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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

DaVinci Resolve Lite 8.1.1 released with unlimited nodes and DNxHD included

no parallel node? I gotta spin up lite and see what's actually missing now... I only installed lite on my laptop and have maybe opened it up a handful of times . but I can already say owning the full version is still worthwhile. If you're making money with it, honestly I don't see what the issue is. They are tools, you put them to work, and you make your living, and have some fun :)

Just yesterday I was doing some one lights for phantom flex footage, and the client wanted the full 2k image in quicktimes for a really linear workflow. baked in custom color and full resolution QT so they can crop or pan and scan if they need to... I think Jim's mantra of 1080p is not enough def applies in this case, limits are still limits. You never know what's gonna come across your table. If you treat this as your livelihood, it's not even a question of why you'd pay for the full version... If I had the dime I'd own my own linux version with the full Resolve Control Surface in a heartbeat...
 
Pretty darn slick move to offer the lite version for free. I'm considering investing the time to get acquainted with Resolve where I never would have spent the money or time before. But I'm on Windows so am waiting for that to shake out. As I grow revenue, spending the extra money to upgrade will not be a problem if I see that Resolve fulfills my needs.

Quite frankly, I don't consider myself a grading pro in the remotest sense, so this Lite version sounds like the perfect complement to an Indie operation. And while 1920 x 1080 is just not enough resolution for what I will do, if it does the job at that resolution, I will upgrade for the higher res.

I suspect some of the Scarlet buyers may adopt this app for their work and will become full-fledged users as they grow. This is very good marketing. Someone has been paying attention.
 
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Steve Sherrick said:
In all fairness Bing, some of us are coming from backgrounds that involved heavy iron equipment. For example, our Avid offline machines used to cost $40,000 and that was for AVR2, not even online quality. VFX systems used to easily climb into the six figures. Cameras used to cost $50-100K. 9GB Avid hard drives used to cost 3x what resolve costs. When you hear some of us say that this stuff is cheap, that is where we are coming from. Not disconnected at all. In fact, it could be argued the other way around. Some folks here have never actually worked in a post production facility, or worked on higher end productions. And that's okay, that's not what everyone sets out to do. I just wanted to give you the reference point for those that have been involved and can relate to the "low"pricing that has happened.

Honestly, I don't concern myself too much with this stuff. If you can get access to the tools and do something cool with them, that's a good thing.
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I agree - and would add that some folks here think that just because filmmaking is, for them, an unpaid hobby that it is a sin for others to expect revenue from their profession, not even realizing that they are expressing full-on Marxist views.
 
shashbugu said:
I'm not sure $1000 dollars is expensive. Its actually very cheap. I was one of the very first people to buy a copy. It was and still is a no brainer. I am still learning how to use it. the reason they have a free version is because they truly understand the learning curve is no joke. They even added 3 way LGG wheels for people like me who complained bitterly about the awkwardness of the interface. Well that is until I tried using both a tangent wave and MC color board. I now realize and appreciate how fast it is to work with the control surface, and why the interface is the way it is.
Resolve lite is certainly great but after you buy a DecklinK and Cuda card you'll appreciate it even more.
Speedgrade in CS6 will certainly not be free, no matter how you look at it. The numbers always add up mathematically. Resolve even if its free will not be a mass market product, because colorgrdaing still is a niche market and Artform.
Although I own what could essentially be termed a color grading suite, I still hire colorists and finishers to polish projects. But at least i can start experimenting with different grades saving them in the still store for the colorist to use.
I can't stress this over and over again, but colorgrading is like still life painting it takes real artistic talent.
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I fully understand this - but do all producers/clients? I think not, only the great ones do - and it is they who sign the checks.
 
jake blackstone said:
Yes, and now it's only a matter of time, before the director brings his Resolve project and says "I graded it and I just want you to polish it".
Or, "Please create a look for me and I will copy it to the rest of the project"
Happy days ahead:-)
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This reminds me of when Apple had J.J. Abrams promote FCP at a product launch. He talked about sitting behind the editor in the Avid suite with FCP running in his laptop and would do his own edit and show it to the editor. I think it was for Alias.
 
Rob Ruffo said:
I was wrong, and they gave away the farm for free.
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You're still moaning about spending $1000 on something that's now worth less than you paid for it? How often does this happens with computers? You buy a Dell or an Apple computer one month, and the next month, a new model comes out that's twice as fast for the same (or less) money. Or you buy a car, drive it off the lot, and its total value goes down 25%. Crap happens.

Realistically, you can make back a $995 investment in color-correction software in less than a day, assuming you had a commercial post house. As several people have previously stated, the software might be the lowest expense in the entire operation. It's the hardware, the monitor, the control surface, the network, the LUTs, the environment, and the drive array that cost all the money. And it's the person using it that has the biggest impact on the results.

Same thing with sound mixing. Avid recently made a drastic price cut to Pro Tools, and a lot of longtime users are screaming that their old software and hardware are now effectively obsolete. I think $3000 will buy you a system today that far outperforms a $12,000 system from a year ago. Progress marches on. Times change.

If you want to complain, call up Dan May (head of Blackmagic for the U.S.) and tell him:

Dan May
Video Product Sales USA, Canada and South America
Blackmagic Design
1551 McCarthy Blvd. - Suite 106
Milpitas CA 95035
(408) 954-0500
 
Marc Wielage said:
If you want to complain, call up Dan May (head of Blackmagic for the U.S.) and tell him:

Dan May
Video Product Sales USA, Canada and South America
Blackmagic Design
1551 McCarthy Blvd. - Suite 106
Milpitas CA 95035
(408) 954-0500
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BM USA is just a US sales arm of the company. The people, who really matter in the decision making process are present right here, on the RedUser. They may not respond to every post, but they do read it all:-)
 
True. I just wanted to save the guy a long distance call to Australia:

Blackmagic Design
11 Gateway Court
Port Melbourne VIC 3207,
AUSTRALIA
+61 3 9682 4770

I don't think he'll get far trying to get through to Grant Petty, but he can try. BTW, there's some good background on how and why Petty bought daVinci at this 2009 link:

http://magazine.creativecow.net/article/blackmagic-davinci-and-what-it-means

What's very interesting is that early into the story, the interviewer asks Petty, "where's my $995 daVinci?" Little did we know...
 
Joel Kaye said:
So how do you compete with FREE? Adobe can integrate and innovate. Their suite brings in the money. But everyone else?

It's not like "water" where you can position yourself as better than tap water.
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The salient point in the comparison to water is that most bottled water is not at all better than tap water, and in many cases its worse than what comes out of the faucet.

So, they are literally charging more for lower quality product.

I don't think that is Black Magic's strategy at all, but my point is that you can succeed in the market. Even if you have a paid product that competes unfavorably against a free product.

Want another example, one in tech? Windows versus Linux. Compared to Linux Windows is unstable, unreliable and frankly gets less out of your computer. It also costs a LOT more ... yet it is the vast market majority.

It might be a bit like Apple vs. Linux. If someone truly made an EASIER and BETTER app they could charge for it. But man how friggin' easy and good will it have to be??? Easier would be integrated into the editor. That leaves AVID and Adobe.

But better? That's Big Iron. They compete on outrageous speed and support. On tight deadlines with big dollars on the line money becomes less relevant. Could Davinci be upgraded to compete with those guys? That's more likely than the other way around. So I'd be nervous if I was them a bit. BlackMagic does have a $30K control panel they want to sell.
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As pointed out elsewhere, Resolve is a "Big Iron" product. You can run it on Linux, and that's actually the only way to really unleash its power.

I think that advantage is going to become less and less important though. In 2014 I think you'll be able to run Resolve on an iMac in 5K resolution premium debayer and work real time for almost an entire grade on a feature film. No Rocket ... just Thunderbolt devices.

What's BlackMagic REALLY got up their sleeve? The did this for a reason and I doubt the reason was to get Free Users to bump to $1k Resolve.
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Actually its probably to get users "hooked" on Resolve, and the fact that they have a bunch of hardware dongles out there for Resolve. You need a Decklink Card for Resolve to do i/o ... and I don't see that changing.

Also, I think Black Magic understands that $20,000 for a Resolve Panel is a bitter pill for the vast majority of the market. For the very few of us who grade well budgeted projects all the time ... it makes sense.

It isn't the future though. Multitouch display panels are the future ... and combined with haptics technology will be how most people interface with computers in the coming decades. Think Star Trek: The Next Generation.

I think you will see a general purpose interface panel from Black Magic, and others, coming soon. I think it will feature a "low end" multitouch control surface for Resolve ... but it will probably be extensible to other parts of the software ecosystem.

Avid is also strongly positioned in this market ... EuCon is a big deal for the kinds of interface such a panel needs.

Frankly ... the technology is sort of solved ... the real problem is the IP laws around it all today. That's why Tangent's iPad application exists ... but not a lot has been done to extend it that I know of.
 
Wow, this point is still being argued. Seems like its all feelings and opinions and no new ground is being broken here. BM has made their strategic choice, and FWIW, I for one, believe they made the right moves. Atleast these moves give Resolve a shot at actually hanging around a couple of years from now instead of going the way of the dodo bird. Possibly, it will then thrive on the business all those "indie" filmmakers being ridiculed here will bring to the table, presumably after they have spent time with the tool and figured out how to use it to their purposes. As far as colorists are concerned, well, the really great ones will survive and continue to evolve and thrive. The ones who are doing commodity work today (making shots match across edits) will be replaced by a plugin. Sorry if that sounds too harsh. But that's software technology for you.
 
Nikhil Kamkolkar said:
Wow, this point is still being argued. Seems like its all feelings and opinions and no new ground is being broken here. BM has made their strategic choice, and FWIW, I for one, believe they made the right moves. Atleast these moves give Resolve a shot at actually hanging around a couple of years from now instead of going the way of the dodo bird. Possibly, it will then thrive on the business all those "indie" filmmakers being ridiculed here will bring to the table, presumably after they have spent time with the tool and figured out how to use it to their purposes. As far as colorists are concerned, well, the really great ones will survive and continue to evolve and thrive. The ones who are doing commodity work today (making shots match across edits) will be replaced by a plugin. Sorry if that sounds too harsh. But that's software technology for you.
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Ha, that funny. After ridiculing the few, that are still arguing the point, you go ahead and start arguing the very same point:-) How ironic...
 
Alexander Ibrahim said:
Also, I think Black Magic understands that $20,000 for a Resolve Panel is a bitter pill for the vast majority of the market. For the very few of us who grade well budgeted projects all the time ... it makes sense.

It isn't the future though. Multitouch display panels are the future ... and combined with haptics technology will be how most people interface with computers in the coming decades. Think Star Trek: The Next Generation.

I think you will see a general purpose interface panel from Black Magic, and others, coming soon. I think it will feature a "low end" multitouch control surface for Resolve ... but it will probably be extensible to other parts of the software ecosystem.

Avid is also strongly positioned in this market ... EuCon is a big deal for the kinds of interface such a panel needs.

Frankly ... the technology is sort of solved ... the real problem is the IP laws around it all today. That's why Tangent's iPad application exists ... but not a lot has been done to extend it that I know of.
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I think you are right. A multitouch control surface would be very powerful. We internally use a custom layout for the ipad of the Resolve keyboard shortcuts for mac, it's not a control surface but in a conjunction with a pen tablet it works quite well. You can download it for free here http://www.esperimentocinema.com/davinci_layout/
 
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