Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time

Apr 19, 2022 by John Aldred Leave a Comment

Blackmagic Design had one of their live presentation events yesterday. And as usually happens during such events from Blackmagic, the announcements were pretty interesting. Dubbed the “DaVinci Resolve Cloud Update”, Blackmagic CEO Grant Petty talks about a lot more than just DaVinci Resolve, including a few new hardware products. But the main event is the announcement of DaVinci Resolve 18 Public Beta and its new cloud collaboration features.

Along with Blackmagic Cloud support, DaVinci Resolve 18 sees new features for the Color, Edit, Fusion and Fairlight tabs, to add some crazy new AI features, tracking for deforming surfaces, new video effects, automatic proxy generation, major Fusion performance improvements and better audio processing. The DaVinci Resolve 18 public beta is available to download in both free and paid Studio flavours.

The presentation is heavily focused on the cloud features, both in DaVinci Resolve and in new hardware Blackmagic has announced in order to support it for higher-end demands. And this is higher-end hardware – unless you think spending $30K on what is essentially 80TB NAS (even if it is a really, really good one that’s specifically geared towards simultaneous multi-user video editing) is reasonable for hobbyists.

But for the specific list of new features available in DaVinci Resolve 18, which is now in Public Beta, you’ll want to scrub ahead to about an hour and two minutes in, where several short presentation videos are shown walking you through the new features of each of Resolve’s different sections. To fully understand how Blackmagic Cloud works, though, you’ll probably want to watch the whole thing as there’s bits of information darted about the new hardware announcements that also tie into it.

The short version is that Blackmagic Cloud allows users to sync their work together, from anywhere throughout the world, for working on collaborative projects. Once a project is created on the cloud, it maintains links to footage and other assets, including all the changes, and new users can be invited to join in to work on it with you. You also get to see what they’re working on as it’s happening, allowing you to both edit the project simultaneously (as demonstrated in the presentation above).

Blackmagic has said that the Cloud interface is going to change between now and the final release, with a number of promising new features. But here is the complete list of what’s new in DaVinci Resolve 18, beginning with a warning that you’ll very much want to pay attention to.

Upgrading to Resolve 18 will require you to update your project database. This is irreversible and you will not be able to downgrade to Resolve 17 or earlier without a backup.

Please check out this wiki page for information on how to properly and safely update or upgrade Resolve.

Features marked with * are in progress and may change before the final release.

Intelligent path mapping to relink files automatically

New Proxy Generator app to auto-create proxies in watch folders

Resolve FX Depth Map for depth keying and grading

Resolve FX Surface Tracker for tracking warped surfaces

Improved Resolve FX Beauty with new ultra beauty mode.

Convert fixed bus projects to FlexBus

Ordering tracks and buses from the track index

Configuring meters decay, peak hold and display modes.

Improved plugin management in the mixer

Expression animated Custom Poly modifiers

Support for 10-bit viewers on Windows and Linux in Studio.

Stream video output to remote monitoring in Windows and Linux in Studio.

Bug Reports need to be submitted to Blackmagic Design. You can post them on the official forum, or if you have Studio, you can reach out to support via email.

Feature Requests need to be submitted to Blackmagic Design. You can post them on the official Feature Request Subforum or in the download form for Resolve.

Bug Reports and Feature Requests posted on Reddit and in this thread will not be addressed or seen by Blackmagic Design.

While DaVinci Resolve 18 is new and shiny, remember that it is a Public Beta version. As such, it will have bugs. Features will be missing, not working properly or subject to change. Making the upgrade from an earlier version of DaVinci Resolve to DaVinci Resolve 18 is also irreversible because it needs to modify the database. So, if you rely on it for client work, don’t upgrade yet!

But if you’ve got a spare machine to play around with it on and see what the new features are like, or you’re just a hobbyist and the only person you’re going to mess up is yourself if everything dies – and you’re willing to take that chance – then go for it. Download, install and have a play.

The new DaVinci Resolve 18 Beta is available to download in both free and paid Studio versions. If you want to find out more or download the newest DaVinci Resolve 18 Public Beta, head on over to the Blackmagic Design website. If you’re not read to go to the new 18 Beta yet, don’t worry, you can still download the final and stable releases of DaVinci Resolve 17 at the same link.

Update: DIYP reached out to Blackmagic Design to ask if installing Resolve Studio 18 Beta used one of your license “seats” and they confirmed that it did. So, if you already have DaVinci Resolve Studio 17 installed on two computers, say your desktop and your laptop, you’ll need to deactivate one of them to activate the Resolve Studio 18 Beta on a third computer.

Filed Under: news Tagged With: Blackmagic, Blackmagic Design, davinci resolve, Public Beta, video editing

John Aldred is based in Scotland and photographs people in the wild and animals in the studio. You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube.

John Aldred is based in Scotland and photographs people in the wild and animals in the studio. You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube.

Dunja Djudjic is a writer and photographer from Novi Sad, Serbia. You can see her work on Flickr, Behance and her Facebook page.

Alex is a commercial photographer based in Valencia, Spain. She mostly shoots people and loves anything to do with the outdoors. You can see her work on her website and follow her Spanish landscape adventures on instagram.

Adam Frimer is a Guinness World Record holder, producer, and DOP based in Tel-Aviv, Israel. Adam owns a production company that specializes in corporate marketing and brand strategy. His videos have collectively hit over a quarter billion views

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