Blackmagic releases DaVinci Resolve 17 public beta
Scores of new features and updates
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Click to watch on YouTube
Blackmagic Design has just released DaVinci Resolve 17 public beta. They had previously announced the software only a few days earlier with no warning and no indication of what to expect. The software has gained many new features, but still has one glaring omission. Let's take a look at some features that I think are most important.
HDR Color Wheels
The new HDR color wheels section contains six wheels with new independent control over luminance and saturation. The range and falloff of each wheel can be adjusted and individual wheel completely disabled and hidden. The usual temp, tint, hue, saturation, etc are now always available without paging over.
Color Warper
If you've used plugins like timeinpixels' Nobe Color Remap you know exactly what this does. It overlays a grid on a color wheel and you can grab a point to shift that color range. It's very intuitive and effective. Blackmagic's implementation looks to be very full featured and goes beyond what timeinpixels did with their plugin. It has separate luma and chroma grids as well, with the ability to adjust groups of points and even lock them down.
Updated Scopes
The scopes have been updated and given more control over their display. The HDR nits scale can now be set at the scope instead of in the user preferences page. If you pop out the scopes you can select a new 3x3 display with multiple scopes of the same type.
Updated Views
The Media Pool has gained the Metadata View which shows a thumbnail and some metadata information at the same time. The Inspector now has button across the top to move between Video, Audio, Effects, Transition, Image, and File. The composite section has moved down to its own section and speed change has been added.
Font Preview
This one sounds silly, but it's one of those features you're really glad they finally added. You can now preview title fonts before selecting one in the drop down list. Just hover over the font and it shows in the viewer.
Updated Plugins
All of the plugins have received new icons and some new ones have been added. Chroma keying has been updated with more powerful features so you might not need to jump into Fusion. Motion Trails, False Color, Smear, Transform, HSL and Luma Keyer are all completely new. They also made Noise Reduction a plugin with the same controls as on the noise reduction page.
Simplified Color Management
The color management page in settings has been simplified to make it easier to understand. Gone are the many rows of color and gamma settings. Now you can select from a drop down and Resolve manages the rest.
Sort Timeline Options
This little gem solves a frustration that I've had with Resolve for a while. You can now sort the timeline drop down list by alphabetical order, creation date, or recently used.
Fusion Titles
Resolve 17 adds a number of Fusion Titles to the timeline. These allow you to easily add motion titles by dragging and dropping the title onto the timeline and entering the text. Just like the plugins, all of the titles and other timeline effects have new icons.
Detect Cut Scenes
This feature will automatically search a clip for edits and chop them up into individual clips. It's very handy when all you have is a finished video and need the clips separated out. Premiere Pro already has this feature so it seems like Resolve is just catching up.
A Glaring Omission
The YouTube presentation, which is over two hours long, made absolutely no mention of Apple ProRes RAW support. Looking at the beta software, there has been no change to raw support. This is getting to the point of being ridiculous. Both Final Cut Pro X and Adobe Premiere Pro support it (with varying features), so it seems odd that Blackmagic have yet to adopt it.
My theory is it has to do with their beef with Atomos, but who knows. Atomos is the only company that makes products which record ProRes RAW. I don't think it has anything to do with Apple not wanting to grant Blackmagic a license. Apple wants their codec adopted so badly that they sued RED to try to invalidate their patent on compressed raw recording (they lost). This is most likely a Blackmagic issue.
The only thing that gives me hope of ProRes RAW support is the line in the code update list that mentions an open SDK for encoder developers. Perhaps this will also allow for ZRAW support.
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