Lesson Info
6. The Ingredients For the Story
Summary (Generated from Transcript)
In this lesson, Casey Faris explains the importance of having good ingredients, or footage, when editing a video in DaVinci Resolve. He emphasizes the need for a variety of shots, including wide shots to establish context and closeups to create excitement and emotion. He also mentions the importance of capturing all the necessary steps in a process to effectively tell a story through editing.
Q&A:
What is the first step in editing a video in DaVinci Resolve?
The first step is to create a new project in the project manager.
Why is it important to have a variety of shots in a video?
Having a variety of shots helps to establish context, create excitement and emotion, and effectively tell a story through editing.
What are some examples of shots that can be used in a video?
Examples include wide shots to show the overall scene, closeups for dramatic effect, and action shots to capture movement.
Why is it important to capture all the major steps in a process when filming?
Capturing all the major steps in a process helps to ensure that the story is clear and that the audience can follow along.
Lessons
Class Introduction
01:14 2Hardware
01:34 3DaVinci Resolve Overview
02:34 4Edit Page
02:42 5Cooking a Story
01:48 6The Ingredients For the Story
04:47 7Media Pool - The Pantry
05:25 8Source Viewer - Inspecting the Ingredients
02:15The Cutting Board
07:00 10Timeline is Where the Story is Made
02:51 11Controlling Clips on the Timeline
02:55 12Control the Clip Order
01:55 13Trimming Clips
02:28 14Control the Timing of the Story
04:26 15Setting In's & Outs in the Source Viewer
05:04 16Editing In Passes: Intro
02:30 17Edit Pass #1: Rough Cut
13:45 18Edit Pass #2: Smooth It Out
13:33 19Edit Pass #3: Get Picky
13:19 20Audio
12:29 21Basic Titles
05:54 22Rendering
04:53 23Further Learning
02:27Lesson Info
The Ingredients For the Story
So, let's get started and actually build something here in Resolve using our little cooking metaphor. The first thing I'm gonna do is make a new project. So if you wanna follow along and you already have Resolve open, you go down to the lower right-hand corner and click on the little house, that will open up something called your project manager. This is where you open and import, export, save all of your projects. It's just a window that has them all available there for you. And what I like to do is just right click anywhere in the empty space and select new project. Let's call this Cooking, and I'll hit create. And now we should have a blank project here with the edit page open, and we're ready to start putting together our story. Now, before we do that, we actually have to have some ingredients for our story soup, right? So let's go find our ingredients. So I'm just gonna go to a folder on my computer where we have all of our footage, and let's just take a look at what we have here.
Here we have a guy cooking. You see what we did there? It's a cooking thing. So this is some nice footage of a guy making a pizza and a couple other various delicious things. As we're either shooting our footage or we're selecting footage that maybe somebody else has shot, we're really looking for good ingredients here, right? We're looking for specific pieces of a story that we could actually put together in a sequence. that makes sense. So here we have some nice footage of him tossing those vegetables. Man, that looks so good. And really what we're looking for here for a good video is a variety of shots. So we have some slow motion shots, really cool stuff like that, we have some closeups, we have some wide shots, and each kind of shot has a specific place in the story. A wide shot like this might be really good to kind of show somebody what the whole world looks like. This is our main talent. This is kind of how the kitchen is laid out. This is where we're at in the world. It's always nice to have a couple of these wider shots so that we can really see, hey, this is kind of the big picture. We also want some closeups, because closeups are generally more interesting. They're more dramatic. Making a video is always a dance between how do I make something clear and how do I make something powerful or emotional? This wide shot is really clear. We know exactly what's happening. He's putting that flour on that dough, but it's not particularly exciting. Whereas something like this, it's a lot cooler 'cause obviously it's slow motion and that's awesome, but our subject is also really big in the frame. So it's really easy to see kind of the details in these peppers and see the details of the water splashing and everything. It's just more exciting. Now, the problem with a closeup is we don't have as much context. We don't know who this guy is. We don't know what he looks like. We don't know where this is in the kitchen. And so that's why we always want to have a variety of different shots, because when we put them together then the audience knows both what is happening as well as they can get excited about it and feel it a little bit. That's really the magic of editing a video, is you can put in clarity here in there, you can put in emotion or intensity here and there wherever you want. And the amount of each kind of shot that you use is really going to change the story. So that's really what we're looking for when we're going and getting our ingredients for our story soup, is a lot of different types of tastes, a lot of different kinds of shots. We want action shots, we want boring shots, we want shots that are really clear, we want shots that are really emotional, as well as if we're trying to show a process, we want to make sure that we have all of the major steps for that process. So if he's cooking a pizza, we want him rolling the dough, we want him spread the sauce, we want him putting on the cheese, we want him putting in the oven. All of those things. Having good shots is essential for making a video. And that might sound obvious, but I've seen a lot of people try and take just basic, like not great shots and try and make a really amazing edit out of it, and you just can't do it. It's going to be a fraction as good as if you had a variety of really nicely done shots.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Stan
This is a great class! Probably my favorite Creativelive class so far. I've been a fulltime photographer for 13 years now, I guess it's about time I get back into video. I love that Resolve has a free version to learn on. The pace of this class was perfect, can't wait to watch the rest of Casey's DaVinci classes.
Simona Geneva
Thanks to Casey Faris for the interesting study material. I have been looking for a creative life course for DaVinci Resolve for a long time and I am very happy that one has already been created on your platform. I look forward to the other pieces. Thanks again for the shared knowledge!
user-ada623
I've seen many DaVinci tutorials that seem to just make things more confusing but Casey's tutorial really took a simple step-by-step explanation to really show how powerful and yet simple it is to use Davinci. The tools Casey covered in this course gave me the confidence to edit the ton of videos I have collecting dust on my hard drive. Great job Casey and a great sense of dry corny humor...lolol highly recommended!!