One of the things I always try and remember is that, from a mental health perspective, it can be valuable to celebrate the small victories, however inconsequential you think they might seem to others, or however minor they might feel in comparison to some of the things they are dealing with. Successfully overcoming something is always a thing worth patting yourself on the back for, and thus today I would like to do just that for myself.
I mentioned the other day that I had been going through the basics of DaVinci Resolve, largely out of necessity because my prior video editor of choice, Hitfilm Express, is no longer available — and, indeed, the company that made it no longer exists, it seems. I had been putting off learning DaVinci Resolve for the longest time because it's the sort of application that you open up and you can feel its UI laughing at you. "You'll never know what all these buttons are for," it says. "You may as well just close me right now and not even bother."
Well, today I decided that I was going to put my three chapters' worth of training to the test and edit myself a YouTube video. And, to my great pleasure, it was immediately just as straightforward as the last seven years I've spend using Hitfilm Express. Yes, there are a number of differences between the two applications — most notably that DaVinci Resolve is a considerably more complex, fully-featured program that can do other things besides editing video — but it seems that I have successfully ported over all the important knowledge from Hitfilm Express to DaVinci Resolve.
I haven't yet done everything in DaVinci Resolve that I used to do in Hitfilm Express — notably, I still need to learn how to do titles and keyframe-based animation and compositing — but taking on the relatively simple project that I did today has given me the confidence to explore the application further, either with or without the training manual by my side. After all, I learned Hitfilm without any real training material — most of the knowledge there I ported over from past experience with Final Cut Pro on Mac, which again, had its own way of doing certain things.
When tackling anything like this, it's taking that first step that is always the most difficult. In fact, I'd go so far as to say when doing pretty much anything, the first step is always the hardest — whether you're talking about working on an elaborate project, or simply motivating yourself to stand up and go and do something with your day.
I have proven myself victorious over several little things like that today — firstly, getting off the sofa and recording the voiceover for my video, then actually going through and editing the thing, and finally, troubleshooting a little issue I had with the export — and I am officially giving myself a pat on the back for my achievements. Now I can spend the remainder of the evening Doing Something Fun without any sort of guilt or feelings of obligation whatsoever.
Getting rid of those feelings of guilt and obligation completely are a whole other matter, of course, but one step at a time and all that. One step at a time.
Oh, and here's the vid, if you want to watch it:
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