Finding editing software that isn’t Adobe can be tricky. There are a few alternatives these include Sony’s Vegas software, Apple’s exclusive Final Cut Pro and the main focus for this blog, DaVinci Resolve.

DaVinci Resolve is free! And is largely similar to Resolve Studio which is used for colour grading in industry. DaVinci breaks editing into 6 main steps with an icon bar at the bottom, these include edit, deliver, colour, music and others.

These work by changing the interface to suit each stage of editing, I’ll go through them and explain each stage.

Media – Cut – Edit – Fusion – Colour – Fairlight – Deliver

Media where you insert the clips you want to use. A handy shortcut for inserting clips is Ctrl + I.

Cut where you can insert your clips and trim them to length to ensure your clips are all in the timeline for editing which is the next step.

Edit where you can edit, add transitions and is where I add keyframes to my clips.

Fusion where the more advanced editing tools are or nodes in this case. Each node represents an effect such as blur, texts and backgrounds. On top of this the Fusion tab also contains tools for editing 3 dimensional items into your footage.

Colour Your one stop shop to all colour adjustments, this tab arranges all of the colour grading tools and makes it as easy as possible to adjust the colour of your clips.

Fairlight The music section of DaVinci and is where all of the audio controls are and is where you can fine tune and add music, sound effects and everything that’s audio.

Deliver The final stage and is where all of the saving, exporting and formatting tools are for when you have finished your project and are looking to share it with the world!

Key Frames

Key frames in the simplest terms are highlighted frames in a clip where certain attributes can be adjusted.

If you choose a further frame and adjust an attribute, such as the position. The first modified frame can be moved completely off the screen to the left. In the second you can reset the positional attributes. The software will recognise the changes between the two highlighted frames and will adjust to the latest.

If you use the adjustments mentioned above the result would be the video panning into shot from the left.

The example in the image. The first key frame, (highlighted with a dot) is the starting position and then the second dot represents where we would like the finishing position to be, the software ensures a smooth transition between the start and finishing points.

All in all, there aren’t many free alternatives that offer the same range of video editing tools as Davinci Resolve does, although windows have a bare bones video editor built in if all you’re doing is adding clips together.

System Requirements.

Lastly while DaVinci Resolve is free, it does have some system requirements you should meet before trying it.

Minimum system requirements For Mac. MacOS 10.15 Catalina 8 GB of system memory. 16 GB when using Fusion Blackmagic Design Desktop Video version 12.0 or later Integrated GPU or discrete GPU with at least 2GB of VRAM. GPU which supports Metal or OpenCL 1.2.

Minimum system requirements for Windows. 16 GB of system memory. 32 GB when using Fusion Blackmagic Design Desktop Video 10.4.1 or later Integrated GPU or discrete GPU with at least 2GB of VRAM GPU which supports OpenCL 1.2 or CUDA 11 NVIDIA/AMD/Intel GPU Driver version – As required by your GPU

Minimum system requirements for Linux. CentOS 7.3 32 GB of system memory Blackmagic Design Desktop Video 10.4.1 or later Discrete GPU with at least 2GB of VRAM GPU which supports OpenCL 1.2 or CUDA 11 NVIDIA/AMD Driver version – As required by your GPU

While the minimum recommended hardware is a 2GB graphics card if you’re editing high resolution RAW footage it is recommended that you should have at least an 8GB VRAM graphics card.

The high requirements are the only downfall of what is otherwise a great free video editing platform that offers everything you could need while video editing at an amateur level.

if you’d like to download DaVinci Resolve you can do so here.