For anyone not in the know, Resolve has an exceptionally capable and feature rich free version. A lot of the AI features (and >4k editing) are locked to the Studio licence which is a one-time payment, but works simultaneously on two computers (including different OS's) and allows upgrades across major versions.

I spent less than $300 on it a decade ago and my licence works fine on new v21 released this week. My least-regretted software purchase in 3 decades.

Recently I edited a few images requiring removing extra people from the frame and I was able to do all editing in Lightroom, in seconds.

As much as I dislike Adobe, Lightroom’s shortcuts and flow are now habits.

I will likely continue using both.

I assumed they would add them later, I hope I'm right!

edit: nope, still only supports Canon, Fuji, Nikon, Sony and iPhone ProRAW.

I already used Davinci to make a custom LUT, blended it with the Adobe camera standard profile to use in lightroom as a base for all my edits as Davinci's color tools are much better, and doing it this way just lets you get tones that you couldn't other wise get with Lighroom/ACR alone. This basically removes the need to have lightroom in there as a finishing step.

The only downside is by now I've got a really solid ImagenAI profile based on the 30k photos I've fed it over time, and that obviously relies on a lightroom catalog, and is also capable of applying my LUT since I've made it a slider in LR. I hate adobe, but I'm not sure I could go back to not using Imagen as now I can turn around a full wedding gallery in about 2 days.

I am pretty experienced linux user and i would have to buy new NVIDIA card and pray things work out.

Sadly i found out it will be much cheaper to buy refurb mac mini. So now i have dedicated machine for editing video.

I have a bunch of photos from a Mini 3 Pro and Mini 4 Pro -- 4 years' worth -- that I haven't published because I don't have a way to process them.

No tools on Linux (RawTherapee, Darktable, RapidRAW) render their colors correctly no matter how you mess with the sliders, and all of the Github issue pages are dismissive of the problem. There is something fundamentally wrong about how Linux RAW libraries are reading DJI photos.

Lightroom on a Mac tested on another computer renders them all correctly, but I don't own a Mac nor Lightroom.

I moved my team to Resolve about 2.5 years ago and I can say with absolute confidence Fusion > AE. Resolve Studio is all you need, period. Lightroom is clearly better right now than their Photo editor but like all their other offerings (ehhh except fairlight lol still mediocre), it's only a matter of time

Most video is going to be AI in the near future. They see the writing on the wall. Their camera business line is going to sharply decline.

But their priorities are not always well-set. In Resolve, significant problems remain while more and more functionality is hastily slapped on.

The so-called "integration" with Fusion remains very poor. Compositions' presence in timelines is extremely fragile, and inexplicably degrades source material's resolution to that of the target timeline. This means that if one of your timelines is HD but you bring UHD clips into Fusion, they will be degraded to HD upon ENTRY to your Fusion comp, before they ever get to the timeline. So in Fusion all of your keys and other selective image processing will be chunky garbage.

Also: If you start a project, import your footage, and then drag a clip to the timeline... Resolve will offer to change the frame rate of the timeline to match. But NOTHING ELSE. Every other major NLE offers to match the timeline to the first incoming footage in ALL regards. But not Resolve, despite years and years of vociferous complaints in their forum. This is a basic, expected feature but ignored by BMD.

And finally a core issue: multiple, unrelated node views scattered about. Resolve needs to consolidate them into a single node view for all processing. That would flesh out Resolve's half-assed "integration" of four or five other products and provide a game-changing workflow that is long overdue.

Where as marketing at all these corporation is trying to genericize "AI features" into anything using an algorithm. "Content aware fill", something we've had for over a decade is now "AI object removal"

"Noise suppression" is "AI voice extraction"

Motion unblur is now "AI motion unblur".

Editing is a craft. You have to watch everything, otherwise you don't know what you have.

A machine organising stringouts and selects can work for interviews, but not for action. But even then it is only parsing your media for semantic intent. It misses the way things are said, which often imparts a different meaning.

You can use AI features for editing. But it is unlikely you will be making anything very intetesting.

the more SFX-end ones like facial aging and face reshaper, or the talent-replacing ones like speech cloning/ADR, feel both too prescriptive for a director to dial in what they aesthetically want, and also not good enough for the final cut. so I struggle to find where they'd be actually useful in a workflow as opposed to being a trap, looking just fine enough at a glance to sneak into a final cut while looking poor when viewed by the audience.

likewise the focal adjustment and upscaling just feel gross. the kinds of things a good cinematographer can already do, and it'll be so so tempting to use tools instead of taking time to do it right in camera because it'll look good enough in the editing bay, but I feel like it'd really stand out as fake in the final cut unless you're targeting like, heavily compressed social ads. the less you use them the better they'll work, which isn't ideal for a marquee feature.

if the blemish remover really does respect continuity it'd be a nice-to-have, but it also feels like another trap to be careless/cheap on things like makeup or lighting at the shoot, at the expense of looking fake in post

I think that's the broader angle that bugs me the most. all of these tools are convenience tools for editors, but in the end they'll really be justifications for directors/producers/studios/agencies to cheap out and do shittier work faster on the shoot. a cheap, shitty shoot covered in AI bandaids is still going to hit an audience like a cheap, shitty shoot.

Different stories shown with different treatment. With CGI, scenes zoomed out to wider shots and effects swelled even louder over lighting, intimacy, acting, etc.

Old styles didn't disappear or stop evolving entirely, of course, but the center of attention profoundly shifted and the "big" production money went with jt.

Generative AI will likely drive some kind of analogous shift in dominant film aesthetics. I don't know where, but I'm not particularly excited by it myself yet.

edit: I may need to give the OpenShot 3.x a chance. The OpenShot release history [1] makes the claim that they have addressed many of my complaints

[1] https://www.openshot.org/blog/

Industry-standard NLE's like Premiere or Avid are probably the closest to Resolve. But even those are legacy programs that rest on their moats, whereas Resolve takes far more chances and does far less dumb shit than Adobe and Avid.

The seamless integration with industry-standard grading software is also... um mindblowing. Premiere has Lumetri and FCP has it'd colour correction tab, both of which are like MS Paint compared to Resolve's colour capabilities.

It's also free. The paid version unlocks mostly things to do with grading.

I'm a Premiere migrant to Resolve (Studio) some years ago, biggest hurdle is the opinionated workflow, it basically wants you to use the tabs in the bottom to go from "Media > Cut > Edit > Color > Fusion > Audio > Deliver" (simplified) so different tools available in different areas, made for different use cases, but in general once you've learnt the overall and high-level concepts, it makes editing really easy and smooth.

Besides, it's probably the most stable video editor that runs natively on Linux since ever, I think I've had it crash once, and the Fusion 3D text doesn't work properly for me, but besides that, runs like a dream and UX is miles ahead anything else available.

It does take some getting used to, but the amount of tutorial content on YouTube is another reason I'm happy I made the switch. A lot of really good stuff on there. (Search on 'DaVinci Resolve Fusion' to see some examples of it in action if you want to get a feel).

As you say, that does mean the learning curve is pretty steep, but it's not as bad as some professional grade software. I was able to get to a point of being able to do some basic video editing/export with it in a few hours of watching YouTube videos and reading documentation. By no means am I an expert but I really appreciate that this is actually software designed to get out of your way and allow focusing on the task at hand without constant popups asking if I've tried some feature I don't have any interest in.

Funny, that's how I think of easy/beginner modes: "in the way, preventing me from getting something done".

Have you read the beginners guide? https://documents.blackmagicdesign.com/UserManuals/DaVinci-R...

At 643 pages it's surprisingly short for how many subjects it introduces. Going further you'll of course want to read In the Blink of an Eye.(978-1879505629) and the Color Correction Handbook (978-0133435542).

And the actual Resolve manual is also really really good. https://documents.blackmagicdesign.com/UserManuals/DaVinci_R...

https://github.com/mhadifilms/dvr/

You can also try pointing Claude to the API surface directly.

The result might be chaotic, but you should be able to automate editing... maybe. :-) Ha. (You'd need a good loop to make sure Claude can see what it's doing..? Beyond screenshots I mean - ie how would Claude know its doing a good job editing?)

(Can confirm - I just opened it on my laptop (I had the latest beta installed) and it prompted me to download the release version)

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