User Manual

Table Of Contents
Changing a Transition to a Cut
To remove a dissolve, thereby changing a transition to a cut, move the playhead at or near the
edit with the dissolve, and click the Cut button, which is fast to do when you’re using the
DaVinci Resolve Editor Keyboard which has a dedicated Cut button.
TIP: Alternately, you can select one or more transitions in the Timeline and press the
Delete key to remove them.
Adding Smooth Cuts
Smooth Cuts are special-purpose transitions designed to make short jump cuts in the middle of
a clip unnoticeable. This is done by using optical flow processing to match the same features on
either side of a cut in order to automatically morph a subject from one position to another over
the duration of the transition.
To add a Smooth Cut:
1 Place the playhead on or near an edit.
2 Click the Smooth Cut button at the bottom left of the Media Pool. A one second Smooth
Cut will be added to the edit point that’s nearest to the edit point.
The Smooth Cut effect works best on clips such as sit-down interviews and close-up head
shots with a minimum of background and subject motion, and where the subject’s position on
either side of the cut is not significantly different. A good example of when Smooth Cut is
effective is when you’re cutting pauses, partial repeats, filler sounds such as “um” or “you
know,” or other speech disfluencies out of an interview clip to tighten the dialog, and you want
to eliminate the little “jump” that occurs at the cut without having to cut away to B-roll. Applying
a short two or four frame Smooth Cut transition to the edit can make this kind of edit invisible,
as long as the speaker doesn’t change position significantly during the cut. The more motion
there is in the background of the shot, and the more the speaker changes position, the harder it
will be to get a useful result using Smooth Cut. Although the default duration for any transition is
one second, you’ll find that Smooth Cut transitions may work much better when they’re short;
2- to 6-frame Smooth Cut transitions often work best to disguise jump cuts.
Adding Other Kinds of Transitions
Opening the Transitions browser by clicking the Transitions button in the UI toolbar reveals all
of the built-in transitions that accompany DaVinci Resolve, as well as any third-party OFX
transitions that you have installed on your computer. These transitions are organized by
categories such as Dissolve, Iris, Motion, Shape, and Wipe.
Chapter – 22 Video and AudioEffects in the Cut Page 460