DaVinci Resolve has to battle more choices than ever when it comes to picking your favourite video-editing software. For everyone from casual content creators to editing professionals, the rise of high-powered computing platforms to deal with ultra-high-resolution video files has meant that software has become more able and more flexible than ever. For many, Adobe’s Premiere Pro and Apple’s Final Cut Pro still rule the roost, but there have been over the last few years an emergence of other options – from software to edit on your phone or tablet device to other, more comprehensive options like Blackmagicdesign’s DaVinci Resolve, offering professional editing, colour grading and audio editing in a compelling free package.
Functionality and usability
For more advanced users, functions like the Fusion 3D CGI effect generator and the Fairlight audio tool have been used on everything from the Avengers to Hunger Games, so you’re in the right company should you choose to invest in the full package.
DaVinci Resolve 19 comes in two flavours, a free platform that most users will work with, and DaVinci Studio, which offers professionals (including many postproduction studios working with high-profile clients like Netflix) a fully comprehensive solution that provides extensive colour-grading tools, collaboration between multiple people at the same time on the same project and up to 60fps exports at Ultra HD 3840x2160 resolution.
The Studio version is a favourite among professionals, but the real coup here is that the software opens up very capable editing workflows for casual users and enthusiasts thanks to its free version. It’s the most powerful free video editing software out there and is popular amongst content creators including YouTubers and streamers. For people looking to upgrade, the one-time fee of $295 is also generally applauded for its transparency. The absence of a subscription model certainly works in the software’s favour.
If you’re used to other offerings from the likes of Adobe, DaVinci Resolve 19 will require some relearning, but mostly in terms of what things are called, rather than what they do. When you start the software, you’ll see a screen to manage your projects, and within the actual editing screens, there are several ‘pages’ (often called modes in other platforms) that allow you to navigate between colour grading, cutting, editing clips, delivering and exporting and tweaking the sound. They’re reached by clicking icons at the bottom of the screen and once you’ve got the hang of how best to use each page, you’ll find yourself clicking between them quickly and making the most out of their functionality.
There’s a lot going on when you first open a project, and you’d be forgiven for feeling a little intimidated at first. You’ll primarily be working on the ‘editing’ page, which offers a fairly familiar three-panel working screen, with a timeline at the bottom that works in much the same way as Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro. Overall video preview is on the right, a preview of the selected clip is in the middle, and your imported video files to choose from are on the left. Selecting a portion of a clip to add to your timeline is straightforward, and then you’re able to add this to your edit. Effects like transitions are well implemented, you can drag them over your timeline but also preview them by hovering over each entry, which is a nice touch. You can also create a range of titles, and we were impressed by the level of advanced features such as motion tracking in the free version.
Smart Reframe is also a tool that can take a standard landscape shot and reframe it for vertical content platforms such as TikTok, while automatically keeping a chosen point of interest centre in the frame. There’s also in-built stabilisation and we found that this worked slightly better than rivals, with plenty of adjustment options available.
Performance
One word of peripherals. Blackmagicdesign also offer a very impressive array of panels and controllers for serious professional editing. These are set up to work seamlessly with the software and often come with discounts when purchasing a full DaVinci Studio licence.
How well a piece of video editing software runs often makes or breaks its usefulness, and it’s pleasing to see that DaVinci Resolve, for all its complexity, ran seamlessly on both the M1 Mac setup and Windows 11 PC we tested on, with an RTX 3060 graphics card installed in the latter. Compared to other similar editing programmes, we experienced a limited amount of lag when editing 4K files, with no noticeable buffering and a quick and easy import from both in-built SSD drives and connected external sources. The minimum specs do require some form of investment in terms of a good quality system, however.
In terms of export, we found that it fell slightly below Premiere Pro in terms of speed, and we also found that adding several transitions, effects or multi-screen elements to a timeline increased the render time significantly. There are plenty of export options available, but for the most part for a conventional HD render, setting everything to ‘auto’ performed very well indeed and it seamlessly applied to right codecs in the right format to enable playback.
Should I get DaVinci Resolve?
There is little reason not to fully recommend Da Vinci Resolve to both experienced and amateur filmmakers and content creators. In fact, if it wasn’t for the relatively steep learning curve and beefy system requirements it’d be on course to receive a full five stars. We would understand if people who are used to other offerings such as Adobe’s Premiere Pro are hesitant to switch allegiances, but if you’re prepared to put the time in, alongside a comprehensive 4,000-page manual (yes, you read that correctly!) you’ll be able to work out how to edit, colour and export some seriously impressive footage.