DaVinci Resolve keyboard shortcuts for Mac

JKL is the oldest muscle memory in the edit suite and the fastest thing to learn in Resolve. J plays backward at full speed, K stops, L plays forward — and pressing J or L repeatedly steps up through faster shuttle speeds each time.

The combinations are where it becomes precise. Holding K while tapping J or L nudges the playhead a single frame; holding K down together with J or L plays in slow motion, with pitch-corrected audio on macOS. Nobody who edits full time uses anything else.

Arrow keys do frames, Shift-arrows do seconds, and the up and down arrows jump whole clips. That three-tier model covers almost all of the moving about you do in a day.

Markers are the other half of this. M drops one without interrupting playback, which is the right way to log notes on a first pass — you keep watching, and the note lands where you were rather than where you stopped.

In and out points are how Resolve knows what you mean, and they work identically in the Media Pool, the Source Viewer and the Timeline. The video-only and audio-only variants are what let you cut picture against different sound without unlinking anything.

The function-key row is Resolve's edit palette. F9 through F12 perform the four edit types you use constantly, and the ⇧ variants cover the three you reach for less often. They are worth learning as a block rather than one at a time, because they only make sense relative to each other.

A, T and B swap tools; ⌘\ adds a cut at the playhead without touching the pointer at all. Note that Delete leaves a gap and Forward Delete ripples the timeline closed — the distinction that catches out every editor arriving from another application.

Trimming in Resolve begins with selecting the right thing, which is what V, ⇧V and U are for: V grabs the nearest edit, ⇧V grabs the whole clip, and U cycles that edit between its incoming side, its outgoing side and both at once. Everything after that acts on whatever you selected.

The nudge keys are the workhorses. Comma and period move a selection one frame; adding ⇧ moves it five, and that five is configurable in the Editing panel of the preferences.

Destination controls decide which track an edit lands on, and doing that from the keyboard is the difference between a three-track timeline and a mess. ⌥ with a number sets the video destination; add ⌘ for audio.

The viewer modes deserve a mention on a Mac specifically, because a large display makes Cinema Viewer genuinely useful for reviewing a cut rather than a novelty.

The Color page rebinds a good deal of the keyboard, which is the single most confusing thing about Resolve's shortcuts. ⌥1 saves a grade to memory here; on the Edit page the same chord picks a destination track. Blackmagic's manual is explicit that shortcuts are page-specific, and this is where that bites hardest.

The four window shortcuts at the bottom are a genuine time saver: rather than adding a node and then adding a window to it, they do both in one press.

Grading is iterative, so most of these exist to let you compare one attempt against another. Versions hold alternative grades on the same clip, memories hold a grade you want to reuse across clips, and stills hold a reference frame you can wipe against.

The two apply-grade keys are the fastest thing on the Color page: = copies the grade from one clip back and – copies it from two clips back, which covers most of the work in a dialogue scene.

This is the page where the confusion is worth heading off directly. Show KeyPress does not record, edit, render or export video. It has no Resolve integration, no plugin, no OFX effect and no Fusion node. It draws an overlay on your Mac's screen showing the keys you press — that is the whole of it.

What that is good for is teaching Resolve. An editor watching your tutorial sees the playhead shuttle backwards and has no idea you were holding J; they see a node appear and cannot tell ⌥S from ⌥P. Drawing the chord on screen at the moment you press it removes the guessing, and because the overlay is an ordinary window above your other windows, any recorder or streaming tool capturing that display captures it too.

Show KeyPress is a paid Mac App Store app requiring macOS 14 Sonoma or later. It draws on your screen; it never reads it.