# DaVinci Resolve Timeline Marker Color Meaning: The Real Answer

> **Quick answer:** DaVinci Resolve assigns no fixed meaning to marker colors. Every new marker defaults to blue, and you can choose from 16 colors (Cyan, Green, Yellow, Red, Pink, Purple, Fuchsia, Rose, Lavender, Sky, Mint, Lemon, Sand, Cocoa, Cream). The color only means something once you or your team decide what it means and write that decision down.

*Published by [TryUncle](https://tryuncle.com) — the AI tutor that teaches DaVinci Resolve on your own screen.*
*Updated 2026-07-18 · DaVinci Resolve 21.0.2 (July 2026) · Canonical: https://tryuncle.com/learn/davinci-resolve/davinci-resolve-timeline-marker-color-meaning*

I get asked some version of "what does a red marker mean in DaVinci Resolve" more often than almost any other markers question, usually from someone who just inherited a project from another editor and is staring at a timeline full of colored dots with no idea what any of them are supposed to tell them. The honest answer disappoints most people the first time they hear it, so let's get it out of the way immediately.

There isn't one. Resolve doesn't ship a marker color glossary, and it never has. The color you see is exactly and only the color someone picked. What it's supposed to mean is a decision that happened in a person's head, or maybe in a bin note nobody attached to the project, and it left the building the moment that person stopped being reachable.

## Does DaVinci Resolve assign a fixed meaning to marker colors?

No. Blackmagic's own manual walks through how to apply a marker color, how to filter a timeline down to clips carrying a specific color, and how to clear markers off a clip, but nowhere does it say what any individual color is supposed to represent. You "right-click a clip's thumbnail and choose a marker color from the Marker submenu" ([DaVinci Resolve Manual, mirrored](https://www.steakunderwater.com/VFXPedia/__man/Resolve18-6/DaVinciResolve18_Manual_files/part2677.htm)), and that's the entire built-in instruction set. Pick a color. Resolve remembers which color you picked. That's the whole contract.

**DaVinci Resolve has never shipped a marker color glossary, and it never will, because the color is the label and you get to decide what it says.** That single fact explains almost every confused forum post and every "wait, what does yellow mean again" moment on a real project. The software gave you paint, not a dictionary.

This isn't unique to Resolve, and it's worth saying plainly before you go looking for the "correct" system, because there isn't one anywhere in this category of software. Every major NLE ships some version of colored markers, labels, or locators, and every one of them treats color as a free-form organizational tool rather than a fixed vocabulary. We'll walk through how Premiere Pro, Avid Media Composer, and Final Cut Pro handle the same problem later in this guide, and the pattern holds across all three.

## What color does a new marker default to in DaVinci Resolve?

Blue. Press M with your playhead over a clip or a position on the timeline, and Resolve drops a blue marker at that exact frame, no dialog, no color picker, just blue. Editor Lewis McGregor describes the mechanism plainly in his rundown of Resolve's Edit page tools: "If you hit M, it will add a marker (or G to flag a clip), which defaults to blue. If you want to adjust the color to highlight a specific issue (say cyan markers will be for sound issues), you can open the marker properties and adjust the color" ([PremiumBeat](https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/davinci-resolve-15-edit-page/)).

Notice what McGregor's example actually is: one workable convention, cyan for sound issues, offered as an illustration of the idea, not a rule anyone else has to follow. That's the pattern you'll see over and over researching this topic. Real editors have real conventions. None of them are official.

To change a marker's color after you've placed it, double-click the marker to open its properties, or click the small arrow next to the marker icon above the timeline before you place a new one to pick a different default for that session. Either way, you're choosing from Resolve's full palette, not typing in a custom shade.

## How many marker colors does DaVinci Resolve actually have?

Sixteen. Resolve's own scripting API has to enumerate every valid color a script can assign to a marker, which makes it the most precise source for the complete list, more precise than any single manual page, since the API can't be vague about a value it has to accept or reject ([DaVinci Resolve Scripting API Documentation, X-Raym](https://extremraym.com/cloud/resolve-scripting-doc/)).

| # | Marker color |
| --- | --- |
| 1 | Blue (default) |
| 2 | Cyan |
| 3 | Green |
| 4 | Yellow |
| 5 | Red |
| 6 | Pink |
| 7 | Purple |
| 8 | Fuchsia |
| 9 | Rose |
| 10 | Lavender |
| 11 | Sky |
| 12 | Mint |
| 13 | Lemon |
| 14 | Sand |
| 15 | Cocoa |
| 16 | Cream |

That's a real palette, wide enough to build a genuinely granular system if your workflow needs one. It's also, in practice, more colors than most solo editors or small teams ever use on purpose. A production tracking twelve simultaneous marker categories is rarer than one tracking three or four consistently, and consistency is the part that actually matters, not coverage.

**Sixteen available colors is not sixteen meanings. It's sixteen empty boxes waiting for you to write on them.** Nothing forces you to use more than three or four of them, and nothing in Resolve nudges you toward using fewer, either. That choice is entirely yours.

## Can you rename or relabel marker colors, the way Premiere Pro lets you rename its labels?

Not inside Resolve itself. Adobe's Premiere Pro takes a slightly different approach here worth understanding by contrast: Premiere ships default color-to-category names (video clips get one default color, audio another), and editors can rename those categories in Preferences so the label reads "B-Roll" or "Needs VO" instead of a raw color name, a customization the software actually supports at the settings level.

Resolve doesn't have that settings layer. A marker's identity is its color, plus whatever text you type into that specific marker's note and keyword fields when you create it. There's no global rename that turns every cyan marker across every project into something labeled "Sound Issue" in the interface. Your convention exists as a shared understanding, written down somewhere Resolve doesn't touch: a line in the project's bin notes, a pinned message in your team's chat, a one-page style guide you hand a new hire on day one.

That's a real limitation if you're coming from Premiere and expect the same renaming workflow. It's also not really a gap in Resolve so much as a different design decision: color plus free-text notes, instead of color plus a renameable category label. Either approach requires you to define the system yourself. Resolve's version just makes that requirement a little more visible, because there's no settings panel pretending to solve it for you.

## What real marker color conventions do editors actually use?

Since Resolve won't hand you a system, here are documented examples from real editors and workflow writers, shown side by side so you can see how differently people solve the same blank-palette problem.

| Source | Convention | What it's solving for |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Lewis McGregor, PremiumBeat | Cyan markers flag sound issues specifically, separate from Resolve's default blue for everything else | Isolating one recurring problem type (audio) from general-purpose notes |
| Our own [DaVinci Resolve editing workflow for YouTube creators](https://tryuncle.com/learn/davinci-resolve/davinci-resolve-editing-workflow-for-youtube-creators) guide | Red for "needs a retake or replacement," yellow for "needs a graphic," blue for "consider trimming" | Rough-cut triage across three distinct action types, so a single watch-through sorts every problem by what has to happen next |
| Film Editing Pro | No fixed color list; the article's own example assigns orange specifically to foley effects clips inside a bin, built around that project's specific asset types | Whatever categories a specific production actually has, rather than a portable template |
| Simon Says AI | No specific colors recommended at all; the guidance is procedural: "make sure your team is aligned on naming conventions, keyword usage, color codes, note-taking systems, etc." (source: [Simon Says AI](https://www.simonsaysai.com/blog/how-and-why-to-use-markers-flags-and-keywords-in-blackmagic-design-davinci-resolve-16)) | Team alignment as the actual goal, treating the specific colors chosen as secondary to everyone agreeing on them |

Four real sources, four different answers, and not one of them claims to be the standard. That's not an accident and it's not a gap in the research. It's the honest shape of the answer to "what does X color mean in DaVinci Resolve." It means whatever the four rows in that table mean, depending on whose project you happen to have open.

**A marker that means something only you remember is a marker that fails the moment someone else opens your project.** That's true whether you picked cyan for sound issues, orange for foley, or nothing at all and you're just clicking whatever color happens to be selected. The failure mode is identical in every case: the meaning lived in one person's head and nowhere else.

## How does this compare to Premiere Pro, Avid Media Composer, and Final Cut Pro?

If you've moved between editing tools, you've probably already run into a version of this same blank-palette problem somewhere else, because none of the major NLEs solve it any differently at a fundamental level.

| Editor | Color mechanism | Built-in fixed meanings | Renameable | Consistent across versions |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| DaVinci Resolve | 16 marker colors, plus separate flag colors and clip colors | None | No, color plus free-text notes only | Yes, the palette itself is stable |
| Adobe Premiere Pro | Label colors on clips and sequences, a separate default palette per media type | Loose defaults tied to media type (video vs. audio), not meaning | Yes, labels can be renamed in Preferences | No, the default palette itself changed in the 24.4 update |
| Avid Media Composer | Locators, added via Ctrl plus a number key, each number tied to a color | None documented | Locators carry free-text comments, not renameable colors | Yes, the numbered-key system is long-standing |
| Final Cut Pro | A Roles system (titles, dialogue, music, effects) plus clip colors, rather than marker colors carrying meaning on their own | Roles have descriptive names by default, but no fixed marker color meaning | Roles can be renamed and subdivided | Yes, though Roles is a different model entirely from colored markers |

Film Editing Pro's own comparison across these tools lands on the same conclusion this whole page keeps landing on: "There are plenty of ways you can choose to assign your color coding and it's going to be largely based on the ingredients involved in your specific project," and further, "work within its available features to develop a system of color coding that makes sense to you" ([Film Editing Pro](https://www.filmeditingpro.com/color-coding-your-editing-timeline-in-avid-premiere-final-cut-x/)). That's four different pieces of software, four different technical mechanisms for applying color, and one identical instruction from the person comparing all of them: build your own.

Even the one place you'd expect a truly fixed default, Adobe's own factory label palette, isn't stable across versions. Premiere's May 2024 update changed the default label colors outright, and Scott Simmons documented the reaction plainly: "This update has left some Premiere users rather hot under the collar despite functionality being pretty much the same as it was before," adding that "the yellow in 24.4.1 isn't really yellow" compared to what editors were used to ([ProVideo Coalition](https://www.provideocoalition.com/understanding-the-new-label-color-and-icons-in-the-2024-adobe-premiere-pro-update/)). If Adobe's own shipped defaults can shift enough between point releases to upset a working editor's muscle memory, that's a good sign that "default" was never doing the job of "meaning" in the first place.

Avid sits closer to Resolve's model than Premiere does. Frame.io's Jack Brown, writing about keyboard shortcuts worth learning in Media Composer, notes simply that "many of us use markers in Media Composer for notes and to-dos for our timelines" ([Frame.io](https://blog.frame.io/2024/06/17/the-avid-keyboard-shortcuts-you-should-be-using/)), a description that could apply word for word to Resolve. Locators get a color tied to whichever numbered key you pressed, and what that color communicates is, once again, entirely up to the editor who pressed it.

**Every major NLE ships marker or label colors with zero attached meaning, because meaning is a workflow decision, not a software feature.** Switching editing tools won't solve this problem for you. It'll just hand you a different blank palette with a different technical name for it.

## Do marker colors carry over between the Edit, Color, Fusion, and Fairlight pages?

Yes, and this is actually the strongest practical argument for building a convention in the first place rather than shrugging it off as a solo-editor concern. A marker you place on a clip while working the Edit page shows up in that same color when you switch to the Color or Fusion page and select the same clip. The color travels with the clip and the timeline position, not with whichever page happened to be open when you created it.

That matters because Resolve is built around exactly this kind of page-to-page handoff. You cut on Edit, hand the timeline to a colorist working on Color, and someone else mixes on Fairlight, often without ever opening the Edit page themselves. A marker you left as a note to yourself becomes, whether you intended it or not, a note to every one of those people too.

The Edit Index makes this handoff concrete. Choose Show Markers from its Option menu and "each clip with one or more markers appears in a list, with columns corresponding to the color(s) and notes of each timeline and clip marker" ([DaVinci Resolve Manual, mirrored](https://www.steakunderwater.com/VFXPedia/__man/Resolve18-6/DaVinciResolve18_Manual_files/part1021.htm)). That list doesn't care which page a marker originated on. It's a single, cross-page audit of every colored dot in the project, which is exactly the tool you'd reach for to check whether your team is actually following the convention you agreed on, or quietly drifting back to whatever color happens to be fastest to click.

You can also filter the timeline itself down to a single color. Resolve's "Marked Clips" filter "filters all clips that have any marker, no markers, or a particular marker; a submenu presents each color" ([DaVinci Resolve Manual, mirrored](https://www.steakunderwater.com/VFXPedia/__man/Resolve18-6/DaVinciResolve18_Manual_files/part2677.htm)). That single feature is the entire practical payoff of picking a convention and sticking to it: filter to red, and every clip anyone flagged as needing a retake appears, with nothing else in the way.

## Are markers, flags, and clip colors the same thing?

No, and mixing them up is a common source of "why isn't my color filter working" confusion. Resolve actually has three separate, overlapping color systems, and each one solves a slightly different organizational problem.

| Feature | What it colors | Scope | Best suited for |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Markers | A specific frame, or a range of frames, on a clip or the timeline | Frame-accurate; can carry a note and keywords | Pointing at an exact moment: a specific line reading, a specific frame with an artifact |
| Flags | An entire clip, everywhere that source media appears | Applies to the whole clip, every instance of it in the Media Pool | Marking a take as a favorite, or a source clip as unusable, everywhere it's used |
| Clip colors | The clip's thumbnail and timeline appearance | Also whole-clip, more visual than functional | Quick visual sorting in the Media Pool: all B-roll one color, all interview footage another |

Markers are frame-specific, which is what separates them from flags applying to entire clips sharing the same source media, a distinction the manual draws directly when explaining how clips can be located by either mechanism ([DaVinci Resolve Manual, mirrored](https://www.steakunderwater.com/VFXPedia/__man/Resolve18-6/DaVinciResolve18_Manual_files/part2677.htm)). A marker on frame 4,201 stays on frame 4,201. A flag on a clip follows that clip's source media wherever it's used across your entire project, timeline after timeline.

That difference should shape which tool you reach for. If you need to say "this exact frame has a problem," that's a marker. If you need to say "don't ever use this take again, anywhere," that's a flag on the clip, since a marker placed once wouldn't follow every other instance of that same source clip elsewhere in your Media Pool. Confusing the two is a common reason a color-based filter looks like it's "missing" clips: you filtered by marker color, but the thing you were actually looking for was flagged, not marked, and those are two separate systems Resolve doesn't merge for you.

Nothing about any of these three systems assigns meaning to a color either. You're still deciding what a green flag means versus a green marker versus a green clip color, and those don't have to mean the same thing as each other even within one project, which is exactly the kind of drift that written-down conventions exist to prevent.

## How should you use marker colors for a client review pass?

This is where the "no fixed meaning" answer stops being an abstract fact and starts being a decision you actually have to make before you send a cut out, because a client review round is exactly the moment your convention gets tested by people who've never opened your project before.

Keep the color count small, three colors at most for anything going to a client, and put the legend somewhere they'll actually see it: in the email you send with the cut, in a note pinned to the project, or read aloud at the start of the review call. A workable three-color shape, adapted from the patterns documented earlier in this guide, looks something like this:

1. **Red: must-fix.** A problem that blocks approval, a factual error, a legal or brand issue, footage that needs replacing.
2. **Yellow: optional or discretionary.** A suggestion worth considering, not a blocker, something you or the client can take or leave.
3. **Green: approved, keep as-is.** Confirms a section the reviewer explicitly signed off on, so a later pass doesn't accidentally reopen it.

That's one workable shape, not the shape. Some teams run a wider version with a fourth color for "needs discussion" separate from a straightforward fix. Others skip green entirely and treat the absence of any marker as implicit approval. The version you choose matters less than making sure it's the same version everyone on the call agrees to before the notes start coming in, and that it's written down somewhere durable, not just said once on a call nobody recorded.

**The safest marker color convention is the one written down somewhere other than your own memory.** A verbal agreement on a call two weeks ago is not a convention your project actually has. A line in the bin notes, or in the deliverable email, is.

## How do you actually set up your own convention in DaVinci Resolve?

Once you've decided what your colors are going to mean, the mechanical setup takes about five minutes.

1. **Pick three to five colors, not sixteen.** More categories than you or your team can recall on sight defeats the entire purpose. Start narrow and only add a color when you genuinely run out of categories, not before.
2. **Write the meaning down somewhere Resolve doesn't touch.** A line in the project's bin notes, a pinned message in your team's chat, a one-page style sheet you hand a new hire on day one. Resolve has no field that stores "what this color means" globally, so that documentation has to live outside the app.
3. **Set custom keyboard shortcuts for your most-used colors.** Open Keyboard Customization from the DaVinci Resolve menu (or Ctrl-Alt-K), search the list for the individual "Add Marker" color actions, and map your two or three most common colors to keys you'll actually reach for mid-edit, rather than always defaulting to blue and recoloring after the fact.
4. **Audit yourself with the Edit Index periodically.** Show Markers, scan the color column, and check whether you're actually following your own rule or drifting back toward whatever's fastest to click under deadline pressure. This matters more than it sounds like it should; conventions decay fastest during the exact crunch periods where they matter most.
5. **Brief every collaborator before they open the project, not after.** A colorist or sound editor who wasn't told your system will read your markers as decoration. Send the legend along with the project, not as an afterthought once someone asks what a specific color meant.

None of these steps require anything Resolve doesn't already offer. The gap this whole page has been describing isn't a missing feature. It's a missing habit, and habits are the one thing software genuinely can't ship for you.

## Can an app help you remember your own marker color system while you're editing?

Reading a page like this one tells you the concepts: no fixed meaning, sixteen colors, a default of blue, and how to build a convention that survives contact with a real project. It doesn't tell you what a specific colored marker on your specific timeline was supposed to mean six weeks after you placed it, at the exact moment you're staring at it wondering.

TryUncle is an AI tutor for DaVinci Resolve on macOS. Ask in plain words and Uncle points at the exact control on your screen. If you've forgotten which color your team agreed meant "needs a retake" versus "optional," or you just inherited a project and want to open the Edit Index to audit every marker at once without hunting through menus from memory, that's the kind of live, on-screen question Uncle answers while you're actually inside the project, rather than making you cross-reference this guide against your own timeline by hand.

This sits in a different category than most tools people mean when they ask about an AI tool to learn DaVinci Resolve. Sottocut and cutagent.ai automate specific editing tasks directly on your timeline rather than helping you audit or remember an organizational system you built yourself. heyeddie.ai and general chat assistants can describe how Resolve's marker colors work in the abstract, the same way this article does, but they have no view of your actual project and can't confirm what color you actually used on clip 47. PremiumCopilot and PremiereCopilot target a different NLE's label system entirely. TryUncle's Uncle watches your DaVinci Resolve screen while you work and can point at the Edit Index, a specific marker, or your Preferences the same way it points at any other control, which is what makes it useful for a workflow-memory problem like this one, not just for learning a new effect. Our fuller comparison of [AI tools to learn DaVinci Resolve](https://tryuncle.com/learn/davinci-resolve/ai-tools-to-learn-davinci-resolve) covers where each of these actually fits.

**Guided practice inside Resolve beats guessing at what a colleague's cyan marker was supposed to tell you.** That's true of a keyframe technique, and it's just as true of a color convention nobody wrote down properly the first time.

TryUncle is a paid subscription, currently in founder pricing at $19.97 a month for the first 20 seats, cancel anytime, so check [TryUncle](https://tryuncle.com/?utm_source=tryuncle&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=davinci-resolve-timeline-marker-color-meaning) directly for the current rate. It's macOS only, and it needs an internet connection to work. If you're the person who inherited someone else's color-coded project, or you're the one setting up the convention for a team that's about to inherit yours, that's a reasonable moment to have something point at the actual marker instead of trusting what a guide like this one assumes your timeline looks like.

## The short version

DaVinci Resolve gives you sixteen marker colors and a default of blue, and it assigns meaning to precisely none of them. Neither does Premiere Pro, Avid Media Composer, or Final Cut Pro, whatever mechanism each one uses under the hood. The color is a label without a definition until you write the definition yourself, somewhere durable, and tell every collaborator what it says before they open the project. Pick a handful of colors, not all sixteen. Write the convention down outside of Resolve, since Resolve won't store it for you. Brief your team before the review round starts, not after the first confused comment comes back. Do that, and the blank palette stops being a liability and starts being exactly what it always could have been: a fast, filterable, cross-page shorthand for whatever your project actually needs it to say.

## FAQ

### Does DaVinci Resolve assign a fixed meaning to marker colors?

No. Blackmagic's own manual describes how to apply a marker color and how to filter clips by color, but it never defines what any color is supposed to represent. The 16 colors are a palette, not a glossary. Whatever a red marker means on your timeline is whatever you or your team decided it means, nothing more.

### What color does a new marker default to in DaVinci Resolve?

Blue. Press M with the playhead over a clip or timeline position and Resolve drops a blue marker at that frame. You only get a different color by opening the marker's properties, or the small arrow next to the marker icon above the timeline, and picking one yourself.

### How many marker colors does DaVinci Resolve actually have?

Sixteen: Blue, Cyan, Green, Yellow, Red, Pink, Purple, Fuchsia, Rose, Lavender, Sky, Mint, Lemon, Sand, Cocoa, and Cream. That full list comes straight from Resolve's own scripting API, which has to enumerate every valid marker color a script can set.

### Can you rename marker colors in DaVinci Resolve, the way Premiere Pro lets you rename labels?

Not inside the app itself. Resolve identifies markers by color and by whatever text you type into that marker's note and keyword fields, but there's no settings panel where you type 'Sound Issue' and have it replace the word 'Cyan' everywhere in the interface. Your convention lives in a shared document, a bin note, or your team's memory, not in Resolve's UI.

### Do marker colors carry over between the Edit, Color, Fusion, and Fairlight pages?

Yes. A marker you place on a clip on the Edit page shows up in the same color on the Color and Fusion pages when you're working that clip there, and the Edit Index can list every marker across a project regardless of which page created it. That's what makes a shared color convention worth setting up in the first place, since your colorist and your sound editor are looking at the same colored dots you left them.

### What's a good marker color convention for sending a cut out for client review?

Pick a small set, three to five colors, not all sixteen, and write the meaning down somewhere the client and your team both see it. A common shape is one color for must-fix issues, one for optional suggestions, and one for approved sections, but there's no standard version of this. Editor Lewis McGregor's own example uses cyan markers specifically for sound issues, which is one workable convention among many, not a rule.

### Is there an app that helps you keep track of your own marker color system while you're editing?

Yes. TryUncle is a paid macOS app whose AI tutor, Uncle, watches your DaVinci Resolve screen and can point at a marker, a bin, or the Edit Index live on your actual project, so you're not relying on memory or a separate document to remember which color you assigned to what while you're mid-edit.

## Sources

- [DaVinci Resolve Manual: Flags, Clip Colors, and Markers (Blackmagic Design, mirrored)](https://www.steakunderwater.com/VFXPedia/__man/Resolve18-6/DaVinciResolve18_Manual_files/part2677.htm)
- [DaVinci Resolve Manual: Finding Clips Using Markers or Flags (Blackmagic Design, mirrored)](https://www.steakunderwater.com/VFXPedia/__man/Resolve18-6/DaVinciResolve18_Manual_files/part1021.htm)
- [DaVinci Resolve Scripting API Documentation (X-Raym)](https://extremraym.com/cloud/resolve-scripting-doc/)
- [PremiumBeat: The New Features of DaVinci Resolve 15's Edit Page (Lewis McGregor)](https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/davinci-resolve-15-edit-page/)
- [Simon Says AI: How (and why) to use markers, flags, and keywords in DaVinci Resolve 16](https://www.simonsaysai.com/blog/how-and-why-to-use-markers-flags-and-keywords-in-blackmagic-design-davinci-resolve-16)
- [Film Editing Pro: Color Coding Your Editing Timeline in Avid, Premiere & Final Cut X](https://www.filmeditingpro.com/color-coding-your-editing-timeline-in-avid-premiere-final-cut-x/)
- [ProVideo Coalition: Understanding the New Label Color and Icons in the 2024 Adobe Premiere Pro Update (Scott Simmons)](https://www.provideocoalition.com/understanding-the-new-label-color-and-icons-in-the-2024-adobe-premiere-pro-update/)
- [Frame.io: The Avid Keyboard Shortcuts You Should Be Using (Jack Brown)](https://blog.frame.io/2024/06/17/the-avid-keyboard-shortcuts-you-should-be-using/)