci Resolve.

A quick look at Mary’s linkedIn page reveals just how experienced an editor she is – with over 25 years in the business, not to mention 12 years of experience as an instructor.

Of all the new features added to Resolve across the application, it’s dedicated audio capabilities are getting the least attention, although editors who do pay attention to them, will dramatically increase the production value of their projects because most things that sound better ‘look’ better too.

Editor Jeff Greenberg shares his experience of editing in Resolve in this presentation from the LumaForge Faster Together stage.

Jeff covers 8 cool things that make your editorial life easier whilst cutting in the app for (maybe) the first time, as well as 3 ‘speed bumps’ that might otherwise catch you out.

One of the big new features for colorists in Resolve 15 is Shared Nodes. Casey Faris quickly demonstrates how shared nodes work in comparison to ‘normal’ nodes and groups.

These will help you work faster if you maintain a mental map of what’s shared, what’s grouped and what’s just a regular node. Aided of course by the UI reminders.

If you’re new to Resolve or just re-installed the next beta update, then you’ll want to make sure you’ve got your Auto Save set up correctly, so you don’t lose any work! Justin Robinson (JayAre) walks you through the various options.

Find the settings under:

DaVinci Resolve > Preferences > User > Project Save and Load

In this video short video you can learn about a few hidden menus and options in Resolve 15, many of which were new to me, so well worth taking the 6 minutes to watch.

You can check out more of JayAre’s tutorials in these previous posts exploring Fusion in DaVinci Resolve 15:

Alex from LearnColourGrading.com share a quick tip on one of the new features in DaVinci Resolve 15 around keyboard shortcuts, which allows you to map the same keyboard shortcuts to different functions in different pages.

vfx fixes in Resolve 15

Lewis McGregor for Premiumbeat.com shares a really useful guide to using the Patch Replacer effect in Resolve to do some quick simple VFX fixes.

The before/after image above shows you how cleanly an errant object can be removed from a shot, whilst tracking it in. Knowing how to do this could make you a hero to your client!

When you first add the Patch Replacer onto a node, you’ll see these two ellipses: the source patch and the target patch.

If we relate back to Photoshop’s clone tool, this works in a very similar fashion.

You place the target ellipse (which can also be changed to a square or an alpha channel) over the area of the image that needs removal and the source patch over an appropriate space to clone.

Avery Peck walks through a Technical LUT workflow in performing LOG to Rec. 709 conversions. Presumably part 2 will cover Creative LUTs.

If you’ve ever wondered if you’re doing it right, this 8 minute tutorial will guide you through some solid best practices, all while avoiding some common pitfalls.

If you want to download more LUTs than you’ll know what to do with check out this popular post: Free Film LUTS for Colorist, Editors and DITs

Tips for DaVinci Resolve 15

As always I like to end these posts with the best tips I’ve seen from editors and colorists shared on Twitter. Be sure to click the date/time stamps to read any replies and comments!

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