Edit and render videos like a pro. Nik Rawlinson shows you how to hit the ground running in the powerful free editing suite

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There are plenty of video-editing tools out there, but DaVinci Resolve is unique in offering a comprehensive professional-grade workflow completely free of charge. It’s a well-established tool, too: the software turned 20 last year, and has been used on big-name Hollywood films including Bohemian Rhapsody, La La Land and Spectre.

If you’ve ever used another non-linear video-editing suite, such as Premiere Pro or Apple’s Final Cut Pro, you should have no problem getting started with DaVinci Resolve, as it uses industry-standard tools and workflows. If you’re coming from a simpler tool such as Windows Movie Maker or iMovie, the interface might seem daunting at first, but don’t be put off. Spend an hour or two exploring what DaVinci Resolve has to offer and you’ll soon start to feel at home – and our top five tips on these pages will help you reap high-quality results from the word go.

Is it really free?

Yes, the standard edition of DaVinci Resolve is completely free, with no ads or in-app purchases, and you can use it for as long as you like, to make any type of video. It will run on any PC running Windows 10 or 11, or any Mac running macOS Monterey or later – although bear in mind that video editing is a resource-intensive process, and if you try to run it on lightweight hardware the experience may be sluggish.

There’s also a Linux edition, for which the publisher recommends a recent edition of Rocky Linux or CentOS, and an iPad version that runs on tablets with an A12 Bionic chip or later; see tinyurl.com/​ 365davinci for download links.

Whichever platform you’re using, you get an extensive set of tools for editing and enhancing video clips in all popular formats, assembling them into a complete film, and exporting the finished product for online sharing or high-quality distribution. Unless you’re a film and TV professional, it will do everything you need – although for those who do fall into that category there’s also a high-end commercial version of the software called DaVinci Resolve Studio, which adds enhanced tools for colour grading, media management, speech transcription, subtitle generation, audio editing and more. At $295 it’s a big step up from the free edition, but for what you get it’s still a very reasonable price.