i've managed to get past the learning hump where davinci resolve has become a greater percentage "tool that can be used to accomplish tasks" than "active impediment to doing anything whatsoever." now the problem is that it turns out video editing is not only hard on a technical level, but also on a creative level, who'd've thunk!! i've already tossed one draft whose direction i wasn't happy with and i'm trying to start this time by just setting out the rough cut from start to finish. but even that has sooo many decisions to be made, and every one of them affects the balance of pacing, clarity, continuity, comedic timing, and so on. and that's not a skill i've ever actually built before and it turns out, crazily enough, it's not easy right out the gate!
i think on some level part of me had some dunning-kruger arrogance going on. i've been watching video media for my entire damn life, i've absorbed plenty of discussions about the art of editing, so like... obviously i'm not gonna be a god right away but i should be able to figure out the fundamentals without too much trouble, right...? (not right. this unspoken assumption was incorrect. there is a reason people go through years of school to learn this stuff)
one of the biggest challenges for me is not being sure just how much setup/establishing time is needed between cuts to keep a viewer from getting disoriented or confused, depending on a given context (whether the location is significantly different from the previous shot, what actions and edits took place beforehand, etc). of course i'm trying to evaluate that myself and gauge my own reactions, but art always has that problem of getting too used to what you're working on and becoming desensitized to certain aspects, and that's only all the more true when your context is "scrubbing back and forth over handfuls of seconds over and over" versus the viewer's "watching it once start to (hopefully) finish with no or few breaks"