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Comment by blattimwind | Hacker News Reader

Arguably Resolve is picking up quite a bit of momentum in the editing space as well, e.g. DR16's "cut" page.

yeah, DR16 is a huge jump forward on the editing side. Several of the big YouTubers have been test-driving it and have said many good things vs. Premiere.

I think if they had a monthly subscription option like Premiere & Avid do, they'd get a lot more people willing to give switching a try. The free version is VERY solid, but $300 just to get 4k support is a pretty big showstopper for a lot of potential converts.

The free version supports 4K (Ultra HD) but not 4K (DCI), which seems a reasonable cutoff point to me - amateur 4K yes, professional 4K please pay.

ah, I missed that. That is a good cutoff, I think. The free version doesn't appear to support GPU-accelerated h.264 encoding, though, which is a pretty big loss.

The free version uses the h.264 codec of the OS, which limits decoding speed and encoding quality on Windows. OTOH exporting to an intermediate codec and then using x264 or a similar best-of-the-breed encoder is probably preferable anyway, from a quality PoV.

The thing is, most people don't actually need 4K.

In fact, I believe most modern films—including big-budget blockbusters—are still being mastered in 2K (with UHD Blu-Ray discs being upscaled from the 2K masters). My question to anyone for whom spending $300 on an NLE is a big deal: does your project really need more image resolution than titles like Jurassic World and The Hunger Games? Keep in mind that, in addition to spending the $300 on software, your image processing and storage requirements have now quadrupled.

For a close look at the impact of image resolution on cinema viewing, I highly recommend Steve Yedlin's excellent Resolution Demo [0].

[0] http://www.yedlin.net/ResDemo/index.html

My point was less about people who need to worry about spending $300 for an editor, though, and more that $300 is a fairy big entry cost to "kick the tires" to see if DR can replace Premiere in their workflow. Versus someone who's looking to go from FCP->Premiere or Premiere->Avid and can pay $20 for a month.

But $300 is not the entry cost to kick the tires. Resolve is free! There is this idea out there that Resolve Studio is the only pro version of Resolve, but that is just not true.

I used (non-Studio) Resolve for months coming from Premiere before purchasing the Studio version largely to take advantage of the real-time lens distortion removal effect.

In my view, the non-Studio version of DaVinci Resolve is a fully capable pro NLE and a formidable competitor to Premiere Pro and FCPX. There are some amazing features added in the Studio version (such as the face refinement tool and real-time spatial and temporal noise reduction) but they appear to me to be non-essential unless you are doing certain very specialized types of work.

There are limits on resolution and frame rate, but they are well in excess of the resolutions and frame rates used by most big-budget Hollywood films.

Is there a specific feature exclusive to DR Studio that is preventing you from kicking the tires with Resolve?

Edit: I’m not affiliated with BMD by the way, apart from being an enthusiastic customer.

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