DaVinci Resolve Notes

Published 2022-04-19. Last modified 2024-02-01.
Time to read: 3 minutes.

This page is part of the av_studio collection.

These are my notes on transitioning from Adobe Premiere Pro to Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve.

Weaning Off Premiere Pro

I have made hundreds of instructional videos using Premiere Pro. It is a good program, but I strongly dislike two aspects of that program:

Adobe radically changes the user interface and even completely changes how important features work between releases. Only one version is provided and subscribers cannot opt to stay on the current version. Instead, everyone is upgraded at once, like it or not. This means your workflow could be threatened without notice after each upgrade. The change that hurt me the most was the removal of the Title Menu and Title Templates in 2017, which were replaced with Legacy Titles.
Very high cost, and no option to purchase outright. I am sure that was good for a short-term boost to the corporate bottom line, but I decided to abandon Adobe, along with many other customers.

DaVinci Resolve

So here I am learning DaVinci Resolve, which offers an impressive free edition.

DaVinci Resolve is not a live recording application. It is intended only to be used for article-production workflows. It will not handle more than one stream of video.

– Blackmagic Design Tech Support, 2022-11-15

DaVinci Resolve Preferences

The Preferences dialog can be displayed by using the menu items DaVinci Resolve / Preferences or by typing CTRL-,.

The dialog title changes according to the sub-option selected, which can be confusing because this means the dialog is not initially titled Preferences, as you might expect. Instead, the first time it opens, the Memory and GPU preferences are displayed, which means the dialog is also labeled Memory and GPU. If you select another set of options, for example, General, the title changes to General Preferences, and the sub-option is displayed the next time you open the dialog.

Audio Output

To send output to the speakers attached to my RME UFX III, I pressed CTRL-, then selected the Video and Audio I/O menu item. The following dialog was displayed, where I set I/O Engine to ASIO and Device to ASIO MADIface USB:

Camera Settings

The other default preferences were fine for my purposes, but I changed the camera settings to suit my Sony A7 iii camera:

Recording Audio

Select the Fairlight tab at the bottom of the screen.
Create an Audio Track by right-clicking in an empty place in the track header area and select Add Track / Mono.
Name the audio track by double-clicking on the automatically generated name and overtyping a new name. I called my new track voiceover.
Go to the channel strip for the new audio track in the mixer panel and click in the Input area, where it says No Input.
The Patch Input/Output panel will open.

TotalMix channels are mapped to DaVinci Resolve channels as:

TotalMix DaVinci Resolve
AN 1..8 1..8: MADIFace USB
Mic 9..12 9..12: MADIFace USB
ADAT 1..16 15..31: MADIFace USB
To map your new track, click on the new track button, then click on the source button, which for me was TotalMix channel ADAT 8, which appears to DaVinci Resolve as 22: MADIFace USB.
Press the Patch button.
Test that you made the proper connection by pressing the R button in the DaVinci Resolve Mixer panel. When you speak into the microphone, you should see signal appear in the meter.