RESOLVE 1 6 | USER REVI EW
“THE CUT PAGE ALLOWS YOU TO GRAB YOUR MEDIA, REVIEW IT, TRIM AND RE-EDIT”
lackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve is well named, it seems. It was already
LEFT Version 16 of Resolve introduces the new dedicated keyboard
and then output the finished product all from a single page, with tools optimised for speed over complexity. Of course, the timeline you are hacking in the Cut page is mirrored in the Edit page, so you could still assemble quickly in the former and finish in the latter, even if you have a more relaxed edit schedule. CUT PAGE The Cut page consists of three main panels. Upper left is usually your Media Pool window, though it can also show Transitions, Titles and Effects. The upper right panel is a single viewer, and the lower part of the screen is the Timeline. The Timeline is split into two parts – a traditional ‘zoomed in’ view of the area you are currently working on, and an overview, showing the whole of the timeline in one. This arrangement means that you no longer have to zoom in and out all the time – indeed there are no zoom controls active in the timeline (which confused the bejeebus out of me before I realised how it works). You can even drag a clip from the magnified region and drop it into place in the overview timeline. It’s
not that accurate, but it’s fast – and that is the point here. If you want to spend ten minutes agonising over a frame or two, then you should be in the Edit page. There is a massive, outstanding and totally brilliant feature of the Cut page. My first task – on traditional NLEs – is to create (or ‘cause the edit assistant to create’) a sequence with all the clips in a bin in timecode order. For historical reasons I call this a KEM roll (KEM edit machines were used back in the days of film). You can use this ‘KEM roll’ to quickly skim through the contents of a bin and even cut straight from it into the timeline. The Cut page has a ‘Source Tape’ – essentially an invisible sequence of all the clips in a bin that behaves in exactly the same way as my KEM roll, but with added benefits. If you reorder the clips in the bin – perhaps by clip name instead of timecode – then the KEM roll re-orders, too. You can jump to an exact timecode by typing in the numerical value: great if you are assembling an interview from the timecode in a transcript, for instance. This feature alone, for me, justifies the existence of
a capable grading tool when Blackmagic purchased DaVinci way back when, and they have developed and added to the software at a prodigious rate. It is a cliche that it’s become the Swiss Army knife of post-production, though Blackmagic has recognised that it’s quite possible to spend several minutes turning the thing over and over in your hands, bewildered by all the attachments, looking for the gizmo that gets Boy Scouts out of horses’ hooves. Resolve 16 attempts to find a solution to that issue – at least as far as editing goes. Many editors simply need to cut their programmes together quickly, from news and current affairs to YouTube programming. For these people, Blackmagic has added a Cut page to Resolve, along with a new Editor Keyboard – the latter, perhaps perversely, giving the new generation of YouTubers the kind of interface familiar to those of us old enough to remember edit controllers like Sony’s BVE 9000. More on the keyboard later. The ethos of the Cut page is that it allows you to grab your media, review it, assemble, trim and re-edit,
NOVEMBER 20 1 9 | DEF I N I T ION 65
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