Davinci Resolve 12 - Flippin' Fantastic Again

Well. Blackmagic Design has done it again - Davinci Resolve 12 is awesome!!!  I've been working with it for about 2 months now and I love all the new features.  Here a quick example:

This week I worked with a long time client who used a new high speed camera from Fastec to shoot an art project.  They were capturing all the footage at 600 fps in DNG raw files and then aiming for a 24p output.  Since this method leaves all the footage in image sequence folders it sometimes makes it a little tricky to review the files and work with them.   

Enter Resolve 12...

Resolve has long been able to read image sequences as clips automatically and then pop them into the media pool as needed.  In this project I simply double clicked each clip folder to load the clip into the source view and then reviewed the clip.  When we found a take we liked I'd pull it from the source viewer into the media pool.  After we found the hero shots I was able to throw them on a timeline and start editing.  BTW this is all in Resolve 12... All in RAW dng - no conversions or proxies.

Once the timelines were built, I went into grading mode and did a little cleanup shot by shot.  The client needed the clips mainly as proof of concept at this point so H264's were fine.  I simply went to the delivery page, chose 264 and entire sequence, added the job to the render Q and was on my way.

The client had done an After Effects session with the footage to look at it earlier in the week but found that difficult to keep a creative focus as there we many steps to get to the end product.  This was so fast, from ingest to output, he now has great confidence about the project moving forward. 

I think the folks at Blackmagic Design have done it again.  This is a terrific step forward for all departments in the video world.

***UPDATE***

So the day after I posted this blog they released Resolve 12.1
Here's the official feature scoop:  

Remote rendering on DaVinci Resolve Studio

Support for native display color profiles on OS X

Preferences option to enable 10-bit precision on viewers on OS X 10.11 El Capitan

Ability to select clips when in blade mode

Support for faders on generators and titles

Ability to extend freeze frames from the start of the edit  

Ability to media manage selected clips on a timeline

Ability to perform negative timecode offset in clip attributes

Improved support for sub-clips from FCP7 XML

Improved rendering of audio transitions (cross-fades) and audio faders

Auto scroll during timeline item resize

Improved sorting in media storage and media pool

Support for smart bin filtering based on clip type

Ability to move clips and timelines from a smart bin view

Support for moving files to the trash instead of deleting them permanently when using the media manager on both Mac and Windows systems

Ability to delete multiple projects and folders in project manager

Ability to decompose a compound node

Ability to grade nested timelines  

Ability to filter clips based on whether they have keyframes

Ability to manually keyframe power windows in frame mode even without tracking

Ability to freeze the current frame on an external matte

User option to copy flags and markers when performing ColorTrace

Improved ACEScc support

Support for stereo decision list (SDL) v0.25

Support for RED SDK v6.0.4

Support for embedding timecode in audio output

 

Until next time, good shooting and editing and grading,

TDTrey