How to Switch from Premiere Pro to DaVinci Resolve

      Hello and welcome back to another video! Today we are talking about switching from Premiere Pro to DaVinci Resolve. I made the switch about a year ago, and I haven’t looked back.

        Before we get into how to switch, we need to get into the why behind switching to resolve. Number one, it’s free. There is a paid version that is worth every single cent, but the general program is free for everyone. Number two, it’s way less buggy. Even the beta version of resolve is better than a normal version of premiere. Number three, it is a one stop shop for all your needs. Premiere is a traditional editor, whereas resolve has all of it. You are inside one tool and you are one tab away from all of your needs.

        So are you sold yet? Well there’s still a lot more so keep reading!

        Now first off, premiere pro is $239.88/year, whereas DaVinci Resolve is $299 as a one-time payment and then you get all their updates for the lifetime of the subscription.

Now, let’s go ahead and download it. Follow this link: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/

Once you have clicked on the download, you will need to pick the OS you are using, fill in all the information it asks for, and then once it downloads, run and install it onto your computer.

        Once you have it installed, let’s open it. This is what you should see when you open it for the first time

Resolve is a bit different from premiere. In premiere you pick a location where you want the project saved. In Resolve, you keep all your projects here in this database.

        In this video, I want to give you all the tips to switch as soon as possible, then once you’ve made the switch you can figure out things as you work.

        Moving onto the window layouts. When you first start them both, they are generally pretty similar. When you drop in footage to the media pool, Resolve will ask you if you want to change your frame rate. Premiere does not, so that is a cool feature.

Now in premiere, you can move the window panes around and customize a layout that really suits your needs. In Resolve, it’s not as flexible as that, but in a way it’s more restrained and allows you to really access things how you need them. Some buttons to be aware of are:

This double rectangle box allows you to show multiple folders at one time with the click of the button.

These buttons allow you to show your media as a list, or as a grid view.

These two buttons allow you to expand or collapse project windows. This allows you to give yourself more screen real estate if you are not using the specific window, but expand it if you need it.

        Moving onto the edit page, again you can collapse or expand windows to customize your layout, you can drag down on your source monitor to shrink the timeline and make the picture bigger.

        A cool feature in the media pool is that when you see these red lines under the clip, that means it is being used inside of the project.

Similar to premiere, when you want to drag in a clip from the media pool, you can drag it over the source clip in the source monitor and it gives you a few options on how to insert the clip into the timeline.

Then, also similar to premiere, when you are on the edit page, you have a list of all the tools you need under the source monitor/above the timeline.

This allows you to quickly access any tools you need.

        Now if it bothers you that you have to learn new keyboard shortcuts, here is a quick tip. Go up to DaVinci Resolve in the top left, click on keyboard shortcuts, then open the adobe premiere pro one.

Now a quick cool tip is if you want to fade music in, you can take this little tab and move it over to X amount of time and it’ll fade it in. In premiere you have to create points and it just takes longer. You can also fine tune it using the little dot in the middle. This feature gives you a lot of great control over the fade in of your sound, compared to premiere pro.

        One great thing about premiere is that every time you open a new timeline, you can see it on the top. When you first open DaVinci Resolve, you don’t see that. However, if you just click on this, it opens a box that you can really fine tune how you want your timeline to be shown. The one circled in the picture below is the option to show all timelines.

Now if you are trying to find timelines in your projects, there is a cool smart bin that you can click that shows you all of your timelines.

        Now speed ramping in premiere is a lot more complicated than in DaVinci. In DaVinci you just select the clip, and get to retime speed and then you can control it by using a keyframe and moving the speed around.

The other way is to select the clip, hit command or control + R, and then you can add a speed point in the drop down menu and change the speed before or after the point.

        Now let’s go through the inspector window. This is similar to the effects control panel in premiere.

Now, if you click on this little icon, you can actually move the picture around and reframe things manually.

If you are hurting for screen real estate, this little button can shrink the source monitor to one clip, allowing you to move things.

You can also click on any of the options at the top and that will get rid of the window, so you can keep only the necessary pieces up on the screen.

        Now moving into the built in resolve effects (in the free version). If you drop in an effect and click on the actual effect, the effect stuff will pop up in the top right (under inspector) and you can fine tune it from there.

        If you want to add text, you can simply add the option for Text+, which allows you to really fine tune what exactly is done in for the text.

Okay, we are done with the edit page. Let’s go ahead and move onto the color page. We aren’t going to deep dive into this, considering that we do a bunch of look recreation videos here where we spend a lot of time in the color page.

        I am going to start off by going into my RGB mixer and select monochrome.

Then I am going to bring up the contrast and bring down the gain, and bring up the gamma to give it a cool look.

Then I am going to create a heavy vignette around the club.

Then we are going to take our curves and pull down.

To copy and paste a grade, you can right click on the clip with the grade you want to copy, and select apply grade.

        Moving onto fairlight. It is exactly like you are in audition or pro tools. It gives you all the stuff you need.

Then you have effects that you can add to the clips.

Once again, the benefit of having everything in one software is you save so much time because you don’t have to jump from software to software to do different things.

        Now let’s move to the deliver page.

What’s great is at the top, you have tons of different media options for exporting your videos.

        Below are the best settings for export. You first want to set the limit to 40,000 kb/s. Then you want to make sure that the gamma tag is at rec.709 so that you avoid that gamma shift. And finally make sure that force debayer and sizing to the highest quality are checked.

Now if you are worried that you have so many templates for premiere and you are worried about losing them, you can check out these websites below.

So that is resolve in a nutshell. At this point, you should be well equipped to make the switch.

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