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I love using DaVinci Resolve - it's intuitive, responsive and more visually driven than many other editing and grading tools out there. It has most of the editing functionality you need as a professional editor, when coming from Adobe Premiere Pro. The only it is missing is a batch encoder extension like Adobe Media Encoder, to allow you to edit and export at the same time. When using it primarily as a video editor, I often find myself having to turn around pieces to camera and social content that needs audio restoration and support.
Fairlight workspace: the great thing about Resolve is that it has dedicated workspaces for each part of the editing and grading process. When monitoring and mixing audio, I switch to the Fairlight workspace which is what Resolve calls its audio layout. Your edit is kept intact, except the video tracks disappear and you can focus on the audio itself. This is by no means a "locked" workspace, although you could lock the tracks you don't want to touch to avoid mistakes. Audio mixing and limiter: similarly to Adobe Premiere Pro, you can apply audio effects from the Effects panel on the left (toggle it on if it doesn't appear), either to individual clips or entire tracks. To do this you need to disable the METERS tab and allow the MIXER tab to give a full view of what has been applied to the tracks themselves, then add effects from the panel like you would on a video clip. If you keep the METERS tab toggled on, you will not be able to start editing track-wide effects in the MIXER tab. I like this restriction however, as it forces you to focus on one thing at a time. Noise reduction: unfortunately, this is my one gripe with DaVinci Resolve - its audio restoration and noise reduction capabilities do not perform as well as they would in Premiere or a dedicated audio tool, especially for human speech. There are excellent third party plugins that can solve this, and to be honest it's always worth investing in a VST plugin that works across all software, as you never know what a client will ask you to edit with on a specific job. I personally use the Waves Clarity Vx plugin, as Waves itself contains a lot of other useful plugins (especially for cinema mixing) that work great and can be bundled to save on cost. Waves plugins are bought on a one-time basis, unlike some of its rivals like BorisFX's Crumplepop that charge a monthly subscription. Audio transcription: once you've treated your clip and edited it to a satisfactory standard, you can actually reduce your project to get rid of unnecessary footage and start transcribing to produce nice subtitles. To do this, go back to the Media Pool right click on the clip(s) you want to transcribe and click AI tools > Audio transcription. An audio icon will appear on the thumbnail of the clip once transcription is ready. Select the clip in media pool then click the text icon at the top left hand corner - this opens up a window with the transcription. Then go to the timeline view at the top left hand corner (not the AI transcription view) and click on the three dots on the right with CREATE SUBTITLES FROM AUDIO. This creates a subtitle track in the TIMELINE / EDIT workspace. To edit that subtitle, click on it and go to the caption in the inspector panel > video > CAPTION for that caption, or TRACK for overall track settings and template creation. Subtitles templates: when in the EDIT / TIMELINE workspace, you can save and edit the subtitle track as a template in your TRACK view on the right hand side. Just click on the three dots at the top and click Save Track as Preset. You can also export this subtitle template for future use. |