frequently asked
Your Resolve questions, answered.
Everything about TryUncle — what it does, how it watches your DaVinci Resolve screen and circles the right control, what it helps with on the Edit, Color and Fusion pages, the permissions it needs, what happens to your footage, and what it costs.
What it is
Uncle watches your screen, listens to what you are trying to do, and points at the exact button, slider, wheel, or node you need next — on your own screen. The answer comes as a spoken reply plus a hand-drawn box or a cursor that flies to the control, so you are never translating words back into clicks.
No. A general chatbot cannot see your screen, so it guesses and hands you a menu path you then have to find. Uncle sees your actual timeline, your actual node tree, and your actual stuck point, answers that specific situation, and circles the control on screen so there is nothing to translate.
A tutorial shows you someone else’s Resolve on someone else’s footage, and you pause, scrub, and try to map it onto your project. TryUncle works on yours — your footage, your project, your current mess — and points at the real control in real time. No pausing, no scrubbing back through a twenty-minute video to find the ten seconds you needed.
All three mean the same thing. TryUncle — one word, sometimes written Try Uncle — is the desktop app for Mac and Windows, and Uncle is the assistant you actually talk to inside it. The only official site is tryuncle.com; that is the only place the app is distributed.
No. Uncle sits up in the menu bar and only appears when you ask. It points; you keep your hands on the keyboard and stay in your flow.
Using Uncle
On Mac, press Shift + Fn to talk, Shift + Option to type, or Shift + Control to ask “am I doing this right — what’s next?” On Windows, hold Ctrl + Shift to talk, tap it for the quick check, or press Ctrl + Shift + Z to type. Every shortcut is rebindable.
No. Voice is optional. Type with Shift + Option on Mac or Ctrl + Shift + Z on Windows. The microphone permission is only needed if you actually want to talk to Uncle.
A little cursor flies to the control and a hand-drawn box or circle marks it. For moves that need a drag, like a color wheel, it plays a short looping motion demo showing where to pull. It works across multiple monitors, too.
Just tell it — “no, I meant the drawn-on effect, not the text.” Uncle re-reads your screen and corrects itself. It follows your latest words, not a stale script, so you can steer it in plain language.
What it helps with
Yes — the Color page is where most editors get stuck, and it is where Uncle is most useful. It points you to the primary wheels, curves, qualifiers, power windows, tracker, node structure and scopes, and explains what each one is doing to your image as you go, so grading stops feeling like guesswork.
Yes. Node trees are the single most confusing part of Resolve for most people. Uncle walks you node by node — serial, parallel and layer nodes on the Color page — and helps you build compositions on the Fusion page, connecting the graph one step at a time until it finally makes sense.
Yes. Trimming, ripple and roll edits, transitions, retiming, the media pool, the inspector — ask where something lives or how a tool works and Uncle points at the exact spot on your timeline instead of making you hunt through menus.
Setup & requirements
Yes. Choose Mac or Windows on the TryUncle landing page, run the installer for your computer, and open the app. TryUncle explains each permission it needs in plain language before you grant it.
It needs permission to see your screen so Uncle can understand what is open, permission to locate and point at the right control, and microphone access only if you want to talk to it. Each permission is explained before you grant it, and you can change it later in your computer’s settings.
TryUncle works with DaVinci Resolve on macOS and Windows — both the free version and Resolve Studio — and keeps up with the recent releases most editors are on. Because it reads what is on your screen rather than plugging in as a plugin, it is not locked to one specific build.
Yes. The reasoning runs in the cloud, so Uncle needs to be online to answer. Your video files and projects are never uploaded, though — only what is needed to answer a question is sent.
Privacy & your footage
Your original media and project files stay on your computer. Screenshots can include visible frames from your footage, are sent to AI providers to answer your request, and may be retained for support for up to 30 days. Avoid showing confidential material you do not have permission to share. See our Privacy Policy for details.
Your question, screenshots, visible control information, relevant conversation context, and installed Resolve setup names may be sent to our service and AI providers. Voice input is sent for transcription. We retain interaction records for support and reliability; see our Privacy Policy. We do not sell this data or use it to train our own models.
No. Everything runs through TryUncle. There are no API keys to paste and no separate logins to external AI services on your end — you just open the app and ask.
Pricing & who it’s for
TryUncle Access is $20/month, and you can cancel anytime. It is built by Marius Manolachi, an online Udemy business instructor and the founder of TryUncle, and shaped by the app’s community of editors.
No, and it never will. Uncle tells you the move; you make it. That is deliberate — the skill stays in your hands, so you actually learn Resolve instead of outsourcing it. Next time you hit the same spot, you already know the move.
TryUncle is for editors who make money with Resolve — freelance client work, monetized YouTube, weddings, corporate — and want to add color grading, Fusion, or faster delivery to what they can charge for. Switchers from Premiere and serious learners headed toward paid work fit too. If editing is purely a hobby, our free community is the better place to start.
Because Uncle is not a course — it is help at the exact moment you are stuck, on your own project. A course is finite: a fixed syllabus on someone else’s footage, and then it ends. Learning Resolve doesn’t end — every project brings a new stuck point, every version ships new tools, and the questions just change shape: Edit basics in month one, Color and Fusion later, delivery specs and client fixes once you charge for it. Uncle answers at every stage, and the math holds the whole way: editors who grade charge $200–500 more per video, so one graded delivery covers more than a year of Uncle.
Honest answer: Uncle is built for expanding your skills — adding Color, Fusion, and delivery to work you already do — not for auditing a 200-node comp on a feature pipeline. If you are running high-end client work and want to push it, email us first and we will tell you straight whether it holds up.