Getting To Know The DaVinci Resolve Control Panel – Overview

Lose the default red buttons on the panel! I find they’re easier on the eyes when they’re in a whitish zone.

This video should be provided by BMD as a freebie for anybody buying the panels.

For sure! I’m all about the white buttons – but I get why some people don’t like them as they’re not totally uniform white. I usually roll 5 for LCD brightness, 2/2/2 for RGB. To get me a nice dim white. In the video so they’d show up a bit better, we had them running at 50/50/50

I went with blue for now, so far i like it, though see the point in neutral white.
But to be honest, to me, nothing beats the looks or red buttons 😀 I cant stand it in session, but when i come in and look at panel in the morning, i love that red 🙂

Thank you both for doing this series!
I started working on this panel a month ago and was kinda shocked that i had to dig stuff about it out on my own here and there. Asking on LGG forum and FB instead of having a dedicated manual. I mean, you can find documentation on any tangent panel including shortcuts, but not on resolve native-doesnt make sense to me at all… 🙂

I would love you to show how you use scroll mode and ripple mode.
I tried those out, scroll i get theoretically, but havent come up with a good way of using it, or when it would be good to use.
Ripple mode on the other hand i would LOVE to use and I tried following manual, but didnt work out and i didnt have a change to play with it again just yet. I can imagine how on a long format project it would be great to ripple node changes to the same node in a filtered timeline or append a new node with current settings but every time i tried it i would get a message that changes are not sufficient enough or something like that. I post exact message tomorrow, if its relevant..
Thanks again, and really looking forward to more insights about this panel!

Thanks so much for starting this Insight series!
A couple of questions: What are “POTS” and “Printer Lites?” Also, what exactly do the triangle keys do? They seem to work sort of as “shift” keys, but the only thing I’ve really used them for is with the “disable current” button, so as to enable the “bypass” and “disable all nodes” functions. (And speaking of the bypass function, is there a better way to do it on the panel? I use it all the time, and it’s super straightforward on the Tangent Element, but quite frankly it’s pretty annoying on this Control Surface).
One more question: how do you change what the fourth wheel/joyball does? I’ve found that its functions change by itself, like it has a mind of its own. Sometimes it works as offset, sometimes it does something else entirely. Am I just crazy? Haha.
Thanks a bunch, guys!

How do you change the light colors?
EDIT: Never mind. I found it in the Control Panel settings.

yep thats the place. they’re saved a part of a config. have multiple configs for different colors.

timeline management functionality is something we’ll cover.

But essentially scroll allows you to simply choose how many clips before or forward of your current one to copy to your current clip. I find it really useful for copying grades without touching the mouse especially in long scenes.

You’re on the right path with Ripple. Check out the Ripple settings on the Color page in Project settings for the different ways it can work detailed coverage on this is actually in the Resolve manual starting page 793.

But yes I know these are confusing things and we’ll cover them in detail in future parts (this series is gonna grow!)

This is a really good idea for a Insight series, thanks! I agree, I never used certain function like Memories but when I got on this panel, I could see I’d use them all the time. Same for Preview Mem and Original Mem – because they have dedicated buttons (in fact I’ve now learned the keyboard shortcuts too!). This panel really needs a built-in Wacom and a better placed keyboard but…

I don’t mind placement of the keyboard, but its for sure a crap keyboard. As I said in the video its just crazy that its not backlit. Also over the years the quality of the keyboard has really shown – the glow on the surround around the keyboard as aged and become less sticky causing the surround to peel off. Maybe I”m a purist, but I don’t want a 30k panel to feel flimsy at any point!

On the Wacom I’m love/hate. For sure people coming from Quantel (I think you right?) or Flimlight background love integrated Wacom. I’ve just never really been a pen guy. With that said I’d love BMD to ‘borrow’ a design element of the Nucoda panel and integrate a touch/pen sensitive UI screen on the panel.

Even space for a little mouse pad would help so you wouldn’t need to lean over so far to mouse! Having a keyboard up front and accessible (and back lit) is very handy because you can use the JKL keys for transport instead of a jog/shuttle.
Looking forward to the next episode in the series anyway, thanks!

Hey Yurii!

The POTS control is like having the primary sliders that you see in the GUI on the panel. You have red, green and blue for lift gamma and gain. Some people prefer working this way as it’s slightly more precise than making adjustments on the balls.

The printer lights pop up on the input sizing screen on the right panel. They are essentially the offset controls but mapped to printer points which was a very common way of grading film prints. I used to get lots of DOPs asking for a point more green but it’s not as common these days.

The easiest way of thinking about the shift keys is look for any keys with small text above and below the lines. Up shift does what is written at the top of the key above the line and down shift does what it says below the line.

A good example of this is Up shift + Base Mem resets the shot back to it’s original state.

If you push the LOG button on the middle LCD screen an option called Joyball Offset shows up. Pushing this toggles the 4th ball between controlling the offsets and controlling the curves.

There is so much panel things to cover we shall many insights to come!

what does the lever do?

Wipes and dissolves to Stills.

thanks patrick. i’ve always wanted to know that.