Several times over the past year, I have been encouraged to learn the video and audio editor (IDE? IME? Integrated media editor?) Davinci Resolve. After stewing on a particularly powerful pitch from Harald Achitz after the recording of Kodsnack 703, I eventually got around to downloading the whole package. It took me a while longer to read up on features, and finally decide to buy the studio version before I actually got around to learning to do anything.
Why so many steps before starting? I had a very particular target in mind: being able to ditch Descript for creating clips of Kodsnack. Descript is a completely web-based editor as a service. It keeps creeping up in monthly cost, sometimes forcing me to update, sometimes leaving me behind with fewer features as it goes.
(Oh, and they are AI everything, around every corner, and want you to pay for tokens.)
I do very simple things with my clips, but the one feature I needed and required to be reasonably simple was the creation of captions. I want my clips to have captions moving along with the speech, and that is nothing I want to create by hand.
In Resolve, this turned out to be nice and simple, once you found it. Resolve decided to bundle transcription and caption creation under "AI" features and only enable it in the for-pay studio version. Happily, the studio is a prodly advertised one-time purchase, and a quite affordable one at that. So this is why I did not start actually editing anything before buying.
Studio installed, it was time to set off! Starting to fumble around in Resolve felt … strange and awkward in a good way, if that makes any sense. It was a long time since I felt so lost in a new app, but it felt great to be figuring out something which is completely made for professional use. Things may not be easy to find, but everything is set up with the goal of being efficient.
As usual when learning something new, it felt very intimidating and slow at first. I made very strange mistakes, the kind which feel completely baffling as they happen. The kind you stop making after learning just a little bit more. And once you have done that little bit of learning, it becomes hard to understand what you even did wrong in the first place.
The key for me was watching a few videos, first a general walkthrough of pretty much the whole app, then a few on specific topics as they came up. I found a video specifically on creating clips for Tiktok which really clicked for me. It both answered the main questions I had at the moment, and showed me a bunch of power user setup. Got to love a fifteen-minute video which still spends a minute or two at the start showing you how to set up some useful keyboard shortcuts.
Somewhere soon after watching that video, I stumbled out of the forest of total confusion and into the plain of things starting to make sense. I have created my first clip which looks and feels the way I want it, and I know the steps I want to do and their order so that it feels repeatable. From here, it is just a matter of building habit and speed, and adding new knowledge if and when I want it. There is a whole universe of extra things to learn, and I am excited about the thought of possibly having my own library of effects and setups and things.
We will see where it goes from here, but the initial stage of confusion is definitely over.
(I can leave Descript behind for editing, but annoyingly they also provide the recording solution I use at the moment. They are in the process of enshittifying that, too, so my motivation is high, I just need to figure out to what first …)