> ...before you'd want to change your subscription...

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.

I made the switch from premier to resolve a few years ago and it feels like such a breath of fresh air. Being able to do the same with Lightroom would be amazing so can't wait to check this out. I've been using the free version and honestly never needed the pro features but I think I'll make the one time purchase today just to support a non-subscription based product of this caliber

Is the Lightroom stuff the same as was discussed on HN a couple months ago? If so, then, see also 296 comments about the new photo mode: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47760529

I have both the latest Lightroom and Davinci Resolve.

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 was not aware that we could edit photos in DaVinci Resolve in Linux. Thank you for this info, I'll certainly give it a try!

I haven't had a chance to look at the non-beta version but in the 21 Beta, the Photo page didn't support Lumix or Olympus raw formats, and I own two cameras: a Lumix and an Olympus. :-(

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 run a photography biz on the side, and this is huge tbh.

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.

Agreed that the photo editing features are killer. AFAIK no other photo editing app allows the user to selectively desaturate a hue and its ability to adjust scoring to restricted lightness range is world class.

Can you run batch processing with the same settings over a large sequence of images like in Lightroom as well? And/or make slight changes to some parameters at certain points of time like correcting light intensity during sunsets the transitions smooths when your hardware made a step change when capturing it?

Unfortunately they are far from Lightroom, maybe next year they'll be closer. I really would like to ditch Lightroom but there is no alternative

Laat time I checked, deleting an image on DaVinci didn’t delete on disk. That’s something I’m really missing

It might be best editor on linux but running it on linux is not easy. You basically need pick correct hardware pick right distro. It might be pretty easy on the oficial rocky linux but on other distros good luck. Also no AMD support.

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.

Also, nobody would have complained about "content aware face fill", "AI" image edition tools have been standard for ten years in Photoshop

>They also added a ton of motion graphics stuff which from the beta seem to be enough to undercut a lot of basic uses of after effects out.

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

Is there any RAW processing software for Linux that works for DJI drone photos?

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.

> For all the potshots about AI,

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.

BlackMagic does quite a few innovative things. I have one of their cameras, and thus a paid license for Resolve. It's my primary editing tool. I've even done a music remix in Fairlight just to see if it could be done.

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.

You might be interested in a tool we're working on which does some of what you're wanting https://sparkfxstudio.com/ It's presently in beta but is an AI tool for helping speed up video workflows using agentic AI.

Because those people see the phrase "AI features" and the first thought is those sloppy generative AI stuff where things shift.

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".

> wasted hours editing

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 people doing the complaining are usually not the people doing real work in these tools. You can always find some loud voices somewhere.

some of these genuinely excite me, like the slate recognition (chore-reduction), clip search (although I'd want to see how reliable it is), and deblur (a typical PITA post fix). anything that makes masking, tracking, and level-matching easier saves hours on hours, but only if they're either reliable or easy to fix what the automation gets wrong (and it'll always get something wrong by the director, no matter how good it is, because telling editors what they did wrong is how directors make money).

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.

Artists HATE AI. I fully expect some sort of DaVinci Resolve backlash, artists refusing to cooperate with those using this software.

They could remove the word "AI" from each one of those feature titles, and the titles would be just as descriptive without them. At this point, it's just marketing noise, more distracting than informative. Maybe like "cyber" in the 1990s. Would you like some AI tea with your cybercrumpets?

Its all local if that helps?

You're right to be tired of it, and of course I haven't tired these specific features yet, but Davinci was already lowering the barrier to entry for filmmakers, and if 21 works as they say it will, then you're looking at a major lowering of said barrier.

I felt the same when I got Vegas and Sound Forge, but they never got released on any platform other than Windows, so eventually outgrew them. I totally understand what you mean; I use it, but also happy with Blender!

What do you like most about it?

Sure, and like CGI, it will change the nature of the media entirely.

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.

It really challenges my stance of human supremacy over AI when I only see these rote, shallow, unimaginative defenses of AI.

How are the learning resources for Blender VSE? I've tried several open source editors (openshot: not fit for any serious purpose, shotcut: would be great if not bugged out) and ended up on Resolve for the combination of being free for my purposes and good community resources. I've looked at Blender for 3D before and found the good resources tend to be out of date. Is that still an issue?

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/

Unless you are on Apple silicon, then im not sure the ARM cpu and hardware is powerful enough for you to get a decent experience. It is heavy software, after all. Still, I would expect them to release Linux ARM builds when we inevitably move over to ARM as the common arch. :)

I use both in my workflows. Though with all of the features of Resolve, I still use FCP for most of my content. FCP is just faster to edit and has a smoother end-to-end workflow. Resolve is still best for colorgrading and fine details, but if you just want to get a project released on time, nothing beats FCP.

Just get Resolve. It is similar to what FCP was before Apple turned it into glorified iMovie. Only it is far more powerful than FCP 7 was back then.

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 moved to Resolve from Premiere and wanted to commit seppuku. Of course, Premiere also made me feel that way.

> The learning curve is as steep and tall as the granite walls of El Capitan.

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...

>just get out of my way and let me get something done

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

If you're organizing/having hundreds of clips you want to put together, or overall want a more opinionated workflow, then I'd say give it a try at least, the free version doubles as a trial :)

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.

Resolve was a much better experience for me than kdenlive. But you can easily try it out for yourself because most of it is completely free (in fact you probably won't ever need the paid features for what you do)

I'm no expert (relatively new to the field myself), but I was trying to put together some simple videos with animations in Final Cut Pro and decided to try DaVinci Resolve, and I'm glad I did. The Fusion stuff bundled into it is incredibly powerful for animations.

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).

You can use the free version (no need to pay), and it should be possible to drive Resolve using the Python API -- see this MCP server built on top of that API:

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?)

I used lightroom over a decade and besides the initial quirks i fucking love darktable. After 6 month I actually like it more than lightroom and never looked back.

Makes sense, as Netflix grade 12k RAW broadcast quality video already takes up a lot of storage space. It would be ridiculous to Ape that into a cloud SaaS. =3

I think it actually released today. I keep an eye on the forums to see the updates - https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=2369...

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

The Lightroom competitor would be a big (and welcome) change to the market if it delivers.

Pretty sure that does not cover a face database indexing your own photos/videos, running locally on your own computer. If it did, that would be extremely silly.

Face search? What do you mean?

Doesn't seem to apply here.

> BIPA establishes standards for how companies must handle Illinois consumers’ biometric information. In addition to its notice and consent requirement, the law prohibits any company from selling or otherwise profiting from consumers’ biometric information.

https://www.aclu-il.org/campaigns-initiatives/biometric-info...

dAvInci Resolve