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All Fit and Trim Fine-tuning edits on the timeline turns out to be wonderfully streamlined once I got comfortable with how things worked. The humble Select tool is quite versatile. It will roll an edit and drag out a dissolve. When you have the Blade tool selected, you get an instant preview of the exact frame that’s under the knife. The Trim tool provides nearly all the other functions you’ll need in a similar, multi-functional way. How Resolve handles trimming depends on where you place your cursor on the transition area. The Trim tool is used for both slipping and sliding the transition point. The program monitor automatically switches to a relevant multi-view mode that shows the changes in context with up to four windows. The PDF and video tutorials also provided a preview of Resolve’s many power tools for complex production work. A good example are its Smart Bins. With them, it was possible to develop some fairly sophisticated logical criteria as to what clips should fall into it and they would appear there as an alias. The formulas are built with drop-down menus of options, so it’s not very hard to create collections based on your exact needs. There’s no need manually move all your graphics or audio-only tracks into bins, for example. Smart Bins can do that. This was just one of many features designed to manage large projects and speed up workflows. Smooth and Speedy On my systems a Retina iMac on the desktop and an M1 MacBook Air on the road, performance was surprisingly smooth with my usual 4K footage that would normally be a problem with other editing software. What was surprising was how well Resolve handled 12K Blackmagic RAW files on the MacBook Air. Blackmagic Design boasts about how well they’ve integrated their latest RAW format into Resolve Studio 17’s rendering engines and they were not exaggerating. The fact that the latest releases of Resolve 17 run natively on M1 silicon was part of it, I’m sure. When projects are big or a lot of effects are involved, working with proxies can be a big help. The Resolves approach to working with them is very friendly. In Resolve-land, this is called “Optimizing” your media. Tell the Project Settings panel the kind of media you want to work with (ProRes for Macs) and select the clips in the media pool. Then, depending on the size of project, take either a coffee or lunch break. When they’re done, switch on the optimized media in the Playback menu. From that point on, you’re working with the much smaller and lighter optimized versions of your files. Your encoded output will come from the originals. Switching between the proxies and the originals is as easy as toggling it in the Playback menu. In the that Optimize panel, you’ll find another wonderful checkbox to enable background caching. When Resolve detects that your system has been idle for a present amount of time, it will render out the previews of complex effects for playback. It’s wonderful those yellow bars go away by themselves. Cutting Up It took me a while to actually “get” the Cut page. Initially, it seemed like something I’d rarely use but would be great for news and sports packages for broadcast editors. It’s also where Resolve’s newest multicam editing features reside. But coming from a linear tape background, I had mentally associated it with cuts-only editing, which I felt I had long outgrown. But that was a mistake. It is just a new approach for making simple projects or rough cuts far faster and easier. The page’s trimmed-down UI, in fact, is perfect for working with laptops. It forgoes the source preview window and in its place is the thumbnail media bin. To the right is the single monitor, showing either the timeline or selected source, and running along the bottom are two versions of the timeline: the traditional multi-layer view that you can zoom in or out of, and a narrow version showing the entire program to simplify jumping about. There are a number of workflow strategies you can use with the Cut page but the general idea is to first select clips and lay them down in some basic order on the timeline. You can do your rough trimming beforehand or wait until it’s in the timeline. Adjusting edits is even easier in the Cut page than it is in Edit mode. When you mouse over them, markers appear at the end and in the middle of the clip to slide, ripple, or trim the edit with the appropriate visual support appearing in the monitor. To change the transition type, the timeline just needs to be near a transition, not directly over it, making that process faster as well.