The Beginner’s Guide to DaVinci Resolve 17 - Lots of Errors

I'm relatively new to DaVinci Resolve but I've managed to learn enough through trial and error and watching YouTube videos to publish a couple of videos on YouTube. I even liked the product enough to purchase the Studio version. When BMD released "The Beginner’s Guide to DaVinci Resolve 17" training material and corresponding lesson files a few days ago, I started in on the lessons as soon as I could.

I'm just starting lesson 4, and I can say that, yes, for a beginner like me, the lessons are great. However, there are significant errors in every lesson so far, which is frustrating because I'm having to spend extra time rereading to make sure the problem is in the instructions and not user error. For instance, every lesson so far has instructed you to get the files for that lesson from the wrong location or to get the wrong file. There are also several instances of introducing a topic, feature, or concept in the lesson after the student was first instructed to use it.

It seems to me that the training material was originally written in a completely different order, and after a reorganization, no one went back in and corrected the lessons for the new arrangement.

I get that this is free training material. And yes, the lessons are still valuable, but, BMD, if you are listening, please get a technical editor to go back over the material and fix these and other obvious mistakes!

I started a thread for the version 16 manual, posting every single error I found.

The authors were pretty responsive in correcting many of those in the PDF version. No reason we can't do the same with this thread.

Great idea. Here is what I have found so far:

• Getting Started, on page xiii (actual page 15) in the “Copying the Lesson Files” section, it says for Windows users to copy the folder to the Video folder, but then in Lesson 1, item 6, it says to “navigate to the Documents folder where you placed the R17 Beginners Guide lessons / Lesson 01 folder.”
• Lesson 1, on page numbered 17 (actual page 33), item 2 “using In and Out points, ” is introduced without fanfare and used heavily throughout the lesson. Then in lesson 2, on page numbered 79 (actual page 95), under item3, in and out points are introduced again as if they’ve never been used. Again, not a big deal, but it struck me as odd.
• Lesson 2, on page numbered 73 (actual page 89), item 3 says to “open the folder for Lesson 03.”
• Lesson 3, on page numbered 109 (actual page 125), item 2, Live Preview did not work for me until I manually enabled “Live Media Preview” by clicking on the 3-dot options menu in the Source Viewer. I do not know why I would have disabled it, but it might be good to show how to enable this feature if it is not already enabled. There is a tip under item 3, telling you how to disable Live preview, but it would be better to provide that info before instructing the user to “hover the mouse pointer over any video clip,” which for me, did nothing.
• Lesson 3, on the page numbered 113 (actual page 129), item 2, it is not obvious nor is it mentioned where to find the Keywords field under the Metadata Editor. I had to change the metadata settings to "All Groups."
• Lesson 4, on the page numbered 122 (actual page 138), item 2 says to “Double-click the Age of Airplanes thumbnail that you restored in Lesson 3.” However, the “Age of Airplanes” project is restored in lesson 5. At this point, I’m not sure if I’m supposed to do lesson 5 before lesson 4 or if I can restore the project now and continue with lesson 4.

• Lesson 4, page numbered 122 (actual page 138), item 4, "4" is repeated, "4 4 In the media pool sidebar"
• Lesson 4, page numbered 122 (actual page 138), item 6, "With the Rough Cuts bin selected, choose File > New Timeline." This only puts the timeline inside the Rough Cuts bin if selected from the Bin List. If the Master bin is selected in the Bin List and then the Rough Cuts bin thumbnail is selected in the asset list, the timeline is added to the Master bin. My point here is that where the new timeline is created very much depends on how the Rough Cuts bin is selected but the only instruction is "With the Rough Cuts bin selected."
• Lesson 4, page numbered 124 (actual page 140), under "Making the First Edit," it says, "In Lesson 1, you learned how to identify a range using the In and Out points in the cut page; now you’ll learn a similar process for the edit page." This is true, but in Lesson 2, using In and Out points in the edit page was already covered. In this lesson, the information on how to find In and Out points is greatly expanded as is how to insert those clips in the timeline.
• Lesson 4, page numbered 127 (actual page 143), under "Replace," it says, "without using any in or Out points." The "i" in "in" should be capitalized and read "In or Out points."

I'm running Resolve Studio 17.2.1 on Windows 10, and a few of the instructions at the end of lesson 4 did not work for me. Could be user error, but I tried each more than once and got the same result.

• Lesson 4, page numbered 140 (actual page 156), item 12. Neither the Overwrite button nor F10 worked for me. Instead of adding the clip to the timeline, the Souce Viewer lost the clip and went black. I had to drag the clip from the Source Viewer to the Timeline Viewer and hover over Overwrite.
• Lesson 4, page numbered 148 (actual page 164), the whole section but items 5 and 6 specifically. Replace, without setting an In point did not work for me. Instead of starting at where the play head was set in the Source Viewer, replacing the clip in the timeline started the clip at the beginning. I had to set an In point first, then Replace worked. Since the whole point of the Replacing a Shot section was to show how to replace a clip without setting In and Out points, this section was a bust.

I found, not an error but a "guidance error" in "The Editor's guide to Davinci Resolve 17", in Lesson 10: page 546.
It quotes "Click the Audio tab and verify that the codec is AAC, the data rate is 320 Kb/s and the
output track is Main 1 (which is the only main output for this timeline).

Whille this might be true for MacOS, in Windows, the highest bitrate output for the AAC codec is 192 due to being Window's maximum bitrate output. I would like this to be corrected because it led me to 2 hours of research to know that I would problaby have to be exporting LPCM.

On pg 30, there is a User Tip about the Boring Detector. The timelines shown in that Tip are ahead of where the edit is in the main lesson.

Seems like that Tip should come later in the chapter.

On pg 35, Step 5, we're told to Trim about about 1 second, yet there is no indicator showing how much is trimmed.

This is more of a bug/missing feature in the software than a Manual fail, though. Trims should always have some indication of exactly how much is being trimmed.

On p 63 Step 5, we're told to add a 2 second title. But the default for titles is 5 seconds, and the Guide never had us change the default.

So...something is wrong here.