How to Use Scene Cut Detection to Import Video Into DaVinci Resolve

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to import final edit footage into Resolve, with all the cuts, using scene cut detection.

Let’s say you’ve got an editor who’s done their edit in another program like Premiere Pro, and it’s now coming to you as the colorist to complete the color correction and color grade. After that, you’ll send it back to them to finalize. There are a couple of really easy tricks that you can do in DaVinci Resolve to help with that workflow.

What you need to do is ask the editor for a “clean out,” which is basically their entire edit with no graphics, no LUTs, nothing else on it other than the footage cut into the final edit.

You then need those cuts into Resolve so that each one can be graded individually. Here’s how.

Right-click on your full edit, which is in this shot above, and go to Scene Cut Detection.

From here, it opens up the Scene Cut Detection window, and automatically if you hit Auto Scene Detect, it goes through to find all of your cuts. You can see if this has worked by clicking over on the right where the Scene, Frame and Start numbers are.

As you click on each one, you need to make sure the two frames on the right-hand side are identical, and the one frame on the left-hand side is different (as you can see above); that denotes where it’s actually detected that there is a cut and has made that cut for you.

Keep going down through those and make sure they’re all identical. You can also scrub through it just to make sure things have worked.

Here’s what it looks like if that hasn’t worked properly.

To fix it, scrub through with your arrow keys on the Cut Timeline.

When the right clip is in place, click Add at the bottom, and that cut will be fixed. When you’re happy that all your cuts are right, click Add Cuts to Media Pool in the bottom right. Then you can go ahead and close your Scene Cut Detection window.

Highlight all of your clips (Command-A or Control-A), and then right-click and choose Create New Timeline Using Selected Clips. Name it appropriately, and hit Create.

They’ll all still be highlighted at the bottom, so double-click and you’ll head into the Edit tab.

Here you’ve got an edit pulled from Premiere Pro into DaVinci Resolve, and it’s ready to color grade!

Tom Graham created the video course that includes this lesson. Marie Gardiner wrote the text version of this lesson, and it was edited and published by Jackson Couse.