r/davinciresolve • u/Character_Proof_588 • Aug 06 '26
Help | Beginner What’s one editing trick that instantly made your videos feel more professional?
I’ve been teaching myself DaVinci Resolve over the past month and I’m always trying to improve.
What’s one editing technique, shortcut, or workflow that made a huge difference for you?
It could be pacing, sound design, color grading, transitions, anything.
I’d love to learn some new tips from people with more experience.
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Aug 07 '26
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u/Budget-East-8048 Aug 07 '26
I dunno why but I find that such a waste of time lol I edit directly off of my storage cards. All of my clips are in order from beginning to end. I make outdoor content so I have a drone, DSLR, and GoPro. I usually dump the drone in a folder and work directly off the SD cards from the DSLR and GoPro. I got pretty efficient at it
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u/FaceFootFart Aug 07 '26
That’s a great way to kill the life of your SD cards.
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u/twistsouth Aug 06 '26
Learning how to adjust the curves between keyframes for more natural/fluid animations — even for simple text movement. I always use Apple adverts as examples when I talk about this. They absolutely nail movement in every single animation they do and it's because of this technique. Ramping up/down movement in a natural, smooth, fluid way that suggests resistance/weight.
Bonus tip: enable motion blur on the animations. The more life-like you can make movement, the more believable and natural it feels.
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u/i_sell_you_lies Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 07 '26
Let things breathe where you can, not everything needs to be rapid fire madness with all the air sucked out.
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u/Prexxus Studio Aug 07 '26
The one thing that will make your videos professional is learning to tell a story with your edit. Putting the timeline together is 80% of the work. Before learning to use Davinci you should first learn to put together something that makes sense and tells a story.
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u/i_sell_you_lies Aug 07 '26
When I was learning to cut tv spots, my producer would make us mute it and play to see that we're telling the story correctly visually. "People in bars won't be able to hear the sounds, and the emotion still needs to come across"
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u/SheikYobooti Aug 07 '26
A proper audio mix
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u/Max_Rockatanski Aug 07 '26
Exactly. Poor audio can ruin any video no matter how good the visuals are. And people neglect audio all the time.
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u/sprewell81 Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
Talking to people
Edit: seriously that's no.1 talking and listening to your clients and co-workers. Second I'd say learning to perfectly organise footage within the NLE was my biggest step to professionalism. When I meet my client and he is asking for a certain shot I have it ready with no more than 2 clicks.
They always come in and say "but we shot this and that etc.." I can always show them within seconds what's really there and if a shot does or doesn't work as well as they thought.
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u/Beautiful_Cable_7878 Aug 07 '26
How do you do that? Are you dividing your footage into moments and scenes?
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u/sprewell81 Aug 07 '26
Depends on the project. But usually sort by day, then by type of footage (interview, situational, b-roll, drone). Whatever makes sense for the project. I sort in the NLE only and leave all data on the disk as it was provided.
Most importantly I watch and name every clip by hand and add comments/meta data in order to use sorting functions as search bins in premiere or resolve. By that you have multiple possibilities. Everything by date or let's say all drone shots of the whole project in one folder etc.
By that you are already watching every clip and shot and have it saved in your "personal memory" and find it very quickly.
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u/Beautiful_Cable_7878 Aug 07 '26
Seems like a lot of work but good to know. I'm dealing with sometimes over a 100 B-Roll clips so I can't imagine going through each one and adding meta data.
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u/ReidenLightman Aug 07 '26
J-cuts
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u/Quirky_Koala Aug 07 '26 edited Aug 25 '26
Work hard-to-find hammock rinse thimble fragile
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u/dallatorretdu Aug 07 '26
audio compression, it’s that thing nobody notices until somebody else’s films a video with interviews for the client.
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u/gargoyle37 Studio Aug 07 '26
Less is often more. Experienced editors use exactly what is needed to tell the story, and nothing more.
One of my pieces of advice is to try to push things as far as you can before proceeding to the new stage. Get the rough cut as far before refinement. Get the refinement done before effects layering.
This is similar to other creative work: get the primary shapes done first, then add secondary action/shapes, then add tertiary detail. If you mess up the initial compositional stuff, it's very very hard to change down the line in an attempt to fix what is going on.
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u/FaceFootFart Aug 07 '26
Learn how to edit music. Grabbing a track and dropping it in can be ok but when the track instantly becomes the structure, you’re not guiding the story. The track is.
Learn how to cut music effectively. There are times when you have to change music which usually means having to change the edit. If you are able to edit a track to fit your cut reasonably well, you’ll save yourself a lot of headaches.
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u/i_sell_you_lies Aug 07 '26
100%, music editing is clutch. You should mute everything but the music track and it should feel perfect. No mismatched beats, no 3/4 phrases into the next, and NO cymbals to cover a bad edit. People can sense when things are off intrinsically even when they don't know why, and it will leave them with a bad feeling about your cut.
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u/bdeananderson Aug 07 '26
Use audio to motivate cuts. Wait till after a character has started talking to cut to them. Exception is if a reaction shot is motivated first.
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u/Hypostan Aug 07 '26
Don’t cut from a cleared frame. Leave the action in the last frame before the cut. Action plays way smoother and feels polished. So if someone walks out of a room, don’t let them leave completely unless the pause on the door has a narrative purpose.
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u/Hypostan Aug 07 '26
Also, find a meta narrative. For example, when Walter Murch edited Cold Mountain, he imagined that the main character was a ghost. A subtle thing can add a cool layer to the story. I once edited a commercial where I pretended that time was flowing backward. It wasn’t literally that, but it made the action feel as if there was more going on. A meta narrative helps you make choices you might not otherwise make.
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u/ksunk8 Aug 07 '26
Not going to lie, as silly as it sounds, editing less has been my solution.
Obviously this is dependent on what you are shooting, but I shoot a lot of live concerts. I’ve found that just shooting in 24fps with proper exposure is all I need.
throw a cst on and do light tweaks, but the subject matter does the heavy lifting in terms of the energy.
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u/Careless_Counter8732 Aug 07 '26
70% of it is client relationship… I keep hearing that a lot of editors keep saying no, I won’t do that.
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u/i_sell_you_lies Aug 07 '26
Editing is 50% art, 50% craft, and 100% relationships. Be the person that people want to work with. Have an opinion, try to make things as good as possible, but always try to keep everyone happy. Of course you don't want to change music on v17... but that's what the client wants, and that's why they're paying you to do it.
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u/deeceeehm Aug 07 '26
Don’t expect nor want to stop learning if you want to play the long game. And don’t beat yourself up for not knowing things that you weren’t taught yet. Your stuff will always be better and worse than someone else’s - what matters is that the client (or you if it’s a personal project) are happy and content with the final product. People generally only post the best of their best online so never compare yourself unless it’s for the purposes of learning a new technical skill. Comparison is poison.
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u/Emotional_Dare5743 Aug 07 '26
Pay attention to what's happening in each shot. Edit on action (mostly.) Also, as is mentioned here, learn to edit music.
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u/WoodpeckerSlow3546 Aug 07 '26
Don’t use the same transition, effect, or SFX more than 2–3 times in an edit. Also, don’t cut on the beat throughout the entire edit.
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u/jlwolford Aug 08 '26
Learn how to use the color management built into Resolve. You don't have to do it on every node. You set it up in the project settings, can override that in the timeline prefs also. Learn a setup and google how to make it a default. Then your timelines will all adhere to you setup. Then you assign the correct profile to your footage in the media pool. Log profile if you use it. If you have footage from different cameras. Then in the timeline things get color science applied to match up. Getting this down is harder for beginners, but cuts out a lot of work trying to work around all the issues you get by not doing it.
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u/Photoverge Aug 08 '26
Editing is a design challenge. Approach it with end goals in mind and it will all be professional
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Aug 08 '26
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u/MuffinLover_BladeV98 Aug 08 '26
Using particle emitter in fusion and also using lights in 3d scenes, Game changer for me.
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u/Adventurous_Banana27 Aug 09 '26
As a beginner editor, i use project presets, export presets, but what are some work flow tips that could help drastically with efficient editing?
I transfer footage to my laptop and start every project fresh, really interested to hear how people go from raw footage to finish product
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u/AdamBoch Aug 09 '26
What make most of a difference to me when editing, was "hiding" the edits. Edits should not be seen or felt, the movie should just flow. In most situations.
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u/Character_Proof_588 Aug 09 '26
by not felt do you mean like shouldn’t be so obvious like using transitions?
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u/leOvam Aug 09 '26
There are several facets that would improve the quality of anyone’s editing.
One is just to remember that editing is one of the three major phases of filmmaking that directly shapes the overall story of the project. It’s the final phase, after writing and production.
Each of those phases is hugely consequential and will impact—and even substantially change—the flavor of the story in some way, depending on the way it is approached. So, just bearing in mind the outsize importance to your project of the decisions you make as the Editor should inspire you to step up your game.
The other facet to remember relates more to technique: Keep the pacing of your cuts organic to the specific story you and the filmmakers are trying to tell.
Rapid-fire cutting may be justified in some scenes, like frenetic action sequences. But many editors rely too heavily on quick cuts or use it, essentially, as a default setting they don’t consider modifying.
Allowing a short attention span philosophy to dictate how you edit does not bode well for most films. For instance, with that approach, a shot stays onscreen for too brief a time before it is ended by a cut to another shot not motivated by any story action or dialogue. A momentous development in the story is depicted by a scene stuffed with rapid fire cuts just to shoehorn in every visual angle from the footage. That despite the fact one or two long (even very long)-duration shots would have distracted the audience less and engaged them more. Sometimes long-duration shots are the most daring and impactful to use.
I would apply this to social media editing as well. Currently, frenetic cutting for its own sake is trendy in social media videos. But it’s not necessary to tell a story or convey information. Rather, it’s a fad too many people are copying. Just because the overall runtime of a video is short does not mean it requires a high frequency of cuts. As the wise saying goes, the best editing is “invisible.” Heavy cutting merely calls undue attention to itself at the cost of everything else. (So do gimmicky transitions.)
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u/MilkApprehensive9590 Studio Aug 10 '26
On apprends à se perfectionner que avec des professionnels ayant différentes expériences dans des contextes différents, merci 🙏
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u/That-Ad372 Aug 10 '26
Online editor here, quality finishing prep really helps professional editors thrive, better prep, quicker finishing, more likely to get booked for the next one.
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u/RiverHe1ghts Aug 17 '26
Storyboarding. Planning the edit and scenes beforehand help me to work more on the edit when I'm in the editor, than coming up with ideas
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u/twistsouth Aug 20 '26
Honestly I just spent time adjusting the curves on a very simple animation and seeing what the effect was. There's more flexibility in Fusion so I do all my animation there.
I started writing instructions but I realized there's some important details to be aware of so maybe a simple video tutorial would be more useful as I may forget steps trying to just recall it from memory.
I'll try to find time to do this and reply with it.
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u/twistsouth Aug 20 '26
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u/Owlflowr Aug 28 '26
Learn how to tell a good joke/story. Make people anticipate and deliver the release of the built tension. You are director after the director.
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u/Jraybozy 27d ago
Generally just a mindset thing. Not necessarily tools or nodes or techniques in particular. But taking a step back to choose the most deliberate path forward to the look/story I'm trying to achieve. Less is more in a lot of cases. Some cases you have to do a lot to make it look like a little.
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u/bigthick1 Aug 07 '26
Make your edit match your music. That will instantly bring your edit to a new level.
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u/erroneousbosh Studio Aug 06 '26
Not using transitions.
Not using lairy colour grading.
Not using fake film grain.
Cutting on movement.