Accelerate Your Workflow with Resolve’s Remote And Local Grades

How to incorporate this under-utilized feature for maximum speed

DaVinci Resolve has a ‘hidden’ feature in Project Settings that is a great tool to speed up your workflow: Remote Versioning. We’re not talking about remote grading – that’s something else entirely.

Instead, we’re talking about an extension of the Versions functionality. A decade ago, ‘Remote Versions’ was the ONLY form of version control in Resolve. But a few years after Blackmagic purchased and released DaVinci Resolve for Mac, they introduced Local Versions – and soon it became the default operating mode of grade management in Resolve.

By default, all color grades are Local Versions. This means each clip’s Color Page node graph is an independent instance. As you grade shots in your timeline, if multiple shots are from the same source clip, you must copy their grade manually.

But ‘Remote’ Versions saves you that trouble. Once a source is graded, every instance carries that same color grade. And if you change the color grade elsewhere on the timeline, every instance of that ‘Remote Version’ is immediately updated.

This Insight digs into the pros and cons of switching from Local to Remote Versioning. We also explore a fun legacy feature, Project Setting > Master Timelines.