DaVinci Resolve 19 Little Things

Little Things I Love

My personal, but completely objective opinion, is that Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve 19 is THE most important tool to know and use for post production in 2024.

If you’re new here, you’re my new best friend - welcome! My name is Chadwick. I’m a 42-year-old New York-based finishing editor and a certified DaVinci Resolve master trainer with 20 years of consecutive daily professional experience in video editing for national broadcast commercials and churches.

The only reason I tell you that today is because I am obsessed with the small details and “perfection” (my commercial side), but more importantly helping you make a difference, using Resolve, in anything you feel called to create (my church side).

So… In no particular order here are my favorite “little things” I love and are brand new to DaVinci Resolve 19.

Restore Deleted Timelines

3 Dot Menu - Deleted Timeline Backups

DaVinci Resolve has always been a very stable software, but one thing you miss out on when you work in collaborative editing mode is incremental backups.  This means if one person in your project deleted a timeline, the only way to go back and get it was to restore your last entire library backup.  I’ve had to do this a couple of times and it’s no fun.  I love that Resolve is now holding onto old deleted timelines.

Numberpad Timecode Entry

Plus and minus to go up and down the timeline, or select to move or trim.  

Edit faster with the number pad, simple as that.  A pro tip is that the period key is the same as hitting zero twice. 

Deliver Page Optimize Audio Loudness

Different from Normalize, this applies compression and dynamics to really make a difference. I think this is somewhat similar to the match loudness feature in Adobe Audition.  It will be a good simple technique to get similar outputs across all of your videos.

Deliver Page Disable Video Layers

Dropdown in video tab.  Generics.  

This will make it very easy to render out multiple versions of your timeline, without the need to duplicate them in your bin.  I’m thinking for me, making submaster, textless generics will be my top use for this but it could also be useful for any kind of versioning.

Marker Clips in Media Pool to Rename

Now you can tab to rename markers in list view of Media Pool.

Keyboard warriors unite on this one.  One simple keystroke to power through renaming without touching a mouse or stylus. Tab, rename - Tab, rename.  Simple but great!

Inspector File Tab Audio Configuration

Skim Preview Audio Channels, and avoid opening clip attributes.

DaVinci Resolve does audio different and that’s not a bad thing.  However, the though of opening up the clip attributes panel everytime you wanted to use a new channel for a new mic in your timeline was kind of pita.  This should speed up changing mics, but more importantly allow you to audition the sound of them with the skimmer in the inspector window.  Love it.

Multipoly

Multimasks in 1 tool like Nuke. This just cleans things up.  We can do more with less clutter on the node tree.  A quick tip with using multiple overlapping masks is to enable the maximum paint mode to avoid doubling up overlapping edges with motion blur enabled.

Blackmagic Cloud Media Sync Improvement

Cloud Store update to work directly with Blackmagic Cloud Storage.  No longer will Google Drive and Dropbox be the only options to integrate with your hardware, physical based Blackmagic Storage.

This should help avoid some of the challenges of large video file sharing and the 3rd party api limitations.

Storage quotas, usage, file sync history, under profile - quota and used amount.  We now have more information on the status of our media that is going into the Blackmagic Cloud Storage.

Blackmagic Cloud Organizations

Resolve Studio Rental licenses, SSO, Group permissions for presentations, storage, rental licenses.  Blackmagic cloud organizations will make this a viable solution for mid to larger size corporations that have security requirements.  It allows for projects to scale up and down without taking on larger capex expenses.  Its easier to bill for the job.

$30/month to rent. Dedicated Project Servers - $100-$600/month. Or simple bmd server $5/month/library

EQ with Analyzer built in

The equilizer has added an animated visualizer so you can interactively see the frequencies as they play to make more visually aided eq adjustments.  There are also new high and low pass slope options for greater control.

Sidechain Capable VST and AU Plugin support

Sidechain EQ carving for a music track to make space for a voice to sit.  I haven’t tested this yet, but the assumption is that waves plugins that you love from ProTools could now be used fully inside of Fairlight.  Most audio engineers I know rely a lot on plugins, and now they can really use them all inside of Resolve 19.

Open FX DaVinci Resolve Renderer Plugin for 3rd party applications

Uses DRX stills. 

This can encaplisate almost everything that is not temporal from the color page, and includes some Resolve specfic effects.  Roundtrip to Nuke, Flame, Fusion Studio.  When installing studio, make sure to select the plugin option.  One limitation is you will need DaVinci Resolve Studio licenesed on that same computer.

Remote Monitoring with IP Address Connections

No need for a cloud login. 

Sign out of Blackmagic Cloud in prefs. Prefs - system - general - checkbox for use remote monitoring without blackmagic cloud. Workspace - Remote monitoring.  Share the IP address to the clients.

Client - remote monitor app - use remote monitor without blackmagic cloud

Use TCP 16410, TCP/UDP 16411, 16412 etc.. per client.

Performance Boost

2x faster decodes with ZIP1 compressed open EXR.  EXR sequences are great for many reasons including that you can distribute rendering across multiple machines, you can render just parts of your comp to update some specific frames that needed love, and they can hold multiple alpha channels independently.

Fusion View LUT

CST, OCIO, and ACES

This makes it simpler to see an accurate view of what the comp will looks like mapped to your sRGB computer screen and still work on linear footage like a good comper. 

Text Plus

On screen controls, right click, in fusion overlay mode.

You can now click and type directly in the timeline viewer with the text plus title effect.  This will make it much more interactive to make refined changes.

Trim Editor (edit page)

Double click, or choose trim - trim editor, drag or common period keys - lets you see the frame count.  And the best thing about the trim editor is it gives you a big look at your outgoing and incoming frame side by side to be as precise as you want to be for continuity editing.