Hi, my name is Jeremy. Coming to Resolve after 15 years with Vegas, and I have a question!

[EchidnaMedia]

Looking forward to meeting everyone!

I use my video editor for compositing in theatrical projection design as well as for videography. So far I've used it on a couple of small projects, and there seem to be ways to do all the things I've been used to doing. But here's a newbie question:

Something I often do while editing in the timeline is play a short section of video to check the appearance of a transition or effect.

In Vegas:

1. Press SPACE to start playing, press SPACE to stop. The playhead returns to its original location. I adjust the thing I'm tweaking, and can press SPACE again to check the result.
2. Press SPACE to start playing, press ENTER to stop. The playhead remains where I just stopped. This is useful.

In Resolve:

1. Press SPACE to start playing, press SPACE again to stop. The playhead remains where I just stopped, just like #2 Vegas. I adjust the thing I'm tweaking, but then I have to reposition the playhead before I can check the result of what I just did.

Is there a way in Resolve to do that #1 Vegas thing? I haven't been able to find it in the documentation, and I've learned from my experience so far that it's something I used a lot in Vegas!

Grateful for any help!

 

[EchidnaMedia]

Just crickets from the Forum, so I asked Claude. As seems to be often the case, it was surprisingly helpful:

Good news — Resolve does have this feature, it's just well hidden. Here's what you need to know:

The feature is called "Stop and Go to Last Position."

You can find it in the Playback menu → Stop and Go to Last Position, and its default keybinding is Alt+K on Windows or Option+K on Mac.

When this mode is active, pressing Space to stop will return the playhead to where it was when you started playback — exactly like Vegas's Space-to-stop behavior.

There's a catch though: it's a toggle (a checkbox), not a dedicated separate command, so you can't easily have two different keys for the two different stop behaviors simultaneously. You have to turn it on or off depending on which mode you want.

Two practical workarounds:

1. Right-click the Stop button in the transport controls (on the Edit page) to toggle it from there — slightly faster than going through the menu. On the Cut page, right-clicking the Stop button doesn't work, so you'd have to use the Playback dropdown menu instead.
2. Assign Alt+K (or Option+K) to a convenient key in Keyboard Customization if you want to toggle the mode quickly while editing.

The "return to last position" mode is especially useful when reviewing a specific clip or effect, as it saves you from having to reposition the playhead repeatedly.

So unfortunately Resolve doesn't give you Vegas's elegant two-key solution (Space = stop-and-return, Enter = stop-in-place) out of the box — it's one mode or the other. But once you know about Playback → Stop and Go to Last Position, you can at least get the behavior you need for your tweak-and-review workflow.