Blackmagic Designs releases Davinci Resolve 12

Blackmagic Designs have released Davinci Resolve 12. It is still Free for the Lite version, $995 for the full version or $29,995 for the full version including the full control surface.

The new version has a new interface that is supposed to be easier on the eyes.

It has multi-cam editing, that allows real time editing.

It has also updated it’s editing mode, with an improved Trim Mode and more.

And it now has a new audio engine for better realtime playback.

And of course grading improvements.

RedShark on all BlackMagic Designs announcements from IBC 2014

RedShark has an article on all of BlackMagic Designs exciting new announcements from IBC 2014.

My personal favorites are:

DaVinci Resolve 11.1 is out now.

And BlackMagic has purchased Eyeon Software the maker of Fusion the high end digital compositing, visual effects and Motion Graphics Software! Wow, and lets hope they do to it exactly what they have been doing with Resolve, make it better, and cheaper than ever! Let’s hope they eventually have a free version with full Resolve back and forth for an amazing new free or affordable compositing program! And lets hope for a Mac version very soon!

Fusion looks insane. Node based, but their Sizzle Reel stills looks very very complicated!

It supposedly already supports CUDA for acceleration so it sounds like a great fit with Resolve.

Info on Eyeon is available at the Eyeon Web Site.

After learning DaVinci Resolve, I decided to delve into Adobe SpeedGrade, so far I will be sticking with Resolve

After learning DaVinci Resolve, and being incredibly impressed with it, I decided to learn Adobe SpeedGrade for it’s integration with Adobe Premiere Pro (my current choice of edit software), but so far I have been less than impressed.

First off with Resolve and a good NVIDIA Cuda card, the program works great with BlackMagic or AJA video cards, is rocket fast and you get a recreation of the timeline from your edit program, and can remove shots as needed, or do basic editing. And you have such a great collection of edit controls and presets.

With SpeedGrade you only get a single video track (or 3 if you have dissolves or transitions as it puts the a & B on different tracks and the transition in between). So you need to prep your sequence, and the send from Premiere is even weirder. Instead of using the original media files, it converts everything into uncompressed DPX image sequences, which will take up a huge amount of space (uncompressed files after all) and it bakes in any effects you applied into the clips. So it basically ignores the awesome Mercury playback Engine from premiere, and it’s only real bonus is that your color correction returns to premiere as a filter applied to the clips.

You can work with original premiere pro clips, but not with the send from premiere command, instead you need to export and EDL from Premiere and import the clips into SpeedGrade that way.

And there there is the fact that it doesn’t export video a monitor using Black Magic video cards, only AJA! This sucks. It should work with everything Premiere Pro does!

And as for the color correction, the lack of curves is inexcusable! Curves are such a powerful color corrector and Adobe needs to fix this right away.

I know Adobe purchased this program to compete with Apple Color (now defunct) and DaVinci Resolve and round out their suite, but I would rather see them base the whole program on the amazing Mercury Playback engine from Premiere Pro, instead of having this current attempt at integrating the two programs, which seems more like a cludge than reel integration. Yes, having the color correction return as plug in corrections is very very cool, but so far that is really the only thing cool i am seeing about SpeedGrade.

I have not fully explored or gotten proficient with the program, and I will report back once I have, but so far my initial impressions don’t make me consider moving away from Resolve for my color correction needs.

Oliver Peters at Digitalfilms has a great comparison of AVID Symphony, Adobe SpeedGrade, Davinci Resolve and Apple Color and my thoughts

Oliver Peters has posted an article with a great comparison of AVID Symphony, Adobe SpeedGrade, Davinci Resolve and Apple Color.

Personally I have been spending a lot of time with Davinci Resolve of late. With a proper video card it is really an awesome program, and is certainly my current choice for color correction. It is fast and easy to use and does a very good job.

The other interest is SpeedGrade which I am learning, mainly because of it’s ability to roundtrip a grade to Premiere Pro and put it on clips as a single filter on each clip. A very cool feature, but the program needs some work before it can really compete with Resolve. First off it needs support for Black Magic cards instead of just AJA cards. If Premiere Pro can do it, Resolve needs to do it. And second it really does need curves. Curves are such a powerful color correction method that many have come to rely on, and not having them seems a huge failing. Other issues I have are it’s abilities with multitrack video are limited, and I have just gotten so used to nodal vs layer based correcting, though that is certainly not going to change. SpeedGrade is powerful and does work well with Premiere, but needs to get some updates to be able to really rival Davinci even with it’s ability export it’s grades as color correction filters into Premiere.

Under $1000 for a way to monitor 1080p with worldwide frame rates using thunderbolt

Allan Tépper at the Pro Video Coalition has a great solution for monitoring video using thunderbolt and a Sony KDL-40BX420E, which will work with US power and supports, both PAL and NTSC frame rates as well as 23.976 and 24 FPS. Very very cool. The monitor is grey market in the US, so he also recommends a third party warranty. This is a inexpensive and great solution for monitoring.

2012 iMac faster than Mac Pro with Radeon HD 5870 in DaVinci Resolve and Premiere Pro CS6

Bare Feats has run the tests, and the 2012 iMac 27″ 3.4GHz Core iMac with 32GB of RAM and the GeForce GTX 680MX GPU actually does beat the MacPro in Resolve and Premiere Pro, but that is a MacPro with the Radeon HD 5870 GPU. Not really a fair test unless you have an NVIDIA CUDA card in the MacPro. As the MacPro still beats the iMac in 2 out of 3 CPU tests.

I have a feeling my non Mobile NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 4096 MB would slaughter the iMac in anything CUDA aware, which would be Premiere Pro, After Effects or DaVinci Resolve.

BlackMagic updates Davinci Resolve to 9.0.3

StudioDaily has the news. Check it out at BlackMagic, it is for Resolve and the free Resolve Lite. It now works with footage without timecode (like if I use my Canon 60D in Premiere Pro without transcoding) by recording timecode onto the audio track.

The free update for full Resovle and Resolve Lite customers also includes an improved CinemaDNG control palette (you can now display color temperature and tint related to camera metadata for more precise control), AAF and XML clip management, improved ARRI and Canon C500 RAW support, and a few more tweaks to the stereoscopic 3D grading interface. Following Apple’s Final Cut Pro X update to 10.0.6 last week, Blackmagic has also added support for XML round tripping in Final Cut’s latest version. A few other nice updates include the ability to play back and grade grayscale DPX files and Phantom Cine grayscale images; support for Adobe CS6 Premiere Pro XML speed changes; a much-improved audio waveform GUI update speed; support for single-frame sequences without numbers in the frame; and a bunch of handy new keyboard shortcuts.