DaVinci Resolve – A high-end video editing/post-production software program
blackmagicdesign.com
blackmagicdesign.com
Resolve is the best color grading software in the biz, without question. Most Oscar winners each year have used Resolve for their grade. The node based workflow is a game changer.
Fair light is the sound editing software and is built on a company they purchased that was a leader in the field. What is truly unbelievable is that you get the full version of fair light in the free version of Resolve. In fact the only thing you’ll miss in the free version is a few plugins. Last year I was doing a color grade and accidentally upgraded to free. Took me an hour to realize.
Fusion is also very powerful for VFX and does an excellent job with a few plugins for planar tracking.
Resolve provides a complete workflow including media management, two editors, color, sound, vfx and export. It is remarkably fast and stable. The BM folks are also super friendly and helpful. Met a few at a DP seminar in NYC end of last year.
I’ve been trying to create awareness about how much BM is giving away and how powerful Resolve is so I’m glad to see it here.
One last thing. Blackmagic raw is unbelievable in the latitude it gives you for heavy grades. We came over from Sony s-log2. One shoot and we were hooked. I kept pushing the footage and waiting for that Sony purple grain to appear in the darks and they stayed clean with a ton of detail. Amazing.
It does an incredible job. We use it with Universal Audio’s Apollo units which contain external DSP and industry leading emulation and it integrates beautifully. Amazing to be able to emulate Ocean Way Studios room sound for a film track, for example.
I’d encourage podcasters to look at Resolve as an audio only workflow option.
Convolution. It's a common, everyday technology that comes with varying degrees of chrome and user handholding. No special magic going on there (except for being able to get your hands on a good impulse response for the space/room in question).
> Resolve is the best color grading software in the biz, without question. Most Oscar winners each year have used Resolve for their grade. The node based workflow is a game changer.
> Fair light is the sound editing software and is built on a company they purchased that was a leader in the field. What is truly unbelievable is that you get the full version of fair light in the free version of Resolve. In fact the only thing you’ll miss in the free version is a few plugins. Last year I was doing a color grade and accidentally upgraded to free. Took me an hour to realize.
> Fusion is also very powerful for VFX and does an excellent job with a few plugins for planar tracking.
> Resolve provides a complete workflow including media management, two editors, color, sound, vfx and export. It is remarkably fast and stable. The BM folks are also super friendly and helpful. Met a few at a DP seminar in NYC end of last year.
> I’ve been trying to create awareness about how much BM is giving away and how powerful Resolve is so I’m glad to see it here.
> One last thing. Blackmagic raw is unbelievable in the latitude it gives you for heavy grades. We came over from Sony s-log2. One shoot and we were hooked. I kept pushing the footage and waiting for that Sony purple grain to appear in the darks and they stayed clean with a ton of detail. Amazing.
> Been using Resolve for over a year and graded a documentary short with it last year. I fell head over heels for Blackmagic and we now own several Ursa mini pro g2 cameras and a few of their smaller 6Ks. We shoot on canon lenses and our entire workflow is Resolve.
> Resolve is the best color grading software in the biz, without question. Most Oscar winners each year have used Resolve for their grade. The node based workflow is a game changer.
> Fair light is the sound editing software and is built on a company they purchased that was a leader in the field. What is truly unbelievable is that you get the full version of fair light in the free version of Resolve. In fact the only thing you’ll miss in the free version is a few plugins. Last year I was doing a color grade and accidentally upgraded to free. Took me an hour to realize.
> Fusion is also very powerful for VFX and does an excellent job with a few plugins for planar tracking.
> Resolve provides a complete workflow including media management, two editors, color, sound, vfx and export. It is remarkably fast and stable. The BM folks are also super friendly and helpful. Met a few at a DP seminar in NYC end of last year.
> I’ve been trying to create awareness about how much BM is giving away and how powerful Resolve is so I’m glad to see it here.
> One last thing. Blackmagic raw is unbelievable in the latitude it gives you for heavy grades. We came over from Sony s-log2. One shoot and we were hooked. I kept pushing the footage and waiting for that Sony purple grain to appear in the darks and they stayed clean with a ton of detail. Amazing.
I do audio work and use an actually proper DAW. Fairlight is pretty crummy and audio editing in resolve is a pain. Rendering a 5 hour audio track and importing into my DAW as a wav doesn't really work either so I'll either have to chop it up with ffmpeg or just use Fairlight. So far, I've stuck with it but it's no joy.ä to use.
That's not what the Baselight[1] people are saying. :)
One thing that hasn't been mentioned here yet is that Resolve is available for Linux. It is BY FAR the best free video editor for Linux.
[1] https://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/products/baselight/overview_bl....
There's a whole thread here: https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=7805...
2. This requires ~2x time and disk space, given that most end-user cameras record H.264/H.265
By the way, they chose to cripple it by making these codecs premium-only features on Linux only: https://documents.blackmagicdesign.com/SupportNotes/DaVinci_... Their excuse for not having H.264 is an outright lie, because Cisco has already paid the royalties for all binary users of OpenH264 on any OS. Furthermore, even if you buy their premium version, the only option to encode to H.264/H.265 on Linux is NVENC, which is inferior to CPU encoders and requires you to own an Nvidia card.
They're outright hostile toward Linux.
https://help.vivaldi.com/article/html5-proprietary-media-on-...
https://gist.github.com/ruario/bec42d156d30affef655
I venture a guess DaVinci Resolve not using already installed codecs is either one of the ways to generate sales, or result of strong arming by MPEG LA.
Cisco paid for all H.264 royalties on any platform (under the condition that you use their binaries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenH264 And this was back in 2013.
Both the free and premium versions are heavily crippled with virtually all common encoders and decoders either restricted or totally unavailable.
It also doesn't even start unless you have an Nvidia card and use closed source proprietary drivers. Despite all the users (paid or unpaid) reporting the issues on Intel and AMD, they just ignore them. And even if they fix those issues, H.264/H.265 encoding (premium-only) is only possible with NVENC with no CPU encoding alternative.
I mentioned two things: (1) the bigger issue, h264 decoder, Cisco already paid royalties for OpenH264 (when linked to their binary) so they simply have no real excuse for not having H264 decoding on Linux (2) lack of CPU encoder on Linux (it's not clear to me why you're bringing up Adobe since it has nothing to do with encoding on Linux), x264 is the gold standard for encoding H.264. NVENC isn't. The x264 binary can be shipped with proprietary products and they also offer a licensing option for linked usage. Similar comparison (NVENC vs x265) goes for H.265.
My other point was to show that other comparable companies are also having issues with encoding output, that this aspect is not always taken seriously for some reason.
And yes, NVENC sucks and AFAIK it is impossible to configure it to produce the same resulting quality (per Mbps) of encoding than what is possible x264/x265, regardless of whether one wants to sacrifice encoding time or not.
Bottom line is be willing to play around with your DE/WM to get Resolve working well in linux. If you do that it can be a much nicer experience.
I just stick to shotcut myself, as a gpl-type person.
There is just no comparison, feature-richness-wise. Shotcut is a toy compared to Resolve.
> there are a myriad of issues on linux
YMMV. I had installations that had 0 problems installing or running Resolve on Linux (with NVIDIA card, that's probably the most supported form of hardware for Resolve.)
- Premiere sucks for handling 4K footage, even with a powerful CPU/GPU. Either you live with stutters in the editor, or use Proxy clips which requires "downsampling" tons of videos. If you got a semi-large project, most of the time will be spent on just converting clips. Contrast with Resolve which just handles 4K footage directly imported into the editor.
- UX of color grading in DaVinci is miles ahead of what Premiere does.
- OpenFX support!
- Use the free version or buy one version ($299) you'll get to keep forever, compared to forced subscription model of Premiere (~$20/month)
- Resolve beats Premiere in render speed, at least on a powerful desktop computer (i7-7700K @ 4.20 Ghz - RTX 2080Ti - 32GB RAM)
- Every workflow I'm used to is much faster to execute in DaVinci than in Premiere. Feels like the UX team over at DaVinci has a bit more thought behind their UX than Premiere, which just seems to put features wherever nowadays.
- Non-linear and procedural workflow with nodes (similar to how Houdini does it) saves so much time as well
Regarding plugins, last time I checked, Premiere still doesn't support OpenFX (but might have changed). It's just a matter of time before the ecosystem for OpenFX is way bigger than anything Adobe could ever dream up.
What's your industry ?
I'm in the software industry. As mentioned in my initial comment, I'm not a professional video-anything, just presenting an hobbyist's view.
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/tra...
I guess I should try learning Resolve.
And nodes already implemented in the `master` branch of the Olive Video Editor.[0]
I think this is mostly down to your GPU - I have an I9/9900 32GB RAM setup with a GTX670, which I mostly use as a DAW, but do my YouTube editing on Premiere. With Resolve (which I far prefer in terms of UI), it's tragic how slow it is - about 2 minutes to render a 30 second HD clip that has stereo audio and nothing else on it. That's 15 seconds in Premiere. So I'm hoping that a future upgrade to a RTX30 series GPU will turn the tables and I'll be able to use Resolve seriously..
I wonder if it's some form of competitive advantage to have in-house software?
(EDIT: looks like Davinci Resolve has been used in TV shows and major Hollywood productions, including Oscar-nominated films [2])
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DaVinci_Resolve
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DaVinci_Resolve#Media_produced...
Blackmagic RAW isn't really "raw" in the sense that it's the data exactly as it comes out of the sensor ADC. It's ever so slightly "cooked" in the camera, which dramatically reduces file size, but still preserves all the dynamic range and color info that you need for doing fun stuff with it later.
Any camera maker could do this and publish a support library, but no software would feel the impetus to integrate it immediately, so nobody would use it, and if nobody's using it, no software would feel the impetus to support it ever.
But because Resolve is such a competent offering in the software space too, you can enjoy the benefits of the new format immediately, if you're shooting with their cameras and editing with their software. And that creates market inertia and people talking about how useful it is, so if other software wants to win users away from Resolve, they'll likely have to grab that library and build in support for the format.
Just the first example that came to mind.
That was certainly the case for the Vegas Video team back when Sony owned the group. That said, it enabled some head-scratching behaviors, like XDCAM and XDCAM EX having different schemas and formats despite both being XDCAM branded random-access media.
If plenoptic computational videography ever becomes more popular, it will likely be on the back of a similar hardware/software integration. Existing NLE products feel a bit shoehorned for RAW post-photography/pre-assembly to grading/finishing workflows being pluggable.
the only thing worse than RED are the rabid fanbois that use them.
Anyway, RED saw the software, stole the interface and made a free version.
RED then threatened to take the Foundry to court, after they integrated REDcode into Nuke. They went on about how innovate and clever the format was. Its just a tar with JPEG 2000.
Source: I am a former Foundry employee.
I was at IBC when we released storm, I had the privilege of using 4 red rockets, all of which broke. I was there looking at the RED forums where they were sharing the cracked version.
I was there when Whitmore got the email about redcode, and not using the official SDK. That we "had illegally reverse engineered proprietary code".
I was at the dinner when either bruno or sam said "it turns out they like storm a lot, but not enough to pay for it"
Interesting, it seems that even after several years away from the company, I have fallen foul of the Foundry's culture of secrecy.
> I had the privilege of using 4 red rockets, all of which broke.
Unsurprising; the original RR was a repurposed DVS Atomix with custom firmware. Now redundant since R3D decoding on GPU was released. RED's overpriced, unreliable hardware is my #1 gripe, but not really relevant to this discussion.
> I was there when Whitmore got the email about redcode, and not using the official SDK. That we "had illegally reverse engineered proprietary code".
I didn't know that a non-SDK-based REDCODE integration was ever in Nuke. If correct, to be honest that was an unwise move anyway; RED have always warned against reverse engineering in their licence agreements (and yes, reverse engineering was necessary to read R3Ds without the SDK, it was never plain vanilla JPEG2000 and didn't use the tar format at all). If Whitmore allowed it, he should have expected RED's response.
The legal grey area is that reverse engineering a file format isn't the same thing as reverse engineering proprietary executable code by disassembly. However, after having had a similar run-in with RED regarding reverse engineering, I have no doubt that Jannard's legal team would have persisted and come out on top.
> I was there looking at the RED forums where they were sharing the cracked version.
Sure, some end users pirated Storm like other Foundry software because the licence manager had been cracked long before, but that wasn't RED's fault.
> RED saw the software, stole the interface and made a free version.
The interfaces were no more similar that any two "pro" video apps (REDCINE-X looked particularly awful at launch). RED built a competing app with an overlapping feature set. This happens all the time.
> "it turns out they like storm a lot, but not enough to pay for it"
And why should they have? RED established a team that could develop their app without charging end users (a loss leader, I suppose), while still remaining profitable. The Foundry failed, or declined, to do so. Storm could have been expanded to cater for the needs of the DSLR (and later mirrorless) filmmaking communities; a much bigger market than indie RED shooters that was crying out for reliable and affordable post software. Instead, Storm was assimilated into Hiero with a big price tag for a handful of customers.
Years later, Bill told me that Storm was ultimately killed "because we didn't understand the low-end market". They could have just asked.
RED were pioneers in the early days of digital cinematography but now they are slowing things down. Can't really understand how they got a patent for something so simple. Even Apple lost the patent lawsuit to use compressed raw video in Prores RAW without paying royalties RED.
I'm hoping Blackmagic RAW would take off beyond Blackmagic cameras, but so far only Atomos has picked it up. (BM and Atomos both use FPGAs in the ISP so maybe that's what you need to process it realtime)
> I wonder if it's some form of competitive advantage to have in-house software?
There is only one company that "goes it alone" and thats pixar. Even then they've steadily been replacing their inhouse tools with off the shelf ones.
From what I recall the only other company that went inhouse was rhythm and hues, and they went bankrupt in 2013.
Most of these tools come from VFX studios in the first place. Nuke, baselight, photoshop, renderman and katana all came from VFX studios originally
It shoots RAW video. And directly onto a USB SSD drive, so you don't need to spend a fortune buying ridiculously expensive fast memory cards.
For comparison, RED 512GB mini-mag alone is $2,400. And it's just a regular $60 SSD repackaged.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Opt-Aaron-Royce-Jones/dp/B07ZZJH5C6
Off-topic but I found it slightly funny that the description of the film is (while you work at Google yourself):
> An idealistic engineer lands his dream job at the biggest social media company in the world. But when he discovers the dark side of the business, he must decide whether to stay silent or risk everything to expose the truth.
Some personal experiences featured in the film maybe? :)
But the day-to-day details are definitely influenced by my Google experience. In particular, as amateur this movie is, it might contain one of the few accurate depictions of a FAANG systems design whiteboard interview ever filmed :)
Adobe has an extreme advantage, in codec support and the fact that After Effects is basically ubiquitous in the industry when it comes to graphics work.
Resolve 15/16 made it a very viable alternative though, capable of some of the most demanding workloads. And tomorrow, Resolve 17 will be announced.
I use Resolve personally. Adobe Premiere on Creative Cloud has become relatively unstable. Crashes, bugs that have been present for 4-6 years now, lost work in their ridiculous auto save process, and slow/laggy timeline playback when coloring/effects are applied, it adds up.
Frequent updates are a complicated thing in fine tuned production environments as well. And until recently, next to no real shared work environment solutions. Resolve has had a pretty great server setup for multiple users for awhile now. Granted, it has a lot of room for improvement. Overall, it's been a night and day difference for me coming off Adobe.
Last year we had three edit bays in Premiere and one on Resolve. All PC, pretty close to the same builds. The editors on premiere had between 50-60 crashes between them in 3 weeks. The resolve station had 1 which was most likely a Windows issue at the time and just needed to be restarted.
But the best part. One time purchase for Resolve Studio, for life.
Back then and for many years, DaVinci booth was a must-see both at NAB Las Vegas and IBC Amsterdam. You could see the marvels or real time color correction using more than $300k of RealityEngine Onyxes and huge gleaming control panels that looked like they just fell from the starship Enterprise.
They switched to Linux in the early 2000s and made Windows/Mac versions. The software and controller hardware remained horrendously expensive, though.
The high price of the software made the rare people who were proficient with it stars in the cinema industry, high-flyers that grabbed big money and drove expensive cars on Hollywood boulevard.
BlackMagic has been the bane of high-end boutique hardware makers for a long time. Apparently at some point they planned to buy 3 or 4 DaVinci Resolve complete systems for some project. Then they realised that they could buy the whole company (a very low volume company indeed) instead for about the same price.
Since then, they made (as they usually do) the software and hardware less and less expensive every year, until they completely broke the market: for the past five years or so you've been able to hire color grading experts working from their room in India on the net. Hollywood specialists aren't amused.
https://www.smartcompany.com.au/entrepreneurs/influencers-pr...
Been using Blackmagic cameras since 2014, I hope one day we'll see Blackmagic Raw on mobile phones as a video codec.
Resolve 17 out tomorrow, meant to be a big release!
DaVinci had better color grading, but HitFilm were better to do simple and funny Visual Effects.
I decided for HitFilm and invested some time to learn it, bu t I see a lot of comments about DaVinci. I believe it has a better market share.
Does anyone can tell me if there is a reason to change tool?
If you find yourself eventually hitting a ceiling with HitFilm (and for family/fun/hobby videos, you probably won't), try doing the same things in Resolve before paying for HitFilm. Otherwise, stick with whatever works for you.
Oh, and if you ever get into buying high-end cameras and gear? The other big selling point in Resolve that it's made by Blackmagic and integrates deeply with their gear.
https://github.com/olive-editor/olive
I started a company https://milk.video to build a better video editing tool for the browser. Think Figma, but for video.
I feel like a lot of modern editing tools are entirely for film or social media, but the most ROI based video at companies doesn’t quite fit either. There is a middle ground between control and utility around editing things like video calls, which I feel like is much harder than it should be.
If anyone is into the video editing/media future space, I’d love to chat! I’ve definitely gone deep into the topic.
Email: lenny@milk.video
[1] https://www.msgtrail.com/articles/20200614-1944-screencastin...
I trialled 6 video editors and almost chose Resolve but ended up using Cyberlink PowerDirector Ultimate, purely for the one extra option they have, which was to allow choosing which direction you face inside the 360 video, at every edit point.
(I preferred Resolve UI much more but needed this one feature they did not have when I was looking, 18 months ago)
I don't really know how you can work on complex projects effectively and share context with just a single screen / contextual view.
I hope more software designs for multi-screen + room-scale collaboration.
Some other sources of inspiration:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BvzlSGGRBU
I'm still a novice at Resolve, but I've seen enough to know that it's insanely powerful. I just wish I would have known I'd get into this 4k video stuff when I bought my computer. I have the newest 13" MacBook Pro, and it can just barely render out a video like this. Lots of stuttering, crashing, etc.
I wonder if I should get an external GPU or if I'd be better off just buying a different computer altogether.
TL;DR: I ended up running DaVinci Resolve on Windows, and it is fantastic!
First: If you want to make a video for Youtube, you probably have to use Resolve. The average video there has pretty high production value, and if you care at all about having views, you probably need the capabilities that Resolve brings.
Technically, Resolve runs on Linux, but I could never get it working. I spent a couple solid days and trashed several installations attempting it. It basically just works under Windows. I did run into a problem with my video files sometimes skipping frames and giving me black frames in the output and performance problems when editing. Using ffmpeg to convert the files from my camera into ProRes format resolved all those problems.
The thing I really like about Resolve is that you won't outgrow it. If you just want to take a few videos and stitch them together? No problem. Want to throw a title sequence on it, or make the transitions fancy? No problem. Have someone walking in front of your camera when you're filming your son's play and want to cut to video from someone else's camera? No problem. That was an actual thing I did, BTW.
Oh, and it's free for all these uses, even with 4K video output.
Plus, there's TONS of resources on youtube teaching you how to do what you want to do. Not everything is easy, like adding a fancy object-tracking call-out took me an hour or two in this experiment, but I was basically just following a tutorial and other options I had looked at it wasn't even possible. https://youtu.be/3csMd-UUSIg
Lightworks was my second-favorite, worked great under Linux, but to output 4K video you had to pay a software subscription. I just couldn't bring myself to add a $25/mo payment that I knew I would go months without using sometimes. You can buy it outright, but it's $500.
I tried toy videos using a number of the other NLEs, IIRC: KDENlive, Olive, Pitivi, Shotcut. They were all pretty clunky but could do the job. If I just wanted to cut a couple simple videos with nothing fancy, and didn't have my Windows box available to run it, probably any of them would be fine.
That sucks, but at least I know I'm not alone. There are tutorials which make it look so easy, but I keep finding myself in problems which either they somehow avoided, or which they swept under the rug to keep the tut looking clean.
I am so excited about the fact that Resolve runs under Linux, philosophically. But as a practical matter, I guess I'll keep trying, and trashing, and reinstalling, until something works.