New editing software - DaVinci Resolve 12 short review

Editing and learning new software at the same time - I must be crazy… But while kdenlive is a very powerful piece of editing software, it has some limitation which makes it a bit clumsy to use for bigger projects.

Also, the color correction features are rather crude. Having hovered around Blackmagic Design’s products already for a while and having received a lot of recommendations for DaVinci Resolve in the Magic Lantern forums, I decided to give Resolve 12 a try. Blackmagic offers a version of Resolve which has very few minor limitations (no 4k editing, no 3D/stereoscopic editing, etc.) for free, so I grabbed it and had a look.

The first impression was quite awful. I couldn’t even figure out how to get my clips into a project to begin with. So I did a quick search on YouTube to find a few introductory tutorials on Resolve (there’s tons of those!) and off we went.

After overcoming the first hurdles, I started playing around with a few clips and within maybe two hours, I already felt at home. Once you have figured out the awkward media source management, Resolve 12 is super-intuitive and crazy powerful. It comes with already a nice selection of transitions, has a fairly good and flexible title generator and - of course - a million functions for color-correction. One of the things that blew my mind was how easy it is to pull a chroma key in Resolve - a great one, that is. It’s just maybe 5 or 6 mouse clicks and an additional click for automatic de-spill and you’re done. Even with not-so-great 4:2:0 h.264 source material.

Not too long after my initial playing around with Resolve, I decided to edit my current project “Tyttö ja sudet 2” with it and the raw cut was ready in just a few days. Me likes! :).

The only thing missing so far for me is the plethora of audio effects that come with kdenlive, most of all, the normalizer. And the biggest downer of Resolve for me is that the free version is only available for Windows (and Mac) - not for Linux. Quite a bitter pill for me as an 18+ years Linux user who prides himself of being Windows-free for 12+ years… But then, Resolve really seems to be worth it, so whatever… :)