Is DaVinci Resolve Studio worth Buying?
So… it’s Black Friday discounted deals season, and DaVinci Resolve Studio is ON SALE for the first time I've ever seen. For those on the fence about continuing to use the free version of Resolve or purchasing the paid Studio version, here are my top 10 Resolve studio-only features.
Noise Reduction & Motion Blur
Over 10 years ago, I needed to denoise footage for a Hotels.com commercial, and this was the initial reason I convinced my employer to spend $1,000 on a DaVinci Resolve 10 dongle. It worked great and still is one of the most significant selling points of the paid version of DaVinci Resolve. Neat video does a great job, frequently better - but at the cost of extra time spent. And no other editing system has anything near as good built right into the software for noise reduction.
The color page motion blur is another incredibly fast way to add fake motion blur to shots that never had it or were sped up in post and lost it. The trick to get the best results here is creating a compound clip or render in place before applying the fake motion blur.
Codec Support
Resolve Studio is the Swiss army knife of the entire post-production world. Except ProRes RAW, there isn’t a codec or camera format that DaVinci can’t handle. This has made it a staple for on-set dailies work for more than a decade, and that's why I love to use it. I never have to worry about getting a file from the newest, badest camera because I know Resolve will support the files right out of the box.
Magic Mask
Nobody likes to rotoscope. Magic Mask is the AI-assisted, motion vector-based tracker that helps extract foregrounds from backgrounds to make quick and dirty garbage mattes. It’s much like the rotobrush in After Effects or the new Magnetic Mask in Final Cut Pro. But what makes Magic Mask special is that it’s easy to add or subtract after the machine learning neural engine does its thing in the Fusion Page. In Fusion, you have all the polygon shape tools and paint strokes to clean up a bad Magic Mask and make a perfect alpha channel.
Text-Based Editing and Audio Subtitles
Nobody likes to transcribe by hand or write out subtitles, right? Well, in Resolve Studio, this is all taken care of by the neural engine that will process the audio and spit back out a text file that can be edited. Just highlight the text and click to add it to the timeline. You can also use the search with the magnifying glass to find a specific word to combine a sentence or two.
Intellitrack Point Tracker
Suppose you have ever wanted to let the computer do the hard work of following a pattern so you can either attach something to it or maybe just stabilize it. In that case, the new intellitrack point tracker is another one of those AI-based neural engine Resolve Studio-only effects that make it worth purchasing. Something calculates under the hood to memorize objects instead of contrast points to get a track that can be used for match moving simply and quickly.
Voice Isolation
The voice isolation feature does magic to remove background sounds and separate them and quiet them down from the main source dialogue. What I’ve found is that this tool is also incredible at removing reverb from large rooms, especially if there is an echo from a PA system. This audio track based feature is like the waves clarity plugin, but it's built into Resolve Studio and ready to use.
Remote Monitoring
How often do you work on a project that involves another person who needs to give approval or direction? If you do, then remote monitoring is a great way to show your timeline streamed out live to their iPhone or iPad with a free Blackmagic ID and them using the free Remote Monitor app. Louper.io is another great live collaboration tool that I love to use, but when I’m in a pinch, the built-in Remote Monitoring has been amazing.
Remote Rendering
Anytime you want to keep working on another shot or timeline or tweak a mix after you’ve kicked off a render in DaVinci Resolve, you just can’t. The entire system uses all its special power to encode and export a rendered-out video. However, with remote rendering, you can send the file to another computer inside your local network to render it while you keep working on the main workstation. This is powerful because you can scale your post house to work faster than anyone else, and it is part of the paid version of DaVinci Resolve Studio. The only catch is that each computer needs to have a studio license for this to work.
Timeline Scene Cut Detection
Color grading a show with a baked out, flat textless ProRes 4444 file is simple with this feature to detect scene cuts from the timeline. This function directly chops up your video file on the timeline so that each shot can be color-graded individually on the color page, even without an EDL or source camera footage. The advantage to this studio-only feature is that it's easy to join cut points by deleting them if the AI engine guessed wrong because its all timeline based.
Clean Feed to 2nd Computer Monitor
Bigger is better? That’s what they would tell me in Texas. My 10th favorite Studio-only feature is the ability to use a second computer monitor for a screen “clean feed” of the timeline. This means you can still preview your video full screen on another monitor even if you don’t have a Blackmagic ultrastudio 3G monitor device with a properly calibrated rec 709 display. Full screen playback is the best way to see every frame much closer to how someone might see it on TV. You can check if eyelids are starting to close - and that’s a big one for me.
I want to know more about what your favorite DaVinci Resolve Studio only features are. Shoot me a message, or comment. Or if you would like to purchase DaVinci Studio - it’s on sale now, check out my affiliate link that helps to support this website and free youtube tutorial channel. See ‘ya soon!
