Insider Tips: Easy Punch-Ins Using DaVinci Resolve’s Adjustment Clip

Every week, Frame.io Insider asks one of our expert contributors to share a tip, tool, or technique that they use all the time and couldn’t live without. This week, Charles Haine shares best practice for creating punch-ins with DaVinci Resolve’s Adjustment Clips.


Punching in with DaVinci Resolve’s Adjustment Clips

If you’ve got a long continuous shot, with either a speaker to camera or an interview, punching in is a great way to break up the shot into chunks. This is a very common workflow for YouTube videos and fits the “voice” of YouTube. You could go through and do an “add edit” for each shot you want to punch in, but that can make shifting the edit around more complicated if you want to make quick and dirty changes on the fly.

Instead of adding edits to a clip a better way to do it in Resolve is to use an adjustment clip. Adjustment clips work by adding a new clip to the timeline that affects all the shots underneath the adjustment clip.

If you’ve got a long interview to break up with punch-ins, add a punch-in to that adjustment clip. Then you can slip, slide, and adjust the punch-in to your heart’s content much faster than with traditional edits.

You can also turn it off whenever you want by toggling Enable Clip off (hitting D while the clip is highlighted) which is a faster way to see the shot in its entirety.


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Charles Haine

Charles Haine is the Interim Program Director for the Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema at Brooklyn College. He has been a filmmaker and entrepreneur working in the motion picture industry since 1999, and received his MFA from USC in 2006. Haine founded the Academy Award and Emmy nominated production company Dirty Robber in 2008, directed the feature film Angels Perch, the websites Salty Pirate, and countless shortform projects including a music video for Fitz & The Tantrums.