In addition to the new battery grip for the Pocket Cinema Camera 4K, Blackmagic has announced DaVinci Resolve 16, the latest version of its video editor that brings a massive collection of new and updated features.
The standout feature of DaVinci Resolve 16 is a new cut page designed specifically ‘for editors that need to work quickly and on tight deadlines.’ The updated cut page is an alternate edit page that features a streamlined interface and a new toolset that makes it easier to ingest, process and export footage.
In Blackmagic’s own words, ‘The [new] cut page isn’t about simplification, it’s about removing the things customers don’t need and building powerful, professional tools that help customers work more quickly. And, sometimes, it means borrowing the things that were great about the past and bringing them into the future.’
These new and improved tools include source tape, a new feature that brings all of the clips in a users bin into the viewer as a single long tape so it’s easier to scrub though, select the in/out points and bring the needed footage into the timeline. Another updated tool within the interface is a dual timeline arrangement that makes it possible to see both detailed sections of footage, as well as the whole timeline at once. This makes it easier to get both a macro and micro look at the work, rather than having to zoom in and out constantly.
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| DaVinci Resolve 16’s Neural Engine at work picking out faces from various clips. |
Blackmagic Design has also added its new DaVinci Neural Engine, which uses ‘state of the art deep neural networks and learning, along with artificial intelligence to power new features such as speed warp motion estimation for retiming, super scale for up-scaling footage, auto color and color matching, facial recognition and more.’
The DaVinci Neural Engine is cross-platform and uses the latest GPU technologies to provide improved performance when working on footage and help to streamline the editing process. Blackmagic Design specifically references the DaVinci Neural Engine’s ability to use facial recognition to automatically sort through footage and add individual clips to folders based on who is in the shot.
ResolveFX has also been updated in DaVinci Resolve 16. You can now add vignettes, drop shadows, analog noise/damage, chromatic aberration, video stylization and even remove objects. Blackmagic Design says there have also been improvements to the scalene, beauty, face refinement, blanking fill, warper, dead pixel fixer and colorspace transformation plugins.
Additional features added and improved upon in DaVinci Resolve 16 include new adjustment clips to help add effects and grades to clips in the timeline, a new quick export tool for uploading videos to YouTube and Vimeo from anywhere inside the app and GPU-accelerated scopes to help keep an eye on the technical side of things. Blackmagic has also partnered up with remote collaboration tool Frame.io to add native support in DaVinci Resolve 16. Now, Frame.io is baked right into the software, rather than working as an iteration.
Below is a 25-minute video of Blackmagic Design walking through all of the changes found inside DaVinci Resolve 16:
DaVinci Resolve 16 public beta is available to download from the Blackmagic Design website, where you will also find additional details.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
