Da Vinci Resolve 15 & possibly 16

[ADBest]

I have just searched the forum for comments on the Da Vinci Resolve program and can find no reference to it.

Members of my club, Darlington Video Makers Club, are busy searching through the mountain of YouTube material to see who can climb the learning curve first.

Bearing in mind the cost of decent video editing programs this free program by the Australian company, Blackmagic, is worth a very close look.

We are into the usual PC specification jungle and I was looking for the views of the wise.

Has it been looked at and discarded and we are just behind the news?

Arthur Best

[Roy1]

Hi. Try googling Da Vinci resolve. I did it and it seems to give a lot of info. Hope this helps.

[Richard Scarsbrook]

Several members of Altrincham Moviemakers have been using Da Vinci Resolve for a while now, and seem delighted with it. It's a full-featured package comparable to Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro, and a step up from cheaper packages like Premiere Elements, iMovie, and the products from Corel, Pinnacle, Magix, Cyberlink and so on. And it's free.

I've read that the reason it's free stems from Black Magic's business model. They sell high end hardware for professional editing suites. Their hardware and Resolve are optimised to work well together - better than Premier, FCP etc - and by giving away Resolve free they hope to build a community of users with Resolve skills who will eventually work in the industry and enlarge the market for their hardware.

[TimStannard]

I've used it and like the workflow. I struggled with it (and gave up) for a 2hr theatrical production, but I put this down to lack of perseverance and the fact I've used Vegas for 14 years. I did not find it as good as Vegas for audio (then again, I don't think anything is as good as Vegas for audio). For example I like to lay down markers on the beat if I'm cutting to music, by tapping a key whilst the music is playing. With Vegas this is pretty accurate, but in Resolve I was getting a frame out (i.e. it didn't respond to the keystroke as quickly).

Nodes for Colour correction is a great way of working. I haven't spent long enough with Fusion to get to grips with using nodes for compositing. What I can see is that any compositing such as was required for my Christmas film "Miracle on the Mantlepiece" would very quickly fill the screen with a network of nodes and a lot of organisation would be required.

For what its worth I did almost all of this promo in Resolve 16 [youtube2]https://youtu.be/8JNI47nyXoI[/youtube2] and I found it as easy as I could reasonably expect for software new to me.It includes split screen work, animated titles, colour correction and some blemish removal (dirt on lens). The only part that was not created in Resolve is the "confetti" explosion at the end, for which i used HitFilm Pro. The festival has not been launched yet so please keep this video to yourselves for now.

[ADBest]

Hi All

I think my search was futile because my password had been erased because of lack of posting activity. Since reinstated thanks to Dave Watterson.

Will now have a browse.

We have set up a closed WhatsApp group at DVMC and we have 13 people climbing the learning curve together, roped together in a digital fashion.

As has been said, it is a bit difficult to get to grips with but that is true of any new program. The only way to learn is to set about a project using 'Resolve' and sort out the problems as you meet them. I must admit that I cheated a bit and did a couple of complicated sequences in Premiere CS5.5 and then imported them into 'Resolve' as .mp4 files.

Blackmajic appears to have come to our rescue in the financial battles with Adobe and Microsoft and dare I say it -- Apple.

Thanks for your comment.

Arthur Best

[Michael Slowe]

No comments on Resolve (Media 100 for me and much too old to change!), but well done Tim, great promo video. Really good, although I never like split screen. The music of course helped you enormously, did they record that just for you?

[TimStannard]

At the risk of going off topic, thanks Michael. The split screen in this instance is supposed to conjour up the idea of seaside postcards but also allowed me to crop in or use lower resolution footage of choirs which came from various sources. One such source for a couple of choir shots (no problems with quality here) was our own Jill Lampert - thanks Jill. The music was on a CD of samples the Festival Director had for his own choir. He obtained permission for its use in the promo (this being a commercial enterprise everythin has to be above board). I was worried as it's extremely repetitive, but once the images were synced it seemd to work rather well - glad you approve. (The short overall length helps, of course)

But the point of posting was really to demonstrate some of the capabilities of Resolve, achieved pretty easily in the hands of someone who has spent years becoming familiar with something entirely different.