Features Big & Small – An Exciting Update To DaVinci Resolve
Want to know what’s just as accurate as your new fancy smartwatch?
The DaVinci Resolve development team delivering a new release in April centered around the annual Superbowl of trade shows – NAB.
Like clockwork, the Resolve team has just released a pretty incredible update to DaVinci Resolve full of new features – well over 200 of them!
The simple fact that the dev team is able to consistently refine Resolve and deliver a new version of Resolve every April is impressive, but this year they did something I didn’t expect – improve what they had, refine existing features, and make new features somehow feel like they were there all along.
In years past, new UI, new workflows and totally new categories of features dominated each DaVinci Resolve release. This year, in my opinion, it’s all about making things better and after the past few weeks testing and working with the new version on real-world projects color me impressed.
Many Improvements & Different Perspectives
With dozens and dozens of new features, it’d be next to impossible to cover all of them in a single insight. In addition, many of the improvements are small enough that you sometimes ask yourself- isn’t that the way it always worked?
The answer, of course, is no, but that’s sort of the beauty of this release. Among killer new features like enhanced noise reduction, new log grading functionality, HDR & RCM improvements – there are hundreds of smaller features that just feel ‘right’.
Over this Insight and in similar ones from Dan and Pat, Team MixingLight will share its favorite new features. And over the coming weeks, we’ll break down some of the marquee ones in more detail.
My Favorite New Features
Man, this is tough.
There is so much to like in Resolve 12.5 it’s very hard for me to narrow it down. But rather than bombarding you with a 90min Insight of all the new features I love I’ve culled it down to my top 5 or 6.
Yep, I do have 2a, 3B, and 5C as well! There are a lot of related complementary new Resolve 12.5 new features so I sort of bundled them together.
Here are my favorites.
- Improved Resolve Color Management – Improvements here are huge! As discussed in various threads here on MixingLight.com not having the ability to separate gamut and gamma has been problematic in the past. Well, now you can do just that making RCM workflow much more straightforward and clear.
- HDR Improvements – HDR is here and not going anywhere. Recognizing this the Resolve team continues to add to HDR specific features. In the movie below I’ll show you some of my favorites including the new HDR Waveform, the HDR node option and ability to pass HDR metadata to HDMI 2.o equipped displays.
- Noise Reduction Improvements – Once you become OCD about noise reduction it’s hard to accept anything less than perfection. It used to be that Resolve’s noise reduction capabilities were good, but a balancing act between real-time performance and actual noise reduction performance. Now in Resolve 12.5, you can have up to 5 frames of averaging for temporal noise reduction and the spatial noise reduction toolset has been completely updated to produce much less ‘chunky’ results
- S-Curve vs Linear Contrast Behavior – I’m probably the only person excited about this! When using Contrast & Pivot resolve as always applied a nice soft s-curve. Now via a preference, you can change the contrast behavior to be linear as it is in other apps. While you can pretty much do the same thing with Lift, Gamma, Gain I have such muscle memory on my control surface with Contrast & Pivot that this option is very much welcomed.
- Node Improvements – At the core of the Resolve color experience are nodes – the team keeps refining how to work with them. This is one category of improvement that had me wondering if things always worked that way! The answer is no – they probably just should have. In the movie below I’ll share some of my favorite new node enhancements.
I’m sure I’ll mention a few other new features in this release but remember Pat and Dan will guide you through many more exciting features including ResolveFX, other UI enhancements and some great workflow changes on the delivery page!
Finally, I should note that many of the HDR specific features I’ll mention are found in Resolve Studio 12.5 only.
As always any questions or things to add please use the comments below
-Robbie
