Blackmagic 15 Out of Beta

Link to Davinci Resolve 15 Software

DaVinci Resolve 15 Free Training

DaVinci Resolve 15

To get things straight right away: There’s no upgrade cost for previous Resolve 14 users. As a new user, you can either download the free version at no cost or purchase Resolve 15 for $299. If you happen to own a dongle for version 14, there’s no upgrade cost whatsoever. Here’s Peter Chamberlain, DaVinci Resolve product manager, on that matter:

Everyone can download and use the free version. Customers with DaVinci Resolve Studio dongles and activation keys, and those with Fusion Studio dongles can download and use DaVinci Resolve Studio v15 at no cost. [posted on the Blackmagic Design Forum]

Let’s move on to the features of Resolve 15. If you already played around a little with previous beta versions you know what’s coming: Fusion is now an integrated part of Resolve. The tabs (as in: workspaces) at the bottom of the screen now include: Media, Edit, Fusion, Color, Fairlight and Deliver. Watch the video below for a fairly extensive overview of the new features:

The above video came out just after the announcement of Resolve 15 so there might be slight changes to some features but you get a pretty good idea of the deep integration of Fusion and Fairlight into Resolve.

In contrast to Adobe whose approach is to develop a whole suite of dedicated apps, Blackmagic has put all the features of several acquisitions straight into their main software tool: DaVinci Resolve. When they acquired Resolve it was just a color correction and grading tool. After that a NLE style video editor was added with version 10 in 2013. Then came Fairlight, a full-fleged suite of audio tools for manipulating and mastering audio. Now, with version 15 their latest acquisition has been merged into Resolve: Fusion, which is an advanced node based compositing tool.

If you’re a Adobe user you could compare Resolve to Premiere Pro (editing and grading), Audition (audio) and After Effects (compositing). These are very different applications, though. Adobe After Effects for example uses layers while Fusion is based around nodes.

The good thing is this: Round-tripping has become a lot easier with both, Adobe and DaVinci Resolve. No more exporting, transcoding, importing, manipulating, exporting again. Adobe uses their so-called dynamic link technology  in order to link (and update in real time) assets from After Effects to Premiere Pro. In DaVinci Resolve all you have to do is hopping back and forth between the different workspaces and that’s it. All changes are being updated in all other workspaces as you go.