Installing the free software and looking around
Okay. Your footage is backed up in two places. Your files are labeled so you can actually find them. Now we open the editor.
I use DaVinci Resolve, free version. There's also a free one built into Windows called Clipchamp, and Mac has iMovie sitting on it already if you're on Mac. I teach Resolve because it's the one I know cold, and because it doesn't age out or start charging you halfway through a project the way some free trials do. If you already like something else, use that. I'm not precious about the software. I'm precious about the backups.
Getting it installed
Go to the actual Resolve website — Blackmagic Design is the company — and download the free version, not the paid Studio version. The free one does everything you need for a family history video. I've been doing this four years and I still haven't hit its limits.
A few things before you click download:
Check your computer can run it. Resolve wants a decent amount of memory and a real graphics card. If your laptop is old and slow already, it might choke. Chromebooks mostly can't run it at all — if that's you, use Clipchamp instead, it's built for exactly that situation.
It's a big download. Depending on your internet, this can take a while. Don't start it five minutes before class or five minutes before you have to leave for a school pickup. Start it, go make dinner, come back.
The install file is a disk image or a zip, and it walks you through it. Say yes to the normal stuff. Say no to anything that tries to install a second program alongside it — sometimes free software tries to sneak a toolbar or something else onto your computer along with it. Read the checkboxes. Uncheck what you don't want.
Once it's installed, open it once just to confirm it opens. That's it for today's install step. Don't touch a single clip yet.
Looking around, not touching
Here's the thing about a new editing program: it looks like an airplane cockpit the first time. Buttons everywhere, panels everywhere, words like "Fusion" and "Fairlight" that mean nothing to you yet. That's normal. You are not going to learn all of it today, and you don't need to.
I want you to do one thing: open the program, create a new project, and just look at the layout without importing anything. Find these four things and nothing else:
- Where you import files (usually called Media or Import)
- Where the timeline is (the long horizontal strip where you'll actually build your video)
- Where the preview window is (where you'll watch what you've built)
- Where the export button is (sometimes called Deliver or Export or Share)
That's the whole map. Everything else in the software exists to serve those four things. I like teaching it this way — find the rooms in the house before you worry about the furniture — that's just my preference, but I've watched people get so overwhelmed by the interface that they never make it to their first cut, and I don't want that happening to you.
A word about the "old guy in the brown chair" problem
This isn't about software, but it belongs here because it's about looking closely before you start moving things around.
Teresa was sure the woman in one of her photos was her sister Karen. She'd told the story that way for years — Karen at the lake house, 1970-something. So actually, when I looked at the photo next to a home movie from the same summer, the woman in the photo had a watch on her left wrist that Karen never wore in any other picture. It was Teresa's other sister, Ann. I checked twice before I said anything.
Teresa was annoyed with me for about ten minutes. Nobody likes being corrected about their own family. But if that caption had gone in wrong, it would've been wrong forever, every time anyone watched that video for the next fifty years. Being right didn't feel great in the moment. It still mattered.
I bring this up now because once you start opening files in this software, you'll be looking at your photos and clips more closely than you ever have — full screen, paused, zoomed in. You'll notice things. A watch. A calendar on a wall. A car in a driveway that tells you the year. Write those things down as you notice them. Don't wait.
One more thing before we start cutting anything
You do not need to learn every button in this program. Most people use maybe ten percent of what's in there. Resolve has color grading tools that could occupy a professional for a career, and you will never open that tab, and that's fine. We're making a family video, not a movie. Learn the four rooms in the house. That's enough to start.
Before next time: get the software installed and opened at least once on your own computer, so we're not troubleshooting installs during class time. If it won't open or looks broken, email me a screenshot before you come in — I'd rather fix it ahead of time than watch you stare at an error message for twenty minutes of class.