DEFINITION October 2019

FEATURE | BU I LD I NG AN ED I T SU I TE THE SURGE OF SOFTWARE THE POWER AND LOW PRICE OF MODERN SOFTWARE AND THE GRUNT OF MODERN WORKSTATIONS HAVE LLOWED YOUNG CREATIVES TO DREAM OF STARTING POST STUDIOS

WORDS JULI AN M ITCHELL / PICTURE L A PRODUCTIONS B lackmagic Design’s hero software package DaVinci Resolve is ten years old this year – and the company is celebrating the moment by

The new collaboration features are perhaps the most interesting in Resolve 16, as they open the software to growing edit and VFX companies. Just add your workstation of choice and research media servers, depending on the programming, add media, furniture, master and client monitors and you could be looking at a multi-seat edit, grading and possibly VFX suite for under $10,000. The free version is locked to a single GPU, so there is no expansion available, but the licensed version is for multiple GPUs. It’s more for facility and production company use. OTHER SOFTWARE Around 20 years ago, editing systems were over £100,000, which is a huge contrast to the price of DaVinci Resolve. However, the ten years of Resolve are scattered with such important moments, like when the system stopped being a Linux-only entity, which was the case when Blackmagic acquired it. Back then, it needed something like a supercomputer to run it on and it only worked with one file format: DPX. It was quickly taken back to being run on Windows and made compatible with other company’s file formats. Of course, there are other NLE softwares; Adobe, perhaps, has come the furthest with its Premiere Pro Creative Cloud product. In fact, at the recent IBC

one tool for that, grading many Academy Award-winning movies.” Being a freebie enables Blackmagic to publish how many times Resolve has been downloaded: seven and half million. So there is no doubt it is the most popular piece of software in the pro video world, but there are no published records of which discipline people use the software for. The paid-for version of Resolve, DaVinci Resolve Studio, is $299 – a similar price to one year’s subscription to other NLE software. It gives you everything in the free version, plus DaVinci Neural Engine features, multi-user collaboration, stereoscopic 3D tools, dozens of ResolveFX and FairlightFX plug-ins, HDR grading, film grain, blur and mist effects.

launching another version. This is the 16th iteration and Resolve continues to be available as a free download. Resolve 16 encompasses editing, grading, audio and VFX, but isn’t recognisable as a piece of software that is given away (they are usually rubbish anyway). The company’s marketing director, Simon Westland, remembers when the price was decided: “It was important for us, if this was a free download, to make Resolve be the best it could be. It couldn’t operate like it was free. DaVinci came from being a colour correction tool and is still the number-

LEFT A screenshot of Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve NLE software in action

40 DEF I N I T ION | OCTOBER 20 1 9

Powered by