I recently spent the time to get decent at DaVinci Resolve, and really enjoyed it. It is a powerful and impressive grading program, and I will certainly be making extensive use of it in the future. I of course have Adobe SpeedGrade though, as it is part of the Adobe Suite, and with the latest version of Creative Cloud 2014 it has not only allowed for your whole timeline to translate over to SpeedGrade (it used to only take on track at a time), but it also applies the looks that you create almost instantly back into Premiere Pro and puts them on the clips as Lumetri Filter FX that play back in reel time on most clips, and mean you don’t have to render out the clips as new clips, you can have your Color correct attached to the original clips! Not only that you can always go back and edit the effects in SpeedGrade at any time! THIS IS AWESOME!

And it works great, at least in initial testing! I was able to quickly come up with a pretty good grade, and quickly send it back to Premiere Pro where it was put back onto the original clips in the sequence! Wow! And I love the new Master Clips setting, which lets you set a grade for every instance of a source in the timeline, what a time saver!

I have to admit SpeedGrade is a little quirky though. It doesn’t handle dual monitors well, not letting you split parts of it’s interface off at all (which meant my scopes were too small). And it basically has no menus everything being in the interface, which seems very un-Adobe like. Not too hard to use once you learn the basics, but certainly confusing for a beginner.

And I hate the lack of Curves. Sure you can go in and you have 9 levels of control over individual luminance levels of an image and can do different color effects to each, and that is certainly powerful and has it’s place, but curves such a quick and easy way of control the look of a whole image at once, that it would be a very powerful addition to SpeedGrade.

The other would be support for more than just AJA Video Output. They need to get BlackMagic support in their as more places have the less expensive alternative to AJA. And you really need video output to get a great grade.

Still, even with these issues I would consider using SpeedGrade for grading with Premiere Pro because it is so easy to do, and just have the grade within Premiere Pro, easily changeable and easily removable. For now I will still go with DaVinci for things that need reel precision, as it works with Black Magic (and that is what most machines I work on use) and has curves, and even some editing functionality, but the integration with Premiere Pro means that I will be turning to Adobe SpeedGrade for much of my color grading needs!