Since Blackmagic combined Resolve, Fusion and Fairlight in the Resolve 15 Beta, I’ve been waiting for this one to get its final stable release. I’ve been using Resolve on and off for the last few years. Little bits here and there. Nowhere near as much as I probably should. But since the integration and 15 Beta release, I’ve been forcing myself to get used to it.
Now, Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve 15 is out of beta and the final version has now been released. It’s got hundreds of new features over Resolve 14, and it’s seen more than a few performance enhancements.
Although many of the features have been in the Beta since initial launch, if you’re coming from a stable version 14 straight to this, then there are a lot of changes to get caught up on. The most noticeable of which is Fusion integration and the enhancements brought to Fairlight audio added, first added in Resolve 14.
There is an absolutely huge list of changes you can browse on the Blackmagic forum, but here are some of my favourites…
- Support for GPU acceleration for the stabilizer with a speed up of more than 10x
- Improved performance when rendering H.264 clips
- Improved save and load performance with database optimizations for large projects
- Improved CUDA performance for high resolution clips and timelines
- Improved playback performance when monitoring on a single GPU system with scopes enabled
- Improved playback performance with mismatched output and monitoring resolutions with Blackmagic Design playback devices
- Dual screen layouts for the Fusion page
- Support for GPU accelerated OpenFX plugins
- Support for multiple track gap deletion
- Improved optical flow for speed changes
- Improved keyboard shortcut mapping
- Improved previews when performing blades on a multi track edit
- Improved ripple cut and ripple delete behavior
- Improved automatic track creation when dragging clips to new tracks
And there’s a whole lot more besides, especially when it comes to colour and LUTs, the Fusion integration, Fairlight Audio’s overhaul, better and faster GPU support, and everything else that just makes this a more complete and polished editing suite.
I’ve been looking to switch my video work away from an all-Adobe platform for a while now, which is the main reason I’ve been forcing myself to learn Resolve 15. Resolve definitely has its quirks, but overall I found myself getting up to speed with the Resolve UI fairly quickly, and able to start editing videos – at least, I did once I started reassigning shortcut keys.
While I have had Fusion installed in the past, I’ve not really played with it much. With it now integrated into Resolve, though, it makes it less of a hassle to deal with. It’s right there, just another tab in the app, and it’s very powerful. Getting used to a node based system vs the standard timeline layer-like system of After Effects takes a little effort, though.
The only place I feel I still can’t quite dump Adobe yet is audio. The Fairlight audio features built into Resolve are rather nice, and they’ve had quite the overhaul in Resolve 15. It might just be that I’m simply not used to them yet, but I can still do my audio much more quickly and efficiently with Audition. Whether it’s me or the software, I don’t know, but I’m going to keep working with it to try and find out.
DaVinci Resolve comes in Free or Studio flavours. The Free version is, obviously, free. It lacks a few of the more advanced 3D, VR, multi-user collaboration, noise reduction and some other filters & effects, but if you’re a one-man band making content for YouTube, it should be plenty. And if it’s not, stepping up to the studio version costs only $299 – which is nothing compared to its former $1,000 price tag – and that’s not a subscription price.
If you’ve never used Resolve before, then for free, it’s worth at least downloading, installing and checking out, even if you ultimately decide to go with different software.
You can download or purchase DaVinci Resolve 15 on the Blackmagic website.
