DEFINITION January 2018

60 USER REVIEW DAVINCI RESOLVE 14

When you get to the 14th version of a piece of software you know the evolution is a serious business, we have a look at what’s new

WORDS ADAM GARSTONE

in the timeline to do some work, and then I use the same technique to close the space up afterwards. With a lot of clips selected, the timeline zoom was not quite as responsive as I would like. One thing I love about the Resolve editor is its flexibility. For about a decade it seemed that jobs would have me hopping back and forth between Avid and FCP, so I evolved a peculiar, bastardised set of keyboard shortcuts for both, that were as similar as possible to each other. I found it simple to get Resolve set up in a similar way, so my fingers more or less hit the correct keys without me really thinking about it. Similarly, although Resolve doesn’t have the free-floating windows of Avid, there is some flexibility in which elements get assigned to which screen, including my preference for a full-screen timeline. Basically, within an hour of set up and familiarisation, I felt as comfortable with Resolve as I do with most NLEs. It’s not all peaches and cream, of course (no NLE is perfect, contrary to the endless arguments on Internet forums). There are a couple of features I would like to see implemented. Firstly, if you load a

projects. It was slow – bizarrely, timelines that would play in real time in Resolve’s grading page, wouldn’t play in the editor. Once the sequence got up towards your average hour long programme, it choked – pretty much everything became too slow to use, from playback to zooming in and out of the timeline. SPEED All that has changed. Resolve 14, even with mid-range hardware, responds much faster. I took a couple of finished, 60-minute TV documentaries out of Avid and into Resolve, and had no issues that would prevent me from using the NLE to edit those programmes. Indeed, the very fact that I could export a complex AAF from Avid and import it into Resolve (just a few unsupported effects failed to come across) presents a challenge to the competition. I’m looking at you Premiere Pro. I found just one sluggish (but not slow) feature. One thing I do a lot is to select all the clips to the right of the playhead, zoom out and then in again – checking that I’m not going to overwrite anything when the clips are moved – and them move the selected clips. This allows me to open a space

e took the unusual step (for us) of reviewing the beta version of Resolve 14 a few months ago, because we felt that the integration of Fairlight’s fantastic audio workstation was important. Since then, it’s become clear that some of the other features that have appeared in version 14 may be even more important than Fairlight, so it’s time to have a look at the full release. Blackmagic Design has been very ambitious with Resolve. In much the same way that everyone in the camera department carries a Leatherman, pretty much everyone involved with post-production has a copy of Resolve. It’s become a Swiss army knife – a high-end grading solution, a DIT tool, a non- linear editor, a multi-track audio workstation, even a common solution for all those “how do I get a project from software A to software B?” issues. And now, the improved editor, Fairlight, and the collaborative tools could make Resolve the centre of a post-production facility, or big-budget narrative production. I’ll be honest, much as I wanted to love Resolve’s NLE when it arrived, it wasn’t up to the job for long-form

WITHIN AN HOUR I FELT AS COMORTABLE WITH RESOLVE AS I DO WITH MOST NLES

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