Pro-level video editing with a capable free version

A massively powerful professional video production application, DaVinci Resolve includes all the cutting, keyframing, color grading, and audio tools pros want. It also offers a capable free version, but there's a learning curve.

Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve, though clearly professional-level video editing software, is a longtime favorite among ambitious enthusiasts because of its capable free version and the ease of use it offers—after a considerable initial investment of time learning this huge, complex software.

Blackmagic Design claims DaVinci Resolve is the only product to combine video editing, motion graphics, color coding, and audio production in one tool. That may be if you compare it with pro-level-only software like Apple Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere Pro, but we’ve seen consumer-targeted software that has all those capabilities. What enthusiast video editor wouldn’t want to put those claims to the test? We did just that, and we found that the massive program delivers on them and adds innovative tools to boot, but—as mentioned—it takes some getting used to, as it doesn’t stick to the usual video interface and workflow conventions.

Version 17 of DaVinci Resolve adds support for new wide-gamut HDR formats and brings a powerful audio engine with 3D audio support.

The free download is popular among YouTubers and gamers, since it gives them a large subset of the program's features without the pro-level capabilities they don’t need. In fact, it’s the most powerful free video editing option you can find. The free version is surprisingly robust, offering standard editing and cutting, effects, motion graphics, color correction, and audio editing.

Some of the more advanced capabilities like DaVinci Neural Engine, stereoscopic 3D tools, dozens of extra Resolve FX filters, and Fairlight FX audio plugins, plus advanced HDR grading and HDR scopes are missing in the free version, however. In testing, I occasionally got a message saying that I would need to pay to use a tool I was trying to use. That’s perfectly understandable—you still get a lot for free.

If you want all the premium features, you have to pay a one-time fee of $295. You can only get a full license through an authorized reseller, such as B&H Photo Video. That’s probably because Blackmagic sells optional custom keyboards and panels that work with the software—those run from the $295 Speed Editor keyboard to the $29,995 Advanced Panel. The company also makes pro cinema and studio cameras ranging from the $495 Pocket Cinema Camera 4K to the $9,995 URSA Mini Pro 12K.

The $295 price just barely beats that of the $299 Apple Final Cut Pro. The latter app requires you to buy the $49.99 Motion and the $49.99 Compressor ancillary apps to get parity in functionality, however. Premiere Pro is subscription-only and costs $20.99 per month with an annual commitment. If you do the math, that means that after a year and three months, you will have paid more for Premiere Pro than DaVinci Resolve.  

DaVinci Resolve runs not only on macOS (10.14.6 Mojave and later) and Windows 10 (1703 and later), but also on Linux, though only on CentOS 7.3 or later (a derivative of Red Hat Enterprise Linux). The program also requires at least 16GB RAM—32GB for Linux, or if you want to use the Fusion motion graphics effect. It’s a 2.4GB download, which is smaller than Premiere Pro’s 3.3GB, without the motion graphics and Media Encoder software. The installation requires a system reboot, which isn’t common for software installation these days. I tested the Windows version on a Core i7 PC with 16GB RAM.

After downloading the installer, you need to install the DaVinci Resolve program itself, but you can optionally install its Control Panels, Raw Player, and Fairlight Audio program. For its size, DaVinci Resolve starts up reasonably quickly. Before you get into the editing interface, you see the Project Manager window, which has hover-scrubbable thumbnails for each of the projects you’re working on.

When you start a project, you see a bare-bones window with a single Untitled Project entry. There’s not a lot of the kind of assistance Adobe is adding to Premiere Pro, nor the amount of hand-holding you get in consumer-focused apps such as Movavi Video Editor Plus. There is exhaustive help documentation, however.

In place of what other software would call modes, DaVinci has seven pages: Color, Cut, Deliver, Edit, Fairlight (sound), Fusion, and Media. These pages are also represented by buttons along the bottom of the program window.

The Media page is where you find and organize media, using color-coding, bins, and metadata. You can also pre-trim source clips here using the I and O keyboard shortcuts. Like Final Cut and Premiere Pro, DaVinci offers take selectors, compound clips, and nested timelines, so timelines can be very flexible (and complex).

Once in Editing mode (on either the Cut or Edit page), you see the familiar three-panel working interface, with the source panel at top left, video preview at top right, and timeline across the whole length of the bottom. There are two timelines on the Cut page: The main one at the bottom shows image frame previews and audio waveforms, while the solid blue one at the top is useful for navigation. You can view source material in thumbnail, metadata, strip, or list views, but you can’t adjust the thumbnail size

The Source panel buttons let you easily control what appears in the Source section: Media Pool, Sync Bin, Transitions, Titles, and Effects. A search box lets you find anything in the source panel—in this page as well as the rest.

DaVinci lets you choose between a locked or free playhead; with the former, you drag the clip across while the playhead remains centered. The latter is more like what you see in other editors: With a free playhead, you move the playhead rather than the media. I had an issue on my Windows 10 test device where I couldn’t zoom the timeline with the prescribed Alt-Mouse wheel action in the Cut page; it did, however, work in the Edit page, and there are even buttons for Full Extent Zoom and Detail Zoom, as well as a custom zoom slider.

You get all the standard keyboard shortcuts: J for reverse, K for stop, L for forward, and Spacebar to stop and start playback. The Keyboard Customization panel lets you go to town with your own shortcuts.

Like Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve offers multiuser collaboration workflows, so that editors, colorists, and sound people can all work on the same timeline—even simultaneously. Use of proxy media makes this more efficient, and the software integrates with Frame.io, an online collaborative video editing platform that can sync projects.

When adding clips to the timeline, buttons let you choose among Smart Insert, Append, Ripple Overwrite, Place on Top, and Source Overwrite (requires synced time codes in the clips). As you’d expect in a pro video editor, you can trim the source clips before adding them to the timeline. While you’re doing so, the preview window splits into two, showing your start and end frames, along with the frame number in a mini-timeline. You can set in and out markers on the timeline to tell the program where to insert a clip from the source. The program lets you do three- and four-point editing, in which you mark the in and out points on both the source and on the timeline to control the clip position.

For trimming, DaVinci selects the appropriate edit tool automatically depending on where the cursor is—roll edit, transition duration, slip and slide—but you can manually select the mode you want.

Pro video editors usually don’t use canned transitions found in consumer products. They either simply jump-cut or use a custom transition. That said, consumer products have started adding custom transition tools such as Pinnacle Studio’s Seamless transitions, which let you identify areas of the before and after clips to zoom, pan, and swoop to.

Resolve has one of the coolest transition interfaces I’ve seen. Simple monochrome shapes appear in the list, but hover scrub over an entry, and your own clips in the timeline show how the transition looks when applied. Not only that: Some striking transitions are at your disposal in the Fusion section, including Camera Shake, Drop Warp, and Tunnel of Light.

Controls for any effects that you apply show up in the Inspector panel, which you can open from the top right button. You can control any effects for which they make sense with keyframes, which smoothly animate the effect’s position or intensity from the start keyframe to the end one.

But DaVinci Resolve’s unique Fusion Studio editor uses a node-based editing workflow that’s beyond the ken of the average enthusiast-level video editor.  It’s basically an input-output system, where you add effects and media along the flowchart. You can reuse effect groups or restrict theme to selected parts of the image.

DaVinci Resolve is excellent at motion tracking, even allowing multiple tracks. To do it, you need to create nodes in Fusion. Suffice it to say that it’s a much more complicated process than it is in Corel VideoStudio or other similar consumer software. The program actually has multiple different tracker tools, including Camera, Planar, and plain-old Tracker.

Smart Reframe is similar to tools that recently appeared in Adobe Premiere Pro and Apple Final Cut. It can take a landscape scene and reframe it as a vertical smartphone-shaped canvas, automatically keeping the point of interest, say a person, in the frame. This tool is only available in the paid Studio version of DaVinci Resolve.

It took me a while to figure out how to apply a chroma key effect: You have to switch to Edit mode (even though you can see and apply the Effects in Cut mode and in the Inspector in that mode), and then switch the viewer window mode to Open FX Overlay view. You draw a box inside the color you want to key out, and eureka! This gets you a reasonable key that you can fine-tune, but just checking the Despill box did an amazing job of cleaning up the key in frizzy hair, which can be difficult for chroma-keying tools.

Picture-in-picture effects are easy to produce. Simply turn on the Transform or Crop tool below the preview player and resize and position to taste.

You can apply stabilization from a handy option in the Inspector. You have three mode choices, Perspective, Similarity, and Translation. The first is the standard version that takes into account motion on any axis; Similarity does the same except it can avoid image artifacts the first may introduce; Translation only stabilizes based on X and Y axis (two-dimensional) motion. As with everything in Resolve, you get plenty of adjustments for stabilization, such as zoom, cropping ratio, and strength. The tool worked quickly compared with Final Cut and Premiere, and if you tweak enough, you can get optimal stabilization.

Multicam editing is another strength of DaVinci Resolve. You can sync by timecode or sound, and use as many angles as you want, though a 4x4 grid is the max the interface can show, which is a standard number for pro video editing software.

DaVinci Resolve sports all the color wheels and spectrometers you’d expect in a professional video editor. You can copy grades, use LUTs, and control edits with keyframes and Fusion nodes. Resolve uses AI for color matching, supports camera raw modes, and offers temporal and spatial noise reduction.

In DaVinci Resolve’s Effects Library, the Titles section includes basic lower third, scroll, and static text options. You can make them any size, position, rotation, color, and font you can think of, as well as apply drop shadow, stroke, and a background color. Below those basics are the Fusion Titles, which include many more choices, many with animations—even 3D animations.

Resolve’s Fairlight audio editor supports up to 2,000 audio tracks. Without even opening that, you can easily lower volume with the line in the audio waveforms in the timeline or use a simple mixer control to the right of the timeline. All of today’s advanced acoustic effects are at your disposal—chorus, de-esser, de-hummer, echo, compressor, noise reduction—many even from the standard Edit page as well as on the Fairlight page. You can download a library of royalty-free stock audio from Blackmagic’s website for use in DaVinci.

For all its massive complexity, DaVinci Resolve is overall fast and stable. When using the free version, I did run into a message telling me “Your GPU memory is full”—something I’d never run into while testing video editing software before. I found that the proxy resolution was set to full resolution by default; halving the resolution corrected the problem, though processing the proxies wasn’t immediate, with the preview going still for a while. The program automatically detects and uses the GPU to accelerate processing.

For the rendering speed test, I create a five-minute movie consisting of four clips of mixed types (some 1080p, some SD, some 4K) with a standard set of transitions and rendered it to 1080p30 MPEG-4 at 15Mbps, H.264 High Profile. I ran the test three times and took the geometric mean (which minimizes the effect of outliers). I tested on a PC running 64-bit Windows 10 Pro with a 3.4GHz Core i7 6700 CPU, 16GB RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 with 4GB GDDR5 RAM.

DaVinci Resolve (the free version, anyway) produced the video in 4:37 (min:sec). It’s not among the rendering speed leaders in our tests, but it isn’t the worst, as you can see from the table.

Blackmagic is to be congratulated on its help document for DaVinci Resolve—it’s a PDF of over 3,500 pages! I appreciate the detailed instructions and information, but that size alone indicates the complexity of the application. If that’s not enough, a web search can find a slew of online video tutorials from avid users. Just to list all of Resolve’s features would be longer than most PCMag articles, so if you want to learn DaVinci Resolve, you’ll need to dig.

DaVinci Resolve is a super-powerful professional video editing application that offers a wealth of adjustments and effects. New users should expect a lengthy acclimation period, however, as its interface and methods differ from the general run of video editing software. Its system requirements are also more demanding than most competitors. The free version is not time-limited and offers enough tools to be useful for many amateurs. If you want to dig deep into pro video editing, you could hardly do better than to tackle this expansive application.

Though DaVinci Resolve has every video editing tool you can imagine along with many more you can’t and is widely used in TV and motion pictures, our Editors’ Choice video editing apps, Apple Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere Pro are better suited for PCMag’s enthusiast audience, as both offer a less steep learning curve and have more in common with entry-level software.

A massively powerful professional video production application, DaVinci Resolve includes all the cutting, keyframing, color grading, and audio tools pros want. It also offers a capable free version, but there's a learning curve.

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Michael Muchmore is PCMag's lead analyst for software and web applications, with an emphasis on photo editing, video editing, and Windows. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up coverage of web development, enterprise software (including databases and application servers), and display technologies (monitors and TVs). Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of web services for a general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine's Solutions section, which educated readers about programming techniques like C+ and Visual Basic, as well as offering tips on using office productivity software. He previously covered services and software for ExtremeTech.com.

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