Setting initial global preferences - DaVinci Resolve Tutorial

- If you've been following along, I've just quit out of Resolve and restarted the software, so that it takes us right back into the Project Manager, where an untitled project is highlighted and ready to go. And I'm just going to press Enter or Return in order to open up that project. Now let's start by setting our global preferences. These are settings that will persist between projects and databases. They're usually related to our hardware setup, or to personal preferences that are not likely to change with individual projects. So, let's head up to the menu item DaVinci Resolve and choose Preferences. Notice up top, there are two sets of global preferences, System and User. Let's set up our hardware first, in the System Preferences. At the end of this movie, I urge you to go through all these system settings methodically. Tweak the settings so they're appropriate for your gear. Since I'm using this laptop, let's start with Memory and GPU. The big thing I check is GPU configuration. If I had external graphics cards, this would tell me that Resolve sees them and allows me to tweak how they work. If Resolve confirms that things look good, I tend to leave this at default, unless Resolve starts acting up on me while I'm working. Let's go to Media Storage. Add any drive here that contains media, if it's not already listed. The important thing is to put your fastest hard drive first at the top of this list. If you have to, delete a drive, add in your fastest hard drive, and then add your other drives back in. This helps with playback if you ever use Resolve's built-in render cache system. In Audio and Video IO, if you have any external video cards or audio interfaces, here's where you select them and set them up. If you're having trouble hearing audio, Speaker Setup is one of the first places you should check to see if you need to make changes. Are you running with a control surface for color grading or mixing? The Control Panels menu is where you set your gear. Are you delivering to your own account in YouTube or Vimeo? You can set up your account info here, so Resolve can render and then automatically upload to your account. And yes, in the Deliver page, you can even set your privacy settings and other metadata. Let's click on Save to save our changes. Notice the dialog box. These system changes usually require a Resolve restart for them to take effect. Not the whole computer, just DaVinci Resolve. Click Okay, but don't quit out of Resolve yet. Now, let's reopen our Resolve Preferences with the keyboard shortcut Command + Comma, or Control + Comma on the PC. Now, let's switch over to the User Settings, and go to Project Save and Load, Enable Live Save. This is a great feature. Resolve continuously saves your work in the background. It can be a lifesaver. Let's go ahead now and click Save. Notice that since we didn't change system settings, the dialog warning doesn't appear this time. There's one more big customization we need to look at: keyboard shortcuts. In the DaVinci Resolve menu, choose Keyboard Customization. This tool is very feature-rich, but there are only three things you really need to know right now. One, you can mimic keyboards from other nonlinear editing systems. Use this pull down to select from any of these other apps. Except, don't use the pull down, please! Leave the selector on Resolve. If you're coming from any of those other systems, understand this: their keyboard layouts are optimized for their features. If you're jamming the Avid keyboard while running Resolve, you are missing the opportunity to learn how Resolve approaches the craft of editing. While you can use the Final Cut 10 Pro keyboard, I urge you, slow down a little, and learn Resolve on Resolve's terms. The second thing I want you to understand is in this Options pull down, you can save, export, import, and rename your custom keyboard layouts. This means you can take your personal layouts and migrate them to any Resolve system. My third takeaway for you is you can use this graphic display of the keyboard to easily visualize what commands are assigned to particular key combinations, and you can see in which of the pages each command has an effect. For instance, X, it marks a clip throughout the application. Shift + Control + X is a ripple cut, but I can change that by clicking in the Edit timeline. The right panel shows Ripple Cut. I click in the box, it's highlighted. Now, let's choose the keyboard shortcut Shift + Option, or on the PC, Shift + Alt + U. The command is reassigned, and the name of our layout gets an asterisk, telling us the preset is modified. I'm going to cancel out and discard those changes. In this series, we'll be tweaking many more preferences as we go along. For now, I'm going to quit Resolve and then relaunch, so that all of the changes we just made take effect.