The settings you cannot change later
Ten minutes that save a week
Most project settings are harmless and adjustable. A handful are not: change them after you have started and you re-frame every shot, re-grade every scene, or lose sync across the whole timeline. This lesson is the short list, and it is worth doing as a ritual before importing anything.
The locked ones
Timeline frame rate. In DaVinci Resolve this is set in Project Settings → Master Settings, and it greys out as soon as media exists in the project. Not the timeline — the project. Import one clip and the decision is made. If you need to change it, the honest routes are: start a new project at the right rate and import the old timeline, or create a new timeline at the right rate inside the same project, which leaves you converting the old one anyway.
Timeline resolution. Changeable, but changing it re-frames every clip whose scaling was set relative to the old frame. If you have already punched in on forty shots, all forty move.
Image scaling behaviour. Covered in the previous lesson. Set it once.
Colour science and colour management. In Resolve, the choice between DaVinci YRGB (no management — what you see is what the clip is) and DaVinci YRGB Color Managed (everything converted into a working space and out to a timeline space) changes how every clip looks. Switching it mid-grade means every grade you have built was made on a different starting image.
For most people starting out, the honest recommendation is: leave colour management off, set your timeline colour space to Rec.709 Gamma 2.4, and handle log clips individually with an input transform. It is one more step per log clip and it is far easier to reason about than a managed pipeline you have not yet understood.
The ones that quietly cost you
Audio sample rate. 48 kHz is the video standard. If your project is at 48 kHz and a clip is 44.1, the editor resamples, usually correctly. If your project is at 44.1 because some music file set it, every piece of camera audio is being resampled instead. Set it to 48000 and leave it.
Optimised media and proxy resolution. Quarter resolution is comfortable on most machines; half if you need to judge focus. Setting it to full defeats the purpose.
Cache location. Resolve writes render cache, optimised media and proxies to a folder you choose. The default is often the system drive. Point it at your working drive with the footage, or you will fill your operating system partition and find out during an export.
Auto-save and backup interval. On, and set to ten minutes. In Resolve this is in Preferences → User → Project Save and Load, with Live Save and Project Backups as separate checkboxes. Turn both on, and note the backup folder path somewhere you will find it at 11pm.
Start from a template project
The reliable way to never get this wrong is to set it once and copy it. Make a project called _TEMPLATE_1080p25, configure everything above, create your standard bins — 01_footage, 02_audio, 03_music, 04_graphics, 05_exports — add your title styles and caption styles, save your export presets, and then duplicate it at the start of every job.
In Resolve, right-click the project in the Project Manager and choose Duplicate. In Kdenlive, save a project template file. In Premiere, save a project as a template and copy the file. Twenty minutes, once.
A worked order of operations
- Decide delivery: resolution, frame rate, aspect. Write it down.
- Duplicate the template project, or create one and set: frame rate, resolution, image scaling, audio 48 kHz, colour space Rec.709 Gamma 2.4.
- Point cache and proxy paths at the working drive.
- Confirm auto-save and backups are on and note the path.
- Create bins.
- Then import.
The order matters because step 2 is only fully available before step 6.
What a template cannot save you from
It cannot tell you what the client's delivery spec is. It cannot know that this particular shoot was at 50 fps for slow motion. And it cannot stop you from opening last month's project, editing in it because it was already open, and exporting a video at last month's resolution — which is common enough that the first line of your quality-control checklist should be reading the export's actual dimensions back off the file.
Today
Open your editor, build a template project, and duplicate it. The next project you start should take thirty seconds to set up.
The one thing to keep
Frame rate, image scaling and colour management are decided before the first import and are expensive to reverse, so configure a template project once and duplicate it rather than choosing settings under time pressure.
Before you move on
Halfway through grading a documentary in Resolve, an editor switches the project from DaVinci YRGB to DaVinci YRGB Color Managed because a tutorial recommended it. What is the cost?
Pick the one you would defend. Nobody sees your answer.