DaVinci Resolve Markers and Timeline View Shortcuts

Adding a marker (M) drops a colored flag at the current playhead position directly on the timeline ruler, and Resolve supports multiple marker colors with optional attached notes, making them useful for a wide range of purposes beyond simple bookmarking — flagging a spot that needs a VFX shot, noting an audio sync issue for the mixing engineer, or marking client feedback points during a review session, often using a color-coding convention agreed on by the team beforehand. Zooming the timeline in and out (+ and -) controls how much horizontal space each second of footage occupies on screen, a constant background adjustment throughout an edit session — zoomed in tight for frame-accurate trim work on a short clip, zoomed out wide for reviewing overall pacing and structure across a longer sequence. Unlike a fixed zoom level, most editors adjust this dozens of times per session depending on the specific task at hand. A practical marker workflow worth knowing: because markers persist as part of the timeline itself and export alongside project files, they function well as a lightweight collaboration and to-do mechanism between an editor and other members of a post-production team, without needing a separate external tracking document for simple frame-specific notes — though for anything requiring extended discussion, most teams still supplement markers with actual conversation or a project management tool. Color-coding markers deliberately rather than always using the default color pays off quickly on any project longer than a few minutes — a common convention is red for problems that block delivery (a dropped frame, a missing VFX element), yellow for notes that need review but aren't blocking, and green for confirmed-fixed items, letting anyone scanning the timeline's marker row understand a clip's status at a glance without opening a separate notes document. Resolve's marker panel (accessible from the timeline toolbar) lists every marker in the project with its note text and color, filterable and sortable, which becomes the de facto to-do list for finishing a cut once markers have accumulated across a long session. Timeline zoom and markers interact in a practical way worth knowing: at a fully zoomed-out view, markers close together in time can visually overlap or become hard to click individually, so a common workflow is to zoom in around a cluster of markers before trying to select or edit a specific one, then zoom back out once done. Some editors also keep a specific zoom level saved as a habit for different tasks — tightly zoomed for frame-accurate trim work, moderately zoomed for normal editing, and fully zoomed out only for a final structural review of the whole timeline's pacing. Markers also interact with Resolve's rendering and delivery workflow in a way worth knowing — the Deliver page can be configured to render out only the sections of a timeline between two specific markers, which is a fast way to export a single flagged section for client review without rendering the entire project, rather than manually setting in and out points each time you need a partial export. Teams working with frequent partial deliverables often standardize on a marker-color convention specifically for this purpose, distinct from the general note-taking colors used elsewhere. Deleting a single marker is done by right-clicking it directly on the timeline ruler and choosing Delete, while clearing every marker on a timeline at once is available from the Timeline menu's Delete All Markers option — a useful reset before handing a nearly-finished cut off to a colorist or sound mixer who doesn't need to see the editor's working notes cluttering their view. Some editors keep two passes of markers in mind: a working set added liberally during the rough-cut phase for their own reference, then a cleaned, deliberately curated set left in place before the timeline moves downstream to color and sound, since a colorist opening a timeline full of unrelated editorial notes has no easy way to tell which markers are actually relevant to their pass. Jumping directly between markers without scrubbing the timeline manually is possible using the Timeline menu's next/previous marker commands, which is considerably faster than visually hunting for the next flag once a sequence has accumulated more than a handful of them spread across several minutes of footage. This matters most on long-form projects — documentary rough cuts or multi-camera event footage — where a session's markers might span an hour or more of raw timeline, and clicking each one individually would cost real time compared to stepping through them in sequence.