Had a great day today poking around in the beta version of Davinci Resolve for the Mac. Spent the first few hours just gleaning through the User Manual and that was actually quite interesting.
See the User Manual for the new 7.0 Resolve is not out yet so I’m looking through the previous version. What I find so interesting is all the tweaks Blackmagic has made to the interface, particularly the Config Panel. They’ve made a lot of very nice changes to combine some things into a single window, moved some other things out to their own tabs and such. They’ve really streamlined the interface and cleaned it up from what I’m seeing in the older User Manual.
Now most of you know I’m a heavy Apple Color user and until Resolve was introduced for the Mac it was hands down the best color correction tool on the Mac. Now I’m not going to do a full comparison of the tools yet because I’ve been using Color for 5 years or so now and I’ve been using Resolve for about 6 hours, and 3 of that was looking through the manual. I’ll go much more in depth about that later once I really have the opportunity to get into the product. It’s actually quite easy to pick up the functions on the software and the Nodes workflow is quite interesting vs. the Secondaries workflow in Color.
But one thing I wanted to address early on. The big complaint about Apple Color I have heard time and time again, via email, on the blogs, in the Creative Cow Color forum is that it doesn’t support all of the Quicktime codecs supported by Final Cut Pro. The second complaint I hear is that it’s too time consuming, too difficult to prepare your timeline to go into Color. Of course both of these complaints come from Final Cut Pro editors who have never taken the time to properly learn the Apple Color workflow and thus create many issues themselves.
Well Resolve is going to require you to learn another new workflow. Like Apple Color, it’s a serious color correction tool designed for colorists, not editors. It won’t support every codec under the sun, it will require the editor to plan accordingly if you want to bring your Final Cut Pro, Avid, whatever timeline into Resolve. I was actually laughing in the edit suite today while playing around with Resolve thinking of all those folks who make some of those complaints I mentioned earlier. What are they going to do now? Resolve is not a standard Apple interface. It’s not a “single click send to Resolve and apply my Color Grade” type of app. You’re gonna have to work to make this application work for you.
For those of you who have taken the time to create a good workflow for Apple Color, you’ll be able to make a pretty easy adjustment into Resolve. For those of you waiting for Apple Color to essentially turn into a Final Cut Pro plug-in, well….. starting planning your workflows now if you want to take advantage of this new option. Apple Color is still an excellent enhancement tool, but it’s a no-brainer to add Resolve to your Mac toolbox for only $999.
Tomorrow will be full day training on Resolve so I’ll be updating again tomorrow night…..
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