DaVinci Resolve 21.1
blackmagicdesign.com
blackmagicdesign.com
For those upset with the new agent integration, keep in mind that one of the big knocks on DaVinci Resolve is that it's hard for beginners. Powerful tools like color grading and nodes take years to truly master (and that won't change), but making it easier for users to collaborate with the agents they already use to help learn and perform basic tasks should help with the learning curve.
Ultimately, professional video editing is an art. An agent might save time with asset management, project/timeline setup, etc., but it won't replace the real experience and taste required for larger projects. I would rather spend the extra time on the nuanced/deeper creative work.
Maybe not entirely handed by AI but when AI starts doing it better than most and in a fraction of the time, for a fraction of the cost, why do you think it wont be at least partly delegated to AI?
the "never" is what gets me here.
The process is the point for any passionate creative. And yes, for every passionate creative you have a burned out creative who's trying to make ends meet who will use more AI centric tools because both that creative and the people paying them likely do not care how things look when they're completed, only that they're completed, on-time, and under budget.
However, again, an actual creative wouldn't. Imagine you and I are climbing a mountain: I'm climbing the mountain because I love climbing mountains. Climbing mountains is what I live for. I work full time and hard as hell so I can afford trips to climb mountains. You, on the other hand, have a terminal illness and you know that at the top of this mountain is a plant you can eat that will cure you with no side effects. So we're both doing this thing, but for WILDLY different reasons.
If as we're climbing a helicopter flies up and hovers behind us and the pilot says "hey I'll take you to the top of the mountain if you want!" we're going to have very different responses: you don't care about climbing mountains, and even if you do, you're not on this particular climb to enjoy it; you're here because you need this plant to cure your illness. You'd be crazy to not jump in that helicopter and get what you need to live. However, I'd be equally crazy to do the exact same thing, because climbing the mountain is why I'm here, I live for climbing mountains, and I want to climb this one.
This is what AI people do not get about creatives and why we talk past each other. AI people think creative people make things to have finished works, and that's certainly a part of it, and basically a requirement if you'd like to monetize your creativity. But like, I work in software as my day job and I'm bloody good at it, but I use AI to generate code sometimes because the process of developing software doesn't do nearly the same thing for me as creating art. I love making art, and I'd do it even if it made me no money. And I know that, because I've been doing it my whole life and it's never made me money. I feel depressed if I go too long between making works of art. I get ideas building up inside me and they itch and scratch at my being until I sit down and spend several hours turning said idea into something I can see, but like, if I just put a prompt into an AI image generator, I feel absolutely nothing doing that.
All of that to say: I genuinely do not believe AI will completely replace all of this, for no other reason than only a fraction (sizable though it may be) of creatives will ever want it, let alone use it. The quality of it and arguing about if it can "match" a human creative isn't the point, the humanity is the point. I don't want to look at AI generated art, and so I won't, and I especially do not want to replace my creative output with that of Midjourney. Ever. I don't care how good or cheap it is which is why those arguments just bounce off of me. I'm here to climb a mountain and you're offering me a staircase.
For me, the point of creativity is play, exploration, and experimentation. I've always jumped on new technology and new media because they're the best place to find those.
From what I've seen, a lot of the "it's a process" people are more interested in craft than art.
They're not creating anything unique, novel, or personal. They 'create' like an engineering problem - master this skill, copy this style, reproduce some acceptable and recognisable version of this popular imagery/content/genre.
There's a huge gap between competent craft and work that has a voice and is surprising - no matter how it's made.
People with that original voice are rare, and many aren't afraid of AI.
That's not to say that AI doesn't it make even easier to make uninteresting, unoriginal content. But the 'process' can also be fighting the default output quality to transcend that.
1) software doesn't commit suicide like some pilots did.
2) software has superhuman reflexes, processing power and are not affected by emotion.
3) software also will eliminate a whole class of failure modes that caused many crashes in the past like: "I won't seek nearest and safer airport because that will be expensive in fuel costs"
4) software is already landing planes and saving lives in the process: https://youtu.be/XawXSLRCM3o
5) Most part of a comercial flight is already controlled by software anyway. Pilots mostly take off/land and input coordinates and altitudes.
6) push for fully automous aircraft during modern war is going to speed up development and test of the tech.
I think it's a matter of time here too.
If, and that's a big if, a pilot did choose a less safe airport because of monetary cost to his airline, it would be because those are the guidelines of the airline. And those guidelines would obviously be in the software too.
I have no idea what legislation is in place regarding this topic and protecting pilots. But even with really good protections, there's no way that it won't affect your social standing with the higher ups if you divert and cost the company exorbitantly.
So pilots do have to make judgment calls about how much they're willing to risk their lives and the lives of their passengers versus a perceived risk, and worse, this judgment call exists in a weird fuzzy area where they're "allowed" to make the safe bet, but in practice, they will be punished for it.
Software doesn't (generally) have this luxury. It decides whether to land or continue flying based on some defined set of conditions.
It can still decide to risk the lives of the passengers. But that decision has to be approved by the airline, and can't live as an informal "you will lose brownie points with management" sword over the necks of the flight crew.
Unless we start to incorporate LLMs and probabilistic models into autopilots... but no-one would ever do that, right? ....
Why not? Personally (although I'm not saying others have to see it this way too), I'd wait until I can see what AI can replace, before believing so, rather than the opposite.
So far, AI isn't able to "set direction" at all in any sensible way, especially for a creative project like TV or movies, the results are just too bad (today). Although it's excellent at "following directions", which is why these new APIs are great and exciting, it lets people who are good at setting direction to leverage these tools to have the direction concretely followed by something, without having to create a group of collaborators.
Until we've seen proven that AI can indeed "set directions" ("have taste"), I think it's fair to assume they're unable to do so in a way that it produces something that humans generally enjoy. And very far from the kind of masterpieces a human can create.
It lets the unskilled access the tools of the skilled without having had to learn all the pitfalls, traps, and safety concerns. With video editing there may not be much at stake but we've already seen how sloppy code ~= vulnerable code when the prompter does not know what they are doing. What's going to happen when project managers start vibegeneering cars and buildings.
As pro software, the UI has a learning curve. Many YouTube videos are out of date, or unnecessarily drawn out.
Additionally, as a hobbyist, project settings, color spaces, clipping, etc can be tricky to miss.
I’ve already been using Claude to (1) help me with UI, (2) QA my delivery, and (3) occasional fixes for audio repair; waveform sync (can’t afford time codes).
I make all creative decisions - including most menial ones - myself, I wouldn’t have it any other way; I enjoy the act of creating. I welcome this integration.
I’m sure some users are gonna agentically grade or whatnot. I don’t like it, but I’m also don’t believe in telling other people what they should do with their own work and creative process.
Watching this next generation closely, because there are just a shitload of red flags starting to crop up that don't seem to be going away.
It seems pretty clear that AI capabilities are jagged. There are good reasons to believe based on research and the subjective evaluation of experts who are quite friendly to AI that there are some tasks creative tasks that AI has been really quite good at (totally disrupting stock illustrations) some where it does so much better than typical person, but not nearly as well as well as an expert (song creation) and some where, so far, it pretty much fails, and sees almost no progress even as models get better and better. (long form creative writting). Indeed, writting style sometimes seems to fall backwards with recent releases.
Also, it's subjectively, but commonly held to be true that most of the content created when AI can execute well lack taste, unless the human creating with AI has it. The term "slop" exists and in legible for a reason.
I mean, maybe this is just a question of different people speaking about different time horizons.
But it seems perfectly sensible for someone to say that there is a lot of automation that can happen in the near term, and that they see no reasonable evidence that AI can do interesting or even coherent work this space.
I don't know that shallow accelerationist boosterism (or panicked doomer despair ) that handwaves away the distinctive variations AI performnce is that enlightening.
And great for beginners, now they get to pay some chatbot company to cover the gaps left by detereorating software design. Lucky they're already using agents... are they?
This feels inverted to me: downtime affords us variety. If I have little downtime then I'll strongly prefer known, efficient methods of doing something, rather than experimenting with new ones.
> As the job gets stripped down to its core function, while a machine keeps the pipeline full so that the work can continue uninterrupted, the downtime slips away.
This I agree with, though.
I don't mean to be harsh, only passionate.
I have a hard time seeing your way. I build software. Tools for humans to do stuff. Whatever they want. Then it gets complex. There are methods to make it more accessible to more people including so called agents. I want to go to there I want to enable the humans.
I feel you bro that you see human getting squeezed out. I do not see it that way. The human is still the nexus.
CEOs and tech bros and hype are all a distraction and a fog that will dissipate with time. We need to focus on the functionality and utility. We are engineers
You are a valuable person in the conversation and we all need you to participate with eyes wide open. I assume you are young. That's not discounting it is welcoming.
[edit: cleaned stuff up to hopefully make it more direct and non-confrontational]
Thank. God.
I never want to rotoscope again.
And frankly I'm not fond of editing either.
What is lost when losing the (understandably annoying) process of the grind? By letting LLMs do the busy work, do you lose the opportunity to stumble into randomness? Do you lose the understanding of what is possible/interesting with the medium?
And do you end up in this derivative future where decisions are made by a system that was trained on all the previous uses of it?
Obviously that's fairly hyperbolic, but I have absolutely felt the pull of it all. When it decides to take a couple extra steps I didn't ask for creatively and I think "eh, that's fine."
*EDIT: I wrote this and looked back and this SOUNDS like an LLM wrote it. See what I mean??????
Ultimately, and this applies to so much of life, "to each, their own," right?
Editing to add my own salient tl;dr: shifting the "easy" tasks onto AI agents leaves the human ones to shoulder the cognitively demanding loads, resulting in burnout.
There are nuances, of course, but if you imagine that while once a human might have been responsible to move 500lbs a day, broken up into primarily small loads, now a robot is moving anything under, say, 20lbs and the human is left to only carry the heavier loads across the same time period so is now hefting 50 or 100lbs at a time and required to do across the same day, so now they're moving 1,500lbs a day.
I'm no expert, but I never found Resolve materially more difficult to learn or use than Final Cut Pro or Premiere. And if you're doing anything moderately complex, it's potentially easier to learn because things that require external tools in FCPX and Premiere are built in to Resolve Studio.
I suspect the agent integration is primarily workflow/UI related, but regardless, I don't see it as any more anti-creative than incorporating precanned effects and presets into a project, and potentially a very useful learning tool since the Resolve UI is quite good at letting you see how the sausage is made.
I don't have a single reason to do any form of video editing, let alone professional video editing, but that kind of pricing model makes me want to buy a license just to make sure that companies like this stick around.
This is commoditizing Adobe for them.
Black magic also make a program that support/ties into the camera hardware on smartphones and they support both Android and iOS.
I've been using Resolve since version 14, still getting upgrades to it! My license does only work on one "computer" at a time though, so when I switch between Linux and Windows, I need to re-enter and activate the license, as when I do that it deactivates the previous (other OS) one. You have seemingly unlimited amount of times to switch though, as I've probably done it on a bi-weekly basis for quite some time.
I’ve been using DaVinci Resolve Studio for 12 years now with frequent updates, with the license I got with the original Pocket Cinema Camera for £800 (still a fantastic pocket size cinema camera, shoots raw cinemadng and ProRes with a beautiful sensor).
One of the best founders and companies around.
[Citation needed]
Although... BMD has actually made it harder, by adding bloat like the Cut page. I have attempted to find value in it a couple of times, and didn't. Now I disable it.
BMD needs to stop throwing crap into Resolve and buckle down and do two things:
1. Fix bugs, including UI defects. The Deliver page is a mess. The clip selection between the Edit timeline and the Fusion page makes no sense. And lots more.
2. Unify the node views. Resolve is a bunch of stuff BMD bought and threw together on different pages. The "integration" is janky and can, especially for the beginner, seriously degrade your work. Once example is how Fusion compositions inexplicably downgrade everything to timeline resolution. So you can bring 4K footage into a Fusion comp, but if your output timeline of the moment happens to be merely HD, the entire composition (including keys) will be degraded to work at that resolution. I mean... really? And beyond that, the relationship between Fusion comps and the timeline events they wind up in is extremely fragile and breaks arbitrarily and unrecoverably all the time.
A single nodeview for all operations would be a long-overdue game-changer for editing software.
"You probably aren't cutting features or television or multicam"
You think THOSE are the target audience of the Cut page? That's not what the marketing has stated.
It's not about the target audience; it's about the target use case. I've tried using the Cut page for quick-&-dirty edits, and it still sucks.
Over time many things become easier to learn and do, and those who might feel upset should make sure their own feet are moving as well in terms of their learning and growing.
I assume that this can be connected to local models, not just cloud models.
But I desperately wish Blackmagic would bring support for VST3 plugins and JACK to Linux. Or, at the very least, allow me to use my MIDI control surface in Fairlight on Linux.
As it stands, I have to do all of my audio production in Reaper, and that's a bit cumbersome.
WRT audio I'm not sure as I only did this with audio less drone footage.
Is that praise? I would hope the bar is higher.
I bought a used computer four years ago to edit 4K video, tens of thousands of raw files off my big Sony cameras, write, light code and research. Many thousands of hours of hard use.
In five years I’ve never had a single program crash and certainly not the whole system go down. Uptime is many months.
I thought that was the expectation
> DaVinci Resolve 21.1 now supports integration with AI assistants such as Claude, Claude Code and ChatGPT Codex, allowing customers to analyze projects, organize media, adjust settings and batch render using everyday conversational language. Customers can ask their AI assistant to create highlight edits from long form video, remove unwanted clips and render deliverables, so they can spend more time being creative rather than getting bogged down in repetitive tasks.
Not every application of AI is "do the creativity for me."
See also: 3D modeling. Autodesk Fusion's interface is truly awful and people put years into learning it to do complex things. The MCP server functionality they added, though still in its infancy with Claude and what it can do, vastly lowers the barrier to entry for people just looking to get into making basic things. They can focus on the actual creative process rather than fumbling with the awkward tooling.
The role of music producer includes a large chunk of ‘knowing how to program synths and samples and drums and effects’. The role of industrial designer includes a lot of ‘knowing how to model things in CAD’. Even roles like academic researchers require skills like ‘formatting LaTeX’.
I’m genuinely quite excited for a shift in human computer interaction which reduces that ‘knowing how to do things on the computer’ tax.
But there are a whole swathe of jobs where a lot of what people do is ‘know how to do the thing on a computer’. Some of that is really because the bureaucracy has been embodied in a computer system so for example the job of handling an insurance claim seems to involve a lot of ‘knowing how to operate the claims computer system’ - actually that person’s skill is ‘knowing how to navigate the claims bureaucracy’.
> Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets us to the thing.
That was that character’s take on Jobs’s ‘bicycle for the mind’ concept.
Then you have experience and skills.
Someone with zero skills in music will be able to make a 'song' but a savvy producer would use tools differently and could leverage them to actually make something creative.
Anyone can make an app those days (or a website or whatever) but mileage varies based on one's nature, also the gotchas of someone with zero knowledge of a field could result issues that someone with experience would've noticed and resolved much earlier or avoided completely.
Me with zero knowledge in architecture can "design" my house but I wouldn't trust my plan without someone looking at it.
AI and AGI provides great lengths in empowering but it might also introduce the false feeling of being capable.
Creativity, capability and motivation still takes important place even with AI.
If the chat-bot/spy-ware aren't integrated, than I don't see a problem with LLM plug-in opt-in support. =3
However it can lead to AI "doing the creative for them" and them out of a job in the near future.
IIRC House MD was one of the first shows to use digital (5D mkII).
Soon there will be AI generated shows. Perhaps entirely personalized.
Youtube, generate me a TNG episode.
It will never be that simple.
For example: the guys on youtube using AI to make new Star Wars movies [1] still did tons of work putting it all together, including the 3d renderings and editing, and they are leaning on old scriptwriting/dialogue from a 1991 Star Wars book. AI is just helping them automate the process and generate some visuals/voice acting, but it still takes a skilled artist with lots of technical knowledge to guide it in the right direction and properly utilize their existing tools/workflows... and most importantly good taste.
Which is maybe why Mechanical Turk will be shutdown in 3 weeks. No more people laundering AI.
The problem of AI “art” has never been that it cannot pass for the real thing. There are plenty of people buying slop ebooks on Amazon today. People will gladly generate a new episode of TNG.
And it will be popular because the discerning ones are the minority. Netflix is a multibillion dollar company serving a lot of mediocre stuff that people happily pay for just to turn off their brain for 2 hours every night.
Hence why I don’t care to justify why I avoid AI generated content at all costs, no matter how good it might look, with most people. It might sound snobbish to say, but they just wouldn’t get it.
I am reminded of an interview I saw about the Stranger Things intro (before mainstream audiences got weird about the show). The producers wanted a practical effects intro, and consulted with people who actually made 1980s intros the show was trying to replicate.
The old guard said the show’s producers were crazy to do it with practical effects and should just use CGI since this was what they would have done, if they had the technology.
Edit: oh god, there is a nearly identical HN post from 2024 from me that I do not remember making. I swear I am not an LLM. I am also hoping that I am not an old man telling his stories over and over either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40453073
George Lucas seemed pretty satisfied when filming the Star Wars prequels to plop himself down in a chair in a room with a giant bluescreen set where he didn't have to walk around and direct in a hot, sandy desert for hours like in the original films. But the movies looked a lot worse for it.
Episode III was pretty good despite filming in 2K.
I think Episode 7 is a more competent film than any of the prequels. Though these days I don't want to watch it cause I know it's setting up a story that goes nowhere.
Source? As a CGI VFX artist in a previous life, I disagree vehemently, and I think you’re spinning an untrue narrative. I’ve never met any VFX artists, whether practical or CG (and I’ve met many), who weren’t keenly aware of how bad effects were and how poorly they age. The few practical folks left are way less enamored of CGI than the CGI people, and they were always that way (by definition?), so it seems like you’re mixing them up.
The fact that shoddy effects get used speaks to directors and budgets and production studios and what audiences pay for, it has almost nothing to do with the artists. That said, you’re also comparing bad CGI with good practical effects, which undermines your point. There were plenty of practical effects that lost their charm as fast as any CG ever did, and today there is plenty of CGI that remains convincing; it depends entirely on which effect and which shot in which movie you’re talking about.
As always, art benefits from limitations.
From the [dead] sibling
> Those old practical effects were incredibly labor intensive and took so long. The famous sequence where from the movie 2001 where he enters the monolith used slit-scan cameras and took up to 5 minutes per frame.
But those effects still hold up today, unlike most CGI from even decades later. So yes, like most modern "advancements" CGI lets you crank out imitations for cheaper but quality is lost. And the cost is itself a feature - it made directors really think about what effects are actually needed and which ones are just noise that don't benefit the film at all. And of course movie budgets on the whole haven't exactly been going down.
smh
Why can Openshot, Kdenlive, any other Linux-native video editor edit MP4 files but DaVinci cannot, unless you pay for it?
Genuine question.
Primarily because Resolve is meant as a tool for professionals - and as a result it can’t get away with using things like Ffmpeg under the hood.
Ffmpeg (for example) doesn’t use officially licensed codec SDK’s to handle certain codecs - it uses reverse engineered tooling.
If you’re working on a personal project or something that is just getting pushed to YouTube that won’t matter 99% of the time.
However if you are working on a professional color grading pipeline for a project that might go to broadcast or into theaters, there are very specific QA tests that the final rendered product must pass - and these unofficial reverse engineered rendering tools often result in rendering errors that can fail these QA tests (and in a way that is basically impossible to troubleshoot).
It’s already enough of a challenge to manage a color pipeline using the officially licensed tools - they can’t really risk that kind of issue with their pro and semi-pro customers.
That said, it’s important to note that MP4 is a just a container/wrapper, not a codec.
So an mp4 file might contain video (or just audio) that is rendered using one of many possible codecs depending on what was chosen by the person doing the render. That will determine whether Resolve whether the free edition of Resolve will support it or not.
I appreciate that it can be confusing for users that patents can still apply to techniques where implementations exist that are both libre and gratis from a copyright perspective, but this has been an issue for Linux-adjacent software distribution for ages—like, see how Debian used to put certain stuff that was encumbered by patents in the US but not in other jurisdictions in special “non-US” repository sections, that sort of thing. It's not Black Magic's doing that the codec space is like this. I wish people wouldn't make so many mocking assumptions sometimes.
This looks similar to using Microsoft provided Media Foundation codecs. No idea why Black Magic doesnt do it like Linux Chromium browsers.
I would be moderately surprised if whatever arrangement is going on there allows full use of the codecs for video editing software and not just for consumer decode of Web resources.
I'm not really sure what actual claim you're making regarding the relevance of “pro-patent views”, but I might interpret it as something like “Red Hat is more likely to play it safe, whereas less IBM-enculturated distributions are more likely to bet on interpretations that let the users take on the risk”. Which I think is probably true; for instance, https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/xqn20n/comment/iqbmv... describes how other distributions chose differently and moved to re-enable the proprietary codecs by default. (Some of them seem to be based in friendlier jurisdictions, mind. I'm not completely sure where BMD is, and I'm not sure how much it matters given they want to sell worldwide, but their full corporate name resolves most strongly to Australia: https://opengovau.com/business/30098098287 and Australia doesn't seem to exclude software from patentability: https://www.ipaustralia.gov.au/patents/what-are-patents/what...)
Anyway, if that's what you meant, I don't think that distinction is nearly as applicable to the situation with Resolve. BMD isn't a producer of a Linux distribution containing a broad variety of stuff, where “users happen to do stuff with the open source software we provide that violates some patents” can maybe be waved off as not their responsibility. BMD is very obviously directly operating in the commercially-distributed professional video tooling market, so codec licensing will be something they have to deal with as a keystone part of their business. Adding something to their software to actively enable people to do professional-style encoding for those codecs without the patent licenses would be playing with fire.
On Windows I edited 100+ podcasts with Resolve and it's so good. Video editing on Linux for the last 9 months with Kdenlive has been killing me (vs Camtasia or Resolve on Windows).
AAC vs Opus is a little bit more debated, but on average should outperform AAC.
Being able to edit without lag is really important, also keeping your CPU load reasonably low when recording is important to avoid dropped frames, or your recording streams becoming out of sync (ie. a webcam video with audio recorded from another input device while you record your desktop).
I noticed on Linux, if I do anything CPU or disk intensive while recording (even with an SSD), I often see these things get out of sync at the point of load. It's an easy fix usually by just cutting the video where it starts to get out of sync and shifting the audio track over ~200-300ms, but it's something that could happen many times so it becomes an issue in the end. I recorded thousands of videos on Windows and never had this problem but it happens every few videos on Linux just doing casual screenshare videos.
AAC vs Opus is similar, except audio related.
In general when recording videos I usually use x264 as mkv which is CPU bound because it produces a much better looking video vs using h264. That's using a bit rate and other settings that tries to balance quality with low disk space.
Sure, but this same hardware was able to edit 1080p / 30 fps videos on Windows without performance issues and not needing to use proxies. Camtasia let me edit videos liquid smooth even if I added different effects. I never encountered a single video that lagged when scrubbing, even 90 minute videos with a dozen tracks. Resolve was also fine.
Kdenlive on Linux is mostly ok but even adding the most basic effects will cause a slideshow when scrubbing and during normal playback in the preview window. I don't know how Resolve will run on Linux since I haven't attempted to install it due to the codec issues (a deal breaker for me on its own).
Hardware decode support for AV1 and H265 is still pretty bad. If you use those formats, a lot of computers will stutter when you move the play head around while editing. On my mirrorless cameras, I much prefer filming in medium to high bitrate h264. I fill up my storage cards faster, but my camera batteries last longer recording like that and the footage is much easier to work with. I have a 4090, which supports h265 decode. But it only works for 4:2:0 footage. If I film in h265 422, my computer falls back to a software decoder. It's easier to just use h264, then I don't have to think about it.
If you want to ship high quality deliverables, you don't want resolve to do the final encode anyway. Resolve tries to use NVENC for encode, which is a much worse encoder than x264 and friends in ffmpeg. From resolve, output prores or something. Then use ffmpeg to do the final encode. I think there might also be ffmpeg encoding plugins.
tldr; Codec matters, but there's a lot more nuance to getting a good image than just picking the newest video codecs.
With proprietary operating systems, the commercial entity behind the OS can negotiate for licensing. Some commercially-associated Linux distributions have efforts in similar directions, like Fedora for instance has some special secondary-repo stuff around H.264 support, but that's at minimum much more fragmentary as a target for an application developer concerned with the legalities.
https://github.com/josephg/resolve-aacfix
AAC streams are decoded and sent to ffmpeg.
What about for encoding? For example if you want to export a video from Resolve in its final form with AAC audio. The readme mentions decoding but not encoding.
No, why would it?
> What about for encoding?
Only decode support. You can add encode support via the official plugin api.
https://github.com/hexitnz/Resolve-Linux-Studio-AAC-FDK-Enco...
I don't know, that's why I asked. I haven't done a deep dive into creating custom plugins for Resolve, so I don't know what the implications of that are from a performance perspective.
I wasn't able to benchmark it directly since it's only compatible with the Studio version.
I didn't try it, but for the paid version, someone also built a MCP server based on the scripting engine.
I'm programmatically adding analysis to sim racing lap guides, therefore my flow is probably different from the usual editing flow, but I have to say I found Claude Code + Opus to be quite capable of making edits with computer use.
Works pretty well!
Yosh is that you?
pacman -S davinci-resolve-free
pacman -S davinci-resolveWay more people should know about this solution.
How to ease key frames, how to fix my HDR captured footage for SDR, how to export the best quality video, how to burn in subtitles with word highlights, how to fix my audio aaand so on.
Either the AI will show me the particular feature and setting or a YouTube tutorial will. I think the AI might be faster and easier in this scenario.
Sadly, things are not quite as straightforward for non-Studio. For one, you need to be a paying customer to get access to the new feature. Moreover, a community-based solution [1], which previously worked for all users, have now artificial limitation in implementing automation for Free users.
Quite a shame really but maybe it will trickle down over time (like expanding export resolution support). Regardless, a much more open implementation than Adobe, who'd like you to pay for yet another chat window.
[1] https://github.com/samuelgursky/davinci-resolve-mcp#free-edi...
Library management is where Lightroom (and honestly CaptureOne) still wins, I couldn't find a good way to manage a 100k photo library.
I created one project and tried importing the whole library, but it took more than 8 hours and didn't make meaningful progress (~10%?) so I stopped (compared to 15hr for the whole thing in Lightroom).
I also did a project for about 1K photos and while the import worked, the library management itself was lacking. I could not find ways to do image stacks for bursts, group by metadata, etc. The obvious filters are there, but I think it needs more work.
I can definitely see the utility of something like this for cases where a media budget just wouldn't have existed in the first place.
Going to look at this version, as I haven't gone through the tutorials yet, so the assistants would be quite helpful.
Works without a hitch, including multi monitor, gpu acceleration etc I use it on Manjaro, installed via AUR.
That said, IIRC it only works with nvidia GPUs and requires X11, and is supposedly finicky to get the environment right for (but the AUR gets it right for me)
Only recently has AMD even become viable for LLM inference on consumer chips and that is the same compute codepaths Resolve would depend on.
So effectively AMD is the issue, AMD on linux is great, AMD on linux for a workstation was kind of hit or miss.
Making it run wasn't easy, and it can't decode MP3 and some video codecs because of licensing issues. It also can't decode WebM. This is kind of a problem because of a lot of free music you can download to add to videos and a lot of video clips you can download from Pexels for example are encoded with codecs it can't decode, so you have to re-encode it with FFMPEG first to a supported codec.
The biggest issues are the supports of video cards (nvidia is the king) and different popular codecs. The problem is partly solved by using paid version, but the gpu/codec support is still not even with Windows, so you have to use ffmpeg to re-encode from/into supported formats.
The good thing about DaVinci Resolve's Linux system requirements is that these are so outdated that basically every developer links their plugins with static libraries they build themselves; and Resolve itself bundles lots of .so files with the app itself. Also Rocky Linux 8 is a good baseline Linux distribution: simple system libraries interdependence, so trivial to export and bundle those.
In other words, binaries created for RockyLinux8 with portability in mind are easily portable to sane modern Linux distributions.
(That doesn't make developing on Rocky Linux 8 fun at all)
I guess the agentic stuff is probably exciting to somebody.
I tried it a few times but I think it didn't work at all with those cards.
Source - I work as a professional editor (amongst other things). Please commenters, do not come at me with your five minute low bit rate projects that required only a LUT and some contrast and 'worked fine' in DaVinci on a potato.
My question was a more of "yes/no" one. So far every time I tried, DaVinci didn't work at all. Not slowly. It completely refused to work on intel integrated graphics, specifically.
LightWorks works flawlessly on the other hand.
https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=2398...
In the mean time, the free version of resolve 21.0.4 will keep working indefinitely.
It doesn't cost Davinci any more dev time to keep it enabled in the free version as the scripting engine is used throughout the app.
And weird to drop support in an odd point release. Usually when features are Studio-only, you'll get a prompt "hey you've reached the limit of the free abilities". Trying already installed scripts after upgrading just failed silently, which was a pain in my butt to debug.
steam has put so much into making gaming on linux so good, one of the last pieces remaining for a ton of people to make the switch is editing.
don’t get me wrong, i run davinci on my non-rocky linux desktop and it’s almost entirely painless, but, what steam is doing with their distro of linux is incredible.
if they were to consider migrating to steamos rather than rocky, between the masses switching to linux since gaming is good enough for so many, if davinci was mostly solid, i think blackmagic could pull millions away from the adobe hell they’re stuck in on windows.
particularly since davinci’s new photo tab is fucking incredible and will so soon be a perfect replacement for lightroom.
DaVinci Resolve is a proprietary application for non-linear video editing, color correction, color grading, visual effects, and audio post-production. It is developed by the Australian company Blackmagic Design for macOS, Windows, iPadOS and Linux.
...
DaVinci Resolve has been used for the color grading and/or editing of feature films such as Alien: Covenant, Avatar, Best of Enemies, Deadpool 2, Jason Bourne, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, La La Land, Love & Mercy, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, Prometheus, Anora, Robin Hood, Spectre, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and X-Men: Apocalypse.
(Wikipedia)
I use DaVinci Resolve for editing GoPro, Canon DSLR, iPhone, and Drone FPV footage. I import clips, use the razor to cut them and rearrange them, occasionally crop and zoom, and then encode them down to h264 or whatever. There are a bazillion features that I sort of know exist but haven't ever had any need to use. Could I make a tool using an LLM that covers my DaVinci workflow? Almost certainly, and I don't think it would take anywhere near 200 prompts. I've made significantly more complex bespoke data analysis pipelines for drone flight telemetry in like... a dozen prompts. But I have no illusions that what I would make as my "DaVinci Clone" would have anywhere near the functionality of DaVinci, just the tiny piece of that functionality that I use.
Then vibe your own 5% editor, but saying that a software so mature and complete as Resolve can be done with some AI and time is something I expect coming from the mouth of a teenager, not an adult.
Resolve is like a top of the line professional camera: there are so many more knobs, buttons, and dials on those because top-end pros run everything manually changing settings as they take photos based on changing light conditions and what the subject is doing. Resolve isn't going to assume what you want and do it: it's a professional tool for professional users. The fact they are still giving it away is amazing to me.
Moreover, not everyone wants to have the hassle of building and maintaining their own version of a thing that isn’t compatible with anyone else’s version of the same thing. And if you hire anyone to help you, now you have to train them on how to use your app. If they leave, those skills are useless for their next job.
(I’m not even covering the idea that you could do it in 200 prompts. I got Claude to create a video player and that alone took over 300 prompts.)