DAVINCI RESOLVE

Edit and render videos like a pro. Nik Rawlinson shows you how to hit the ground running in the powerful free editing suite

- Nik Rawlinson

Is it really free?

Yes, the standard edition of DaVinci Resolve is completely free, with no ads or in-app purchases, and you can use it for as long as you like, to make any type of video. It will run on any PC running Windows 10 or 11, or any Mac running macOS Monterey or later although bear in mind that video editing is a resource-intensive process, and if you try to run it on lightweight hardware the experience may be sluggish.

There's also a Linux edition, for which the publisher recommends a recent edition of Rocky Linux or CentOS, and an iPad version that runs on tablets with an A12 Bionic chip or later; see tinyurl.​com/ 365davinci for download links.

Whichever platform you're using, you get an extensive set of tools for editing and enhancing video clips in all popular formats, assembling them into a complete film, and exporting the finished product for online sharing or high-quality distribution. Unless you're a film and TV professional, it will do everything you need - although for those who do fall into that category there's also a high-end commercial version of the software called DaVinci Resolve Studio, which adds enhanced tools for colour grading, media management, speech transcription, subtitle generation, audio editing and more. At $295 it's a big step up from the free edition, but for what you get it's still a very reasonable price.

1 Import and organise your footage with 12 bins

Putting together a project in DaVinci Resolve starts with importing your raw footage into the program. You can add files to the Media Pool by dragging them from the Windows File Explorer to the upper left panel in the Resolve interface, or by clicking the Import Media button above the Media Pool panel (you can also use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+I).