▲ 270 points
back
94 comments
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.
> Resolve is the best color grading software in the biz, without question.
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....
Fairlight was not really a leader in the field of sound editing software. It was a ground breaking company 30 years ago when they introduced the Computer Musical Instrument (CMI), but they went through hard times due to the incredibly high cost. The company was reformed several times, was bought and sold several times, and no doubt had some vaguely valuable IP coming with it. But their sound editing software has never been a leader in the field, and wasn't widely used. Being a part of Resolve will likely result in more exposure and use of any technology that gets reused.
> 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.
> 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.
I'm not professional video editor by any degree, but a free time "creativists" (or whatever you wanna call it, I do animation, vfx, music production, video editing and more), and since something like 2010 I was using Adobe Premiere but since ~one year ago moved to DaVinci Resolve. Here are the reasons why Resolve beats Premiere today (in a hobbyist's view):
- 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
Premiere is also ridiculously unstable (have gotten more so over the years seemingly). I've experienced this on different PCs, different videos, in many situations. It is up to a point where it is clear that it's just not about random bugs or messy plugins or underpowered computers - it is about bad quality of the software. And it is not getting any better. There are many reports of this on the internet. Resolve is much more stable.
>Resolve beats Premiere in render speed, at least on a powerful desktop computer (i7-7700K @ 4.20 Ghz - RTX 2080Ti - 32GB RAM)
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 don’t have much experience with other video editing software, but when I had to make some walkthroughs of new product features DaVinci got the job done and the result was fantastic—even on the free version.
> - Non-linear and procedural workflow with nodes (similar to how Houdini does it) saves so much time as well
And nodes already implemented in the `master` branch of the Olive Video Editor.[0]
I agree with you but PrPro has been around for a longer time and thus has a huge community for advices, tutorials and marketplace for panels and plugins
I've heard from friends in the indie film space that BlackMagic cameras come close to RED cameras but at fraction of the price. It's interesting that BlackMagic produces their own video editing software as well (well, it was an acquisition [1]).
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...
It means they can do things that would otherwise stall due to waiting for industry adoption. Like coming up with their own file format that sucks less than other formats in some important ways.
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.
This is correct. Blackmagic introduced a full raw workflow recently which was a game changer. Red holds a patent on raw video which they’ve been real dicks about aggressively enforcing. It has stifled innovation. BM got around that by partially debayering their capture and storing it in a format that gives you the flexibility of raw but is more performant and avoids Red’s patent bullshit. It’s amazing to grade BRaw footage. You just keep pushing it and, oh look there’s detail in those shadows and those highlights aren’t actually blown out. No banding, no grain, massive color depth at 12bit and the flexibility to change ISO in post.
RED cameras are a personality cult. Sure they had great resolution back in the day, but they expensive, and a massive pain in the arse to post process, unless you bought their crappy redrocket cards that were uber fragile.
> 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
Yes, you can buy a brand new BMPCC 6K camera for under $2000.
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.
I've worked in broadcast media and we used a lot of Blackmagic Kit. Their linux support for their hardware is first class too.
Fusion (originally "Digital Fusion" by Eyeon Software, now part of Resolve) is also a purchase [1].
I love Resolve. I recently edited a feature film[0] using the free version, and it's fantastic. I had been a Kdenlive fan before, but they're just not on the same league.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Opt-Aaron-Royce-Jones/dp/B07ZZJH5C6
Thanks for sharing that, very nice to see feature films made with Resolve! Also found nothing that comes close to Resolve when running on linux.
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? :)
Professional production engineer here — Resolve has been a really interesting journey over the years. Until Resolve 15, nobody was really taking it very seriously as an editing tool.
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.
I'm a long time Fusion user so when Blackmagic bought it, I started to look into Resolve as well. The fact the both are nicely integrated and, as you said, it's a one time purchase makes it a no-brainer for me. Amazing software.
I am a bit surprised to see resolve here today, as tomorrow resove 17 is released.
It was brought up in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25022665
I want to tell you an amusing anecdote about that program. DaVinci was originally developped 30 years ago on very expensive SGI hardware, with very expensive dedicated controller hardware.
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.
Love Resolve and Blackmagic, and Grant Petty is one of the best founder CEO's in the business - super knowledgeable, hard working and heart in the right place.
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!
When I started editing some family videos, I researched some free editing software. My two champions were DaVinci and HitFilm express: https://fxhome.com/hitfilm-express
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?
HitFilm is a home-targeting package with some built-in effects and pro-targeting paid addons, and Resolve is a pro suite that happens to be mostly free and more intuitive than other pro suites. Resolve's color grading is its highest-profile feature and built-in on the free version, where most of HitFilm's color-grading features are gated behind paid add-ons or the Pro version.
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.
People might be interested in the olive editor:
https://github.com/olive-editor/olive
Olive is worth following but it's way too early to compare it to anything. It's in alpha.
Surprisingly, I’ve never tried Resolve, and seeing it here, I realize I should.
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
I've found Resolve to be more productive than other video editing programs I've used, primarily because the core operations of navigating through video and cutting clips just feel much more responsive to me. With other editing programs I often feel like the UI is waiting for editing operations to complete in the background, but with Resolve it feels like the UI updates instantly so I can continue working. It sounds like a small change, but it can make a huge difference for productivity since you are no longer waiting for UI confirmation after every action.
I just stich my vacation GoPro videos 4k60fps h265 with basic transitions and its the best among all I have tried. And the free version just works good enough for a usage like this. I’m not using any other features but I wish to be a semi-pro one day, but I wish they had a simpler version for use cases like me to appeal to general audience, I have been amateurly editing videos for more than 15 years and never heard of it, or probably it seemed too complex. But its not!
I recently used DaVinci Resolve (on a Mac) to create and edit screencasts. I wrote down [1] my experience including tips how to create a screencast in discrete steps versus doing one take which proved impossible for me to achieve.
[1] https://www.msgtrail.com/articles/20200614-1944-screencastin...
Resolve is decent for editing 360 video on a budget (GoPro Fusion, Insta360 etc).
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 love how this marketing page showcases people working at least somewhat collaboratively in a spatial, room environment. It's super refreshing to see this (even if it's sadly just 1 person driving the controls instead of everyone participating in the computation).
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:
Here's a music video I made in resolve and posted to YouTube yesterday:
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.
A desktop would probably serve you well. MacBooks are intentionally designed to thermal throttle under load so you can make full use of the hardware. Plus the flexibility of being able to switch out individual components is nice if you want to upgrade you gpu in a year or something
I used Resolve a while back to edit some vacation video, it worked well. I remember seeing on their website that they made control panels and the external GPU and thinking "it's nice they found a way to support their software." I had no idea they made cameras and all this other stuff! Their cameras are really cheap too. This is a game changer if they're any good. How have I not heard of them? Haven't paid much attention to cameras for a decade but surely they've been around.
I have yet to use it as I haven’t done video work in almost decade, but it’s really good to see some real innovation there after Avid, Apple and Adobe have been somewhat asleep at the wheel. Apple in particular did a terrible job with much of their video suite with the FCP 7 to X transition with iMovie influence.
That’s how I ended up using resolve, once it started becoming problematic to install FCP7 on new machines. Found it pretty simple to switch for most basic purposes.
Has anyone found a way to get Resolve to render previews into a RAM or disk buffer before playing them, instead of trying (and failing) to render everything in real time? This is my main complaint coming from Premiere -- along with the inexplicable lack of tooltips on obscurely labeled buttons.
And yet I've never managed to install it on Ubuntu. It's built for Redhat and there's apparently a series of adjustments that must be made, which are slightly beyond my grasp as a DOS refugee still trying to figure out this Linux thing.
As someone who learned video editing with Premiere I tried using Resolve and I can't get used to it. The forced workflow and node based effects are annoying. I cut out Adobe to cut costs and I miss it.
I just say this: In current situation of locked subscription models and bloated UIs Black Magic work is a breath of fresh air. And bmRaw is game changer. They get big thanks from me. Keep it rollin.
I'm not sure why but I'm very fascinated and satisfied by their choice in models.
The main drawback is that there’s no support for ProRes RAW.
a new version, DaVinci Resolve 17 event Nov 9th, 10am PST.
resolve is the best and I am so happy with Blackmagic as a company. They really leveled the playing field for small video producers like me
Last year I spent a couple months trying out a variety of video editing software. I really wanted something I could run on Linux.
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.