DaVinci Resolve Keyboard Shortcut Workflow

When you're beginning in DaVinci Resolve it's completely natural to control almost everything with the mouse. You find a tool, move the cursor, make the adjustment and then return to playback.

There's nothing wrong with that, but it creates a surprising amount of friction once you're making the same editing decisions hundreds of times.

The keyboard starts becoming powerful when the commands you use constantly sit directly under your fingers. You see the frame where a clip should start, make the trim and continue watching without breaking your concentration.

This sounds like an extremely small improvement until you start using it consistently.

Instead of reaching for the playhead every time you need to find another frame, your left hand can control the direction and speed of playback while your attention stays on the footage.

For dialogue, interviews, YouTube videos and longer-form footage, that alone can make reviewing an edit feel considerably faster.

The reason I like Q, W and E for these commands is physical as much as technical. The keys sit together and represent three editing decisions I make constantly: remove the beginning, cut here, or remove the end.

That creates a very simple mental model.

Once the layout becomes instinctive, I can move through a sequence with J, K and L and use Q, W and E to reshape it without continually changing the position of my hand.

This is why Q and E make such a large difference to my workflow.

If I've found the moment where a shot should begin, I don't necessarily want to create a cut, select the unwanted section, delete it and then manually close the gap. I want to make one editing decision: this is where the shot starts.

Ripple trimming allows the timeline to respond to that decision. When material is shortened, later timeline material moves to accommodate the new duration.

Where I use it constantly

• Removing the dead space before someone begins speaking.
• Tightening pauses in talking-head content.
• Removing camera movement before a usable B-roll moment.
• Cleaning the end of a clip after the useful action finishes.
• Rapidly assembling sequences from longer takes.

There are plenty of ways to cut a clip in Resolve. What matters to me isn't whether W is somehow the “correct” key — it isn't — but whether the assignment makes the overall keyboard workflow faster.

Placing Split Clip on W means my three main edit commands sit beside one another.

If I need to isolate something in the middle of a shot, I place the playhead, hit W and immediately continue working from that edit point.

When I want an unwanted section to disappear completely and the later timeline to move with it, a ripple-style delete is generally more useful than leaving an empty space behind.

In the workflow shown in my video I use Shift + Delete as part of this cleanup process on Mac.

The exact behaviour of any shortcut can depend on your keyboard preset and context, which is why I always recommend looking at the command attached to the key rather than treating a physical key as the workflow itself.

The command matters more than the letter

That's particularly important if you work across different computers or have imported a keyboard preset from another editing application.

A fast edit usually combines both.

What I'm trying to eliminate is unnecessary movement between the two when a simple keyboard command can make the decision immediately.