DaVinci Resolve 21

For all the potshots about AI, this update is huge even if you take away the AI features. They basically added lightroom to this release. There's some polish before you'd want to change your subscription, but its really tempting. It may be the best photo management/editor on linux. Yes, I know about darktable and rawtherapee and I stand by what I said. They also added a ton of motion graphics stuff which from the beta seem to be enough to undercut a lot of basic uses of after effects out. The later two features are in the free release as well!

So much respect for Black Magic. They are absolutely World Class and their business model is extremely generous.

Having said that, for all the AI features, the big one would be setting key frames etc. with an agent, driving the general editing workflow with text,etc. I realize this is non trivial but it's certainly viable for a team of this calibre.

I think if BM added a paid for agent which helped execute their traditional video editing tools (even if it "only" supported a subset) then that's a subscription a lot of people would be willing to pay for, especially as their core tool is so generous.

people complaining about AI features have clearly never wasted hours editing video or lost time and money discovering a technical flaw in a rush shot three days ago. For actual workflows, these tools are lifesavers

I really don't understand why people are complaining about the AI features. These all mostly seem like solid quality of life enhancements and CGI-like tweaks.

Eventually, in moviemaking, generative AI is going to be seen the way CGI is. That is, how people complain about CGI when it's obvious/distracting/noticeable, but the best usages of it won't be noticeable.

Got a copy of the Studio version a few months later I opened my YouTube channel: among the best money spent in software of my life.

I just pulled in 10 iPhone RAW files. It did a really nice job of processing them, I did the usual pulling-up shadows and highlights, and played with some of the sliders. Noise reduction and sharpening tools are primitive. Yet the photos look great. I finally managed to export ("render") them.

It's a baffling process flow if you're coming from Lightroom or a manual ACR workflow. But I'm excited to see where this goes. Quite simply, the output results are great. And free!

The whole first section: 9 features, 9 titles with "AI" in them.

I don't think their use of it is bad at all, I'm just tired.

I tolerate Resolve, essentially it’s just inertia. It is hard to imagine software could be commercial and so poorly made.

My favorite glitch that has persisted for many versions is how if you background it while it is launching, the GUI becomes frozen and the only way to use it is to kill the process and then launch it again making sure to not switch to any other apps while it loads. The worst one that comes to mind, because it happens all the time when I am using it, is when you hit undo once it could undo multiple recent changes (never know how many exactly, just have to guess), and if you then redo in panic it would only redo one of them, so you have to manually do it (fun when it involves fine color adjustments). For my own sanity will not try remembering all the other ones. In addition, a lot of counter-intuitive design choices, messy color management, etc.

Proprietary cross-platform software for multimedia production tends to be polished but Resolve genuinely feels worse than an Electron app, with subtle delays and micro-freezes in many interactions.

To be fair now with all those “AI” features they could probably say it is optimized for “agents” or something…

For all the issues with AI, these features aren't so bad. The "AI" search is possibly one of the more useful ones. That'll save me a fair bit of time.

The only thing wrong with Resolve is there is no "just get out of my way and let me get something done" mode. No easy/beginner mode. This is a very sizable, complicated piece of a software that has little bounds on what you can do with it. The learning curve is as steep and tall as the granite walls of El Capitan.

That's not really a critique on the software -- it's not trying to be what it's not. But the criticism of the software is painted by the fact that it's hard to get good at it. Well ok I will critique it: the user interface is garbage. Like they studied old versions of Gimp and thought, "let's do even worse".

The metaphor isn't perfect, but it's got some of that ol' TIMTOWTDI Perl feeling to it.

One of the rare pieces of software that actually gets you excited with each new release. Moved to Resolve from Final Cut a few years back and I've never been happier. Looks like this release just continues the already great experience.

Anecdote time.

I couldn't get Resolve to run on my discrete-GPU-less PC running Fedora. First the lack of RPM or Flatpak were lame, but integrated graphics was the real killer.

I started learning Blender VSE and walked away super impressed. Finally found my editor. (Spent years getting used to Premiere on Mac and PC.) It runs good even though I don't have a dedicated GPU yet, unlike Resolve. (And Blender is a full-on 3D modeller, I should note.)

I'm going to scale up my hardware eventually, but right now my editing needs aren't huge. Just chopping and splicing up stuff for YouTube. Blender's VSE is incredibly good for my use case.

There's a Linux amd64 version and a Windows arm64 version. However, I use a Linux arm64 machine, and arm64 machines are going to be a lot more common going forward. I wonder if there are plans to release a Linux arm64 build?

The audio-driven animation stuff here is so nice. A year ago I went on a journey to produce a video podcast waveform based off the audio track, and the process was incredibly painful for no obvious reason. My hope here is that I can now just do this all within Fusion and not need to render this in an external tool.

Also nice is built in loop (ping pong) animations! No more duplicating keyframes!

https://kylekukshtel.com/building-video-podcast-resolve-audi...

Discussion from April when this was announced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47760529

For people using Resolve, would you recommend someone already quite well-versed in KDenLive to switch, for some non-profit work on cutting together educational content with some animations, some talks etc?

Will it allow me to drastically improve my workflow (save time for some tedious tasks), increase quality of the outputs etc?

Those who have moved to Resolve from FCP: would you share a few words about your experience?

I’ve used FCP for a long time but have never loved it. I also have some experience with non-destructive workflows like Blender geonodes and have heard that Resolve adopts a similar paradigm. Definitely curious!

Just last week I made some automations for my recording and editing process in Resolve. Using Python to script initial editing.

It works pretty well. I tried it this morning and in about 15 minutes I had recorded and edited a three minute video.

(I've used AI transcription in resolve before, not this is actually editing the transcript with an llm and then inserting the clips. I also did breath detection and b roll placement. The Python scripting later is poorly documented and only supports a subset of the functionality of Resolve.)

Best release notes I have seen in a while. I don't even work with movies/pics, but this was so easy to understand. Well done

Anyone using this headlessly got a read on how much of this an agent could do without human intervention? Would love to have a gut check on "sure, spend the $295 and you'll get some benefits for free if you have an agent run your videos through this before shipping them"

To be clear, my use case is making weekly online videos suck a little less - not grading feature films :)

so, it looks like all the AI features run locally (via DaVinci AI Neural Engine)?

Does someone know if Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera is a good camera since it comes with the resolve studio ? Instead of buying a separate camera in the same price rangen (sony) for studio or indoor recording ?

Excited to see Resolve continue to improve. Hopefully this encourages more improvement in the wider ecosystem as well. Adobe really could do some amazing stuff with Premiere and After Effects.

Resolve is an incredible tool, and I wish they improved the Linux support especially on AMD. It's the last reason why I have a windows machine, and Win11 made it unbearable to use.

Still a public beta?! Not sure why this is news ... the AI features?

I like that it runs on Linux but coming from Lightroom, it is a challenge to use. I don’t even know how to import photos that are added to a previously imported folder

I still can't believe this software is free.

Hey Blackmagic, just be sure you're not in violation of Illinois BIPA with the face search thing. They can and will come after you.

Blows my mind how weak the competition for Adobe still is after all these decades.

Does it support phone recorded video without conversion?

That was the blocker for me. Kdenlive does

could use a little more AI. have they considered replacing users altogether?

Extreme Quality AI UltraSharpen is a Bourgeois Concept

I think this is my sign to learn video editing.

I despise AI generated no-effort art as much as the next person but what they are offering here is fine-grained application of AI tools which is completely different to one-shot do the art for me. Does anyone have experience with the processing cost it takes to run these effects locally? Topaz takes a minutes to do superresolution on a single picture and this has to work for many frames so I'd assume it is faster?

Also excited about the picture stuff. I'm on an aging Lightroom version and wouldn't mind something that works well on Linux. Also huge plus point is the licensing model.

Do they need to say AI for everything? I am so sick of even a basic plugin being named AI. The word has lost its meaning. Give up already.

who is going to use all this stuff to make what movies... where is the audience for any of it?

Wrong kind of “resolve” haha. This one is more “please don’t let my AI-generated code leak keys before deploy” than video editing.