DaVinci Resolve 12 Special Report

DaVinci Resolve 12 Special Report

July 28, 2015

Three colorists discuss DaVinci Resolve 12 including: What it means to use Beta software; favorite features (so far); areas of improvement


Resolve 12 Public Beta 1: Special Report

In Mailbag Episode #25 Team Mixing Light chatted about NAB 2015. Of course, a big topic of conversation was the newly revealed DaVinci Resolve 12—and that it wouldn’t be released until ‘July 2015’. Here we are in July 2015—and DaVinci Resolve 12 Public Beta 1 has been released!

In this Insight, Team Mixing Light chats about our initial impressions of DaVinci Resolve 12

Since this is such a huge update, including a complete overhaul of the interface, we decided to focus our discussions on our initial impressions. Of course, one of the first topics of discussion is:

What does it mean to work with Beta software?

All three of us have had years of experience testing beta software, and all three of us were on the DaVinci Resolve 12 Private Beta—which began about 4 weeks ago. We offer a round of tips for existing DaVinci Resolve users who want to upgrade and work in Resolve 12 Public Beta 1. Because we tend to bounce around in our discussion, here’s a quick summary:

  • Don’t upgrade existing databases: Instead, create a fresh database with DaVinci Resolve 12 and import your existing projects into this new database.
  • If you are going to update existing databases, back them up first!
  • DON’T keep Resolve 12 along side Resolve 11 on your computer: You’ll need to install one version over the each, each time you want upgrade / downgrade. Otherwise, you’ll be guaranteed all sorts of problems if they’re both installed simultaneously.

One thing we don’t mention: You CAN keep DaVinci Resolve 12 and DaVinci Resolve 12 Studio side-by-side. Unlike previous versions, the ‘free’ and ‘paid’ versions of DaVinci Resolve 12 can co-exist on the same computer.

Other initial Resolve 12 Public Beta 1 sources of useful information

In addition to this Special Report, on ‘Launch Day’ we found two other sources of information worth looking at:

  • DaVinci Resolve 12 User Guide: What’s New – With Resolve 12 getting a full re-write of the 1000+ page User Manual, the author of the User Manual – Alexis Van Hurkman – blogs the sections of the manual you’ll want to read to get up to speed on the new features. Absolutely required reading for any solo-DaVinci Resolve 12 user is Chapter 5: “Improving Performance, Proxies, and the Render Cache” vanhurkman.com
  • Resolve 12 Beta Features and First Impressions – serial link and Twitter hoarder, and friend of Mixing Light, Jonny Elwyyn, gathers up a bunch of Tweets, quotes and links of private beta testers sharing their initial thoughts. jonnyelwyn.co.uk

 

Part 1:

What does ‘Public Beta’ mean?

Download The Special Report

[separator]

Part 2:

Our Favorite DaVinci Resolve 12 Features (so far)

Download The Special Report

[separator]

Part 3:

DaVinci Resolve 12: Areas for Improvement

Download The Special Report

Comments

Homepage Forums DaVinci Resolve 12 Special Report

Page 1 of 2

  • Remco Hekker
    Member

    Hé Guys,
    Thanks for the insights.
    @Robbie: The R12 installer on Windows does have an Install PostgreSQL checkbox.

    I’m looking forward to the coming insights.
    Remco


  • Robbie Carman
    Guest

    Yep! I found that out when I installed Resolve 12 on my Surface Pro 3! Wooot!

    Also heard form the Resolve Dev team. They will indeed be shipping PostGres with the installers but its an option not installed by default.

  • Love these special reports guys, its like a play-by-play Christmas day for colorists. Cheers gentleman, thank you.

    ps. I agree with Pat, I liked how sequences lived separately! It would be cool if with sequences presets we already have the ability to save, also saved some default folders like footage, sequence, Offline, Audio, etc. also scope location, size and settings.

  • um… Wow, next. testing on my 3 yr old netbook!

  • Awesome special reports. It is truly a holiday for colorists. Appreciate you sharing ur experiences from using it for a few weeks. Making jumping in faster 🙂


  • RobbieCarman
    Guest

    well don’t get too excited! it crawls to a snails pace when actually doing some grading work – but for a quick fix or to spot check it works great. Actually the coolest thing is since i’m on a shared database was connecting wirelessly to the DB and with footage local on the surface walking around the office looking at a real project!

  • More thinking how it can be a database server or a calibration unit


  • Paul Willis
    Member

    The addition of the colour management is amazing. I love that we can do a proper colour space conversion without LUTs, and those wanting to work exclusively with web deliverables and no output hardware can work and deliver in sRGB. Hopefully less ‘why does it look different when I export?!’ posts on forums from those who aren’t intending to work in broadcast.


  • Patrick Inhofer
    Guest

    Nice point about sRGB and deliberables.


  • Paul Willis
    Member

    It could be really helpful to a lot of people. I’m getting what I expect using the output colour spaces, but input colour spaces give me vastly different results than the directly equivalent LUT. I need to get my head around this a bit…


  • Patrick Inhofer
    Guest

    I think the key is: Don’t assume the ‘directly equivalent LUT’ is directly equivalent at all. I’d assume Blackmagic’s redone the math and doesn’t feel compelled to replicate the results you’d get with the shipping LUT. At least, that’s my operating assumption.

  • At 9:00 in Part 3, Patrick describes a workaround to copy/import project presets from a database to another. This workaround has been the object of an Insight here on MixingLight. If you’ve missed it, feel free to check it out and become a Preset Ninja!

    [ML0280] How to Become a DaVinci Resolve Project Preset Ninja: https://mixinglight.com/portfolio/become-davinci-resolve-project-preset-ninja/

  • Hi everyone ! I’d like too share something that happened today during the session. I’ve opened a project that was waiting for finishing. Graded on 11.1.3. Currently running 12b3 (which by the way is awesome). And let me tell you that it does not look right at all. Like Patrick suggested, I’ve tried to import the project from both a backup DB and DRP file. Still does not match the grade I did. It was shot on a BM 4K, RAW footage, a lot of things happening at pre-clip, post-clip and timeline level, used YSFX a lot. I can’t find what’s going on here. Force to go back to v11 to finish that project. The strange thing here is that it’s the only project I’ve encountered this problem. Here’s a picture so you can see what’s happening.


  • Patrick Inhofer
    Guest

    I’ve shared a few projects with Blackmagic that didn’t import correctly form earlier versions. They found the bugs and in later versions of R12 seemed to fix them.

    My suggestion: Do the same thing. This is the perfect time to help Team Resolve solve these things. Their team is focused on getting out of Beta. You can email them from their support site and include download links to the R11 project so they can import it and figure out what’s going on. Be sure to give them step-by-step walkthrough of precisely what they need to be looking at.

    Earlier in the beta cycle I was forced to revert back to R11 on a few existing projects… thus is the nature of the beast. But I try to get Blackmagic the feedback that I was forced to revert and provide them the tools they need so they’d have the opportunity to fix it and ensure I wouldn’t get bit again.

  • Thanks for the answer ! I’ve already sent them a few log files for the crashes I’ve experienced, but I didn’t think of sending the entire project.

Page 1 of 2

Log in to reply.

1,000+ Tutorials to Explore

Get full access to our entire library of over 1,100+ color tutorials for an entire week!


Start Your Test Drive!
Loading...