Editing Smarter: AutoCut for Video Creators

[00:00:04] Hello everyone and welcome back to Beyond the Post. My name is Bodie and I am your host.

[00:00:09] Now, today's episode is going to be a little bit different. Normally Robb and I will sit down and

[00:00:12] have a topic and we discuss it, but on this episode I'm going to walk you through a plugin

[00:00:18] that I use for DaVinci Resolve called AutoCut. Before we get into that though, I do need to let

[00:00:24] you know that this is an episode that's probably better consumed on YouTube. I'm going to be showing

[00:00:31] you exactly how I use AutoCut in DaVinci Resolve and if you want to get the full benefit, I would

[00:00:38] recommend watching on YouTube for sure. Now, having said that, still download it because we still get

[00:00:43] credit for the download for audio if you're going to do that kind of thing, but yeah, the video is

[00:00:49] the way to go for this. I do want to give everyone a little update on Beyond the Post Season 3. Robb and

[00:00:55] I have Season 3 all planned out, so that's great. We're currently working on recording these episodes

[00:01:01] and scheduling interviews. I don't have a launch date as of yet because trying to coordinate three

[00:01:07] or more people's schedules is difficult, especially around the holidays, so we're working on it and

[00:01:13] we'll give you an update soon. Okie doke, let's get to our main topic. Like I mentioned before,

[00:01:21] we're going to talk about a plugin called AutoCut. AutoCut is actually for DaVinci Resolve and Premiere

[00:01:26] Pro. I used to have access to a Premiere Pro account, but I no longer have that, so I am using

[00:01:32] the free version of DaVinci Resolve. Before I get into how I use AutoCut, let's talk a little bit about

[00:01:39] DaVinci Resolve and to be more specific, where you download it from. So I use a Mac. When I initially

[00:01:47] downloaded DaVinci Resolve, I downloaded it from the Mac App Store. When I tried to use the AutoCut plugin

[00:01:54] with the Mac App Store version of DaVinci Resolve, I would get an error or it just wouldn't work,

[00:02:01] period. I contacted AutoCut support by email and their recommendation was to delete the Mac App Store

[00:02:08] version and download DaVinci Resolve directly from their website, which is Blackmagic Designs website.

[00:02:16] They own DaVinci Resolve. Apparently, the Mac App Store version has some extra security slash

[00:02:22] permissions that interfere with some plugins, not all plugins, but some of them. There was probably

[00:02:28] a way around this so that I could continue using the Mac App Store version, but it was just much

[00:02:35] easier to download the DaVinci Resolve from Blackmagic's website. DaVinci Resolve, I mentioned

[00:02:42] this, I use the free version. There is a free and paid version, but 90% of the people listening to this

[00:02:49] video or watching this video right now, the free version is fine. It's actually more than fine.

[00:02:55] It's pretty full-featured. All right, on to AutoCut. AutoCut, like I said, is a plugin for DaVinci Resolve

[00:03:03] and Premiere Pro. It does many different things. Some of those things that might be useful to you

[00:03:08] are automatically removing silences. By the way, a little bit of silence in your episodes or in your

[00:03:15] content is not a bad thing if you use it right. It will add captions and it will edit multicam clips.

[00:03:23] And this is what I use it for, is editing the multicam clips. So I already have an established

[00:03:30] workflow in Final Cut Pro. But like I said, AutoCut is not available for Final Cut Pro. It's only

[00:03:37] available for Premiere and Resolve. But before AutoCut, I would have to create a multicam clip in Final Cut

[00:03:45] Pro. And then I would have to choose which camera to activate based on who was talking. AutoCut does

[00:03:54] this automatically. It chooses which video file to show based on who's talking. It's not perfect and I

[00:04:02] have to go in and fix things, but honestly it saves me between 45 minutes and an hour and a half

[00:04:09] on that initial editing process. In addition to that time savings, there's a significant amount of

[00:04:16] cognitive load that is taken off my plate when using AutoCut. So it makes the whole process easier.

[00:04:24] It's not a one-stop shop. You still have to go in and make changes and add some things that you want

[00:04:31] to add. But it makes the whole process a whole lot easier. So I'm going to walk you through the process

[00:04:38] right now. First thing we need to do is we need to come up to our DaVinci Resolve and we need to go to

[00:04:47] Workspace. From Workspace, we're going to go down to Scripts. And from Scripts, we're going to click on

[00:04:54] AutoCut. All right, here we go. And all right, so you can see that it's got AutoCut Silences, AutoCut

[00:05:18] Podcast, Captions, Profanity Filter, which is pretty big, and then AutoZoom. Obviously, we're going to

[00:05:25] click on the AutoCut Podcast. Click on that. We're going to select our active timeline, which we already

[00:05:30] did. Now, here's where we set things up. I'm just going to make this a little bit bigger here

[00:05:39] so it's easier to see. All right. So first, we want to assign our audio tracks, our speakers.

[00:05:47] I'm on audio track A1. That's me, Bodhi. And Rob is on audio track A2. That's Rob. If we needed to add

[00:05:55] a speaker, we could do that. We can add as many as we want and we just need to label them over here.

[00:06:01] So I'm going to close this because it's just Rob and I. And then we go to our camera setup.

[00:06:09] So you can see V1 is me and V2 is Rob. Same thing here with the

[00:06:18] add camera. If you wanted to add a wide shot, I could add Rob and me to the wide shot.

[00:06:28] So if everybody's recording in the same room, we could do that kind of thing.

[00:06:32] We're going to do that today. So we'll delete that.

[00:06:38] But it's very useful if you do a podcast in person or you're doing interviews in person.

[00:06:46] And then we go to our camera duration. So here are some presets. I have found that I don't like

[00:06:54] any of these presets, but you play with them and see what you like. Down here where it says minimum

[00:06:59] duration. This is the minimum amount of time that somebody is on camera. So let's say I have this

[00:07:08] set for 10 seconds. If somebody only talks for two seconds and says, uh-huh, it's going to be on that

[00:07:16] person for the full 10 seconds. There's going to be eight seconds of the person just sitting there

[00:07:20] picking their nose. That brings us to maximum duration. And that is the maximum amount of time

[00:07:27] that the camera will stay on someone before switching. Rob and I tend to be very verbose

[00:07:33] and talk for long periods of time. So I have this set high. There is some benefit to switching camera

[00:07:39] views every so often to keep people interested in the video. I'm actually working on different ways

[00:07:45] to do this inside of Final Cut. So for this particular workflow, I just keep this at 350 and I leave it

[00:07:54] where it is. All right. The next part here is down at the bottom and that is handling unused clips.

[00:08:02] So you can have it delete any unused clips or you can have it disable any unused clips. If you choose

[00:08:10] delete, those unused pieces are completely removed and you can't use them anymore. If you choose disable,

[00:08:17] it just grazed them out for lack of a better word. And then you can go in and if you need to fix

[00:08:24] something or adjust something, you can easily do that. I choose disable. That way I can fix anything

[00:08:30] that I think that AutoCut got wrong. So, and it's an easy process to correct. Now, having said all that,

[00:08:39] let's go ahead and hit the start podcast editing button here. It's down at the bottom. It's orange.

[00:08:47] Click on that. Now it's going to go through its paces here and you can see it over to the right. It's got

[00:08:59] the render queue and it's telling you everything that it's doing. It's going through. I will say,

[00:09:06] if you look at my naming conventions here, BTP season three, episode seven, this is how I keep track

[00:09:15] of everything. The timeline is named that the exported files are named that, that way everything is easy

[00:09:24] to find when I'm in a rush, except for that one time when I made a huge mistake, but that's, that's why we

[00:09:33] make mistakes to remind us not to do that again. So we are sitting in that took about

[00:09:42] a minute and a half for that first pass. Now it's going through and doing the second pass

[00:09:53] and you can just kind of see the timeline here. And this video, by the way, is about 54 minutes long.

[00:10:03] It's a little less, but I am pretty sure it's right under 54 minutes.

[00:10:10] And this is taking, you know, about another minute, minute, 15 seconds for this to

[00:10:17] make the cuts. So if we come over here at the front, you'll start to see it cutting the timeline,

[00:10:33] which is down here. I should say, while this is doing this, you can see Rob's picture is up in the

[00:10:40] preview window because Rob's video is on top. It's always going to be at the preview window.

[00:10:46] So we'll close out of this. It's successful. So we're going to close out of this so we can see,

[00:10:51] and I'll just run through this. You can see me talking

[00:10:56] and then I'm still talking and then it switches to Rob

[00:11:02] and some, like I might want to take that out, right?

[00:11:09] Now Rob's going to talk. So if you come down here, you can see

[00:11:15] that Rob's video is grayed out. And on this one, my video is grayed out. So it's disabled. I can

[00:11:23] change this if I want to, but right now I don't want to because all I use DaVinci Resolve for is

[00:11:30] this specific process. Now, if you are somebody like me who wants to use Final Cut for your editing

[00:11:39] suite, and like I said, it's a real bummer that we don't have anything that's similar to this on

[00:11:44] Final Cut, you can actually go through and export this from DaVinci Resolve to Final Cut.

[00:11:53] So what you're going to do is you're going to come down and you're going to click on this little

[00:11:56] rocket down here and it says deliver. So click on that and bring this all the way back to the front.

[00:12:06] So you come up here to the top left and you make sure that it says Final Cut 10,

[00:12:14] not final, unless you have Final Cut 7, but Final Cut 10. And then you're going to choose a source

[00:12:20] name, which is going to be the default name. And then you need to choose a folder. This goes into a

[00:12:26] default folder. I have to change it to where I want it to go every single time. And from there,

[00:12:33] you just go down here to the bottom right and you say add to render queue.

[00:12:39] And then you simply say render all. Now I'm not going to do that just yet because I'm not quite

[00:12:45] ready to do that. But once you render this, it's going to put all of the little tiny clips into a

[00:12:52] folder in whatever, wherever you specified it. And from that, it's going to also have a Final Cut

[00:13:00] project file. And when you're ready to edit in Final Cut, you just click on that Final Cut project file.

[00:13:06] It'll open up in Final Cut Pro and then you open up the timeline in Final Cut Pro and you're ready

[00:13:13] to go to work. And it works pretty seamlessly. So that is it for me. That is our whole tutorial.

[00:13:19] I hope this was helpful. If you have any questions, you can send me an email. It's

[00:13:36] patreon.com. Rob and I have actually been recording all of our planning sessions. So we cover everything

[00:13:44] from editing to pitching show ideas, tips on booking guests. Rob and I will walk you through

[00:13:51] our content calendar, how we put that together. So if you're interested in that kind of thing,

[00:13:57] it's beyondthepost.fm forward slash Patreon. And you can even get a free trial. I think it's seven

[00:14:03] days. You can get a seven day free trial if you're interested, but you don't know if you want to spend

[00:14:08] the money yet or not. Go over there and check it out and risk free trial. I do want to thank our

[00:14:13] patrons, Bill, Andrew and Jeffrey for supporting the show and making it possible for episodes like

[00:14:20] this. So thank you, Bill, Andrew and Jeffrey. All right, everybody, that is it for me. I hope

[00:14:26] you all have a wonderful week and Rob and I will be back with you soon.