Learn video editing to a polished three-minute cut in two months
Two months in DaVinci Resolve — about 45 minutes a day learning the tool plus weekend edits — gets a beginner to a finished, color-graded, audio-mixed three-minute video. Roughly 50 hours total. You will not be a working editor. You will own the full post-production loop and never need a paid editor for personal work again.
2 months · ~50 hours · cut, color-grade, mix and export a 3-minute video from your own footage
1.DaVinci Resolve (free) — install and the official manual
Blackmagic gives away a version of Resolve that almost matches the $295 Studio version, and it includes editing, color, Fairlight audio and Fusion VFX in one app. There is no reason to start anywhere else. Install it, open the official "Beginner's Guide to DaVinci Resolve" PDF (free on Blackmagic's training site) and skim the first three chapters. Don't try to memorize anything yet.
Free
DaVinci Resolve training →2.Casey Faris — Introduction to DaVinci Resolve
Faris has been teaching Resolve for thirteen years and his free YouTube full-course beginner videos are the consensus on-ramp. Watch one section a day, replicate it on the same project, and pause whenever something doesn't match. His Resolve Basics playlist covers the page-by-page workflow you'll use every day and his color-grading videos demystify the Color page faster than anyone else.
Free
Casey Faris on YouTube →3.Edit a real project, end to end
Tutorials teach you knobs; projects teach you editing. Pick something concrete — a vlog, a short interview with a friend, a travel cut from phone footage you already have — and finish it. Cut, audio-mix, color-grade, export. Watch it the next day, write down the three things you'd fix, and fix two of them. Ship it. The first finished video is the moment you stop being a beginner.
Free
DaVinci Resolve download →If this doesn't fit you
If you only edit short vertical content for TikTok and Instagram, skip Resolve and use CapCut on desktop. The finished result for that format is usually indistinguishable, the learning curve is half as steep, and Resolve's strengths — color and audio — barely matter at 60 seconds.
Why this path
Premiere is the industry default but Adobe's $23/month subscription is a tax beginners don't need to pay, and Final Cut locks you to Apple. Resolve is free, runs everywhere and is increasingly the standard in colour and indie post. Faris is the rare instructor who actually shows you how working editors think rather than how features work. Skipping the finished real project is the universal mistake — tutorials forever feel like progress and produce nothing.