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. Uncle 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.
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
Three shortcuts, all rebindable: hold Shift + Fn to talk to it, press Shift + Option to type a question, and press Shift + Control to ask “am I doing this right — what’s next?” Ask the way you would ask an editor sitting next to you.
No. Voice is optional — type your question with Shift + Option instead. The microphone permission is only needed if you actually want to talk to it.
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. Download it, drag it into your Applications folder, and open it. macOS will ask for a few permissions so Uncle can see your screen and point at controls — it explains each one in plain language before you grant it.
Three: Screen Recording, so Uncle can see what is on your screen; Accessibility, so it can locate and point at the right control; and Microphone, only if you want to talk to it. Each one is explained before you grant it, and you can change your mind in System Settings anytime.
Uncle works with DaVinci Resolve on macOS — 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 media never leaves your Mac. Uncle reads your screen to understand what you are looking at — the same screen-recording permission any capture or streaming app uses — but it does not upload, store or share your footage or your project files.
Only what is needed to answer: a screenshot of your screen and your question. It is sent to AI providers solely to generate your answer — not sold, and not used to train our own models — and your media files themselves are never uploaded.
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 is free while it is in early access — no credit card required. It is built by a DaVinci Resolve instructor who has taught 100,000 people online, and it is shaped by the app’s official 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.
Editors and colorists who know what they want but do not have the Resolve vocabulary for it yet — plus beginners who would rather learn by doing than by watching hours of tutorials. If you are already pushing past what the free tutorials cover, Uncle is built for you.