It is crime against whole society(!) performed by owners and some management (few people, frequently it is one guy!) to offer inferior version.

This "inferior version" you mention is free. There should be no expectation in a free product, only gratitude that it is available for all to use. If you don't like what is currently available, you can start a company and create a superior product and release it all for free, bearing all the costs out of your own wallet!

I must admit I'm confused by the discussion is anything different from the previous free version? It seems the crippled features are the same as before?
Per there website "The free DaVinci Resolve 14 includes all of the same high quality processing as DaVinci Resolve 14 Studio and can handle unlimited resolution media files. However it does limit project mastering and output to Ultra HD resolutions or lower. DaVinci Resolve 14 only supports a single processing GPU on Windows and Linux and 2 GPUs on the latest Mac Pro.

If you need features such as support for multiple GPUs, 4K output, motion blur effects, temporal and spatial noise reduction, HDR tools, Lens distortion correction, de-interlacing, Resolve FX Lens Flare, Lens Blur and Film Grain, 3D stereoscopic tools, remote rendering, an external database server and collaboration tools that let multiple users work on the same project at the same time, please upgrade to DaVinci Resolve 14 Studio."

I fully understand Vitaliy's view on this. I also disagree 100%. Unfortunately that must mean I don't understand. Personally I would be happy if BMD scrapped the free version and only made a commercial version. Then we could get more focus on fixing some of the issues that professional colourists have been asking for over the last few versions, instead of the addition of lots of feature requests from noobs.

@caveport

Personally I would be happy if BMD scrapped the free version and only made a commercial version. Then we could get more focus on fixing some of the issues that professional colourists have been asking for over the last few versions, instead of the addition of lots of feature requests from noobs.

More probably you want paid version only so it'll be less competition :-) Deep down :-)

As for "professional colourists", it is like old vinyl. Present in each and every CAD, drawing etc software developers boards.

@Scot

I guess I did not notice having a way under powered graphics card so have always made proxies. Seems a strange choice as anyone trying it out using common H264 would experience the performance loss and perhaps choose not to go with Resolve because of it.

It has nothing to do with GPU power, but with special decoding block in GPU present now in all Intel, Nvidia and AMD GPUs.

As I can understand BM now they want to slowly turn free version into some kind of trial. They have big hope that they could pull the trick with lowering price and forcing most users to buy it. I already told where it ends, but they need to go it full way in.

@caveport

No, you really have no idea. No need to tell me about my own experience or what I really want.

I have very good idea.

Look around - lot of robbers, murders, cheats and lot and lot of other stuff. And most of them have economic reasons. Same as your thoughts deep down. How cool it'll be to make this beginner wannabe to pay to reduce competition, sweet :-) But of course you bury such amoral thought deep down. No, of course you want for them to focus on hardcore colorists, of course.

Well that makes no sense at all. None of your statements in this topic are clearly thought out or articulated.

Absolutely. Poor old neurons in your head fight to keep their old connection even if it hurts whole organism, let them do their job. But as you'll eat more and read more, make another attempt, who knows that surprise can happen.

Thanks, Mike, for that tutorial. Apart from the missing levels before recording, I'd like to add two points:

– Would be great to have a visual countdown before the beginning of recording – Looping would be great too, automatically adding another track if you repeat

That's the way proper ADR is done ;-)

BTW, over the next few days I'll add some of my observations and thoughts about DR 14 here. Please forgive me if i touch subjects that have been covered before, this thread is already quite long…

Collaborative Workflow

Until now collaboration was limited to grading, while editors (or clients) could just have a look at somebody else’s timeline. This is going to change completely, all specialists can work in a team now (Studio version only!). You’ll obviously need a fast network for this and a common PostgreSQL server. It doesn’t need to be a dedicated machine, but should be up and running all the time for sure. The old multi-user scheme with individual login has been dropped for this. Of course any system needs some kind of locking mechanism not to create total chaos when working in a team, but DR is doing it in a quite simple manner. For editing you have bin locking, i.e. as soon as someone becomes the owner of a bin, all the included clips and timelines are locked against changes by others. They can look at the stuff and copy it into their own bins, though (copying means making links to the footage, not wasting space).

Now the new owner can make an alternative version of the edit and later both can compare their timelines with a pretty intuitive graphical tool. That tool, BTW, is available to you even if you are one person shop without a server and sit down next to somebody else to compare versions of the edit. Every discrepancy is nicely marked in the a graphical interface and you can accept or deny every single change. This method will apply to the Fairlight audio timelines too. Color grading is locking only the single clip while you are working at it. As soon as you activate another one, all changes become visible to others and can also be changed by them. Of course this needs a lot of discipline and trust in the team and some may ask BM for a bit tighter control of access rights – hey, in capitalism everybody is your competitor ;-)

OTOH there is an integrated chat system for teamwork and forming an organization…

Collaboration has logical consequences for saving: DR is now live-saving every single step to the current project immediately and the former auto-save by timed intervals has been dropped. The new approach allows for an undo history, one shared by Edit and Fairlight, another one for Color. But of course it’s also more risky, any serious hiccup can ruin your file and worst case make it unreadable. So, you should manually save versions frequently, in particular as long as you are testing the beta builds.

This is the graphical interface to compare timelines:

New Formats

Resolve supports frame rates up to 120 fps now and you can re-conform to other speeds in full frame increments from 1 to 120. Resolutions up to 16,000 by 16,000 pixel are possible, but where will be the hardware for such an „Ultra 8K“ format in 120 fps? New codecs: Canon C200, Nikon RAW, DNxHR, Arri RAW in Open-Gate resolution and MP3 audio on all platforms, even AC-3 audio (both in MTS and Quicktime files) is finally supported on all systems. H.264 with high 10 profile is read on Windows too and became speedier with beta 6. Support of H.265 is still limited, but clips from a Samsung NX1 work (R.I.P.). All codecs where BM needs to pay licenses are only supported in the Studio version, for sure. In general quite a few more metadata are read. DR understands CLF-LUTs too now, which are becoming a kind of universal format as it seems. If you'd like to try it out: BM has added a day for night look and a Kodak 2383 emulation.

For output a few formats have been added which are offering alternatives to ProRes, in particular on PC: DNxHR HQX in 10- and 12-bit versions and the whole list of VP9 Codecs. Googles VP9 is a license-free alternative to HEVC and supports resolutions beyond 4K and the important variants of HDR. It’s not only an internet codec, since there are lossless variants up to YUV 422 in 12 bit. Encoding of H.264 offers multiple passes as an option and ticking „Network Optimization“ allows beginning to play the clip before encoding is completed. Export to ProTools has been improved, e.g. it will keep track names intact.

Unfortunately, no other movie codec than ProRes 4444 is carrying an alpha channel up to now. But they seem to be working on an integration of the alpha channel in DNxHR files, though it's not functional even in beta 6. Should become a viable alternative to ProRes for PC users (well you can always resort to numbered image sequences like TIFF or TGA). This is promising since DR now supports alpha channels quite well, not only from the incoming file, but you can add keys and masks from grading nodes too. Which leads us to the next subject: compositing.

Alpha export is there, but only for individual clips and not yet working in anything but ProRes 4444:

Tried using 14 Beta to edit a music video shot on Atomos Ninja Assasin 4k ProRes..... playback is awful for sync editing. Anything more than a single track needs rendering to play with any kind of smooth motion... Tried every optimization I could find, and eventually gave up and went back to FCP X.... I was never so happy to see my old friend X as I was that day.

You're not ready yet Resolve... I'm not buying a super system just to edit with you.

@nomad

Yes, FCP-X is really making good use of the available hardware.

Most strange here is that ProRes really does not need much hardware. So, it is interesting what can cause such big difference.

@sammy

Sounds like a bug.

..also ofx plugins (even one plugin ) slow down frame rate playback by 2-3 times fold (even when no other nodes added )

Any plugins?

It can be very inefficient implementation, like constant copy between GPU-RAM (as it is 32bit values for each of RGB).