Comment by neovive
21 hours ago
I've been using it for many years, and it's grown in power and functionality with every release. BMD has offered free upgrades to Pro users (with no subscription) for many years, which is refreshing given the current state of software licensing.
For those upset with the new agent integration, keep in mind that one of the big knocks on DaVinci Resolve is that it's hard for beginners. Powerful tools like color grading and nodes take years to truly master (and that won't change), but making it easier for users to collaborate with the agents they already use to help learn and perform basic tasks should help with the learning curve.
Ultimately, professional video editing is an art. An agent might save time with asset management, project/timeline setup, etc., but it won't replace the real experience and taste required for larger projects. I would rather spend the extra time on the nuanced/deeper creative work.
Not only are the upgrades free, the full license is still only $295 and can be freely migrated between macOS, Linux, and Windows (unless something has changed, serial numbers can be activated on two systems at a time and transferred freely so long as you have Internet access).
I'm no expert, but I never found Resolve materially more difficult to learn or use than Final Cut Pro or Premiere. And if you're doing anything moderately complex, it's potentially easier to learn because things that require external tools in FCPX and Premiere are built in to Resolve Studio.
I suspect the agent integration is primarily workflow/UI related, but regardless, I don't see it as any more anti-creative than incorporating precanned effects and presets into a project, and potentially a very useful learning tool since the Resolve UI is quite good at letting you see how the sausage is made.
$295 one time permanent license with free upgrades and can be migrated between different computers?
I don't have a single reason to do any form of video editing, let alone professional video editing, but that kind of pricing model makes me want to buy a license just to make sure that companies like this stick around.
Black Magic supports all three platforms and they’re not exactly a large company. They show every day that there is no excuse/reason not to support multiple platforms. Anything else is just an excuse by a lazy developer. The developer for Blender is also the same. A user of both programs.
Black magic also make a program that support/ties into the camera hardware on smartphones and they support both Android and iOS.
Plus you get the license for free when you buy a camera from them!
I’ve been using DaVinci Resolve Studio for 12 years now with frequent updates, with the license I got with the original Pocket Cinema Camera for £800 (still a fantastic pocket size cinema camera, shoots raw cinemadng and ProRes with a beautiful sensor).
One of the best founders and companies around.
> $295 one time permanent license with free upgrades and can be migrated between different computers?
I've been using Resolve since version 14, still getting upgrades to it! My license does only work on one "computer" at a time though, so when I switch between Linux and Windows, I need to re-enter and activate the license, as when I do that it deactivates the previous (other OS) one. You have seemingly unlimited amount of times to switch though, as I've probably done it on a bi-weekly basis for quite some time.
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Having a powerful video editor you can grab any time you need to is useful in a way few other bits of software are. Sure, for trimming and even some basic editing or watermarks, ffmpeg works great, but there are times when having full editor ui is beneficial
They make their money from hardware (and hopefully will continue to be able to do so).
This is commoditizing Adobe for them.
Highly recommend the studio version. The ability to edit by transcript is worth the price alone.
Or buy the ~$400 speed editor and get the license for free. That's what many people do.
For me it was the other way around - bought the license and got the speed editor for free. Though it may be a different model, I think the stand-alone price for it was way less than $400.
Taking away some of the more monotonous and "uncreative" tasks in any job can be taking away some of the variety in the work. Variety is nice. Variety affords us downtime. As the job gets stripped down to its core function, while a machine keeps the pipeline full so that the work can continue uninterrupted, the downtime slips away.
And great for beginners, now they get to pay some chatbot company to cover the gaps left by detereorating software design. Lucky they're already using agents... are they?
I have to disagree. You are already many levels away from the actual pixels. This is what software is for. Drawing a line for you personally is dismissive of the rest of the user base. Just because there is a so called agent added to the mix doesn't remove the human. It includes far more humans and enables them to use the tool. This is design if done right. Also you seem to be critiqueing the concept not the implementation.
I don't mean to be harsh, only passionate.
Hard dissagree, it's just the pot boiling to harvest data and render future users helpless without the chatbot. Your stance is anti-human, and the robots and ceos will not appreciate your efforts in giving capital more power over creativity.
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> Variety affords us downtime
This feels inverted to me: downtime affords us variety. If I have little downtime then I'll strongly prefer known, efficient methods of doing something, rather than experimenting with new ones.
> As the job gets stripped down to its core function, while a machine keeps the pipeline full so that the work can continue uninterrupted, the downtime slips away.
This I agree with, though.
This concept of, say, "productive downtime" was the topic of an article I encountered/skimmed not long ago: "There are no easy calls anymore" https://www.customerexperiencedive.com/news/agents-are-overl...
Editing to add my own salient tl;dr: shifting the "easy" tasks onto AI agents leaves the human ones to shoulder the cognitively demanding loads, resulting in burnout.
There are nuances, of course, but if you imagine that while once a human might have been responsible to move 500lbs a day, broken up into primarily small loads, now a robot is moving anything under, say, 20lbs and the human is left to only carry the heavier loads across the same time period so is now hefting 50 or 100lbs at a time and required to do across the same day, so now they're moving 1,500lbs a day.
> Taking away some of the more monotonous and "uncreative" tasks in any job can be taking away some of the variety in the work. Variety is nice.
Ultimately, and this applies to so much of life, "to each, their own," right?
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I've been thinking a lot about this across many different mediums, not just filmmaking, and I think it's one worth digging deeper on.*
What is lost when losing the (understandably annoying) process of the grind? By letting LLMs do the busy work, do you lose the opportunity to stumble into randomness? Do you lose the understanding of what is possible/interesting with the medium?
And do you end up in this derivative future where decisions are made by a system that was trained on all the previous uses of it?
Obviously that's fairly hyperbolic, but I have absolutely felt the pull of it all. When it decides to take a couple extra steps I didn't ask for creatively and I think "eh, that's fine."
*EDIT: I wrote this and looked back and this SOUNDS like an LLM wrote it. See what I mean??????
> Taking away some of the more monotonous and "uncreative" tasks in any job can be taking away some of the variety in the work.
Thank. God.
I never want to rotoscope again.
And frankly I'm not fond of editing either.
Helping more beginners might upset some who have put in the labor.
Over time many things become easier to learn and do, and those who might feel upset should make sure their own feet are moving as well in terms of their learning and growing.
yes to agents! how i had wished i could just point an agent at my footage and instruct "do something sensible with color grading and audio cleanup". i just want something presentable for a hobby video podcast. it doens't have to look a million bucks, and i have no time or desire to learn the intricacies involved. just something that would get me 70% (or 50%!) the way there would be more than fine.
Resolve is not any harder to use than any other NLE.
Although... BMD has actually made it harder, by adding bloat like the Cut page. I have attempted to find value in it a couple of times, and didn't. Now I disable it.
BMD needs to stop throwing crap into Resolve and buckle down and do two things:
1. Fix bugs, including UI defects. The Deliver page is a mess. The clip selection between the Edit timeline and the Fusion page makes no sense. And lots more.
2. Unify the node views. Resolve is a bunch of stuff BMD bought and threw together on different pages. The "integration" is janky and can, especially for the beginner, seriously degrade your work. Once example is how Fusion compositions inexplicably downgrade everything to timeline resolution. So you can bring 4K footage into a Fusion comp, but if your output timeline of the moment happens to be merely HD, the entire composition (including keys) will be degraded to work at that resolution. I mean... really? And beyond that, the relationship between Fusion comps and the timeline events they wind up in is extremely fragile and breaks arbitrarily and unrecoverably all the time.
A single nodeview for all operations would be a long-overdue game-changer for editing software.
Have you ever considered that you aren't the target audience for the cut page? It's supposed to be paired with a speed editor and is mostly intended for assembling rough cuts. You probably aren't cutting features or television or multicam so it's usefulness is probably out of your range of use.
No offense whatsoever. But this whole line "but it won't replace the real experience and taste required for larger projects" is not how I see it. I wish people are more humble at this juncture of AI progress. This is not to say humans won't play a part but saying xyz cannot be replaced is a big stretch. Saying its not there currently is okay but saying it won't replace I don't see where that's coming from.
The way I see it, it’s all about how you use it. Let people have tools; their output stands on its own legs.
As pro software, the UI has a learning curve. Many YouTube videos are out of date, or unnecessarily drawn out.
Additionally, as a hobbyist, project settings, color spaces, clipping, etc can be tricky to miss.
I’ve already been using Claude to (1) help me with UI, (2) QA my delivery, and (3) occasional fixes for audio repair; waveform sync (can’t afford time codes).
I make all creative decisions - including most menial ones - myself, I wouldn’t have it any other way; I enjoy the act of creating. I welcome this integration.
I’m sure some users are gonna agentically grade or whatnot. I don’t like it, but I’m also don’t believe in telling other people what they should do with their own work and creative process.
Because there has to be demand for it. There are hundreds of tasks that could be automated right now, and people still choose to do them by hand. Just because something is technically replaceable doesn’t mean it will be replaced and editing is a deeply personal part of the process for almost every director. It will change, but for serious work, it will never be a sure shot job handled entirely by AI. Sure, for low effort marketing videos you’d outsource to Fiverr, it’ll happen sooner or later but that’s not what we’re talking about here.
> ...but for serious work, it will never be a sure shot job handled entirely by AI.
Maybe not entirely handed by AI but when AI starts doing it better than most and in a fraction of the time, for a fraction of the cost, why do you think it wont be at least partly delegated to AI?
the "never" is what gets me here.
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For anything that can create better margins, and that is not outlawed, there will be demand.
> But this whole line "but it won't replace the real experience and taste required for larger projects" is not how I see it.
Why not? Personally (although I'm not saying others have to see it this way too), I'd wait until I can see what AI can replace, before believing so, rather than the opposite.
So far, AI isn't able to "set direction" at all in any sensible way, especially for a creative project like TV or movies, the results are just too bad (today). Although it's excellent at "following directions", which is why these new APIs are great and exciting, it lets people who are good at setting direction to leverage these tools to have the direction concretely followed by something, without having to create a group of collaborators.
Until we've seen proven that AI can indeed "set directions" ("have taste"), I think it's fair to assume they're unable to do so in a way that it produces something that humans generally enjoy. And very far from the kind of masterpieces a human can create.
Yes people really need to take the AI’s feelings into account before they say things like that.
The person you are replying to seems to have a depth of experience with editing over many years.
It seems pretty clear that AI capabilities are jagged. There are good reasons to believe based on research and the subjective evaluation of experts who are quite friendly to AI that there are some tasks creative tasks that AI has been really quite good at (totally disrupting stock illustrations) some where it does so much better than typical person, but not nearly as well as well as an expert (song creation) and some where, so far, it pretty much fails, and sees almost no progress even as models get better and better. (long form creative writting). Indeed, writting style sometimes seems to fall backwards with recent releases.
Also, it's subjectively, but commonly held to be true that most of the content created when AI can execute well lack taste, unless the human creating with AI has it. The term "slop" exists and in legible for a reason.
I mean, maybe this is just a question of different people speaking about different time horizons.
But it seems perfectly sensible for someone to say that there is a lot of automation that can happen in the near term, and that they see no reasonable evidence that AI can do interesting or even coherent work this space.
I don't know that shallow accelerationist boosterism (or panicked doomer despair ) that handwaves away the distinctive variations AI performnce is that enlightening.
I understand what you're saying and I agree, ostensibly, but on the caveat that it's hinged on the "we don't know what we don't know" aspect of reality. If we restrict our domain to what's forseeable, it's still apparently the case. Astra's demos have me scratching my head, diminishing returns are kicking in harder and faster than anticipated. It seems we've entered a phase to where frontier companies have completely abandoned improving the substrate because they can't justify it. It seems like it's all just harnesses and reasoning orchestration at this point. Hell, everybody but Google seems to have given up even on projection layer improvements (and Gemini is unusably bad in other ways).
Watching this next generation closely, because there are just a shitload of red flags starting to crop up that don't seem to be going away.
Taste is subjective - that's why it can't be replaced.
I would gladly enjoy to collaborate with an agent if I can learn more about video editing. I edit my video only for passion and to learn something new though, so I guess that professionals may see this in a different way. But I don’t think that it’s much different from how Claude code revolutionised the software scene.
Same. I edit lots of stuff in DaVinci, but am quite bad at it. As in, I spend forever figuring out how to do the stuff I want to do. I don't need the AI to invent stuff for me or take any decisions, just help me achieve my vision. Often it's quite simple stuff, where I'm forced to watch a too long video tutorial to figure out how to do something. But if I instead can ask it "help me to configure it so that the subtitles get baked into the video" or whatever it would be nice.
> it won't replace the real experience and taste required for larger projects
[Citation needed]