Blackmagic’s cutting edge video editing suite has just seen a major new revision, which the developers are calling one of the biggest overhauls of the software in recent years. Creative software upgrades create a tricky dilemma for all those that use these tools as part of their workflow, especially professionals; are the new features significant enough to warrant the cost of an upgrade? And what about bugs? Could the new version create problems that might interfere with your daily routine? It’s a difficult conundrum to reconcile, but the allure of the latest and greatest tools is often a strong one.
The headline features in the new version of davinci resolve include cloud-based working, allowing multiple editors to collaborate remotely, as well as a fully-featured proxy generator that promises to speed up your day-to-day tasks by switching out high-resolution footage with lightweight proxy data in a single click. There are also improvements to color space handling, GPU acceleration, and a host of other quality-of-life changes that promise to boost your productivity without compromising on Resolve’s industry-leading speed and ease of use.
Cloud Projects
The ability to work with colleagues and contributors remotely is a long-requested feature that is already available in several competing products, but Blackmagic has waited until they felt confident in their own implementation of this feature before rolling it out in this new retail release. No corners have been cut here; the Blackmagic Cloud functionality allows project files to be hosted remotely, similar to the Team projects functionality that Adobe users have enjoyed for some time.
Now, Resolve users can benefit from the same cloud-based project libraries that have proven to be a gamechanger for video editors that use Premiere Pro. Multiple people can work on the same timeline, see the changes to the timeline in real time, and choose to accept or reject them according to their personal preferences. Resolve boasts an additional trick up its sleeve however in the form of private clouds; this feature is free-of-charge, making it ideal for smaller creators, whilst those with more complex requirements can opt to take advantage of Blackmagic’s Cloud server for a small fee of just $5 per library per month.
Proxy Generator
Working with full-quality footage whilst editing makes for a time-consuming experience; this isn’t a disadvantage of Blackmagic’s software, but an inevitable reality of working with the extremely high bitrate source content that many modern video projects are filmed in. Creating your source material in 8K resolution offers numerous benefits, such as being able to zoom into specific areas of the video with no loss of quality but placing these files directly on your timeline inevitably causes problems when scrubbing through the timeline.
The solution to this issue has been well-known for some time; create an intermediary format file in a lower quality that you can use as a placeholder whilst editing, then replace the lower-quality files with the full bitrate versions prior to exporting the finished project. The trouble with this method is that it can be extremely time consuming to mirror your changes between the different source formats prior to export.
Now, in DaVinci Resolve 18, the new Proxy Generator application makes proxy-based workflows seamless and intuitive. The Proxy Generator is a hotfolder-based transcoder system that can generate H.264, H.265, or Apple ProRes proxies automatically whenever adding new source video to your project library. Switching between these lightweight proxy formats and the original footage requires only a single click.
The Proxy Generator functionality can also be combined with the Cloud Projects feature, allowing all users whether based on-site or off premises to edit using proxies, before relinking the timeline to the camera original source material for color grading and final exporting. Users without access to high-powered GPUs will benefit from the Blackmagic Clouds ability to create these proxy formats on the fly remotely, before making them available to use directly from the cloud. Thanks to Blackmagic’s Media Asset Management platform, all proxy footage can be viewed directly within a web-browser, and settings can be tweaked to generate higher or lower quality proxy material quickly and simply.
New Color Features
The Magic Mask feature from version 17 is back in DaVinci Resolve 18, now sporting an enhanced Object Mask facility available directly from the Magic Mask palette. The Object Mask feature is able to recognize and track the movement of thousands of unique objects in real-time, including animals, vehicles, people; anything you can imagine is now uniquely selectable and available for secondary grading or effects application without any time-consuming preparation. The software is able to pick out these important elements of your project without user input, enabling you to concentrate on your creativity.
The New Feature List in Full:
- Support for Blackmagic Cloud to host and manage cloud-based project libraries.
- New Blackmagic Proxy Generator App automatically creates and manages proxies.
- Ability to choose between working with proxies or camera original files.
- Support for intelligent path mapping to relink files automatically.
- Improved project library performance for private server.
- New object mask recognizes and tracks movement of thousands of objects automatically.
- New depth map generates 3D depth matte of a scene in DaVinci Resolve Studio.
- New surface tracker for tracking warped surfaces in DaVinci Resolve Studio.
- Refined ultra-beauty tool in Resolve FX beauty for advanced corrective work.
- Expanded subtitle support for TTML and XML timed texts, and embedded MXF/IMF.
- Support for reversing shape, iris and wipe transitions in the edit page.
- New 5×5 multicam enables viewing of up to 25 simultaneous different angles.
- Faster GPU accelerated paint tool with smoother strokes.
- Support for live previews when using the Text+ color picker.
- Ability to convert historical fixed bus projects to FlexBus in project settings.
- Improved Dolby Atmos immersive mixing, including Binaural monitoring.
- Decomposition of nested timelines with all track data including FX and automation.
- Innovative space view scope in Fairlight shows position and relationship in 3D space.