How to censor swear words in DaVinci Resolve

Before you start

Resolve splits this job across pages, which turns out to be convenient. The cuts and the mute happen on the Edit page; the blur happens on the Color page, where every clip carries its own grade, so a blur applied to a one-second slice exists only on that slice with no keyframing of the effect on and off. Fairlight is optional unless you want sub-frame audio trims.

The free version and Studio differ in a few of the tools mentioned below, transcription in particular, so if a menu item is missing on your copy, the by-ear alternative is given. Menu names are from recent versions.

Find every swear

1. In the Media Pool, right-click the clip and look for Audio Transcription, Transcribe (recent versions; availability depends on version and edition). The transcript window searches by word and jumps the playhead when you click a line.
2. At each swear press M to add a marker, and search again for plurals, -ing forms and phrases.
3. No transcription? Play at speed (L twice), tap M on each swear, then go back and tidy each marker to the word.

Bleep a word

1. Turn off Linked Selection (Ctrl+Shift+L, Cmd+Shift+L on Mac) or Alt/Option-click the audio, so you cut only the sound.
2. Playhead at the start of the word, Ctrl+B / Cmd+B to split; again at the end. Zoom in for accuracy; Fairlight lets you trim at sub-frame if a frame is too coarse.
3. Select the slice and press D to disable it (silent), or drag its Volume down in the Inspector.
4. Resolve has no Bars-and-Tone clip. Import a short 1 kHz beep (any free WAV), or generate one by patching Fairlight's oscillator to a track (Fairlight, Patch Input/Output, source Oscillator) and recording it. Drop it in the gap on a free track, trim it to the slice and match its level to the voice in the Inspector.
5. Drag the fade handles at the top corners of the slices either side in by two or three frames to avoid clicks.
6. Repeat per marker; two swears close together get one slice and one tone.

Mute instead

Same splits, D to disable, short fades, no tone. If the dialogue has its own track, mute only that track's slice and the music carries through; on a single mixed track the whole mix drops for the word.

Blur the mouth

1. On the Edit page, split the video at the word's start and end (Linked Selection on, or Alt/Option-click the video) so the slice has its own grade.
2. Go to the Color page with the slice selected and add a serial node (Alt+S / Option+S).
3. In the Window palette pick the circle, size and position it over the mouth and soften the edge.
4. In the Tracker palette press Track Forward. Resolve's tracker is good; for a head turn, stop and keyframe the window.
5. In the Blur palette raise the radius well up on that node, or add ResolveFX Blur, Mosaic Blur from the Effects panel for a pixelated look. The mouth shape should be gone, not softened.
6. Check the slice at full resolution; the window must cover the lips for every frame of the word.

Check it before you deliver

Play the timeline once with sound and once muted. With sound, listen for a tone that starts late or a slice that clips the word before it, and watch the Fairlight meters on each gap: a mute should read nothing, a tone should sit where the dialogue sits. Muted, watch the mouth; if you can still read the word, the window is too small or the track drifted on a head turn. On the Deliver page keep the project's resolution and frame rate and render as you normally would; a plain H.264 MP4 at your usual bitrate is fine whether it is the master or the file you send on for censoring.

The faster way

For a handful of swears, the pages above are fine. For a long video, a stream or a batch, let the censoring be a render. Export the cut, upload it to Redactify, pick the preset for where it is going, turn on mouth blur if anyone is on camera, mark each face once, review the list and download. The clean file comes back at the same length, resolution and frame rate, so you can bring it back into Resolve to finish the grade and titles, or censor the raw footage first and edit clean. Audio costs 1 credit a minute, video with mouth blur 2, and new accounts get 30 credits free.