Resolve 15 Beta 6

Beta 6 of DaVinci Resolve 15 has been released, which a few bug fixes and has some extra tweaks. I have been using the beta on a project I have been doing recently and it has been both interesting and annoying.

The project is the first episode of the Dr Who fan movie I started making before starting DVC, but never finished because work and families got it the way.  As it was filmed many years ago, in 4×3 and originally on Umatic and Hi8 cameras, there has been a lot of cleaning up and resizing to do to make an acceptable picture to be view on today’s widescreen TVs. Because of Resolve’s nice noise reduction and grading abilities a lot of this have been done inside Resolve.

This did involve get DV AVI SD footage into Resolve.  Resolve does not load most AVI types so this had to be converted to QuickTime DV and the timecode added, which I worked out a way to do quite quickly.  I then had to re-create the edit done in EDIUS originally inside Resolve and grade etc.  This has taught me a lot about using Resolve and some of the great tools it has, as well as some of its shortcomings as an editor.  As an example, it does background rendering – so any clip that needs rendering will be done while you are working on something else, and this kicks in and works well.  The only problem is that if you change something on an already rendered clip it does not delete the render – you have to manually do this yourself – so there is a lot of clicking and deleting render files of existing clips you have to do.

On the other hand there are many positives like the aforementioned noise reduction and the fact that it loads and plays image sequences easily – and there are quite a lot of CGI-rendered effects as image sequences in this production.

In the end I took most of the scenes rendered in Resolve and put them into EDIUS, combined them with scenes I had done in EDIUS and rendered the final result because EDIUS does better H.264 encoding and I know I can rely on it.

I did use the beta 15’s new ability to read and make GV AVI files to transfer between the two which was very handy.

The noise reduction is in the Studio version of Resolve where as everything else I have mentioned is in the free version.