DaVinci Resolve 21

(blackmagicdesign.com)

135 points | by pentagrama 2 hours ago

17 comments

  • bbatha 1 hour ago
    For all the potshots about AI, this update is huge even if you take away the AI features. They basically added lightroom to this release. There's some polish before you'd want to change your subscription, but its really tempting. It may be the best photo management/editor on linux. Yes, I know about darktable and rawtherapee and I stand by what I said. They also added a ton of motion graphics stuff which from the beta seem to be enough to undercut a lot of basic uses of after effects out. The later two features are in the free release as well!
    • cjonas 1 hour ago
      I made the switch from premier to resolve a few years ago and it feels like such a breath of fresh air. Being able to do the same with Lightroom would be amazing so can't wait to check this out. I've been using the free version and honestly never needed the pro features but I think I'll make the one time purchase today just to support a non-subscription based product of this caliber
    • altairprime 8 minutes ago
      [delayed]
    • jackofalltrades 55 minutes ago
      I was not aware that we could edit photos in DaVinci Resolve in Linux. Thank you for this info, I'll certainly give it a try!
      • dofm 3 minutes ago
        Output size is limited to 4K in the free version, I think. Which is not nothing (8MP or something, good for a reasonably large print) but it might make you question how much editing belongs inside Resolve.
      • Hobadee 46 minutes ago
        You couldn't until this release. :-P
    • well_ackshually 33 minutes ago
      Also, nobody would have complained about "content aware face fill", "AI" image edition tools have been standard for ten years in Photoshop
      • embedding-shape 21 minutes ago
        I remember CS2 making big news with the "healing brush", that's like 20 years ago or something like that.
        • dofm 5 minutes ago
          That wasn’t an AI tool at all, though. Neither is pre-2023 content-aware fill, AFAIK.

          They are both PatchMatch (well the healing brush certainly is), which is a heroic bit of code. Entirely deterministic statistical algorithm. Not AI by really any definition (including back then)

          • embedding-shape 2 minutes ago
            In my mind, it's as much "AI" as "AI Slate ID" introduced in this release, which I guess was kind of the point of what GP said.
    • echelon 57 minutes ago
      > For all the potshots about AI,

      Most video is going to be AI in the near future. They see the writing on the wall. Their camera business line is going to sharply decline.

      • swatcoder 38 minutes ago
        > Most video is going to be AI in the near future

        That's like saying all fine art would be photography, all film would be CGI, or all music would be synthesized electronica.

        That's not how aesthetics seem to work. Artists will make more or less good use of generative AI in their work, and it will probably seep into most media in some way or another, effecting them, but arts mostly don't get replaced and AI doesn't really offer an exception to that history.

        • darkwater 15 minutes ago
          There will also be a longer or shorter period of time in which such technology will be abused by artists (because it's new) and at some point it will stabilize.
      • AngryData 14 minutes ago
        I doubt it because I wouldn't waste my time watching it and I can't imagine all that many people today that don't already watch AI videos are going to suddenly change their mind and decide they like AI produced Hallmark movies.
      • echoangle 45 minutes ago
        Aren’t the cameras they are making aimed at professional productions? Those are probably going to replaced last, the first thing will be (or are) TikTok clips shot on smartphones.

        I don’t think they’ll see a decline in cinema camera sales due to AI soon.

      • Sohcahtoa82 10 minutes ago
        No way.

        Even the frontier models running on insanely powerful hardware could only generate 15 second clips in low resolutions.

        And yeah, I saw some demos from Seedance 2.0, and they were awful. It's ridiculous how much people on Xitter were like "You can't even tell it's AI!" and I was like "It's trivial to tell it's AI" and could easily pick out all the markers. An individual screenshot could look good, but every time the camera angle changed, there would be a glaring inconsistency.

        You people are either blind, delusional, or outright insane. AI might be used for a quick clip, or used to enhance something recorded by a camera, but "most video" is definitely wrong.

      • CyberDildonics 51 minutes ago
        "AI makes real world obsolete." I think that's enough hacker news for today.
      • 13hunteo 46 minutes ago
        Why do you believe this? Are you expecting all media to become fully AI - sports, TV, movies, youtube?
        • add-sub-mul-div 40 minutes ago
          They've been spamming slop project submissions the last few months. But then again, who isn't?
      • VladVladikoff 54 minutes ago
        God I hope not. That’s depressing.
      • Geezus_42 50 minutes ago
        Even more reason to check out.
      • BoredPositron 35 minutes ago
        You are only looking at your own consumption at the moment. There are a lot of problems that still need to be fixed especially with rope artifacting. The 4k most models taunt isn't equivalent to a real 4k image or video as well at the moment you need a quality factor of two to get the equivalent result of a shot image or video. Resolution does not indicate quality.
  • bluelightning2k 50 minutes ago
    So much respect for Black Magic. They are absolutely World Class and their business model is extremely generous.

    Having said that, for all the AI features, the big one would be setting key frames etc. with an agent, driving the general editing workflow with text,etc. I realize this is non trivial but it's certainly viable for a team of this calibre.

    I think if BM added a paid for agent which helped execute their traditional video editing tools (even if it "only" supported a subset) then that's a subscription a lot of people would be willing to pay for, especially as their core tool is so generous.

  • odsodsods 1 hour ago
    people complaining about AI features have clearly never wasted hours editing video or lost time and money discovering a technical flaw in a rush shot three days ago. For actual workflows, these tools are lifesavers
  • jscheel 19 minutes ago
    I really don't understand why people are complaining about the AI features. These all mostly seem like solid quality of life enhancements and CGI-like tweaks.
    • starkparker 4 minutes ago
      some of these genuinely excite me, like the slate recognition (chore-reduction), clip search (although I'd want to see how reliable it is), and deblur (a typical PITA post fix). anything that makes masking, tracking, and level-matching easier saves hours on hours, but only if they're either reliable or easy to fix what the automation gets wrong (and it'll always get something wrong by the director, no matter how good it is, because telling editors what they did wrong is how directors make money).

      the more SFX-end ones like facial aging and face reshaper, or the talent-replacing ones like speech cloning/ADR, feel both too prescriptive for a director to dial in what they aesthetically want, and also not good enough for the final cut. so I struggle to find where they'd be actually useful in a workflow as opposed to being a trap, looking just fine enough at a glance to sneak into a final cut while looking poor when viewed by the audience.

      likewise the focal adjustment and upscaling just feel gross. the kinds of things a good cinematographer can already do, and it'll be so so tempting to use tools instead of taking time to do it right in camera because it'll look good enough in the editing bay, but I feel like it'd really stand out as fake in the final cut unless you're targeting like, heavily compressed social ads. the less you use them the better they'll work, which isn't ideal for a marquee feature.

      if the blemish remover really does respect continuity it'd be a nice-to-have, but it also feels like another trap to be careless/cheap on things like makeup or lighting at the shoot, at the expense of looking fake in post

      I think that's the broader angle that bugs me the most. all of these tools are convenience tools for editors, but in the end they'll really be justifications for directors/producers/studios/agencies to cheap out and do shittier work faster on the shoot. a cheap, shitty shoot covered in AI bandaids is still going to hit an audience like a cheap, shitty shoot.

    • dist-epoch 6 minutes ago
      Artists HATE AI. I fully expect some sort of DaVinci Resolve backlash, artists refusing to cooperate with those using this software.
      • gigatree 1 minute ago
        “WE WANT TO DO THINGS THE HARD WAY AND WE WON’T BUDGE”
  • antirez 1 hour ago
    Got a copy of the Studio version a few months later I opened my YouTube channel: among the best money spent in software of my life.
    • gbraad 1 hour ago
      I felt the same when I got Vegas and Sound Forge, but they never got released on any platform other than Windows, so eventually outgrew them. I totally understand what you mean; I use it, but also happy with Blender!
    • ncfausti 1 hour ago
      What do you like most about it?
      • embedding-shape 12 minutes ago
        One really neat thing is that you get free major updates. I bought a Blackmagic camera back when resolve was version 14 I think, and today I still use the very same license with Resolve 21.

        Not that I spent any extra money on the license compared to what the camera itself costed, but I also feel like the 0 money I spent was well spent :) Harder about the time commitment to move from something you know really well to something new, but the time I spent on that was very well worth it too.

  • pcurve 2 minutes ago
    so, it looks like all the AI features run locally (via DaVinci AI Neural Engine)?
  • bensyverson 12 minutes ago
    Hey Blackmagic, just be sure you're not in violation of Illinois BIPA with the face search thing. They can and will come after you.
    • nullbyte 7 minutes ago
      Face search? What do you mean?
    • rafram 5 minutes ago
      Pretty sure that does not cover a face database indexing your own photos/videos, running locally on your own computer. If it did, that would be extremely silly.
    • dist-epoch 7 minutes ago
      Doesn't seem to apply here.

      > BIPA establishes standards for how companies must handle Illinois consumers’ biometric information. In addition to its notice and consent requirement, the law prohibits any company from selling or otherwise profiting from consumers’ biometric information.

      https://www.aclu-il.org/campaigns-initiatives/biometric-info...

  • samuell 25 minutes ago
    For people using Resolve, would you recommend someone already quite well-versed in KDenLive to switch, for some non-profit work on cutting together educational content with some animations, some talks etc?

    Will it allow me to drastically improve my workflow (save time for some tedious tasks), increase quality of the outputs etc?

    • flexagoon 5 minutes ago
      Resolve was a much better experience for me than kdenlive. But you can easily try it out for yourself because most of it is completely free (in fact you probably won't ever need the paid features for what you do)
    • embedding-shape 15 minutes ago
      If you're organizing/having hundreds of clips you want to put together, or overall want a more opinionated workflow, then I'd say give it a try at least, the free version doubles as a trial :)

      I'm a Premiere migrant to Resolve (Studio) some years ago, biggest hurdle is the opinionated workflow, it basically wants you to use the tabs in the bottom to go from "Media > Cut > Edit > Color > Fusion > Audio > Deliver" (simplified) so different tools available in different areas, made for different use cases, but in general once you've learnt the overall and high-level concepts, it makes editing really easy and smooth.

      Besides, it's probably the most stable video editor that runs natively on Linux since ever, I think I've had it crash once, and the Fusion 3D text doesn't work properly for me, but besides that, runs like a dream and UX is miles ahead anything else available.

    • billti 11 minutes ago
      I'm no expert (relatively new to the field myself), but I was trying to put together some simple videos with animations in Final Cut Pro and decided to try DaVinci Resolve, and I'm glad I did. The Fusion stuff bundled into it is incredibly powerful for animations.

      It does take some getting used to, but the amount of tutorial content on YouTube is another reason I'm happy I made the switch. A lot of really good stuff on there. (Search on 'DaVinci Resolve Fusion' to see some examples of it in action if you want to get a feel).

  • wavemode 1 hour ago
    Eventually, in moviemaking, generative AI is going to be seen the way CGI is. That is, how people complain about CGI when it's obvious/distracting/noticeable, but the best usages of it won't be noticeable.
    • swatcoder 57 minutes ago
      Sure, and like CGI, it will change the nature of the media entirely.

      Different stories shown with different treatment. With CGI, scenes zoomed out to wider shots and effects swelled even louder over lighting, intimacy, acting, etc.

      Old styles didn't disappear or stop evolving entirely, of course, but the center of attention profoundly shifted and the "big" production money went with jt.

      Generative AI will likely drive some kind of analogous shift in dominant film aesthetics. I don't know where, but I'm not particularly excited by it myself yet.

    • add-sub-mul-div 15 minutes ago
      It really challenges my stance of human supremacy over AI when I only see these rote, shallow, unimaginative defenses of AI.
  • Lalabadie 1 hour ago
    The whole first section: 9 features, 9 titles with "AI" in them.

    I don't think their use of it is bad at all, I'm just tired.

    • zuminator 36 minutes ago
      They could remove the word "AI" from each one of those feature titles, and the titles would be just as descriptive without them. At this point, it's just marketing noise, more distracting than informative. Maybe like "cyber" in the 1990s. Would you like some AI tea with your cybercrumpets?
      • dist-epoch 4 minutes ago
        "Background removal" or "Face aging" without AI were done before, and they were shit.

        Putting "AI" into the feature title means "this time it actually works"

    • miniman1337 1 hour ago
      Its all local if that helps?
      • Lalabadie 1 hour ago
        I think they've made lots of great practical choices! 100% in agreement with running local models for these tasks.

        My opinion is that, for end users, if you name your feature "AI" to market it, you kind of already failed to read the room. You're writing to VCs while hoping it convinces customers.

        Name what the feature does, what it gains them. Call it "smart" if you must imply some black box treatment.

        Naming AI as the selling point for everything feels a lot like that Android tablet ad circa 2010:

        "Your wife will love the new dual core Tegra™ chipset!"

        • Sohcahtoa82 2 minutes ago
          > My opinion is that, for end users, if you name your feature "AI" to market it, you kind of already failed to read the room. You're writing to VCs while hoping it convinces customers.

          100% this.

          Maybe I live in a bubble, but consumer sentiment regarding AI seems extremely negative. Boasting "AI" features is more likely to lose sales than to create them.

      • embedding-shape 57 minutes ago
        And each is very specific to a use case, not a "general chat prompt for triggering API calls" but things like "ML model to categorize video clips and assigning tags + names, so you can find it faster" and similar.

        I'd also get tired if it was "AI ala Microsoft/Google" where the goal is to get you to write forever with a chat bot somewhere else, but these features are very different from that.

  • fishgoesblub 1 hour ago
    For all the issues with AI, these features aren't so bad. The "AI" search is possibly one of the more useful ones. That'll save me a fair bit of time.
  • goldenarm 22 minutes ago
    Resolve is an incredible tool, and I wish they improved the Linux support especially on AMD. It's the last reason why I have a windows machine, and Win11 made it unbearable to use.
  • wmf 47 minutes ago
    Discussion from April when this was announced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47760529
  • Avenassh 24 minutes ago
    Wrong kind of “resolve” haha. This one is more “please don’t let my AI-generated code leak keys before deploy” than video editing.
  • gbraad 1 hour ago
    Still a public beta?! Not sure why this is news ... the AI features?
    • billti 16 minutes ago
      I think it actually released today. I keep an eye on the forums to see the updates - https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=2369...

      (Can confirm - I just opened it on my laptop (I had the latest beta installed) and it prompted me to download the release version)

    • NBJack 1 hour ago
      The Lightroom competitor would be a big (and welcome) change to the market if it delivers.
      • alfanick 43 minutes ago
        The Lightroom competitor working on Linux is a huge news.

        (Darktable doesn't count, it's a scientific software with some wobbly UI).

        • alfanick 6 minutes ago
          Edit: Still garbage, required 100-lines script and LD_* shim to make it even run at Linux Mint 22.3 on AMD CPU + GPU. UX is even worse than Darktable, don't bother, not even close to Lightroom.

          At this point we need a Kickstarter campaign to make Lightroom run in Wine/Proton (no, no matter how much you try, it will not work so far). Edit: or GSOC to support Darktable to improve their UX.

  • neko_ranger 1 hour ago
    could use a little more AI. have they considered replacing users altogether?
  • akatsutki 1 hour ago
    Full AI