DaVinci Resolve 21 NEW Quality of Life Features
Welcome to my lightning round of BRAND NEW favorite features DaVinci Resolve 21, what they do, and where to find them so you can start playing right away.
Render Magic Mask in Place
You can now render the magic mask out on the color page with the 3 dot option menu. This bakes out a ProRes clips and attaches it as an EXT matte. Perfect - no more retracking magic mask!
Spellcheck for Text
You’ll find both in the property inspector and clicking on the viewer, new curvy underlined markup to suggest a spelling fix. Right click the underlined word to accept the fix. We also have a font browser. In the inspector for a title, to the right of the font family, there is a new font browser icon to expand and preview installed fonts, or mark them as a favorite to appear in the favorites list.
Background Renders and Tasks
In system preferences you’ll find options under the new background tasks category to enable background renders, which includes hitting render from the deliver page and continue working on the same computer. Also you can run the AI transcriptions or proxy generation with new task options. When tasks are running, the lower right has a new process interface for background tasks.
Affinity Support for Layers
In the free photo editing and design software affinity, you can save the native AF file, load it into the media pool, place on a timeline and right click to “split layers in place”. Oh and saved changes in Affinity update immediately to the timeline!
Speaking of Layers, how about the updated Updated Keyframe Panel supporting multiple selected layered clips. Perfect to line up animation keyframes across different video tracks. As well as retime curves have bezier controls for speed ramping.
Hide Edit Page Tracks
Open the Index in the upper left of the edit page. Click Tracks, and you can save screen space by clicking the eyeball icon to shy away the track. Don’t worry it’s still there, and the composite result is in the viewer.
Fairlight Folder Tracks
The Fairlight page has another screen space saving trick called Fairlight Folder Tracks. Create a folder track by selecting multiple tracks in the left side header, right click and choose - “add tracks to new folder”. It’s like a compound clip, but better because you can toggle it back open, or just drag the nested tracks back out.
Mono Pans evenly to Stereo Tracks
Mono Clipson Stereo Tracks play evenly out of both headphones and speakers, instead of assuming you wanted sound only on the left channel.
Source Timeline Show Destination Patch
In the left source viewer, when clicing the timeline view in the upper left or using the hotkey option Q, to view the un-edited clip in a wide timeline panel - the blue source patches reflect what tracks will edit across to the right side orange program creative timeline. Disable here on the source side, it won’t make it to ther record side. Editing tools keep getting better! Oh I also noticed, if you swap between the source and record sides with Q, the divider line position stays in place which is also wonderful.
Tabbed Bins
Right click any bin to open as new tab. Or faster yet, use the hotkey command T to create a new tab, or command W to close a tab like you’re browning the web. If you search the keyboard customization you can assing next and previous tab like I have to the tab key and shift tab key for fast navigation. Oh and lets say you have a music bin and want to always view it as a list. In the top media pool toolbar change it to list view, then right click in the bin to choose “always open in list view”. Another useful new feature in thumbnail view is to click the 3 dot options menu to “export as pdf” to print out an overview of the frame view of all the clips in a bin.
Set Project Poster Frame
You can now force the project manager thumbnail images. In the media pool - drag the cursor over a frame of a clip in thumbnail view and right click. Go to “clip operations” - choose “set project poster frame”. The last 5 are used in the project manager.
Deliver Page Upgrades
In the lower left you’ll see file size estimations. There is a new H.265 codec option for Main Concept, which was previously a high end add encoding option - just included now. Also color managed timelines or projects can render with different output color space settings.
Remote Grades in Source Viewer
This feature is especially useful if you do your own color management with nodes instead of on the timeline or project level. The best way to set this up, is under project settings go to the general options tab, look at the color section, and uncheck “use local version for new clips in timeline”. This will default all new timelines to using “remote versions” for color page grades.
Remote grades automatically apply to all instances of the same file in the same project. So if you place a grade on a clip in a timeline now, not only will the grade be visible on the same clip in the source viewer which is what the new feature does. It also is pre-graded when it lands on any new social media aspect ratio timeline as well.
Select Transitions
From the timeline dropdown menu choose select transitions as a quick way to modify existing transitions on clips to make longer, change the type, or easily delete.
Remove Clip Color, Flags, Marker Attributes
This is a new option when you right click to remove attributes to cleanup timelines. I will use this a lot to select only the audio segments to remove redundant markers to make timeline navigation faster.
Reset to Original Audio Configuration
This is a new right click option on a media pool clips to restore any custom dual system syncing or channel mapping done in the clip attributes audio tab back to the original embedded settings.
New Data Burn-in Window
Under the top menu, go to workspace, down to data burn-in and we have a whole new window of options in Davinci Resolve 21. The data burn-in window overlays information on the timeline footage, useful to pass metadata visually in rendered out footage. I like the placement presets to pin to the corners. Pro tip here is to uncheck gang render text styles to freely align left or right.
This tool still is unable to show source timecodes for multiple video tracks at the same time. It displays the upper most clip that’s visible. I would love to see this one updated to include layer support.
Multicam Updates
There are three helpful changes to multicam on the edit page. When you right click to create a new multicam from the media pool, there’s a checkbox to “use full clip extents”. This will ignore all in and out marks. There is also a new Mulitcam Audio options called All Angles. All angles includes all audio tracks from all cameras individually. If you have one camera with 2 channels and one with 4 channels of sound. The multicam will show and use all 6 for easier edit page mixing and cutting.
The last important multicam update allows you to use the Q hotkey to show the multiview, not just in the left source viewer, but also out to your clean feed or blackmagic i/o box for everyone to see all angle options large in the room like a live switcher.
Fusion Node Remote Monitoring
Under workspace, down to remote monitoring - which streams your timeline out over blackmagic cloud or across your internal network, you can now send a fusion page node to this stream without going back to preview on the edit page. After starting the stream, on the fusion node, hit 3 on the keyboard or click the new 3rd dot to patch out to the remote monitor stream.
Compare with Timeline Backups
In the media pool bin, right click on a timeline and choose “compare with timeline backup”. Choose a timeline backup from the top dropdown list to compare against. The top is the backup - think source timeline with the blue playhead, the bottom is the current timeline - think program with the orange playead. If you wnat to accept the older timeline segments, from top to apply to bottom, just right click.
Transcriptions Column in List View
Right click the column header to customize columns and search to include “transcription” to preview the transcribed audio without opening the transcribe window for text based editing.
Batch Change Timeline Audio Channels
Select multiple clips on a timeline and right click to pick a different embedded or linked audio channel. Also if you shrink height of the tracks with shift scroll wheel, you’ll see the track names on audio have a nice darker fill to make them easier to read. This can be turned off in the top left timeline tool bar menu option for “display clip names”.
Picture in Picture Effect
This is an included facecam style effect that I will likely use for tutorials moving forward. This is in the Resolve FX - Filters section, but the fastest way to use it is to select a clip and shift space and type picture in picture. It defaults to the lower right with rounder corners but you can adjust and even make it circle with the inspector controls.
Krokodove Motion Graphics
If you’ve ever felt advanced motion graphics are lacking in Resolve and Fusion, I don’t think you will after you spend time to learn Krokodove. This has been available in the past from the Reactor package manager, but is now integrated. I honestly have not clue how to use it, but it makes me excited to learn a whole new motion graphics design toolset in the Fusion page this year.
Analyze Word Timing
In the inspector you can fix adjusted caption timing for word highlight style captions. First edit the clip segments like a normal title. Then re-analzye with the new button to “analayze word timing”. Or adjust and entire timelin at once in the track header. Right click the subtitle track header to “synchronize word timings”.
Color Page Updates
The color page node graph has a new list view. In the upper right corner you can click to view the nodes as a stack of changes. There’s also version support for groups, 4 more node stack layers for complex grades, and the all new multimaster trim manager found under the color menu for doing final passes on top of a master for a new deliverable.
Photo Page
And of course we have the new Photo Page to organize and grade photos like film which I have a dedicated quick start guide on screen for you to click on now, or if you’d rather learn the new AI tools in DaVinci Resolve 21 that’s there too!
