Tutorials Video

Resolve’s Seven Pages, for a Premiere Editor

By Infinite Creation · Intermediate · ~11 min

The Problem

Resolve does not have a workspace you arrange. It has seven pages, each one a fixed room for a stage of the work, and you travel between them. For an editor used to dragging panels into the shape of the day, this is the adjustment that decides whether the first week is irritating or interesting. The mapping from Premiere is mostly clean, and the places it is not clean are worth knowing before you go looking for a panel that does not exist.

Method

Media: the ingest room, which Premiere does not really have

Media is where footage is brought in, viewed, organised and cloned from cards. Premiere spreads this across the Project panel, the Media Browser and a separate application in Media Encoder. Resolve gives it a room. The practical consequence is that ingest becomes a deliberate stage rather than something you do by dragging files into a bin, which is slower on a small job and considerably safer on a large one.

Cut and Edit: two editors, and you only need one

This is the mapping that confuses people most, because there is no Premiere equivalent of having two editing pages. Edit is the conventional one and is where a Premiere editor should live. Cut is a faster, more opinionated interface built for turnaround work, with a different timeline model. Neither is a beginner version of the other. Pick Edit, ignore Cut until you are curious, and do not try to learn both at once.

Fusion: where Dynamic Link went

Fusion is a node based compositor built into the application. The nearest Premiere comparison is the relationship with After Effects, and the comparison is imperfect in an important way: Fusion is inside Resolve rather than beside it, so there is no round trip and no second application to manage, but there is also no ecosystem of templates and no equivalent of the After Effects community. The site covers Fusion separately.

Color: the reason most people are reading this

Lumetri is a panel with a stack of effects. The Color page is a room built around a node graph, which is a different way of thinking rather than a richer version of the same one. This is the best documented part of the migration and the site already covers the node tree in depth, so it is not repeated here.

Fairlight: a full mixer, not an audio panel

Premiere has audio tools attached to an editor. Fairlight is a mixing environment with a channel strip, busses and its own effects, in the same application. For anyone who has been round tripping to a separate audio application, this is one of the larger practical gains of the move, and one of the least discussed.

Deliver: the render queue, without a second application

Premiere exports through Media Encoder, a separate application with its own queue. Deliver is a page. Presets live with the project, the queue is in front of you, and nothing has to hand off. The adjustment is that batch exporting across many projects is less convenient than a standalone encoder, which is a real loss if that is how you work.

Remap the keyboard, then find out what did not map

Open Keyboard Customization from the DaVinci Resolve menu and choose an emulation preset. The manual states the limitation directly: shortcuts can only be remapped to commands that functionally exist within Resolve, so where a Premiere feature has no equivalent the shortcut may not be mapped. Spend ten minutes finding which of your most used keys fall into that gap. That list is your actual learning curve.

What the Method Assumes

Resolve open, with any project loaded, so you can move between pages as you read
Your usual Premiere workspace in mind, or on a second screen

Gotchas

Switching pages has its own shortcuts. Learning them early is worth more than learning any editing shortcut, because page switching is the thing you will do most.
Resist rebuilding Premiere inside Resolve. The pages are opinionated on purpose and the opinion is mostly correct.
If a panel seems missing, it is usually on a different page rather than absent.

Knowledge Base

Going Deeper

The two questions people ask in the first hour.

Why there are two editing pages

Cut and Edit both cut, which looks like duplication and is not. Edit is the conventional timeline with the full feature set. Cut is built around a different premise: that on fast turnaround work the bottleneck is finding and placing shots rather than refining them, so it uses a two level timeline and a different trim model. Neither is a simplified version of the other, and trying to learn both in week one is the reliable way to feel that Resolve is confusing when it is merely opinionated.

What page switching costs you, and does not

The instinct from Premiere is that changing workspace is expensive, so you avoid it. In Resolve the page switch is the normal unit of movement and it keeps state, so returning to the Edit page puts you back where you were. Once that is trusted, the model stops feeling like a constraint. Until it is trusted, every switch feels like a commitment.

Where This Fits

Resolve's pages map to stages in the arc Video Production Fundamentals follows, from edit through grade to delivery.

FAQ

Q: Do I need to use the Cut page at all?
A: No. It is an alternative, not a stage. Many working editors never open it.

Q: Can I have the Edit and Color pages open at once?
A: Not side by side in one window, which is the point of the model. On two displays you can get closer, but the intended workflow is to move between rooms.

Q: Is the keyboard preset enough to feel at home?
A: It removes most of the friction and none of the gaps. The manual is explicit that a feature with no Resolve equivalent will not be mapped.

Vocabulary

Cut page A second editing interface in Resolve built for fast turnaround work, with a different timeline model from the Edit page. It is not a simplified Edit page, and neither is a beginner version of the other, so an editor arriving from Premiere can start on Edit and leave Cut for later.

Fairlight Resolve’s audio page. A full mixing environment with a channel strip, busses and its own effects, inside the same application as the edit. For an editor who has been sending audio out to a separate application, it removes that round trip entirely.

Deliver page Resolve’s export and render queue, built into the application as a page rather than handed to a separate encoder such as Media Encoder. Presets live with the project and the queue sits in front of you, though batch exporting across many projects is less convenient.

Keyboard Customization The Resolve window, opened from the DaVinci Resolve menu, that holds shortcut mappings and the emulation presets for other editors. Mappings made here can only point at commands Resolve actually has, which is why checking what did not map is worth ten minutes.

Sources

Behaviour described here is from the vendor manual, read directly. Checked 2026-09-11.

Blackmagic Design, DaVinci Resolve 21 Reference Manual. Read 2026-09-11. Chapter 4, System and User Preferences, page 125: the Keyboard Customization window offers emulation presets for other editors, and states that shortcuts can only be remapped to commands that functionally exist within DaVinci Resolve, so a feature without an equivalent may not be mapped in the same way.