Text-based editing in DaVinci Resolve: what Studio does, and what it does not.

Resolve Studio can transcribe a clip and cut it from the text; free Resolve cannot. What the Transcription window does, where it stops, and the route that works in both editions.

What text-based editing in Resolve actually is

Transcript-based editing means choosing the cut by reading instead of scrubbing. In DaVinci Resolve that idea arrives as two Resolve Studio tools that share one transcript. Audio Transcription turns a clip's dialogue into timed text. The Transcription window shows that text, lets you search it, and turns a selection of words into an In and Out point on the source clip, which you then insert into the timeline like any other edit. That is the whole feature.

What it is not is a general-purpose transcript. It is one clip's text, inside one project, read by one window. That matters less for a single sit-down interview than for anything with more voices or more files.

How do you edit from text in DaVinci Resolve Studio?

1. Confirm you are on Resolve Studio. Right-click any clip in the Media Pool. If Audio Transcription is not in the menu, you have the free edition, and no setting unlocks it. The route in how to transcribe video in DaVinci Resolve, free edition included is yours; skip to the alternative below.
2. Transcribe the clip. Right-click the interview clip and choose Audio Transcription > Create. Pick the language if your version asks. The work runs on your machine and the transcript is saved with the project, so it is there the next time you open it.
3. Open the Transcription window and read. Choose Audio Transcription > View on the same clip. The transcript appears with timecodes down the side. Click a word and the source viewer's playhead moves to it, the fastest check of whether the line is as good as you remember.
4. Search for the line you can name. Type a word into the search field at the top of the window and step through the hits. Read outward from each one: the usable bite starts a sentence before the keyword and ends where the voice falls.
5. Select the range by text. Drag across the words you want. Resolve sets the In and Out on the source clip to match, trimmed to the words' timing. Widen the selection by a word on each side if the cut sounds clipped.
6. Insert or append it. Use the edit buttons along the bottom of the Transcription window to insert the range at the playhead or append it to the end of the timeline. It lands as an ordinary edit on the timeline.
7. Tighten it on the timeline, not in the window. The Transcription window is for finding and choosing. Head and tail trims, the breath before a line, the pause that makes the answer land: those happen on the timeline with the usual trim tools.

Where Resolve Studio's text-based editing stops

Four edges show up as soon as the footage is more than one clip.

It works one clip at a time. The Transcription window shows one clip's transcript. Six interviews means six transcriptions and six windows, and a line you half-remember means searching each one until you find it. Nothing reads across the project.

Nobody is labeled. The transcript is one stream of text with no speaker names. In a two-person interview you can tell who is who from what is said. In a panel you cannot, and "everything the second guest said about the budget" is not a question the window can answer.

It finds; it does not rank. Search returns every hit for a word in order of appearance, all with the same weight. Which of the fourteen hits for "flood" is the one where the subject stops reciting and starts remembering is a reading job, line by line, in every clip.

It cannot tell you what is missing. If the cut needs someone to say what happened the morning after, and nobody did, you find out at the assembly.

None of that argues against the feature. For one interview on Resolve Studio it is the fastest route from a remembered line to a cut without leaving Resolve. It stops paying when the project is many interviews or any panel, and the question is who said the thing about the morning after, and whether anyone said it better.

The transcript-first route, in both editions

The alternative works the same on free Resolve and on Resolve Studio. Transcribe the camera files before Resolve, with speakers labeled, in a tool whose transcript covers the whole project. Search and mark the selects in that text, where one box reads every interview. Then bring the marked ranges into Resolve as a timeline file: a CMX 3600 EDL with clip names and your notes as comments, imported in the Media Pool or with File > Import > Timeline, or FCPXML when the interview is multicam and the angles should stay switchable. The import dialog and the reel-name setting that catches people are in how to import an EDL from a transcript into DaVinci Resolve.

What you give up is the Transcription window itself. What you get is a transcript with names on it, one search across the whole project, and a selects timeline in Resolve that is already in order. The cut still happens in Resolve. The finding happens before it.

Common questions