How to Edit a Podcast in DaVinci Resolve, Step by Step

Work in this order: set the project timeline to 1080p or 4K at your camera frame rate, import every camera and the separate audio recorder into one bin, sync with audio waveforms, do a rough pass on the Cut page, clean the dialogue in Fairlight, add a light grade on the Color page, then deliver.

The order matters more than people think. Editors who grade before locking the cut end up regrading shots they later delete. Editors who mix audio before the cut is locked remix every time a segment moves.

Set the project up once, properly. File, Project Settings, Master Settings. Timeline resolution 1920x1080 or 3840x2160, frame rate matched to whatever the camera shot, usually 23.976, 25 or 29.97. Resolve locks the project frame rate as soon as you drop the first clip on a timeline, so get it right before you start.

One bin per episode. Camera A, Camera B, the recorder WAV files, music, and graphics. A two hour raw record turns into a 45 minute episode faster when your bin is boring and predictable. For anything longer than about an hour of multi-camera footage, generate optimized media (right click the clips, Generate Optimized Media) so the timeline scrubs instantly instead of stuttering.

If your show is a two person conversation with cutaways, the workflow below is roughly the same one I use on interview shows, just done by hand instead of by feel.

Select every camera clip plus the external audio file in the Media Pool, right click, New Multicam Clip Using Selected Clips, and set Angle Sync to Sound. Resolve matches the waveforms and builds one multicam clip you can cut between live.

Set Angle by Filename or Angle by Timecode if your cameras were jam synced. Sound sync is the one that saves you when they were not, which is most shows.

Drop the multicam clip on the timeline, open it in the source viewer, hit the multicam button, and play. Press 1, 2, 3 to cut between angles in real time. It feels like switching a live show, and for a 60 minute episode you can get a full angle pass done in about 70 minutes.

Two things break sync in practice. First, cameras that stop and restart mid record: split those into separate multicam clips per take, do not fight it. Second, the classic 29.97 camera plus 48kHz recorder drift on cheap bodies, where the ends of a 90 minute record sit a few frames off. Fix that by cutting the show into segments and re-syncing each one, or by nudging the audio at the drift point.

Multi-camera shows are where the time really goes. If you want to see how a cut like this gets structured before anyone touches a key, read how we handle multi-cam editing.

The Cut page exists for exactly this job. It shows the whole timeline on top and a zoomed view underneath, so you never scroll. For long form podcast work it is faster than the Edit page by a wide margin.

My pass looks like this. Play at 1.5x with JKL. Mark in and out on anything dead, hit the trim, keep moving. First pass targets three things: the setup chatter before the real start, the restarts where a guest fumbles a sentence and says it again, and any tangent that goes nowhere for more than 40 seconds.

Resolve 18 and up ships Detect Scene Cuts and a Smart Edit mode, and Studio adds transcript based editing where you delete a paragraph of text and the timeline cuts with it. That is real time saved on scripted segments.

What it will not do is judgement. A silence detector cuts the pause before the best line in the episode, because the pause is what makes the line land. That is why our editors watch the whole episode. Nothing is auto cut by silence detection, and the difference shows up in the first two minutes of any show that has a guest who thinks before they answer.

One practical habit: keep a second timeline called EPISODE_SELECTS and copy anything funny or quotable into it as you go. That timeline becomes your source for vertical clips later, and it costs you nothing while you are already watching.

People forgive soft focus. They do not forgive a boomy room or a guest who is 9dB quieter than the host. Fairlight is a full DAW inside the same app, which is Resolve's single biggest advantage over the alternatives.

A chain that works on almost every voice, in this order: Voice Isolation set around 30 to 50 percent (Studio only, and do not push it to 100 or the voice starts sounding underwater), a high pass filter at 80Hz to 100Hz to kill desk rumble, a gentle dip around 250Hz to 400Hz if the room is boxy, a compressor at roughly 3:1 with the threshold set so you see 4dB to 6dB of gain reduction on normal speech, then a limiter on the bus.

Target loudness matters more than peak level. Set the Fairlight loudness meter to the streaming preset and mix the dialogue bus to about -14 LUFS integrated for YouTube and Spotify, with true peak no higher than -1dBTP. Music beds sit 18dB to 22dB below the voice, not 6dB, which is the mistake almost everyone makes on their first episode.

Do each speaker on their own track with their own EQ. Bus them together at the end. It takes ten extra minutes and it is the difference between a show that sounds edited and one that sounds recorded.

If the raw audio is the problem rather than the mix, fix it upstream. A better capture chain beats an hour of repair work, which is the whole argument for spending money on the microphone before the camera.

Resolve is a color grading application that grew an editor, so this part is the easy part. For a podcast you want consistency across angles, not a look.

On the Color page: balance each camera to the same white point first, then match skin tones between angles using the Gallery still as a reference. Add a soft node for contrast, and if you want a house look, put it on a shared node graph you copy to every clip. Keep it subtle. Faces that go orange in the highlights read as amateur on a big TV.

Graphics live in Fusion or in the Edit page title tools. Lower thirds for guest names, a chapter card between segments, and an end card. Build them once as a template and reuse them across the season, which is the same logic behind a good title sequence. If color specifically is where your show falls apart, we go deeper on that in podcast color grading.

Export from the Deliver page. YouTube preset, then override: H.264, 1080p or 2160p, restrict to 16 Mb/s for 1080p or 45 Mb/s for 4K, audio AAC 320kbps at 48kHz. Free Resolve will not export H.265 above 1080p and has no hardware accelerated H.264 encode on some systems, so a 60 minute 4K export can take a while on a laptop. That limitation alone is why some hosts buy Studio at $295 one time.

Audio only version: use a second Deliver preset that renders the dialogue bus to a 128kbps or 192kbps MP3 for the RSS feed.

Yes for most shows, and the free version is not crippled the way free tiers usually are. You get the full editor, full Fairlight, multicam, and 1080p export with no watermark and no time limit.

What you give up: Voice Isolation and Dialogue Leveler, 4K and higher export, the Neural Engine features like Magic Mask and transcript editing, temporal noise reduction, and some hardware acceleration. Studio is $295 once, no subscription, and it pays for itself on a video show that publishes weekly.

The honest comparison is not Resolve versus another app, it is Resolve versus your Sunday. The software is free. The four to six hours per episode are not. A 60 minute two camera episode realistically takes a competent editor four to six hours in Resolve, and takes a first timer closer to ten.

If you are still choosing tools, we lay out the same tradeoff between the other two big options in Premiere vs Final Cut for podcasts. Resolve wins on price and audio. Premiere wins on plugin ecosystem and collaboration. Final Cut wins on raw speed on Apple silicon. None of them wins on the hours.

Hand it over when the edit is stopping you from publishing, or when the show is growing and the edit is the thing that does not scale.

The maths is straightforward. Our Starter plan is $199 per episode for a single camera 1080p cut with one revision round. Studio is $299 per episode for 2 to 4 cameras, 4K, and unlimited revisions. Both are per episode up to 60 minutes as the base, cheaper up to 30 minutes and more up to 90. A 4-episode pack saves 15 percent, monthly saves 25 percent.

Compare that to a typical agency at $300 to $400 per episode plus around $400 a month for clips. Add-ons here are priced separately and honestly: vertical clips $25 each, show notes and chapters $35, rush 24-hour delivery $75.

First cut comes back in 48 hours. Revisions come back the next working day. Hosts tell us the real win is not the money, it is getting Sunday back.

You keep everything. Footage, project files and exports are yours, and we hand over the Resolve project so you are never locked in. That is the whole podcast video editing service in one paragraph, and the pricing is on the page.

One more thing that sits outside the edit but decides whether anyone watches it: the thumbnail. Our sister studio ClickTheory does 8 thumbnails for $250, and on YouTube that is often the highest leverage $250 a show spends.