Editor and teacher Bart Weiss looks at DaVinci Resolve 15: a familiar editing interface, Fairlight audio with an ADR tool, upscaling and built-in Fusion.
We used to talk about the 3 A’s of editing, Avid, Adobe and Apple. I think the time add a B for Blackmagic is now. For those of you that have been moaning about the loss of Final Cut Pro 7 this could be called Final Cut Pro 8. The interface will seem familiar, and it has the full suite of apps, on steroids. We all know that Resolve is the go-to color grading software, and often we will use Resolve to ingest footage, now you can just stay here.
There are some touches in the editing part, like being about to have several timelines opens and letting you cut and past from one to the other. And letting you have different keyboard shortcuts for each room.
Last year they added Fairlight, the sound editing program but it was mostly a shell of what was to come and now it is here. There are many nice touches here including a nice noise reduction and many other filters and effect, but the thing that will run your head is the ADR section. You can import a cue sheet list and have real and the interface really thinks about what you need to do to have a good adr session.
A really nice addition is a super scale upscaling which will take your SD footage and make it look better. It slows down things a bit but it can really help.
There are hundreds of improvements but the one that will make a difference is the integration of Fusion. For those that don’t know Fusion has been around for since 1987 and is a sophisticated graphics program. In 14, it was paired with Resolve, you could send a project to it and round trip back, but now you just go to the Fusion room, work on a clip, and go back to the edit page.
Fusion is kind of like After Effects but works with a node based system that will freak you out the first time you look at it. But once you look into it, it is simply a matter of building blocks, connecting effects or tweaks to a node or block, than adding more, and adjusting what you add.
Each block has an input and output. Once you get this, integrating effects will come easy.
Indeed one of the best things about the Adobe universe is being able to go back and forth from Premiere to After Effects, and now the Resolve universe is a good match for that. All that and you can have a free version that does so much. And if you purchase the Studio version, it is a one-time $299 purchase, instead of paying Adobe for the rest of your life.
Maybe it’s time resolve to try something different.
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