# TryUncle vs Clicky vs YouTube Tutorials for DaVinci Resolve

> **Quick answer:** TryUncle ($29.99/month founder rate) watches your DaVinci Resolve project live and points at the exact control. Clicky is a free, open source AI buddy that works across any app but isn't Resolve-tuned, while YouTube tutorials are free, pre-recorded, and can't see your screen. Pick TryUncle for accurate live correction, Clicky for a free general assistant, or YouTube for structured basics.

*Published by [TryUncle](https://tryuncle.com) — the on-screen assistant that teaches DaVinci Resolve on your own screen.*
*Updated 2026-07-23 · TryUncle founder pricing, Clicky's open source and HeyClicky releases, and DaVinci Resolve 21 (July 2026) · Canonical: https://tryuncle.com/learn/davinci-resolve/tryuncle-vs-clicky-vs-youtube-tutorials-for-learning-davinci-resolve*

Somebody in our community asks a version of this every few weeks, usually right after finding Clicky on Product Hunt or X: why pay for TryUncle when there's a free AI that watches your screen too? It's a fair question, and it deserves an answer that names where the free option actually wins, not a comparison built to make the paid product look inevitable.

We've spent seven-plus years doing professional, commercial video editing, and we built and now run a video-editing community that's grown past 100,000 members, most of whom found their first real stuck point in DaVinci Resolve the same way: alone, at night, with a paused tutorial in one tab and a half-finished timeline in another. This is the comparison we'd actually give someone in that community who asked us straight, weighing three real options instead of pretending only one of them exists.

## What is Clicky, exactly?

Clicky is a free, open source AI assistant that lives next to your cursor on macOS, sees your screen when you ask it something, and points at the control you need with a hotkey and your voice. It was built by a developer who goes by Farza, and the code is public on GitHub under an MIT license, so it isn't a mystery box, anyone can read exactly what it sends and where.

Farza described it directly when he announced it, and it's worth quoting in full because it's the clearest first-person account of what the tool actually does:

> "I built this thing called Clicky. It's an AI teacher that lives as a buddy next to your cursor. It can see your screen, talk to you, and even point at stuff, kinda like having a real teacher next to you. I've been using it the past few days to learn Davinci Resolve, 10/10."

That's from [Farza's own post on X announcing Clicky](https://x.com/FarzaTV/status/2041314633978659092), and it matters here for a specific reason: the creator's own first use case for the tool was learning DaVinci Resolve. This isn't a general AI assistant that happens to work in Resolve by accident. Its builder used it for exactly the job this post is comparing it on.

Under the hood, Clicky streams your screen and voice to three services: Claude for reasoning about what it sees, AssemblyAI for turning your speech into text, and ElevenLabs for speaking the answer back, all routed through a Cloudflare Worker proxy that keeps the underlying API keys off your machine, according to [Clicky's own GitHub repository](https://github.com/farzaa/clicky). It requires macOS 14.2 or later to run, and Xcode 15 or newer if you want to build it from source yourself rather than downloading a compiled release.

## What is TryUncle, and how is it mechanically different from Clicky?

As of July 2026, three real options exist for getting live help inside DaVinci Resolve. TryUncle is the on-screen assistant for DaVinci Resolve on macOS. Ask in plain words and Uncle points at the exact control on your screen. Unlike Clicky, which is a general-purpose tool that happens to work across Figma, Blender, code editors, and DaVinci Resolve alike, TryUncle exists for one job: DaVinci Resolve, specifically, on the Edit, Color, and Fusion pages.

That focus is the whole difference between the two, mechanically. Clicky's model has to recognize whatever application happens to be on your screen, whether that's a spreadsheet, a stock chart, or Resolve's node graph, using general screen-reading intelligence with no DaVinci Resolve-specific tuning behind it. TryUncle is built and evaluated against DaVinci Resolve's actual interface, panels, and terminology, so a question about a power window, a Fusion merge node, or a Fairlight bus doesn't have to be recognized cold the way it would by a tool built for everything at once.

You ask Uncle by voice or by typing, on your own project, at the moment you're stuck, and it answers about your actual timeline instead of a demo clip, according to [TryUncle's own site](https://tryuncle.com) and its FAQ. It's currently in founder pricing at $29.99 a month for the first 100 seats, cancel anytime, macOS only, and it needs an internet connection every time you ask it something, since the reasoning runs in the cloud rather than on your machine.

## What's actually on YouTube when you search "davinci resolve tutorial"?

More free video than anyone could watch in a lifetime, made by real working editors who are genuinely skilled at both DaVinci Resolve and explaining it on camera. Casey Faris has taught Resolve and Fusion for years, covering everything from color fundamentals to motion graphics builds, according to [his own YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/@CaseyFaris). Cullen Kelly, a professional colorist, runs a channel built almost entirely around color grading in Resolve, from scopes through advanced node structures, per [his channel](https://www.youtube.com/@CullenKelly). Neither is a fringe name. Both come up unprompted whenever the topic turns to learning Resolve for free.

The demand behind that content is real, not just an assumption. The DaVinci Resolve subreddit sits at roughly 221,000 members, adding about 67,000 in a single year, a 43.3 percent jump, according to [GummySearch's tracked subreddit statistics](https://gummysearch.com/r/davinciresolve/). That's a community still growing fast, which says something about how many people are still hitting walls a video, on its own, didn't fully resolve.

**A YouTube tutorial is recorded once and plays back identically to everyone who clicks it.** Neither Clicky nor TryUncle shares that limitation, since both reason live about whatever's actually on your screen. That single structural fact is the thread running through the rest of this comparison.

## The comparison table: TryUncle vs Clicky vs YouTube tutorials

Here's the honest version, side by side, with nothing smoothed over in either direction.

| | TryUncle | Clicky | YouTube tutorials |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| What it is | Paid assistant built for DaVinci Resolve | Free, open source general screen assistant | Free, pre-recorded video |
| Sees your live screen | Yes, on request | Yes, on request | No |
| Built specifically for DaVinci Resolve | Yes, Edit, Color, and Fusion pages | No, works across any app | No, whatever the creator filmed |
| Cost | $29.99/month, founder rate, first 100 seats | Free, open source, MIT licensed | Free |
| Platform | macOS only | macOS (native), community Windows port available | Any device with a browser |
| Works offline | No, needs internet every time | No for the cloud AI models, yes if run fully local with Ollama on the Windows port | Yes, once downloaded |
| Who maintains it | A company, with paid support incentive | An independent developer, open source, community-contributed | Individual creators, no shared maintenance |
| Setup | Download, sign in, grant screen permissions | Clone or download from GitHub, add API keys or run local | Open a browser, search |
| Corrects your specific mistake, live | Yes | Yes, in whatever app is on screen | No, only the demo's mistakes |
| Covers DaVinci Resolve-specific terminology reliably | Purpose-built and tested for it | Depends on the underlying model's general knowledge | Depends entirely on the individual creator |
| Data sent off-device | Screenshot and question, per TryUncle's privacy policy | Screenshot, voice transcript, sent to Claude, AssemblyAI, and ElevenLabs | None, video only plays back |

**Clicky is free where TryUncle is paid, and open source where TryUncle is closed.** That's the honest tradeoff at the center of this whole comparison, and it's worth sitting with before reading any further section that tries to argue around it.

## Is Clicky actually free, or is there a catch?

The original, open source Clicky genuinely costs nothing. It's published on GitHub under an MIT license, meaning you can download it, read every line of what it does, and run it without paying anyone, according to [the project's own repository](https://github.com/farzaa/clicky). There's no subscription tier hidden behind the free download and no feature locked away for a paid upgrade in the open source version itself.

Where it gets slightly less simple is that a separate, related product called HeyClicky exists as a commercial offering, running on a freemium model with a free tier and paid upgrade options, according to [a third-party review of HeyClicky](https://www.everydev.ai/tools/hey-clicky). Exact pricing for HeyClicky's paid tier isn't published in fixed numbers in the sources available for this comparison, so treat it as a separate product from the free, open source GitHub version rather than assuming they're identical.

There's also a real cost that isn't measured in dollars: using the AI-powered version requires API keys for Claude, AssemblyAI, and ElevenLabs, which the open source project's own instructions note you'll need to supply, meaning heavy use could rack up API charges on your own account even though the software itself is free. A community-built Windows port sidesteps this entirely by supporting fully local, offline inference through Ollama, at zero cost beyond your own hardware, according to [that port's own GitHub page](https://github.com/Bitshank-2338/clicky-windows).

## What does a full year actually cost across all three options?

YouTube tutorials cost $0 a year, Clicky's open source software costs $0 plus whatever API usage you generate on your own keys, and TryUncle runs roughly $360 a year at its $29.99 monthly founder rate. Here's the fuller breakdown, since "all in" means counting more than the sticker price.

| Option | Cost per year | What that number doesn't count |
| --- | --- | --- |
| YouTube tutorials | $0 | Your time spent searching, scrubbing, and translating a demo fix onto your own footage |
| Clicky, open source | $0 in software | Your own Claude, AssemblyAI, and ElevenLabs API usage charges, which scale with how often you ask |
| Clicky, community Windows port, fully local | $0 | Requires a machine capable of running local vision models through Ollama at reasonable speed |
| TryUncle, founder rate | About $360, first 100 seats | Requires macOS and an internet connection every time you ask |
| DaVinci Resolve Studio | $295 one time, no subscription | The free edition already covers most of what a beginner needs, per Blackmagic's own comparison |

DaVinci Resolve Studio is worth naming here for scale, since it's a one-time $295 purchase with no recurring bill at all, according to [Blackmagic's own product page](https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve). A full year of TryUncle at the founder rate runs a little more than the one-time price of the entire paid version of the software it's teaching. Clicky's real yearly cost is the least predictable of the three, since it depends entirely on your own usage and which API keys you supply, not a number Clicky's own project sets or publishes anywhere.

None of this means the subscription is automatically worth it for you specifically. If Clicky's free tier answers your questions well enough, or a handful of tutorials cover what you actually need, $0 forever beats $360 a year by any measure. Where the math actually flips toward paying is covered in the worked examples below, where the real cost isn't the dollar amount, it's how long you stay stuck.

## Does Clicky actually know DaVinci Resolve, or does it just see the screen?

This is the honest crux of the whole comparison, and it's worth answering plainly instead of assuming either direction. Clicky's Resolve knowledge comes entirely from Claude's general training and whatever it can infer from your screenshot in the moment, since the project isn't built or tested specifically against DaVinci Resolve's interface. Farza's own post about using it to learn Resolve is a real, positive first-hand account, but it's one person's early experience with a general tool, not a claim that Clicky has been purpose-tuned for Resolve's panels, terminology, or workflow the way a Resolve-specific product would be.

TryUncle's whole premise is the opposite: it exists only for DaVinci Resolve, which means its accuracy on Resolve-specific terms like a power window, a Fusion merge node, or Fairlight's bus routing isn't riding on general-purpose intelligence recognizing an unfamiliar app cold. That's a real, structural difference in how much you should trust either tool's answer on an obscure or version-specific control, and it's the main reason this comparison exists as three options instead of a straight YouTube-versus-AI choice.

**A general-purpose screen assistant has to recognize DaVinci Resolve fresh, every time, the same way it recognizes Figma or a spreadsheet. A tool built only for Resolve doesn't have that problem, because Resolve is the only thing it was ever built to understand.** Neither claim is a knock on Clicky's engineering. It's a description of what "general purpose" and "purpose built" actually mean once you get past the marketing.

## Worked example: fixing a bad color qualifier pull

Theory is easier to trust once it plays out on one real control. Take the qualifier, the tool that isolates a color range so you can adjust just the sky or just a face without touching the rest of the frame. All three options can teach it. Here's what actually happens when your own footage doesn't cooperate.

On YouTube, you search "davinci resolve qualifier tutorial" and land on a solid video. The instructor pulls a qualifier on a shot with a saturated red jacket against plain gray, because that makes a clean five-minute lesson. The hue range tightens perfectly on screen. Your own subject is standing in front of a wall that's almost, but not quite, the same tone as their skin. The qualifier grabs both, and the video never warned you, because the demo clip was chosen specifically to avoid this exact problem.

With Clicky open, you hold the hotkey and ask if the selection looks right. It looks at your screen, sees a color qualifier panel with a selection that visibly includes background alongside skin, and can point you toward the general area where a softening or refine control usually lives in a color tool, drawing an arrow at what it can identify on screen. Whether it names the specific DaVinci Resolve control correctly depends on how well the underlying model recognizes Resolve's particular qualifier panel layout, since that recognition isn't purpose-built the way a Resolve-only tool's would be.

With TryUncle open, you hit the Check shortcut and ask the same question. Uncle looks at your current node and your actual matte, built specifically to recognize DaVinci Resolve's qualifier and refine controls, and points at the softening control that fixes it, on your shot, without you first having to figure out what the problem is even called.

We hear a version of this exact question inside our own 100,000-plus member editing community fairly often, and while working through your own qualifier live is still the fastest way to build the underlying judgment, Uncle can point at the precise softening control on your own project the moment you get stuck on it.

## Worked example: matching an export setting to a client's platform on deadline

A second, common scenario: a client emails at 4pm asking for a vertical cut optimized for a specific platform's current spec, due in two hours.

The YouTube path starts with a search, lands on a video that spends its first ninety seconds on general export theory before reaching the actual numbers, and you scrub forward hoping the upload date means the settings are still current.

Clicky can look at your Deliver page and describe what it sees, general export terminology it recognizes from training data broadly applicable across editing software, not settings verified specifically against DaVinci Resolve's current delivery presets or a specific platform's current spec.

TryUncle names delivery specs directly as covered surface on its own site, and this is precisely the scenario it's built around: you ask from inside your own project and get pointed at the specific fields to set, without leaving the Deliver page to go verify a general answer against Resolve's actual current interface.

## Worked example: a Fusion composite comes in backwards, and you don't know why

A third scenario, common enough that it has its own dedicated troubleshooting page on this site: you build a split screen or a simple composite in Fusion, and your foreground subject vanishes behind the background plate that was supposed to sit underneath it. Nothing crashes. Nothing throws an error. The layers are just wrong.

On YouTube, you search "davinci resolve fusion merge node tutorial" and land on a solid, well-produced lesson that explains Merge nodes clearly, using a demo project where the instructor already wired everything in the right order. The video never shows the broken state, because nobody deliberately records themselves making the mistake first, so you're left comparing your own tangled node graph against a clean one and guessing where they diverge.

With Clicky open, you ask why your subject is hidden. It can see two clips feeding into a merge-style node and describe what a compositing operation generally does, drawing on Claude's general knowledge of node-based tools, since DaVinci Resolve's Fusion page isn't the only node graph a general model has ever seen a screenshot of. Whether it correctly names that this particular Merge node treats the first-connected input as Background and the second as Foreground, rather than assuming a different compositing tool's convention, depends on how well the underlying model recognizes this specific behavior instead of node-based compositing in the abstract.

With TryUncle open, you ask the same question on the Fusion page. Uncle is tuned specifically to DaVinci Resolve's Fusion page, so it can point straight at the two connections on your actual Merge node and name which one feeds Background and which feeds Foreground, on your composite, rather than describing Merge nodes as a category.

**A Fusion Merge node decides Background from Foreground by which wire you connected first, not by which socket looks closer to your cursor.** The fix is mechanical either way: disconnect both inputs and reconnect your background plate first, your foreground element second, according to [Blackmagic's own Fusion manual](https://www.steakunderwater.com/VFXPedia/__man/Fusion18-6/Fusion18_Manual_files/part176.htm). Don't trust color alone to check your work either, since the Background input's own color has shifted across Blackmagic's manuals over the years, yellow in the Fusion 9 manual, orange in the current Fusion 18.x manual. Our [full walkthrough of fixing a swapped Merge node](https://tryuncle.com/learn/davinci-resolve/davinci-resolve-fusion-merge-node-background-foreground-backwards) covers every step, including the subtle side effect nobody expects: swapping the inputs can also shrink your composite's frame size, since the Background input, not the Foreground input, sets the Merge node's output resolution.

## Worked example: a Power Window won't stay locked on a moving subject

A fourth scenario, familiar to anyone who color grades handheld footage: you draw a Power Window around a face, hit track, and watch it drift slowly off the subject over the next few seconds, or snap off entirely the moment someone crosses in front of the shot.

On YouTube, the tutorial you find tracks a Power Window on a clean, well-lit, static-camera interview clip, because that's the footage that tracks cleanly on the first take and makes for a tidy demonstration. Your own shot is handheld, low light, with a hand crossing in front of your subject's face for two frames. The video's advice, drawn from a much easier clip, doesn't obviously map onto why your specific track keeps failing.

Clicky can watch your Color page and see that the window has drifted off your subject, describing the visible symptom accurately. Naming the actual cause, whether the Zoom, Rotate, or Perspective 3D tracking options are fighting low-contrast footage, versus a completely different problem where something briefly blocked the tracked area, depends on how precisely the underlying model maps that symptom to DaVinci Resolve's specific Window Tracker palette rather than tracking behavior in general.

TryUncle, tuned to the Color page specifically, can look at your actual tracker settings and your actual footage and point at which checkbox is fighting your shot, rather than describing tracker drift as a category of problem.

Either way, the fix comes down to the same handful of moves: turn off Zoom, Rotate, and Perspective 3D if the window drifts gradually rather than snapping off, move the window onto a higher-contrast feature like a collar or a hairline instead of smooth skin or open sky, and switch to Frame mode to hand-key through the specific frames where something crossed in front of your subject, according to [Blackmagic's own DaVinci Resolve manual on motion tracking windows](https://www.steakunderwater.com/VFXPedia/__man/Resolve18-6/DaVinciResolve18_Manual_files/part2864.htm). A steady drift and a clean snap-off are two different bugs with two different fixes, and neither a tutorial filmed on easier footage nor a general screen assistant automatically tells you which one you're looking at. Our [full breakdown of every cause behind a drifting Power Window](https://tryuncle.com/learn/davinci-resolve/davinci-resolve-power-window-keeps-losing-tracking) walks through both, including the upstream noise reduction and lens correction effects that can quietly confuse a tracker before you ever touch the Window palette.

## What if the AI points you at the wrong control?

Worth naming plainly after four worked examples that mostly went right: sometimes it doesn't. Any tool that reasons from a screenshot can misread a similar-looking icon, describe the wrong panel, or answer confidently about something it actually got wrong, and neither Clicky nor TryUncle publishes an error rate you could weigh against the other.

The honest habit, regardless of which tool you're using, is to treat the answer as a strong nudge rather than a verified command. If a suggested fix doesn't match what you're actually seeing on screen, or the named control isn't where the tool says it is, stop and check Blackmagic's own manual or training material before you act on it, rather than clicking around hunting for whatever the assistant meant.

TryUncle's narrower scope, built and evaluated only against DaVinci Resolve's own interface, is a structural reason to expect fewer of these misses on Resolve-specific questions than a tool built for every application at once. That's a reasonable expectation based on how the two tools are built, not a claim this guide can verify with a published number, since neither company nor project has released one. Clicky's open source code at least lets a technically inclined user trace exactly how it reasoned about a screenshot, which is one way to sanity-check a wrong answer that a closed product doesn't offer in the same way. A YouTube tutorial, whatever else its limits, doesn't have this particular failure mode: what the instructor shows you is what actually happened on their screen, correct or not, and you can judge it the same way you'd judge any other person's work.

## Is Clicky safe to install, and what happens to your screen data?

Worth answering directly, since all three options handle this differently. A YouTube tutorial never sees your screen at all, it's a video playing one direction, nothing to weigh on privacy since the interaction never touches your files.

Clicky, because it's open source, is the one you can actually verify yourself before trusting it. Its GitHub repository shows exactly what it captures, a screenshot and your voice transcript, and where that data travels: to Claude, AssemblyAI, and ElevenLabs through a Cloudflare Worker proxy that keeps the raw API keys off your device, according to [Clicky's own repository](https://github.com/farzaa/clicky). Because the code is public, you or anyone with the technical skill to read it can confirm that description matches reality, which is a genuine trust advantage a closed product can't offer in the same way.

TryUncle reads your screen through standard macOS Screen Recording and Accessibility permissions, only at the moment you ask a question, not continuously in the background. What it captures is a screenshot, your question, and the labels and positions of on-screen controls, according to TryUncle's own privacy policy. That screenshot briefly passes through third-party AI providers before being automatically deleted after 30 days, and TryUncle states it doesn't use your data to train its own models.

If you're cutting a wedding video, none of this is a meaningful risk either way. If you're grading footage under a studio NDA, that's a real conversation to have with whoever owns the NDA before installing either tool, and Clicky's open source code is at least independently auditable in a way a closed product isn't.

## How hard is each one to actually set up?

YouTube requires nothing beyond a browser, a search, and a click. That's the whole setup, and it's a real advantage for anyone who wants to start learning in the next thirty seconds.

Clicky's open source version requires more technical comfort than either alternative, and more of it than just an API key. You either download a compiled release or clone the GitHub repository and build it yourself with Xcode 15 or newer, then supply your own API keys for Claude, AssemblyAI, and ElevenLabs. Running the AI-powered version end to end also means standing up a free Cloudflare account for the Worker proxy that keeps those keys off your machine, and a Node.js 18 or newer environment to run that Worker, according to [the project's own setup instructions](https://github.com/farzaa/clicky). On top of the accounts, the app itself asks macOS for microphone, Accessibility, and Screen Recording permissions on first launch, the same category of permission grant TryUncle needs, just with more infrastructure sitting behind it. None of that is difficult for a developer, but it's a meaningfully higher bar than downloading a signed macOS app, and it's the kind of setup that can quietly stall a non-technical editor before they ever get to ask their first DaVinci Resolve question.

TryUncle's setup is closer to any other Mac app: download, sign in, grant the Screen Recording and Accessibility permissions macOS requires, and it's ready, with no API keys, Cloudflare account, or local server of your own to manage or pay for separately.

**A free tool that requires you to manage your own API keys isn't actually free once you count the setup time and the usage-based charges those keys can generate.** That's not a criticism of Clicky's engineering, it's a genuinely different kind of cost than a flat monthly subscription, and which one is cheaper depends entirely on how much you'd actually use it.

## Do Clicky and TryUncle work across multiple monitors, or remember your last question?

Two practical questions that don't show up in a feature list but matter the moment you're actually grading a scene: what happens on a multi-monitor setup, and does either tool track what you already told it a minute ago.

Clicky's own GitHub documentation confirms multi-monitor support directly: Claude can embed a tag in its response telling the app to move the cursor to a specific point "across multiple monitors," according to [Clicky's own repository](https://github.com/farzaa/clicky). That's genuinely useful if you're a colorist running scopes on a second display and the DaVinci Resolve window itself on a primary monitor, a common setup that a lot of screen-aware tools handle badly. TryUncle's own public materials don't specifically address multi-monitor behavior one way or the other, so if your rig runs more than one display, that's worth confirming for yourself before you rely on it mid-session rather than assuming either direction.

Conversation memory is the other open question. Neither Clicky's project documentation nor TryUncle's own FAQ describes the assistant remembering what you asked a minute, or a question, ago. The safer assumption for both tools is that each question starts fresh: if your follow-up depends on something you said earlier in the session, restate the relevant detail rather than assuming either assistant carried it forward. A YouTube tutorial doesn't have this problem in the same shape, since the entire video's context is sitting there in a timeline you can scrub back through whenever you need it.

## What about Windows or Linux editors?

TryUncle is macOS only with no public Windows roadmap. The original Clicky is also macOS only, requiring macOS 14.2 or later. If you edit DaVinci Resolve on Windows or Linux, neither of the official, actively maintained products is available to you directly.

There is a community-built Windows port of Clicky, made by a different developer than Clicky's original creator, that runs on Python and PyQt6 instead of the native SwiftUI codebase, according to [that port's own GitHub repository](https://github.com/Bitshank-2338/clicky-windows). It supports Claude, OpenAI's GPT-4o, Google Gemini, and GitHub Copilot as cloud providers, or fully offline, zero-cost operation through Ollama with open models like qwen2-vl. It's a genuinely useful option for a Windows editor who wants a free, screen-aware assistant, but it's a separate, independently maintained codebase, not an official release, and it inherits whatever bugs or gaps come with a smaller community project rather than a company's support commitment.

YouTube, meanwhile, works identically on any operating system, since it's just video in a browser. For Windows and Linux editors specifically, YouTube plus Blackmagic's own free training remains the most reliable zero-cost path, with the community Clicky port as a genuine, if less polished, second option.

## Does either AI assistant reliably cover Fairlight audio?

Neither one names Fairlight audio as confirmed, tested coverage, so treat both cautiously on audio-specific questions and lean on video for now.

TryUncle's own public materials focus on the Edit, Color, and Fusion pages, and Fairlight isn't named as covered surface in its FAQ or homepage copy, according to TryUncle's own site. Clicky's coverage of Fairlight depends entirely on how well Claude recognizes Fairlight's mixer, bus routing, and clip-level EQ panels from a screenshot, a general capability rather than something built and verified against Fairlight specifically.

For audio-heavy work, dialogue leveling, noise reduction, or a full mix, the more reliable path right now is still YouTube. Plenty of dedicated Fairlight tutorials exist, and Blackmagic's own free training curriculum includes a full audio-specific track covering audio basics, sound design, mixing, voiceover and ADR recording, and Dolby Atmos across six dedicated videos, according to [Blackmagic's own training page](https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/training). If your specific gap is audio rather than color or edit, don't assume either AI assistant has it covered without verifying the answer against Resolve's own documentation.

## Who actually built these, and does that matter?

It matters more than most comparisons admit. Clicky was built by an independent developer, Farza, who published the code openly and has said the codebase "remains open source, do whatever you want I don't mind," according to [statements referenced in the project's GitHub repository](https://github.com/farzaa/clicky). That's a real, low-friction trust model: no company behind it to go quiet or change terms, but also no company behind it with a support obligation if something breaks or the maintainer moves on to something else. Clicky launched on Product Hunt with 147 upvotes and a #6 day rank within its first few months, a modest but genuine early signal of interest, according to [its Product Hunt listing](https://www.producthunt.com/products/clicky-2).

TryUncle is a company product, built specifically for DaVinci Resolve, with the incentive structure that implies: it needs to keep working and keep improving because subscribers are paying monthly and can cancel the moment it stops earning that payment. We're the team building it, and we've also taught more than 100,000 students on Udemy as an official Udemy Business Partner and worked with Fortune 500 companies on video and creative workflows, the same instinct that shaped why Uncle points at controls rather than just describing them in a chat window.

Neither trust model is automatically better. An open source project can be abandoned, forked, or drift out of maintenance with no warning and no refund to ask for, since there was never a payment relationship in the first place. A commercial product can raise its price, change its terms, or shut down entirely, but it also has a direct financial reason to keep working for the people currently paying it.

## What about the other AI editing tools people mention alongside these?

Worth naming plainly, since this category has more entrants than just these three. Tools like Sottocut, PremiereCopilot, Eddie AI, and CutAgent occupy a different lane entirely: they automate edits, assembling rough cuts or answering chat questions about your project, rather than teaching you the interface live. Sottocut and CutAgent, for instance, can move clips and apply changes to your timeline directly from a typed instruction, with a review step before changes land.

That's a meaningfully different job than what TryUncle, Clicky, or a YouTube tutorial do. An automation agent delegates the click. TryUncle and Clicky both point at where the click should happen and let you make it yourself. If what you actually want is someone, or something, doing the edit for you, this comparison isn't the right one, and it's worth reading about those automation tools separately rather than assuming they behave like either option covered here.

## Do people actually finish the YouTube tutorials they start?

Often not past the first few minutes. Educational content on YouTube typically holds a healthy 45 to 55 percent audience retention across an 8 to 12 minute video, according to [Prepublish's 2026 YouTube retention benchmarks](https://prepublish.ai/guides/youtube-retention-guide), which means even a well-made tutorial loses close to half its viewers before the video ends. Neither Clicky nor TryUncle has a completion metric at all, because there's no video to complete, though that also means neither gives you a visible finish line the way a tutorial's runtime does.

Guillaume Chaslot, a former Google engineer who worked directly on YouTube's recommendation engine, put the underlying incentive in blunt terms in his own writing:

> "At YouTube, we used a complex AI to pursue a simple goal: maximize watch time."

That's from [Chaslot's own account of the system he helped build](https://guillaumechaslot.medium.com/how-algorithms-can-learn-to-discredit-the-media-d1360157c4fa). **YouTube's recommendation engine was never built to get you unstuck. It was built to keep you watching.** That's not a reason to avoid the platform, plenty of tutorials are genuinely excellent regardless of the incentive underneath them. It's a reason to treat "the top result" as a popularity signal rather than a speed-to-answer signal.

## What happens when DaVinci Resolve updates and the tutorial or the AI is behind?

DaVinci Resolve 21 shipped in June 2026 after a seven-week public beta, adding an entirely new Photo page for still-image workflows, AI tools like IntelliSearch and CineFocus, an AI voice generator, more than 100 new Fusion effects, and a new folder function in Fairlight, according to [Blackmagic's own "What's New" page](https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/whatsnew) and [PetaPixel's coverage of the release](https://petapixel.com/2026/06/03/davinci-resolve-21-officially-released-with-new-photo-editing-ai-tools-and-much-more/). That's not a small update, and it's the kind of version delta that separates these three options in genuinely different ways.

A YouTube tutorial recorded against an older interface can keep outranking a fresh one on accumulated watch time, with nothing on the viewer's side signaling it's gone stale until they notice a panel that's moved. TryUncle, because Uncle reasons about whatever's actually on your screen in the moment, doesn't need a re-filming pass when a menu moves, though what this guide can't confirm is how well its live pointing handles a page as new as Photo, since that surface is recent enough that TryUncle's own public materials don't specifically address it yet.

Clicky's situation sits in between. Because it's reasoning live off Claude's general knowledge rather than a fixed video, it also doesn't need a re-filming pass. But its accuracy on a brand new page like Photo depends entirely on how much the underlying model has learned about that specific interface, which is largely a function of how much public data about DaVinci Resolve 21's newest features existed at the time the model was trained, information neither this post nor Clicky's own materials can verify precisely.

## What does the research say about live correction versus watching?

There's a sturdier body of research behind this than any of the three options' marketing usually admits, and it predates online video entirely. In 1984, Benjamin Bloom published a paper comparing conventional classroom instruction against one-to-one tutoring, and the average tutored student scored above 98 percent of students in the untutored control group, a two standard deviation improvement, according to [the summary of Bloom's findings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_2_sigma_problem). Bloom himself flagged the practical catch: one-to-one tutoring is too costly to deliver at scale, a caveat that's aged into almost exactly the question a screen-aware AI assistant, whether free or paid, is built to answer four decades later.

That finding isn't a perfect match for this specific three-way comparison, since Bloom measured tutoring against a live classroom lecture, not a pre-recorded video or an AI watching a screen. But the underlying mechanism, correction on your specific attempt, in the moment, rather than a general explanation delivered identically to everyone, is exactly what separates a fixed YouTube tutorial from either Clicky or TryUncle reasoning about your live screen. Our [deeper look at the research behind the best way to learn DaVinci Resolve](https://tryuncle.com/learn/davinci-resolve/best-way-to-learn-davinci-resolve) walks through this study, and several others, in full.

## Which one should a complete beginner start with?

Start free, every time, before spending anything. Blackmagic Design publishes its own full training curriculum: nineteen instructional videos across editing, color, Fairlight audio, and Fusion, plus six downloadable PDF guides, each with lesson project files and a free certification exam, according to [Blackmagic's own training page](https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/training). Pair that with a solid beginner playlist from a creator like Casey Faris, and you have a genuinely complete, zero-cost first pass through the entire interface.

Once you've done that and you're sticking with it, the honest split looks like this:

| If you are | Start with |
| --- | --- |
| Completely new to editing software of any kind | Blackmagic's free training plus a beginner YouTube playlist |
| Comfortable with computers, technical, want a free AI assistant across multiple apps | Clicky, alongside the beginner tutorials |
| Comfortable with computers, want an assistant tuned specifically for DaVinci Resolve | TryUncle, once you have a real project open and get stuck |
| Already editing in another app, just new to Resolve | TryUncle or Clicky, since your judgment already transfers and you mostly need Resolve's specific menus pointed out live |

A beginner installing either AI tool on day one, before ever opening DaVinci Resolve, is reaching for the wrong tool at the wrong moment. Both Clicky and TryUncle answer questions about something already on your screen. On day one, nothing meaningful is on your screen yet, so there's nothing for either to react to.

## Which one fits a working freelancer on deadline?

TryUncle, most reliably, for the reason covered in the export worked example above: purpose-built accuracy on Resolve's actual current interface matters more than general capability when a client delivery is due in two hours and there's no time to double-check a general-purpose answer against Blackmagic's documentation.

Clicky can still help here if you're comfortable verifying its answer yourself, since it's genuinely fast and free, and a technical freelancer who already trusts their own judgment enough to sanity-check an AI's suggestion loses little by trying it first. What a freelancer on a hard deadline doesn't have time for is scrubbing a general tutorial for a spec question they've never hit before, which is where YouTube loses ground to either AI option in this specific scenario. If you're weighing whether the subscription pays for itself at all against what you actually bill, our [full cost and ROI breakdown of whether TryUncle is worth it](https://tryuncle.com/learn/davinci-resolve/is-tryuncle-worth-it) runs those numbers in detail.

## What if you're a colorist or Fusion artist specifically?

For deep color or Fusion judgment, a dedicated colorist YouTube channel still teaches sequencing better than either AI tool, but TryUncle's Resolve-specific tuning gives it an edge over Clicky on Color and Fusion page terminology.

A dedicated colorist channel like Cullen Kelly's has a real advantage neither AI assistant has: it was built by a working colorist specifically to teach color judgment, not just button locations, moving from scopes and primary correction through secondary qualifiers, windows, and shot matching in a deliberate sequence. That kind of structured sequencing is hard to replicate by asking either tool scattered questions one at a time.

Where the two AI options split from each other is accuracy on Resolve's own vocabulary. TryUncle is built and evaluated specifically against the Color and Fusion pages, so it's positioned to recognize a misplaced node or a qualifier grabbing the wrong tone more reliably than a general tool has to. Clicky can still attempt the same diagnosis, using whatever Claude already knows about node-based compositing broadly, since Fusion's node graph isn't unique to Resolve conceptually, but its confidence on Resolve-specific naming and layout isn't purpose-verified the way TryUncle's is.

The honest recommendation for a serious colorist is closer to "structured video first, live tool second" than picking one exclusively: a dedicated color YouTuber for the underlying judgment and vocabulary, then whichever AI assistant fits your budget and platform for catching the specific thing going wrong on this week's actual grade.

## Is there a way to use any of these across a whole team, not just solo?

Worth separating from the solo-editor framing above, since agencies and small studios ask this differently. TryUncle's own materials describe its founder pricing in seats, one $29.99 subscription per person, with no bulk or team-plan pricing named anywhere in its public materials as of this writing. That means outfitting a five-person edit bay means five separate subscriptions, not one shared login, unless TryUncle publishes a team tier later.

Clicky flips that entirely. Its MIT license places no restriction on how many machines run it, so a whole team can clone the same free repository onto every editor's workstation. The real cost shifts instead of disappearing: either each editor supplies their own Claude, AssemblyAI, and ElevenLabs API keys and the team absorbs several smaller, usage-based bills, or one person's keys cover the whole team and that person's account eats everyone's combined usage. Neither arrangement is documented or recommended by the project itself, so a team adopting Clicky is making its own call on how to split that cost, not following a published plan.

YouTube, as always, scales to a team for free by default, no seats or shared logins to think about. For a studio training several junior editors at once, a shared playlist plus one paid TryUncle seat for whoever's doing the trickiest client work in a given week is a reasonable middle path, cheaper than a subscription per editor and more reliable than routing everyone through one person's API keys.

## What if you've watched a dozen tutorials and still feel stuck?

This describes a lot of the people who end up asking this exact comparison question, and it's one of the recurring stuck points we see inside our own 100,000-plus member editing community. Watching a dozen tutorials, or fifty, and still not feeling confident on your own footage isn't a sign you did something wrong. A video teaches recognition of someone else's decisions, and recognition doesn't automatically convert into judgment on unfamiliar footage. Our [deeper piece on why watching tutorials doesn't build the skill you think it does](https://tryuncle.com/learn/ai-at-work/why-tutorials-dont-work) breaks that mechanism down in full, and it applies here directly.

If that's you, the fix usually isn't another tutorial covering mostly the same ground. It's a feedback loop the videos never had: post your actual timeline somewhere people will react to it, whether that's a community like r/davinciresolve, a colleague, or a tool built to watch your own attempt and correct it live. Both Clicky and TryUncle can serve that role, at different confidence levels on Resolve specifically, and the choice between them at this stage comes down to whether general screen intelligence is good enough for you or whether you want the accuracy of a tool built only for Resolve.

## Decision table: which one actually fits your situation

| Your situation | Best fit | Why |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Never opened Resolve before | Blackmagic's free training plus a beginner YouTube playlist | Free and structured, nothing to correct live yet since no real project exists |
| Comfortable with computers, technical, budget is zero | Clicky | Free, open source, works across DaVinci Resolve and everything else you use |
| Comfortable with computers, wants the most accurate Resolve-specific answers | TryUncle | Built and tuned only for DaVinci Resolve's own interface |
| Switching from Premiere or Final Cut | TryUncle or Clicky | Editing judgment already transfers, you mostly need Resolve's menus shown live |
| Freelancer on a deadline | TryUncle | Purpose-built accuracy matters most when there's no time to double-check |
| Windows or Linux editor | YouTube, Blackmagic's free training, or the community Clicky Windows port | Neither official macOS-only product is available |
| Editing NDA-covered client footage | YouTube, or an open source tool you can audit yourself first | Clicky's public code is independently verifiable; TryUncle reads your screen by design |
| Wants to verify exactly what an AI tool sends off your machine | Clicky | Open source means you can read the code yourself |
| Small team or agency outfitting several editors at once | YouTube plus one shared TryUncle seat for the hardest cases | TryUncle bills per seat; Clicky's shared-key cost split isn't standardized |
| Already watched a dozen tutorials, still stuck | TryUncle, Clicky, or an active community | The gap is feedback, not more content to watch |
| Wants full production-quality entertainment while learning | YouTube | Established creators invest production value neither AI tool attempts |

## Can you use all three at once?

Yes, and there's no real conflict between them. YouTube gives you the ordered fundamentals for free. Clicky gives you a free, general-purpose screen assistant you can also lean on in Figma, Blender, or your code editor, not just Resolve. TryUncle gives you an assistant built and priced specifically around getting DaVinci Resolve's own interface right, every time, without you needing to verify its answer against Blackmagic's documentation yourself.

**A tutorial is something you watch once and move past. A free general assistant is something you keep for everything you do. A specialized tool is something you pay for precisely because it doesn't have to guess.** If your budget only stretches to one paid option, that's the real question underneath this whole comparison: how much is DaVinci Resolve-specific accuracy worth to you, over an assistant that's merely good at recognizing software in general.

## Choose TryUncle if, choose Clicky if, choose YouTube if

Choose TryUncle if you already know your way around a real DaVinci Resolve project, you're stuck on something specific right now, and you want the most reliable, Resolve-tuned answer without stopping to verify it yourself.

Choose Clicky if you're comfortable with a bit of technical setup, your budget is genuinely zero, and you want one free assistant that helps across DaVinci Resolve as well as every other app on your Mac, not just this one.

Choose YouTube if you've never opened DaVinci Resolve before, you want a fully structured, ordered curriculum with no setup at all, or you're on Windows or Linux where neither official AI tool runs.

Don't take any of these three recommendations purely on this post's word. YouTube's real value shows up in whether a tutorial actually gets you unstuck faster than guessing on your own, and the retention data above says a meaningful share of viewers never make it to the part that would. Clicky's real value shows up in whether a genuinely free, general-purpose tool handles DaVinci Resolve's specific interface well enough for you personally. TryUncle's real value shows up in whether getting corrected live, by a tool built only for Resolve, actually beats a free general assistant's best guess. Test what fits your actual budget and situation before committing real time or money to any of the three, and if the honest split above still leaves you between TryUncle and one more paid alternative, our [comparison of the AI tools built specifically to learn DaVinci Resolve](https://tryuncle.com/learn/davinci-resolve/ai-tools-to-learn-davinci-resolve) covers the wider field, or check [TryUncle's current pricing](https://tryuncle.com/learn/davinci-resolve/tryuncle-pricing-plans) before the founder rate moves up.

## FAQ

### Is TryUncle better than Clicky for learning DaVinci Resolve?

Better at a narrower job. TryUncle is built specifically for DaVinci Resolve, tuned for the Edit, Color, and Fusion pages, for $29.99 a month at founder pricing. Clicky is free, open source, and built for any app, so its DaVinci Resolve coverage depends on whatever the underlying AI model already knows about Resolve's interface, not on Resolve-specific training. If you only care about Resolve and want the tool tuned for it, TryUncle. If you want one free assistant that also helps in Figma, Blender, or your code editor, Clicky.

### Is Clicky actually free, or is that a trial?

The original Clicky, built by developer Farza, is genuinely free and open source under an MIT license, published on GitHub at no cost. A separate commercial version, HeyClicky, runs a freemium model with a free tier and paid upgrades, though exact pricing isn't published in fixed numbers. The open source version has no subscription and no trial clock.

### Does Clicky work with DaVinci Resolve on Windows?

The original Clicky is macOS only, requiring macOS 14.2 or later. A separate, community-built Windows port exists on GitHub, made by a different developer, that can run fully offline using Ollama at no cost or connect to Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, or GitHub Copilot with your own API key. It is not the same codebase as the original and isn't officially maintained by Clicky's creator.

### What's the best way to learn DaVinci Resolve fast?

Start with Blackmagic's own free training guides and a beginner YouTube playlist for the ordered fundamentals, since both cost nothing. Once you have a real project open and hit a specific problem, an in-app tool that watches your actual screen, whether that's TryUncle or Clicky, corrects the mistake faster than searching for the right tutorial timestamp.

### Is there a free AI tool to learn DaVinci Resolve?

Yes. Clicky is free and open source, and it can watch your DaVinci Resolve screen and answer questions about it, though it wasn't built specifically for Resolve the way TryUncle was. Blackmagic's own training guides and certification exams are also free and cover the fundamentals in a structured order.

### Can I use TryUncle, Clicky, and YouTube together?

Yes, and there's no real conflict between them. YouTube gives you the ordered fundamentals for free. Clicky gives you a free, general-purpose screen assistant for quick questions across any app you use. TryUncle gives you an assistant built and tuned specifically for DaVinci Resolve's own interface, panels, and workflow. Running more than one doesn't break anything, it just means paying for TryUncle on top of two free options.

### Who built Clicky, and can I trust it with my screen?

Clicky was built by a developer who goes by Farza, and the code is public on GitHub under an MIT license, so anyone can read exactly what it does before installing it. It streams your screenshot and voice transcript to Claude, AssemblyAI, and ElevenLabs through a proxy that secures the API keys. That's a different trust model than a closed commercial product: you can verify the code yourself, but you're also relying on an open source project's ongoing maintenance rather than a company's support commitment.

## Sources

- [TryUncle](https://tryuncle.com)
- [TryUncle FAQ](https://tryuncle.com/faq)
- [TryUncle Privacy Policy](https://tryuncle.com/privacy)
- [GitHub - farzaa/clicky: an AI teacher that lives on your desktop](https://github.com/farzaa/clicky)
- [Clicky: AI buddy next to your cursor on Mac (Product Hunt)](https://www.producthunt.com/products/clicky-2)
- [Farza (@FarzaTV) on X: announcing Clicky and using it to learn DaVinci Resolve](https://x.com/FarzaTV/status/2041314633978659092)
- [GitHub - Bitshank-2338/clicky-windows: community Windows port of Clicky](https://github.com/Bitshank-2338/clicky-windows)
- [Hey Clicky - Screen Aware macOS AI Assistant (EveryDev.ai)](https://www.everydev.ai/tools/hey-clicky)
- [Casey Faris (YouTube)](https://www.youtube.com/@CaseyFaris)
- [Cullen Kelly (YouTube)](https://www.youtube.com/@CullenKelly)
- [DaVinci Resolve (Blackmagic Design product page, free vs Studio specs)](https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve)
- [DaVinci Resolve - Studio (Blackmagic Design)](https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/studio)
- [DaVinci Resolve Training (Blackmagic Design)](https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/training)
- [DaVinci Resolve - What's New (Blackmagic Design)](https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/whatsnew)
- [DaVinci Resolve 21 Officially Released With New Photo Editing, AI Tools, and Much More (PetaPixel)](https://petapixel.com/2026/06/03/davinci-resolve-21-officially-released-with-new-photo-editing-ai-tools-and-much-more/)
- [YouTube Retention Benchmarks 2026: What's Good? (Prepublish)](https://prepublish.ai/guides/youtube-retention-guide)
- [r/davinciresolve Subreddit Stats & Analysis (GummySearch)](https://gummysearch.com/r/davinciresolve/)
- [How Algorithms Can Learn to Discredit 'the Media', by Guillaume Chaslot (Medium)](https://guillaumechaslot.medium.com/how-algorithms-can-learn-to-discredit-the-media-d1360157c4fa)
- [View video transcripts (YouTube Help)](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/15930243?hl=en)
- [Bloom's 2 sigma problem - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_2_sigma_problem)
- [DaVinci Resolve Manual: The Merge Node (Blackmagic Design)](https://www.steakunderwater.com/VFXPedia/__man/Fusion18-6/Fusion18_Manual_files/part176.htm)
- [Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve Manual: Motion Tracking Windows](https://www.steakunderwater.com/VFXPedia/__man/Resolve18-6/DaVinciResolve18_Manual_files/part2864.htm)