Of all the cool gear and equipment shown off at NAB this year, I gotta say the most impressive was Blackmagic Design’s reveal of DaVinci Resolve 14. There are so many reasons I could choose to highlight as to why I liked it so much, but the most serious is definitely the incorporation of Fairlight’s audio technology to such an extreme extent.
Over the past few years, Blackmagic has slowly brought Resolve into the NLE space by adding more and more editing tools. It really can into its own with the release of 11, but 12 and 12.5 made it a serious contender. And the best part of their strategy was the release of a Lite version for free, though a Studio version was still available with some features dedicated to professionals. Now, with a complete audio suite in addition to editing and world renowned color grading tools, Resolve 14 is looking like it might be one of the best NLEs on the market. Especially since they managed to slash the price of the full version to $299 from $999.
This not only makes it a great choice for people like me, shooters who occasionally need to throw together a rough edit or make tweaks to a final cut, but students/beginners and advanced amateurs who may be comparing it to the likes of Final Cut Pro X or Adobe Premiere Pro as part of a Creative Cloud subscription. The biggest reason being that there is no subscription and there is a free version to try out to see if it is the right fit, and that you don’t have to pay for until you really need the features locked in the full version.
I could go on and on about how significant the Fairlight tab is on Resolve 14 (though not really since I’m not an audio expert), but there are other nice tweaks that make this the best version yet. Under the hood Blackmagic has made it much more responsive, up to 10x in certain situations due to more advanced processing methods. This also means that it should run better on lower-spec machines and laptops.
Another major change for professionals (full version only that means) is the addition of baked-in collaboration options. Now you can have multiple users working on a single project at the same time. This can dramatically speed up workflows and there is a chat so that all the users can easily communicate with one another.
There is a lot more hidden away as well, and if you are a current user looking for all the details I highly recommend checking their site and forum for a details list of changes. Anyway, I know what I’m doing tonight, downloading the public beta of DaVinci Resolve 14 and then waiting for the official release so that I can purchase a full license.
Shawn C. Steiner 